two thousand and twelve and father g a transgender section called the collection we don't have a for sale story but we can order if you get it in a week and a half from tennessee  useless house alex is right there she's not waving anymore and we stopped at useless house in santa fe and they're both like man we've been working at bookstores since we left pegasus and they're just like it hasn't been as good like when we were at p didn't realize how fucking good we had it it's so rad i love pegasus so much and i'm so thankful for the time that i got to be here it's truly treasure among bookstores in the world so do it we might have to just stay here can we stay here after we close and pay because there's a lot of really good beer that we got to drink what louder oh the addict yeah there's an addict up here that i'll take you to this is from early on in the book it's about a woman named maria who's living in new york and working in a bookstore not me she strolls back into work and nobody noticed that she was gone but nobody ever does she makes a plan build a nest by the customer service terminals in the back of the ground floor eat half of this bagel help anybody who asks for it wrap up that bagel and then go to see if any interesting review books have come in cool things have probably come out the last time she checked maybe a week ago just so goddamn many books so maria sets up shop at a computer terminal it is exactly everything everybody complains about when they work retail for the next half hour people are rude people are confused people want her to figure out what they want for them whatever she munches away this is actually this actually doesn't bother her maria's retail persona is impressively on better she's watched people burned out on retail be jerks to the public for a long time at the store and it's pretty gross plus this is manhattan everyone is an asshole for a while maria got into the revolutionary potential of being nice but now she's kind of over that too and gets pretty zen about it mindful being a dick to people who aren't being  just leaves her feeling like a dick the bookstore though so she gets like i am looking for this book it has a blue cover a lot it's supposed to be the worst annoying thing you can ask a bookseller but she's into it people always think they know less than they actually do about a book she can usually drop out of them and figure it out when did you see it where did you hear about it is that a happy book these conversations can be almost like a moment of actual human connection except it's a one directional connection maybe in another life maria will be a therapist or a social worker or something in the middle of helping a customer figure out that she is looking for amy hempel who rules maria realizes that she doesn't know if she's sleeping at home tonight or if steph is or what she makes a mental note to call steph some areas in the process of breaking up with her girlfriend steph at this point hopefully i'll remember to annotate the things that need to be annotated all day though she keeps forgetting to by the end of the night she just wants to go home but it's not really clear whether she can everybody's leaving to get wasted at the bar in st mark's at the cheap pitchers which is always an option but maria is exhausted and not really into the idea she's on the sidewalk outside the closed book store and finally taking your phone from her bag when kieran bumps into her my eyes are glaring cuts he pretty much yells responds with shitty impressions of james joyce who kiran is really into she's supposed to say yes i say maybe whatever yeah sure fine yes whatever sure but right now th but right now it's not like she even wants to talk to him it's stupid anyway he has to post to be this end of gender tough punk genderqueer radical but it's not like james joyce was working to undermine patriarchy here and we'll talk about all the reasons that yes joyce was working to undermine patriarchy but the actual answer is no james joyce was a patriarchal fuck and dead white man worship is a function of patriarchy but fuck that conversation right now maria ignores him maybe he doesn't know that steph told maria they're fucking so the reason that they're breaking up is because stuff allegedly she sings or have a chainlink by clock around her waist locks it climbs onto her by rides into the street she heads into the direction opposite her house towards midtown manhattan obviously you can't ride all night instead of going home you'll get tired and bored and obviously there is work in the morning but she decides to ride for a while one nice thing is that her phone's in her bag which means a staff call she won't hear it she's kind of aware that she's making yourself the bad guy here that she's kind of acting like an asshole whatever yes sure fine yes whatever fine shore who cares she rides up town riding a biased bike in most of manhattan and that totally rules but riding through midtown is awful twenty four hours a day it's practically impossible unless you're trying to get bruised on a bumper which is a mood she's in sometimes a mood she might be in now actually even on a sunday night like tonight it's pretty gnarly it's all hills in gridlock eighteen wheelers buses in cabs so you have to cut between the cars that's the best cutting