I wrote this piece in October 2023, concurrently with the events it describes. The Black Warrior Review published it in print this spring. Since I now have permission to publish it, I wanted to share it here, so that more people can read it. I recently moved from Los Angeles to Bangkok. I’ve been working on some slow-burn essays and a final round of edits for a book, so may not have fresh work to publish here for a while.
I try to go to a Starbucks at least once a day, each time in a new neighbourhood. This one is in a strip mall in Glendale. I like them full of gruff middle-aged men with balding heads and beer bellies who don’t take any notice. My life has splintered into incommensurable parts, and I’m here to write it together.
Just as I open my laptop, a woman sits next to me. I would guess she was in her fifties. She has pale skin and platinum blonde hair, large breasts, and a slight belly. She wears a tiny denim skirt and a skimpy grey crop top. White pencil outlines her eyebrows. She goes straight in: Have you done the bottom? She points at my groin. It comes so fast I don’t have time even to appraise my discomfort. I say no. She says: I have. She says: Don’t listen to what people say about the bottom. It hurts so much. It’s been two years, and it still hurts all the time. It hurts so fucking much.
But it’s worth it, she says.
Once you have the bottom, she says—she leans closer, cupping a hand beside her mouth to whisper—you are no longer trans.
She turns towards me, spreads her legs.
She says: Look.
The Starbucks is buzzing. It’s around two in the afternoon.
I look.
Once you have the bottom, she says, you don’t even need to wear panties.
She has already made that quite clear.
You no longer, she says, when you’re in a changing room, have to hide behind a towel.
Day and night, she says, you’re a woman.
You’re a woman, she says, day and night.
***
You should call me Cissy, Cissy says. It’s 3.30am, and she’s seeing me out. Matt, my bull, she says, still sometimes calls me Jasmine, and it always feels wrong. Her phone is on the table, but she pulls another from her pocket and asks for my number. She already has my number, but I give it to her anyway. She’s flying to London in a few days. But we’ll be talking, she says, texting, phone calls, FaceTime. We’ll keep talking. We’ll be talking a lot, she says. Right?
The next day she calls me. Can you pick up a package at my old place? she asks. Of course, I say. I go after school; I’m stuck in traffic for nearly an hour. I can’t find a package. I call her. Just climb into the back yard, she says. I’m a six-foot transsexual in three-inch heels, I say. People are starting to notice. Just do it, she says. Her wish is my command. She tells me to meet her at The Kibitz Room, Fairfax, at 9pm, for her movie’s fundraiser. The Kibitz Room is a dark and narrow dive, with a stage on the left as you enter, booths all along the side past the stage, and a bar opposite the booths. Each time she introduces me to a friend, she says: Thalia is doing a PhD in Creative Writing at USC. They never seem impressed, but she doesn’t seem to care. She leaves me among them, an ornament—I want to be an ornament—while she rushes about talking to all the people. When her friends ask how we know each other, I only tell them that we met last night.
When I began doing sex work, Cissy says, I was only twenty. She is on The Kibitz Room’s stage, opening her stand-up routine. But look at me, she says. I’m a tiny Asian woman, right? So you know that when I was twenty, I barely looked fifteen. [Laughter] All my clients were old white men. [Laughter] Sorry. What I meant to say was: all my clients were paedophiles. They were just too cowardly to commit to it, so they came to me instead. [Laughter]. Now I’m entering my thirties, and it’s all these twenty-something tech bros coming to see me. They have too much money and just want a dommy-mommy. They want to watch me fuck daddy while I kick them in the face. [An audience member says to a friend: She’s not making that up, you know]. This is what it’s like, she says, wrapping up her act, to be an aging dominatrix.
Towards the end of the night, she tears open the package. Eyebrows up, eyes wide, mouth wide open, gasp. It’s a black vinyl trench coat. She thought she wouldn’t get it before her trip. She tells me I’m a good girl. The best girl, she says. Big smile. Thank you so so much. And her words wipe out the stress from all the day’s driving.
When I’m helping her clear up the stage, she gives me a tripod to put in my trunk. For our photographer, she says, if you don’t mind driving to Beverley Hills this week. She gives me a book—John by Annie Baker—to deliver to her old acting coach. He’s in West Hollywood. You can just drop it through the mailbox. She’ll set up a lockbox, she tells me, so I can enter her home when she’s gone, water her plants, make myself comfortable, you can relax, she says, make it a little writers’ retreat. She asks me if I can give her friend a lift home and, indeed, an hour later, I find myself parking on a residential street in Hollywood, watching a stranger leave my car.
