Vintage Toys for Lucky Boys Read online

  Dammit! He didn’t mean to throw a Nixon quote in there, but it certainly colored Max’s reaction. Instead of getting all self-righteous, he just laughed. “Yeah, man, I know, but that’s the law and I have to follow it. For all I know, you could be an undercover cop looking to bust me.”

  His kind gaze softened Randy to the point where he couldn’t bear to argue. But what could he say? If he claimed he’d left his wallet at home, Max would just tell him to go and get it. Anywhere else, he’d have been long gone, but there was something encouraging in Max’s demeanor. The more he looked him in the eye, the more Randy thought this might be a safe place. His friendly gaze sparked the image of the hippie woman leaving the shop as he’d arrived. She was very tall, with broad shoulders. Max had called her a draft-dodger, hadn’t he? Vietnam was way before his time, of course, but even Randy knew only men were drafted to war. Only men would have come up to Canada to dodge the draft.

  In an ultra-casual motion, Max picked up his toothpick-pointer-thing. He tapped at the plastic sign indicating which credit cards his shop accepted. Behind the sign, on the old-school cash register was a sticker that made Randy’s heart jump. At the top of the decal was a rainbow flag, and on the bottom there was a familiar pink triangle containing the transgender symbol of a Mars arrow, a Venus cross, and a combination of the two all joined by a central ring. In the middle were the words “Friendly Space.” Randy stared at the sticker. On the one hand, it was a clear indication Max had read him. Why else would he have uncovered the sticker? If boys could cry, he would have cried. Instead, he bit his lip and suppressed the hurt. And, God, did it ever hurt when someone could tell he was FTM.

  On the other hand, he had to feel indebted to Max for his class. Instead of just calling him out, he’d displayed some subtlety. He’d given Randy the opportunity to disclose or not to disclose. He had a choice, and the gentle and encouraging look in Max’s eye made the whole situation a little easier to handle. Not that it was easy easy; he wondered if he was being set up, but couldn’t bring himself to believe any trans-basher would have that friendly space sticker up in his shop. His mind showed him a slide show of every negative situation that could arise out of disclosing, but in his heart he knew Max was a good person. He knew Max wouldn’t hurt him.

  Wiping his sweating hands on his cargo pants, he grabbed for his wallet and slid out his folded-up passport.

  Surname/Nom: VENNER

  Given Names/Prénoms: JENNIFER ANN

  Nationality/Nationalité: CANADIAN/CANADIENNE

  Date of Birth/Date de naissance: 24 APR / AVR 1977

  Sex/Sexe: F

  He held his breath as he handed it over to Max. Somewhat ashamed and somewhat bashful, he said, “I haven’t changed it yet.”

  Max took a look to confirm and then passed the ID back to Randy. His voice was smooth and receptive when he asked, “Why not?”

  As quick as he could, Randy folded it up and shoved it back in his wallet. “I don’t know,” he said with a shrug. “Just… everything costs money, you know?”

  Nodding, Max said, “One hundred and thirty seven dollars, last time I checked.”

  Randy looked straight up at him, trying not to seem too shocked. It was just a really random figure to know with such precision. “Yeah.”

  “I have an ex who’s trans,” he said. Randy felt a smile growing across his cheeks as Max walked toward the back room. He offered an inviting nod and went on, “I still have strong ties to the community. Want to sit down for a coffee? I know how hard it is to find allies in the big bad world.”

  “Sure!” Randy cried before thoughts of rat poison and Arsenic and Old Lace clouded his vision. Why did he have to be so suspicious of everyone? Because there were people out there who could and would do him real harm, given the opportunity. He had to protect himself.

  The back room might have once looked spacious—like on blueprints—but was now overrun with boxes and stuff. In its own era, before houses on this street had been converted to shops and offices, this room had probably been the kitchen of a family home. Back in the corner, there was a vintage fridge. The dingy window looked out onto a snow-covered garden. From the trellises and structures, he could tell it was extensive in the growing season. “I’m not much of a gardener,” Max explained. “When I bought this house, it came with so much land in the back that I rented out gardening plots to apartment-dwellers up the street.”

  “That’s a good idea,” Randy said, pondering what he might possibly be able to rent out. Probably nothing.