between cars she pumps her legs up a hill and they start to hurt she puts a hand out in the taxi side mirror this could be the beginning of an all night odyssey like eyes wide shut or something but then she's over a hill her bike is coasting down hill and then she's climbing another her legs protester she pulls over onto a sidewalk a movie is actually a really good idea it's an feeling when you're so used to not being able to sleep to decide ahead of time not to sleep but it'll feel really bad when you get properly exhausted which will happen on romantically soon but right now maria is stoked she walks her bike two blocks just up a sidewalk in the street so she can self righteously hog half a lane and get in the way of cars to a theater where there's a movie playing with a monster in it she buys a ticket almost goes in has the best idea turns around finds a bodega buys a forty stuffed it into her bag and goes in the theater good audience i wonder if you know every week she can't really drink forty's anymore twenty nine year old sad old lady barely can handle it but sneaking up here into the movies is the point not the actual drinking or sits in the middle three rows from the front there like to other people in the theater because nobody sees monster movies on sunday nights she's been in this theater before she saw some other stupid movie with some other stupid monster in it some other time that she was all emotionally distressed and having a time out from her normal life that time the movie had been a matinee and afterward she decided to sneak into a different theater and see a different movie but then she completely chickened out when she saw a single usher that stereotype about transsexuals being all wild and criminal and bold and outside the norm and like engendering in the townsfolk the courage to break free from the smothering constraints of conformity that stereotype is about drag queens maria is transsexual and she is so meek she might disappear she did however sneak a forty into the movies it ends up being kind of a stupid movie if anybody has ever talked with me about movies before you may recognize the movie i'm about to describe that maria's saying it's a really important film it ends up being kind of a stupid movie but when we go see monster movies we are looking for stupid there are a lot of explosions the monster is gross and the plot goes like this for fifteen minutes you're introduced to the characters and you think i fucking hate these yuppies i wish a monster would kill them and then for an hour and fifteen more minutes the monster takes its time killing them it's annoying it's an annoying predictable cliche but maria always sympathizes with the monster if you had a conversation with her about it though and you imply that there were very obvious reasons she would flip out on you this is not the type of insight in which she is interested anyway it's late it's like one am by the time she gets out of the movies bars close at four in the bookstore people are certainly still drinking but maria is starting to feel foreshadowing in her shoulder muscles about what tomorrow is going to feel like if she doesn't get at a little sleep so a compromise she buys a five dollar bottle of poisonous whiskey at a little hole in the wall liquor store she sips it on our way home gloves with cut off fingertips riding past the cheap bar in st marks the permanent traffic cluster fuck it power into lancy williamsburg bridge a navy blue sky without stars and a beer buzz before she even started drinking whiskey she doesn't call staff she doesn't even check your phone it's like how if you don't open the official looking on below but can't do anything bad to you plus who knows where that phone even is in her bag plus it's cold plus right now she's way too busy looking picturesque like batman in this little alcove in the middle of the top of the williamsburg bridge drinking her whiskey and looking at the buildings on the manhattan side of brooklyn side the manhattan side which is worse she can't decide she likes the metal the bridge is made of th looking fence so you can't hurl yourself into the river it strikes her that she probably kind of hates everything she picks a fight with herself i think she doesn't hate trans women who have just figured out that they're going to need to transition but don't know what to do about it so they're super nervous but also kind of relieved she doesn't hate trans guys who are working on the fact that they've acquired male privilege outside the queer community but also in a weird way inside the queer community especially in the way that their presence tends to be or eliminate or invalidate that of trans women so they're working on it and starting conversations about it and being accountable to trans women she doesn't hate puppies pretty much everything on cute overload dot com is pretty ok actually in her throat tells her to stop being all romantic and weird and getting trashed batman so she starts writing again more or less free falling down the other side of the bridge thinking about cute overload dot com the video where the baby panda sneezes there are probably other things she doesn't hate feminist theory she proposes i guess i don't hate feminist theory she doesn't hate having a favorite obscure band that she keeps a secret and