The Best American Essays 2022 by Alexander Chee

Author:Alexander Chee
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2022-08-26T00:00:00+00:00

Calvin Gimpelevich

Among Men

From Ploughshares

YEARS AGO, IN the liminality of early transition, I worked a brief labor job. I hadn’t started hormones and looked like what until recently I had been: a dyke. At the café where I hung out was a private contractor, with a crew of macho-seeming mostly Hispanic workers, doing construction and remodeling. He liked the Republican Party and surfing; hard work, hard rock, and weed. He hired me for a three-day trial, at minimum wage, to impress a mutual friend. He was sleeping with her.

I lacked the skills for complex or unsupervised tasks. Instead, he had me drive with him to different job sites, sometimes carrying things, while he smoked and expounded on life: Women should not do construction, because they lacked physical power. He hired a woman sometimes, an electrician, but she worked slower and cost more, so he only did it to mix things up. I wanted to be a man? I didn’t want to be a man. Being a man was wanting to—he made a sound between a roar and a grunt, hitting the steering wheel—all the time. “You know what I mean?”

“No.”

“That’s being a man. You just—agh!”

He didn’t want to use my new name (my current name), but I refused to say the old one. He tried to buy it. Anytime I wouldn’t do something, he wanted to pay. At lunch, unpacking my vegetarian sandwich and salad, he offered me one hundred dollars to eat meat. I was making eighty-eight dollars a day.

I didn’t want to admit the toolbox was too heavy, so I staggered forward, thrusting my entire body to move it ahead, breathing hard, and stopping when he couldn’t see. The other men smiled and offered to do it for me. I put it down, picked it up, and lurched forth. Eventually, the box reached its appropriate shed.

Prep work went better. Sweeping, protecting the floors. Covering furniture and molding in plastic. I mixed grout and laid tile while he yelled on the phone.

On the next drive, through forested back roads, he talked about lesbians. It didn’t make any sense, two women together. No meat, no substance: foreplay. Like air. He asked me about my girlfriend. He said we should have a three-way with him. If I answered, he spoke louder, crushing whatever I said. Finally, with the two of us alone on the long country road, with no cars in sight, no buildings or even hikers, this man, at least twice my weight, with a powerfully sculpted body, in long shorts and a ball cap and half-day’s stubble, said, “I should pull the car over and ravish you until you like it.” He looked at me. “What would you say?”

These interactions happened so often it didn’t register as a threat. The hostility started when I was a teenager, as my chest developed, and became more pronounced as I edged into bastions of maleness—like construction—and favored men’s clothes. Sometimes, it came with a complicated inverted kindness: I missed the gendered hazings of boyhood, the agh inserted in men.

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