Indomitable

Wake up, I growled at a dozing booth attendant, as I pushed four anvil cases and a pile of network gear across Hall B of the Minneapolis, Minnesota Convention Center.

I was full of myself, drunk on working and laughing with old friends. The boiling cauldron of deaths, the IRS, loneliness and estrangement seemed to be ebbing and tempering its heat. My feet a whirl, I was off the couch, dancing the tango.

I parlayed my duties to hearing the story of a transsexual whose dress though feminine nonetheless had the appearance and walk of an NFL linebacker. Her blonde locks perfectly manicured, curled and lay upon apish shoulders that hunched forward as though forged by swinging a hammer onto red, glowing, smoking steel. The physical violence this woman could unleash would put a stadium to dancing The Wave and whirling their Homer Hankees.

I've always needed the green light but have idled too often at red. Always the punk rally call, "I don't fucking care," would ring in my mind. I've sung it at the drop of a hat.

What about this transsexual? How did she explain to parents, brothers, a son and daughters that Mr Johnson, at 6' 2" and 220 lbs, was called to by an unrelenting need. That the barriers of shame and astonishment were no deterrent, because to prevaricate is to die.

What intolerance, what inability to wallow in perpetuity pulled her out of the closet to be giddy in the women's department at Macy's? This human incapacity to lie still for good enough.

Where did Johnson get the balls to be a woman?

I growled, with a deceptive tone that required verification from my smirking mug to detect solidarity, "no sleeping in the booth." Her head sprang up and her shoulders jerked into attention but something was off about her physical mannerism. Where I saw the narcoleptic struggle of an insomniac in need of a slap on the back from a co-conspirator lived a dark opacity, a lonely impenetrability of cataracts. No light or image could bring her touch. Sound, words, tone, delivery are the bridge.

With an exaggerated effort, she lifted one eye lid while failing to open the other, it was as if to demonstrate dependence and to submit and appeal for gentle understanding--like a kitten stretching on the ground at my feet. I thought of Grasshopper, played by David Carridine, asking blind Master Po, played by Keye Luke, "Master, why do you dislike me?" To which Master Po replied, "Because, you so ugly." Po's interest isn't to bully, but to evoke, to conjure within that we are not who others perceive, but that we are unique, and are a perfect argument against good enough.