Damn it Johnny, you know I love my Big Beef N Cheddar
The second time I ever came out as trans, it was in an Arby’s drive-through in Alberta on a flip-phone in the height of the oil boom. A decision made with impassioned haste that left lingering memories of trying, failing, and the desire to try again regardless of how bad it all can feel.
In the early 2000s, I sat in the driver's seat of my 1994 Plymouth Acclaim, its alternator slowly dying, causing the car to rattle and shake, and stared at an unknown menu rife with potential. All possible futures and curly fries. I had never been to an Arby’s, I had only ever imagined it, only ever dreamed it was real, until I suddenly found myself stuck in a line snaking around the crumbling stucco husk of one just off the highway. A drive-thru line of bodies not moving on or ahead, providing ample time to settle and be still, to let my mind wander unguided while my tired and aging car rumbled under me.
I cannot confidently tell you what year this was, but I can tell you it was after June 2004 because the CD stuck in the aftermarket stereo hastily installed in my dashboard was The Beastie Boys’ To The 5 Boroughs. An album I was very excited to buy because I loved the Beasties enough to overlook countless flaws. In the years since, I have softened on the record. It’s good, but never fully great, but it does include choice lines like:
cause I’m a freaky streaker like Winnie-the-Pooh,
T-shirt and no pants and I dance the boogaloo
I found myself guided to Arby’s by the same misguided emotional landmarks that anyone might be lured to the drive-thru of a fast food giant they have never tried—aimless despair and idle curiosity. I was living in Alberta, had finished trade school, and was working in a glass shop with an array of men riddled with causal bigotry. Men who, often over coffee and cigarette breaks, threw slurs and idle threats to the wind like so many discarded amber-painted butts. Their bitter filters flung to the dirt and pavement to be forgotten, as if they meant nothing.
I asked a colleague once what he would do if he had a son who came out as gay, and with a cold, steady voice he told me he would beat it—he called this fictional child “it”—to death and try again until he got one that wasn’t “broken”. Then he asked to borrow 4 bucks for a cup of coffee, and I gave him a 5 dollar bill without question.
I kept to myself more than I allowed myself to be lured into offers for after-work drinks, or weekend BBQs. I spent my time hiding parts of me away where no one could see them and so instead, I wandered, and I did so largely without purpose. Down roads I didn’t yet know, into malls and bigger malls and the small towns that would sprout up around newly hoisted Best Buys. I searched for coffee shops or record stores, or anywhere I could hide and maybe be seen, and drove through the city just to have time with myself in a car going nowhere at all. Just to be alone with a stereo placed there by a friend who worked at an A&B sound, a job he took because they let him be high at work. At a certain point in your life, it’s enough that your job lets you work while you’re high, and I was jealous of that simple desire. Harder for me to be high at my job, where my life depended on the stability of myself and the coworker who said he would beat a fictional gay child to death without a second thought. There’s a morbid need for clarity in that.
This is not to say I was alone. I had friends who lived in another city a few hours away, I dated women whose names I struggle to remember clearly in the years since they were once so important to me. A few years earlier I had broken up with my high school girlfriend after telling her I wanted to be a woman while Nickelback’s “How You Remind Me” played in the background and the reaction to that news pushed me deeper into a self-destructive closet from which little would emerge. I wasn’t alone, but I was lonely because my heart was isolated from any other part of my body.
I saw a trans woman on CSI:Vegas, and she was a dead body. The second and third and hundredth time I saw a trans woman on TV she was a dead body, or a poorly written sex worker, and often both. It’s a grim landscape that allowed me to see the future I wanted for myself reflected in death on TV, but I did all the same, and I thought about it constantly. I tried to come out while Nickelback played in the background, and it went badly, but I thought about trying again. I knew only bad, terrible outcomes for my own desired future, but I yearned for it still. No matter how ruinous they were foretold, trans desires were always worth pining for. I dreamed of them, alone and in private, on long drives and endless wanders through a city I could never bring myself to love.
I went to Arby’s because I had given up on feeling anything at all, and that is an angel and a devil on your shoulder, each ethereal voice whispering big beef ’N cheddar. The woman I had been dating texted to ask why we hadn’t seen each other in a while, and why I seemed distant. These message came in easy fragments. C U SOON? and R U OK. I texted STRUGGLING RN, and the reply came TELL ME. I weighed the options, and thought about what I was about to lose if I went the distance with the thoughts that plagued me.
