Thirteen
TRANNYGATE
Only once in my life have I ever wished for a time machine—or, lacking the technology, a driver’s license.
It was Christmas in Los Angeles, which despite not looking much different than any other time is, indeed, special. I’d spent nearly a decade out on my own—even going so far as to tilt my “west sii-ide” the 90 degrees it took to claim the east—but California was still called “home.” There’d always be one week at the end of December when the weather was in the high eighties and time was frozen in the late nineties. Not only was I back, but we were. Gina knew all the old stories I only wanted to hear in L.A., my grown-up lullabies. Like that time Richard Shin threw a “bomb” made of water and single-ply from the second-floor boy’s bathroom onto Janet Lalebekeyan’s back and then she bitch-slapped him with the same wet toilet paper in front of everybody. Everybody was small enough to fit in a carry-on that week. Actually, everybody was just me and Gi.
I think we all started after I went away to college. She started calling to talk about the gorgeous eggheads I’d be meeting. Fools that we were. Eventually we became more than each other’s sounding boards—we were each other’s wailing walls. Whenever I got back into town, there was only one question: “Dude, what are we doing esta noche?”
On this particular break “we” now included a new dude named Bilal. She wanted me to meet him, and instead of being envious, I was excited. Too bad he left me wishing for a pimped-out DeLorean capable of turning back time to before the night started.
The three of us were having drinks at the bar/lounge in the Sofitel off Wilshire Boulevard near the Beverly Center. A glass of Riesling was $16, but we weren’t college or even graduate students anymore, so f*ck it. Gina and Bilal had fallen in love a few months before, after a day spent in bed watching Clue—her favorite movie of all time, next to our favorite, which is Teen Witch. Unable to top his unflinching knowledge of Clue’s complete working script, Gina gave Bilal a pass on being half African.
A brief note on xenophobia and dating: when you’re from Los Angeles, where one is either black or Mexican, not Martian, your opinion of people opposite the globe is formed almost exclusively by the movie Not Without My Daughter. Forged in the fires of Lifetime, NWMD is a film about race, religion, family, abuse, divorce, escape, and Sally Field’s convincing hijab. Basically, she marries a doctor who happens to be Iranian (as played by Alfred Molina) and everything’s all lovey-dovey until he takes her and their kid to Tehran and then goes bat shit crazy after praying or something. In the end, Field plus her daughter escape on a magic carpet, kind of. Anyway, the movie also doubles as code word for racism in romance if, finding ourselves in mixed company, we need to express fears over a potential partnering of one with an other.
“Ooh, look at Punjabi MC being all sexy at the bar. Hollaaaaaah….” one of us might say in reference to an attractive gentleman of South Asian descent.
Cutting her off after a quick up-and-down, the other might reply, “Dude. Not. Without. My. Daughter.” And the issue would get tabled—indefinitely. Gina’s looking past Bilal’s African-ness was huge, therefore prompting me to utter the phrase, “I like him for you.”
Third-wheeling it suddenly didn’t seem so bad. She was super hyped about a guy, and I wanted to bask in some of the afterglow. Unfortunately, my time in the spotlight was all too brief.
Okay, there was a tranny at the bar who kept eyeing Bilal. Gina pointed her out. When he (Bilal, not the she-man) walked over to chat it up with her (the tranny), we were horrified. The scoop was that the tranny (name unnecessary) was in fact a real live thirty-five-ish woman with whom Bilal had done some things. How we came to find out this information I was never sober enough to know, but once it was revealed, there was no stopping the onslaught. Also I don’t think she looked so absolutely mannish—there were some very women-of-the-WWF thighs and a pair of arms that would decimate Angela Bassett’s in What’s Love Got to Do with It—but nothing that would place her last in the LGBT acronym marathon. But Gina said, so I went with it.
“They didn’t do it or anything,” Gi reported back after interrogating Bilal over by the men’s room. “But they got close. Made out, but didn’t do it. I was like, ‘Oh word,’ and he was like, ‘It was a bad look. I was drunk.’ He admitted the folly of his ways—immediately.” Fine, can we go back to talking about my life now?