  “Yeah, and they say money doesn’t grow on trees.”

  Randy smiled as Max retrieved two mugs from the cupboard. One was shaped like the Roadrunner’s head. The other was pinky-beige with a penis growing out the side for a handle. He thought he should find that one funny, but it seemed inexplicably jarring. “I’ll take the Roadrunner,” he said. “Unless it’s yours.”

  “Well, they’re all mine now,” Max replied, pouring out two cups of coffee. “The handles on these novelty mugs break off like nothing. Lots of people will come into the shop, they’re looking at a mug, and the handle just comes off in their hands. I glue them back on, but the value is so low I just end up stocking my kitchen with them. I’ve got more mugs than I can handle. Cream and sugar?”

  “Black is good for me,” Randy replied.

  Max handed him the Roadrunner, laughing, “Once you go black….”

  “Yeah,” he chuckled. When Max offered him a seat at the table by the window, he sat in the one padded vintage chair that wasn’t piled sky-high with papers and crap. It felt so cozy to be sitting in a warm kitchen with Max. “Hey, I can just picture that cock snapping off in some guy’s hand. He must have gone beet red.”

  Topping the penis mug with cream from the fridge, Max nodded toward the window. “No, this little guy was a gift from one of my gardeners, Mrs. Pham. Older lady, but she just loves me.” Picking up a pile of file folders from one of the kitchen chairs, he looked all around for somewhere to put it. There were already masses of papers everywhere, so he tossed it on the floor. “All summer she was trying to set me up with her granddaughter, saying, ‘If Huong is going to date white boys, I should be able to choose which ones.’”

  “Oh no,” Randy chuckled, sipping his coffee. Very gourmet. Good stuff.

  “Yeah,” Max said with a giving smile. “And I kept making my excuses, but this lovely woman had tunnel vision: I was going to date her granddaughter. That was that. So one day, I finally had to say, ‘You know, Huong sounds lovely, but I’m gay. I date men.’”

  When Max paused to sip from his penis mug, Randy asked, “What did she say?”

  He placed the mug down on the 1950s gold-specked tabletop, smiling as he swallowed. “She didn’t say anything at the time. She just kept on gardening with a scowl on her face. I thought she’d pack up her magic beans and never come back to my garden.”

  “Did she?”

  Taking another sip, Max nodded. “After the weekend, she came back with this thing. Found it at a flea market, she said, and thought of me right away. ‘Because you like the boys’. It was hilarious. She was just glowing, with this impish look on her face. It was great.”

  “Yeah,” he agreed. “Sometimes people really surprise you. That was like my mom when I sort of came out to her.” When he said those words, came out, he looked down into his coffee, but when he’d finished his sentence he looked up to find Max nodding. “I mean, she probably sort of had a sense for a long time. We still live together and everything, so there’s a lot of interaction there. And, you know, a lot of the ‘guy stuff’ I grew up doing was right there alongside my mom. All the sports and the fixing stuff around the house, you know? I learned all that from her. So she understood, when I told her how I felt. I guess I knew she’d understand and that’s why I was so okay with talking about it. I wasn’t even all that surprised when she said she’d had some of those same feelings, just not so strong as me, I guess.”

  “Sounds like a good mom y
ou’ve got there,” Max replied, absently running his fingertips along the penis-handle on his mug.

  “Yeah,” he said. He couldn’t keep himself from smiling at the thought of her acceptance. “She’s really great. That’s why I decided to sell those toys Brent gave me. I wanted to get her something incredible for Christmas. Bagging groceries for a living, you know, the money’s tight.”

  “I hear that,” Max replied. When he got up and walked to the counter for a top-up, Randy realized his Roadrunner was still almost full up. He took another sip. “Try being an entrepreneur. You spend the first few years of your business working fourteen-hour days seven days a week and still owing everybody else money. You kiss your social life goodbye when you take on a business, that’s for sure. I’m only at the point now where I could even consider either taking on staff or finding a good guy.”

  “Unless the staffer and the guy were the same person,” Randy cut in. “Then every workday would be like a date night. God, wouldn’t that be awesome?” It was only after he’d said it that it struck him how he sounded. A little like, You can hire me and date me. How’s about it? Max must have thought he was totally desperate.

