Ponyboy, p.1
Ponyboy, page 1
ponyboy
a novel
Eliot Duncan
to all the boys who were first girls
Author’s Note
Although some of this novel was inspired by my life, this is a work of fiction and the usual rules apply. All characters, events and incidents have been fictionalized and reflect my imagination, and none should be understood as a literal depiction of any person, event or incident.
negative three: birth in verse
Toni, Paris
Toni sweeps my hair off the gray bathroom tile and asks, Do you know what it feels like to really make eye contact with yourself? The tiny flecks make my neck and shoulders itch. I try and fail at brushing them off. I meet my inescapable form in the mirror, find Toni’s gaze and shrug. My eyes seem bigger. My jaw, more structural.
Toni’s acrylics are goth elegance: a blue close to black, each nail filed to a point. They run down my newly buzzed skull. Tiny, cold waves slosh down my spine. I smile, calmed by Toni’s touch. I breathe there for a second, then scan down my torso. It doesn’t make sense. I press down on my chest. I’ve always known that they’re fundamentally pec muscle. I cringe at their indecent bounce and certain weight, the impossibility of hiding them. An inevitable symbol for recognition out in the world, my life sentence as woman, girl.
I saved a six-pack all day, a great accomplishment. Now I gulp deep. Chilly, golden bubbles in my chest. My binder makes chugging hard. You’re not supposed to smoke with it on, says the internet. Each beer tilt on my lips crashes through my entire body—bringing ease, then, later, a smothering oblivion.
I want to make eye contact with myself. I stand on the couch and look for me in the cracked mirror over the fireplace. Light a cig. Turn horizontal. The curve of my chest flattened but not gone. No. They’re, visually, slightly there. Still, the binder’s heavy compression allows me to move, to assert my boyhood with less fear.
Toni reads something thick in the chair across from me. They’ve tied up their long dark hair, and there’s a golden shimmer on their eyelids. We catch each other’s glances and they begin cutting lines on the coffee table. Their hands are quick, elegant truths and I want to tell them so. Instead, I take the line they sliced for me and kiss the heaven of their neck.
Toni smells like before. We grew up and over and out of Iowa, together. After high school Toni went to Providence and me, here, to Paris. I move freer in their company, in the comfort and simultaneous ache of knowing someone so well for so long. More and more, they show me I could exist, that I could live. They allow the light of me to come forth, giving grace to even the shame of me. My truth able to arise, unmuffled and frank. It’s not your shame, they’d say, it doesn’t belong to you. Never has.
My girlfriend, Baby, left Paris for a couple weeks to make art in Hackney with her hot mentor and professor, Sophia. Not knowing how to be alone more than I already always was, I begged Toni to come see me. When I picked them up at Charles de Gaulle, they looked different: softer, glowy. In their long hug, my everything stirred.
Without Baby my living room is sterile, especially for a Saturday. Toni and I will go out tonight or people will come here and we’ll laugh and dance and sure, there will be rants, and maybe we’ll fuck. I smell greatness all around my life. Maybe that’s cocaine. My movements are welding into a smoother, masculine strut. My cock-intelligence smolders in my furrowed brow. Sharp clusters of percussion move me. I move more now than ever. I’ve got a whole world erupting outside the one that they spun on woman orbit. A whole world to let go of from white-knuckled grip. I have to get rid. Have to let it fall. I finish my beer. Start another. And another. The Misfits, I think. Just more Misfits.
Toni keeps their estrogen pills in a small golden tin, a heart etched on the top. I accidentally brush the tin off the coffee table on my swoop out of the apartment. We crouch, picking up the flat green ovals. They put their hand out for the pills I’ve collected, laughing. Unable to feel anything but thirst, I tell them: I’m just gonna duck out for some beer.
At the alimentation générale, I slide one green bottle into the front of my tight, overdyed Wranglers. The cold bottle rests between my skin and a copy of Leash by Jane Delynn, a parting gift from Baby. I’ll never finish it. It makes me too hard. Still, I keep it close to me wherever I go. I pull it out from time to time, sighing into a line on the métro, in a café, at the bar. I dream with its paragraphs, feeling Baby beside me.
