Michaela Sue

= July 26, 1982 (Day Eight) =

That small animated nurse with the freckles is on the phone with someone who has a loud boomy voice, and I can hear him complaining about something on his bill. Someone must have transferred a call to the wrong line. I make eye contact with her and find myself smiling. God she’s cute. What was her name? Patty? She rolls her eyes and holds the phone farther from her ear. “Sir, that’s not my jurisdiction. You need to call back....”

I give her a nod and attempt a wry and sophisticated cynical smirk.

In a chromium rack on the counter, manila folders stand up with plastic tabs that have our names on them — Noelle’s, mine, Ellen’s, Jake’s, Ronald’s...

The nurse finally manages to get off the phone and says something to her colleague about needing a break. Colleague replies “See you in a bit, Penelope”, which gives me her name. Oh yeah, and I think Gary called her Penny, that’s the name I heard. Hey, I was close. We end up walking together down the hall.

With plastic trays and stainless steel utensils and napkins in hand, we point at hash browns and sausages and the counter person dishes out what we’ve chosen. “I’m curious about something”, I mention to her. “When this place was being described to me, one of the things they said would be part of the experience would be an examination of nutrition and vitamins and electrolytes and all that stuff, how the things that we eat affect how our brains work. I was in nursing school before I got here, studying to be an LPN, and I really liked the classwork ... anyway, it doesn’t seem like they do any of that here as a class, I mean it’s not on my schedule and I haven’t seen anything like that on anyone else’s.”

“No, I mean we have a dietician who sets guidelines they use in meal planning. But you’re right, there’s no instruction. Did you like nursing?”

“I liked a lot of things about it. I liked being a member of the nursing team, and I liked the patients.”

“Think you’ll go back to it?”

“I have been thinking about that...but...I don’t think caring for people on a physical-body level is what I’m best suited for. The biggest problem was feeling like I was invading people’s space and interfering with their autonomy. I had a patient die once while I was at lunch. I took his vitals and gave him his meds, went to lunch, came back and he wasn’t breathing, no pulse. It wasn’t unexpected, congestive heart failure and a DNR order, so it was just a matter of when. Anyway, I asked my nursing instructor ‘What do I do now?’, and she said after I report it to the ward supervisor, if I could clean him up for the family, that would be good. So as I’m giving him a bed bath and rolling him over and arranging, I realize how much easier these things are when the person is dead. Because then I’m not worried that I’m bothering him, you know? Anyway, I think maybe when you feel like it’s inconvenient that the rest of your patients aren’t all dead, that could be a sign that nursing might not be where you belong.”



* * *





I walk past the piano and down the corridor to the doors to recreation. Sun glares down out of a pale blue sky. Texas hot and dry. Same as it ever was... yeah thanks, David Byrne.

Many of the other residents are dressed more sensibly than I am. George and Ronald are in cutoff jean shorts; Valerie has nylon shorts with piping. All I brought were full-length pants.

”Hey everybody”, Joanne greets. She’s attired in dark rose spandex and she has very nice shapes. “Today I want us to take turns running a lap around the track. I’m going to time you, and I want you each to try to do your run as close to exactly three minutes as possible. That’s not all that fast but it can be a challenge if you’re not used to running.”

I feel like moving; I’m restless and I’ve got the urge to walk for hours, which is my favorite way to let the back of my head process stuff and sort things out. Instead, I shuffle and stand and wait my turn with the others.

I’m not the first person to whom Joanne calls out, “You’re going faster than pace. Pull it back a bit”, and I’m also not the last. The speed she’s picked for us is just barely faster than a brisk stride. Awkward, too slow to run, too fast to walk. Maybe it’s useful to exercise this weird gait but it’s unpleasant.

Ronald just ignores Joanne and runs at a much faster speed. “I don’t care, I used to run track, c’mon Joanne, this isn’t fun!” Then Valerie clowns around, running backwards part of the way, finally sprinting to the end. Mutiny.

”Well, I’m going to run around the outside perimeter”, I point.

”Couldn’t you just do jumping jacks or something?”, Joanne suggests. She’s admittedly cute in her stretchy clothes. Male sexuality is annoyingly stupid. I don’t like Joanne. She flattens my ears, I don’t know why. I do like the way she looks. I don’t like how that makes me feel.

”I’d rather cover some ground”, I reply, then take off at a lope. Enough other people aren’t following instructions that I don’t figure my own insurrection will matter.

