It’s Never Just a Coat

We were drunk and stumbling home on liquor snuck into the movies, a hip flask each. Liz fell asleep halfway through the film; her snores were loud and drawn out, and earned a few hushes from other patrons. Her loose change and keys and phone kept falling out of her coat. They made a racket that rivaled the action sequence in the film. What did we watch? It’s a smooth, celluloid blur. I was overcome with drunken concern to remember much.

I poked Liz awake at some point, helping her to see at least part of what she paid for. She had drool on her chin and was rigidly, depressingly heterosexual, but I loved her a little anyway. We were the last ones to leave the theater, struggling to pull on our coats against the night’s winter chill. I liked how Liz tried to rearrange her now-mussed hair as it cascaded long and dark across her shoulders. I loved how her attention left it even messier than before. It was late enough that we were the only two walking on that part of the street, our shoes crunching through a thin layer of ice and snow.

By far the more functional of the two, I was going to walk Liz back to her apartment and then head home. Both of us had apartments downtown, so the walk would only be a few blocks total. Crime was a problem in Huntington, West Virginia. Walking around after dark, especially as a woman, or posing as a woman, when I always felt like something more, something stranger, was always tempered with a caution that penetrated even the foggiest moment. Liz’s roommate John warned me to avoid driving down side alleys at night, because guys liked to jump out and stop the car, then rob and beat the shit out of luckless folks.

I remember the freezing winter air and pulling my puffy coat around me more tightly. It was a real Air Force aviator’s jacket, meant for high altitudes, olive green on the outside with a hunter orange inner lining. I’d found it in a Paris thrift store for 35 euros, and it was the warmest thing I’d ever owned. Wearing that coat, with my shaved head and baggy jeans, I felt like the butch I was always meant to be.

The air was bitter, the kind that stung at exposed flesh. I felt my ears and the skin of my shaved head burn, but I was preoccupied with making sure Liz stayed upright. She stumbled down onto the crosswalk and her long hair flipped out into a sable half-halo. It was adorable and ridiculous. When she looked at me, her eyes were wide with seeing the world anew from the fuzziest of perspectives.

“Red light,” I said, indicating that we could cross. When she didn’t move, I gave her a little push to the small of her back. I looked at the backs of her legs in her tight pants, her boots. Reluctantly, she began to walk forward. I remember wanting to slide my arm around her waist to steady her and enjoy her warmth.

“They need to slow down,” Liz replied, pointing down the street.

A car was speeding towards us and toward the light. They weren’t slowing down.

Liz stopped in the middle of the street, looking at the red Mustang with a scowl. She started yelling at them. I pressed my palms to her back, pushing her towards the sidewalk.

As we neared the curb, the front of the Mustang passed behind our knees. I felt the motion of it brushing hot against my jeans. The Mustang glided to a stop in the middle of the intersection, but reversed quickly over the lines.

“Hey! You almost hit us!” Liz yelled at the driver. She backed into the curb and wobbled—maybe with anger—but still managed to be fierce.

“Motherfuckers!” I yelled, indignant, watching the passenger window go down.

A man in his early twenties leaned out, looking drunk or high or something enough to make his eyes red. His eyes were wild and suddenly angry. I was closest to him and took an involuntary step back even as I cursed at him.

“Nice coat, you fat fucking dyke!” he yelled.

“What the fuck did he say?” Liz demanded. Her eyes were wide. “Fuck you!”

“Fuck off!” I added. My voice wasn’t as loud as Liz’s. I took another step back when I heard him swear. Then the driver’s voice chimed in, the two of them creating a muddled stew of profanity.

When they started to get out of the car, I panicked.

“You fucking dyke!” one yelled.

“Fat fucking cunt!” said the other one.

I kept backing away.

“What did that asshole call you?” Liz demanded. “Why don’t you both suck on a dick!” she screamed.

Her words were brave, but we were both backing away and turning the corner. Liz’s apartment building was halfway down that street.

I knew that, if we had to run, we wouldn’t make it.

