199: Genderswitch, redux
Each year is divided into two neat segments, delineated one from the other by the full day of journeying, the hours in a car when he is very small and the hours on the bus and train and train and bus again when he is older. The limbo hours that belong neither to Boston nor Atlantic City, but to motion, to the swaying rock and rhythmic clatter of the coach. Sleeping and waking blur together while machines carry him from one world to another. There is something of ritual in the long passage, in this insulating fugue state. And then there is the last squeal of brakes, the bus coming to a stop in Atlantic City (or in Boston), and the boy jerks to full wakefulness, gathers his luggage, disembarks, and leaves on the bus's worn seats the habits of the previous months.
And if it is Atlantic City, then he seeks the first opportunity at his aunt's to change, shucking faded denim and plain T-shirt and tatty sneakers in favor of the finer things in life. Or at least the more colorful: the scarlet splash of lipstick, the rich dark purple of eyeliner, the bright brassy baubles that glitter with an enthusiasm only rhinestones can manage.
After eight months in Boston-- after eight months of grey stone and grey rain and grey minds, of school ties and geometry exercises-- it's time to breathe again.
***
The first time is simply a child's curiosity (he is a precocious six-year-old, but theories of grand aesthetic rebellions are still beyond him). The busy wonderland that is the backstage dressing room is open to him: a world of feathered headdresses and sequined bustiers, of powders and paints reapplied hastily between numbers.
It's fascinating to watch. To a child it smacks of magic. The bright bulbs ringing the long mirror and counter, which is lined with legion bottles of all sizes and colors. The girls jostling at the counter and getting their makeup on with the mad efficiency of show business, quick strokes and swipes of brushes and puffs that transform in the space of seconds, turning faces that were only average into the sparkling eyes and smiles and rosy cheeks of the high-kick lineup. Or into china dolls, slant-eyed pale-faced mysteries with small red hearts for lips. Barbara (who brings him cookies) puts on the yellow wig and the red dress and the last necessary alchemy of rouge and lipstick and she is suddenly 'Marilyn'. Magic. Magic paint.
Left to his own devices as the girls perform their last song-and-dance, the child is willing to effect an alchemy upon himself, and by the time the girls file back in-- tired, sweaty, stripping off their feathers and costume jewelry-- Paul has half a stick of lipstick on his face-- and hands, and clothes.
To his puzzled frustration, he has been transformed only into a mess (which any six-year-old can manage, with or without cosmetics). Barbara finds a wet cloth, and she's barely got him scrubbed clean before Rita's grinning and leaning in with a tube of carnelian lipstick-- this is how you do it, mijo-- and destiny is forged. Or at least painted. For a half-hour, the girls jostle for turns as they had for counterspace, shrieking with laughter as they layer on the makeup and encourage him to try on pieces of their wardrobes.
When his aunt inevitably heads backstage to find out where her dancers are, it is to find Paul seated imperiously on the counter, bedecked like a child raja in fake pearls and draped satin, having his nails done. Under Roxana's silent stare the girls fall silent and apprehensive, and the more ambitious plans involving the hair rollers are abandoned.
A verdict is finally exhaled, along with a cloud of cigarette smoke: "He looks like a goddamn kewpie doll."
Everyone laughs, but it's Rita who plants a liberal kiss on his rouged cheek and giggles, "Don't listen to her, mijo. You're beautiful."
And with the bright bulbs glittering around his reflection, framing a face that is both his and not his-- rounder and rosier of cheek, softer of lip and eye, more what a child should look like, more what a mother might find lovable-- the magic works, and he believes what she says.
***
He is a willing mannequin, and the rest of that summer involves much traipsing around in as much of the show costumes as the girls will dress him in. An incident involving the stairs and one of the feather boas, overlong for a small child, brings about a stern reprimand from Roxana to the girls about carelessness with the props, but as Paul is given both pieces of the now-useless boa he doesn't care.
