Strawberry

My first memory is of the first time I saw the sky. Epic reckonings are often benign, so don’t worry, I’m just a letter in an envelope as far as the ocean above us is concerned.

What led to the second thing I remember about this life was being terrified out of my sky story and into the events that follow, until I woke up in an octopus.

This is a true story, a brief history of my best guess at what my body has been calling sex.

My second memory was at a stoplight. I was three. Mom assures me that we were not at a stoplight, that we were in motion, driving on the 610 Loop, and that I was actually eight.

It is no small wonder how I managed to confuse a stoplight with a loop that literally encircles the entire city of Houston, or that there’s a five-year differential between my actual second memory and what I believed to be my second memory.

I am not light reading. There is no pause button. Absorb what you can. Add it up later. This is not the time for pretending we can’t hear Chechnya raping that woman in the first Mad Max movie, terrorizing a mother and her baby. Killing them.

I hope Mel Gibson’s heart has learned to risk more softness. I hope his attackers have too. If you really wanna understand what I’ve come here to say, then you have to remember— there’s a point of connection in everything. My nickname for God is The Math.

The Math is a word problem.

In 1982, a red pickup truck pulled up next to my mother on the 610 Loop. In the bed of it was an upright, strapped-in motorcycle with a strawberry-blonde-bearded drunk riding high and unbathed in the seat.

Only a woman could have given a man like that his strawberry color. Only women have the guts to give birth to men. There are a lot of people in this world already aware of what I am just now finding out. There are no stoplights on the 610 Loop.

Mom says there was no such thing as a man sitting on a bike in the bed of that truck, said, There was a truck with a motorcycle in it, yes, but there wadn’t no Strawberry. She did say, though, that four men on motorcycles were riding right behind it.

I don’t remember that. I don’t remember how many tentacles it had. But I do remember what I dreamed after seeing Mad Max, how The Acolytes yanked my mother through the car window, bashed her up to blood in the dust. Laughed about it.

Me in the back seat, shrunk to the size of a tadpole, in the sunken-eyed section of a nightmare, knowing that giving myself to violent men would be the only protection a three-year-old could offer, to give them what they wanted. Something soft.

Don’t talk to me about what it means to petrify until you’ve lived at a stoplight, unless you’ve dreamed your worst death and believed it was about to happen. I remember Strawberry leaning on down to look at Mom, a sloppy laughing inquiry

into her lap, her driver’s seat. A slug

is the closest known land relative to the octopus. Octopodes communicate neurologically. Felt to me like Strawberry wanted to party. Felt like his fun, grizzly buddies in the cab did too, smiling the way a follower smiles. The way drunk soldiers smile. The way men with no Math smile.

Wanted to throw things around a little. Wanted to slap a knee about it. Or an ass. Grab some titties. Grab the softness off. Eat a gazelle. Chase it down first. They laughed. And they laughed. Hyenas. They could take what they want if they wanted.

There are too many moral people, noble people, whom I admire, who might come to see me as disgusting if they find out my behavior, how my body copes with sex. How strong humiliation makes me. Three-year-olds don’t get credit for learning survival like this.

You’ve probably already forgotten that when an eight-year-old boy feels too much pressure to be a man, he will remember his body as three just to dismantle the shame of himself. Even when he’s forty-four.

I don’t know how to stalk things. If that’s what being a man is, I never was one. I was working to figure the difference between safety and living alone. Was trying to outrun my faggot before it could make me any softer.

Was bearing the weight of watching my heroes believe I would burn forever, and loving them anyway. This is what I know about being a man. Straight people need a gun for power like this. Y’all look like Russia, hiding behind his dumb Chechen son.

My mama played her best southern bell for those bikers, played her kindness, played it well, knew that fear only speeds up chaos, so she just smiled and pointed to her three-year-old son in the passenger’s seat having his second memory. I was at a stoplight.

They were all in motion on the 610 Loop.

When we finally pulled away, I was eight, sobbing and incompetent. The only way an eight-year-old can protect his mother from a blur of men is to give them what they want. Nurture. My nature.

Stop trying to figure it out. I done told you, boy. I am a woman from the bottom of a food chain living in the body of a man at the top. A letter in an envelope. The first time I saw the sky. Put here to stop giving birth to the apocalypse.

I still don’t know why—when presented with the opportunity to invent an alternative reality—some writers go to such great lengths to make us worse than we already are. In 1979, Mad Max was released, a gang of bikers tormenting strangers.

It didn’t even have to exist. Chechnya doesn’t even have to exist. They are certain I don’t. If men stop cultivating a fear of death, does the apocalypse lose its charm? Does everybody soften up? Please, use your words or go back underwater.

I know you’re petrified about feeling useless, about what to do with your power if it’s not in a war, wars that are already over. What exactly are you fighting? Is it a word problem? Do you need a tutor? Has anyone checked your work?

Does the power you feel from impact, from punching, from penetration, a pistol’s kick, jet propulsion, does it know who gave it birth? Does it know it was feminine?

In the end, it will come down to The Math, to word problems we are still uncomfortable with, like Intimacy. Like Courage. Softness and Actual Courage. Are you beating your people because you don’t know how to fix your dirt bike?

When I finally tried to re-remember, as far back as I could, I arrived at a stuffed animal, a gigantic green octopus. Mom said, No, it was a frog, not an octopus. Said it was so big I would fall asleep on it or wrap myself up in it.

But I don’t remember that. The only thing I remember being wrapped up in was an airplane. Sealed myself into it. Left for a tour. Jet propulsion. A letter in an envelope.