Texting on a flip phone was a painful process dragged from tired fingers. Hitting numbers once or three times just to conjure a single letter on a screen. There were only so many you could afford to send before the extra charges rolled in, and each text sent was a precious memory sent over unseen wires, written with simple codes. Words shortened. Feelings truncated.
This is all to say that I thought it all through so carefully. Each letter, how many times each number would have to be hit to lay all cards on the table. A 4, pressed 3 times. A space, then an 8, a 4 twice then three times again. A 6 twice. 5 twice too. T9 was, for some phones, predictive. It could read a message and see the writing on the wall and imagine what might be coming next, but there was no imagining what I was typing out because who would ever type that in their dreams they were the dead body found in the bathroom of an 2-star restaurant on the Las Vegas strip in an episode of CSI. I got two words and moved up to the menu grounded in the pavement at the head of the drive-thru line.
Arby’s is sandwiches. That’s it, or at least that’s what I thought. Just sandwiches, and sandwiches are often just nothing. I can find nothing at home for less than this. They were offerings of shaved beef, cheese. A bun. Curly fries on the side. Coke. Nothing. Empty. But I was here, and there was a car behind me and a thousand cars ahead of me, each of them engaged in this long act of nothing, so in a panic I ordered the Beef ’N Cheddar, with curly fries and a Coke and also a roast beef sandwich on the side. I was here now, and maybe this would be the last time. Perhaps when this was all done it would be my body found in a bathroom somewhere, sad and forgotten. Why not two sandwiches before the end comes to claim you? Drive ahead, the voice crackled through the menu, and I wound my window back up and idled in place, turned the Beastie Boys up louder and skipped through to the songs I could still believe were perfect.
The screen of my flip phone, still open, had two words eagerly waiting for a third and final thought. I hit 4 three times, a 6 twice and then a space. Drove ahead, idled again. The car rattling below me. I hit 8, then 7 three times, then 2. My heart raced as the secret appeared in block letters on the LCD. 6 twice, 7 four times and repeated. I said the word aloud to make sure I knew how to spell it and felt my body shiver, turned the volume up louder in case my body language suddenly became too loud. 3 twice, 9 twice, 8 twice. My fingers hurt, moved up the line, but I was so close now. 2, then a 5 and it was done. I hovered over the button to send it, sweating a little, my car shaking and not moving. The Beastie Boys all at the same time on the stereo.
Send.
Nothing. I moved further up the line. Nothing. Shaking car. Turn the stereo up. Feel the blood in my face, colouring my cheeks. Nothing. I looked at my phone screen. Nothing. I checked for missed calls, and hovered over the idea of calling her, but thought that was not the best plan right now. Calling from the drive-thru at Arby’s to explain it was just a joke, the whole I’m a transsexual thing. But It wasn’t, and I wanted to see if and where the idea would land.
Move ahead please, sir.
I paid for my order, then picked it up at the next window. I pulled into the parking lot. Turned the car off but kept the key in, kept the Beastie Boys on the stereo to drown out the anxious thoughts in my head and stared at a phone that was as silent as the day I first flipped it open and bit into a sandwich that was nothing and everything at the same time. The cheese melted perfectly over the beef, warm and comforting and begging for more. I ate it so quickly it might not ever have been real at all, and then turned to the fries to clear the table before the roast beef course.
Coke to wash it all away.
The phone silent on my dashboard, cooking in the sun.
The roast beef was the same, moist and tender, sweet and inviting and clinging to the bun it was pressed into. It lived in my brain like a song heard a thousand times, one I knew every word to but could not remember ever hearing for the first time. When it was done, and it was gone, I wanted a thousand more, but the phone laid silent on the dashboard still. I had to do something to shake the weight of my decisions off, to turn anxious thoughts into aimless wandering. I turned the key over, felt the car shudder to life once more, and I drove away, my stomach full and my heart freed just a little, the words I knew to be true burned into my phone screen, never to know a reply.
A few months later, that same silent phone dropped out of my pocket from hundreds of feet in the air while replacing a window on a high rise, and it shattered upon meeting the ground. It died, taking all my unacknowledged secrets with it, and I felt the same twinge in my heart knowing what words it took to the grave with it. I thought about sandwiches too, and how perfect they tasted, how beautiful nothing became when I needed it to steady my heart. When everything became too much, when the world only showcased my desires as tragic, shameful, or loathsome. When thinking about transness meant thinking about the end. I knew the words I found for me were more than all that, more than nothing, and when I needed the truth of it, I could always spell it out. Even if it was just for me and even if it was not going to stay, even if the words would be ignored. I could say it all out loud and claim its power to keep me moving ahead just a little more.