When I first met Cissy, the night before—after picking her up from dinner with Matt, her bull—she said, A submissive is a person who is comfortable with someone else being the main character. I said, I feel like being the main character is how I earn a living; I mean I make myself the main character in all my writing. Being with you and being submissive, I said, even doing stuff that most people would find boring, is kind of like a vacation. I’m a really good sub, I said. You don’t know just how good I am, I said, but you’ll see. I should charge for this shit, I said. And she said: I love it for you that you own that.
We stayed up all night that night. She packed while I cleaned her kitchen and living room. We talked and talked, became an us, a people like us, you know it when you see it, we’re built different, most people can’t recognize it or just don’t want to, it’s a miracle we even got this far. It’s not what we’ve been through but that we never let it stop us. We saw something in each other, we agreed, that we rarely see in anyone. Or we saw, perhaps, what we wanted to see, but at least we let each other see it.
A framed poster of Belladonna of Sadness sat against a wall. Oh my god, I said, I love that film. It’s my favourite, she said. I saw it, I said, as a teenager, a shitty pirated version. Can you believe, she said, you are the first person I’ve met who knows it? But it’s so sad you never got to see the remaster. She put on the remaster—her projector filled the wall—and we let it roll in silence as we ADHD’d each other, weaving multiple strands of conversation; always interrupting each other; not minding, I think, the other’s interruption; and always making our way back to whatever we hadn’t finished. What I remember catching, or what caught me for a moment, knocking me off our talk, was the scene in which Belladonna comes apart, breaking open at the groin, her two sides splitting away from one another, until all that remains on the screen is blood.
How far we’ve come, I wanted to say, as people for whom, as children, a movie like this was our idea of comfort. But I checked myself, because how presumptuous and what does that even mean?
She gave me old clothes. I gave her a fashion show. A brown suede jacket. A blue silk dress. Black Honey Birdette lingerie. Other items I can’t afford.
While folding her clothes, I told her she dressed like a grunge kid. I know, she said, I dress like a boy. When I was young, she said, I was so upset that I wasn’t a boy and even more upset that I didn’t have a penis. So many people have said this to me, I said. What do you mean? she asked. Maybe what I meant to say, I said, is that lots of people want to share their gender stuff with me. Really? she asked. She sounded disappointed. You know, you might be a man, I said. Really? she asked again, and I heard it, this time, as hopeful. Don’t ask me, I said, you’ve just got something to explore. But don’t all girls think that? she asked. Like, isn’t it a common phase? I don’t know, I said, but I don’t think so. But it’s OK now, she said. I don’t need to worry about it. It’s easier these days. I just put one on whenever I want, take if off again.
Towards the end of the night, I told her that I was interested in working. A friend had recently asked if I could join sessions—for clients into transsexuals. She had offered a fifty-fifty split. We haven’t started yet, I said, but I’ve been wondering since about what else I could do. Cissy said: I can teach you everything. You can come to some sessions to watch. They’ll pay. We can make content together; it’s a safe way for you to learn. But you’re a sub, right? And you’re not into men, either? Yes, I said, but my experience as a sub, I think, means I’ll know exactly what they’re feeling. And I’m not into men, sure, but I might be into hurting them. I might also be into money.
After Cissy leaves for London, I start spending the weekends at her house. I give it a deep clean. I organise her shit. I scoop up and wipe away the protest shits of Huxley, her sphinx cat, whose diarrhoea, I am sure, stems from sheer spite at her departure. I like having this two-story house to myself. I try to enjoy it as my own, her life as if my own. I laugh when I open a cupboard in search of fresh cat litter and find, instead, a box full of dildos. I take Huxley, the little shit, along with the exemplary Poppy—from whom Huxley would do good to learn some manners—to Cissy’s mother’s house in Irvine. Before I agreed to this, I had consulted a gen z lesbian couple that in theory I am dating: As a sub, is it OK to ask your Domme to cover gas? The answer was basically: Yes, dum dum, consent, etc. So I do, and Cissy says yes, and I realise: boundaries, and so on, come on Thalia, be a good girl, but don’t lose sight of yourself. I listen, for the hour-long drive, to The Phenomenology of Spirit, at 0.7 speed, for no other reason than that there is something wrong with me. To get from Paolo Verdes to Irvine, I cross what I will later learn is the Vincent Thomas Bridge. I see the ocean and a naval yard, row upon row of cranes. Everything sparkles, the waves, the containers, the suspenders on the bridge, and it makes the long trip—my anxiety about Huxley making a mess in my car—all worthwhile. Huxley delivers a stink bomb just before we arrive, but he doesn’t shit in his carrier, which feels, to me, like a major win. When I meet Cissy’s mother, she speaks quietly, and I can’t hear her well. After she hugs me, we stand in the doorway and stare at the cats. When it’s time for me to go, she simply pushes the front door against my body until I leave.
