wouldn’t be founded until 1993, however. So I think of Zora Khyber as an early pioneer, a sort of John the Baptist crying in the wilderness. Writ large, that wilderness was America, even the globe itself, but more specifically it was the redwood bungalow Zora lived in in Noe Valley and where I was now living, too. After Bob Presto had satisfied himself on the details of my manufacture, he had called Zora and arranged for me to stay with her. Zora took in strays like me. It was part of her calling. The fog of San Francisco provided cover for hermaphrodites, too. It’s no surprise that ISNA was founded in San Francisco and not somewhere else. Zora was part of all this at a very disorganized time. Before movements emerge there are centers of energy, and Zora was one of these. Mainly, her politics consisted of studying and writing. And, during the months I lived with her, in educating me, in bringing me out of what she saw as my great midwestern darkness.
“You don’t have to work for Bob if you don’t want,” she told me. “I’m going to quit soon anyway. This is just temporary.”
“I need the money. They stole all my money.”
“What about your parents?”
“I don’t want to ask them,” I said. I looked down and admitted, “I can’t call them.”
“What happened, Cal? If you don’t mind me asking. What are you doing here?”
“They took me to this doctor in New York. He wanted me to have an operation.”
“So you ran away.”
I nodded.
“Consider yourself lucky. I didn’t know until I was twenty.”
All this happened on my first day in Zora’s house. I hadn’t started working at the club yet. My bruises had to heal first. I wasn’t surprised to be where I was. When you travel like I did, vague about destination and with an open-ended itinerary, a holy-seeming openness takes over your character. It’s the reason the first philosophers were peripatetic. Christ, too. I see myself that first day, sitting cross-legged on a batik floor pillow, drinking green tea out of a fired raku cup, and looking up at Zora with my big, hopeful, curious, attentive eyes. With my hair short, my eyes looked even bigger now, more than ever the eyes of someone in a Byzantine icon, one of those figures ascending the ladder to heaven, upward-gazing, while his fellows fall to the fiery demons below. After all my troubles, wasn’t it my right to expect some reward in the form of knowledge or revelation? In Zora’s rice-screen house, with misty light coming in at the windows, I was like a blank canvas waiting to be filled with what she told me.
“There have been hermaphrodites around forever, Cal. Forever. Plato said that the original human being was a hermaphrodite. Did you know that? The original person was two halves, one male, one female. Then these got separated. That’s why everybody’s always searching for their other half. Except for us. We’ve got both halves already.”
I didn’t say anything about the Object.
“Okay, in some cultures we’re considered freaks,” she went on. But in others it’s just the opposite. The Navajo have a category of person they call a berdache. What a berdache is, basically, is someone who adopts a gender other than their biological one. Remember, Cal. Sex is biological. Gender is cultural. The Navajo understand this. If a person wants to switch her gender, they let her. And they don’t denigrate that person—they honor her. The berdaches are the shamans of the tribe. They’re the healers, the great weavers, the artists.”
I wasn’t the only one! Listening to Zora, that was mainly what hit home with me. I knew right then that I had to stay in San Francisco for a while. Fate or luck had brought me here and I had to take from it what I needed. It didn’t matter what I might be compelled to do to make money. I just wanted to stay with Zora, to learn from her, and to be less alone in the world. I was already stepping through the charmed door of those druggy, celebratory, youthful days. By that first afternoon the soreness in my ribs was already lessening. Even the air seemed on fire, subtly aflame with energy as it does when you are young, when the synapses are firing wildly and death is far away.
Zora was writing a book. She claimed it was going to be published by a small press in Berkeley. She showed me the publisher’s catalogue. The selections were eclectic, books on Buddhism, on the mystery cult of Mithras, even a strange book (a hybrid itself) mixing genetics, cellular biology, and Hindu mysticism. What Zora was working on would certainly have fit this list. But I was never clear how actual her publishing plans were. In the years since, I’ve looked out for Zora’s book, which was called
“I’ve got one question,” I asked Zora one day. “Why did you ever tell anybody?”
“What do you mean?”
“Look at you. No one would ever know.”
“I want people to know, Cal.”
“How come?”
Zora folded her long legs under herself. With her fairy’s eyes, paisley-shaped, blue and glacial looking into mine, she said, “Because we’re what’s next.”
“Once upon a time in ancient Greece, there was an enchanted pool. This pool was sacred to Salmacis, the water nymph. And one day Hermaphroditus, a beautiful boy, went swimming there.”
Here I lowered my feet into the pool. I lolled them back and forth as the narration continued. “Salmacis looked upon the handsome boy and her lust was kindled. She swam nearer to get a closer look.” Now I began to lower my own body into the water inch by inch: shin, knees, thighs. If I paced it the way Presto had instructed me, the peepholes slid shut at this point. Some customers left, but many dropped more tokens into the slots. The screens lifted from the portholes.
“The water nymph tried to control herself. But the boy’s beauty was too much for her. Looking was not enough. Salmacis swam nearer and nearer. And then, overpowered by desire, she caught the boy from behind, wrapping her arms around him.” I began to kick my legs, churning up water so that it was hard for the customers to see. “Hermaphroditus struggled to free himself from the tenacious grip of the water nymph, ladies and gentlemen. But Salmacis was too strong. So unbridled was her lust that the two became one. Their bodies fused, male into female, female into male. Behold the god Hermaphroditus!” At which point I plunged into the pool entire, all of me exposed.
And the peepholes slid shut.
No one ever left a booth at this point. Everyone extended his or her membership to the Garden. Underwater I could hear the tokens clinking into the change boxes. It reminded me of being at home, submerging my head under bathwater and hearing the pinging in the pipes. I tried to think of things like that. It made everything seem far away. I pretended I was in the bathtub on Middlesex. Meanwhile faces filled the portholes, gazing with amazement, curiosity, disgust, desire.
We were always stoned for work. That was a prerequisite. As we got into our costumes Zora and I would fire up a joint to start the night. Zora brought a thermos of Averna and ice, which I drank like Kool-Aid. What you aimed for was a state of half oblivion, a private party mood. This made the men less real, less noticeable. If it hadn’t been for Zora I don’t know what I would have done. Our little bungalow in the mist and trees, neatly surrounded by low-lying California ground cover, the tiny koi pond full of petstore goldfish, the outdoor Buddhist shrine made of blue granite—it was a refuge for me, a halfway house where I stayed, getting ready to go back into the world. My life during those months was as divided as my body. Nights we spent at Sixty-Niners, waiting around the tank, bored, high, giggling, unhappy. But you got used to that. You learned to medicate yourself against it and put it out of your mind.
In the daytime Zora and I were always straight. She had one hundred and eighteen pages of her book written. These were typed on the thinnest onionskin paper I had ever seen. The manuscript was therefore perishable. You had to be careful in handling it. Zora made me sit at the kitchen table while she brought it out like a librarian with a Shakespeare folio. Otherwise, Zora didn’t treat me like a kid. She let me keep my own hours. She asked me to help with the rent. We spent most days padding around the house in our kimonos. Z. had a stern expression when she was working. I sat out on the deck and read books from her shelves, Kate Chopin, Jane Bowles, and the poetry of Gary Snyder. Though we looked nothing alike, Zora was always emphatic about our