  But Max seemed to be mulling over something altogether different as he fixed his coffee with cream. “So, how do they pay you at your work, if you haven’t changed your ID yet?” The question made Randy nervous… or embarrassed… or something like that. He didn’t want to answer. He didn’t answer. Max returned to the table. Sitting across from Randy, he asked very casually, “Do you still identify girl at work?”

  Ashamed. That was the name of the feeling Randy had tapped. “I pretty much dress the same, except I don’t bind. It would just be so weird because I’ve been working at the same supermarket since high school. I’ve known some of those people for like fifteen years, and they all call me Jen. It was one thing explaining the whole situation to my mom. I don’t want to have to explain myself to a hundred other people. I don’t want to go to work fearing for my safety, you know?”

  “I know,” Max said right away. “Oh, you’re preaching to the choir, man. But, I tell you, once my ex—his name was Jack—once he started on T and really got chin-deep into the whole thing, he became so much more comfortable in his own skin. It works wonders, having that piece of ID with your chosen name on it and having those hormones coursing through your body.”

  “It all just seems so huge, you know?” Randy said. “The hormones, the ID, the telling everybody I’m a guy now, and then surgeries if I go that far. I definitely want top surgery, but I don’t know about bottom. It’s dangerous, I hear, and sure I’d have a penis, but it wouldn’t work. And everything’s got a price tag on it.”

  Max nodded. “Well, you know, some things are covered by Medicare, but you’re right—not everything. And, hey, you’re sixty-five hundred dollars richer today, remember. Go ask your friend Brent what other toys he’s got squirreled away. Maybe we can put a few more dollars in your many pockets,” he chuckled, pointing his penis mug down at Randy’s cargo pants.

  But Randy was off in fairyland. “How did your guy, Jack, get through it all?”

  “With my help,” Max replied. He laughed, shaking his head. “That sounded way too self-congratulatory, but you know what I mean: it helps to have friends you can rely on. Yes, Jack lost some friends along the way, but he gained others through a social support group downtown. He was lucky to work with a doctor who really understood trans folks. I’m not saying he was shooting sunshine out his ass every day of the week, but his transition was smoother than some peoples’.”

  With a surge of jealousy toward this unknown Jack, Randy said, “Wow, I wish I had someone like you in my life.”

  “Well,” Max began, shrugging his deliciously huge shoulders. He looked out the window. It had started snowing again outside. “I know we just met, and I don’t want you to feel like I’m taking up a cause here, but if you want my support, you’ve got it.”

  When Max reached his hand across the table, Randy was overcome with an emotion that could only be described as love. Christ, he couldn’t be falling for this guy. Why, when he’d only be rejected? But, then, there was Max’s palm face-up on the table. Maybe it wasn’t an offer of marriage, but it was obviously an offer of something. Now Randy didn’t know if he ought to shake it, slap it, or slip his own hand into it. He stared at that palm until it reached up, grabbed his arm, and shook him. “Okay, fine,” Max laughed. “I’ll take my support and give it to some other trans guy in need.”

  “No,” Randy cried. He sounded so whiny. Pushing his voice down, he said, “No, I want your help. I need someone who knows the ropes, because I really do want to push forward.” Setting his Roadrunner mug down on the table, he reached over to place his hand on Max’s. “There’s so much I don’t know, and you know how it is out in the world of guys: you always need to be the best. You can’t falter or ask questions. You always need to be in command, be authoritative.”

  “You don’t have to,” Max countered, flipping his palm around until they were holding hands. “There are all different ways of expressing masculinity. Look at me—I play with dolls for a living—and do you think anyone would ever accuse me of not being a man?”

  “Hell, no,” Randy replied, eyeing his great chest. “But look at your muscles. That’s what gives you the Olympic edge.”

  Max shrugged like they weren’t a big deal. “Once we get you on T, you’ll put them on like wildfire.”

  “Is that what happened with your Jack?”

  A reflective smile melted across Max’s lips as he gazed out to the back garden. He slipped his hand out of Randy’s. “The testosterone changed Jack in more ways than one, but that was okay. He was becoming more himself.” Throughout the pregnant pause that followed, Randy drank his coffee and watched Max’s face as he escaped to the land of memory. Finally, Max continued, “I won’t say the T turned him straight, but it really brought to the fore a newfound love of boobies and pussies and all things related to skirt-chasing. It was hard for me, at first. I felt like I’d helped him so much along the way and suddenly he was leaving me high and dry. But, you know, we all experience our progressions in life, and I guess that was Jack’s.”

