III
Matt the Mutt, 1979
I had a dog like that once, the man said.
Now I got a bird.
Holy shit! It’s Matt the Mutt! He’s here! He’s there! He’s got Penny in a corner! He’s got his front paws on her back! What’s he doing? Tee-haw, Matt the Mutt! Now he’s satisfied, and he’s off: trotting down the hall, running down the staircase. Wait, what’s this? He’s paused on the second-floor landing—he’s lifting his leg, and whoo-hoo! He’s whizzing right there on the wall! Matt the Mutt cannot be stopped! Was that the back door? Look out below! He’s running down the stairs two steps at a time, arriving in the mudroom precisely in time to attack my father, who’s lumbering through the door. Dad had hoped to sneak into the house without Matt the Mutt hearing about it, but Matt the Mutt cannot be stopped! He’s leaping into the air and barking and pushing back upon my father’s shoulders with both paws before falling back onto the floor and then leaping once more while barking and trying a second time to tackle my father and bring him to the floor. My mother’s footsteps are coming swiftly, but not swiftly enough. Matt the Mutt leaps into the air again, barking and snarling. Dad is trying to ward him off with his briefcase. Dad is not succeeding.
“No,” my mother says, reaching for the dog’s collar. “No!”
Matt the Mutt doesn’t like being hauled off of my father, and now he’s barking at Hildegarde, who’s put her hands over her ears. My father is shouting something at her, but she can’t hear him, what with the barking and the covered ears. Matt the Mutt bounces into the air again and shoves my father against the door! Dad puts his briefcase down. Matt the Mutt raises one leg and pisses on it.
“Noo,” says my mother. My father reaches for his briefcase, but he gets dog piss on his hand, and now Dad is yelling and my mother is shouting and Matt the Mutt is barking some more and leaping into the air.
Upstairs, in the library, Penny looks languidly up from the place where she lies and thinks, Lord of my love, to whom in vassalage thy merit hath my duty strongly knit, to thee I send this written embassage, to witness duty, not to show my wit.
Meanwhile, at Wesleyan University, where I am now a senior, Donna and I have reached my dorm room, and we kiss to say good night, and the kiss goes on for a while, and it’s all very sweet. Donna has big brown eyes. She says, “The thing is, I don’t have my diaphragm. Can you wait while I go and get it?”
“Your diaphragm,” I say to her. I’m in a tight spot. Because of course I really like Donna, and making out with her is really great. But I don’t love her, at least not with all my heart and soul. So I’m of two minds about what—if I’m understanding Donna’s suggestion properly—is her proposal that we have actual sex.
“Yes,” says Donna. “It’s back at the house.”
“Well,” I say. “Well-dee-well-dee-well.”
At Wesleyan I have inexplicably become cool, in part because I have both the hair and the glasses of John Lennon, who at that exact moment is not yet dead. I have a radio show during which I simultaneously play, on twin turntables, the Grateful Dead’s “Dark Star” as well as T. S. Eliot reading “Burnt Norton.” In my sophomore year, I write and produce a radio serial entitled Squid Family, which becomes very popular among a certain demographic. I play the college carillon each day at noon and feature theme songs from 1960s television shows, including F Troop and The Brady Bunch.
Sometimes I play the Christian hymn “How Can I Keep from Singing?” It would be a long time before I come to terms with my faith. In order to save face among my brethren and sisthren, I suggest that my hope that there is a force of love greater than ourselves is mostly ironic. In this way, I sneak by.
My life flows on in endless song;
Above earth’s lamentation,
I hear the sweet, tho’ far-off hymn
That hails a new creation;
Thro’ all the tumult and the strife
I hear the music ringing;
It finds an echo in my soul—
How can I keep from singing?
I play piano and the Autoharp in coffeehouses and sing songs that I have written, including “Mr. Rogers Does the Puppets’ Voices” and “Just a Bunch of Assholes from Outer Space.” I am tremendously entertaining.
It is natural to assume that someone as entertaining as this is having loads and loads of sex. In fact, it is so natural that the fact that I have, in fact, had sex only once so far is a possibility that has not occurred to any of the women who are drawn to my questionable character. And the longer this goes on, the more impossible it is to explain to a potential lover that I’m reluctant to proceed with this project because I, like, don’t actually know what I’m doing. Plus, the true love thing. There are a lot of obstacles.
The summer before, I had made love for the first time with another girl named Donna—if you can call an experience that was shorter in duration than the roll of summer thunder making love. Still, I loved Donna (London Donna, let us call her, to differentiate her from College Donna); she was the first person I had really fallen in love with since Shannon and the first woman to love me in return. I don’t know why I was such a miser when it came to giving my heart away. In my entire life I have had sex with fewer people than the number of dogs I owned.
I don’t know, maybe I was just scared. What would happen if we had sex and the next day she didn’t love me anymore? What would we do then?
Being in love, to me, was a thousand times more important than having sex.
Years later, when I finally emerge as female, everyone will say they are shocked. Shocked!
It is already clear that, at age twenty-one, I am less successful at being in love than Matt the Mutt.
Or, to be more exact about it, it’s that he does not conflate love with sex. He takes what he wants, without any sense of guilt. Matt the Mutt does not know what second thoughts are. All he knows is that joy is for the taking. I, on the other hand, will toss and turn over the question of love, whether I am deserving of it, whether I am right to ask it of another. It’s not that I don’t like sex; even my abbreviated experiences thus far confirm my suspicion that this business could, potentially, be a lot of fun. But unlike Matt, I didn’t want to share it with just anybody, even someone I like as much as College Donna. Even at this young age I have already set the bar incredibly high—no sex without love, no love without soul.
I’m probably hardwired to experience the world in this way, although there are times when I wish I were not. It would have been a lot easier, to live a life without regret.
