Jacks and Coke

by M.J. Sions

Alexandra Tran

For the sake of preserving my little brother’s anonymity, I’m going to refer to him as “The Predator.” Reconstructing a person is different from reconstructing a dress, in that it has to happen as far away from lights as possible, with a sense of formlessness, and, also, in that you don’t end up wanting to scream “the problem is your weirdly shaped hips!” at a temperamental starlet. If theater production hadn’t worked out for me, I think I would’ve considered going into therapy.

When we were kids, our mom always called The Predator her clever child, and it must have stuck in his mind. He has a compulsion to think past the surface of things for seemingly no reason other than that he can, and therefore should. That’s not the only compulsion that got him in trouble, but it threads the holes in the timeline together nicely, and you can find it tied in a tiny figurative bow at a point three years ago. He was unreasonably, nonsensically proud of himself for predicting the first move of our state legislature after the protest vote swept them into office: Comprehensive anti-discrimination law expansion, the first of its kind since the 1960s, according to several spokespeople. Of particular interest to The Predator were the laws surrounding transgender individuals, specifically new regulations protecting them from having to use restrooms that did not correspond to their identities. He read the first wave of newspaper articles on his phone in the café of a college library, despite the fact that he was several years post-grad. His old backpack supplied a nice bit of camouflage while he read, glossing over the quotes from proponents, but twirling the quotes from the opposition in his brain.

Let’s get one of the uglier pieces of his state of mind out of the way here: He didn’t care about gender identity at all. The Predator had never met a trans person before; as far as he was concerned, the dialogue around protecting trans women was offensive for the way it disregarded the experience of the modern sexual predator. What offended him most was the amount of vagueness that legislative opponents were getting away with. “Sexual predators will do x to accomplish y,” as if any of his vocation were simple. Their case was a thesis statement with nothing else offered, no firm outline or, as he grossly put it, no specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, time-bound objectives.

Still, The Predator was intrigued. It was like news of a new element reaching a chemist, or a rule change in a sports league. He decided to take up the challenge of using the new regulations to his advantage and went whole hog on planning it out. He was unapologetically corporate about it — checklists, diagrams, PowerPoints, graphs. He was a professional and a predator, looking to mash the two together as a professional predator. His work-life balance was shaped like an equilateral triangle split down the middle, with its two sides converging on a top point that represented women. His manager was a woman, and his office was stocked with nude pumps, tasteful jewelry, twill skirts and straightened hair, all of it coming with mandated repression of his urges and tight controls on his words. His personal life, on the other hand, was stripped of any significant repression. Outside of work, he stalked women regularly. He was a groper, and he’d always gotten away with it.

Now he realized that if he were going to pull off his insane plan, he had to be read as the right kind of weirdo. He was wound tighter than a corset lace and pounding Adderall on the weekends already, and he felt all his revelations as exponents of themselves. He had to be read as the right kind of weirdo by executing a juggling act with his presentation and location. He had to spot the right bar, choose the right woman, exit through the right door, and have his sensory stimulators all in the right arrangement. One of his PowerPoints outlined two separate five-point metrics: He had to look right, smell right, sound right, feel right, taste right (?); and, second, he had to have his environment (which included the woman) look right, sound right, taste right (no), smell right, and feel right. The first series of rights governed the entry into his plan, and the second (in a phrase lifted off one of his utterly horrifying PowerPoints) “maximized experiential satisfaction.”

Meanwhile, I was on the other side of the city, truly in love with life. I’d managed to stumble into a job as a costume designer for an all-female theater company, and the relentless, daily girl power had me buzzing like a Doubleshot would. My life was fabrics, colors, and measurements without the accompanying gaze. Turns out those things are a boatload of satisfaction, “experientially,” when nobody’s ruining them. The only drawback, other than being completely ignorant of my brother losing his mind, was that I couldn’t talk about my job around men. First time I tried it, the response I got was, “What happens when everyone’s periods sync up?” After that I started telling them I worked in real estate, and I wasn’t the only one in our company using real estate as a cover. And I wasn’t the only one who’d gotten the crack about synchronized periods. If I had to sum up my mental state at the time, I’d say it amounted to “Yay, go ladies!”

