The Best American Essays 2016 Part 2

"Alexander," was all she said, stepping off the chair at the Clinique counter and sweeping me up. She pulled my ski mask over my head and led me out of the department store to the car, like I had stolen something. We drove home in silence, and once there, she washed the lipstick off my face and warned me to never do that again.

She was angry, upset, she felt betrayed by me. There was a line, and I had thought I could go back and forth across it, but it seemed I could not.

Until I could. Until I did.

I was not just mistaken for a member of other races, as a child. I was also often mistaken for a girl. What a beautiful little girl you have, people used to say to my mother at the grocery store when I was six, seven, eight. She had let my hair grow long.

I'm a boy, I would say each time. And they would turn red, or stammer an apology, or say, His hair is so long, and I would feel as if I had done something wrong, or she had.

I have been trying to convince people for so long that I am a real boy, it is a relief to stop-to run in the other direction.

Before Halloween night, I thought I knew some things about being a woman. I'd had women teachers, read women writers, women were my best friends growing up. But that night was a glimpse into a universe beside my own. Drag is its own world of experience-a theater of being female more than a reality. It isn't like being trans either-it isn't, the more I think about it, like anything except what it is: costumes, illusion, a spell you cast on others and on yourself. But girl, girl is something else.

My friends in San Francisco at this time, we all call each other "girl," except for the ones who think they are too butch for such nellying, though we call them "girl" maybe most of all. My women friends call each other "girl" too, and they say it sometimes like they are a little surprised at how much they like it. This, for me, began in meetings for ACT UP and Queer Nation, a little word that moved in on us all back then. When we say it, the word is like a stone we pa.s.s one to the other: the stone thrown at all of us. And the more we catch it and pa.s.s it, it seems like the less it can hurt us, the more we know who our new family is now. Who knows us, and who doesn't. It is something like a bullet turned into something like a badge of pride.

Later that night we go to a club, Club Ura.n.u.s. John and Fred have removed their wigs and makeup. I have decided not to. Fred was uncomfortable-a wig is hot-and John wanted to get laid by a man as a man. I wasn't ready to let go. As we walked there, we pa.s.sed heteros.e.xual couples on the street. I walked with Fred, holding his arm, and noted the pa.s.sing men who treated me like a woman-and the women who did also. Only one person let on that they saw through me-a man at a stoplight who leaned out his car window to shout, "Hey, Lola! Come back here, baby! I love you!"

My friend Darren is there, a thin blond boy done up as Marie Antoinette in hair nearly a foot tall and a professional costume rental dress, hoopskirts and all. On his feet, combat boots also. He raises his skirts periodically to show he is wearing nothing underneath.

Soon I am on the go-go stage by the bar. On my back, riding me, is a skinny white boy in a thong made out of duct tape, his body shaved. We are both sweating, the lights a crown of wet bright heat. The music is loud and very fast, and I roll my head like a lion, whipping the wig around for the cool air this lets in. People squeeze by the stage, staring and ignoring us alternately.

I see very little, but I soon spot Fred, who raises his hand and gives me a little wave from where he is standing. I want to tell him I know the boy on my back, and that it isn't anything he needs to worry about, but he seems to understand this. I wonder if he is jealous, but I tell myself he is not, that he knew what he was getting into with me-when we met, he mentioned the other stages he had seen me on around town. Tonight is one of those nights when I am growing, changing quickly, without warning, into new shapes and configurations, and I don't know where this all goes.

I feel more at home than I ever have in that moment, not in San Francisco, not on earth, but in myself. I am on the other side of something and I don't know what it is. I wait to find out.

Real I am proud for years of the way I looked real that night. I remember the men who thought I was a real woman, the straight guys in the cars whooping at me and their expressions when I said, "Thanks, guys," my voice my voice, and the change that rippled over their faces.

You wanted me, I wanted to say. You might still want me.

Real is good. Real is what you want. No one does drag to be a real woman, though. Drag is not the same as that. Drag knows it is different. But if you can pa.s.s as real, when it comes to drag, that is its own gold medal.

I'm also very aware of how that night was the first night I felt comfortable with my face. It makes me wary, even confused. I can feel the longing for the power I had. I jones for it like it's cocaine.

The little boy I used to be, in the mirror making faces, he was happy. But the process took so much work. I can't do that every day, though I know women who do. And that isn't the answer to my unhappiness, and I know it.