Most of the boys I knew at Wesleyan had a lot more in common with Matt the Mutt than they did with me.
“Maybe,” I said to College Donna, “we should just call it a night. It’s been so great.” We had spent the evening listening to the music produced by the college’s Javanese gamelan orchestra, that being the fashion at the time.
“Oh,” said Donna, trying to hide the fact that I had crushed her. “Oh, okay.” I don’t think it occurred to her, in a million years, that my keeping her at arm’s length was not about my not desiring her but about a lack of faith in myself.
I kissed her again, now that we’d come to this agreement. “Well, well,” I said. “Well-dee-well-dee-well.”
“Good night, James,” said Donna with a sigh, and headed off toward her house. I stood in my door and watched the empty hallway for a few moments.
Many years later, a colleague of mine at The New York Times, another Wesleyan alumna, expressed disbelief that I hadn’t had sex at college, where she too had briefly been a member of the team of women hoping for a whack at James Boylan. “If you never had sex at Wesleyan, it wasn’t for lack of opportunity,” she said.
“I know,” I told her. “I had plenty of opportunity. I just didn’t have any motive.”
I thought I was all done with the business of not having sex for the evening, when from across the hallway, a dorm-room door swung open, and there, all sleepy, was my friend Lucy, a bighearted, Camel-smoking, slow-talking architecture student. She had glasses almost exactly like mine. “Jaaames,” she said, and raised one eyebrow.
Meanwhile, back in Pennsylvania.
My mother belongs to a group of ladies who play bridge. They come over to our house every six weeks or so, to play cards and to eat cucumber sandwiches and to drink gin and tonics in the middle of the day. The doorbell rings. The back door creaks open. “Hildegarde?” calls Mrs. Towson, one of the neighbors.
Hildegarde has told her friends not to walk in unless she herself has opened the door, but most of the women in her circle ignore this request, figuring, well, what’s the worst that could happen?
In answer to this query, ladies and gentlemen: It’s Matt the Mutt! Here he comes, fresh from fucking the daylights out of Sausage, who’s still lying discombobulated but highly satisfied on my bed up on the third floor. Matt’s come down all the flights of stairs in just a few seconds. He hits Mrs. Towson like an avalanche off the Matterhorn, and just like that Mrs. Towson is on her ass and the tray full of guacamole and chips is rotating through the air. As Hildegarde enters the room, Mrs. Towson, a lovely, round woman wearing a dress covered with large purple flowers, finds herself covered with guacamole and surrounded by pieces of broken dishes. There are corn chips on the floor, in her clothes, in her hair. Matt is lapping up the loose chips as if there’s no tomorrow. Now he’s lapping the guac out of Mrs. Towson’s hair.
“No,” says Hildegarde. “No!”
“Why, I—,” says Mrs. Towson.
Hildegarde is pulling back on Matt’s choke chain-collar and now he is coughing and hacking as if he’s being strangulated. He snaps out of Hildegarde’s hands and runs around the room. He gets as far as our freezer, in which an entire side of beef is stored in separate pieces individually wrapped in butcher paper, each one marked RIB EYE or GROUND BEEF or ROUND STEAK, and then he raises his leg and pees on the freezer. There’s another knock on the door, and in comes Mrs. Larou, who lives just down Devon Boulevard. She has a plate full of deviled eggs. Matt looks over at her.
“No,” says my mother. “Matthew! No!”
But Matt the Mutt will not be counseled. He sees Mrs. Larou, and her platter full of deviled eggs, and he knows what must be done.
Shortly before my sister boarded the plane for Minnesota, my parents had gathered us around the living room fireplace once more. It was not clear, during this period, if Dad’s melanoma was in remission or what, and I feared, given their somber expressions, that they were going to tell us that Dad’s cancer had indeed metastasized. Instead my father explained, in his quiet, twinkling, academic manner, that a socialist magazine in Minnesota had declared that he was one of the top ten people to kidnap in America. It was an honor, I guess, but not the kind you wanted.
Why anybody would want to kidnap my father is beyond me. Even if you believed that the world would be better off without capitalist stooges, surely there were better people to ransom than Dad. As far as capitalist stooges went, he was more Shemp than Curly. I’m not saying he wasn’t a stooge, but please. He was a long way from Moe.
My guess is that the person who wrote the article hadn’t really done much research. The writer had come up with this story in the same way that I, some years later, would come up with an explanation to a police officer for why I was driving a car wearing the bottom half of a gorilla suit. Dick Boylan was an innovator, to be sure, in the field of financial instruments, and no one would mistake him for Noam Chomsky. But all things considered, if what you wanted was to bring about a more just society, there were all sorts of other people you’d want to murder first.
My father thought the whole thing was funny—not the threat of being whacked, but the idea that anyone would think he was important enough to kidnap. The FBI, however, didn’t share his sense of humor, and Dad wanted us to know that we were all going to be followed around by undercover agents in the months to come and that we should make sure, therefore, that at all times we were behaving in compliance with the laws of the United States.
(It is worth mentioning that, these many years later, I have written to the FBI and requested the confidential files pertaining to my father under the Freedom of Information Act and likewise googled my father’s name along with other key words such as “assassinate,” “kidnap,” and “stooge.” The FBI wrote me back to tell me they didn’t have anything; the Google searches yielded exactly nothing. Which leads to the conclusion that either the FBI is lying to me now or my father was lying to me then. Or, even more likely: that over the years this story has become completely distorted in my memory so that I have, once again, turned Something That Never Happened into Mythological Family Legend.)
My sister, however, says she saw her FBI agent all the time at Carleton. She’d see him, now and again, lurking outside the dorm or hanging out on the street near some college-town bar, smoking a cigarette. She and her friends would wave to him, and he’d nod back.
