Electric Cars And Indeterminate Sex–We Live In A Hybrid Age

Jan Bossey was well into his sexual transition, feeling a bit dodgy and off his feed at times, but the hormones had kicked in nicely, and that Springtime, feminine feel that he had so long been waiting for, had finally arrived.  He put on his Easter bonnet – yes, he knew it was too early, but he simply felt like it, and his new self gave in far more easily to whim and fancy than his old self had.  

When he was a Senior Vice President at a major consulting firm on the Route 128 tech corridor, he had been decisive in his attitude, peremptory and unforgiving in his management, and absolutely determined and goal-oriented in his life.  He was a feared supervisor not because of the harsh punishment meted out to laggards, but because of his stature.  There was no one in the firm with more intelligence and resolve than Jan Bossey.

It was a complete surprise when it was learned that he was unhappy in this premier macho role and had opted to transition.  During initial psychological counselling his feelings about femininity were probed, and while he was not exactly asked to pick from a Chinese menu of options, it amounted to that.  Like everything else in modern genderism, there was a spectrum, ranging from tough Bernal Heights flannel and jackboots tough girls to sweet, frilly, pretty things and everything in between.  Of course, the counselor noted, gender transition was not yet an exact science, no bulls eyes, only approximations.

Jan, feeling if one was in this thing, then one had to be all in, he opted for the frilly end of the gamut.   His mother, like him a romantic and vaudevillian at heart, looked like Toulouse Lautrec’s Jane Avril, all feather boas, black stockings, petticoats, and dancing shoes.  “I feel pretty, no matter what anyone says, especially your father”, she said to young Jan who was always her most attentive audience, sitting on the plush dressing room divan waiting for his mother to emerge.  

All that anticipation and delight when she finally threw open the door and danced before him had taken hold at a very early age; and despite the many years of suppressing it and becoming an ur-macho Simon Legree, it never went away.  So the choice of the girly-girl persona was easy enough.

Yet, as he proceeded in his transition, he felt that there was something wrong – a niggling sense of incompleteness and dissatisfaction.  He was stuck between second and third gears, he thought on his last trip up and down the Strip in his hemi Dodge Charger.  This too will pass, advised his transition counselor.  One does not simply pull out all that nasty male stuff in one go.  Soon enough he would see the changes he was expecting, and today, the day she donned his Easter bonnet and headed for St. Maurice’s church to flirt with the men talking golf with Father Brophy, the change was secure.

Or almost.  As much as the counselor told him to dismiss his persistent, recurrent dreams of pursuit and penetration, he was always a man in them.  What was this all about?  Despite his current demission and removal from the psychiatric pantheon, Freud’s insights could not be totally dismissed.  Psychiatry was not all behaviorism and drugs, but the psychological potpourri of genes, hormones, childhood, and their weird dynamics.  If he was chasing women in his dreams, it had to mean something.  Perhaps ‘that nasty male stuff’ his counselor referred to was not just a flimsy thing easy to extract, but something more permanent and resistant to the daily doses of progesterone injected every day.

This middle state, this inconclusive, changeable period of neither here nor there was not unpleasant at all, for what man or woman could feel both male and female?  The very pleasant calm before the storm, the final explosive burst of pure sexuality at the end of the transition process.

Jan had always liked cars, and the Dodge hemi was but the last in a line of muscle cars he had had ever since he turned eighteen.  There was that reconditioned 65 Corvette; the 64 GTO, 389, Hurst three-on-the-floor transmission, racing tuned double carb beast; the chopped and channeled Camaro which tipped out at 150 without so much as a groan or a shimmy.  

He went to car shows and admired the cars he could never afford – Ferraris, Lamborghinis, and Maseratis.  He liked to hang around body shops, garages, and racetracks.  He bought a TR-3 for $500 dollars back in the day, took it to Lime Rock and raced in the short track at the foothills of the Berkshires, did his own tune ups, lubes, and brake jobs.  Cars and men were one.

On that very Sunday when he went out in his Easter finery, he noticed a number of hybrid cars in the church parking lot.  Now what were they? he asked permitting himself a moment of doubt.  Of course he knew what they were – little underpowered four-wheelers designed to save energy, to turn on and off, gas and electricity, and designed to get you there without much fanfare.  It was the idea of a hybrid that piqued his now highly sensitive metaphysical interest – something, like him in his current transitionary stage, that was neither this nor that, neither here nor there.