When my friend Danny gives me a photo from that night, I see something I didn't notice at the time. I look a little like my mom. I had put on my gla.s.ses for him-a joke about "girls who wear gla.s.ses"-and in that one picture, I see it all-the dark edges of my real hair sticking out, the cheapness of the wig, the smooth face, finally confident.

I send a copy to my sister and write, This is what I would look like if I was your big sister.

I can't skip what I need to do to love this face by making it over. I can't chase after the power I felt that night, the fleeting sense of finally belonging to the status quo, by making myself into something that looks like the something they want. Being real means being at home in this face, just as it is when I wake up.

I am not the person who appeared for the first time that night. I am the one only I saw, the one I had rejected until then, the one I needed to see, and didn't see until I had taken nearly everything about him away. His face is not half this or half that, it is all something else.

Sometimes you don't know who you are until you put on a mask.

A few months after Halloween, a friend borrows my wig. He has begun performing in drag on a regular basis. I have not. I bring it into the bookstore where we both work and pa.s.s it off to him. It looks like a burned-out thing, what's left in the wick of a candle after a long night.

I go to see my friend perform in the wig-he has turned it into the ponytail of a t.i.tanic hair sculpture, made from three separate wigs. He is beautiful beneath its impossible size, a hoopskirted vision, his face whited out, a beauty mark on his lip. Who was the first blond to dot a beauty mark on her upper lip? How far back in time do we have to go? It is like some spirit in the wig has moved on, into him.

He never gives me the wig back, and I don't ask for it back-it was never really mine.

CHARLES COMEY.

Against Honeymoons.

FROM The Point.

My wife is seated in a beach chair. She peers over her book and sees me approaching some seals hauled up on the sand. There are only a little over a thousand of these Hawaiian monk seals in existence. When they are discovered on beaches, volunteers rope off an area around them to form a zone where they can rest undisturbed.

So my transgression of one of these knee-high boundary ropes draws the attention of everyone who has been standing at the edge of the rope watching the seals. Hauled up, they look like smooth brown boulders lying on the sand. They don't move. All spectators, wife included, hold their breath as I continue to bear down on the group. When I get very close-just a couple of steps away-the nearest seal heaves its head back. Its nose is suddenly drawn directly upwards. It lets out a double "haauwll . . . haauwll" that is Jabba-like: a wheezy barking that vibrates in the air in a way that communicates girth.

My wife's favorite part of our honeymoon is this moment: my shoulders-up posture of mortal fear, stunned sandaled foot stuck out momentarily in midstride; then the acrobatic leap-pivot of redirection that looks like I have bounced off of something springy. To the spectators, until then incredulous at the edge of the rope, I am pardoned. Not a rule-flouting a.s.shole after all. Just oblivious. Or, more precisely, actually that oblivious. As it lays its head back on the ground, the seal makes a sound like the last of the water gurgling down a drain. Then a hard, sand-scattering sniff. I retreat at a pace slowed so as not to recall prey in flight. A tall woman with short blond hair smiles at me commiseratingly as I cross back over the very bright and obvious orange rope. Maybe it has unconsciously struck some of the spectators as an image of all our trespa.s.sing on the island.

Probably there are lots of different ways to be distracted. You can be distracted because you are elsewhere, like if I had been walking on the beach but really, in my mind, I was having a conversation with my sister or something. Then there are various ways of being in a "state of distraction," where the mind can't get a grip on anything, e.g., kids with ADHD. Then there is the way in which I was distracted on the beach. This was different. I wasn't thinking about anything else. I was in paradise, with no responsibilities whatsoever, but my mind was like that of someone with stage fright: attention bent back on itself, focus jammed up and cresting like the big storm-heaved Hawaiian breakers. In some sense I think I saw the seals.

I was on my honeymoon. The strange and tricky thing about a honeymoon is that even while it's happening, it's already lived as a story. We sit inside it saying, "We will have been here."

The honeymoon as we know it, the postnuptial trip for two, hasn't been around all that long. In the nineteenth century there was something called a "bridal tour," where newlyweds would travel, sometimes accompanied by friends and family, to visit relatives who hadn't been able to attend the wedding. The bridal tour made sense when a marriage was much more about social ties and the joining of two families than it is now: the pair journeyed not as tourists but as a tour. At the turn of the century couples began to adapt the bridal tour to make it a private pleasure trip instead. In Marriage, a History Stephanie c.o.o.ntz talks about the transition from bridal tour to honeymoon as part of a larger revolution in the form of family life in general: the increasing interiority and privacy of the family unit, as well as marriage becoming obsessively all about the two individuals and their bond.

