Issue 42 - Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art

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that caught the rats that sought to rob the farmer's granary. Sometimes they drugged sailors and stole all of their possessions, even their socks. In my opinion, the hustlers only set the trap, for it was the sailors who led themselves into such a visible snare. Perhaps, this whore from a village in northeastern Thailand and I faced the same dilemma: we worked closely with people all of the time, yet experienced very little, if any, intimacy. "Okay," she said, "if you have room with air con, it free." The 72-hour liberty call ended uneventfully, orders were barked "Anchors away!", ensigns were raised, and the U.S.S. Weitz was once again underway. I decompressed quickly from a spastic comet of muscle to a naval petty officer in a starched white uniform. For the time being, I submitted quietly to "the way things are," but as always, I yearned to stumble across a secret trail that would lead me to a sense of well-being. The Navy provided me with consolation in the form of duty and purpose; my men and my supervisor depended on me to perform important and sometimes hazardous tasks at sea. I didn't have much in common with the rest of the men in the division, but, nevertheless, there were always a few of them around for conversation, even on the nights when I couldn't sleep or when I returned to the ship after a bout of drinking. The afternoon of our departure, walking down the starboard weatherdeck, I discovered the owl perched stoically on one of the overhangs. How he made it out to the weatherdeck from the depths of the aftersteering room was again a mystery. Why didn't he fly off when we anchored at Phuket? That was his last chance to be near land for a week. Perhaps he had been too weak. But as I looked into his yellow eyes, he slowly opened his tiny V-shaped wings. He shot off from the overhang only to be slammed down to the steel deck by the strong sea winds whipping alongside the ship. As he tumbled down to the deck, I snatched him before he bounced over the side. As I held the little owl in my hands, I could feel Valdez's stare and turned. He was standing behind me, looking serious and distant. When underway, he expected his men to work, not goof off. But I could not allow the owl to die dishonorably, to simply plop into the ocean like a discarded Pepsi can. Surprisingly, Valdez stood quietly with his arms crossed. He looked down at the deck as sailors did when one of their own was masturbating in the toilet or sniveling in his rack when he got an "I am fucking someone else now" letter from his wife or girlfriend. After a few seconds in my hands, the owl opened his wings again. Perhaps the heat of my hands strengthened him. I turned Iny back to the wind, and the owl stood up in my cupped hands as if he knew that I wanted to assist him in takeoff. I hoped he would catch the wind just right and get a good gliding start. I lifted him above .my head. When the time was right, he shot from my hands and flew. He flew low, just skimming over the waves. I thought I saw him fall into the water, but I aln not sure. II
I'd like to start with a few questions about Normal. What were some of the assumptions you had going into writing a book about transsexuals, cross-dressing heterosexuals, and the intersexed, and how correct did they prove to be? Has the experience given you a more extravagant sense of normal? I like the last part of that question because I do think it has given me a broader sense of the normal. It's also given Ine a pretty strong sense that it is people and culture, not nature, that decide what's normal. If it were up to nature, light would be as normal as health and as common, and blue potatoes as normal as yellow ones even if they are not as common. I think we tend not to notice how much we take what feels comfortable to us for granted, and how Inuch we tend to use that as the bar of in fact what is nonnal, or even what is natural. I had just thought that women who had sex-change surgery were very unhappy, self-hating lesbians; that people who were opposed to surgery for intersexed babies were just crazy people with a political, gender-free agenda; and that cross-dressing heterosexual men were just kidding themselves that they were of course closeted gay men - and I didn't understand why they couldn't just be out and proud. I think I was wrong on all three counts. C: Do you find you confront the challenge of redefining your characters when you're writing fiction too? I'm never wrong when I write fiction. That's why we like to write
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Issue 42 - Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art

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