on roses and postscripts

When I was in junior high, I volunteered at a local museum--worked with animals, taught tracking classes, showed kids how to pan for gold and make apple cider, all that. There was a boy there I didn't get along with so well, name of Charlie; we worked together on the newsletter and frequently stepped on each other's toes, because we were both pompous and smart and had something to prove.
Some time later, clean-cut Charlie and I were in high school together. We'd evolved; Charlie was an overweight goth who loved to shock people, and I was just going into my beatnik phase--you know, crying at the end of "The Dharma Bums," black turtlenecks, poetry readings at the local cafe, leather jacket, the works. We traveled in different circles, but for one: Charlie was out to some of us as gay, and I was eventually out to a very few people as bi. And it drove me crazy; Charlie always pushed the limits, one step past far enough, and I always argued that his shock tactics made him and the rest of us look bad. I'd argue quietly with straight friends for queer rights, and share the bed with the gay guy in choir on school trips, to show everyone he was okay. Charlie, meanwhile, would be shaving off his eyebrows, using the women's bathroom, coming to school in a skirt. I stopped being known as the smart kid--I was the poetic kid, now. And Charlie was, proudly, the freak.
We worked together, for a while, founding a student forum. Our principal came weekly; he was a good man, and listened to us when we had ideas about school policy or told him something wasn't working. The popular, elected leadership kids put on assemblies; Charlie and I and a few others were the ones the administration actually listened to. After the Columbine and Springfield shootings, they put us on statewide TV as an example of how a student body should take care of its own--and, in fact, one boy told me once, in private, that he'd been pondering a copycat shooting himself, but felt the forum gave him a voice and a feeling of having earned respect, and he was finding his way in the world. The house that Charlie and I built, albeit uneasily, meant something, and we went to other schools teaching them to do the same, and advised principals from neighboring towns by the end of the year. It was good-cop-bad-cop: Charlie, the Marilyn Manson fan, pushed the envelope, drew in those who wouldn't have listened otherwise; I, the clean-cut distance runner and theater kid, would orate for a while in the middle ground, looking more reasonable; stuff got done. Charlie helped a lot of kids, but I usually got the attention. I was the photogenic one, after all. I tried, with false teenage magnanimity, to be his apologist sometimes.
We were both overcompensating.
Charlie didn't show up at school for a while, senior year, but that wasn't unusual. What was unusual was the content of the card I got from the principal in class, the morning after I'd won the local Rotary's award for community service. In it he congratulated me, and told me I'd do well next year at college, and expressed his confidence in my future. At the end:

"PS-- I was sorry to hear about the death of your friend Charlie."

I walked out of class in a daze, spent the day holding people who were crying, arguing with the vice-principal until he was finally browbeaten past his lame excuses into lowering the flag to half-staff for five minutes--it'd been down for a whole day, a few weeks before, for an alumnus of the high school who'd died in a helicopter crash. We began to hear details: Charlie had run away to Portland, had been there for a while, and that's why we hadn't seen him lately. Charlie was a street kid. Charlie was hanging out at a local youth shelter, getting his life together. Charlie was taking estrogen. Charlie had died of a heroin overdose.
First try. Just tried the junk once. Bad batch or something. An OD.
Days later I spoke at the memorial service. His family talked about how he was a good Christian boy, and glossed over who he'd been for the past few years. His friends talked about how they missed him. A piece of a film he'd been making with other street kids was screened.
I spoke about how crazy Charlie drove me. How his constant envelope-pushing got on my nerves and made me uncomfortable. And how we'd all been lucky for it, because Charlie being Charlie made it possible for all the rest of us to fly under the radar, to stay safe, to build bridges for ourselves and live our own lives because he was drawing the fire toward himself. And how I missed him, more than I'd ever expected to.
It was the first memorial service I had ever attended. We all wished we'd been there, in those last few days, in those last few hours. Known how bad it was. PS--I was sorry to hear about the death of your friend Charlie.

