When I Was a Man

Five years old and the summer sun beats down on my black bowl cut, heating my scalp and sending streams of sweat to the tips of my hair and into my collar. It’s so hot I could take off my shirt, but my mom and I have already had that battle:

“Ay! M’ija! What are you doing, you changa? Loquita! Put your shirt back on now!”

“Why? They all get to take off their shirts! It’s not fair!”

“You are a girl. You’re too old to be going around like that anymore.”

“But Mami!”

“Do you want a spanking? Put that shirt on right now, girl, before I tell your daddy!”

Five years old and my favorite outfit is a navy blue velvet sailor suit. Blue like boys. Navy like my daddy. I smooth my chubby hands over my belly, fuzzy like Grover’s and round like E.T.’s.

A shadow falls over me as I play with my Voltron action figures in the yard.

“Hey, you wanna play?”

He is blond like Jesus. Blue-eyed, too, his hair curling soft around his pink angel cheeks. He is so nice to me, not like the other boys I play with, who make sure to treat me extra rough ’cuz they don’t want to get beaten by a girl. He never sees the wrath that lets me knock boys who are faster and older to the ground. I let him boss me around and choose which toys we will play with. I even let him be Lion-O and I settle for being his sidekick, Panthro.

I don’t know his name and he doesn’t know mine, but at the end of each day I dream about bringing him into the house, tucking him into bed with me so we can giggle and wrestle till we fall asleep, our mouths pushing breath against each other’s faces all warm and dewy.

Now, as a cynical grown-up faggot, I know that he was just hustling me for the toys he would never get to call his own. He didn’t have the kind of mother who would comb the thrift stores and swap meets for all the latest Toys “R” Us castoffs. But still, it was one of the first times I felt those jolts of boylove slide through my body.

I am now twenty-two years old and home from college. My mother is ashamed to show the rest of our family my graduation pictures, the anime-boy hair beneath the graduation cap, the brown slacks and button-down shirt beneath the gown.

Twenty-two years old and my mother, as always, is telling me stories:

“Remember that white boy that lived on the block, M’ija?”

“Which one, Mom?”

“The puti, the one that used to play with you sometimes . . . ”

“Oh yeah! What ever happened to him? He never came around anymore after a while.”

“Yeah, well, I never told you, but there was this one time you weren’t home and he came to the door and he says, ‵Can I play with your little boy?’

“‘I don’t have a little boy,’ I says. ‘Oh . . . you mean my little girl. Her name is Mah-nee-kuh.’

“He just looked at me so confused! ‵Oh,’ he says, and . . . he just left, baby. He never did come back after that, did he, M’ija?”

“No, he didn’t, Mom.”

Twenty-two years old and I can hardly explain the sadness that I feel. I think that I may never know boylove like that again.

I may never pass like that again either. Or be so completely and heartbreakingly betrayed.