The first metric The Predator conquered was “feel right.” His interpretation was simple enough: He drove to a fluorescent-lit, humming drug store to get a new pack of razors to shore up his tactile regions. He ended up staring down a pack of pink razors, wondering if the ones meant for girls would work better on legs, but soon skirted the decision when he noticed there would be a judgmental cashier involved. The Predator went home with the blue razors and recorded “Self-checkouts” in his bullet-pointed slide of “Lessons Learned.” He felt a roll in his stomach over shaving his legs, but he had to. He had to be read as the right kind of weirdo, and a convincing act was going to involve some minor external edits. The leg hair would grow back. He had to wear pants to work anyway.

Of course, the girl he was going to grope had to feel right too. She had to have soft, tight, smooth, youthful skin that could nearly slip out of his hands like a wet bar of soap. That was what he was working up to, but he wasn’t going to get anywhere near his imagined dove without sounding right. The Character he was becoming continued to evolve, honestly, beyond the level of depth he had achieved himself. She (his Character, with a politically correct pronoun) was a nervous little weirdo, empowered to traipse around in the ladies’ room but still skittish about the whole endeavor, not someone who was going to go clomping through the bar in a pair of clunky leather heels. It being summer, he went with a harmlessly pretty pair of knock-off Jack Rogers sandals, which also carried the benefit of a forgiving fit in case he misfired in translating his shoe size to women’s sizes. He threw a fake name on the shipping address and placed the order online, then moved on to the next topic: Looking right.

Things got complicated here for The Predator because — let’s all take a deep, cleansing breath and make sure we’re sitting down — he wanted to avoid looking stupid. He’d already shaved his legs, worried about his feet, plucked a couple chest hairs, etc., and on some level the raucous, psychopathic enthusiasm had lost some of its reality-shoving steam. The Predator wasn’t a woman in any sense and to be confused for one was an outrage, but his Character was a person who, in his mind, suffered from intense delusions of being a deformed woman empowered to shake off h/is/er (I don’t know what pronoun he was using by now) deformities. So The Predator argued with The Character on how much was too much. They argued into the early morning, fell asleep and threw images at each other like a food fight until The Predator’s body woke up, resolution nearly reached.

The Character was willing to excuse a plain white men’s T-shirt as long as it was tucked into a skirt. The Predator was willing to wear a skirt as long as he didn’t have to wear makeup. The Character was willing to give up the farm in the makeup department with the exception of mascara, which The Predator agreed to on the condition that he didn’t have to wear a wig. They shook metaphysical hands, and The Character surrendered her voice while the Predator went back to logistics. He had a skirt to order (it would have to have an elastic band) and a tube of mascara to buy. He consulted his “Lessons Learned” slide and drove out to a grocery store that he knew had a self-checkout line.

It seems like living in the mind of a lion in the savannah or an alligator in the everglades would be primal and free, but maybe there isn’t any meaning at the top of the food chain. Up there, maybe the only beauty is in weakness. Predators like that probably feel like they live in a giant art museum, posing uncomfortably and losing the ability to admire — everything is below them, and everything is the same. The Predator saw himself as unassailable, an unambiguously perfect human. He covered up the mascara in his basket with a bag of chips like he were a teen buying condoms, scooted the tube across the scanner, noted the price, bought the chips, took his bags, smiled to himself, and said, “Women are pathetic.”

Throughout all the PowerPoints and online shopping, he’d lost sight of the thrill of getting away with something. As he glided out through the automated doors, he felt his excitement return. He had to get away with more things! It was one thing to devise his plans in an empty apartment, but it was an entirely different bird to compose his magnum opus in public. The following Saturday afternoon, he walked downtown and felt out the layouts, clientele, and proclaimed inclusiveness of the bars. No one drinking in any of the bars, idling at any of the intersections, or ambling across any of the clicking cobblestones had any wisp of what he was up to. Titillated, he bobbed in and out of several establishments and mentally checked boxes like a fire marshal. Entrance logistics required inclusiveness, exit logistics required a rear exit next to the ladies’ room. The Predator weaved invisibly through blocks, almost rooting against finding the perfect spot so that he could prolong the courtship. But then he found it — an obnoxiously perfect location on 25th Street, with a rainbow flag behind the bar and a rear exit so close to the bathrooms that it could’ve been a linen closet.