We’d been pounding Rieslings for about three hours. The last lick of the scoop was that Bilal and the tranny were only one naked sexy time removed, meaning that this was the chick delivering the goods before Gina got the job. I won’t say she was jealous, but she was definitely something close. My job as the best friend was to deflect. “Dude, look at her.” Knock back. “Puhlease, she’s hideola!” Swig. “What the hell are they over there gumming it up about? Prostate cancer?” Chug-a-lug. When it finally came time to pack up our stink eyes and head home, I won’t say we were drunk as f*ck, but we were definitely close.
There’s something that happens at the end of any night when a nondriver has been driven to some far-off locale—Beverly Hills, say—by a driver who has found herself exhausted by drink. Call it the whispering hour. It’s when the driver slurs to whomever’s closest, Who’s taking [social retard who can’t drive] home?
Fortunately, since 1996, Gina and I have never had to suffer through the faked loss of hearing necessary for the nondriver to survive the whispering hour. The term gas money was Greek to me, but my lack of language skills never seemed to bother her. Whenever the lights came up, dunking whatever club in vampiric mace, I’d never have to pretend-hail a cab or ask who was heading my way—Gi was always heading my way.
With Tranny gone and the lights on, Gina, Bilal, and I waited for the valet to bring The Explorer around front (Gina’s Ford Explorer has been around for more than a decade, earning through sheer guts the respect of a direct article). Standing far enough away that I didn’t vomit from their cuddling but still close enough to make it obvious I needed a ride, I may have heard the soft grumbling of a quiet riot against taking me all the way across town to my grandma’s, but promptly dismissed it. Where to next, guys? When I climbed into the backseat, though, the nonsexual tension was thicker than the Tranzilla’s thighs, which is to say impossible to ignore.
Me playing dead wasn’t working. Through the white noise of passive-aggressive mumbling from the passenger’s side (a spot already molded to my cheek specifications, but whatevs), it was clear that Bilal was pissy about something. Were we back on the tranny thing? Come on guys, give it a rest. I thought it best to decrease my surface area and disappear into the leather. While I spent the next couple of lights dissecting deserted sidewalks, attending the beat-up skin around my thumbnails, and knuckle-ironing my club jeans, the game of chicken happening in front reached critical mass.
“Drop me off, then.” His fingers already gripping the trigger.
“Whatever.” Her nerves already shot.
“I’m serious.”
Now, I’ve been accused by lesser beings of being a touch narcissistic, but this was actually about me. Boiled down to the basics, Bilal didn’t want Gina driving me home, presumably because she was drunk, but probably because he wanted her naked at his house posthaste. He actually suggested I take a cab. She suggested he shut the hell up.
Then he was all, Drop me off. And she was all, Sure. And he was all, No, really. And she was all, Fine, Bilal. The whole scene was ripped from the pages of our ninth-grade yearbook—the one where Gina wrote, “KIT this summer and don’t let these dudes get you down. Keep ya head up ” They were still one-upping each other when Bilal took whatever the opposite of a chill pill was and, hopped up on misguided courage, flung open the car door. While. The Explorer. Was still. In motion.
“What the f*ck are you doing?!”
“Let me out,” he yelled, pretty pointless, since technically some of him was already out.
Gina busted a U-ie across four lanes of traffic and screeched up to the nearest stretch of curb. Then Bilal, open car door still in hand, leaped out without saying a word. The silence woke me up.
“Dude, what the—”
“F*ck it,” she said, staring straight ahead like a woman possessed, or one pissed the hell off.
To describe this new turn of events as awkward would not be understatement. It would be criminally negligent. First off, now I’m being chauffeured around like an overscheduled six-year-old on her way to yet another play date, while Gina—now cast as the overextended BlackBerry mom—barrels down Wilshire Boulevard, daydreaming about how different her life might be without the brat in the back. The weightlessness would take some getting used to, but at least she’d be free. More than a cock blocker, I was a relationship millstone. And it only took me a few hours.
We headed in the opposite direction of wherever it was Bilal dared himself out of the car. He was behind us somewhere, getting swallowed up by the L.A. night or propositioned by its employees. Four morphed into five morphed into six on the radio minute hand before either of us said anything.
“Dude, what the—” I felt that that needed some repeating.