I tie my thick denim jacket around my hips. I grab four more bottles and walk wide to the counter. Without thought, I ask for two bottles of whiskey.
I hear Baby go: Really? But she’s not here for a whiskey limit, not here to touch the back of my neck, not here to demand wide angles of time from me, not here to look up at me when she’s down on me—her enormous brown eyes, her mouth and long fingers not here to erode me.
The guy at the counter smiles. Baby told me that this guy knows I steal. Then why doesn’t he say something? Maybe he finds your childish theft charming, she said. I wink at the guy. I pay and leave with Baby hot in my mind.
Rue Saint-Denis shudders inside me: the clogged corners I swivel past, with women waiting in tight colors and thin-strapped sandals, men in blazers, people yelling out prices of fruit arranged in pyramids, wet vegetables and laid-out fish. The pigeons are in one shitty flock under the arc, La Porte Saint-Denis. Then there’s the piss stench, the cigarette—perpetual and essential. Some people, part of another world, eat on sunny terraces at cafés. They’re clean, aloof. Lovingly, I navigate this ancient city’s crevices. I dodge lingering eyes. My core expands into the street. I touch everything with my heart. I give the guy outside the tabac a couple cigs and light one for myself. A group of people pass with rolled canvas and violet fabric under their arms. A man without a shirt jogs down the middle of the road and I vanish into envy for his flat chest.
July’s heat is amplified: it smacks limestone, cobblestone, then limestone again. We humans get damp, rude and slow. Past a short tangle of bikes and cars, light posts and leafy trees is my door. It’s painted a worn but vivid Grecian blue. The narrow front corridor is dark. It has a bank of mailboxes. Bikes and strollers lean on the adjacent mirror. I take a hard right and walk up to the hot cube of my apartment. Seven flights. No thin, slow elevator. Just me taking every other step, wings tucked, whiskey close.
My space is eighteen square meters, large for a chambre de bonne. It’s on the very top floor, which, in Hausmannian buildings, were the maid’s quarters. The room has a full-sized bed, a small couch, a desk and a coffee table. Next to a built-in cabinet for clothes and an old fireplace are a mini-fridge, a sink, and a hot plate. The ceiling is a slanted wall, the underside of a mansard roof. There’s one thick, exposed wooden beam, a spine. The single window on the slanted wall, when swung open, makes it possible to think. The bathroom, off the entry, has a porcelain tub and no showerhead. On the wall along the tub, where the tiles end, is a wobbly wooden shelf. I keep my hottest books there.
I hear music from the hallway and feel a shiver down my leg from the beer in my waistband. Toni greets me with their voracious grace: Ponyboy! They’re railing through the blow and someone I don’t know is on the couch looking prim and bothered. I meet her, a friend of Toni’s from Brown. I feel nothing, pass her a beer. Toni takes one step to the kitchen, looking at what I bought. And this, I say with a smile, pulling the large green bottle from my jeans. Toni wants whiskey on ice. I remind Toni but mainly me: Take it easy, love. I briefly hold the place where their jaw and neck meet. My hand, pedestrian. They kiss the inside of my wrist. Cheers. They lift their drink. Cheers.
Toni gestures to their friend: We were just talking about somatic fictions. Cool, I say. With the heat, Toni’s enthusiastic company irritates me. There’s no space for me. I drink fast, fast and then faster. I want to melt all over the room. I want to not be a body anymore. I want to slick warm and affectionately away from the self I was taught to be, sliding over their conversation and out the window, into mother evening.
Toni goes on, Remember when you said that you didn’t know if you wanted to be a boy or be treated like one? I pour and down another drink, taking an ice cube to the back of my neck. I sit next to Toni’s sweating friend on the couch. I respond, Your answer, Toni, was: What’s the difference? Exactly! Toni snaps: Gendered ontologies are productive, categorical fictions. To be is the same as to be treated as. I say, To be treated as is to be? I don’t know, Toni. I want to grab the red journal Baby gave me but it’s been elected holding place for the tidy pile of drugs.
Toni’s friend politely asks: I’m sorry, what’s your name again? Not looking up, I shrug: What’s yours? I’m Dover, she says, putting her cold beer on my cheek. I turn to her. Thanks, Dover, I whisper, letting her cold gesture become everything.
