Dear Diane,
So much magic old footage of you still endures online, a spiritual stalker’s dream. Sometimes Caroline and I watched it together: early concert footage and awkward local interviews where Eddie, Tom, and Adam stammer while they try not to look into the interviewer’s cleavage, bizarre lip-synch setpieces—five of you posed in striped shirts, five of you posed in convertible cars, big hamburgers on trays attached to your windows, slender bikini waitresses on car-hop gravity skates blinking anxiously at the key light as they glide all Bubsy Berkeley in the background, guitars echoing out of the studio monitors. You watch it all, presumed prince surveying your subjects.
To hear a lot of people tell it—to hear me tell it, I worry—you seem avoidant, ingrown, vanishing. But on the tapes, where you’re present, something else is happening. It projects from you like a force field, touching all the people in the tiny YouTube frame with you. Tom Happy in 1964, clean-cut and pumping his foot as he sings your songs to a crowd, looks back at you every four measures, smiles: do you see him? And do you think he’s good? You look ahead and keep playing your bass; sometimes you remember to smile, something your father instructed you to do, a way you and your customers can build rapport.
You have more power than you believe, Diane; your inability to understand that doesn’t make people less subject to it.
Caroline worked at my trailer, editing sound and curating clips from each day’s backlog of raw footage, posting and feeding videos out to social media drops, liking and sharing the work of people she knew according to karmic principles of threefold return. She answered fan mail, too, really answered it with long letters that asked a lot of counter-questions, except in the case of obvious creeps like the guy who tracked her location based on the upload time of each video and different stuff in the backgrounds, and who kept sending emails saying he was coincidentally going to be in the same town as her next stop, or he could be, and they should have a real meeting of the minds finally. She didn’t respond all the time—just sometimes, as one might train a rat in a Skinner box—but when she did, it was by hand, in her handwriting built from big swimming blobs with stub ascenders and descenders, curlicue serifs, a vacuole to accommodate any reader. (Let’s not discuss my own trans girl handwriting, which you have by now experienced plenty of.) She wrote her letters and then she walked out, jacket zipped against fall winds, to the post office just before the highway access to mail them. To mail a letter you write someone: imagine that.
It was abstract to me that she had fans, that anyone I actually knew might be worthy of fans: that it was possible to give out love, to get it back. What does it feel like to have faith that your actions are worth doing?
Perhaps you are wondering about the secrets of what a trans woman and a cis woman do in bed. A fair question, given your own mysterious circumstances! Here is how I will try to answer you. Before, my memories of sex mostly involved not wanting to exist during it: to be a presence, a little hot circle of disembodied light that moved over my interlocutor, giving something without wanting to get. If the other person wanted to give, I would let them do or have whatever they wanted: because sex is not about wanting, it is about something else. It is about wanting to be seen, in conditions where, because of my body, it was not possible to be seen. So we hid in spaces, me and my partners, where dysphoria smoked into every corner of the room like incense in cathedral corners long after a ritual has stopped.
I think it is still essentially like this, except I don’t let the other person do whatever they want anymore. This is because a hand on my shoulder will make all of me reorient to that touch. Because there is hope, and I’m bashful in the face of hope. All of this is still very theoretical, something I am working out when we touch, sometimes, which we do less and less: and it was a relief, Diane, when I grew familiar enough to her to grow uninteresting, when she stopped asking me for that.
We talked—one day lying on my sweating bed after the incident at the spaceport, a rare time she stayed with me rather than in the dorm, air thick with palo santo from the crystal shop and double estrogen sweat—about exactly how we would manage the sale of my trailer and everything in it that I’d built, when we went north to find Mona Slinks, and you somewhere beyond her.
I mean, we’re gonna need money, aren’t we? she asked. —As soon as we figure out the right direction to go in. Or earlier, you know. There’s nothing holding us back here.
There’s my friends, I said.
She laughed. —Ronda’s not your friend, she said. —You don’t even like her.
I didn’t look at her. —It’s just—suppose we like, hang out here for a year, I said. —Save up some money, keep soaking and researching. Really get it right. Then we could even buy a truck or something, you know? Outfit it with a hitch, maybe, so we could take the whole trailer up with us. We could live in it, you know, when times get bad.
She made a face. —I don’t want to carry a trailer with me for the rest of my life, she said. —We could sell it now and get a car. One can totally live in a car.
You could live in a car, I said to her. —Or you could take the bus.
She looked back at me. —We could take the bus, she said. —What am I going to say to B——, Diane, whatever, without you?
I’m glad you value me as a translator, I said.
Look, did I actually do something wrong? she asked.
I put my head down again. —I feel pressure from you, I said.
What pressure? she asked.
To live in a car, I pleaded. —Or, I don’t know. To run off on this adventure, and to translate for your family, and to form a band with you? And maybe right this second, maybe that isn’t what I need? Maybe I need to keep hold of what I have? Maybe you don’t understand why I’d need that?
No, I don’t, she said, and I looked up. Her eyes were level; all feeling was suddenly gone. —I also didn’t say we should start a band.
I guess I made that up, I said.
It’s a great idea, she said.
No, I know it is, I agreed.
We looked at one another, and I knew we were deciding what instruments each of us might play.
Later, after fighting again, apologizing again, working it out between us again, Caroline lay down beside me, set her hand on my back. She petted my back like you’d pet a dog whom the thunder has startled: slowly unknotting it, whether I wanted that or not. What did I want?
As she touched my back, she whispered to me: I’ve let things go too, it’s okay, I’ve let things go too. It made me furious, furious even as I lay there too relaxed to move. As if I haven’t. As if I have no idea what comes of throwing everything you know on the gravel lawns, turning out all your lights, locking the door on your life. As if nothing might have been worth keeping.
This is how we lived—Caroline at work watching Mona Slinks’s profile while she arranged her footage—desert skies, aisles of endless meats for grilling and broiling, gleaming incomplete towers of spaceports, my face, awkward and winking into the lens. She stitched it into weird trash mosaics, let the online tide flow out, let it bring love back in kelp garlands that she threw around her shoulders.
And I worked too: I swept up; I ran reservations; I washed and distributed towels; I prayed. And I soaked in a private bath on the clock watching the unanimous Rio Grande, my spine steeping in heat like a noodle losing its semolina brittleness, becoming supple, digestible. It was on one of those days, praying to become digestible, that I realized I no longer wanted to find you, Diane. I no longer wanted a vector for escape. What I wanted was for you somehow to find me and Caroline, here, to join us, here, in the still and quiet and safe place I had found: what I wanted was for none of this to stop.
Love, Gala