It's easy to understand why, for the first half of the twentieth century, the honeymoon was so appealing. Until relatively recently a marriage came after courtship: after semipublic calls to an eligible girl, usually in her living room. The honeymoon provided some much needed one-on-one time. Naturally, in its privacy, this was also the time to cleave, carnally, finally, to one's new spouse. In fact at first the honeymoon was a bit scandalous for this reason, because of the attention it drew to the bridal bed. But as the twentieth century softened in its att.i.tude toward s.e.xuality that turned around. To my grandparents' generation, the thundering of Niagara Falls was a trope for newlywed s.e.x, and going to Niagara was about giving in to an irresistible force of nature. (Thus the rhyming of "v.i.a.g.r.a," which is meant to draw on that a.s.sociation.) Which is to say that it used to be pretty clear what the honeymoon was about: it was the s.p.a.ce the couple took to begin new intimacies. This is still the lingering idea that the "honeymoon" evokes, still how the trip is sold. The advertis.e.m.e.nt has the couple at their beachside balcony. A gla.s.s of wine is drooping in her hand, and her eyes say something like "at last." The trouble is that in our own time an actual honeymoon has little to do with an "at last" anymore. For almost all of us it is silly to go on a honeymoon for privacy. The couple plots their trip to a remote island where they will at last stare uninterrupted into each other's eyes, but they do the plotting alone around their kitchen table.

The guidebook's cover had a picture of Kauai from above on it. I don't know why a Kauai guidebook would have anything else. Kauai is, in my opinion, irresistibly appealing from that angle. From above, Kauai looks like a fat oyster with a barnacle in the middle. The barnacle is a volcano. Its natural attractions are appointed evenly to its sh.o.r.es: the huge canyons in the west; the long sunny southern coast (where we would be staying); the more populated "Coconut Coast" in the east, with its rivers and waterfalls; the sharp, serrated ridgelines around Ha.n.a.lei in the north, with perfectly flat fields at their feet running out to deep beaches.

The perfection of Kauai's roundness is fully comprehended when you open up the guidebook and look at the road map on the inside cover. There is a perimeter road, but it cannot connect through the rugged Na Pali coastline in the northwest. So the island is round, but you cannot go 'round it, and unless you are exploring it by boat it might as well be long and skinny.

We arrived at our hotel at 1:00 a.m. The lobby was part of an enormous hall with an open-air atrium in the middle of it, which housed (if that's the word) a tiny jungle. As we checked in, we could see parrots perched sleepily on the boughs of the trees, and, looking through the trees, all the way out to the audible surf. As I remember it, we woke up noonish the next day. We slept late because of jet lag, but also because it was so dark outside. Where I come from, when the rain starts it sprinkles and spits. Here, as I stepped out our door, the first raindrop fell from the sky and made a wet spot on my shirt the size of my thumb. A half hour later we were walking by the lobby and tropical rain teemed into the atrium like nothing I've ever seen. It was awesome, but the awe was like what one would feel at watching the ocean finally invited indoors. It set off some hardwired anxiety about flooding.

Swimming in the rain through the turns and lobes of the fern-girded "lagoons" of the resort; a manmade waterfall rumbling on your head, coc.o.o.ning you concussively in a membrane of water; sitting in the 100-plus-degree hot tub while cold rain makes little iridescent crowns on the water like the surface is simmering and steaming-that is really neat. But you can only do so much of it. In fact I think that one's body can only handle so much of it. We went to a place that the resort called a library-really a bar-and played checkers with wrinkled fingers.

The next day, with the rain not letting up, all paradise-specific plans were pretty much kaput. I thought maybe we could visit the nearby botanic gardens-this seemed rain-compatible-but on the phone the gardener informed me that the entry road had just washed away in an avalanche. Then this same guy, unprovoked, told me that if we were thinking of snorkeling at some point, this kind of intense rain would make the shallow snorkelable waters muddy (this being the sort of place where the material from the road had ended up), which are the conditions in which sharks mistakenly bite people. Then he added, as if in consolation, "The nice thing is it never rains this hard." The rain did abate for an hour that afternoon. We found a small sandy gap between the jagged volcanic rocks on Shipwreck Beach outside our hotel and carefully boogie boarded among them. Until, that is, a Hawaiian family showed up with their own boogie boards, and the matriarch almost ran me over with a stony face that said "I don't see you."