He had never had much patience for Teslas until Elon Musk’s designers made one that would go 0-60 in under two seconds and was one of the fastest production cars on the market.  Musk never got on this neither fish nor foul hybrid bandwagon.  He went all in for electric, and he would make Tesla the peer of the fastest Ferrari on the road.  A macho car despite its batteries and plug-ins.

The hybrids were delicate little nothings that flipped on an off, never made a fuss, and were nothing but shows of environmental purpose for the leafy neighborhoods of Northwest Washington.

So wasn’t he a hybrid? A neither here nor there male/female?  There was no technique for scraping all the XY chromosomes from his DNA and replacing them with double X’s.  Not like sparkplugs or alternators.   He would be an XY male for the rest of his life, like it or not, Easter bonnets notwithstanding. 

But doesn't nature trump nurture in these behavioral days?  It was what you believed you were not what you actually were that counted, that made a difference.  If you truly believed that you were a woman, and that the belief could be augmented by a shot or two of female hormones, then you were a woman, no questions asked.

Yet the hybrid image stayed with Jan and he couldn’t shake it.  He was becoming what he never intended to be – a she-man, he-woman, a sexual hybrid.

The hybrid cars and Freudian dreams put the brakes, so to speak, on Jan’s transition.  He could wear an Easter bonnet whenever he wanted with all his equipment intact, or revert to Dodge Charger hemis; retake the fifth floor of his old firm and rule the roost like he once did, or join the secretarial pool.  

The transgender, gender fluidity advocates had a point.  Sexual expression was a matter of preference, so go with your personal flow. Where Jan got off the bus was denying genetic determinism.  As many frilly dresses as he might wear, no matter how many high heels, handbags, perfume, and eyeliner were his, he would always be Jan Bossey, tough guy.

He went overboard on the return – full beard, heavy drinking, Harley Hog in the garage – but soon settled back into his own particular maleness.  A few friends asked where he had been for the past year or so, but he demurred – family business, personal affairs and that sort of answer – but soon enough that hiatus had been completely, absolutely forgotten.

Is Class Disappearing In America? - Yale Men Who Summer On The Vineyard Don't Marry Across The Tracks

Back a generation or so, 'nationality' was the distinguishing feature of American society.  One was labeled early and often as Italian, Jewish, Irish, Polish or any of the other minor immigrant groups which had come to these shores.  Epithets were common, accepted, and dismissed as shorthand, and national stereotypes, often not far from the truth, were widely held.  The Irish were indeed brawlers and drunkards if you went down Arch Street to the Blarney Stone or the Dublin Arms any Friday night. 

Sean O'Shaughnessy was proud of his broken nose, never realigned and as off kilter as an old telephone pole.  He downed his pints of Guinness one after the other until he was roaring drunk, picked a fight with any one of the Reilly boys and fought until blood had soaked the sawdust.  No one stepped in to stop the brawl - it was as much a part of Friday night as NHL hockey fights, and O'Shaughnessy always paid Mickey Finn, the owner, for anything broken. 

Italians were loud and whole neighborhoods smelled like garlic. Mothers hung out tenement windows and yelled at each other. All clothiers, tailors, and jewelers were Jewish, and the Poles from Silesia were as dumb as stones.

  

New Brighton was typical of small New England cities in those days, divided by class.  The sons and daughters of the industrialists who built the city lived in the West End, summered on the Vineyard, played golf at the country club, and planned trips to Greece together. 

Italian doctors treated Italian patients, Poles-to-Poles, Jews-to-Jews and each lived in his own quarter of the city - not as well-heeled and old money like the West End, but places like Walnut Hill or Belvedere.  They had their own golf courses, and summered at local beaches or a few weeks in the Berkshires. 

The Swedish housepainters, carpenters, and electricians lived in salt boxes in Eddy Glover; every Pole in town lived on Broad Street in four-story walkups, but in a neighborhood with delicatessens, kielbasa shops and a cathedral which celebrated masses only in Polish. 