Rita offers to pierce his ears, as she has done for her own daughters: Roxana draws the line. But Barbara gives him a pair of clip-on earrings, and another of the girls a pair of (much too big) heels scuffed to the point of worthlessness, and Paul continues to trip up and down the stairs in finery, with a Cupid's bow of lipstick on his face often as not courtesy of his aunt herself. Sometimes he wobbles out among the patrons, who hoot and clap, or gravely compliment the little lady on her dress, to which the little lady says a solemn thank you, and totters back to the sanctity of backstage.
And nobody says little boys shouldn't wear that or it's time to stop playing dress-up now, because the people who come to Roxie's do so for things like Barbara's Marilyn-Monroe act and the flashing thighs of the women and Maureen's slow sashay on-stage and out of her dress and a few drinks to wash it all down with, and not to pass any sort of judgment at all, unless it's on the quality of tonight's cocktails. Even Roxana's husband only chuckles and returns his attention to his poker hand, and so for three whole months Paul is allowed to be beautiful never knowing little boys aren't supposed to be.
The first hint that perhaps, just perhaps, this is not something everybody does comes when August rolls toward September and he must prepare for the return north. Roxana helps him pack, and when she comes to the heels and the boa and the rest of it that he's already stuffed into his bag she takes them back out and puts them in a drawer. At his look she says They'll be here when you come back and he has to accept that.
In the car, as the slumbering whirligig that is Atlantic City in the morning drops away behind them, Paul breaks one of the unspoken rules about his visits with his aunt, the rule that says they don't talk about his mother, her sister.
"Would she love me more if I was a girl?"
Roxana shoots a quick glance at him from behind her own thickly-mascaraed eyelashes, then returns her gaze to the road. He's beginning to think she won't answer him-- adults often do not-- when she clears her throat and says, "It wouldn't make a difference, Paul."
***
In school that year a classmate tells him he hits like a girl. Paul-- remembering the bruising grip with which his mother had seized his wrist upon finding him forgetful of his scales, remembering other incidents-- fails to comprehend how this is supposed to be an insult.
Someone else tells him he runs like a girl too, and, thinking of how his aunt can dance, long legs flexing as she crosses the length of the floor in two swift grand jetés, he is forced to conclude that they have never seen a girl before.
***
Summer comes again and the car ride back to Atlantic City is filled with an anxious silence on his part, toes kicking at the dash no matter how many times Roxana tells him to stop, until finally they're there and he can run up the stairs and check the drawer and she did not lie to him, they're still there, dusty but there. Relief. Paul refuses to take off the boa for two days.
***
Learning, life is a learning process. Winters drag by in Adams, in the grey, in the classrooms while the teachers drone out facts that he already knows or do not interest him to learn. Retreat to books, ink on paper, black and white. In contrast, summers flicker by in quick bursts of color and motion. Roxana teaches him the five positions of the feet, the plié, the pas and port de bras; the girls show him how to can-can. And how to apply foundation and eyeshadow and lipstick, and how to braid hair.
And his mother continues to educate him in Bach and Brahms and Berlioz and Beethoven, a litany of Bees that swarm in his ears, striped white-black-white-white-black-white instead of yellow-black, and as he grows older he realizes that Roxana was right, it would not have made a difference had he been a girl instead of a boy. Or if it had, it would only have made things worse: she would have pushed a daughter harder in that absurd dream of diva. And then been envious of any success achieved...
Better boy, better snips and snails and puppy dog tails. Except that he has never owned a dog, nor wants to, and, while snails are admittedly fascinating, he has no clue what snips are, and overall sugar and spice sounds like a better deal. There are no girls at Adams, and Paul forms wildly inaccurate ideas, influenced by his summer acquaintances, of what the fairer sex learns in the second and third and fourth grades. Whatever else, he is fairly certain they are never forced to pick teams and play baseball in the rain. Or told that having your lip split by another child "builds character."
Which isn't to say he passes up all manly pursuits. His uncle teaches him to gamble.
***
During his tenth summer his uncle pulls him aside for a heart-to-heart, another education. His uncle is of Italian stock, and they believe in getting an early start on the important business of romance.
"Hey, Paolo," Orso says, tobacco-stained fingers on his shoulder, drawing him off to the cluttered office where he keeps the club's finances in some sort of dubious order. An easy-going man, Orso is content to let his wife rule their club with a fist manicured in iron, but there are duties one man owes another, and God knows the kid won't learn it from anyone else. He sits his nephew down, privately thanking the Virgin Mary that the boy is actually looking like a boy today, and launches without preamble into an explanation.