Just as I close my eyes, Toni tells me to come have a look at myself. I open my eyes and Dover takes her beer back to her mouth. I stand up slowly and look down at myself in the massive oval mirror laid on the coffee table. My face is sliced by Toni’s cocaine spurs. Trying to really see myself among the white banks, I whisper: Ponyboy. Touching my forearm like she’s my girlfriend, Toni nods: Ponyboy.
As Toni unpacked, they handed me their button-downs and blazers. I passed them my dresses, tank tops and skirts. On the night they arrived, they walked, jet-lagged, disheveled and stunning, around my tiny apartment, touching the slanted roof and exposed beam. They smiled: This is beautiful. Look outside, I said. We leaned out the open window, elbow to elbow, and laughed at their mom believing we were a hetero couple in high school. W e really did punk everyone, Toni said, taking a bad photo of the street below.
Later, we sat on my bed and looked through old photos on Facebook. Toni drank coffee. I poured myself more red wine and calibrated how much blow was hidden in my desk.
With each click a smooth, heavy stone sank deeper into my core. I can totally see you as a boy in these, Toni said. Thank you. They laughed at a photo of me in a short black dress. My hair long and brown. Eyes far, far off somewhere. That was the night we snorted their sister’s Adderall since the principal breathalyzed at the entrance. I remember taking off my impossible heels and staring at the gym floor as Toni lightly grinded with their calculus teacher.
As I stared at my nearly empty glass, I felt an ancient cry brew. Look at this one. Toni stopped at a photo of us in middle school. Black fluffy wings are strapped to their back. I’m in a black suit with an unlit cigar in my mouth, chin cocked high, eyes looking down. Mom, entertained, agreed to slick my hair back. What was I for Halloween? Yourself, Toni said with a laugh, and no one recognized you.
An Interlude of Becoming, House Party, American Midwest
I forgot to keep talking, that’s the thing. I meant to look people in their eyes, I meant to ask for help. I meant to keep it all in check so that I didn’t get lost again. That’s what’s true now: I’m lost again.
My body holds every stray gaze, every man’s breath on my neck, forcing inside all their ache, all their hate for the world, for themselves. It’s not just the living men, but those canonized, those held reverent too. Nietzsche’s cock-consciousness looms at my door. I use his dead language as he shoves into me with violent genius, whispering: “Werde, der du bist.”
My body holds that kind of projectile agony: one large living man at a party holding me down. I became a fish on his dock, swarming for the cool lake of ferment that I knew as home: another bottle of anything, please another drink. To extend the metaphor, I’d tell you I took his bait, but the conceit doesn’t track. He pulled me out of the water bare-handed and the air was his, so I suffocated. I was fourteen, maybe fifteen, and all wide-eyed, unmoving, coming to. He hurt, fucking dreams and breath out of me forever.
Toni, Paris
Now my life droops on this hooked orbit. My central tug, mother alcohol, builds me rooms to live inside—ones I don’t have to actually be inside to be inside. I lose my body exceptionally. I come to and know any stranger’s touch as inevitable. With alcohol’s force, I have words to say, thoughts to think.
I wake up with huge, glorious gaps from every evening prior. Parts come back to me in horrific, cinematic blasts. My feet jump off a dark green bench. Toni’s gorgeous mind leads me. Then the next day, pacing around, eating bites of food, drinking mugs of coffee. Waiting for night, to drink and forget things again. I slither from bed, step in a puddle of beer. Toni’s in the bathroom. “This Charming Man” loops. I clean up the spill with my/Dad’s Dead Kennedys T-shirt and halfheartedly sing: “Will nature make a man of me yet?” What can I do with all this desire except go forward with it in my palms?
Baby, Paris
A week before Toni’s visit, Baby woke branched in the crux of my arm. The morning was flat, blue and gray. I felt far away from each corner, every tilt, edge and crack of our apartment. The next day, she would leave for London with Sophia.
Will you email every day? Baby asked as she stepped out of bed. Sure. I nodded and swallowed, getting into my binder. The buzzer buzzed and Baby slid into jeans and a red sports bra. She jogged to the door. Oui? C’est moi.