Angel Girl, thank you [kiss] [kiss], Cissy texts one day. my favourite girl, thank you, she texts another. ty for everything, my Angel, she texts, I can’t wait to see u. While I’m at a USPS, trying to figure out to which city to send her Invisalign, we text logistics for half an hour, and I compare myself to a fly that’s always buzzing in her ear. You’re not, she texts, you’re my little fairy / [fairy] / Granting me little wishes. She sends me pictures of treats from Fortnum & Masons, asks what I’d like her to get for me. She sends cross-eyed selfies from museums—she’s wearing her vinyl trench coat—and pictures of meals she’s shared at restaurants and the homes of friends. She sends a picture in which she sits on a toilet, wrapped in a white towel, with her right foot on the edge of the bath, poised to shave her right shin, while ignoring the man, wearing only the rope that binds him, who is lying face-down in the tub.
Cissy’s London address is near where I lived, fifteen years ago, as a student. I have so many recommendations to give her—all my old haunts: restaurants, cafes, bars, and oddities—but when I open Google Maps and begin to search the area, I burst into tears. I calm down, try again, but again I start to cry. I love London, but I won’t return to England. How can I explain this to Cissy? I need ready access to hormones and women’s spaces. I want a womanhood more than the butt of a joke. I am so far, I feel, from forgiving England, but I feel like a drama queen for thinking like this, for seeing myself an exile despite how ostensibly tame the threat.
I text Cissy to tell her that looking at London is making me cry. I open the map again, and my eyes walk from Cissy’s address down the Holloway Road, across Balls Pond Road, past the Eastern Curve Garden, the Peace Carnival Mural, and Café Oto—worthy visits, all three—past Dalston Lane, and finally to flat 54B on Graham Road, in front of which I drag and drop the little yellow Google man. I look at the balcony. Almost a decade ago, in the middle of winter, a partner tied me up and left me near this balcony’s window. She also worked as a professional dominatrix. She left the window open. She left her bed at intervals to kick me into silence. She untied me in the morning, so I wasn’t late for work. I didn’t stop shivering as the shower filled the room with steam. I did not consent to any of it. I say to myself, It’s OK, Thalia. She isn’t there anymore. And even if she was, it doesn’t matter. You are safe now, over here.
When I wake up the next day, I find a text from Cissy: Can you start an OnlyFans on your visa? She has shared a bunch of screenshots from Quora about freelancing on an F1. No, I reply, and even if I got a green card, the university only lets me work in the summer. We can build a content vault in the meantime, she texts. How about a video series, I text the next day: Thalia’s first *insert kink here*. First clip: Goddess Jasmine teaches Calypso (tbc) how to kick a man in the balls. Yes totally [heart], she texts. She tells me that Matt, her bull, has worked with trans women before. We can film us kicking him, she says. And alone in my bedroom, I picture myself doing it—kicking Matt, her bull, in the balls—and I surprise myself, because as I imagine him keeling over, again and again, I cannot stem my laughter, which breaks free from a part of me I never knew I had, the part that cherished the idea that I never wanted to harm another.
I’m writing about Cissy when Cissy calls. After she updates me on her travels, we talk about her life as an Asian American woman and mine as a transsexual, which is to say we talk about how exhausted we are. I tell her about a writing conference where I was the only trans woman. All day, every day, I say, people were telling me how beautiful I was. They gushed about my work, even people who hadn’t read it. It was creepy. When someone insinuated that I was there only because I’m a trans woman, I corrected her: I’m here, I said, because I’m so well-behaved; I rock the boat like it’s a cradle. I’m a bougie white girl. I’m safe. I’ve been wondering if that’s why I’ve got so into service submission, I say. It makes serving a cis person sexy, consensual, and transparent; a feature, not a bug. A reclamation, Cissy says. It’s a theory, I say. But it makes sense, she says, and it’s also why I think you should be serious about working. Why? I ask. So you know what it’s like, she says, to have power in a room.
***
At the Starbucks in Glendale, the trans woman—who is no longer, thanks to her surgery, a trans woman—takes my number and calls it. She leaves a voicemail while I sit beside her, listening, to recap how and where we met.
Her name is Kathy.
It’s so good, she says, talking to you.
I never get to meet any elders, I say.
We can help each other, she says.
Sure, I say.
Can you find me somewhere to live? she says.
I don’t think—
I’m paying too much, she says. It’s just too much. She screws up her face, begins to speak like someone who is about to cry, but she doesn’t cry. Two-thousand dollars a month, she says. It’s just too much. Can you find me a roommate?
I’m not—
Where do you live? she asks.
In Echo Park, I say.
Can I live with you? she asks.
I’m sorry, I say, but—
Do you like dancing? she asks.
She stands, shimmies to an empty spot in the middle of the Starbucks.
Isn’t it so good, she asks—she snakes her hips, rotates her wrists, bobs her head from side to side—to finally be who you are?