There were no black people in New Brighton - except for the Dominican who was the Surgical Ward janitor at New Brighton General Hospital, and he counted for the only Latino as well.  Race and ethnicity were not issues in that 'nationality' generation, and nobody was clamoring for any more diversity than what they had. 

Arthur Townsend was a West Ender.  The Townsend family had roots in Northumberland and had come to America in its earliest days.  Arthur had genealogical links both the Massachusetts Bay Colony and Jamestown.  The Townsend side of the family moved to New Haven with the Davenport mission in the early 17th century, became prosperous landowners and shipbuilders, and finally industrialists.  The family moved a few miles to the north and settled in New Brighton where they founded the factories that produced arms and material to the Union Army and the United States Army in both world wars. 

So when Arthur was seen with Marilyn Petrucci, the daughter of a factory worker, a Sicilian not many years off the boat, and sister to six other children in the worst part of town, his parents were livid.  What was a St. Paul's and Yale education worth if note to marry well?  Worst of all she was a smallish, dark girl who wore cheap perfume.  She was not only unsuitable for Arthur,  she was unthinkable; but Arthur found her irresistible. 

La nostalgie de la boue, said his father citing Emile Augier from his novel, Mariage d'Olympe referring to the hero's dalliance with the lower classes turning it into a kind of reverse romanticism; but there was no romance in it all.  Once his son crossed the tracks, it was like Dante's Inferno -  Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate - enter here and lose all hope. 

It simply wasn't done in those days.  Multiculturalism was not even a fictional notion.  One stuck to one's own kind. 

In Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story, the Broadway 50s musical based on Romeo and Juliet, a boy and girl from two opposing gangs, one Anglo and the other Puerto Rican, fall in love. Anita, a friend of Maria, warns her against getting involved with someone from a different community.  She sings:

A boy like that
Who'd kill your brother
Forget that boy
And find another
One of your own kind
Stick to your own kind
A boy like that
Will give you sorrow
You'll meet another boy tomorrow
One of your own kind
Stick to your own kind

“Stick to your own kind” is her refrain. If you don’t, you’re asking for trouble.  Of course Maria does not listen, bad turns to worse, and the final scene is a melodramatic replay of the end of the star-crossed lovers.

Arthur's father had had many romantic adventures as a young man - summers on the Vineyard were literally harems for wealthy young men of good parentage - and during his years working at J.P. Morgan on Wall Street he trolled the girl ghettoes of the Upper East Side and landed one blonde, blue-eyed beauty after another; but his son's dipping into the mire was something else indeed.  It was not just youthful sexual exuberance or his son's social adventurism.  It was complete idiocy and dangerous to boot.  All he needed at his age was a grandson who looked like a Ubangi. 

Social opprobrium always works wonders, and his Yale roommates, all from as well-positioned families as his own, told him if he wanted wiry poontang, pick up one on the New Haven Green and be done with it. 

Italian girls from Wooster Square did indeed come to the New Haven Green to meet Yale men in the vain hopes of a a meal ticket out of the ghetto; and not a few Yalies took advantage in a one-and-done affair. 

The New Haven Green, historic burial place for the Davenports, the Potters, and the Longworths and gathering place for Revolutionary partisans whose militias were instrumental in the war against the British, was the modern day crossroads for the two communities.  Italians from Wooster Square came across the canal to shop at Malley's and see the latest Hollywood epics at the Palace and Strand, and crossed the Green in sight of Harkness Tower, the Old Campus, and Silliman College. 

Now, while the Yale Nantucket-Vineyard crowd wanted some wiry, tangled guinea snatch as a chaser for their usual blonde, silken delights, Wooster Square girls wanted husbands.  Tired of wife-beaters, garlic, and goomba parading, they wanted the real America, the white, flaxen-haired, well-tailored and well-mannered men of Yale. 

So it was easy pickin's for Yale men, so it was within that augury that Arthur's roommates disabused him of his 'love' for this non sequitur, inconsequential woman.

It worked, and Arthur straightened out, went up to Smith, Vassar, and Wellesley, dated the most eligible girls from his milieu and married well.   A home on Park Avenue, winters in the islands, and of course summers on Nantucket. 