They started to follow us. I turned and half-tripped with urgency. We’re not going to make it, I thought and despaired. Flashing blue and red lights made everyone stop. The police were standing outside Sharkey’s, the local dive bar famous for its karaoke nights and fistfights. There were six or seven cops milling about or in the process of getting back into their squad cars. I’d never been more relieved to see the cops before.

Both men stopped at the sight of the cops and backtracked to the open doors of their Mustang. There was not a single car stopped around them, or another living soul on that street. The light was still red and they revved the engine loudly. A string of curses sloughed from the open window. They said they were going to fuck us up, going to do terrible things. Even on the curb with policemen around the corner, I didn’t feel safe. All it would take was a moment of drunken bravado for that Mustang to pivot and jump over the curb and plow into us, cops or no. I kept pulling at Liz’s arm.

She yelled at them again, something creatively vulgar.

The light turned green and the Mustang peeled off down 4 th Avenue.

“What the fuck…” Liz said, trailing off as we watched the red taillights. When they were out of sight, she started a fresh rant, going on about entitled assholes who thought they could do whatever they wanted. I was close to tears. And cold.

I was just starting to embrace my identity as a butch lesbian, but I still wore skirts to teach in. I always had big earrings and makeup on in the classroom. As a graduate student, it was my first year teaching at Marshall University and I wasn’t out at work yet. I had just come out to my deeply religious parents two years prior. It was all so new. As much as I tried to embrace this delightful new part of myself, there was always a tendril of fear, ready to latch on. And then there were the other feelings, about being woman-but-not-quite, being something more. I had not heard the words ‘genderfluid’ and ‘non-binary’ yet.

I walked Liz the rest of the way to her apartment, past the idling cops at Sharkey’s and over smashed bottles ground into the sidewalk. There was always so much glass, green and brown and white pebbles that made strained crunching noises as we walked, sort of like a note held too long in a song. It was one of a long list of downsides to living next to a bar, but Liz and her five other roommates overlooked it all for the cheap rent. The entire time, Liz was frothing in anger over the men and what they tried to do, but I wasn’t really listening. I felt hyper-aware of everything going on around us. I worried that the cops would suddenly get interested in us, in what we were doing, or that my hip flask would suddenly fall out of my jeans. My heart was pounding and I was breathing hard.

“Are you okay?”

I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t.

We looked at each other for a long moment, and she hugged me tight, offering to let me come inside her place and sleep on the couch instead of walking home. I stuck out my jaw and shook my head, insisting that I would be fine. What I really wanted was another drink and my own bed.

“Promise you’ll text me when you get home, okay? Please?” Liz asked.

“I will. I’ll be fine.”

Liz was leaning against the doorframe of her apartment, and I was sure she wouldn’t be awake long enough to read the text I’d send, let alone respond. But she hugged me once more and wished me a good night, before disappearing into her darkened apartment.

It felt colder without her there.

I walked past the cops again, aware by now that some of them were watching me. Sharkey’s was still lively despite the recent bar fight and lingering police that had been called to stop it. The path to turn the corner and away from all of this stretched out impossibly long.

That tendril of fear that had never left now coiled tighter at the base of my spine. I never really noticed how many bars lay between our two apartments downtown. How many strange, older men would be outside smoking, watching me with suspicion. I wished for a hat to cover my head, to cover my short hair on top and the shaved sides. To be fair, my ears were also freezing. I wanted a cigarette so I’d have something to do with my hands, my mouth. Even if it meant freezing fingertips and flashing my rainbow-colored fingerless gloves. But my hands stayed firmly in my jacket pockets, and I avoided looking anyone in the eye as I walked.

Even though the Mustang was long gone in the direction I was now headed, I kept looking behind me to see if I was being followed. There were only smoking bar patrons and a few homeless folks, but I flinched all the same. I picked up my pace, my fat thighs rubbing together almost painfully. The sting of the cold through the worn-too-thin jeans and the burn of friction on my inner thighs meant I was miserable even if my coat kept the rest of me warm.