“Dude, I can’t.” What she couldn’t didn’t need repeating.
“We can’t just leave him back there.” Note here the casual usage of the royal “we,” most often bandied about by those packing a nondriver ID. “How’s he getting home?” Equally disingenuous, the nondriver always worries about how others are getting home even though she can do absolutely nothing useful in the situation seeing as how she, in title and definition, is a useless member of society. Even more applicable, the manless best friend always f*cks shit up and then wonders aloud how to fix it.
“He said drop him off, so I dropped his ass off.”
“Jesus.”
Staring her down, I compelled her into turning around before we’d driven so far away it’d be a waste to go back—he’d either be murdered or too mad. We pulled up near the corner and parked where Bilal went all Evel Knievel on us. He was at the bus stop now, lounging on a bench like he belonged there, wanted to be there.
“Go get him,” said Gina to the Helena reflection.
“F*ck!” replied Helena back to the car mirror.
I should also mention that at this moment in time I’d known Bilal for maybe eight hours, give or take however many times we’d exchanged cell phone “hi’s” to the other in the background. Now it was my job to convince a known daredevil that although getting back in the car would be less exciting than hanging out on Beverly and Wilshire, it’d probably be more dangerous. Plus, I didn’t think the buses even ran that late, and obviously he didn’t have money for a cab, or else he’d have given it to me. Before Bilal would get off the bench, he had to say that Gina made bad decisions, and by this point I was inclined to agree. But since I was the bad decision, I kept my mouth shut and gave him an “Umm-hmm” instead. I did, however, mention something about him being totally right, Gina being totally drunk, and it being totally 2:00 a.m. Years from now, they’d be telling 2.5 kids this story. Good thing Helena was there! On the walk of blame back to The Explorer, I gave Bilal the new rules of engagement: no judging, no whispering, and definitely no leaping from moving vehicles—at least until I was out of the car. Then off to grandmother’s house we went.
Everything was pretty normal for a while, if normal’s definition is ass-numbing silence. Up front, I’m sure the two of them were busy practicing whatever speech they planned to deliver to the other in the morning. In my head, I was volunteering to take a damn cab or at least sleep on somebody’s bumpy couch. You two kids work it out in the bedroom, I’ll be fine right here. But I knew Gina wouldn’t let me. Because by now it was the principle of the thing. She was going to drive me home no matter the cost—relationship, gas money. I wanted to tell her something, anything, to make all this weirdness disappear, but I left it alone.
Eventually they did get into a debate of stage whispers about what bad decisions Gina made—namely, having me as a friend. Actually, I’m just assuming that last part, since I was playing possum in the back so well I forgot I existed, which was probably for the best.
The universe, or more tangibly the Los Angeles Police Department, has a way of reminding us of such things. The time machine would’ve come in handy right about now.
The scene was Manchester Avenue, a stretch of depressed gravel that kisses the Pacific Ocean to the west and tongues down Inglewood on the east. It’s familiar and old. Like most Los Angeles streets south of anything good, it belongs to the ’60s on a clear day and the late ’80s on a smoggy one. Earlier Bilal had mentioned something about there being drunk-driving dragnets on Manchester right across from the cemetery and next to the Forum—where huge crowds of screaming fanatics used to worship the Lakers and now do the same for the Lord. But since the general consensus inside The Explorer was that Bilal was a damn maniac who opened the doors of moving vehicles, we shut him down before he even got started.
We should have listened.
“What’s with the traffic? It’s like three in the freaking morning,” I asked the Stupid Questions fairy outside my window.
“Is that a cop?”
“Perfect.”
We couldn’t see the whole thing until Gina pulled up to her place in the line to get f*cked. The stoplight, blinking red like a silent alarm, flashed everything into obviousness—cops in cop cars, clipboards, mobile booking units that made me think of temporary classrooms, tow trucks, poor unfortunate souls trying to pat their heads while rubbing their tummies, and the absence of hope. One uniformed gentleman walked up to Gina’s window, did the international hand sign for “Roll your window down, your best friend just ruined your record,” and asked her if she’d had anything to drink. She said, “No.” I imagined we’d get the same cell, but one never knows.
“You sure, ma’am?” he asked, giving her an eye exam with the flashlight buried in his palm.