I won't pretend to be one of these people who likes the rain, at least not day after day. Glancing at the useless guidebook on the nightstand, the stubs of paper poking out marking what we were supposed to be doing, it felt a bit like the plot of a really depressing National Lampoon movie with only one joke in it. But my purpose here is not to complain about the rain. In fact the impetus for writing this is that, on reflection, those were our best days. Something awfully dear had been paid by pocketbook and planet to get us all the way out here just to be rained on. But now I see that the rain, while it lasted, had protected us. I was irritated but more or less sound of mind.

On the third day my wife and I sort of decided to just carry on like it wasn't raining. We walked from the hotel up onto a bluff. From here we could see a solitary monk seal somersaulting in a pool among the wave-lapped rocks below. We were about to head back (we were getting soaked) when we noticed a path-or more like a weblike network of paths-through the sandy pine groves that grew along the lithified cliff. We wandered through these until eventually they converged on a trail that took us through the old burial ground of the kings of the island. We got lucky and the rain lightened to a drizzle. Looking out over the ocean, the clouds were a lumpy but unpunctured, untouched low sheet below which even lower, closer clouds were marauding. Then the sheet was pulled back and the sun shone. That's the moment when I really remember it taking over: the seemingly inexplicable anxiety about my trip. I remember that up there, with a king's vista of the gray Pacific, something in me had turned the wrong way. I was witnessing beauty, I knew, but the beauty was just making me watch the churning clouds, worried about losing our pocket of good weather. This was the quiet beginning of my real botheredness regarding "experiences." We walked along the cliff until it dropped down to a remote beach. Fog opened and closed the landscape to us.

My sense is that a lot of people actually have a hard time traveling for leisure. There are some people, of course, who fail to really "get away" because they can't leave something behind. The cla.s.sic image would be the honeymooner apologizing as she ducks into a room to take another call from work. When she isn't on the phone you can catch her staring into s.p.a.ce.

Solutions to being elsewhere are, it seems to me, pretty straightforward under most circ.u.mstances. Shut off the phone. Then time is on your side. My distraction, by contrast, was a bit more insidious. It seemed to feed on the objectively good experiences of the trip itself. It wasn't that I couldn't see my perfect macadamia-crusted mahi-mahi because my thoughts were elsewhere; to speak truthfully I could see my mahi-mahi very clearly. But it was like I aimed my fork at the fish but kept accidentally skewering something else-my future reminiscence of it. I wasn't elsewhere, but I seemed to inhabit a time other than the present. I wanted to be, as we say, "present." But my problem with presence seemed to be capable of feeding on my own awareness of it. "Just relax," I would tell myself. "Well, I can't relax when I'm anxious about relaxing," I would (accurately) reflect, and so forth as new and seemingly more nuanced forms of self-correction recommended themselves seductively as a solution to the problem they were creating.

The latter part of our trip contained some dry weather. On the first dry day, the sunny one, we went to the beach, and I nearly trod on the flipper of an endangered seal, as reported. On the second we went for a hike. The name of the mountain, the "Sleeping Giant," seemed auspicious. I thought that hiking would be exhausting enough to cut off oxygen to my new second self. A walk, Th.o.r.eau says somewhere, returns us to our senses.

The path up the Sleeping Giant had turned to black volcanic mud from the rain: wet and smooth and sticky like potter's slip. It made a sucking fup with each step up, then, on stepping down, tiny pip-popping noises as more mud oozed out and acc.u.mulated around the sides of our shoes. As we neared the top, another couple came down the path. I have no complaints about making such a cliched choice of venue. But there is a strange feeling when one comes around a corner and stands face to face with what are obviously other honeymooners. Few times in my life have I felt so powerfully the idea of alternate selves. She had straight blond hair. He had jeans on and was hiking in Chacos, with a minimal backpack and a bottle of water in his hand. This is when we would have exchanged exclamations on the incredible mud. But they pa.s.sed us in silence down the canyon path.

Who knows what their story was. I thought I saw in them the same sort of ingrown distraction I had. This was speculation of course. But there was, in fact, a striking speechlessness to everyone we encountered on our honeymoon once the rain stopped. When it was raining we would talk about the weather. (I've never understood why people make fun of talking about the weather. It is of perennial consequence and thus never not interesting.) But once the weather was clear no one wanted to say anything to each other.

As I said, the honeymoon as we know it, the trip, hasn't been around very long. It's pretty much a twentieth-century phenomenon. The term honeymoon, however, is much older. It used to refer more generally to the sweetness of the earliest days of a marriage. Some people think that the word comes from a tradition in some European cultures in which mead (fermented honey) was drunk by the new couple for the first moon of marriage. Mead was supposed to be an aphrodisiac. This etymology is cute but probably not accurate.

