MOG

It was one of those strange days. Overcast and drifting, lidded by the sky. I was 21 years old. I'd gone down the Australian east coast to a place called Moruya for the funeral of an ex-girlfriend's father. And I wasn't over the ex-girlfriend at all.

I stayed with a couple of friends, a pretty kooky pair. The guy used to wear white suits and white hats, very much like Elton John on the cover of his Greatest Hits, Volume 1. Not a look you normally see much of in a small country town like Moruya.

'Elton' had this vision of himself as something of an avant-garde photographer. His favorite subject at the time were men's penises in all kinds of abstract formulations, images that declared him as a florid Robert Mapplethorpe of the Australian south coast. Needless to say this dandy about town cut a rather gay figure among the truckies, bikies, surfies, farmers and hippies.

His girlfriend was no slouch at alien style either. She wore pink mini-skirts, furry boots and outfits that must have come out of early '70s musicals like Hair. She also wrote epic poetry inspired by Tolkien.

The two of them used to smoke pot and work on the poems together, speaking their own invented language, a kind of high, squeaking Ye Olde English that got more garrulous and out of control the more stoned they became.

Most of my friends aren't like this. Even now this couple stand out for being unusual. The important thing about them is the girl they introduced me to - for only they could have done the introduction.

Their new flatmate looked like a younger, sexier Chrissie Hynde from The Pretenders, a real dynamo. I couldn't figure out what such a happening, super-intelligent girl was doing in Moruya in the early '80s. She had Sydney, if not London and New York, written all over her.

It's no understatement to say I noticed her. But then just about any guy would. Even so, I was embroiled in my unrequited love for my ex-girlfriend, my inability to understand why she went out with the her new boyfriend - he was so boring and conservative the logic of it eluded me like an insult - and the funeral itself.

At the funeral of her father I longed to be a supportive presence, to wrap my ex-girlfriend in a blanket of tenderness. But even then I recognized that my supportiveness was really a pressure on her, that it held an urgency inside it colored most of all by own needs, and even, on the day, my selfishness. It was me who needed the connection. Me who was angry at not being able to touch and hold her.

After the church service there wasn't really a wake, except for the close family. I was outside the circle of my old girlfriend yet again. Relegated to being a shadow. Never really her boyfriend at all, not openly, not publicly. The relationship had always been clouded in ambiguities, half-heartedness. I bitterly resented the symbolism of it all.

My evening was free, so I ended up with 'Elton' and 'Hair' at a wild party full of bikies and hippies. 'Chrissie' was there too. I had not seen her all day - but with the funeral, the frustrated emotional energy, the greyness of the weather, there remained a sexual energy which seemed to sleep inside the suppressed feelings of the entire day. I could sense my attraction to Chrissie - the way too, she appealed to me, directing energy at me - bristling and raw beneath the affable and polite gestures.

And yet something about what was happening between us felt out-of-kilter, though I couldn't put my finger on it. At the party, she hung invitingly close, standing quietly beside me for a while before I lost track of her amid the revelries. Elton and Hair disappeared. And I ended up staggering home through the lonely streets at about 2 a.m. It didn't seem to matter in the end. I was happy to let myself be carried away. There was that final sense of being released to myself in the empty cool streets, of being free from everyone, free from my own needs.

The house was deserted or asleep when I arrived. So I began setting up my makeshift bed on Elton and Hair's couch downstairs. All of a sudden there was a knock at the door. It was Chrissie.

She had locked herself out and gone over to a friend's house to kill time before trying to get in again when someone was home. Things seemed to move with an automatic agreement or understanding from the moment she entered. We had a glass of red wine and a smoke, chatting away pleasantly, full of absurd small talk before we finally started kissing and rolling around the floor.

After lots of this rolling about I managed a rather breathy, 'Let's go upstairs'. We laughed as if the whole day had been wasted pretending to deny this want we both felt, a night of going through the motions that finally lead us where we really wanted to be.

Her room was simple and spare, with wooden bookshelves crowded with lots of cool literary books as well as a few that indicated a fascination for the dark side of life: post-modern theses on S & M; obscure art magazines devoted to all kinds of sexual and tortuous peccadilloes, performance artists such as Stelarc, who hung himself from a ceiling by fish-hooks, or Chris Burden, who had himself nailed to the back of a Volkswagon and got someone drive him around a small suburb for a few minutes before releasing him.

As interests go, they were fashionably twisted and arty. It was the early '80s, the beginning of an age when physical distortion was regarded as powerful and dangerous.

In some inarticulate way at the time, this irritated me. I felt predictably offended and bothered. But my primary interest was Chrissie, and a pretty straight up-and-down heterosexual experience, so I didn't worry too much about personal philosophies or arguments over fetishism vs art.

She was olive-skinned, dark-eyed, and spectacularly fit. By now we had our clothes off and had slid between the sheets - but she did this odd thing of leaving an overhead reading lamp on just above our heads. It glowed into our faces, whoever was laying beneath the other, like a particular burst of sun.

Perhaps I neglected to mention clearly that by now (in my foolish youth) I had smoked some ridiculously strong marihuana. It was like toking on an acid trip. So the fact I kept getting these funny, unreadable message at the back of my mind, an uncertain blinking charge of the synapses, wasn't unusual. What was it, what was it?