"Now maybe yet you got no girls to impress, hey, but you're going to in a year or two, Paolo, and there's things you should know. Uno, a woman will ruin you if you are not very careful. You look at her with one eye, sí, and the other, you look at your wallet. Duo... "
Paul listens silently and attentively to a discourse on how you ask a girl out ("Americans are too shy. Just tell her she's beautiful, and that you gonna pick her up at eight"), how you compliment her ("always say her hair is good"), and how to know you're in love ("your heart, it stops beating a second, then starts again very fast, Paolo") without comment. He supposes that, since Orso says it, it's likely he will want to impress a girl sooner or later, and he has learned enough of wariness not to ask, even of genial Orso, what one should do if one wants to impress a boy. However, by the time Orso gets into what you do once you've got the girl's shirt unbuttoned, Paul feels the need to interrupt.
"I know this part, Uncle Orso."
"Oh yeah?" A dubious look, an eloquently arched brow. "You know all about having the sex?"
Paul shrugs. "What do you think all the girls talk about in the dressing room? Just their boyfriends and what they did last night with them and how many times. Stuff like that."
Orso's other brow arches; he's impressed. "With you in there? You sneaky little bastardo...What, they talk about, like, how good the man was?"
"Yes."
Orso laughs. "You are a happy pig in shit, Paolo! ....wait, wait-- all the girls-- you mean, even your aunt too?"
"Especially her."
"SHIT! What's she say about me?!"
Thus goes the birds-and-the-bees.
***
His classmates at Adams inevitably discover women, at least through the medium of pages torn from their fathers' Playboys and passed about discreetly. Paul glances at the first of these to come into view, curious as to what has everybody wide-eyed, but upon seeing the image his already-low opinion of his classmates' intelligence goes down another notch: she barely has one breast uncovered, big deal. He's been privy to that and more for years now.
He points out casually that he sees the real thing every summer, and while they claim not to believe him, there is a somewhat gratifying flicker of awed envy in their eyes all the same. They never do admit to really believing him, either, but somehow Paul becomes the de facto Expert on Girls (the irony is not lost on him, especially as he's starting to doubt he's ever going to be Interested), a relayer of his uncle's advice and a supplier of salacious information-- and, later, supplier of more skin mags as well, brought back from Atlantic City in his bookbag.
He keeps the Playgirls for himself.
***
By the time the Kinks release "L-O-L-A" (the year after Stonewall makes the news), Paul's a veteran of the eyeliner pencil and the lipstick case, and has long since traded the deteriorating feather boa of childhood for a pair of vinyl go-go boots, miniskirt, a wig... Atlantic City is a wonderful place for a boy of fourteen who can pass for a girl of sixteen, and when he's in drag, walking down the street with a saunter as polished as any working girl's, nobody gives him so much as a second glance -- or rather, nobody gives him a questioning glance; he attracts quite a lot a of second glances.
Winter is for a world that grows increasingly smaller, increasingly narrower, starts shoving him and his classmates towards what are you going to do with your life? and offers the dullest possible options as answers. Summer is for blue skies and turned heads, for the boardwalk and the neon nights, for waking up each day deciding if he feels like being boy or girl or something in between, something with high cheekbones and long lashes that flutters back and forth between genders like a bird between telephone wires, a contralto laugh and falsetto purr trailing in his wake. Summer is a time for playing at being older with the recklessness of the young. Summer's for being beautiful, mijo, mija, and this is how you do it.
And the Kinks sing Girls will be boys and boys will be girls, it's a mixed-up muddled-up shook-up world except for Lola...
***
And time passes and in two and three more years he's sorting out what he wants to do, helped along by Frank Serpico in the news and too many books full of ideals. And two dead bodies, and the stories that the girls tell-- not the ones of what they did last night and how many times, but the ones for which they drop their voices to whispers, the ones about how Jenny-- you remember Jenny, she worked over at the Atlantis-- they found Jenny dead behind the casino-- or You know Carla? Her pimp knifed her, she's in the hospital...