As for me, I never saw anyone, which makes me think that either the FBI suspected I was too inconsequential to kidnap or (more likely) I was so oblivious to everything that a federal agent followed me around for a year or so and I never noticed.
I know this story makes me sound slightly deranged, as though I am the transgender version of Chuck Barris, and that’s a little embarrassing. On the other hand, I had drinks with my sister just a couple of months ago and I asked her, once again, about this business, and she affirmed that she’d been followed around all her freshman year at Carleton by a private dick, not to mention a whole bunch of fraternity boys.
Where was he, then, I ask, the day my sister was walking through the streets of Northfield, Minnesota, and encountered the adorable child pulling a wagon? Where was he when the child pointed to the tiny puppy in the wagon, an adorable white fluff ball with black patches over his eyes and ears? “You want a puppy?” said the child. “His name is Matthew.”
My sister thought the situation over. She had a choice. On the one hand, she could keep on walking, maybe head up to the library, maybe work on a paper she had due. On the other hand, she could take the unspeakably adorable puppy into her arms, thank the child, and commence a new life as a dog owner. Matthew could live in her dorm room. She imagined, as hippies in a commune might raise a baby, that they could all share him. The dog was hopelessly, heartbreakingly cute. I ask you, who would not have taken the puppy?
Oh wait. I thought of someone.
My mother passed away in 2011, just shy of her ninety-fifth birthday, and if she were reading this today, at the crisp age of one hundred plus, I imagine she would even now clear her throat and raise one delicate, fragile hand.
Because of course, at the end of her freshman year, we will pick up my sister at the Philadelphia airport. We get her luggage off the baggage carousel, but then she says, “Wait, there’s just one more thing.”
“What?” says my mother, already fearing the worst. “What?”
A moment later, a crate pops down the conveyor belt, a crate that contains the adorable Matt the Mutt, who looks out upon this new world through the bars of his cage, upon the members of my family with an expression not unlike Aragorn as he makes his final entrance into Minas Tirith. Rejoice, my people, Matt suggests. I have come to dwell among you all my days.
Late in her life, Dodie Smith wrote a sequel to The Hundred and One Dalmatians, The Starlight Barking. In it, all the dogs in England awake to find their humans in a deep sleep from which they cannot be roused. Cruella de Vil makes a brief cameo, although she, too, is asleep. The dogs head to Trafalgar Square, where Sirius, Lord of the Dog Star, addresses all dogdom from the top of Nelson’s Column. From this vantage point, he gives the dogs of the world a choice—to join him on the dog star, where they can all live forever in bliss; or to remain on Earth and take their chances with humanity.
Pongo—one of the heroes of The Hundred and One Dalmatians—takes a walk through the National Portrait Gallery in hopes of settling upon the right answer. He’s especially moved by the plight of all the lost dogs, creatures who surely must feel that Sirius’s offer is alluring. “Today we have hardly felt like lost dogs,” one says. “Because in a way, all dogs have been lost.”
In the end, the dalmatians decide to remain on Earth. “Perhaps one day, Sirius,” thinks Pongo, “we shall be ready to join you and accept bliss. But not yet.”
Thanksgiving 1979. My grandmother, sitting in a green wing chair by the fireplace, rattles the ice cubes in her empty highball glass. “Voka,” she says. My father takes her glass and heads out to the kitchen. In a love seat upholstered in white linen sit my grandmother’s friend Mrs. Watson and my aunt Gertrude. Mrs. Watson has a hard time hearing anything, which sounds sad but actually works out for her pretty well. Aunt Gertrude is looking wistfully at the Cable-Nelson in the corner. “I wish I knew how to play the piano,” she says. “I’d play it for you.”
“You do know how to play the piano,” says my mother. “You’ve been playing the piano since we were children!”
“Do I?” says Aunt Gertrude, always interested to learn things about herself.
“You don’t remember anything!” shouts Gammie. “Hildy, get her something to drink.”
My mother hates being called Hildy. “Can I get you anything?” she asks her sister.
“Maybe …,” said Aunt Gertrude, but then her sweet face is overcome with uncertainty and worry. She’s overwhelmed by her choices. “Maybe some prune juice?”
My mother looks at me. “Jimmy, could you get your aunt some prune juice?”
“Sure,” I say.
“And put some voka in it!” shouts Gammie.
“I don’t want anything to drink!” says Aunt Gertrude, worried.
“How would you know?” asks Gammie.
“Jimmy, you’re not going to put anything in my drink, are you? Promise me you won’t!”
It hurts my feelings that Aunt Gertrude thinks I’d dose her, because I wouldn’t. But my aunt has decided that I cannot be trusted. My mother leans forward and whispers in my ear, “Maybe you could just give her a little.”
“You know what’s interesting?” says Gammie, pulling her latex breast prosthesis out of her bra. “This looks exactly like a real boob!” She’d had a mastectomy the year before. We’d been worried about her, but Gammie now appeared to be perfectly okay. “Science is just something,” she says. “That they could do this!” She waves the boob around. “Science!”
It is impressive—science, that is. “Here ya go,” says Gammie. She hands the boob over to Mrs. Watson. “Maybe you could get one, Hilda.”
“Whoop? Whoop?” says Mrs. Watson, which is her all-purpose response when she can’t hear what’s going on. When I was young I thought Hilda’s deafness and her constant mantra of Whoop? Whoop? Whoop? was very funny. But now that I am old and have hearing aids myself, I’ve come to appreciate the utility of Whoop? Whoop? Whoop? It says what it means.
