I kept myself awake on the road by wearing my tambourine around my neck, like a collar, and drumming the off-beats directly into my ears, the drum sticks sometimes grazing my cheeks or my glasses, if I wore them. I had been practicing driving without my glasses, had discovered that I didn’t need them as I had believed for almost all of my 33 years. In fact, by not wearing them, I extended my energies by a hundred miles or so because my eyes were allowed to unfocus enough to rest. Especially in the night, when the flicks of reflective pavement guided my focus more efficiently than traffic in broad daylight, I became meditative on the human capacity to compensate senses, to achieve the somatic equilibrium to survive, even when hurtling down the highway at 96 mph with three adolescent chickens sleeping peacefully in the backseat through the crash of percussion.
I decided that, to justify a decision to invite a total stranger into my motel room for a fleeting, unsatisfying fuck, I would engage them first in a three-part “test.” The first part would determine whether I could stomach their cis-manhood at all: an intellectual riddle whose only parameter was, theoretically, honesty. I didn’t care what the answer was, per se, but how genuinely they considered it. The question: “Knowing that I do not identify as a woman, would you fuck me differently than a woman?” I took pleasure in their brief surprise, their careful silence. The second part I would preface with the question, “Do you know Bruce Lee?” And then, “Have you heard of the two-inch punch?” With their consent, I would measure a hand-width back from their sternum and hit them flatly with my fist. If they toppled, the deal was off. If they stood their ground, I would conclude the test with an often practical question, such as, “How many people have you slept with in the past three months?” Not that that mattered, either.
I was smoking a joint outside my room while on the phone, standing against the railing overlooking the parking lot when a man passed by. He seemed agitated, and so I offered the stranger a hit. He introduced himself as a demon, and it wasn’t until filing the police report days later that I learned his name was Daniel. Daniel was keeping his young lover—“The Goddess,” as I referred to her—under his spell in their room down the hall, and over the next few nights, I would learn of their immature, toxic, and conspiratorial relationship as they played me out of $500 of my dwindling safety net. The Demon and the Goddess tried to persuade me out of my nonexistent love affair (I would continue to insist on its validity for many months) with a former friend while I mediated their tired arguments. We would smoke, complain about money (our lack of it), and I would perform songs in exchange for kisses from the Goddess.
I met Terrance at the Tesla charging station near a Red Lobster outside Ashland. After rolling him a joint from my frunk, we made plans to fuck at my charming suite at the Spring Hotel, where I was able to believe I was meeting my destiny. What other small town could fit my fringe proclivities so well? A crystal shop across from the hotel carried a slab of labradorite that I couldn’t pass up. Next door, a handsome ginger served up a chocolate malt on the house. Down the street, a fiber store and game shop boasted all the supplies I would need to initiate my pleasure revolution. I read my tarot decks in the breakfast parlor, made friends with whomever would meet my eye, envisioned a life as a guest entertainer, as if the hotel were a cruise ship, or better yet, the space station Deep Space 9. I could be the ferengi bar keep, peddling truth instead of latinum. Terrance, a black man 17 years my senior, fucked me generously. After, he detailed his strategy to take advantage of the tax breaks and incentives recently passed by Biden that would allow him to rake in millions through solar projects over the next decade. I interpreted all this as divine intervention, of course: I had found the flip-side to my coin. Where I drove a black Model 3, Terrance drove a white Y. Where I was a brand new trans boi, he was an experienced hetero cis daddy that seemed both willing and able to carry me into the next phase of my world-changing plans. He accompanied me to the adult store, where I planned to cut a deal with the regional manager to prostitute myself out to whatever exclusive shmucks passing through town. “Fifty-fifty,” I told her. “I haven’t done anything like this before,” she said. “Me neither,” I said. We smiled.
In the hospital, I met a fairy. She spent most of her time drawing maps of unusual planets and stars and vampire creatures, and when I shared with her my theory of my godliness, my Cupid inheritances, she informed me of her magical nature, including her undetectable pregnancy with none other than Satan’s child. A part of me fell in love with her then: the brazen confidence and unfaltering commitment to such otherworldly responsibility. I tried my best to honor that confidence. She liked to smoke menthols, and I promised to procure a pack for her on the day of our mutual release. She was dropped off at a safe house; it was the last time I saw her. I still have her menthols.
The night warden came into my room and sat on my bed. He reached under the covers and lifted my waistband. Terrified and bewildered, I did nothing. I said, “No.” I may have choked on it.
After inspecting my palm and adjusting my spine with a vision-clarifying crack, the wizard at the Griffith Park drum circle informed me that I had six spirits residing within me. “Six?” I asked. He wore a tie-dye t-shirt, a long, white beard that tapered past his pot belly, and glasses. “Six,” he confirmed, incredulous himself. At the drum circle weeks later, I would fend off three men with my drumsticks—my unicorn horns—which splintered on their kneecaps. Instinctively, as my body realized their intention to harm me, I drove my sticks at the knees of one and exclaimed an apology—so shocked I was at my violent reaction. Then, acknowledging fully the situation I found myself in, I repeated the motion, like an exercise repeated in Kung Fu class. The men retreated. I’d keep the drumsticks with me on the road, over a year later, as talismen of my self-defense abilities.
How do I discern the will of the gods from mania-induced fable? How have prophets ever done so? The most difficult lesson learned in adulthood came a year after my beloved Abuela’s death. I agreed to drive my brother home from the airport. He interrupted my lunch to ask me whether I’d allow him to fuck me. “If that’s a no, just don’t tell Mom or Dad,” he said. I looked out the window, waiting to wake up from the nightmare. He interpreted the silence as consideration. “How long have you been thinking about this?” I asked. “Two years,” he said. After he retreated upstairs, I drove myself to the local park, crawled under the steering wheel, and wished for death. I eventually concluded that many realities could exist at the same time, and that it was folly to believe in yours alone. If a fantastical thought could spring to mind, could ring true at a given moment, then yes, it could be true. One merely needed to believe. Isn’t that what all religions asked of us? Faith. Why not be your own god, your own prophet? Why not choose yourself? The philosopher Byron Katie poses the question, “Can you ever really know is anything is essentially true?” No, I find that nothing is essentially true, but we all define the truth on our own. The truth is that I perceive the unperceiveable because I believe what others simply do not. I find the evidence of my truths as much as you might prove the existence of God. This does not make me a prophet, no, but it does make me as rare as one.
According to my birth chart described by Chani Nichols, my destiny is to bridge the dead and the living. May 25, 1989, 9:08 AM (?). Who am I to say the stars are misaligned, that the life’s work of a contemporary goddess misguides all her acolytes?
I have a memory of being carried down the stairs by an angel. I was a toddler