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.