Hilda holds Gammie’s breast prosthesis in her hands thoughtfully and considers the situation she’s in. She was a World War I army nurse, widowed young. When she isn’t going Whoop? Whoop? Whoop? she has a gentle Yorkshire accent. She has been my grandmother’s best friend for decades. They used to live next door to each other when they both had apartments in the old John Wanamaker mansion on 2032 Walnut Street off Rittenhouse Square. This was the only house I was ever in that felt more haunted than the one my family had moved into. It was a crazy Jacobean Revival–style mansion, once owned by the department store magnate, that had since fallen on hard times. Once, my grandmother took me into the basement, which was stuffed with statues and old wedding dresses and steamer trunks. In one corner was an actual stuffed fucking bear, standing on its hind legs. The bear was dusty. “The people who owned this stuff are dead,” my grandmother announced with a strange satisfaction. “Dead!”
“I’ll be back,” I say, taking Aunt Gertrude’s glass and heading into the kitchen. My mother holds up her thumb and forefinger in the universal symbol for “just a little.”
In the kitchen my father is sitting quietly at a table and smoking a cigarette. The round, claw-footed table is the same one at which six years earlier my friend John had looked around and noted that the walls were breathing. Gammie had found the table in the basement of the Wanamaker mansion. “Hey, old man,” I say to him.
“Hey, old man.”
My grandmother’s empty vodka glass sits upon a table. “Mom wants me to put some vodka in Aunt Gertrude’s prune juice,” I observe.
He blows out some smoke. “Why not?” he asks.
“You want me to make the drink for Gammie, too?”
He nods. “You bet.”
My father is wearing plaid pants and a blue oxford-cloth shirt monogrammed with his initials: JRB. Dad still smokes L&M Kings. My mother can’t stand the fact that he smokes. But every time he tries to stop, he turns into an almost unrecognizably angry, short-tempered grouch, and rather than share a house with this irritable stranger, my mother has surrendered to the smoking.
Matt the Mutt sleeps upon the floor at my father’s feet. It is rare to catch him in a moment of repose.
I mix up the drinks. After I nearly fill Aunt Gertrude’s glass with prune juice, I look at it uncertainly. “You really think I should put alcohol in her drink?” My father is staring toward the ceiling, watching the smoke from his cigarette curl and dissipate. For a moment he doesn’t respond. Then he looks at me, eyes shining.
“Do you miss her?” he asks me.
He’s talking about my sister, who got married a year and a half ago, in between her junior and senior years at college, and who’s since moved to Oregon, where she is teaching special-needs kids. In just a few months, Mount St. Helens will explode, leaving an inch of ashes all over her front yard. Cyndy will sweep some of these into an envelope and mail them to me in Connecticut, where by then I’ll be living in a group house with a bunch of hippies in a comedy-group commune. As one does. I will hold the ashes in my hands and think of my sister all the way across the country.
I still have those ashes, still wrapped in a plastic bag inside a tin tea box that Gammie gave me when I was a child. I have a few old letters from Shannon in that box as well. The carnation I wore when I got married. A pregnancy stick with two lines in it. Some old love letters. A photograph of London Donna that I can’t quite bring myself to throw away. Plus, the ashes of a volcano.
“Yeah, a little,” I said.
My father nods. It’s our first Thanksgiving without Cyndy, and everything feels a little weird. I am happy that my sister is in love and that she has found something—teaching—that she seems to enjoy so much, and I love that she is embarking upon a new adventure. But it hurts my feelings that my sister has launched upon a new life without me. The way I figure, I will never launch upon anything. Oregon is undiscovered country as far as I’m concerned. I’ve never been farther west than Ohio. My sister says she’s seen the Pacific Ocean, a thing so vast I cannot possibly imagine it is real.
In the years since then, I have come to understand that this is exactly what happens: you get used to a certain way of being in the world, and then it changes. The people you love move away, or die, or something else happens—sometimes you just fall out of the habit of friendship, and the friend who you once saw almost every day becomes someone you track distantly—through Facebook, or Christmas cards, or not at all. I’ve had children of my own who’ve grown and moved away, and now I understand that feeling those pangs of distance and change is far more normal than any reliable routine. But in November 1979, this was all new territory. Sometimes the passage of time feels terribly personal, as if mortality is something they came up with just to hurt your feelings.
My sister had called us earlier that morning in a panic. She’d taken her turkey out of the refrigerator and found the giblets still frozen inside the cavity. Somehow she’d panicked and concluded that the turkey she’d bought from a farmer’s market had not been properly dressed and that it would fall to her to do the ceremonial disemboweling. My mother had talked her down, finally convincing her that she just had to run a little hot water into the cavity to accelerate the melting process. Still, my mother had been unnerved by this call. Cyndy had seemed pretty upset, considering it was just giblets.
“I miss her, too,” says my father.
I pick up the glasses with the prune juice and the vodka. “Guess I’ll head back out,” I say.
“Oh,” says Dad. “Stay a little.” He’s not heading back into the fray until he’s finished smoking his cigarette. I’ve never smoked, marijuana notwithstanding, but the look of satisfaction on my father’s face as he blows the smoke from his L&M King into the air is compelling.
I sit down at the table next to him. “I’m glad you two …,” he says, and then, midsentence, sucks on his cigarette and holds in the smoke. This is one of my father’s signature moves—getting half of a sentence out and then making you wait while he holds the smoke in his lungs—and it’s either endearing or infuriating, depending. He blows out the smoke. “Became friends.”
I nod. Taking an emotional inventory of things, as I noted earlier, is not exactly in my father’s wheelhouse. “Yeah, well,” I tell him. “We decided it would be more fun to gang up on you.”
He chuckles in his twinkly way. “You know, we might have spent a little too much time …,” he says, and takes another big lungful of smoke and holds it in. I wait for him to exhale. As I wait, I hear Matt the Mutt, asleep at our feet, barking in his dreams.
“Following the horses,” says Dad.
I don’t really know what to tell him, because of course this is true. “It’s fine,” I say.
“You never cared too much for the horses,” he says.
“Not really.”