And helped along also by the fact that he knows it's the last damn place in the world where he should try and make a career for himself, last damn place that a boy who likes boys should set his sights on. But the teenager Paul-- graduating from Adams two years early, with the highest grades the school has seen in two decades-- takes hostility and converts it into fuel. Takes not-being-particularly-welcome, or indeed welcome at all, as a personal challenge, as a gauntlet thrown down before him.
The world of law enforcement is no place at all for a clever young faggot, so of course he goes there.
There are detours, of course; more school. New York. John Jay. Columbia. The NYPD. And they are busy years, little time for anything other than books and training, and he does not spend very many hours in heels and mascara. It is again a white-and-black-and-grey winter of professors and paper. Leached of all color except the rust-red of blood, radiating out from the dissections and autopsies and permeating everything. And it is the same color as the bricks that made up Adams' walls and also, somehow, the same color as Rita's lipstick.
In New York, Paul drives for the first time. In New York he takes up fencing, and later learns to shoot. Cars and swords and guns, a boy's own toys. And in New York he finds there are still bullies, and this time there is no running from them, no library to seek out, because it's his fellow cops bringing it, bringing it because he's a boy who likes boys and this boys' club doesn't want boys like that for a member, and in New York Paul wins his first fight against a bully: gives Officer Harrison multiple concussions and a shattered eardrum and pieces of glass that take three hours of surgery to pick out, and when the lieutenant hauls him off Harrison with a Jesus Christ, Smecker, alright, you made your point, Paul snarls through his own blood It builds fucking character.
New York teaches him how to be a boy, and he learns he's an angry one.
And some nights he curls in bed, exhausted from the day's violence, too tired for sleep, listening to New York screaming and wailing outside the window, and Paul thinks if he'd been a girl, if he'd been born a girl-child, could he possibly be here? This city, this life, with so little beauty in the sirens and the precincts and the body bags.
Surely he'd be somewhere else. Someone else. Dusky eyeshadow rather than the rings of his current weariness, the yielding curve of a breast rather than the holster-shaped bruise on his ribcage. Satin instead of uniform blue, pearls instead of gunmetal.
Doesn't know, he doesn't know. And he can hypothesize all he wants, but it's not testable, because all the magic paint in the world won't make it real.
fandom: boondock saints
muse: paul smecker
word count: 3135 (YA RLY)
And if it is Atlantic City, then he seeks the first opportunity at his aunt's to change, shucking faded denim and plain T-shirt and tatty sneakers in favor of the finer things in life. Or at least the more colorful: the scarlet splash of lipstick, the rich dark purple of eyeliner, the bright brassy baubles that glitter with an enthusiasm only rhinestones can manage.
After eight months in Boston-- after eight months of grey stone and grey rain and grey minds, of school ties and geometry exercises-- it's time to breathe again.
***
The first time is simply a child's curiosity (he is a precocious six-year-old, but theories of grand aesthetic rebellions are still beyond him). The busy wonderland that is the backstage dressing room is open to him: a world of feathered headdresses and sequined bustiers, of powders and paints reapplied hastily between numbers.
It's fascinating to watch. To a child it smacks of magic. The bright bulbs ringing the long mirror and counter, which is lined with legion bottles of all sizes and colors. The girls jostling at the counter and getting their makeup on with the mad efficiency of show business, quick strokes and swipes of brushes and puffs that transform in the space of seconds, turning faces that were only average into the sparkling eyes and smiles and rosy cheeks of the high-kick lineup. Or into china dolls, slant-eyed pale-faced mysteries with small red hearts for lips. Barbara (who brings him cookies) puts on the yellow wig and the red dress and the last necessary alchemy of rouge and lipstick and she is suddenly 'Marilyn'. Magic. Magic paint.
Left to his own devices as the girls perform their last song-and-dance, the child is willing to effect an alchemy upon himself, and by the time the girls file back in-- tired, sweaty, stripping off their feathers and costume jewelry-- Paul has half a stick of lipstick on his face-- and hands, and clothes.