I felt stupid for not taking Liz up on her offer to crash on the couch. John and her other roommates were probably working their way up to the hard liquor, and I could’ve mooched at least a drink or two.

But I just wanted to be alone.

When I got into my apartment complex—a ratty old hotel transformed into studio apartments—my thighs and ears were numb. There was a glass wall with over-sized blinds at the front of each apartment, making it easy to tell if someone was home or not—awake or not. I contemplated knocking on my neighbor’s door, but Angie was already asleep.

Earlier that year, I had broken up with Angie. She was only the second serious girlfriend in my short gay dating life. I was twenty-three and the lesbian dating scene in West Virginia was dismal. It was fucking depressing. Even the online dating apps were mostly filled with attached women looking for a threesome. I was too obstinate to be someone’s unicorn—and way too butch. I met Angie in a housing arrangement fluke, when we were both stuck in the college dorms. She was a junior and I was a first-year grad student, and I caught her staring shyly at me a few times around the elevators.

Angie was short with floppy, dark hair that always curled in impossible, adorable ways. With her love of good food, tea, and books, she always joked that she was like a queer hobbit. I asked her out and we dated for six months. They weren’t very spectacular months, but I think loneliness drew and kept us together more than anything. Despite being a young white woman living in the 21st century, and in no way, shape, or form a part of any Native community, Angie thought that she had the core “animal spirit” of a wolf.

Months prior, weepy and drunk after our breakup, I heard she had gotten down on all fours on her apartment floor, and howled and growled like the wolf she proclaimed to be. Our mutual friend Mark texted me that night after 2:00 a.m., asking if I was still awake. He added that it had to do with Angie, but I didn’t respond. I heard sobbing through the (thin) shared walls of our apartments, then what I thought were yells.

After drinking too much and weeping about her dissolving relationship and family issues, Angie got down on all fours and growled, howled, and bared her teeth at Mark. Usually, when she got too drunk, she would play a few rounds of Mario Kart or another videogame and fall asleep. This time was different. The rest of the alcohol was dumped and, after a tense half hour of negotiating with her she-wolf self, Angie resumed her weeping.

Mark texted me again, but I didn’t know how to go over there and negotiate with her in that state. While Mark sent me long, laboriously typed text messages about what had happened, I listened to my ex-girlfriend weeping through the wall for minutes before quieting. We broke up due to intimacy issues, and an inability to communicate to each other what we wanted.

Even knowing that she really believed she was a wolf, I contemplated waking her up that night after leaving Liz. I still spent time with her and occasionally contemplated texting her for a booty call. Instead, I went into my own apartment and left the overhead light off, drinking in darkness in front of my computer and hating the fear that refused to go away.

I felt that fear when Angie and I held hands in public, or whenever I went to and from the only gay bar in town, appropriately named Stonewall. Huntington was an inhospitable place for young queers, and I heard stories of harassment or all out beatings. One of the college football players had gotten arrested for beating a gay couple outside of Stonewall, for daring to share a kiss in front of him. He wasn’t charged with a hate crime, as the West Virginia Supreme Court ruled that hate crime laws against sex discrimination didn’t apply to sexual orientation. I remember being told that most folks headed to Lexington, Kentucky, or Louisville, to hit up the gay bars there. It was safer in a bigger city.

That night after the incident with Liz, I worried that Huntington would actually be the death of me. I was very visibly butch and completely unable to pass as straight. What if I had to let my hair grow out, or go back to wearing the femme clothing my mother continue to buy for me? Every year she bought me a new winter coat in the hopes that I would abandon the aviator jacket. My mother would present me with blouses, skirts, and dresses every time I went home to Pennsylvania to visit. These presents always included talk of me joining everyone to visit the oppressive Roman Catholic church of my childhood. The church that had numerous sermons on the “evilness” of homosexuality and the threat of damnation.