doesn't tell anybody about because sharing it would ruin it that one is kind of nice she definitely doesn't hate purana her one trans friend who doesn't drive her up every fucking wall fuck she's a purana phone call for like three days she happens sometimes especially nuclear relationship right and it's not like maria never fucked here in which he was with st what was i thinking about a list and then she's at the bottom of the bridge waiting at the weird turn the corner light williamsburg there was a point when you seemed like a scary tough neighborhood but now it's obvious that the graffiti on your walls gets put there by art student this is from a little later in the first half of the book this oh i've read this part with that part before this is more bike riding is not just about bikes did you all see the movie premium rush did you like it in your old steps waiting at the apartment which is odd because she drives to work in new york city traffic means that riding a bike is usually way faster than driving but she's on the couch in her work clothes with a bottle of organic red wine because she knows that esther dial and non organic red wine don't mix the fact that she's got the whole bottle of wine on the table her own glass half full and maria's empty waiting says that they're going to have a long conversation about a long talk hi she says and she stands up hugs maria i left work early she says do you want mine thanks she pours a glass maria wonders about the food she barely ate lunch and probably ought eat something steps on the couch now though ready to launch and so eating gets de prioritised marias like maybe i should have that shot first a little context maria it has is late for giving herself a shot of estrogen which is making her a little bit emotionally volatile and on the way home just before the scene happened she has decided to break up with stuff marias like maybe i should have that shot first it would really make a formal feel more lucid until tomorrow though so a shot gets de prioritised to she sits on the couch the thighs with the way from steph look steph says i am breaking up with you ten minutes later maria's on her bike again there will be no closure no conversation no figuring out what the fuck is going on tonight she slowed down that glass of wine without any food and now she's on her bike flying down jamaica ave purana doesn't live anywhere near by and who knows what her  just way the fuck down south and west towards where all the signs are in russian and the avenues have letters for names maria hasn't called her yet and she also hasn't decided whether she's going to stop into a bar for another drink or two probably not the desire to self obliterate isn't as intense as the fear of dealing with people and purana is maybe the greatest fucking genius who ever lived and not dealing with people so maria rides for a while fast until her legs hurt and her lungs won't breathe right anymore but she doesn't really know which way south or west are she thought she'd been pointing in the right direction but maybe she's never ridden from her own apartment to puranas maybe she's always gone there from work or taken the train weird she's in some kind of clean looking neighborhood full of two story apartment buildings and parking lots she's like i bet i'm either near the ocean or in queens she finds a subway station carries her bike down the stairs and checks a map chest heaving face damp in the humid night she's in queens near the ocean she pretty much went in exactly the wrong direction which is more due to the way she rides her bike than her emotional state she tends to just point to direction and trust that she'll get there it almost always works who knows how she got so turned around but whatever riding feels good so she doesn't get on a train she loves her bike back up to the street and starts to ride as soon as she's going pretty fast she gets doored shit as soon as she's going pretty fast she gets doored shit luck she kind of bounces off falls on the ground bounces up and glares at the person she doesn't say a word to boring looking white guy in the car just makes a fearful face gets back on her bik almost immediately she's going fast again cutting through a busy looking intersection as the light turns yellow soon she recognizes her own neighborhood then she recognizes the neighborhood next to it and then the next one it's dark out at this point in the air is all misty around the street lights it's like a picture inside  what at the after party i'll show you my new jersey tattoo and it's it's pretty cool her face is kind of wet and she starts to worry that it's going to rain for real that she's going to show up around as with the total but straight it doesn't though it's just misty turns out her on his neighborhood is really far away though inevitably maria runs out of adrenaline she stops that or red light even though when there's no cars you're supposed to blow through stop lights to show that you are an anarchist she sort of starts to process the conversation she instead had about half an hour ago ambush well maria was freaking out about how to have that conversation steph figured out how to communicate more directly than either of them has ever done before there wasn't much to say after that it was like i was going to break up with you too