* * *
—
But so, as I was starting to say before, I never asked them the obvious question—I never asked them if they’d heard the Kinks song.
And it’s possible they hadn’t. “Lola” was released in 1970, by which point my parents, neither of them music fans—though sometimes, in the car, my dad would play the Big Band station on the radio—were well into their forties. It’s also possible that they’d heard the song, but hadn’t paid attention to its lyrics. I’ll never know. I never got to ask. They passed away six years ago, within a week of one another. My mother died suddenly, from a stroke, during the first semester of my last year at Berkeley, and my father, though the doctor named his cause of death a heart attack, was, I submit, killed by my mother’s stroke as well.
Anyway, Lola, despite being the most common diminutive of Dolores, was not a name by which either of my parents had ever called me. I was sometimes Lor, sometimes Del, less occasionally Delly, usually just Dolores.
* * *
—
When I graduated college, I was nineteen years old, and, between the sale of my parents’ house in Austin and the life insurance benefits, I had about half a million dollars. This was a lot of money for me. It would be a lot of money for most any nineteen-year-old, I would think.
I bought an apartment on the Lower East Side, and began to work toward my PhD in Philosophy and Gender Studies at Columbia University. I don’t want to bore you, describing my dissertation, which was eventually published, as you probably know, under the title Flesh-and-Bone Robots You Think Are Your Friends, but suffice it to say, it contained some new, or maybe just unfashionable ideas about sex work and gender, and yet I arrived in New York having had very little personal experience as a sex worker, and having failed to befriend the few transgender people I’d met. Nor had I, to my knowledge, ever known anyone else with ambiguous genitalia.
While at Berkeley, I’d worked at a club in Oakland for a couple of weeks and had sold some manual and oral to half a dozen or so men—I’m getting ahead of myself.
* * *
—
My ambiguous genitalia. I should talk about that first. I considered myself a very lucky girl—and still do. My penis, as you may or may not have noticed by now, is quite small when flaccid—it’s there, certainly, and you’ll be surprised, I think, at its size when I’m erect—but it was even smaller before I hit puberty, and, with enough of a muff, it was very easy to hide, so I kept my muff thick, and I was never subject to any of the kind of awkward, much less traumatic locker-room bullying moments children born with ambiguous genitalia legendarily suffer. Also, my breasts and my hips came early—sixth grade. And they came in quite shapely, as I know you’ve noticed. In short, I received a lot of attention from boys, and I preferred boys.
Well: I preferred boys to girls. What I preferred far more than boys, however, were men and women. I preferred those boys who looked more like men and those girls who, like myself, looked more like women. This was—again quite luckily for me, I think—never much of an issue. I spent just one year in high school before matriculating at Berkeley, which was full of men and women, and although, as I said, I had breasts and hips quite early, I only became interested in sex toward the middle of that first and only year in high school, around the time my penis began to enlarge.
So I had three or four months or so of subpar, though certainly quite memorable and fun, sexual encounters with high school boys who were so inexperienced, and so happy to have access to a wet pussy, a wet pussy belonging to a girl who was not only far and away at the top of her class intellectually, but whose face and body, if you’ll forgive my lack of humility in saying all of this, a girl whose face and body were the envy of any girl she’d ever encountered—they were so happy to be able to touch my pussy, these boys, to fuck my pussy and lick it and have me pull at and suck on their penises, that neither the steely erection at the top of that pussy, nor the sticky ejaculate that erection invariably shot onto their hair or their wrists or their waists or their bellies ever seemed to trouble them. Or if it did, they never said. And they all came back for more. Or tried to.
* * *
—
I was a lucky girl to so reliably be able to make the boys feel lucky. And sure, there were rumors about what I had between my legs, but I really don’t think anybody believed them. How easy, do you think, would it be to believe such rumors in 1991? when they concerned a girl who other girls so blatantly envied? a girl who all the straight boys were jealous to touch, to kiss, to fuck? and especially when the girl was named Dolores, which everyone knows is long for Lola? Kids are often cruel morons, but they’re rarely fools. The last thing they want is to look like fools. Given my name, the rumors too closely resembled punch lines. If you didn’t fail to recognize them as such, then the joke was on you. I had a lot of fun.
* * *
—
I had more fun in college. At Berkeley, they all assumed I was of age, or close enough. Why wouldn’t they? With a little makeup, I’d looked eighteen since I’d turned thirteen. And even though the boys and young men I slept with were rarely as inexperienced as those I’d slept with in high school, they were just as grateful to have me, and oftentimes, I think, more grateful because they’d known other pussies, and mine…My pussy’s different from other pussies, and not just because there’s a penis at the top of it. When I come with my cock, I also come with my pussy, which tightens, contracts, convulses, throbs. And when my penile orgasm stops, the vaginal one’s just getting started, and you, if any of you is inside me, even just your little finger or your tongue—you feel it. You can even see it if you’re looking. You can’t even imagine how good it looks, much less how good it feels til you’ve experienced it. And I do wish I could take credit for it. I wish I could say that I conditioned my Kegels or had some operation or learned some wild technique from some ancient sex manual to make my pussy so…good…but I can’t. I was born this way. A gynecological wonder. A miracle. So those more experienced boys and men at Berkeley—they knew they were into something special, something unique, even beyond what they’d first imagined, and they…appreciated it.
* * *
—
The few transgender people I met while at Berkeley—I didn’t fit in with them. They had a hard time being what they were, having what they had, not having what they didn’t—and they had hard lives, unsympathetic parents, horror stories of childhood abuse and alienation. They’d usually had surgeries or taken hormones or seen psychiatrists—many times all of the above—and beyond all that, they just weren’t, in conventional terms, very attractive. Physically. They were, in many cases, sexually repellent, and, with few exceptions, those who weren’t repellent seemed to me—and, I imagine, to others—to deliberately attempt to make themselves so. I didn’t know why they would do that, if that’s what they were doing. I didn’t know if it was out of some sort of overcompensatory pride in the ways they diverged from conventional physical beauty, or if they’d suffered so much that, in order to feel safe, they actually set out to repulse anyone who might have otherwise taken a sexual interest in them, or even if, as so many of them claimed, they really believed that their conventionally unattractive-if-not-repellent hair- and clothing- and vocalizing-styles were somehow striking meaningful blows to our mindfuckingly dominant patriarchy. And then again maybe it wasn’t deliberate. Maybe it was that the hormones they were taking or the complications that arose in the wake of their surgeries left them in such physical discomfort that they couldn’t shine the way attractive people do, or that they really had no sense of what looked good or acceptable to the rest of society. I didn’t know, and, try though I did—maybe I didn’t try hard enough—I never would figure it out. It wasn’t something one was allowed to talk to them about. Or, at least, it wasn’t something I was allowed to talk to them about.