The OED doesn't mention mead. Instead it points out that in early recorded uses of the term, the moon in honeymoon refers to the fact that no sooner is the moon full than it begins to wane. The lexicographer Richard Huloet writes in 1552: "Hony mone, a terme proverbially applied to such as be newe maried, whiche wyll not fall out at the fyrste, but the one loveth the other at the beginnynge excedyngly, the likelyhode of theyr exceadynge love appearing to aswage, ye which time the vulgar people cal the hony mone." Thomas Blount in 1656 is more explicit on the lunar metaphor: "Hony-moon, applyed to those marryed persons that love well at first, and decline in affection afterwards; it is hony now, but it will change as the Moon." So back in the day, to say of a couple that they were in their "honeymoon" wasn't sentimental but diagnostic, like saying someone is on a shopper's high. Perhaps it was a bit more wistful than that, but the point was jocular chiding of the couple (and the species).

It is tempting to call the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century use of the word honeymoon cynical, but if you think about it that might be a bit anachronistic. It wasn't cynical to draw attention to the fact that "exceeding love" was going to fade from a new marriage, because back then love was not an ideal of married life. The inst.i.tution had other priorities, for which the vagaries of love could be a problem. For the ruling and propertied cla.s.ses, marriage was about connections and the control of inheritance. For the lower cla.s.ses it was about these things too, as well as a partnership for day-to-day labor. And it was an a.s.sociation pleasing to G.o.d. It wasn't until the Enlightenment that people began to believe that personal love and marriage were somehow essentially bound up together-that one would, in an ideal life, "marry for love." And it was much, much later than that that we got to where we are now, the other extreme, when a loveless marriage is a monstrosity.

Some people think that once love fully infiltrates the inst.i.tution, this will mean the dissolution of marriage itself, which (it will someday occur to us) will have surrendered its logic and purpose. Maybe. But the general idea of promising oneself to lifelong companionship with another person has proven to be less frail than conservatives have proclaimed year after year. Marriage in the West has outlived some seemingly vital parts of the order it upheld, e.g., the loss of the laws and cultural norms around "illegitimate" children. It survived women working outside the home. By all appearances it will survive gay marriage. Certainly the gay marriage movement underscores the continued power of the inst.i.tution, given that the movement is driven by the desire of an excluded group to take part in it. What is clear, however, is that marriage isn't what it used to be. Something has changed at its core. And as love is increasingly thought of as its center and its condition, the rites, roles, and laws of marriage have been transforming as well.

An instructive example is the wedding. At many weddings, vows are spoken that date to the eleventh century. After the love revolution, however, what those words are doing is not the same. It used to be that two individuals walked into the church one day and walked out of it with a new relationship, new responsibilities, new rules, effected in the public vow. Whatever its other ethical dimensions, the wedding was on the model of a contract, and could be prosecuted like one.

When love becomes the basis of marriage, however, the vows take on a different kind of significance. They become the declaration, the lived representation, of the ardor that the two people feel for each other. This change has been accelerating in the last fifty years, when many premarital couples start to live together and basically have mini-marriages. The words commemorate and crown the bond; they do not bind. This commemoration is not nothing. The "I do" marks and makes memorial a mutual devotion that already has a life of its own but that otherwise sprawls in a messy and often unspoken way across a lifelong loving companionship. But a representation is a radically different sort of thing for a ceremony to be, and a very different experience.

I believe that the honeymoon has had a similar recent history. In the twentieth century the honeymoon was for intimacy and initiation. In the last couple of generations, it lost this more direct function. Now intimacy and initiation take place in the first months of, as we put it in our maximally understated and sweetly simple way, "being with" someone.

What happens when the honeymoon loses its function? Does it just become a vacation with a special name? That's basically how I approached it (not really thinking one thing or another about it). I thought it was a good excuse to go somewhere warm in December. We were, as everyone else we know is, exhausted. I vaguely figured that if twenty-first-century honeymooners don't fall into each other's arms anymore, well, then they collapse on the bed side by side. It sounded nice. But my experience was that that's not quite the honeymoon's mood either. Instead the honeymoon has gone the way of weddings and a lot of other traditional things: what was once performative becomes commemorative.

This memory-making-that this is to be a representative good time, that the cameras are rolling, as it were-can make you do all sorts of idiotic things on your honeymoon. I was seriously considering making some sort of stand against a whole Hawaiian family, one on six (what would this even have looked like?), because they had stolen my boogie-boarding spot. I stood in the shallows, with a foamy wave sucking at my calves, scheming how to seize the day.

