Some Minor Renovations

A story from my childhood

My mother is a self-proclaimed interior decorator. The only thing that makes her stand out from the many others who claim the same is that she is actually good. Too good, perhaps. Growing up, she took absolute authority over the aesthetics the house and as a result, I ended up spending most of my childhood blue-scadooed inside of an Ethan Allen catalogue. The houses would look fantastic, but they were about as comfortable as the assortment of brown sweaters she forced me to wear on major holidays. Living with my mother forced me to consider if watching TV was really worth it after having to dig through layers of rock-solid pillows and lift an awkwardly large potted plant that looked fully capable of consuming our dog.

Her mind was keenly tuned to observe form before function--blindly in most cases. At the onset of my teenage years we came to Charlotte, North Carolina in search of a house. My parents decided that suburban Philadelphia had had enough of us. It probably had. Before we left, my mom informed us that our realtor was named Roxy, a name that, for some reason seemed to fully encompass the very essence of her character. When I finally met him I thought that the man shaking my parents’ hand was mistaken. Roxy did not look at all like I imagined he would--which was somewhere between Truman Capote and Liberace. Instead, standing before me, talking to my parents was a very ordinary-looking realtor, the kind of person who spends his entire life existing as a series of grey suites and black folders. Roxy showed us one house that my Mom was particularly fond of.  

“Kim, we have five kids. How do expect us to fit in a three bedroom house?”

“I love this house” she told to my father. “Gary, we’re buying this house. Look how big the attic is! We could turn it into another bedroom for Trevor.”

Despite the fact that this proposal might satisfy my dream of one day becoming a super hero, I voiced my disappointment to her. Had she the vision to see past the décor (which we tried to explain to her several times was not included) she would have noticed that it was a small place on a lot that backed up to an artificial pond, and past that a busy road. A great environment for unwatched children to grow up. Fortunately, we did not end up buying the house.

She seemed to find it necessary to redecorate and reinvent various rooms of our home in much the same way that my dad would change radio stations on long car rides. If something lost her interest, she just went ahead and moved on. Whether this came from boredom or sporadic bursts artistic vision I cannot say, though neither would have surprised me. Things were constantly being rearranged and painted over, replaced and eventually thrown into the attic (or the basement, if they were lucky enough for my mom to consider using them again). Furniture had a shelf life in our house, and a relatively short one at that.

Her various escapades and projects called for workers. Lots of strangers--people that I could not stand. It wasn’t that I was prejudiced against people. I liked people, but the mud-stained boots and sea of blue jeans lapping against my cabinets four days a week hardly fit the description. These were monsters. They attacked with awkwardness and dirty pickup trucks parked in my driveway in such a way that made it impossible for my brother and I to escape their presence through a game of basketball. I had grown up watching the occasional Bob the Builder cartoon, but these men had no talking tools. Instead, they tried to talk to me--in my own home! How was an eleven year old supposed to eat breakfast at 11:30 in his underwear with a sweaty balding man asking him useless questions?

“So ya play any sports, kid?”

Oh, of course. Haven’t you seen me on NFL network?

I gave them answers with the same halfhearted honesty that reflected the initial inquiry. What did I care what they thought of me? These were men who made a living interrupting other people’s lives in order to sand their counter tops.  

Then I met Jess.

Jess resembled a man who looked like someone I thought I might have known, like an actor in an ABC Family one season spinoff of some halfway successful movie. What set him apart was that he was amiable. When he asked me those same questions he seemed genuinely interested in what I was telling him. So Jess and I talked, and we became friends. Not friends, per say, but friends in the way that you are when you exchange a high-five with someone else’s dad--or in my case our carpenter.

What remains etched most prominently in my memory is Jess’s car. He drove a brown Chevy Bronco (which is really an irrelevant detail because all Chevy Broncos are brown). On the back of his car, he had a tweety bird tire cover. I thought it looked funny, juxtaposed with the inherent manliness of the rest car, but given the events that followed, it was completely fitting. 

My mom had Jess working on a project. Her plan was to take one bay of our three car garage and turn it into a laundry room. This would mean that our current laundry room would become a “butler’s pantry” (not that we had a butler, and even if we did I doubt his appetite or needs would necessitate an entire pantry). It was obviously going to take some time, and my mom--being the person she was--didn’t want the neighbors to know too much about it, lest they decide to copy her. “Oh, we’re just doing some minor renovations” she would tell them.