Yet, for reasons neither his family, colleagues, or friends could understand, Arthur still had that itch for something other than the flaxen-haired beauties of his class, and took up with Annie Casertano from the Brooklyn projects.  She was a single mother with two children, surviving on welfare and downtown Manhattan cleaning jobs, divorced twice, both from Italian dockworkers, but for some inexplicable reason was Venus de Milo for Arthur Townsend.  He wasn't sure which he loved more - Annie or the projects, such was his nostalgie de la boue and ornery populism. 

Managing the affair was tricky.  He and his family lived in Greenwich and the hours of his Wall Street job were punishingly long, so sojourns in Bay Ridge were not easy.  Yet, he managed.  He had too such was his extraordinary desire. Although the nasty remarks of his Yale roommates often popped up on the Far Rockaway train to Brooklyn, clattering around and interrupting his thoughts of the beautiful Annie, but he dismissed them. 

She hoped that he would leave his wife but she had no clue about his other life, the rarified atmosphere of the well-to-do, or the near impossibility of him marrying below one's station, so assumed that love would conquer all and her ships would come in. 

As for him, an affair in Bay Ridge was far easier to conceal than one in the city - his stories about layered loans, redevelopment projects, and offshore money were easier for his wife to take on face value than if he simply was 'staying late at the office', or meeting clients in Gramercy Park. 

Perhaps it was the contrast that did it - dark, hippy, high-heeled, made-up Annie from the projects and elegantly tailored, manicured, Armani and Arpege  Elizabeth Barrett Browning from Beacon Hill.  Coming home after a Saturday with Annie - driving up the long driveway past the carriage house and the stables, admiring the thousand-year old oak tree,  being greeted by Samuel the butler and kissed by his fragrant, wine-scented wife was immeasurable. From one set of arms and bed into another, irreplaceable. 

Just to be clear, the projects in Arthur's day were nothing like they are now - savage, tribal places ruled by gangs, hookers in the halls, Fentanyl dopers sagging and frozen on the steps, pimps and tarts on the avenues.  They were just poor white, just like New Brighton across the tracks but more concentrated.  The smell of garlic and roast peppers was in the halls, in the elevators, and on the stairs.  Arthur could have been visiting Marilyn Petrucci on Alexander Street and instead was on the 21st floor of the Verrazano Homes. 

   

Annie never gave up hope, and so the goomba idyll so fantasized by Arthur Townsend continued.  A black-white thing in these same projects renamed the Frederick Douglass Homes would never be possible in a million years, but today class has been replaced by race and the barriers are impenetrable.  Slumming - for that was what his wife called it when she finally found out where he was punching his ticket - does not exist today. 

Elizabeth forgave him, he gave up the life and they lived happily ever after, but lounging on the beach on St. Bart's he was sorry that class had disappeared.  He liked being upper upper in bed with lower lower and smelling pasta fazool on the stove.  No one of the new technocratic empire would ever know the pleasure.  Oh, sure, there was always Louise from Gaithersburg but she was just anybody, and there was nobody like deep guinea Annie Casertano or Marilyn Petrucci anymore. 

Invitation To A Beheading - The Public Undoing Of A Limited Mind

There was never anyone like Felicia Roberts, a woman of limited intellectual range but with a loud, irritating, harping voice that attracted attention.  She crowed, hectored, and badgered until her audience either gave in or walked out.  She had that kind of effect on people. 

What did she hammer on about?  Donald Trump, of course, an easy target but one that suited Felicia to a tee.  She could go on for hours about the man, his devilish moods, his hopeless ignorance, his racism, misogyny, and homophobia.  She harangued her golf partners, her tea party guests, her alumnae friends and all her neighbors.

The thing of it was that she fulminated in a a vacuum.  Every single one of her University Park neighbors had flown a Black Lives matter flag, posted Hate Has No Home Here lawn signs, drove electric cars, voted solidly Democratic, and loved Kamala Harris. 

So did all her wretched hawking was pretty much for her own benefit - like crows cawing on a telephone line.  She felt good about herself - she was doing her part to rid the nation of the beast in the White House. 

Her social group was as unalloyed and passionate about the progressive cause as she, her colleagues, and professional associates. She lived in a cocoon, her private playground, a congenial venue for sharing ideas and opinions. 

