The excuse

 

“I love to see a guy in drag” Hanna had said casually as a group of us sat around a table in Denny's late one night.   I have no idea what the conversation before that statement was, but I had fixated on that statement.   For everyone else it was just a quirky thing to say by one of the quirky goth people sitting in the quirky corner of “Freak Denny's” 

For me, it was an opportunity.  

The thing about living under a mask, even one so thick that you become numb to the fact that there is a mask there at all, is that you, the core you, still wants out. The piece of yourself that you buried still wants to be part of the world. The girl I buried under my football star/womanizer mask still wished she could be at the wheel.

All that she needed was an excuse. Some reason to let her out while still pretending that she was not real. An alternative explanation for her presence. Hanna had just laid one on the table.

Dharma Coffee house had opened in Fairfax Virginia and quickly became the place for bored teens to hang out.  Most of us were into theater, or music, or just didn’t fit in with the high-school football game crowd.  I was reading a lot of Hunter S Thompson and Jack Kerouac at the time so it was a perfect fit. 
At the Coffee house I had met and become part of a circle of friends who were members of the theater departments of three high schools.  Hanna was one of those friends.  Since we met, Hanna and I have gotten along fairly well.  Everyone in the circle seemed to whisper in my ear that I should date her and I later discovered that our community of matchmakers was telling her the same thing about me.  It seemed like we always ended up sitting beside each other at the coffee house, or at Denny's, or when we would hang out in the dark playground at VanDyke park.  

I had just come out of a devastating breakup though, so I was gun-shy. Hanna was very cool, tall, quirky, and fun but I valued our friendship and was in the midst of a series of short term consensual hookups.  I would meet a girl at a party or at the coffee house.  We would flirt, I would warn her that anything we did was “just for fun and nothing more” and then we would go “park” somewhere private.  

I was in no mental state for a lasting relationship.  I didn’t respect myself enough for that at the time and I respected Hanna too much to add her to the list of girls I’d gone parking with. 

Then Hanna said that phrase and everything changed.  Something, I would later learn that her name is Katie, saw a glimmer of a chance of hope in Hanna’s off hand statement.  She saw a way that I might let her peek out through the mask. She began to beg me from the back of my mind where I had hidden her. 

“Like Klinger?” I asked.  Echo’s of my father’s frantic insulting lecture from the time he caught me bouncing up fresh in my mind.  My cheeks burned in embarrassment at the memory as I said the words. I had to be so careful, I must not let anyone see what I was trying to do.  I was walking into dangerous ground.  

“Eww!  No!” Hanna replied. “I mean when a guy makes the effort!  Makeup, voice, even underwear.”
My heart was racing.  Katie was jumping up and down in her prison.  

“Oh wow!”  I said.  “Like a transvestite.”  

“It’s such a turn on!” Hanna replied.  

Something clicked in my head,  this was flirtation!  I could do flirtation.  I could do this, I just needed to make it seem like she was persuading me!  Like it was almost against my will.  

“How much of a turn on?” I asked leaning in closer.  

She licked her lips. “Are you offering?”  

“What would I get out of it?” I asked.  

She put her hand down under the table and onto my thigh.  “I always wanted to give a blowjob under a man’s skirt.” she said.  

I swallowed hard and looked around the table at the other people there watching us.  I felt exposed and about to pass out.  Even Katie lost her resolve in the moment.  There were too many eyes on us.  

“Heh, Anything for a blowjob!” I said with a fake laugh.  I then changed the subject as quickly as I could and the moment passed.  

Later that night as everyone was leaving, I walked Hanna to her car.  “Were you uh serious about that offer?” I asked.  

“Were you?” She replied.  

I grinned and nodded.  

“Saturday!” She announced.  

Saturday I showed up at her house, terrified while Katie was hopeful.  

Hanna came out to the car carrying a gym bag. “My parents are home!  We need to go somewhere private”  

In northern Virginia, there was no where “Private” for 2 Highschool students to go.  So we ended up deep in the woods at Great Falls park.  It was fall, and I reasoned that we could hear footfalls in the leaves long before we would be in sight of anyone.  

So there, in the woods, allegedly for the mercenary cause of receiving a blow job,  I stripped naked in front of Hanna.  

Hanna was tall and she was not thin, where I was a lifeguard in the summer and still swam laps despite no longer being on the swim team.  So her clothes were almost exactly my size. 
She handed me light blue nylon panties, and I pulled them on, the bulge threatening to stretch them.  

She passed me pantyhose and I forgot to pretend not to know how to bunch them up and slide them on.  Next was a lace demi bra and rolled up rags to stuff it with.  

She gave me a crop top, leaving my belly exposed and a maxi skirt that came down to my ankles.
I stood there, in front of her, feeling like Katie as she took out her makeup kit and began applying foundation, blush, eyeliner and lipstick.  

She held up her compact mirror for an instant and Katie looked back at me.   The moment flashed past so quickly that I soon lost it and never recalled it again until recently.  

Once I was fully dressed, we sat and talked for a long time. 

Hannah wanted to do this again.  She was convinced that she could restyle my hair enough that I could pass, at least enough to go to Trax on a Thursday night.  Trax was a bar run by the gay community for the gay community in DC that opened its doors to straights on goth nights. 
I said I was willing to give it a try.  Katie could feel the bars loosening on her prison. We then talked about voice strategies.  I was taking dialect lessons for acting at the time and we agreed that throwing in an accent would help me pass by complicating the ear.  

She never did climb up under my skirt, the alleged reason I had agreed in the first place.  

Time passed, the sun got low, and my afternoon as Katie with Hanna came to an end.  

We never did it again though we often talked about doing it. 
Hanna and I tried to date but, as much as we enjoyed each other’s company, there was never a romantic spark.  She was a good friend, but nothing more.  I internalized this and blamed the fact that she had seen me cross dressed.  None the less, memory of the event finally helped me understand what was going on when I had my introspection years later.  Katie pointed to it accusingly. 

Katie never did get to go to Trax.  

I never received another excuse.  The cage door shut once more and Katie went back to a fitful sleep. 

**After I had come out to myself.  I reached out to Hanna who now lives on the other side of the country and asked her point blank if she had known about Katie back then and was giving me an excuse.  She said that she had not, but that I was the third Trans person who had told her that she had helped them.  I suppose empathy is enough