“Bye bye mein lieber Herr.
Auf wiedersehen, mein Herr.
Es war sehr gut, mein Herr, und vorbei.
Du kennst mich wohl, mein Herr.
Ach, lebe wohl, mein Herr.
Du sollst mich nie mehr sehen mein Herr.”
~Sally Bowles in Cabaret
CW: TALK OF RAPE, DRUG USAGE, BLOOD AND VOMIT, SUICIDE, CHILD ABUSE
If you’re not going to deal with your shit well at least deal with it as dramatically as possible. This has always been a maxim of mine and in all my years of sage wisdom and aged learning I have yet to forsake this particular trait of my character. A friend tells me it’s because I’m a Cancer cusp of some other sign. Another friend tells me I need therapy. I know, at least certainly, that the latter is true.
And the truth is I am still ashamed of myself for waking up on that bathroom floor. I am ashamed of myself for not knowing where I was. I am ashamed of myself for feeling pain in my body where pain should never be. I am ashamed of myself for crying about it. I am ashamed of myself for making it out to be a funny story in hindsight, when the truth is that I was afraid. But this isn’t a sad story, so I won’t tell you a sad story. It isn’t a funny story, although if I do laugh I do not blame you. I laugh about it. To me, it was strange beyond everything. I don’t have answers, just questions.
In my retelling of this story I noticed over the years that my telling has drifted somewhat. This is due to three factors. The first being that I was high and it was long ago, and I can’t be expected to remember things clearly, this is partially a lie I tell myself and others. While I do not remember everything, I do remember. The second being that I find myself being charitable with some details I don’t always wish to talk about or commit to words. The third being that I don’t really like who I was and am at the best of times struggling to cope with who I am.
When waking up from a crash after a high (that involves having ingested or snorted chemicals which I can only vaguely remember) the first thought that always crossed my mind is that waking up was the first mistake. Your mind and your body remind you of this fact loudly and in clear, visceral pain which you see as flashes of either blinding white or black static. The second thing that crossed my mind, as it always did, whether I was in my own bed or on a stranger’s floor, is that I had no damn idea where I was.
I was on a floor. I did not recognise the floor. I did not recognise the bathroom rising out of that floor. The blood was mine. The vomit was mine. I knew this because they were currency my body was still in the process of spending. The trick was getting up and staying up. There is a kind of pain in the body that will at least try to prevent you from doing the most mundane things. Picking yourself up. Making your limbs move. Opening your eyes. Keeping your eyes open. If you’ve experienced this pain, you know what I’m talking about. That fear that if you close your eyes, that will be the thing that snips the puppet’s strings and leave your body to collapse to the ground never to get up again. But the scene around me was one that I knew was going to have to be dealt with, if not by me, then at least by a team of professionals.
I remember thinking smugly to myself, “Fuck, you don’t look as bad as all that.” I was skinny in those days. A heady diet of cocaine, stress, binge-purging, and self-hatred had my body at least looking something the way I’ve been told my whole life how I should look. I could play this ‘boy’ everyone expected. I had a slight stubble, the blood underlined the stubble, my face wasn’t bruised. I could salvage this. I could get away and nobody would know a thing.
The moment passed and I realised that there was no way I could leave this bathroom in this state. So I stripped down.
Blood in my underwear confirmed what the pain was telling me. Something happened. But I won’t deal with it. I won’t deal with it. Not now. I have to get up and leave. I’d been raped before that night and this didn’t feel like that, so… no I won’t deal with this. And… I never really did. Not even as I write this.
I stood in the bath and used the detachable nozzle to shower myself. I ground the bar of soap into a hand towel and lathered it up to clean myself off, and then the floor. I washed my clothes, getting as much soap into the fabric and then out of the fabric as I could. The water ran mostly red. It never did stop running red. “Do bodies have this much blood?” I thought. When I couldn’t smell vomit or blood anymore I pressed as much water out of my clothes with my knees in the bathtub. I was still dripping as I stepped out of that bathroom.
