you’re getting it all over. Here.” She pressed a rag from a nearby laundry basket to the large gash. “Hold this on it, press hard.”
Still drunk herself, Melanie somehow controlled the bleeding, while steering me, loudly babbling about Aquaman, up two flights of stairs to her bedroom and into my sleeping bag.
I remember the morning. I woke up in Melanie’s bright bedroom, unsure of who or where I was for several long moments, my mind completely devoid of memory, my head pulsating painfully. I moved my arm to rub my face and a sharp pain seized my elbow. The smell of vomit and blood hit my nostrils in a rush and I gagged, but my stomach was empty. Inspecting my elbow, I felt encrusted blood and puke all over my arm, neck, and the side of my face. With my good arm, I touched my head, where dried vomit clumped in my hair. Just then, Melanie entered the room.
“Your mom’s on the phone,” she said, squatting beside me. “How’re you feeling?” Her nose wrinkled at the harsh smell.
“Terrible. I am so sorry.”
“It’s okay,” she smiled. “You were pretty funny.”
“Does your mom know?”
“Yeah, but she’s just worried about you. She won’t tell your parents.”
“I know she wouldn’t. I feel so crappy, I don’t even care,” I moaned as I tried to get up. We walked slowly down the stairs, Melanie assisting me, my head spinning, stomach cramping. I reached for the phone with bloodied fingers and took a deep breath, summoning my most normal-sounding voice.
“Hi Mom.”
“What time did you get up?” I tried to gauge her tone.
“Just now, we stayed up late talking,” I lied.
“Uh-huh. Time to get home, we have things for you to do,” she said icily. She knows. I’d later discover she and my dad saw the party from the street as they drove home from their concert.
I showered, scrubbing hard in an effort to wash off my embarrassment and shame along with the filth. I ate a piece of dry toast and gathered my things. Mrs. Solesky had washed and dried my clothes while I’d slept, and I apologized and thanked her for everything. She smiled sympathetically and gave me a warm hug. I promised her I’d be back to take the sleeping bag to the dry cleaners and replace the iron.
Filled with shame and dread, I shuffled the full 120 feet from the Soleskys’ house to ours slowly, like a death row inmate on his last day. I found my parents sitting quietly in their recliners in the living room, unusual for a Saturday morning.
“Were you at the party at the Rowans’ house?” my mom asked before I’d even taken a seat.
“Yeah.” So intense was my hangover, I didn’t even consider lying.
“Were you drinking?”
“Yeah.”
“Where?”
“Melanie’s. And at Lynn’s.”
“The Soleskys were out? You said they’d be home.”
“Yeah.”
“What were you drinking?” Dad finally joined in.
“The Polish stuff. And then some Crown Royal. And beer.”
“You drank the Polish stuff?!” they exclaimed in unison, eyebrows raised. I nodded. My head ached more from the movement. I thought I detected a smirk on Dad’s face. His moustache turned down slightly when he was amused.
“Well,” Mom said. I waited several moments for more. She appeared uncharacteristically at a loss for words. “You’ve probably suffered more than you would from any punishment we could give you. Go help your dad clean the garage.” She banished me with a wave of her hand.
That was the last time either of them spoke to me about drinking. Socially, I was incapable of having just one drink. I didn’t drink daily and often went several weeks between drinks. Where some binge drinkers aim to get blind drunk, my goals were less clear: I simply couldn’t stop once I started, even knowing the result could be a blackout.
Drinking eased my social anxiety. When I drank, I didn’t worry about not fitting into my gender, or my skin. I was popular, and I enjoyed it, but I lived in constant fear of someone learning the truth about me. I had the high social standing that came with being an athlete and a good student. No one teased me, bullied me, or made me feel like the outsider I knew myself to be. I was keenly aware of the privilege I enjoyed as a white, middle-class, non-marginalized person, and I was terrified of losing it. Drinking helped me maintain my facade.
After graduation, many of my classmates came out as gay, lesbian, or bisexual, but I’m not aware of any other transgender people who attended school with me. I have tried for years to explain the dynamic around LGBTQ awareness at Bishop Carroll High School in the early 1980s, but I’ve never been able to. While the student population had its fair share of entitled frat-boy types, I don’t remember witnessing or hearing of anyone being called out or teased by any of the masters of the universe for being different or queer.
As an androgynous-looking teen, perceived by others as a tomboy, I certainly could have been targeted, but I never was, perhaps due to my popularity. My high school was an extremely classist place where it was very easy to determine where kids fell on the social and economic spectrum. As long as they fit in economically and didn’t challenge the status quo in any other ways, even the most effeminate boys and butch girls studied with, interacted with, socialized with, or were themselves members of the popular crowd.
Still, I tiptoed carefully, walking a tightrope between finding some comfort in my skin and maintaining a school wardrobe that wouldn’t attract negative attention. Working after-school and summer jobs at various places from Dairy Queen to an athletic shoe store gave me the means to keep up with the trends touted in The Official Preppy Handbook, a satirical 1980 paperback most kids in my high school were desperate to emulate. Calgary was the new Connecticut, and boat shoes, chinos, and polo shirts were all the rage for anyone who was anyone.
Formans Menswear occupied a busy corner in our local mall. Tasteful lighting and dark wood paneling gave the store a piano-bar vibe. Navy-suited and black-tuxedoed mannequins posed in the window displays, classy and Bond-like. Breathless, I drew myself up to my full height whenever I stepped inside that magical world of menswear, glancing shyly at the dapper salesmen gliding through the tasteful displays with confidence and efficiency.
I desperately wanted a Lacoste shirt, one of those pretentious little French alligator-emblem golf shirts that all the cool kids in school wore, but I feared a dark or neutral color would play up my masculinity and spotlight me as a gender outlaw. I chose a pink version, loose and unassuming, killing two birds with one crocodile—vaulting me into the realm of the cool and cloaking me in faux femininity. I wore that shirt two or three times a week for the next two years, convinced it was my protective cape.
The fact that today I can sit back and remember several schoolmates who I later learned were gay, lesbian, or bisexual and say, “Duh, of course they are,” only reminds me that I never considered any of us as “other” during my school years. So earnest were my own efforts—conscious and predominantly unconscious—to cloak my transgender self and adhere to mainstream behaviors, that I failed to consider that others might possibly fall outside the mainstream, too. Many of the queer
