you get a lot to like with a marlboro || dante backstory: i'll expand later but first context, texas, childhood, transgenderism, bisexuality, cowboys, family, transmasculinity, mexico, billy joel.

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YOUR LIFE IS ONLY LIVING, ANYHOW ,
&& EVERYBODY LOVES YOU NOW  .

BILLY JOEL.

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Somewhere in Texas, 1980

She sits on the fence and watches the cattle. She’s ten years old, chewing a dissolving mass of bubblegum. She stole it from Luz━four-year-olds don’t know how to blow bubbles, let alone the big ones. Her black hair tufts around her neck in a soft, curt wave, she’s always pushing her bangs back, but she hates the clips and bobby pins her mother tries to make her wear. They itch, they’re too pointy. The black and brown cattle lurch like devoted boulders through the fields.

When she was born, her parents weren’t married yet, so she has her mother’s last name. Her father moved from New York to Texas when he was young, then he lived in Mexico for five years, where he met her mother in El Pájaro, in Durango. The ten-year old closes her eyes and smells the sand and the sprigs of bright green plants. In her mind, Durango looks like Texas at sunset, where the vegetation is dark with life, and the sky is a blank palette of indigo and violet. It always feels, even in the dead sludge of summer when the ground hisses with heat at midnight, like there is a sharp edge in the air, like that of a snowstorm.

At school, she runs as faster than anyone━she makes herself do it. Dakota, a boy with a frustrated expression and messy hair, skinny and mid-height, all elbows and quivering muscles, races all the fastest kids, one after the other. When it’s the girl’s turn, she runs circles around the gym until everyone’s watching. After a while the teacher calls, “Alright, butch, let’s let the other boys have a turn, huh?”

At recess, a hole in the dirt appears in the corner of the schoolyard. The fence frays at the bottom, chewed and battered by animals in the night. Sometimes, when the students sit on the concrete and stare into the narrow tunnel, they can see slinking shiny movement, and when someone yells, “Shut up, shut up!” they can hear the husk of a burrowed rattle.

The girl kneels as though she’s inspecting the nuts on the wheel of a car. All the girls go quiet, all the boys say, “You won’ get it, they’ll bite y’ and you’ll die.” The girl says nothing, she smiles and flexes her fingers. Surely, the baby rattlesnake pokes up its head, stern line of a mouth, dull black suggestion of a head. One girl, Chenoa, stifles a yelp with her hand (the girl likes the way her bracelets click together when she moves).

“Watch, everyone be quiet,” she announces. Her dark brown eyes dart from her own partially outstretched hand to the immobile head of the snake. It doesn’t rattle, it’s too young. When it ventures out half an inch further, she scoops her hand forward and snatches the animal up just behind its head, keeping her fingers curled so it can’t bite her. Its flinging tail she braces with her other hand. She has a tooth missing near the front, it fractures her triumphant smile. “See? He ain’ scary.”

In class, she brags that she knows perfect Italian, and recites everything her classmates shout at her to translate, especially the curse words. No-one else knows how to speak Italian, not in the whole town. The girls, even Chenoa, lean forward and profess how romantic it all sounds. Despite the fact that her talent separates her from the boys, she secretly likes the way they cling to her every word, so close she can smell their sweet breath, and feel their hot giggles when they try to copy her, a little moon-eyed in the dusty classroom.

By high-school, the impressiveness of her tomboyish nature has faded and has almost been forgotten by her peers. She can no longer pretend to have real friends, who stick around to watch her do impossible feats or signal for her to crack a good joke. There are people she likes, however.

One boy, Samuel, stands outside the school to smoke. He has long wavy hair too short to be like a Native man’s and too long to be like a cowboy’s. His family is from Oklahoma, his dad drinks most of the time. He goes to the library to look at pictures of classical sculptures and lingers on the men. He thinks the girl is a guy, but he never says anything about it.

They hardly talk at all. They stand there with their hands in their pockets, watching the birds or the clouds move swiftly in the flat sky. They’ll ask for a light, or what the other did last night, whether he did the homework. Two fourteen-year-old boys thinking the same thing.

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William Martin Joel is the picture of masculinity. Dante tapes the cover of The Stranger over his bed, and looks at it upside down when he lays awake staring into the dark, when he remembers to pray. Most people wouldn’t understand his intense association with a Jewish kid from Long Island, but Joel says everything he’s ever felt. Dante wishes for a world where he is not limited to childish pursuit of dressing up in his father’s clothes, which fit badly on his hips, and imagines the cowboys come and gone before him, a world where he holds the earth with his hand and he is invincible.

A Wednesday evening, a few days after his sixteenth birthday, he falls asleep and dreams of wild horses, and wheels on a paved road. He dreams of fire sticking to the clouds. The sun burns through the windows and stings with an unkempt, gnawing fervor. He can smell the cilantro and onion his mother chops in the kitchen downstairs, hazing the air in juice and green life. The scent starts him awake, he stares at the clock so that the numbers make sense at half-past six.