So Bill Baxter took her completely by surprise.  Bill was a Trump supporter - a man delighted with the President's outrageous persona - the glitzy, Baroque ballroom, the two hundred and fifty feet tall Victory Arch, the Field of Heroes, and the fancy makeover of the Kennedy Center - and equally thrilled at his turning back the woke tide and pursuing a definitive conservative agenda. 

He was an invited guest at the home of a third party for dinner given in honor of a local poet who had promised to read verses which she hoped captured the zeitgeist of the horrendous Trump years.  Bill was a colleague of one of the guests who suggested that he would be a good addition to the gathering, and, a gracefully aging, divorced middle aged man, he would make the perfect companion for the many widows attending. 

Now, Bill was recondite about his political views.  Better to keep them to himself, living as he did in the same lock-stepping neighborhood as Felicia. Expressing anything other than the received wisdom - that Trump was a destructive, divisive interloper, an autocrat, a boorish, lowbrow, bourgeois bottom feeder - would be upsetting to everyone. 

Not a week passed when he was not asked about the American flag flying over his front porch - not a little Fourth of July ACE Hardware throwaway but a proper, full-sized banner. That must be a symbol of his Trump support, passersby asked to which he simply responded that it was part of his patriotic family tradition - Revolutionary War veterans, DAR dames, and Philadelphia Franklin relatives. 

He was not lying, exactly, for it was all true; but because he could not show any more direct for the President without having eggs thrown at him, the flag would have to suffice. 

So, he was prepared to keep his own counsel at the dinner, keeping true to form and not letting on his partisanship; but after Felicia had finally dipped into the last of her vichyssoise and stopped talking, he had to respond.  Something about Elon Musk being a Nazi-saluting, racist anti-Semite simply required a riposte. 

In his best, most polished, practiced eloquent manner, he fashioned a reply that acknowledged Felicia’s concerns, agreed that Musk had indeed ruffled many feathers on his way up and down Independence Avenue addressing issues of waste and fraud in the federal bureaucracy, but wasn't she - Felicia - wandering into dangerously offensive territory.  Where was the evidence?  On what grounds did she brand him as a racist enemy of the state?

Of course Felicia had never had to construct any logical arguments regarding Musk.  Everyone she knew knew that he was a crony capitalist, out only for money, himself and the establishment of a cabal of like-minded bigots.  

So looking quite thunderstruck, she bumbled and floundered, looking for the right reply; but since she had never been asked for proof - who needed it for God's sake when the truth was right there staring you in the face? - she had no ready answer. 

Bill waited until she composed herself and then continued on the in the same vein - questioning her attacks on Musk, Trump, Vance, and Rubio - the band of thieves assembled as Trump's henchmen to take over the country. 

As one absurd notion after another poured out of the woman's mouth the more incensed and offended she became, the more her motor revved up, and the torrent of invective and ad hominem attacks increased in intensity and volume. 

When she paused for breath, he added one more logical codicil to his argument, and sat back.  Let the woman rant on infinitum for all he cared, showing her true colors and her desperately addled mind to all those around the table.  

When she stopped again amidst an uncomfortable silence, she was flabbergasted.  The usual applause and amens were absent. The wind had been taken out of her sails.  She finished her diatribe and could think of nothing to follow.  No one jumped to her rescue.  Nothing about the World Cup, the NBA Finals, or tacking on the Bay. 

Not that anything Bill said in Musk's defense - his creation of a hundred thousand jobs, exploring space, on the forefront of cybernetic healing (brain implants to help the deaf hear and the blind to see), in the avant-garde of free speech - had any traction with this devotedly progressive gathering.  

It wasn't so much that he changed their minds, just that he showed Felicia to be a blustering fool. Progressivism was a passionate calling, for sure, and  some measure of invective and even exaggeration was at times necessary, but such unhinged, demented outbursts did the movement no good. 

Felicia looked like a drowned duck, feathers all wilted and sagging, quacker closed, eyes distant and unseeing.  She felt deflated, dispirited, and lost.  She would never be the same again.

'It just goes to show you', Bill said to a colleague the next morning; but after such a wild evening he could be excused for not finishing his thought.