“I know. You found your own way, though.” He nods, and his gaze becomes distant again. I have no idea what he’s thinking about. Is it possible he is remembering the sound of Lloyd Goodyear, pulling his bow across his cello strings?
From upstairs, there comes a very slow, heavy sound. I know what this means, and I can suddenly foresee the future. Penny has jumped out of my bed on the third floor and even now is beginning the long, long voyage down the stairs toward the living room, where my mother and Hilda and Aunt Gertrude and my grandmother are still considering Gammie’s latex breast. This is the world we live in. Jimmy Carter is president.
“I think it’s very satisfying,” my father says, “that you’ve done so much at Wesleyan.” He chuckles quietly. “After they wait-listed you.”
It’s interesting that my father’s mind has now alighted upon the injustice of my having wound up on the wait list at Wesleyan. I have continued my reign of terror as the overachieving child of the family, weird as I am, editing the college newspaper, winding up on the board of directors of the radio station, and by all measures acting as though I am heavy business at the college, and this gives my father great satisfaction after I was so nearly rejected. All in all, I am a good boy, the child my parents don’t need to worry about, a status that will continue on for a few more years until my sister and I change places, and all at once she is the good child and I am the source of the unending heartbreak and scandal that rips us all apart.
Matt the Mutt raises his head suddenly. Up periscope. Penny is coming down the back stairs. A moment later, she arrives in the kitchen, and the future I imagined now comes to pass. Penny looks around with an expression that suggests, Who are all these people? I seem to recognize them from somewhere. Then her eyes alight on Matt and his upon her. Matt is up! He’s on his feet! He gallops to her side! In a single swoop, he mounts the old dalmatian and he’s in like Flynn! Whoop! Whoop! Whoop!
Penny, no longer a young dog by any measure, looks at the ceiling in rapture.
Remember the night we broke the windows in this old house? This is what I wished for, George Bailey.
My father stubs out his cigarette, and the two of us consider the fucking dogs. Matt the Mutt, incredibly, has been neutered, but you’d never know he was shooting blanks given the enthusiasm of his ministrations. Penny, for her part, is a changed woman since Matt came to town. In part this is because she was diagnosed with a thyroid condition and is now on medication that has restored the hair on her tail and also put an end to the flowing brown goo that oozed out of her eyes in days of yore. Penny, well into her eighties by now in dog years, is suddenly walking around on spotted paws singing, “Ah! Sweet mystery of life, at last I’ve found thee.”
Matt finishes up, then turns to my father with a look that says, Can’t live with ’em! Can’t live without ’em! Amiright? Then he walks over to the wall, raises one leg, and pees on it.
“I got it,” I say, and head over to the sink where a roll of paper towels and Top Job are permanently left out. I wipe up the puddle as Matt heads out of the room. Penny lies down, contented.
“That Matthew is a character,” my father says in a voice that suggests he finds the dog’s antics charming. This isn’t all that surprising, as my father generally found everything charming, except when he was trying to quit smoking, when he generally found everything to be the opposite.
“What are we going to do about him?” I say.
Dad looks perplexed. “Do? What do you mean, do?”
“I mean,” I say, “he pees in the house. He bounces all over everybody when we come in the door. He barks at you if you try to stop him from bouncing and peeing. He humps everything. He’s kind of, you know, terrible.”
Dad nods happily. “Penny seems satisfied.”
“He was raised in a college dorm room! Then Cyndy just left him here! What are we going to do, just keep—living like this?”
My father seems confused by my passion, given that, technically, I don’t live like this at all. Nine months of the year I’m off at college, and after my senior year it is my father’s fond hope that I will head off to law school. Still, it infuriates me that the house my parents have spent years renovating smells like pee and that you can’t walk in the front door without Matthew taking you down like a left tackle sacking a quarterback.
“What do you suggest?” my father says, giving me a look.
“I don’t know,” I say.
“We’re not giving away your sister’s dog,” he says, and he makes it clear this is a matter of principle for him.
“Couldn’t we take him to, like, dog-training school?”
My father smiles wanly at this, as if I have suggested that we might teach the dog how to operate a forklift. He looks at me adoringly, as if the fact that I would suggest something so completely out of the question is just testimony to the fundamental goodness and idealism of my character.
Through the door behind us is the entry room of the big old house, and in one corner of that room is the dog door that leads out to the kennel. A few months earlier—at the end of my junior year—I had come home from a semester in London. I’d thought, melodramatically, of never coming home, of just starting life over again in England as a different person. But I didn’t know how to start life over. The things I wanted seemed impossible. Plus, I missed my family—Dick and Hildegarde. Gammie and Hilda. Aunt Gertrude. And my sister.
Penny and Matthew.
I’d traveled around Europe for a while after I finished up the semester in London. My friend Zero and I climbed a mountain in Spain and pitched a tent and ate baguettes and drank wine for a week or so. We walked around naked on the mountaintop. We kept milk cold in a small patch of snow. Below us was a vast valley, surrounded by rippling green mountains. One evening we watched a shepherd miles and miles away leading his flock home at sunset. The sound of tinkling bells around the goats’ necks came to us across this inconceivable distance.
I’d finally taken my leave of Zero in Ireland and hitchhiked to Dún Laoghaire, taken the Sealink to Holyhead and a train to London, where I spent the long morning wandering the streets looking for a robe embroidered with a Chinese dragon I’d decided I wanted to buy for London Donna. (But the market where these things were sold was closed, and I just stood there looking mournfully at the shuttered bazaar.) Then I took a train to Heathrow, and a plane to New York, and then an Amtrak train to Philly, and then, at last, the local train back to Devon, where, at 1:00 A.M. on a summer night, I walked with my ridiculous backpack up the dark suburban streets of my adolescence. I arrived at my parents’ house, just as I had left it. I was wrong when I thought I’d never come home. As it turned out, I’d keep returning to this house, again and again, until my fifties. My own children eventually came to call it “the mother ship,” a place where it seemed, at one time, that my mother would live forever.