This is where the second part of this adventure starts. Stepping out of the bathroom still doesn’t tell me anything about where I am. I don’t know this house. A cursory glance at the photos on the walls and on the tables offer me little answer as to whose house this is. There is a girl my age, she looks at me the way I imagine someone would look at an armed assailant. To her credit she doesn’t make a sound. There is noise downstairs.
“Where am I?”
To my annoyance, she doesn’t make a sound. So I find my way downstairs. Downstairs doesn’t help me find out where I am. Where there are far too many people. A party? The noise is a lot. There is music playing and people smoking and dancing and drinking. Everyone seems to be my age, but I don’t recognise faces. I think none of them recognised me either. One by one, face by face people start looking at me as I make my way down the stairs, dripping rose coloured water, if there was someone there who knew me, they didn’t claim me.
I wanted to ask, “Where am I?” But I couldn’t form the words anymore. This is where things get hazy in memory for me. I remember the not-silence of a room in which people stand silently with music blaring over their faces. I remember my car being there. I remember thinking that I must have driven there. My keys were there, but whether I had them with me at the start I don’t know. My bag was in the car. Driving out of their driveway did nothing to tell me where I was.
I could have been driving an hour or I could have been driving all night, but eventually I found myself on the highway that led back to the city as I descended from the little town where the rich people lived overlooking the city below as I returned home, to a home I didn’t want to return to. At least that part I think I remember. I don’t remember getting home.
I remember that I didn’t cry about it then. I would cry a day or two later, before it faded into memory and became something funny that happened to me. For what it’s all worth, I never did turn out to be the handsome skinny boy in that bathroom mirror. I became someone entirely else. And for that I’m thankful.
I often think of the small transgender child I never was. A creature hiding in plain sight while everyone spoke to an imaginary boy that never was. I often thought of the thing that came crawling down those people’s stairs that night and wonder who they saw. For what it’s worth, I’m sorry about your bathroom, and your carpets, and your towel, and your soap.
Even though Charl in 2003 and Charl in 2020 are as different as two people could be with 17 years and a lifetime of mistakes between them. In those years I thought of myself as a boy, a man, and if stubborn unwillingness to confront the truth of myself then the fact that words like ‘nonbinary’ were not available to me till years later should give you indication of some of the pathos of who I was. Why do other trans folk seemingly deal with this shit so beautifully? And here I am on the floor, bleeding. And when I think this, I am always back there again, on that floor.
Joan Didion in Slouching Towards Bethlehem writes:
“…I think we are well-advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.”
This is advice I have not taken well… ever — much to the sighing head-shakes of anyone who knows me and who undertake the ill-advised labour of loving me. I am a mess. But, so are you. So I guess you’ll appreciate this. But I write these things not because I’m ashamed of the boy I was. That boy never existed for me. That boy was a fiction made up by others told as a funereal dirge sung over my life’s every waking moment. I write these things because I’m ashamed for always having been the coward, the hypocrite, and dealing with a shitty situation in the worst, most self-destructive ways possible.
I was nineteen and young and couldn’t cope with the abuse I was suffering. I wasn’t a child because I was nineteen and I wasn’t an adult because I was nineteen. I had tried to kill myself before then. And Think of Maya Angelou who said, “Children’s talent to endure stems from their ignorance of alternatives.” And I wish that was true of me. Although looking at who I am now, perhaps I succeeded.
Maybe once that little child from so long ago had finally drawn their last breath. Maybe I could forgive myself after all these years. Or maybe I can become the person that little child needed. It has been nearly as long since then as I was old then.
This is all the products of my reptile brain, mind you. My rational brain knows everything about blaming rape victims, and the stigma of victimhood, and the possibility that I was drugged beyond what I did to myself and both those thoughts are things I can’t deal with so la la la I can’t hear you.
Okay, it’s a little sad, I guess. Yes, I did go to therapy eventually. I’m still healing.
-o0o-