The worst of it, though, is the nasty pathology of presence. The honeymooner wants, above all, to be present. But he wants to be that way so that he can have been that way on his honeymoon. The result, in my experience anyway, is the opposite of that intended: each moment slips through his fingers; everything is always already over.

In its own way, the wedding too is lived to be looked back upon. But for the wedding this has an intrinsic n.o.bility. The wedding is an experience that is to be fulfilled through time. Importantly, in the case of a wedding, the self-consciousness that marks the ceremony, the sweaty palms and anxiety and audience and all, is a match for the deliberateness of being married-the work, the will, that is poured into it and makes its inner life, perhaps in the twenty-first century more than ever. In contrast to this, the contemporary "honeymoon" has no place to put self-consciousness. It has plenty of portent, but the portent has no path to development in one's life. The honeymoon confusedly tries to commemorate something sensual and spontaneous-the honeyed early times of marriage. The idea, vaguely, is not to fulfill its memories but just to relive them, to reminisce. The result is a minor disgrace of the mind.

As we descend the Sleeping Giant we can hear the crowing of Kauai's feral roosters. Kauai is full of wild chickens. They live in the woods. They are all colors: gray; black-and-white speckled; green; orange with a rust-brown hood; a skinny drab brown one who looks like a mother who has no time to take care of herself, with ten chicks, beaks down, pecking, peeping, taking up a sidewalk. They stand on the posts of chain-link fences. They dart in and out of the fluorescent square of light under an awning. The guidebook had mentioned these. The chickens were brought over by the original Hawaiians in their double-hulled sailing canoes on their 2,500-mile colonial voyage from the South Pacific in the fourth century. (The big mystery with these colonists being where they thought they were going.) With no predators-for example, there are no snakes on the islands-the chickens thrive.

When we get back to our car at the bottom of the climb, a rooster with an electric blue-green body and a gray tail is standing in the crook of a U-shaped tree branch. He goes "c.o.c.k-a-doodle-doo," then hops off and struts away into the lush understory. The honeymooner can't hear it. The end stage of honeymoon sickness is when A-MA-ZING-itself the most numb of exclamations-is mouthed by your face.

PAUL CRENSHAW.

Names.

FROM Hobart.

Keller was Killer and Weaver was Weiner and Penn was p.e.n.i.s or just a d.i.c.k. Benavidez was Bean Burrito and Ellenberger was Hamburger and Alarid got called a.s.shole more than his real name. Hoteling was Hot Ding-a-ling. Ramirez was Rape-kit. I was Crankshaft or c.u.mshot or c.o.c.ksucker, depending on who was doing the calling, whether my fellow soldiers or the drill sergeants who stalked the halls of Basic Training scowling behind mirrored shades, their boot steps ricocheting like rifles.

Crawford got called Crotchface. Rhea became Gonorrhea after Talley(whacker) scrawled the gonor in front of Rhea, though with a name like Rhea it was only a matter of time before someone put the gonor in front. Clapp was too easy and so no one even bothered changing his name, only put "the" in front of Clapp, and Syphers couldn't escape syphilis any more than any of us could escape Fort Sill where we found ourselves in the summer of 1990. Sackett was Sackbreath and Swallows got asked what he swallowed more times than I care to count, though we all laughed every time, exhausted as we were from long hours and little sleep and hard training, our eyes red and bones tired and some fear lingering deep inside that made us think such jokes were funny.

Nguyen we just called Gook. Ten Bears became Ten Bears f.u.c.king. Black we called White and White we called Black and Green we called Baby-s.h.i.t and Brown was just s.h.i.t. Bevilacqua was Aqua Velva, which was getting off pretty light as far as names went so sometimes we called him Bologna or b.a.l.l.sack.