In the end, her “minor renovations” ended up taking a little over a year and a half. The whole thing could have been finished quicker, but Jess began spending copious amounts of time talking to my mom during work. These weren’t the conversations that men had with other women. They would gossip. They would rant. I never understood the entirety of what they were saying, but I could tell that Jess was acting slightly different. A few months in, Jess had changed completely. He started wearing odd clothes--short jean shorts, nice shoes, halter tops. Occasional lipstick here and there. He grew his hair out and I am pretty sure he had it feathered. This went on for a little while. I really wasn’t sure what to think of it. I just let it go. Actually, I got used to it. Nothing could prepare me for what was to come.

B***s.

Not fat man-b***s, but the real deal. Jess was a transsexual.

My parents didn’t give me a very good explanation of what was going on. I mean, how could they? I was in the fourth grade. There isn’t a speech on gender identification in the back of dad’s ole’ playbook. What they did tell me was this: Jess is now a woman.  

“So you can just switch?”

I had to act completely normal around Jess. That was the most important thing. At this point it was spring time. The weather was favorable, so we opened the pool early. Jess decided to follow suit. After he was done working, Jess took it upon himself to test out the structural integrity of our lounge chairs, fully clad in a bright yellow bikini that he had bought. I’ve always wondered how that transaction went down. Did he act like he was buying a gift? Maybe. But more than likely, Jess walked into the store and physically tried on the clothes. This was one of his most defining characteristics. Jess was a bold person, something you could tell by looking at his work. It was art, really. Jess did not by any means go into his womanhood halfheartedly, either. If he was going to be a woman, he was going to be a damn good one.

Eventually, my mom started joining Jess on the patio, and together the two of them would talk well into the evening--the housewife and the transgender carpenter, each with a brightly colored bikini that seemed to represent their own interpretation of the changing seasons.

Once, my mom had to run out while Jess was working. She left my brother Collin and I with Jess, a pizza, and a promise not to be too long--which really meant that she could be gone anywhere from two to six hours. It was early in the day, so we assumed that Jess would be working and decided to eat our pizza right away outside. But within the few minutes between my mom’s departure and our trip to the patio, Jess had found the time to change into his bathing suit and relax with a book. Was he wearing it underneath his clothes now?

We found him sitting on a lounge chair in a pose that would have been fitting on an obnoxious birthday card. He smiled and waved to us and proceeded to get up and waltz over in a faux-elegance that can only be described as exactly that. He motioned for us to put the pizza down on the table.

“Oooh, look! Mah-gah-ree-tah!”

Collin and I exchanged a look of disbelief and utter confusion--like the women who has just been somberly informed by her doctor that her expected child is in fact a triceratops.

Or there was the time when my dad’s car was stuck in a snowdrift on our driveway. I was too young to help him and my mom was useless when it came to manual labor. This left Jess. Reluctant at first, Jess came through to lend a neatly manicured hand. Anyone driving by would have been astounded to see a pair of powder blue snow boots and a white frock coat pushing my dad’s silver mustang up the drive way through thick layers of snow.

I don’t really know what happened to Jess. One day my mom’s “minor renovations” were finally finished and Jess just stopped showing up. I later learned from my dad that Jess had been living in a crummy apartment near our hockey rink. Jess was at our house so often that I assumed he must have lived close by. As it turned out, he was making a forty minute commute every day he came over.

 Looking back, Jess’s decision to change his sex really wasn’t different from my mom wanting to change our garage into a laundry room. It wasn’t odd, it was bold. We all have small urges and thoughts deep within our minds. The deepest ones sometimes frighten us. Jess just had the courage to run with his.

While he was still working for us, Jess would sometimes sit crying with my mom in the kitchen. I always assumed that it was something to do with his hormone therapy. Recently, my mom explained to me that his wife and children left him some time before he started working for us and had not talked to him for several years. “He had it rough” she told me. “How do you think you would react to that?”

            I don’t have an answer for that one. I constantly find myself judging people before I even hear them speak. I formulate my entire opinion on gestures, clothing, and appearance. If I were to be introduced to Jess today, I would already have in my head an unchangeable image of who he was before the initial “hello”. But not then. I watched Jess’s sexual transformation in the same way that I watched leaves fall off a tree. Back in those days change was change, and while the idea certainly perplexed me, Jess was still the same person in my mind, just as the tree remained a tree. Talking to Jess after his gender alteration was very similar to talking to someone after a dramatic haircut--different, but nonetheless the same. Bewildered friends would often ask me “Who’s the guy wearing daisy dukes and carrying lumber up your driveway?” “That’s Jess”, I would tell them. I never said “the gay construction worker” or “some weirdo my mom knows”. “It’s Jess”, I would reply. Just Jess, the transsexual carpenter who was, more than anything, in touch with his innermost thoughts.