Initially, I run around the outside border of the recreation space, the tennis courts and track and ballfield area. After two laps of that, I widen out and run along the inside edge of the fence that encloses the undeveloped area of the hospital property with trees and underbrush. Things had been cut back to put in the fence, but it means hopping over dead branches and leaping over boulders, so it’s more of a cross-country run.

Joanne yells out to me. As I come around the building side of the rec area, she waits in front and I slow to a stop. “I’d really rather you didn’t get that far away”, she tells me.



* * *





I take my customary seat in Mark’s office. He comes around and briefly clasps my shoulders in a greeting-hug. I think he’s sincere about wanting to be a caring counselor-person. I’ve thrown a lot at him, honestly. He’s still here, trying.

“You got out and then you decided to come back in”, he says, stating the somewhat obvious. “What do you think you learned from those events?”

“The important thing here is that I get to be the one to decide how I’m going to spend my time. Even when I’m showing up for all the things that are on my schedule, that’s me deciding to go along with that, and I don’t have to. Speaking of which, by the way, I still have AA and NA on my schedule, and as I’ve told you, I don’t think they’re relevant to me and I’d like them taken off. I get that not being an alcoholic or a drug abuser doesn’t mean I don’t need help to come to terms with how I’m living my life, but if I accept that, I’m still not a drug addict or an alcoholic.”

“I see your point, but the twelve step programs aren’t on your schedule because you have a drug or alcohol problem. That may be what they’re mostly focused on, but you can probably get something out of them anyway, and apply them to your own situation. Everyone here is signed up for AA and NA. I can ask, and see what your treatment team thinks, but we don’t want to start a mad rush for everyone dropping sessions that they probably need, so I can’t make you any promises. Meanwhile, please keep attending.”

I look back at him, noncommittal.

“I’ve noticed”, Mark comments, “that you take a certain pride in being immune to other people’s opinions. What I want you to think about, is that it may not be all positive, this not caring what other people think. You’re going to find it hard to bridge gaps and connect with people if you don’t give a shit about how they feel.”



I am thinking about that pretty extensively these days, but it’s not a simple situation that reconciles easily. I think Mark Raybourne would like to establish it like some kind of ‘wake up and smell the coffee’ maxim, some profound and single-sided truth, the kind of insight you embroider into a sampler and frame for your wall. ‘You can’t get close to people and push them away at the same time’ or something like that.

The example situation that my mind keeps harkening back to is fall of ‘79, University of New Mexico, the semester just before I came out. Unlike a lot of other places and times prior to that, where I’d been harassed and attacked, ridiculed for being femme and called queer and faggot and all that, the UNM students had mostly been pretty non-judgmental and accepting. Several of them came right up to me and told me so. They’d say things like, “If you can accept yourself, you’ll find that other people are ready to accept you as you are.” The central problem was that most of them perceived me as a shy gay guy who was uptight and in denial about it and still in the closet, but freaking out. That’s the pattern they had some familiarity with; it was the phenomenon they knew about.

I didn’t have a handle on my difference yet myself, I just knew their tolerant reaction made me really uncomfortable. That particular acceptance wasn’t letting me be myself, it was pushing me into something. Or towards something. That sounds homophobic, doesn’t it? But it wasn’t gay male people who were doing the pushing here. Think about that. I was being pushed towards thinking of myself as either gay or else embracing straight-plus-masculine, the only alternative.

By the time spring rolled around, everything was different; I was cheerfully telling people “I’m actually not a gay guy, I’m a sissy, like the opposite of a tomboy. Think of me as one of the girls except I happen to be male. It’s similar in some ways to being gay, but also different.” But I couldn’t have told them that in the fall. Things hadn’t clicked into place for me yet.

So sometimes it is necessary for me to tug on people to pull them closer with one hand, while pushing back at them with the other. A type of ‘yes, but’ reaction to what they are thinking about me and how they are behaving towards me. I mean, sure, if people are being hostile and judgmental, I don’t need to bother with them and their opinion of me doesn’t matter. I know I don’t deserve that. And I don’t even hate them for it any more—they’re messed up and their heads are full of twisted notions and lots of avoidance. There’s some creepy horror movie version of us that they’re scared of, and it isn’t even us they’re scared of, it’s their own weird horror movie shit. At the opposite extreme, if people are taking time to really get me and understand me, I do care and their thoughts do matter. But so much of the time it’s somewhere in between those positions. Not closed off to me but seeing me in skewed ways, filtered through assumptions and attitudes.

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My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.


My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.




Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.

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