  Randy stared into his coffee for a while, wondering if the same thing would happen to him. He didn’t think so. He hoped not. If he was going to be attracted to girls, wouldn’t he have been there already? “Most of the trans guys I chat with online say they went through a period of seeing themselves as butch dykes before realizing they were trans. That never happened for me. I never liked girls. I didn’t even like being friends with girls when I was a kid.”

  “Oh, I played with the girls when I was a kid,” Max said. “My mom thought it was cute. My father hated it.”

  “Nope, no girls for me. Even when I was in high school, I hung out with the boys. But at that point, I didn’t really know how I fit in with them yet. I was pretty slutty. I liked it though, because I felt… I don’t know… it’s hard to describe,” Randy said, thinking back through the years. “At the time, I kind of saw them as gay for sleeping with me. I liked to take it from behind and picture myself as a kind of a twink bottom with a totally flat chest taking it up the ass. I mean, I was pretty flat-chested anyway, so it wasn’t much of a stretch, but I remember feeling like I was initiating all these ‘straight’ guys into a different world. But, you know, we’re all so immature in high school. Now I can’t even imagine what I’d do in bed with a guy.”

  Max’s eyebrows seemed to rise for a split-second before he could get them under control. “Can’t you?”

  Randy looked back at him with a crooked grin. “Why? Do you have any suggestions?”

  “Absolutely,” he said with a proud smile. “First off, you need to know where your no zones are. I mean, you need to be able to communicate to your partner where you aren’t comfortable being touched.”

  “Oh, that’s easy,” Randy said, picking up his coffee. “Everywhere.”

  “Well, that narro
ws it down,” Max laughed. “By everywhere, is it safe to assume you mean your chest and your…” When he paused to clear his throat, Randy chuckled. The bashfulness seemed so uncharacteristic. “Lower parts?”

  Randy nodded. “Yeah.” He brought the Roadrunner mug to his mouth before deciding he really didn’t feel like any more coffee. “It’s weird. It’s like I want a boyfriend, but I don’t go for it because… I don’t know….”

  “You want a guy who sees you as a guy,” Max suggested.

  “Yeah, exactly.”

  “But you know you’ll have to disclose soon enough, and you’re afraid he’ll stop seeing you for who you are.”

  “Exactly!” Randy cried. He couldn’t believe there was someone out in the world who understood him so well after knowing him for only half an hour or so. There was an instant spark, an instant affinity, and he wondered with all his heart if Max saw it too. “And on the off-chance I found a guy who saw me as a guy, what are the chances he would be able to respect my need not to fuck? It just seems like that could never happen, you know? And I don’t want to be the trans guy who runs around sucking every cock on the block. Anyone can hand out blowjobs. I need to know a guy respects who I am, you know?”

  With a caring smile, Max said, “Oh, I understand completely, little man.” Max looked him straight in the eye with a gaze of absolute honesty before saying, “I mean it. I understand what you’re going through.”

  This time, Randy held out his hand, setting his mug off to the side. Max placed a much larger palm on top of his and left it there. His smile was so open and giving, Randy wanted to jump him on the spot. Of course, the body he pictured doing the jumping had no boobs and no pussy. It was a guy’s body—flat where it ought to be, and protruding in one particular place. What he wouldn’t give to feel Max suck his cock… the cock he didn’t have. And that was exactly the reason he didn’t like thinking about sex.

  “You know,” Max said, observing the obvious sadness in Randy’s face. “Sex doesn’t have to mean one man fucking another man.” He brought Randy’s hand close to his mouth and slowly kissed each knuckle. Randy thought his heart would explode if his throbbing lowers didn’t get there first. “Sex can be anything from a lusting gaze, to calling a guy up and telling him what you’re going to do to him when you get together, to….” Looking up at Randy, Max flattened out his fingers. “Have you ever considered how many body parts guys and girls both have? I mean, even cocks and clits have the same origins in the womb.”