and then they just kind of looked at each other steph cried and for a minute maria felt like she might not and she felt heartless i mean down to the bottom of her lungs but then she cried too just a little they hugged and maria said something about figuring out logistics tomorrow but that she had to go get drunk right now steph laughed which made me feel like probably one day they'd be friends dyke i feel shitty not to have gotten to say all the shit that maria's just realizing she needed to say about patterns of checking out on her own life and stuff but i am not your girlfriend anymore is pretty close to i don't have to listen to your shit anymore and plus who actually wants to say those things out loud no matter how bad you need to the light changes and realizes wait shit hold on i am elated it's that feeling like you just left on a car trip or arizona or michigan or something and you don't have to worry about rent or work or feeding the cat or anything at all for a whole week is that there's no time limit i don't have to take care of myself or sleep or this might be kind of a bad news train of thought past that stoplight the road goes downhill for a really long time and her bike feels like a pegasus or something so it's straight to say you feel like you're flying but it's like flying she spreads her arms out like on the bow of the titanic at the bottom of the hill is the edge of park slope her honest house is still like miles away and even though it's not raining the mist is soaking through or close to maria decides to take the train this is the actual reason that she doesn't know her the way on her bike it's a pointlessly far ride she realizes she's gotten bored right around here before she is a catharsis biker not a distance biker plus on the train you get to read books and drink whiskey so she stops in the liquor store and buys a flask this is a theme in the novel she doesn't want to be drunk but she does want to be drinking it occurs to her to text purana stuff broke up with me coming over she gets on the train without waiting for a reply because what's she going to say no plus iran is not going to be doing anything she hates everybody way too much to go out when she doesn't have to queue train is pretty full because it's a tuesday night and the people who work in the city live in fancy two story homes up by her on a so they're on their way back maria gets into the role of dirty punk with bright fake colored hair taking up too much space smelling bad and drinking whiskey like she's known real crusties and she is not a real crusty but in comparison to these investment bankers she is like boxcar berth she's also excited to be reading a book called big black penis which is about masculinity and black men she holds it up high so everybody can read the title it's for the best that she rarely feels excitement like this because she's kind of being confrontational about it the james grew up in the worst fucking town and he still lives here and he's probably going to die here it's stupid it was a boom town in the late hundreds of beefy cowboys and ladies of the night or whatever and then everybody realized there was no fucking goal here and left for california then nothing happened here for one hundred years it was just a shitty little streambed dribbling between two shitty little mountains until sometime around when he was born in the mid nineties when the walmart corporation saw an opportunity for brand infiltration and blew a hole in the side of one of the mountains and put a little bridge across the middle of the parking lots of the stream could run through the middle and differentiate the star city wal mart from every other wal mart in the country that doesn't have a stupid fucking stream running through it he actually kind of likes the stream as soon as there was a wal mart in star city the people who got jobs at the wal mart needed places to live so they bought these shitty condos down the length of the stream and then went all the waterfront property was taken up they started paving streets away from the stream until they practically almost had a fucking town here almost a town there's a truck stop out toward route eighty in a couple stores that aren't walmart a shitty little florist kind of big garage but mostly since walmart sells everything every other shitty little store would sell anyway this town is like there is a mountain with a wal mart on it then there are a bunch of stupid buildings on the hill spread out beneath it then there are some more houses around where the ground flattens out there's a steep road that goes straight down the hill and up less steep road that swerves around the long way down the hill and last year they put in a game stop and a subway and six empty stores in a strip mall be between the highway and the wal mart but mostly what they have is dirt and dust and nothing and majestic boring visas and bored asshole teenagers and scars the name of the shitty little town makes it sound like celebrities would make ation here or something like in a dumb cop show from the seventy's or a two dimensional stage set from an old black and white movie but really the only reason to name the shitty town star city is that at night there are so many fucking stars above it as long as you are facing away from the wal mart that's the big picture