It was locked that night, though, and I knew that outside of waking up my parents, there was only one other option. So I put my backpack down and I went into the kennel and climbed the cinder-block staircase that led up to the dog door. And then I squeezed through it. I got stuck briefly, like the Grinch in the chimney. Matt the Mutt wandered into the back room. He didn’t think it was unusual to see me wiggling through the dog door in the middle of the night. He began to lick my face, so violently I was afraid for a moment he might lick it off completely. I’d traveled halfway around the world, but now I was home.
With my sister’s departure for the West Coast, I am suddenly the only person under the age of fifty in my family’s circle. I understand that it is my job now to play the role of son, chauffeur of the elderly, changer of lightbulbs, mixer of drinks. It’s not a role I’m particularly good at, and my sarcastic, narcissistic character makes my resentment of my responsibilities all too obvious. Still, I do the job anyway, not because I want to but because I have to. There are times, like now, when my father gives me a look, as if to remind me, Taking care of other people is its own reward.
It is a view of the world that I struggle to live up to. If I am honest about it, I’m still trying to live up to it.
From the living room comes a scream and then the sound of many raised female voices. Penny sits up and growls, the hair on her back standing up like a Mohawk. Matthew barks, and there’s more screaming.
“Ah,” says my father. “There we go.”
We both get up and head into the living room. To get there we have to pass through the ornate blue dining room with its antique fireplace and a grandiose chandelier, through the entry hall with its sweeping oaken staircase, through a large arch with a keystone that leads into the formal room that contains the piano, and another fireplace, and my father’s collection of rare first editions by Somerset Maugham, and the oil painting of my scowling grandfather, and my screaming relations.
Matt the Mutt is making the scene! He’s got Hilda Watson’s leg! He’s humping her Yorkshire kneecaps! My mother is shouting, No, bad dog, down! and Aunt Gertrude is sniffing her prune juice for vodka, and Hilda, as the dog fucks her leg, is still holding my grandmother’s latex breast, and Gammie is smoking a Parliament and laughing her head off, wearing an expression of delight, as if she had rubbed Aladdin’s lamp and wished for just one thing, and this was it.
Penny enters the room and stands beside my father and me with an air of disappointment, like—I let you out of my sight for one moment, and now you’re seeing Hilda Watson’s leg behind my back.
Hilda’s hands are up in the air, hallelujah style. She’s still got the latex breast. Whoop! she says. Whoop! Whoop!
No, my mother says, now on her feet, tugging back on Matt’s collar. But Matt is determined. Nothing can stop him from expressing his love for the leg of his dreams.
My father smiles gently, looking on. For just a moment his gaze falls upon the portrait of his father. You shouldn’t have left me, he wants to tell old James Boylan, my grandfather. You’d have found things so entertaining, if you had not died.
A month later, I drove Matt the Mutt to the vet in my parents’ car, a cream-colored Oldsmobile Omega. It’s the same car in which I once kissed Shannon. I hadn’t heard from her in a while, and now that I had, finally, been the object of someone’s actual affections, I thought about her less. I had received lovely letters from London Donna the summer before. She signed them Je t’aime and drew hearts on the envelope.
Still, something in me had already been trained to think of myself as fundamentally undeserving of love, and in years to come when women would say Je t’aime or its equivalent, my first reaction was to think, Yeah, well. That’s only because you don’t know me well enough. It’s a conviction that’s hard to drop, once you get used to it, even after you’ve spent half your life (as I have) married to someone who makes clear every day exactly how much she adores you. In the twenty-first century, when I receive the sacrament of ashes, instead of saying, “Thou art dust” (the standard observation for the occasion), the pastor of Riverside Church will take me in her arms and say, “Jenny Boylan, you are beloved by God,” and I will collapse in her arms like a rag doll, sobbing, so surprised am I, even after a lifetime of what turns out to be mostly joy, to be told that I am beloved by anybody. Even in my late fifties, when told by Reverend Doctor Amy Butler that I am beloved by God, my first thought is to protest—That’s just because He doesn’t know me.
But in this I suspect I am wrong.
Matt the Mutt, for his part, suffered from no such doubts. He was the canine version of Pepe Le Pew, or Donald Trump, convinced—all evidence to the contrary—that he was the most attractive and desirable soul on earth. Every time we yelled at him for peeing in the house, every time we yanked him by the choke chain off of yet another person’s leg, he simply smiled at us with a look that said, Zee leetle one, she is playing ze hard-to-get!
I did not know what the vets had in store for Matt, although I suspected they had something. My mother had told me that the vets had “one more option” available for treating his exuberance and that I should tell them that it was time.
She didn’t want to give me the details, but she said that the doctor would know what I meant.
Let us pause here for a moment, before we proceed on into the Tredyffrin/Easttown Veterinary Center, to deal with a little paperwork.
My sister, who had for a long time been absent from my life, and who then became the center of it, had now become absent from it once more, in part because she was now married and living on the West Coast and also because, of course, this is what happens in life: friends arrive, and then they disappear. We talked on the phone every week or so, and we also engaged in plenty of hilarious correspondence; I had a cartoon series called Pigs on Motorcycles that I sent her once a month that was, in its own way, a graphic continuation of the material I’d first explored as inventor of The Hildegarde Time Show.
But I’m suspecting that some readers—especially some of you who might have spent a little too much time reading books filled with clever jargon—might have been working up a little theory of your own regarding my adorable sister, namely, that the genesis of my transgender identity probably had something to do with my alternating jealousy of, and love for, her. If this thought has crossed your mind while reading this story thus far, then good for you! You’re cleverer than this book’s author by half and maybe should get into the authoring business yourself! You’d be surprised how enjoyable this new career might be! Plus, you get to travel around the world on airplanes and argue with right-wing pundits on television who will tell you, I don’t know you, Professor Boylan, but even without knowing you I can tell you I know you better than you know yourself! Talk about fun!