“Well, just a glass of wine or two.” This was so ballsy it made my mouth water. I swallowed with a guilty gulp, remaining silent without having to be told.
“Ma’am, can you pull your car around the corner here.” Politeness while being policed is offensive. And since peeling off in a cloud of smoke down Manchester and to my grandma’s for a new pair of panties and then maybe on to Mexico was out of the question, so was defending ourselves. I couldn’t protect Gina, and it seemed as if Bilal just didn’t want to. He planted an elbow against the passenger door, resting his chin on his balled fist and rolling his eyes. Teaching her some kind of lesson, I suppose.
Another uniformed gentleman took Gina away to do all the choreographed calisthenics you see on Cops. Thank God she’d decided against heels. While she aped drunken Darrin’s Dance Grooves outside, I was going ape-shit inside. They were about to take her down to Chinatown! And it was all my fault—sort of. I promised baby Jesus I’d buy the ten-lesson package from Drive Right as soon as I got back to Washington—just please don’t force her to fashion a shank out of her Shu Uemura eye pencil. As I begged our Lord and Savior to spare Gina from a life of checking “yes” to the crime conviction question on any application, Bilal reached into his back pocket and pulled out his PalmPilot. Bilal has JC on speed dial? Nope, but he does have a saved game of Solitaire.
“What the hell are you doing?!” I said, wedging my head into the space between him and his home screen. Visual confirmation complete. This dude was in fact playing a game designed specifically for octogenarians and eighth-graders while the woman he told me he loved (again, we’d known each other for one-third of a day) was pivoting with her left foot on the imaginary line, dividing the us of right now from whatever we were before an acronym made everything all blurry. DUI. Don’t underestimate incompetence. What was bizarre about this entire situation, aside from the fact that an innocent Riesling-induced rage had spun way out of control, was how damn nonchalant Bilal was acting about the whole thing. As if Gina and I both had brought this on ourselves. As if the two of us together were the problem. Maybe one without the other would have a chance.
Every good friend just wants to be needed by the other, until she’s not because a penis has come between them. Then when the thing goes limp, she’s needed again, and whatever condescension she feels is fleeting, wiped clean by the righting of the order of things. This was how it was supposed to be, right? Just me and Gina. I hated him for making me feel so damn useless.
“Well, there’s nothing we can do right now,” Bilal said without looking up from the stacks of cards smaller than Chiclets in his hand. He was serious. This was happening. I was being voted Most Likely to Have to Get Her Shit Together When Boyfriend Loses His without having to hand out cupcakes or oversize buttons.
“Are you insane? We need to figure out what we’re going to do if they arrest her ass,” I said, squinting my eyes in the rear-view, trying to make out if the objects therein appeared bigger than they actually were. I mean, were we really in the shit? Was Gina going to do time, or at the very least suffer major bureaucratic inconvenience, because I was too busy for a driving lesson ten years before?
“Oh, they’re going to arrest her,” Bilal announced, without pity. Great, a card game enthusiast and a pessimist.
As far as rescue teams go, Bilal and I sucked. Lacking the positive energy necessary to secret her out of those handcuffs and back in the driver’s seat, we spent the next half hour debating whether or not Gina (a) brought this on herself, (b) would get out of this unscathed, or (c) would be not only scathed but scared shitless. He kept the time by tapping black and red cards across the screen with his stylus. I drummed the backbeat against my window, watching to make sure she wasn’t getting brutalized—or worse, videotaped.
A rap on the windshield threw us off. Yet another Mr. Officer, Sir—this one kind of sexy in that lame Bachelorette Party stripping-to-get-through-med-school sort of way, did I mention it’d been a long time?—came over to smash my pipe dreams: Gina was in a mobile home being booked under the suspicion of drunk driving. Her continued refusal to take a breathalyzer test (more balls!) would most definitely end in a one-way ticket down to Chinatown. Population: alarming. Praise Jesus, there was a conjunction in there somewhere. If one out of the two of us had a California driver’s license, they could release her to our custody, and this whole thing would play out in the fluorescent light of day court. Otherwise, The Explorer was on its way to wherever irresponsible cars go for a time-out. Since Bilal was from Ohio, and I was from Idiot Island, our last card got played before the game even started. No, we couldn’t talk to her. No, we didn’t have much time.