The reading light shone over her face as my hands moved feverishly down her breasts to between her legs. I was out-of-it, young and also relatively inexperienced for my age, and I began to have trouble finding her vagina - which was rather embarrassing, to say the least. I lacked panache. But this was much worse than fumbling over a bra strap.

In the meantime her face seemed to be changing. I studied it like water, stupefied. It was if one second I was looking at a girl, the next it would waver into the face of a boy. Back and forth. I started to blink as this kept happening, my hands fumbling between her legs with less and less intensity.

"What is it?", she said, looking up challengingly at me.

"Oh...er...oh...er..." I stumbled, unable to find words to express myself.

"Yes?" she asked again boldly.

"I'm sorry... I've had this really strong pot and this probably sounds weird.... Oh God, I'm really out of it...you see, um, well.... Are you a boy?"

The question fell out of me. Not as a thought, so much as some instinctive form that took its own shape in my mouth. Chrissie just looked back at me, not angry, not stunned, just definite. "I am a woman and I have always been a woman."

Eh?, I thought to myself. What kind of fucking answer is that? "I am a woman and have always been a woman." The phrase went round and round in my head, and when I asked her again more clearly if she was a boy she said the phrase again. It didn't have a great ring to it. Less of a direct answer than a manifesto. But she did have the body of a woman. She was a woman. And yet things weren't quite right.

"Well, er...it's just...like I can't sortof quite find your...er, well, your...er, vagina. I can't find it."

Just saying the word 'vagina' made me feel strangely embarrassed. But then Chrissie took my hand and jammed my two fingers up between her legs. It was not an erotic experience for me. It was there after all, but it felt kinda - funny. Like a hole or a place, but not what I had known as a vagina. And so I just half-sat, half-lay there beside her, my fingers stuck inside her like someone had shoved them into an electric socket, looking at her face changing - boy/girl, boy/girl, boy/girl...

Finally I extracted my fingers and sat on the side of the bed, my head in my hands, confusion reigning. "Look you'll have to excuse me.... I'm not sure if this is happening.... I'm very heterosexual in my mind.... I can't... it's just that I smoked some very strong pot... Oh wow, this is....."

Chrissie listened to it all, making low noises for a while, till I realized she was masturbating. "What a pity," she said, looking at me.

I was shocked, and politely demanded that she, "Stop it! Hey! Stop that." I was even more embarrassed now. A girl had never done that in front of me before.

I then explained that I needed to go back downstairs and have a good lay down on the couch. She seemed quite blasé about that, even vaguely amused. Then I kissed her on the cheek and left, totally blown out, and fell into a heavy, doped sleep on the lounge downstairs. A sleep as heavy as any I have ever had. When I woke up the next day I had an early breakfast with her before she went off to work - it was all very husband-and-wife-ish. I gave her another peck on the cheek as she left, a gesture of 'no hard feelings' combined with not knowing if the night had really happened at all.

Later that day I tried to introduce the subject discretely with Elton, but he just sniggered wisely without giving me a straight response. And so I left Moruya, stunned, but still wondering if what I'd perceived and experienced was true.

A month later I got a brief letter from her saying she was dropping by on a visit to Sydney, and would return a book I'd lent her earlier on the day of my visit. She'd written the note to me on the back of a photocopied image that was clearly her at about age 15, a schoolboy with long hair looking monstrously feminine - and in what could only be described as crucifying pain as a result of his appearance.

At some point or other I assume she must have begun taking hormones and then had operations to begin releasing herself from her male body into her female one. I found myself wondering about that strange, blurred territory between genders, and between forms of sexuality, and how I had reacted that night - my gut response to not follow through with sex, my sensing she was a boy, yet also knowing "I am a woman and have always been a woman" was a phrase that had truth in it. Nothing fitted into the picture easily, least of all me.

I've often considered the subtle energies in the seduction process that first vaguely warned me something wasn't right. That 'funny feeling' in the back of my mind that I first dismissed as pot-addled kinesis. And I think it was because she, in some way, hunted me down: despite everything about her, the way she approached me was the way a man would seduce a woman, in some unreadable yet felt code that put me in a female position. She still approached me like a man who wanted a woman.

The schoolboy picture she had sent was so full of pain, so disturbing, I almost immediately screwed it up and threw it in the garbage bin. It was as confronting as anything I have ever seen. So terribly private. That she wanted to trust me with it, or tell me something, was all the more frightening for me. Even touching the image troubled me, as if the pain flooded into my hands.

Later when she came round to my home, having told me the exact time she planned to drop by, I made sure I wasn't there. My Sydney flatmate simply told me this "really sexy girl dropped off a book of yours". I just said "yeah" bluntly. I wanted to escape anything to do with it. And yet something in me felt sad for being so afraid, for failing to make the connection.

Every now and then, perhaps once or twice a year, I will run into her in Sydney. And I pretend that nothing ever happened. And I am so terribly friendly, so regular in her company. I know she appreciates this. And yet this friendliness holds an absolute distance within it too - as smooth and undisturbed and blankly reflective as the surface of a pond.

Posted on 11/19/2006