To his puzzled frustration, he has been transformed only into a mess (which any six-year-old can manage, with or without cosmetics). Barbara finds a wet cloth, and she's barely got him scrubbed clean before Rita's grinning and leaning in with a tube of carnelian lipstick-- this is how you do it, mijo-- and destiny is forged. Or at least painted. For a half-hour, the girls jostle for turns as they had for counterspace, shrieking with laughter as they layer on the makeup and encourage him to try on pieces of their wardrobes.
When his aunt inevitably heads backstage to find out where her dancers are, it is to find Paul seated imperiously on the counter, bedecked like a child raja in fake pearls and draped satin, having his nails done. Under Roxana's silent stare the girls fall silent and apprehensive, and the more ambitious plans involving the hair rollers are abandoned.
A verdict is finally exhaled, along with a cloud of cigarette smoke: "He looks like a goddamn kewpie doll."
Everyone laughs, but it's Rita who plants a liberal kiss on his rouged cheek and giggles, "Don't listen to her, mijo. You're beautiful."
And with the bright bulbs glittering around his reflection, framing a face that is both his and not his-- rounder and rosier of cheek, softer of lip and eye, more what a child should look like, more what a mother might find lovable-- the magic works, and he believes what she says.
***
He is a willing mannequin, and the rest of that summer involves much traipsing around in as much of the show costumes as the girls will dress him in. An incident involving the stairs and one of the feather boas, overlong for a small child, brings about a stern reprimand from Roxana to the girls about carelessness with the props, but as Paul is given both pieces of the now-useless boa he doesn't care.
Rita offers to pierce his ears, as she has done for her own daughters: Roxana draws the line. But Barbara gives him a pair of clip-on earrings, and another of the girls a pair of (much too big) heels scuffed to the point of worthlessness, and Paul continues to trip up and down the stairs in finery, with a Cupid's bow of lipstick on his face often as not courtesy of his aunt herself. Sometimes he wobbles out among the patrons, who hoot and clap, or gravely compliment the little lady on her dress, to which the little lady says a solemn thank you, and totters back to the sanctity of backstage.
And nobody says little boys shouldn't wear that or it's time to stop playing dress-up now, because the people who come to Roxie's do so for things like Barbara's Marilyn-Monroe act and the flashing thighs of the women and Maureen's slow sashay on-stage and out of her dress and a few drinks to wash it all down with, and not to pass any sort of judgment at all, unless it's on the quality of tonight's cocktails. Even Roxana's husband only chuckles and returns his attention to his poker hand, and so for three whole months Paul is allowed to be beautiful never knowing little boys aren't supposed to be.
The first hint that perhaps, just perhaps, this is not something everybody does comes when August rolls toward September and he must prepare for the return north. Roxana helps him pack, and when she comes to the heels and the boa and the rest of it that he's already stuffed into his bag she takes them back out and puts them in a drawer. At his look she says They'll be here when you come back and he has to accept that.
In the car, as the slumbering whirligig that is Atlantic City in the morning drops away behind them, Paul breaks one of the unspoken rules about his visits with his aunt, the rule that says they don't talk about his mother, her sister.
"Would she love me more if I was a girl?"
Roxana shoots a quick glance at him from behind her own thickly-mascaraed eyelashes, then returns her gaze to the road. He's beginning to think she won't answer him-- adults often do not-- when she clears her throat and says, "It wouldn't make a difference, Paul."
***
In school that year a classmate tells him he hits like a girl. Paul-- remembering the bruising grip with which his mother had seized his wrist upon finding him forgetful of his scales, remembering other incidents-- fails to comprehend how this is supposed to be an insult.
Someone else tells him he runs like a girl too, and, thinking of how his aunt can dance, long legs flexing as she crosses the length of the floor in two swift grand jetés, he is forced to conclude that they have never seen a girl before.
***
Summer comes again and the car ride back to Atlantic City is filled with an anxious silence on his part, toes kicking at the dash no matter how many times Roxana tells him to stop, until finally they're there and he can run up the stairs and check the drawer and she did not lie to him, they're still there, dusty but there. Relief. Paul refuses to take off the boa for two days.
