Excerpt from "The Call-Out" by Cat Fitzpatrick
by Cat Fitzpatrick
By way of introduction to this piece:
This short extract comes from a novel-in-verse called The Call-Out. My current elevator pitch for it is “Eugene Onegin meets Sex and the City but with transsexuals.” It’s a fully conventional novel, with a plot arc and everything, and it also rhymes and scans in elaborate Russian 14-line tetrameter feminine rhyme stanzas. There is probably some kind of masochistic impulse behind my desire to place so many constraints on myself.
It follows six queer, mostly trans women in Brooklyn through a single year, as their disastrous relationships culminate, not in an Onegin-style duel with pistols, but in the 21st century equivalent, an internet call-out. As well as being about questionable love, it’s also a story about what it takes to build community in marginalised populations, and the forces that tear it apart. It’s probably an elegy for a time I felt optimistic about trans women’s community, but also a celebration of some of the weird institutions (drag shows, poetry readings, picnics, parties) we’ve managed to build and even maintain. They may be dysfunctional, but they’re ours.
CHAPTER FOUR
Let the spring rewind: watch all the flowers
close, and their stems curl into the seed;
the May warmth chill and the April showers
rise into the clouds, the turtles recede
under the ice, to sit without doing
much at all, except accruing
acid in their shells, and watching the sun
for some indication that winter’s done.
The short cold days are always distressing
for Keiko too, and so, apart
from when she has classes, she just makes art
and rereads comics. Its productive but depressing.
Then March comes along and mitigates the gloom
and she stirs, and decides to tidy her room.
She puts her sketchbooks into piles,
arranges her pencils by depth of hue,
then starts to gather the lino tiles
she uses for printblocks. As she sorts through
she comes on the one that Gaia commended.
She grins to herself, then, since they friended
each other at some point during that night,
she opens messenger and starts to write
a message: “Hi. It’s been a while
but I’d still like to be your friend.
Can we hang out?” She adds at the end
a blushing emoji with a winning smile.
Gaia writes back almost straight away:
“Oh hi! I’m maybe free today?”
They go back and forth in polite vacillation
until finally Gaia suggests a place:
a peculiar hipster amalgamation
of bar, taxidermist, and performance space
with a recherché selection of frozen cocktails.
It’s down on Atlantic, under the rails
in a rezoned oil and tire shop.
They’ve kept the sign. It says “Quick Stop.”
Keiko’s on time, right to the minute.
She orders an Aperol slushy at the bar.
They check her ID, then hand her a jar
with a plastic elephant swimming in it.
Gaia’s late. Her apologies are profuse.
Her bourbon fro-yo comes with a moose.
Now it’s necessary to make conversation.
–“I’m really sorry I was late!"
Gaia repeats. Then some hesitation,
quickly surmounted: “Isn’t this place great?”
–“There’s lots of… animals?” Keiko queries.
–“So many! And they have this performance series.
Tonight’s Bloody Mary. She’s this enby queen
who’s like, the greatest thing on the scene.”
–“I’ve never seen a queen performing.”
–“They’re one of our closest analogies
to the classical Cybeleian mysteries.
both institutionalized and non-conforming,
a licensed danger, a traditional threat…
Like, how have you never seen one yet?”
–“Cybelian?” –“Yeah! Like, Magna Mater?
She’s a Roman goddess with cross-dressing priests,
who had an actual imperial charter
to hold these, like, castration feasts.
They’d sever their testicles, then run off shrieking
into the fancy areas, seeking
some rich guy’s house, and then they’d throw
their balls through the door, and refuse to go
until they got paid. They’d fall into trances,
and prophesy, and curse, and generally be mean.
They dyed their hair, played the tambourine,
had public sex, did wild dances…
They wanted to ban them, but never dared.
Even the emperors were way too scared.”
–“I like this idea. We should be scary.
I didn’t transition to be nice and polite!”
–“Well, you should stay to see Bloody Mary.”
So they sit drinking slushies until ten at night,
when Mary starts singing. She’s not lip-syncing.
She comes on as a rich white lady, who’s been drinking
and is trying to get her gardener into bed
with a version of Can’t Get You Out of My Head;
She does Dancing With Myself (by Billy Idol)
as an incel in a trench coat driving a van
into a crowd; she does Rocket Man
as Kim Jong-Un, getting more homicidal,
until she reveals she was Trump all along
and destroys the world at the end of the song.
I’m there too, at a different table
away in the back. I don’t love the place
but Mary’s worth seeing. And so I’m able
to see the expression on Keiko’s face.
To say she’s enraptured is no exaggeration-
she tries to start a standing ovation.
She stamps. She cheers. When the show is done
she turns to Gaia: –“Ohmigod that was fun!
I’d heard that drag was misogynistic
but that was art. Hey, you wanna make out?”
Gaia makes a face like she’s struggling with doubt.
–“I usually try not to be moralistic
but you’re drunk, and after the thing at New Year
I think it’s not a great idea.”
And that is that. The moment is shattered.
Gaia broke it. Keiko looks crushed
and Gaia gabbles, as if words mattered
in matters of the body. Their goodbyes are rushed.
They return alone to their residences.
No need to linger on the consequences.
Too painful. Let’s skip a month or so:
Gaia’s off work. She decides to go
up onto the roof of her building
to leaf through Lucian’s True History,
listen to vaporwave on mp3,
and let the rays begin the work of gilding
(even though it’s only May)
her limbs for their imminent summer display.
##
Cat Fitzpatrick is the Director of the Women’s and Gender Studies program at Rutgers University- Newark. She wrote the book of poems Glamourpuss (Topside Press), a poem from which was nominated for a Pushcart prize, and co-edited the anthology Meanwhile, Elsewhere: Science Fiction & Fantasy from Transgender Writers, which won the ALA Stonewall award for Literature. She is currently working on a verse novel in Onegin stanzas about trans women in Brooklyn making terrible choices. This is a topic she knows a fair bit about.