that's star city from above the establishing shot how it looks from the outside not the james would know the furthest outside star city he's ever been is reno like four times if you're from reno star city probably looks like some debris and nothing next to a mountain but if you grew up here it's probably because your parents moved here to work at the new wal mart when it opened because there were no fucking jobs anywhere in nevada in the mid ninety's or something unless you wanted to deal blackjack in reno but neither james's parents wanted to work in a casino whatever who cares james grew up here and it is stupid fuck star city the small picture the tight shot the close up is that james is don't as hell recline in the flimsy plastic bathtub with the black grout or whatever the fuck it is called the moldy stuff that seals the tub to the floor on the wall he is hot boxing the bathroom of his apartment half way down the hill from the wal mart right now he is too stoned to tell if the water is hot or cold it is probably lukewarm who knows he sits up and looks at the mirror and can't see anything because there's so much smoke in here and also because that shit is all fogged up from how hot the bath water was some impossible to no amount of time ago he's thinking about how much he hates star city and why it produces such apathetic and useless f figure one james figure to nicole but mostly he is just stone in spacing out he keeps coming back to how cheap this bathroom feels this town sprung up out of nowhere and they built the shitty apartments out of bullshit but it's weird how even though he feels numb about pretty much everything else in his life he can't quite get accustomed to his shitty apartment the material of the tub against his bony ass feels like he could get up and punch through it brittle plastic brittle bones james smokes weed specifically so he can think about his ass against this bath tub and not about the fact that his girlfriend nicole left an hour ago stormed out in an angry huff he's in the bathtub because on some level he knew that if he hadn't given himself a project immediately he would have followed her out of the apartment out into the parking lot and made amends apologized patch things up but she's right to be mad there is something wrong with him he has no idea what the fuck it is but he does need to figure it out if he's ever going to have a normal human relationship so he was like well i'll hot box my bathroom and think about it he's working on it he gave himself a job he left his phone on the bed went into the bathroom and blocked the crack at the bottom of the door with a towel and old habit from getting hired as mom's house when he was fourteen that he didn't even realize he didn't need to do anymore he made sure he had at some point accidentally put the batteries back into the smoke detector ran a bath and blaze the shit out of ten or twenty dollars worth of weed he even used the pong not one of the pipes smoked up buds no shake the plan was to smoke until there was no air left in the bathroom to smoke until he could see through time to smoke until he figured his shit out and he's beginning ish it out everybody knows that smoking weed is hardly the path to self knowledge or anything it's probably the path away from self knowledge and less self knowledge is like thinking about establishing shots and stanley kubrick movie it is not but this shit is seriously better for figuring out his shit than sitting on the couch with nicole again watching some dumb movie she wants to watch because all the movies james like are likes are creepy or gross or impenetrable or whatever he should brought his i pod speakers and hears something even with smoke instead of air and hear it feel shitty to think about this stuff fuck feelings ok so this is from later in the book kind of getting towards the end and this is going to raise more questions than it answers which is why you're going to buy a hell of copies of this book at this point james has to acknowledge this feeling that's been creeping up and down his spine since he first saw her at wal mart but which so far he's been able to ignore he's like who the fuck is this person in my apartment probably she can see that he's kind of weirded out so she starts talking but he kind of talks over her he's like who are you like for real all i know about you is that you're trans in that you have a pretend dog and cat and maybe you have pretend heroin too but maybe it's real what are you doing here she's just like yeah ok and then neither of them knows what to say so again james is like for real who are you marie is sitting on the floor and james is on the futon she looks up at him from across the room with her bangs in her eyes pushes their hair back off her forehead her kind of big forehead and sighs ok she says sure i'm twenty nine i grew up in a shitty little cow town in pennsylvania moved to new york city after college transition six years ago and work in a bookstore well i guess i used to work in a bookstore i don't know like a month ago i figured out that i was really unhappy with my life so i borrow stole my girlfriend's car and like i guess i just pointed at west james things like yeah you're a heroin addict and like you're inevitably unhappy with your life because you're trans right meaning transition