Leaks had a leaky d.i.c.k, and Lebowitz was a lesbian, to which he would proclaim loudly that he was indeed a lesbian, trapped in a man's body, another lame joke that we all laughed at because there was nothing else to do, no other way to get through the long days than to laugh and name each other d.i.c.ks and diseases and dysfunctions. At eighteen we were barely grown boys wielding weapons of war while bombs went off in our little part of the world and the ground shook beneath us. Our drill sergeants were constantly calling us c.o.c.ks and c.u.n.ts, threatening us with physical violence. We were scared all the time-of our drill sergeants, of the base where we had been sent to train, of the future-and to keep the fear from flying out we flung bravado at one another in our choice of words. We were all dysfunctional, we thought, for we were told so by the drill sergeants all the time, from the first long days when we arrived at Fort Sill and cried sometimes in this harsh new place, through the hot afternoons of drill and ceremony, marching in big round wheels under the summer sun, all the called commands a way to discipline us, make us move as one unit instead of fifty different men, like the naming was to break us down so we could pull closer together; through Basic Rifle Marksmanship and the hand grenade course and the bayonet course where we stabbed dummies of Russian soldiers; through med-training where we learned to treat sucking chest wounds and splint broken limbs and administer antidotes for anthrax and sarin and mustard gas; through morning eight-mile runs and evening mail call and even through the too-short nights. We could shoot and fire and knock out hundreds of push-ups but were constantly derided, a strategy meant to demean us but also demand that we rise above such degradation.

I'll say we did. That a man can get used to being called d.i.c.khead or dumbf.u.c.k or some other designation, to be named by his nationality or upbringing, some physical attribute like Aaronson's d.i.c.knose or Biobaku's almost blue skin. Twenty-five years later I laugh at being called Crankshaft and c.u.mshot. Benavidez's big belly did seem to hold a lot of burritos, and when we graduated and were waiting to be released for the last time, some of us to go to college and some of us to war, we shook hands hard. I'll miss you, Motherf.u.c.ker, we said, and other words that only made sense in light of living with fifty men for months at a time, hearing farts and of football and girls they'd f.u.c.ked, all the things men say to make themselves sound stronger.

Perhaps we were scared of letting one another know how we felt so we hid everything behind a screen. Perhaps all our words are only screens for what we might say if we were better people or perhaps we only use words that fit what world we find ourselves in. Our voices were hoa.r.s.e from yelling all the time, making us sound much older than we were, and we had to shave every morning now, look at ourselves in the mirror and see the men we might become.

In our final days of training, as we wound down toward release and finally began to relax a little, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and we were all called together so the drill sergeants could tell us we were going to war. We stood there in stunned silence until someone-Talleywhacker, maybe, or Hot Ding-a-ling, said we'd f.u.c.k that f.u.c.king towel-headed sandn.i.g.g.e.r right in the f.u.c.king a.s.shole is what we would do, and we all cheered with our hoa.r.s.e voices standing there in our young boots.

But later that night after lights out, as we lay on our bunks in the darkness, we had no words to contain how we felt. The silence stood around us like stones. We could hear bombs off in the distant part of the base, as if the war had already come. The windows rattled softly in their panes. There were no jokes, no called names. Only a hundred quiet conversations, Alarid or Benavidez or Talley whispering across the big bay dorm, "Hey Crenshaw, hey man, are you scared?"

JAQUIRA DIAZ.

Ordinary Girls.

FROM The Kenyon Review.

We started talking about dying long before the first woman jumped. What our parents would do once we were gone. What Mr. Nuez, the a.s.sistant princ.i.p.al at Nautilus Middle School, would say about us on the morning announcements, how many of our friends would cry right there on the spot. The songs they would dedicate to us on Power 96 so that all of Miami Beach could mourn us-Boyz II Men's "It's So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday," DRS's "Gangsta Lean." Who would go to our funerals-boys who'd broken our hearts, boys whose hearts we'd broken.

She was a French woman, the first jumper, that's what people said. She didn't live in Southgate Towers-Papi's high-rise apartment complex, where he also worked as a security guard-but her boyfriend did. According to the boyfriend's neighbors, they'd been having problems-she drank a lot, he drank a lot, they fought. That night, the neighbors told Papi, she'd been banging on the door for a while, calling the boyfriend's name when he wouldn't open. My father was in the security booth outside the lobby when he started getting calls from some of the Southgate residents. They thought they'd heard a crash, something falling from the sky, the air-conditioning unit on the roof maybe. Or maybe someone had flung something heavy off their balcony. n.o.body had expected it to be a person, least of all my father.

Our planning started way before the French woman jumped, during a four-month stint living with my mother in Normandy Isle, across the street from Normandy Park. One day after school, Boogie and I were on the swings, rocking back and forth, digging our sneakers into the dirt and kicking off. We talked about how we'd do it, imagined we could make it look like a tragic accident. We'd get hit by a Metro bus while crossing the street, which would be easy since n.o.body expected a girl to just step in front of a bus in the middle of the afternoon. The park would be alive with people-ballers on the courts, kids on the merry-go-round, boys riding their bikes on the sidewalk, hood rats on the corner waiting for who knows what. We'd smoke one last stolen cigarette, flick the b.u.t.t before we jumped the fence out of the park. Then we'd take care of it, the business of dying.