Actually it is a theory more or less like this that my very first psychoanalyst will come up with in just a few short years. My reaction to this when he first reveals its brilliance will be a slight sense of confusion. Because sure: I loved my sister. How lucky was I to have someone in that haunted house with me when I was growing up who could both braid a pony’s tail and play electric bass? But having her life? Please. I never wanted her life, not once. I mean, it was all right for her. But the life I wanted was my own.
I mention this because my shrink isn’t the only person to come up with this theory, and to be honest, it feels more than a little insulting to me and a deliberate misunderstanding of what it means to be trans. When Shannon, decades later, learns that I am trans, she will also say something like He always wanted to be me!
I admired Shannon’s brilliance as an actor, her sense of humor, her fierceness of character, and it’s true that among the women I knew when I was young, she did provide a feminist model for how a woman could be in the world. There weren’t a lot of women like that, at least not in Devon, Pennsylvania.
But I didn’t want to be her, either. I’ll hear this refrain again and again, after I come out and finally step into the world. The heartless and the cruel and the just plain stupid will declare, Well, he just wanted to be like his sister, or his girlfriend, or little Natalie Wood, and while I’m always delighted by the felicity of people’s invention, the fact that such theories are colorful and clever should not overly distract us from the fact that they are, as it turns out, laughably untrue.
This is a good point to mention all this as well because in the story that lies just ahead I will find the first opportunity to leave the world of men in which I have dwelled. I was only nineteen or twenty, and to be honest, the boy who spent his days feeding Hamburger Helper to his Venus flytraps is not all that well buried within me, no matter how many letters I received from London Donnas declaring their love in French or how many evenings end with College Donnas imploring me to wait just long enough for them to get their birth control devices.
When I was young, I was haunted by the person I imagined I could never be. Now that I am old, what shocks me is not that, against all odds, I became that person. What shocks me now is that all the boys and men I once was still live within my heart, along with every last dog that ever helped them on their way.
The vet was out in Berwyn, which back then was a working-class town with a toilet seat store, a blacksmith, and a Mexican joint called Tippy’s Tacos, where Jim Wilson and I had once engaged in a hot-sauce-eating contest that had not ended well. It was also the home of Conestoga High, where I’d have gone to school if my parents hadn’t sent me to Haverford instead. The vet was close by a set of railroad tracks, where a year or two earlier a boy my age had been electrocuted on a signal bridge. I thought about him sometimes, wondered if he’d done it on purpose, wondered if that had solved anything, or if, like Anna Karenina, at the last second he’d thought, No, wait, I’ve made a terrible mistake.
“Come on, Matt,” I said, pulling into the parking lot. The electric wires suspended above the Paoli Local tracks hummed in the early winter air. I put the dog on a leash, which he immediately began straining against. He yanked and bounced and jumped. “Just relax,” I said to him, although given the mystery of the nuclear option I had come to explore, I can’t say I’d have done much relaxing myself, were I the dog, which I was not.
We entered the vet’s, checked in with the receptionist, who invited us to take a seat. It was just me and Matt in the waiting room, plus a guy who had what I presumed was a bird in a cage underneath a cloth. The cage was on the bench next to him. There were chirping sounds. Matt the Mutt bounced and yanked, like a jumping bean.
“He’s a cute dog,” the bird-man said.
I looked at Matt, the white fluff ball with the black spots on either side of his head. I had long since forgotten how adorable he was. “Yeah,” I said. “He’s pretty excitable, though.”
The man nodded. “You have him fixed?” he asked.
I said yes. “He’s still all wound up, though.” Matt was desperately trying to get to the man’s leg.
“I had a dog like that once,” the man said. “Now I got a bird.”
I looked at the cage, hidden by the sheet. “Is your bird sick?”
“Well,” he said. “His droppings is all bloody.”
“That’s a shame,” I said.
“Tell me about it.”
The vet came out, and Matt and I were ushered in to a private examination chamber. “Ah, Matthew,” he said. The vet was a young man, not much older than me. He wore a white coat with his name stitched into it in red thread. He looked good. I remembered how I had wanted to be a veterinarian when I was a child, but the prospect of med school was just too overwhelming. I wanted to help animals, but it seemed as if the only way to do this was through the terrible portals of organic chemistry and cell biology. So, I’d thought: Forget that. “What seems to be the problem?”
“He’s really out of control,” I said. “He humps everything, pees everywhere, knocks people over when they come through the door, stands there and barks at you if you try to tell him no.”
“And having him neutered hasn’t changed any of this,” said the doctor.
“No,” I said. “He hasn’t … slowed down at all.”
“Hm,” said the doctor. “Well, let’s take a look.”
The vet listened to Matt with a stethoscope as the dog squirmed and bounced. It was as if he were the dog equivalent of young Elvis.
After a while, the doc took the stethoscope out of his ears. “Well, there’s nothing wrong with him,” he said. “He just needs firmness, and training. He’s developed some bad habits. You need to show him who’s boss.”
“My mother said you discussed … some other option?”
The vet thought about this for a moment, puzzled, then understanding broke through. “Ah,” he said. “Well, there is one thing we can do. It’s experimental. But we could give the dog hormones, you know, that would have a sedating effect. It’s an experimental protocol.”
I listened to the vet’s words as if they were reaching me from a great distance. If I understood him correctly, what he was suggesting was we give Matthew female dog hormones. The theory being that a little estrogen might provide perspective.