doesn't work james is struggling with his gender funny meaning transition doesn't work but what he says is it took you a month to drive a couple thousand miles she smirks at him and pushes her hair back again i don't know she says i guess i did a lot of hanging out in parking lots and stuff james goes like on heroin she laughs kind of too loud she says that whole thing is fucking stupid when i was sixteen i had a friend who was really into heroin right used by hundreds of dollars worth the time right and just do it recreationally shoot heroin on a friday night or tuesday night is in matter  dumb teenage shit check out how tough we are i latched on to him when he go to philadelphia and buy four hundred dollars worth a given twenty and have him bring back a couple dime bags whatever no big deal she stops talking for a second and then nods like she's figuring out how much of the story to tell him and she's decided all of it so yet check this out she says i just sort of broke up with my girlfriend we have been together for a bunch of years and developed this routine where we had an apartment and cats and stuff and her bills were under control she had a grown up job that was turning her into a grown up kind of and i realized like i guess i just figured out that i wasn't happy right i was blaming her for stuff and getting pissed that she was turning into a grown up or whatever but mostly i was just so checked out i didn't even understand if i was mad or sad or confused or what you know james is like i do know some dumb stuff happened maria says and then we broke up and i was like well shit the problem is that i've been trying to be responsible and accountable to everybody else and to make sure that nobody was freaked out by me or my feelings or desires or whatever i was like the solution is to become as irresponsible as i can obviously that turned out to be a totally stupid theory here's the thing james h when i was driving across the country right and hanging out in small town parks in route eighty off ramps and drinking truck stop coffee refills in the middle of the night what i realized was that was not a pattern that started in my relationship with staff this was a pattern that went back my whole fucking life i was totally checked out in high school to the point that it seemed like a good idea to try a little heroin now and then i barely made facial expressions in grade school i learned to  it well enough that people didn't mistake me for an autistic kid actually it's fucking wild if you think about it how well being totally checked out emotionally can look like normal american masculinity so looking back i was like holy shit i don't remember much about being a little kid but i must've checked out even back then meaning started the pattern that mean steph broke up over when i was a little kid when i started to develop a personality and gender and to express that personality in gender a tiny little dirtbag congar who didn't know anything about being trans or saying i want to be a girl or i am a girl who only knew that she wanted to be in poison to dress and act like the rock stars who are boys but who got to where all the makeup and outfits everybody everywhere started socializing that stuff out of me i was an observant kid you know i looked around and i was like well shit i'd better listen to these messages i'm getting from t v in from the grown ups around me instead of whatever the fuck obviously incorrect brain is telling me whatever the fuck my obviously incorrect brain is telling me you know being completely checked out that shit started when i was a tiny little kid i started really hating myself when i figured this out like in a way that i never even felt before like my fucking astral hate chaka had been revitalized i was like whoa i have a lifetime's worth shutdown emotions to work through so it's a good thing i'm by myself out here i thought about it and wrote about it and stuff and eventually when i was like cool i have all this heroin it probably be easier to overdose and die than it would be to work through what twenty five years of self invalidating habit so i called my friend  always been way leveler headed than me and she was like hey stupid did you ever stop to think that that pattern that coping mechanism was actually a brilliant strategy to keep yourself alive she was like listen up dummy when you were a little kid and it is the mid eighties saying i need to be a girl is not the sort of thing that tends to be met with love and appreciation it is the sort of thing that tends to get met with well you are a boy and well we'd better put him up and fuck we had ourselves a little freaked baby and shut the fuck up junior was like maria you dolt the smartest thing you could have done in that no win situation was to be like ok player game until i'm old enough to run away from it and figure out my own stupid game she was like which you did right you moved to new york you transitioned you fucking solved did the problem wasn't that coping mechanism the problem is that the coping mechanism became a pattern of behavior and it is really hard to just up and a behavior pattern is like parana man why the fuck are you fucking rich you are a genius i said this kind of through tears and she was like maria i'm not rich because i'm trans and because i'm a woman