From there he pivoted back to his last actionable metric: Smelling right, even tasting right. Perfume was a must, but it was an expensive must. Instead of subjecting himself to the humiliation of going to the department store to buy perfume for an imaginary lover, he decided to pay a visit to a feminazi he knew and then pilfered a bottle from the top of her dresser while she was in the bathroom. And here’s where this story becomes a tornado, and here’s where it comes for me, and here’s where I want you to picture me kicking, grabbing, shouting, protesting, falling fully against my will into the vortex. Guess who the feminazi was.

“You worked with all girls. I told myself you’d never notice. It wasn’t like you had men to impress,” my brother would later tell me. I had to hear that from my own brother.

All of his goods arrived in indistinct boxes and padded envelopes, and once the boxes and envelopes had all been emptied and ripped to shreds or crushed into pancakes, it was time for him to get ready. The elastic on his skirt hugged his waist more than he imagined it would, and the fake Jacks tugged on his feet in a way that felt like plantar fasciitis. And the perfume came out in little jet spurts instead of a cotton-candy cloud, and he poked himself in the eye “like fifteen times” with the mascara wand, but those moments are the cute ones, the pubescent ones, the ones that aren’t like covering his eyes to keep the little flecks of cocaine from getting vacuumed up onto his lashes, or the bag of white dust with its plastic tail wedged against his waistband. The Predator arose from a line in hunt mode and left his apartment and headed toward 25th Street.

The day outside was bright in a hostile way. The Predator had gone from a spy to a spectacle, and he paid careful attention to the sources of the stares. Downtown there were counterculture part-timers at work and establishment types (like him) on walks with wives and jaunts with bros. It occurred to him that he hadn’t given enough gravity to the phrase “in broad daylight” — he’d used it as a source of adrenaline, but hadn’t let it worry him. The gazes were making him sweat more than the humidity was. They were the gazes he wanted, even though they made him shake. Bewildered eyes slanted toward hatred, and those eyes belonged to the husbands and wives, poodle-walkers and bank analysts. Approving glances came from the tattoo-bearers. He knew he was being read right, and opening the door to the bar tipped his world to the side and shook off the suspicious folks. He glided into a brick-enveloped inclusive space, where no one could suspect him of ill intent without being ashamed.

The door to the ladies’ room sat like the entrance to a princess-storage tower in a fairy tale, separated from him by an unimposing moat. It was like someone had come in and pulled the teeth of all the alligators, leaving only The Predator, who was now the Apex Predator. The Apex Predator’s waistband was leaving a sweat stain on his T-shirt, and his new shoes were giving him blisters, but other than that, all systems were go, PowerPoint metrics satisfied, experience imminent. He pushed open the door to the ladies’ room without a protest or challenge. That was the beauty of a perfect plan: an anti-climactic execution.

Once inside, he removed the balled-up plastic bag from his sweaty waist and did a line of coke off one of the faucets. In all his hypothetical diagramming, he hadn’t even considered the tactical perfection of a restroom intended for women. There were no urinals. No one could see him above the ankle. Had there been two women relieving themselves, the second wouldn’t see him gently but firmly reach out to touch the first. There were not, however, two women. There was only one little lonely pair of Jacks, real ones, pink ones, pretty ones, shoes he could lose himself in imagining what was above them. The Predator wanted to laugh at the perfection of it, but he held in his laugh.

In fact, he became tense holding it in. His brain was hyper-stimulated from parallel buzzes, and he wanted to build out an image of his target with manic exactness — to choose her hair color, put her in a dress he liked, give her hands as dainty as her feet, cinch her waist — but he could not afford to, lest the stall open and offer up someone different. His mind was a cartoonish nightmare sequence, and he had to hold it all inside of him. The Apex Predator had to remain calm, lying in wait for the moment as the anticipation stretched him thinner and thinner. He needed a distraction, a task that could speed up time. He was willing to take anything. He was so powerful, so anxious, primed for success and in need of action but wilting under the lack of control.

The Apex Predator noticed that his mascara was slightly uneven.