Some girls took sleeping pills and then called 911, or slit their wrists the wrong way and waited to be found in the bathtub. But we didn't want to be like those ordinary girls. We wanted to be throttled, mangled, thrown. We wanted the violence. We wanted something we could never come back from.

Ordinary girls didn't drive their parents' cars off the Fifth Street Bridge into Biscayne Bay, or jump off the back of a pickup in the middle of I-95, or set themselves on fire. Ordinary girls didn't fall from the sky.

We spent most afternoons that way, in the park, smoking my mother's cigarettes, drinking her beer. Sometimes we paid the neighborhood tecatos to get us bottles of strawberry Cisco, or Mad Dog 20/20, or St. Ides Special Brew. Occasionally Kilo, my boyfriend, and his cousin Papo would show up with a bag of Krypto and smoke us out. We'd lie on the bunk beds, listen to DJ Laz's power mix, and laugh our a.s.ses off. Until the effect wore off and we were ourselves again-reckless, and unafraid, and p.i.s.sed off at our parents for not caring that we spent most of our time on the streets or drunk or high, for being deadbeats and scutterheads. But it wasn't just our parents. We were p.i.s.sed off at the whole f.u.c.king world-our teachers, the princ.i.p.al, the school security, the DARE cop. All those people, they just didn't get that there was no way in h.e.l.l we could care about homework, or getting to school on time-or at all-when our parents were on drugs or getting stabbed, and we were getting arrested or jumped or worse. Only three months before, Mikey, Kilo's best friend, had been killed in a drive-by shooting.

One Sat.u.r.day morning, after a long night of drinking and smoking out on the beach, the four of us walked back to Normandy Isle in a haze. It was so early the sky was still gray and the Metro buses had just started running. The sidewalk along Normandy Drive was secluded except for the four of us. For a while we just walked, sand in our sneakers, our mouths dry, my hair frizzy from the beach air, Kilo holding my hand, Papo and Boogie holding hands in front of us, the four of us marching down Normandy Drive, laughing and f.u.c.king up all the lyrics to Slick Rick's "La Di Da Di." It was our thing-pretending we were beach b.u.ms, that nothing could touch us, that life would always be like this. Carefree and limitless and full of music. We didn't yet know that Miami Beach wouldn't always be ours, that even in a few years when we were all gone, we would still, always, lay claim to it, that we would never truly belong anywhere else.

We had just gotten to Normandy Park when we spotted this kid riding his bike across the street. He was dark-skinned, with hair shaved close to the scalp, wearing a wifebeater and baggy jean shorts. I knew him from the neighborhood. Everybody called him Bambi. He was older than us, out of high school already, but he looked young.

When I glanced at Kilo, his face had changed, turned the color of paper. His lips were pressed together, and I could see the vein in his temple throbbing like it did when he was fighting with his mom, or when he was about to throw down. We all stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, and Kilo let go of my hand, pulled out his pack of Newports, and lit one. He took a long drag, then rubbed at his eye with the back of his hand.

"Y'all know that guy?" Kilo asked.

"That's Bambi," I said.

"Doesn't he look just like Mikey?" Kilo asked, but n.o.body said a word.

Back in my room, the four of us piled up on the bunk beds. Kilo and I sat side by side on the bottom bunk, our backs against the wall, and Boogie and Papo fell asleep on the top. After a while, Kilo leaned over and laid his head on my lap, the vein in his temple still throbbing. I put my hand on his head, listened to him breathing, and after a while I noticed he had tears in his eyes. I wiped them away with my thumb, but they kept coming. He wrapped his arms around my waist awkwardly like he needed to hold on to something but didn't know how. This was not the Kilo I knew.

The Kilo I knew threw up gang signs and wore baggy jeans and wifebeaters and high-top Air Jordans. He was tattooed and foulmouthed and crazy. He looked at people hard, laughed loudly, talked back to everybody, played streetball, and dunked on half the guys in Normandy Park. The Kilo I knew smoked blunts, drank Olde English 800 by the quart, talked dirty, cracked his knuckles, sucker-punched a guy twice his size, tagged all over the back of the Metro bus, got kicked out of school.

We were like that for a long time, Kilo crying into my lap, holding me, and me not able to say a single word. While I hated seeing him that way, the truth is it also made dying seem like more of an option. And I realized that that was exactly what I wanted-a love like that. I wanted somebody who loved me so much my death would break her.

The first time, I was eleven.