Was there someone, a real adult maybe, into whose custody they could release her? Yes, yes! I called Frances, who showed up in PJs and Asics. Bilal called his roommates, Jewish guys doing the scriptwriting thing. Oh, wait, did we mention that only The Explorer’s registered owners can save it from the tow truck? Crap. I was trying to avoid calling Jane and Carl, Gina’s parents, at all costs. There was a time in eleventh grade when Gi told her mom she was with me when in fact she was with a college guy until well after midnight curfew. By the time sixteen-year-old Gina finally got home, the always-appropriate Jane, who’d been waiting on their manicured lawn in a terry-cloth robe, said, “Ass.” I didn’t want to be the jackass at the beginning of that sentence. So using the 3:00 a.m. voice, my opening line for talking to Jane had been passed down over the centuries from f*ckup to f*ckup: “We’re okay….”
But were we? I knew I was, and Bilal, who all during the wait to be rescued by people obviously more qualified managed to stack all his cards up in a row, had to be too. It was the “we” part that had me all messed up. Without me, Gina would be on the opposite side of the universe right now, in a place called her boyfriend’s arms, oblivious to the fact that she had a selfish bitch for a BFF and a possibly autistic a*shole for a boyfriend. Solitaire for a straight hour? Really, guy?
Even if I had the DeLorean, the flux capacitor, and all the gigawatts to get us out of here, Doc only knows when I’d program it for—1996 and Melrose Driving School? To Pilgrim High School in 1994, when the sporty girls needed a fifth and Gi picked me? Two hours ago on the corner of Wilshire, or a day ago when Gina said she wanted me to meet Bilal: “All right, you gotta see this dude and tell me what the deal is.” Helena from today would have tried to convince the Helena from yesterday to say something sincere or white girl–ish like, “If you like him then I like him. I’m sure he’s perfect!” And when the old Helena rolled her neck around to give me the side eye and ask, “Why the hell…?” the time-traveling Helena would cut her off with the YouTube of right now and say, “This is why, bitch!” Then the happy couple in the picture would fade back into existence, minus the annoying friend holding up bunny ears behind them. Then the present day would be even better than before. Or…
Maybe all of this was a good thing. Well, not the whole DUI situation—everyone can agree how much that was going to hurt come tomorrow morning—but perhaps by some convoluted cosmic kismet, my lack of a driver’s license had inadvertently outed Bilal’s lack of common sense. I mean, why didn’t he just drive? Why didn’t the three of us just head to his house, which was like ten minutes from the bar, and sleep off our troubles? But see, someone in possession of a nondriver’s ID cannot ask these types of questions from the backseat. It isn’t done. Also, what kind of sociopath plays solitaire when his girlfriend might be in solitary? It didn’t take long for me to diagnose Bilal with Asperger syndrome. I was rescuing Gina from having “special” children. Screw my promises to Mr. J. H. Christ: not driving was saving more souls than the Forum on Sundays.
In the time it took for me to absolve myself, the cavalry had arrived. Frances came first, walked straight up to Gina at the mobile home moonlighting as the intake center, gave her a wink, and said, “It’s all good.” Then she gave Gina her shoulder, and the two of them stood still for a minute. Then came Bilal’s white boys from Hollywood. And then Carl and Jane, who, just wanting their daughter back, decided to hold the furious for later. I was all set to roll down my window and yell, “It wasn’t me!” but thought better of it. Whichever way the steering wheel turned, it was me. I’d helped rack up negative points on her driving record and added yet another name to the losing column of her love life because, obviously, I’d have to inform her of what a jerk Bilal had been this whole time. She should probably dump me, though—trade me to some East Coast team where nobody passed me the ball. Trying for one last Hail Mary, before everybody got to The Explorer, I gave Bilal the score.
“Don’t say shit to her. All that other bullshit that happened before—forget about it, for now at least. She’s had handcuffs put on her. She is now a person that has been handcuffed. Her whole life is a shambles.” I was talking fast, hoping he was catching some of it, any of it.
“All right,” he said, sounding annoyed.
I wish I could say he’d put down his phone.