I knew I could never go back to living like that: closeted, full of self-hatred and denial, feeling uncomfortable every moment in clothes that may as well have been as binding as corsets, and not nearly as liberating as binders. I could never go back to long, impossibly thick hair that my mother refused to let me cut above my ears.

The first time I shaved my head, I laughed and laughed with the joy of it. Before grad school, I was home for the summer and fed up with my long blonde locks, now in a multitude of braids, that would take forever to brush out. I remember standing over the sink, holding my father’s electric clippers and relishing their vibrating hum in my hand. My blonde-brown hair pooled under the leaky faucet, and I couldn’t stop smiling. I used the smallest clip and shaved my hair almost down to the scalp—right down to stubble.

My father simply gave me a look that said, ‘You have done something different, and it will be an issue in the house.’ That night, my mother stopped in the doorway of the dining room while the rest of us were eating. She looked at me for what felt like an eternity.

“I’m just wondering what happened to my beautiful little girl,” she said finally, voice wavering and tears forming.

She had to excuse herself to the upstairs bedroom, but we could all hear her crying. My siblings were mad that I had upset her and my father. They thought I was irrationally pleased with myself.

Actually, I just felt free.

As my hair began to grow back, I couldn’t stop rubbing my hands over it, as though I had become my own lucky charm. I was proud of my short hair and it felt right. My mother’s unwillingness to accept me hurt, but I knew then that I wouldn’t go back to the way things were just to please her—I would be miserable.

I tried to put the incident with the Mustang out of my mind. The next Monday, I taught in pants and a button-up, feeling comfortable for the first time in ages. I felt better, more confident. All of the terrible things I thought would happen…didn’t.

When I called Liz the next week, she remembered very little about our walk home. What little she did remember, she chalked up to men being assholes. Liz didn’t remember the fear, our walking backwards until bathed in the red and blue lights from squad cars. I felt irrationally mad at her, even though she was so drunk it was a wonder she could remember anything at all. I realized that she didn’t have to live with the same kind of fear that I live with every day, and when confronted with hatred, she forgot about it fairly easily.

“Are you okay?” Liz asked me, concerned.

“I’m fine,” I lied.

I told her what she wanted to hear, buried the fear deep in my gut, and convinced myself that I was being irrational about the whole affair. I tried to put it all behind me, but that fear never left me.

Two years later I moved to Louisiana, even further south of the Mason-Dixon line. I had gone down there for grad school. Shortly after I moved, I was walking home from the library one night. A Ford SUV drove by, slowing down for a moment, and I saw the shadows of two men inside.

Suddenly he yelled out his window, “Dyke!”

He tossed his soda in my face as I walked by. Then he sped off. The sticky brown liquid of the soda clung to my face and my hair. I could feel it pulling at the hair on my arms as it dried into shiny rivulets, flowing downward.

I stopped on the sidewalk and stared down at myself for a long time, my chest feeling tight. There was a coldness in my belly as my old fear came back, stronger than ever. It was the same fear from the night Liz and I were accosted by the two men in the Mustang. I hurried home and tried not to think about the fact that I didn’t have a washing machine yet. I tried not to think about the fact that I would have to carry these clothes, covered in sticky shame, to a laundromat. Sometimes, fear is necessary. It’s a survival instinct. But after these kinds of incidents, I wonder how much of my life will be spent in survival mode instead of living.

While I’d met some truly remarkable people in this new city, I felt the same trepidation about going out in men’s clothing, in my clothing. I still worry about the short length of my hair, my visible butchness, and whether or not it will draw the ire of some random hateful person. It’s taken me years to become comfortable with my butchness and my queerness. Years to shed the conservative homophobia of my childhood. I wonder how long it will take me to shed this intense feeling of fear. Will I ever shed it?

When I fantasize about the future, I think about being a big, strong… dyke. I see myself with more muscles, a shaved head, wearing a binder under a crisp button-up shirt. I see myself able to fix leaks in the house, or able to rehome or kill the spider my girlfriend squeals at, knowing it’s existing too close by. I fantasize that the fear is still there, but it is so miniscule that it’s pointless to worry about.