This was a long time ago, and to be honest I can’t remember the exact names of the drugs the vet had in mind, and in retrospect it seems insane, like something I must have dreamed. But a little research on the always reliable internet suggests that this is a course of treatment provided for aggressive male dogs, at least in some instances.
The drug the doctor had in mind was probably not diethylstilbestrol, although this particular compound was one that had crossed the Boylan family threshold once before. My mother had been given this drug, a synthetic hormone, during her pregnancy with me, in fact, since she was in her forties then and was considered to be at elevated risk for miscarriage.
DES was taken off the market in 1971, though, after scientists concluded that it caused cancer, and birth defects, and a host of other issues. One side effect of DES was an alleged increase in intersex and transsexual “conditions” for fetuses exposed to the drug in utero. I’m not especially swayed by this connection, and not only because the science is still inconclusive. I don’t discount the effect of hormones upon our sense of self. But we are more than our chemicals, and surely some aspect of our souls comes from a place we cannot name.
“And would this be safe? For Matt, I mean?”
The doctor shrugged. “I wouldn’t recommend it.”
“What are the risks?”
“Well, you know,” the doctor said. “You’d be feminizing your dog.”
“I think my mother thinks he’d just calm down a little.”
“Well, he might calm down,” said the doctor. “But he wouldn’t be—you know. The same dog.”
All at once we were in the heart of a complex philosophical conversation.
“Is it dangerous?” This wasn’t the question I really wanted to ask.
“Not dangerous exactly,” the doctor said. “I just think there are better methods.”
“Such as …?”
“I think you should try to train your dog,” he said. “You ought to work with him. Drugs are the easy way out.”
I knew what he meant. But if I understood my mother correctly, the easy way out was exactly what we’d been looking for. Plus, what did it mean, that the dog would be feminized? So like, if we were driving in a car, Matt the Mutt would no longer be quite so reluctant to ask for directions? If we went to visit a friend, would Matt the Mutt henceforward insist that we just bring our host a little present?
“We can give you a sample if you want to give it a try,” the doctor said.
“But you’re saying you think it’s a bad idea?”
“Like I said,” the vet said. “You might not recognize your dog after.”
I left the vet’s with the pills in a canister. The man with the bird was gone.
On the way back to the house, Matt had his whole body out the passenger-side window of the Omega, his jowls and face blubbering in the air like an astronaut experiencing the incredible g-forces of liftoff. He stood there erect and joyful, the dog in full. He was like Sir Edmund Hillary atop Everest, like Neil Armstrong standing in the Sea of Tranquility. The winter sun shone down on his fluffy black-and-white face. Clouds of glory followed in his wake.
I pulled the car into the driveway, put Matt on the leash. In one hand I held a sample of feminizing hormones.
Dog hormones, to be sure. But hormones notwithstanding.
What would you have done, if you were me? Would you have maybe taken just one, to see what things might happen?
If you didn’t like it, you could always just not take more. Call it an experiment that didn’t work out.
If you did like it, well, there’d be more where that came from.
I know lots of transgender people who have their own version of the dog-hormone story, especially people who transitioned back when our very existence seemed debatable, before the scientific and political communities unanimously determined that people in such profound need should surely be helped and that the best response to this lifelong sense of wrongness is compassion and kindness.
Thank goodness everything has changed, and no one ever has to suffer through what I went through again. Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!
I know a woman who stole her wife’s birth control pills, took them on the sly. One of her breasts grew a lot, the other just a little. I know another woman who says that while riding a motorcycle, she was stung by a bee that “reset her endocrine system.” I know others—lots of them, hundreds, in fact—who have ordered illegal hormones from Mexico off the internet, women who had silicone injections in their breasts that migrated unpleasantly throughout their bodies. Sometimes, in the wake of these choices, they died.
Then there is Candy Darling, of Warhol’s Factory, who popped estrogen pills as if they were Good & Plenty. They gave her amazing skin, incredible breasts, and cancer.
I know thousands and thousands of transgender people who have tried to find their way in the unforgiving world—without resources, without support, without love. Is it really so surprising that anyone should rely upon their own cunning in order to outsmart a medical and therapeutic community that, for so long, sought only to deny us the treatment we so desperately needed?
You add everything up, filching hormones from the family dog doesn’t seem like such a stretch.
As for me, the thing I didn’t know was what would happen if, against all odds, I had my heart’s desire. In the end, might I not be just like Gomer all those years ago—who did not know what to do with the thing he had always wanted (that is, my throat) when he finally got his paws upon it?
It wasn’t that I didn’t know who I was or what I wanted. But I was afraid.
Plus, there were times when being a boy—or a young man, as you’d have to call me by this point—was not without its pleasures. Sure, it was my second-best life. But my best life seemed to offer only violence and chaos. In the meantime: I’m the editor of The Wesleyan Argus. I’m trailed by girls who look at me with desire and call me Jaaames. I play Autoharp in coffeehouses where people are stunned by my little folk songs that manage to be both crazy funny and unbearably angry.
Like I said, there is something highly entertaining about “Imitation Imitation.”
Perhaps one day, Sirius, we shall be ready to join you and accept bliss. But not yet.
On the way into the house I lifted the lid off the trash can and stuck the drugs in the garbage.
My mother was sitting at the kitchen table, the round one with the lion claws, when I came through the door. “Well?” she said. “What did the vet say?”
Penny wandered into the room, laid eyes on Matthew. Matt took a look at her and thought, in his Pepe Le Pew voice, Ze little love bundle. She is looking for ze trysting place! He rushed to Penny’s side, and then—he climbed aboard! Matt was having his way! The world lay at his paws.
We looked at the two of them, going at it.
“He says that we should take him to dog school,” I said. “He says we need to show him who’s in charge.”
Matt threw back his head and howled. Ze game of love, he noted, is never called on account of darkness.
It was pretty clear who was in charge. It was not me.