Charlie was the first transgendered person I ever met, even though I didn't know it at the time, because I'd never heard of such a thing, such a possibility. I wasn't safe enough to tell, anyway; I couldn't be trusted with it. I only use the pronouns I do because those were the ones I knew, and I was informed later that he was using both standard sets interchangeably up till the end. PS. PPS.

Tonight I went down to a local youth center to see a presentation on certain medical procedures relevant to the trans community. I was dressed conservatively--sweater over collared shirt, blue jeans, clean, sensible boots, hair pinned halfway up--in a room full of punks, suits, tattoo queens, physicians. As I was mingling after the question-and-answer session, I saw something pinned to the wall--a piece of paper, with a poem dedicated to Charlie, two dates after his name. I pulled back. Next to the poem, a lock of his hair, pinned to the wall. And a board next to that, with messages dedicated to him. And above that, a big black-and-white photo. And more notes and poems and photos near those. "I miss you" and "we love you" and everything else--a whole wall, interspersed with photos and blessings for another community member, also deceased. They called him "Charlie Rose". Apparently it was a name he'd chosen.
This was where he'd gone. This place had been his new home, and it had been full of new friends. I asked someone in attendance if they'd known him, and they said no, but they knew people who had, and they'd heard "the story"--they spoke in reverent tones, as though it was a sacred legend.
Charlie was known and loved in that place, and missed when he had passed on. He hadn't had to hide.
And yet, inescapably, he had also died alone, at the business end of a desperate needle, and his friends and enemies back home had to hear it over the loudspeaker because none of us had the means to find out personally.

Charlie was--
Charlie was--
PS--Charlie was more brave, then, than a seventeen-year-old me could comprehend being. I was hiding in the bathroom at two in the morning, applying makeup clumsily, scrubbing it off, hating myself, feeling so alone and frightened and freakish that I didn't know what to do but huddle under my covers and shake. I went to school in the day with my buzzed hair and cracking knuckles and photogenic fakery, and I looked down on Charlie-who-would-be-Rose for daring to exhibit a boldness of expression I couldn't even have the courage to dream of. We both lived in fear, but Charlie met it head-on; badly, perhaps, clumsily, ham-handedly. But head-on. I maneuvered. I ran. I shoved it down and prayed and prayed it would go away.
PS--I tried to distance myself from someone I could have known better and who could have known me because I was frightened of guilt by association. I saw that fear and beauty and depth in him and I ran from it because I couldn't take it, and I complained about him aloud in order to make myself seem more normal.
PS--I didn't know Charlie was my friend--I didn't know I was Charlie's friend--until I saw those words. I was sorry to hear about the death of your friend Charlie. I didn't know how much of a damn I gave until I nearly wept, reading at that memorial service, in front of all of Charlie's Sunday-school teachers and every goth in Central Oregon, and I didn't know why because I was that good at lying.
PS--I was sorry to hear about the death of my friend Charlie.

We were sisters, Charlie Rose. We were sisters and we never knew it because we were stupid damn teenagers too busy with ourselves to look at each other and say, you could be someone I could know like myself. We were so busy preventing school shootings and proclaiming on TV that communication was good for young people and so were vitamins and homework, that we never knew.
We could have been there for each other.
Charlie, if I'd been brave enough to be your sister, I could have been there for you.
I can't tell you how much it meant to me to know that, even in that last, lonely moment, you were loved in this town that you and I both ran away to, this city that eats our hometown's freaks and outcasts and sometimes spits them out later knowing themselves better.
You weren't the only one. You weren't the only one and I wasn't the only one and I miss you, you brave, stupid, exhibitionist bastard. You helped me without even meaning to, years after I'd stopped sparing you a thought, years after I, too, had kicked off the pumice dust of the desert that raised us and come here to Portland. And there you were, on a wall.
I miss you.

May you pass peacefully into the distant West, my fallen sister, and rest in loving arms. May you at last know peace.


Goodnight.