The task came to him like a first sip of coffee, or the wobbly steps at the end of a run, or the sound of a plate clinking against the table on a hungover morning, or none of those, because the feeling was more like the splash of an ice cube in a glass of bourbon, or the sides of a shoe coming together on the first tug of the laces, or the sky filling up with deep, austere blue on the end of a fussing, fidgeting, endless night, or none of those, or some, or all, and the simplicity of the task refreshed him: His lashes were not quite right, and he could wipe a little bit off the darker one. That was all. He leaned into the mirror and raised his unpainted nails (he now realized) to his eyes (why did he care about his nails?) and began to even things out by sliding his lashes between his fingers. But the mascara didn’t come off as easily as he thought, and it was dry, so he turned on the water and wet his fingers and started to slide again (he could see the shoes under the stall in the mirror), but something wasn’t right. The mascara was coming off, but something wasn’t right (should he just burst in and grab her?) because now the other eye looked more defined (no, he’d find her in an ugly pose), so he wiped at that one with his wet fingers and his eyes were (wait, hold on) —

The stall opened behind him….

There are stories of Stendall Syndrome, so common they have a name, where coming into contact with the Mona Lisa is too much to handle, and the observer faints. There are historical accounts of men severely weakened, moved to shaking, by the unfathomable depths of the Grand Canyon. There are artists who have mused on insanity and death from simply seeing the entirety of the universe. There are cautionary tales of humans finding their minds permanently shredded by a whiff of angel dust. To these tales add my brother, who was so gurgled up on stimulus bubbles that he found himself paralyzed by his own eyes when she came forth, when she saw him leaning into the mirror and said, “Let me help you with that.”

In a wet, salty voice, The Predator said, “I think my eyes are different sizes.”

The woman smiled. Her purse was on her arm, and she reached into it and removed a tube of mascara. “Every woman has her flaws. Don’t worry,” she said as she made his eyes symmetrical again.

Quietly, she told him, “I think what you’re doing is really brave.”

And she walked away. He watched her bottom like a stunned cat watching a bird through a screen door. And then he felt the onset of an avalanche inside him.

Stomach ulcers brought on by the sight of “asking for it” outfits. Erections that fizzled when he touched them. Frequent trips to church. Nightmares about wearing satin. Panic attacks in the makeup aisle.

For about six months after the encounter in the bathroom, my brother thought he was actually transgender, like going to a hypnotist for insomnia and leaving convinced you’re a pop star.

Half-written emails to his former victims. Whole bottles of vodka. Triple doses of Vicodin. Long hikes in hot weather without a water bottle. Cuts up and down his forearms. Cigarette burns on the soles of his feet.

Shattered glass, shredded paychecks, nine-hour drives in circles around the city. A naked jaunt through Food Lion. A beard that nearly touched his collarbone.

He’d put his hands onto the everything of femininity and absorbed too much too fast. “I felt like I’d crawled through my own eye and ended up trapped there,” he’d tell me. But then the tide began to pull back. Half-written emails became finished emails. Church actually seemed to promise redemption. He started believing he could be real again, and he stopped showing up to work hungover.

If he’d crawled into his own head, then accepting himself had to be his way out, and he became aware that acceptance would never come without action. He started volunteering at a battered women’s shelter, then he compiled a list of every lead he had on buying roofies and left the list at the police station. The Predator left, and my little brother returned. Now he’s on the couch, and I’m on the loveseat, drinking coffee and watching him sleep.

And I’m wondering a lot about myself. I want to know if I could’ve figured it out, and I’m wondering things that are less hypothetical than that, family things. I’ve been mousing around all morning. The coffee machine gurgle would have woken him up, so I took the machine and the filters and the grounds into the bathroom. I’m wondering if I have the same female objectification gene, and I just swung the other way with it. The blinds are all closed. I closed them after he fell asleep last night. I’m wondering if he even realizes that I’m a woman, or if he convinced himself I was different when he turned into a psychopath, the same way, I guess, that I mentally turned him into an animal last night when he began to tell me his story. He came here as an act of penance. He came here to tell the truth. He said it was the only way he could start making things right. More than anything, though, I just want him to keep sleeping. When he wakes up, I’m going to have to decide whether he deserves to be forgiven.

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M.J. Sions is a transgender writer and editor from Richmond, Va., whose work has also appeared in Jersey Devil Press and The Corner Club Press.