It’s Sophia. I know, I said, rolling my eyes, throwing on Baby’s blue T-shirt and my black jeans. Baby looked at me from the door and asked if I’d choose the music. Mhmm. I moved to her, lifting her in my arms, her legs wrapped around my waist. The seven flights gave us time. I walked us to the couch, our hearts close, my breath on her neck. I’ll miss you, I said.
Sophia knocked. Baby unraveled from me and went to the door to greet her. I put on a Townes Van Zandt record that made me think of Mom—the album with him sitting at a desk, the one with the blue door. I stepped to the kitchen and made us all coffee.
Sophia was wide-strided, an authority. At forty-six, she was more than twenty years ahead of us. She drove a red vintage Triumph. Her skin had been punctured with more ink; she had bathed in more seas. She’d loved more people, seen more of the sky. She’d been before we were. Rare, to see a life that proved the potential for our own. Most of the time, the future felt like an obscure projection I was afraid to want because there wasn’t evidence of future me anywhere, in life or in fiction. I just knew Jack Halberstam and I were the same, so I existed there, in theory.
Sophia nodded at me in the open kitchen and sat on the couch. Her slanted smile hit cool, shy and untryingly alpha. Baby sat next to her and I watched them every few seconds while the coffee got strong, noting the proximity of their words.
I set down mugs of coffee between us. Tomorrow is the day, Sophia stated plainly, her hands on her knees: Ready for London? Baby nodded at the rolls of canvas in the corner. I sipped my coffee slow and looked out the window to the building across, at the slabs of limestone, the glossy windows in sun, the wrought-iron curvature. When I focused on Townes Van Zandt’s pleading confidence, I felt the tall grass of Grandma’s farm and her red truck on gravel.
Sophia asked how I’ll survive two weeks without Baby. I don’t know, I joked: I’ll probably just kill myself. I knew with hilarity that the very thing keeping me alive, in orbit, was the same thing that could end me, that could fling me into a quiet, dark forever. Baby laughed like that was inevitable, but she knew like I knew: no matter how close to death I’d venture, I’d always come back for her. Sophia’s silence filled the space with grounded concern. Townes Van Zandt kept it all heavy. Sophia sweetly tried, But you’ll get a lot of reading done, no? I nod. An old friend, Toni, is coming to visit from the States.
A day later, I woke not knowing how I got back to my apartment. I opened the massive window on the slanted wall above my bed and smoked, looking at the street below. As I blinked into living, I remembered the Seine’s silky black surface from a cab, a warmth, a strobe light, shots, a staircase, a touch from another and a bathroom stall. Getting gone like that had sunk into an average aspect of my life.
As I watched people filter in and out of the grocery store below, my phone rang. The screen said Mom. I answered reluctantly. I shaped my voice into someone else, Hey. Hey, sweetheart. I tell her this and that, moving books around, opening my empty fridge, and trying to make my bed. She asks about school and I tell her my philosophy degree is going well. As I look at the books I haven’t read, I say I might want to stay for a year or two after graduating. I hadn’t been doing well this last semester. I could barely make it to class. She asks me how often I see my dad. Every now and then, I assure her. Dad moved around a lot for work but had settled, more or less, with his partner in Germany. Mom and he divorced just before high school ended. I wanted to get far, far away, and when I asked, Dad agreed to support me and my studies in Paris.
Toni is coming tomorrow, I say. Remember Toni? She did. She asked if we were building something romantic. I have a girlfriend, I reminded her. She told me she has a new boyfriend; they go bow hunting at Grandma’s farm. She says elk is delicious. Oh—I stare far off somewhere—cool, that’s very cool.
American Midwest
I’m cold, seventeen and drinking shit whiskey on a porch in Lincoln. Earlier, I promised a different version of myself I wouldn’t finish the last bottle, let alone steal this one. I’m alone but gorgeous in this dismal, obsessional fight of everyday. I always surrender away from, not to. I’m on the porch of a house that could be any house on a street that could be any street.
Too-frequent, too-bright streetlights illuminate clusters of other drunk people. No one wears coats. I see girls with smoothed legs, small wallets tied to their wrists, looking like they piss rosewater. They’re strong, I think, for having to be so cold and around so many entitled men at night.