***
Learning, life is a learning process. Winters drag by in Adams, in the grey, in the classrooms while the teachers drone out facts that he already knows or do not interest him to learn. Retreat to books, ink on paper, black and white. In contrast, summers flicker by in quick bursts of color and motion. Roxana teaches him the five positions of the feet, the plié, the pas and port de bras; the girls show him how to can-can. And how to apply foundation and eyeshadow and lipstick, and how to braid hair.
And his mother continues to educate him in Bach and Brahms and Berlioz and Beethoven, a litany of Bees that swarm in his ears, striped white-black-white-white-black-white instead of yellow-black, and as he grows older he realizes that Roxana was right, it would not have made a difference had he been a girl instead of a boy. Or if it had, it would only have made things worse: she would have pushed a daughter harder in that absurd dream of diva. And then been envious of any success achieved...
Better boy, better snips and snails and puppy dog tails. Except that he has never owned a dog, nor wants to, and, while snails are admittedly fascinating, he has no clue what snips are, and overall sugar and spice sounds like a better deal. There are no girls at Adams, and Paul forms wildly inaccurate ideas, influenced by his summer acquaintances, of what the fairer sex learns in the second and third and fourth grades. Whatever else, he is fairly certain they are never forced to pick teams and play baseball in the rain. Or told that having your lip split by another child "builds character."
Which isn't to say he passes up all manly pursuits. His uncle teaches him to gamble.
***
During his tenth summer his uncle pulls him aside for a heart-to-heart, another education. His uncle is of Italian stock, and they believe in getting an early start on the important business of romance.
"Hey, Paolo," Orso says, tobacco-stained fingers on his shoulder, drawing him off to the cluttered office where he keeps the club's finances in some sort of dubious order. An easy-going man, Orso is content to let his wife rule their club with a fist manicured in iron, but there are duties one man owes another, and God knows the kid won't learn it from anyone else. He sits his nephew down, privately thanking the Virgin Mary that the boy is actually looking like a boy today, and launches without preamble into an explanation.
"Now maybe yet you got no girls to impress, hey, but you're going to in a year or two, Paolo, and there's things you should know. Uno, a woman will ruin you if you are not very careful. You look at her with one eye, sí, and the other, you look at your wallet. Duo... "
Paul listens silently and attentively to a discourse on how you ask a girl out ("Americans are too shy. Just tell her she's beautiful, and that you gonna pick her up at eight"), how you compliment her ("always say her hair is good"), and how to know you're in love ("your heart, it stops beating a second, then starts again very fast, Paolo") without comment. He supposes that, since Orso says it, it's likely he will want to impress a girl sooner or later, and he has learned enough of wariness not to ask, even of genial Orso, what one should do if one wants to impress a boy. However, by the time Orso gets into what you do once you've got the girl's shirt unbuttoned, Paul feels the need to interrupt.
"I know this part, Uncle Orso."
"Oh yeah?" A dubious look, an eloquently arched brow. "You know all about having the sex?"
Paul shrugs. "What do you think all the girls talk about in the dressing room? Just their boyfriends and what they did last night with them and how many times. Stuff like that."
Orso's other brow arches; he's impressed. "With you in there? You sneaky little bastardo...What, they talk about, like, how good the man was?"
"Yes."
Orso laughs. "You are a happy pig in shit, Paolo! ....wait, wait-- all the girls-- you mean, even your aunt too?"
"Especially her."
"SHIT! What's she say about me?!"
Thus goes the birds-and-the-bees.
***
His classmates at Adams inevitably discover women, at least through the medium of pages torn from their fathers' Playboys and passed about discreetly. Paul glances at the first of these to come into view, curious as to what has everybody wide-eyed, but upon seeing the image his already-low opinion of his classmates' intelligence goes down another notch: she barely has one breast uncovered, big deal. He's been privy to that and more for years now.
He points out casually that he sees the real thing every summer, and while they claim not to believe him, there is a somewhat gratifying flicker of awed envy in their eyes all the same. They never do admit to really believing him, either, but somehow Paul becomes the de facto Expert on Girls (the irony is not lost on him, especially as he's starting to doubt he's ever going to be Interested), a relayer of his uncle's advice and a supplier of salacious information-- and, later, supplier of more skin mags as well, brought back from Atlantic City in his bookbag.