He turns his head back on the pillow and looks at Joel’s side profile on the album cover. His hands, his shoulders under the suit, his bent knees. The unmade bed in black-and-white is intimate, the image simultaneously staged and closely amorous. Dante has the feeling the photo has been curled and crushed and lit aflame in his chest. He stares at the downward curve of Joel’s mouth and cheek; and, under the blanket, through his jeans, presses a few fingers between his thighs. In this way, he does not yet have to face the fact that what lies there is not at all the same as what is inevitably between Joel’s. He slides his hand under the denim, his belt cinched too tight, gaze falling to the singer’s hands, imagining the warmth of his mouth, firmness of his extraordinarily male pianists’ fingers. And his own fingers, in his mind they’re the same: as is that hard tightness that builds in his gut and strains...and he strokes there and imagines...

“Hey!” There is the drum of a fist on his bedroom door.

“Fuck,” he mumbles, jerking his hand back onto the bed. “What is it?” he calls louder, runs his other hand through his hair, kicks back the blanket.

Luz, hanging nimbly onto the doorknob, ten years old with river-water soft hair and a voice like a prayer, swings back and forth on the balls of her feet. “Mama says dinner’s ready.”

“Fuck, don’t scare me like that.”

“I knocked,” she says, balancing on one white-socked foot. “Don’t cuss.” When he was her age he looked for every reason to say faggot and dipshit and motherfuck and cocksucker.

Downstairs, he kicks impatient feet against the linoleum floor; eats fast, not at all like a lady; enunciates every word of his stories, even twists around his mother’s, to make them unserious jests, to make Luz laugh. She nearly spits water into her cupped hand, she tries to copy him, maps his many quick movements in her head. Luz wants to do everything her brother does, even though she shrieks when he picks up wild animals and is scared to hop her bike off a ramp of a pile of bricks and a few wooden planks.

“Ellos están esperando para mi,” he insists, “para el juego.”

“¿Puedo yo también?” she adds, to be included.

Mama dismisses them, Luz grasps a ratty notebook by the door as Dante yanks his shoes on.

“¡Te amo, Mama!” He says it first, but she choruses after him.

She writes stories in journals of dragons and priests, fairies and nuns, and he fixes all the spelling mistakes before running off the porch to play kickball in the fragrant orange air. She watches him with suspended disbelief, glowering wonder, as he dodges the ball and skips past each base. She thinks her brother is the most astounding thing in the whole world, he knows everything about the plants and the animals and the tethered birds in the sky.

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He tramps out across the fields, mildew-red dirt sticking to his shoes and the legs of his jeans. He wears small boys’ sizes and when they are too long, rolls the cuffs up and tucks them into his boots, even in the summer. He wears a big plain brown t-shirt with a burn at the hem. The breeze, however tepid, feels foreign and delightful on the back of his neck, courtesy of his own clumsy attempt at a haircut last night.

The bugs hum and whittle a song in the grass. Like many sixteen-year old boys, he has an urge to destroy something, kick it to pieces, light it on fire. Like a sixteen-year old girl, he thinks about preservation. He wonders which is the opposite of destruction: preservation or creation.

He gets to the abandoned barn, like a bare and disjointed tooth sticking gravelike out of the roiling earth at the edge of the field. He crushes suffering weeds under his shoes in the doorway and breathes the mildew and rancid soiled air. He calls out, and there’s no-one to hear him

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At the town library, they have old advertisements on the walls. In the 1940s, a dark-haired girl in long red gloves gazes fondly at a lover overseas, Marlboro dangling between her fingers like a vice for lovesickness. Some decade and a half later, a cowboy stares into the camera, squinting in the sun, tattoo trailing a black eagle and stars over the back of his hand, an evenly smouldering cigarette. You get a lot to like.

“Whatcha starin’ at?” asks Samuel, pointing to another ad. “‘Where the flavor is’?” He smiles complacently. He wants to go down the street and steal a couple of Cokes, then probably smash them somewhere, but Dante’s been standing in the same place for hours, or five minutes.

“Ain’ they cool?” he asks.

“Who? Those guys?”

“Yeah.” Dante thrusts his hands into his pockets. He likes Sam, but he doesn’t like hanging out with him, he makes him jealous just by breathing. His sun-lightened long hair and strong face and muddy bluejeans. He looks like a movement wherever he goes. Dante flexes his toes in his boots, he doesn’t think he’ll ever pull that off. He feels very small around other boys, and stiff, and quiet.

“They alright. Yeh wanna go t’ the ol’ barn?”

A knot tightens in Dante’s chest. He presses his molars together. “What makes ‘em alright?” Is it the jacket? the cigarette? the way they all look the camera straight-on?

Sam thinks Dante’s eyes are startlingly bright and beautiful when he turns to him, half-imploring, waiting for Sam to understand, trying to divine an answer from clumsy attention and half-serious suggestion. He’s so struck there in the hallway, that he doesn’t quite hear Dante’s voice asking the question: Sam hears the words (What makes ‘em alright?), without the demand (Tell me I have it, too).

“I dunno,” Sam says finally. “Their tattoos’re cool. They don’t look like they take no shit.”

“Right. You think I could do that?”

Samuel touches the ends of his hair. “Do what?”

Dante has a feeling he should be doing something. “Whatever, let’s go.”