Summer Fun by Jeanne Thornton

Author:Jeanne Thornton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
Publisher: Soho Press
Published: 2021-05-02T20:51:21+00:00

November 1, 2009

Dear Diane,

So much magic old footage of you still endures online, a spiritual stalker’s dream. Sometimes Caroline and I watched it together: early concert footage and awkward local interviews where Eddie, Tom, and Adam stammer while they try not to look into the interviewer’s cleavage, bizarre lip-synch setpieces—five of you posed in striped shirts, five of you posed in convertible cars, big hamburgers on trays attached to your windows, slender bikini waitresses on car-hop gravity skates blinking anxiously at the key light as they glide all Bubsy Berkeley in the background, guitars echoing out of the studio monitors. You watch it all, presumed prince surveying your subjects.

To hear a lot of people tell it—to hear me tell it, I worry—you seem avoidant, ingrown, vanishing. But on the tapes, where you’re present, something else is happening. It projects from you like a force field, touching all the people in the tiny YouTube frame with you. Tom Happy in 1964, clean-cut and pumping his foot as he sings your songs to a crowd, looks back at you every four measures, smiles: do you see him? And do you think he’s good? You look ahead and keep playing your bass; sometimes you remember to smile, something your father instructed you to do, a way you and your customers can build rapport.

You have more power than you believe, Diane; your inability to understand that doesn’t make people less subject to it.

Caroline worked at my trailer, editing sound and curating clips from each day’s backlog of raw footage, posting and feeding videos out to social media drops, liking and sharing the work of people she knew according to karmic principles of threefold return. She answered fan mail, too, really answered it with long letters that asked a lot of counter-questions, except in the case of obvious creeps like the guy who tracked her location based on the upload time of each video and different stuff in the backgrounds, and who kept sending emails saying he was coincidentally going to be in the same town as her next stop, or he could be, and they should have a real meeting of the minds finally. She didn’t respond all the time—just sometimes, as one might train a rat in a Skinner box—but when she did, it was by hand, in her handwriting built from big swimming blobs with stub ascenders and descenders, curlicue serifs, a vacuole to accommodate any reader. (Let’s not discuss my own trans girl handwriting, which you have by now experienced plenty of.) She wrote her letters and then she walked out, jacket zipped against fall winds, to the post office just before the highway access to mail them. To mail a letter you write someone: imagine that.

It was abstract to me that she had fans, that anyone I actually knew might be worthy of fans: that it was possible to give out love, to get it back. What does it feel like to have faith that your actions are worth doing?

Perhaps you are wondering about the secrets of what a trans woman and a cis woman do in bed.

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