He keeps the Playgirls for himself.
***
By the time the Kinks release "L-O-L-A" (the year after Stonewall makes the news), Paul's a veteran of the eyeliner pencil and the lipstick case, and has long since traded the deteriorating feather boa of childhood for a pair of vinyl go-go boots, miniskirt, a wig... Atlantic City is a wonderful place for a boy of fourteen who can pass for a girl of sixteen, and when he's in drag, walking down the street with a saunter as polished as any working girl's, nobody gives him so much as a second glance -- or rather, nobody gives him a questioning glance; he attracts quite a lot a of second glances.
Winter is for a world that grows increasingly smaller, increasingly narrower, starts shoving him and his classmates towards what are you going to do with your life? and offers the dullest possible options as answers. Summer is for blue skies and turned heads, for the boardwalk and the neon nights, for waking up each day deciding if he feels like being boy or girl or something in between, something with high cheekbones and long lashes that flutters back and forth between genders like a bird between telephone wires, a contralto laugh and falsetto purr trailing in his wake. Summer is a time for playing at being older with the recklessness of the young. Summer's for being beautiful, mijo, mija, and this is how you do it.
And the Kinks sing Girls will be boys and boys will be girls, it's a mixed-up muddled-up shook-up world except for Lola...
***
And time passes and in two and three more years he's sorting out what he wants to do, helped along by Frank Serpico in the news and too many books full of ideals. And two dead bodies, and the stories that the girls tell-- not the ones of what they did last night and how many times, but the ones for which they drop their voices to whispers, the ones about how Jenny-- you remember Jenny, she worked over at the Atlantis-- they found Jenny dead behind the casino-- or You know Carla? Her pimp knifed her, she's in the hospital...
And helped along also by the fact that he knows it's the last damn place in the world where he should try and make a career for himself, last damn place that a boy who likes boys should set his sights on. But the teenager Paul-- graduating from Adams two years early, with the highest grades the school has seen in two decades-- takes hostility and converts it into fuel. Takes not-being-particularly-welcome, or indeed welcome at all, as a personal challenge, as a gauntlet thrown down before him.
The world of law enforcement is no place at all for a clever young faggot, so of course he goes there.
There are detours, of course; more school. New York. John Jay. Columbia. The NYPD. And they are busy years, little time for anything other than books and training, and he does not spend very many hours in heels and mascara. It is again a white-and-black-and-grey winter of professors and paper. Leached of all color except the rust-red of blood, radiating out from the dissections and autopsies and permeating everything. And it is the same color as the bricks that made up Adams' walls and also, somehow, the same color as Rita's lipstick.
In New York, Paul drives for the first time. In New York he takes up fencing, and later learns to shoot. Cars and swords and guns, a boy's own toys. And in New York he finds there are still bullies, and this time there is no running from them, no library to seek out, because it's his fellow cops bringing it, bringing it because he's a boy who likes boys and this boys' club doesn't want boys like that for a member, and in New York Paul wins his first fight against a bully: gives Officer Harrison multiple concussions and a shattered eardrum and pieces of glass that take three hours of surgery to pick out, and when the lieutenant hauls him off Harrison with a Jesus Christ, Smecker, alright, you made your point, Paul snarls through his own blood It builds fucking character.
New York teaches him how to be a boy, and he learns he's an angry one.
And some nights he curls in bed, exhausted from the day's violence, too tired for sleep, listening to New York screaming and wailing outside the window, and Paul thinks if he'd been a girl, if he'd been born a girl-child, could he possibly be here? This city, this life, with so little beauty in the sirens and the precincts and the body bags.
Surely he'd be somewhere else. Someone else. Dusky eyeshadow rather than the rings of his current weariness, the yielding curve of a breast rather than the holster-shaped bruise on his ribcage. Satin instead of uniform blue, pearls instead of gunmetal.
Doesn't know, he doesn't know. And he can hypothesize all he wants, but it's not testable, because all the magic paint in the world won't make it real.
fandom: boondock saints
muse: paul smecker
word count: 3135 (YA RLY)