You never really forget your first. Where and when and who you were: sixteen years old at the football game, twenty-six outside the bar, twelve on the playground. Or who they were: all the boys with mouths shaped like knife wounds, the men in scuffed boots, the ones who looked like your father or brother.
You never forget when the word was first hurled at you, or whether a fist or a baseball bat came swinging right behind it. Whether it was whispered, spat, or graffitied. Whether it was costumed: sissy, punk, queer, pansy. “You like that.” “I’m not that way.” “I bet you like that shit, don’t you?”
You never forget your first “faggot.” Because the memory, in its way, makes you. It becomes a spine for the body of anxieties and insecurities that will follow, something to hang all that meat on. Before you were just scrawny; now you’re scrawny because you’re a faggot. Before you were just bookish; now you’re bookish because you’re a faggot.
Soon, bullies won’t even have to say the word. Nor will friends, as they start to sit at different lunch tables without explanation. There will already be a voice in your head whispering “faggot” for them.
I still dreamed about Cody every so often, even though I hadn’t seen him for two or three years. My dreams usually started with his mouth and the way it must have looked when he said the word. “Faggot” is slick with spit. He’s on the other side of that locked door, saying “faggot” over and over again, taking off an item of clothing each time he says it. Cody in a pit-stained wife beater, cargo shorts unzipped and at his ankles, red plaid boxer shorts sliding down his legs, the faint happy trail revealing more and more of itself, the base of his dick, a pale pink root.
Cody—in my mind—became the word itself.
“Faggot” swallowed him whole and spit him back out as a wet dream.
Before him, the first wet dreams that I remember weren’t about boys or girls so much. It started with amorphous bodies. A pair of beautiful legs, a chest pressed against the small of my back, a cloud of hot breath on my neck, an improbably long tongue tracing my entire silhouette. The dreams weren’t gendered. Shadows would keep the faces out of view. There weren’t breasts, but smooth, perfect curves. There weren’t dicks, but throbbing veins. That feeling knew no gender, until Cody happened. And, in dream after dream, kept happening. By the time I started high school, the bodies of men seemed, suddenly, almost aggressively present. Not just in my dreams, but all day long. Men were everywhere. A plague of miraculous bodies. How had I not noticed before?
Just after I started my sophomore year of high school, a black construction worker spent three days working on the roof of our apartment building. There were other men on the roof each day, but his body is the body I remember: shining with sweat as if he’d been dipped in coconut oil from head to toe, the red tone of his brown skin radiant in the sunlight, muscles straining as he worked on the roof’s tiles. And a smile so bright, it was vulgar. Coming home from school, I’d find reasons to hang around, even going so far as to set out a pitcher of ice water for the workers one day. Once, in passing, he called me “youngblood.” I repeated it to myself under my breath, trying my best not to smile too obviously while he could see me.
His body became an idea I dragged into bed with me at night. Or I’d pull in the body of my track coach, or one of the football players Mom cheered on while watching Monday Night Football. How did other people concentrate with all these bodies just walking around all the time? So many men and boys, each with bodies to study and memorize.
Well into high school, in all these dreams I had the body of a girl. The kind of girl I thought these guys would sleep with. The construction worker’s wife, the football player’s girlfriend, the woman framed in the photograph the track coach kept on the wall in his office. Any woman would do. Any body but my own.
The rough little poems I had started writing by then were usually in the voices of women and usually overly obsessed with Greek mythology. As Medusa, I wrote about refusing to look at myself in the mirror, lest I turn myself to stone. As Penelope, I wrote about dreaming of my husband’s body, years crashing between us like waves. As Eurydice, I wrote a poem in which I mistake the heat of the underworld for the warmth of Orpheus’s body curled around my own in sleep. Always poems from mythic women about the distance between their bodies and the bodies of their beloved.