Aslaug's Axe Shed

Yesterday evening, I took a most pleasant stroll down memory lane with my good friend Emil. A pleasant stroll that ended up taking me down side-streets to memory lane I haven’t gone down for a long, long time. I think I’ve been afraid of revisiting them, because they, as opposed to where the trip started, are horrible places. But I have needed to go there. I need to tell this story. I need to be honest with myself. And with the world.

I have to do this, even if it’s difficult. If you don’t feel like reading something disturbing, you might not want to go on. Fair warning.

To start with the beginning, I was bored out of my skull around half past four in the afternoon yesterday. I was looking forward to a friday evening with absolutely BUG all to do, and I called Emil and asked him if he wanted to drop by for a movie. He said he’d love to but that he was still at work (he’s got an after-school job doing dishes at the largest super-market in Aalborg … first Friday of December … damned I felt bad for him). Anyway, he would be home around twenty past nine and if I was okay with him coming by that late, he’d love to.

So … he did. He had a bit of a tale to tell as well, about how he managed utterly dumbfound a fellow known by most people using the bus-terminal in Aalborg. He’s an elderly chap and a member of Jehova’s Witnesses. Strangely enough, he seems to avoid me these days after last time he tried to convince me of the wisdom of his beliefs … can you believe that? Avoiding me? How strange.

Anyway, Emil, who is also heathen, had basically totally floored the guy and I got a good, hard laugh out of the story.

Then we settled down to watch a movie I had bought only a the day before. It’s an old classic in my movie collection, but since switching from VHS to DVD, I hadn’t found it anywhere. Now I did, and I wanted to share it with someone.

The movie in question is “The Crying Game” from 1992. It involves one of my all-time favorite actors, Stephen Rea in the lead role as a member of the Irish Republican Party … which is slightly bizarre since Rea is from Ulster himself and a protestant.

However, much as I love Rea’s acting (both in this movie and others), the main reason for me placing that particular movie so very, very high on my list of all-time favorites is the other lead role … Dil.

I’m not sure that “The Crying Game” was really noticed in America, since it deals with distinctly European (in this case British) issues, such as IRA terrorism and the Ulster-problem which at the time was still a bleeding wound in Europe, but over on this side of the pond, it had a huge, huge impact.

I have to explain something here. Back in the early months of ’93 when this movie finally reached Denmark, I had just turned 17. I was a desperately fucked up individual … more so than most teenagers, and for obvious reasons that you all know. I was a very, VERY sick puppy at the time. I had just survived my third suicide attempt when a friend had literally walked in on me just as I put the sharpest knife of my then-extensive knife-collection to my veins, and I was in a right sorry state overall. I didn’t know how to cope with the battle that went on inside me and I didn’t WANT to cope with it. I wanted it to go away, pure and simple.

Already back then, I liked going to the movies. That’s always been something I’ve enjoyed. I like to sit there in the darkness … in the quiet of the great room, with a massive screen in front of me and just be sucked into the movie. Whether that movie be a grand epic or a small, independent film … I like the engrossment. If you watch a film on DVD, you can pause it, get up and go and get something to drink, you can turn around and chat with the person next to you and just rewind if you missed something important, but in the cinema, you have to give your full attention to the film.

I like that.

And so, I remember watching “The Crying Game” for two reasons. Firstly because it was a movie I knew I couldn’t talk about at home. It was a bit like smoking … it was taboo and something one shouldn’t do. I knew if I were to tell anyone I had watched that film, I’d be given a cold shoulder, so I went quietly one evening, where my parents thought I was playing a roleplaying session. Instead, I cancelled and went to the movies.

The second reason was one line, spoken by the female lead, Dil.

“Can’t help what I am.”

But I’m getting ahead of myself here. I should go back to that evening in late january 1993, to the darkness of the cinema.

I remember it so clearly I can even see the room before me. That cinema has since closed and been replaced by a bigger, more modern one with better sound and so on. But I remember the room so clearly. It was almost packed full when I entered. I was so surprised. Mind you, “The Crying Game” had been severely hyped before hitting the big screen, for reasons I’ll get back to, but the media had managed to keep a lid on the big reveal for once. Or almost. Most people didn’t know about it … but I had heard about it from someone in the United States where I had been the year before as an exchange student. So I was prepared for it, and I was specifically going to watch that movie because of the “secret” theme.

There were a lot of couples there. It was a dark blue cinema-room, gently sloping downwards as such places typically are, with thick, comfortable seats. You could see the despondent looks on the faces of a lot of men there, who had apparently been dragged to watch this “romantic drama”, as I recall it had been labeled, by their girlfriends or wives. Most of them were totally unaware of what was waiting for them. Nowadays, something like this couldn’t happen … with the Internet and everything, but back then, it was actually possible to keep a secret like that almost watertight for a couple of months.

It was the premiere night, you see.

And I was there, watching a film I had wanted to see from the second I had heard about it. Wanted … and -needed- to see.

So the film starts. Fergus, an IRA volunteer, played by Stephen Rea, assists in the kidnapping of Jody, a black English soldier played by Forest Whitaker from a fairground. Jody is then kept as a hostage while the IRA demands the release of one of their members, in English custody.

Despite the gruesome situation, Fergus who does most of the guarding, and Jody strike up a conversational friendship. Jody tries to keep his spirits up, but slowly comes to realize that he will die. Fergus is despondent that he will have to do the deed on orders from his superior, but he at least tries to be a decent person towards Jody until that time arrives.

Jody tells Fergus the old fable of the scorpion and the frog, and they seem to be getting along very well. Jody then requests that Fergus go back to England, to find his girlfriend Dil, and tell her that he died thinking of her. Fergus, naturally, tries to make Jody think of something else but it doesn’t work, and eventually he agrees to do it, taking Jody’s wallet with a picture of Dil, for reference. He comments that she’d be “anybody’s type” and she is, in fact, quite a beautiful young lady. Jody, still upset but calmer once he is sure that someone will take care of telling Dil, settles down.

When the day comes and Jody is to be shot, he tries to escape. Fergus can’t bring himself to shoot the soldier in the back and so chases after him. During the chase, Jody runs in front of one of the Scaracen APC’s used by the English army, just as they are arriving in force to rescue him. The IRA safehouse is leveled to the ground and most of the terrorists die, although Fergus escapes since he wasn’t in the house … and his two superiors, a man and a woman (with whom he seems to have a relationship) escape as well.

So … Fergus has to go underground. He does so by keeping his promise, going to England to find Dil. He calls himself Jimmy and gets a job at a construction site.

By this time, early in the movie, the moviegoers were all quiet and paying attention. The story was engrossing and it was clearly a tale of deep morality and some serious emotional issues.

And then Fergus finds Dil. I swear, I can still recall how the vast majority of guys in the room just -sighed-. And I can also recall how more than one woman seemed a little distraught how their boyfriends or husbands were clearly infatuated with this rather glamorous female figure on the screen.

The trick, of course, is that not all is as it seems.

Dil is in fact a pre-op transsexual. It’s never stated in the movie, and some have speculated that she’s simply a very convincing transvestite, but MOST people seem to agree that she’s more than that. She identifies as a woman … -absolutely- so and is offended when it is suggested that she isn’t one. Transvestites don’t do that. They identify as their birth-gender, and have an opposite-sex persona that they assume for sexual kicks.

Dil doesn’t and anyone watching the movie quickly realizes that she doesn’t live the way she does to get some kind of kick out of it. In fact, she points out the emotional anguish at one point, explaining how she tends to fall for anyone being even the slightest bit nice to her. Because she’s desperate for that kind of warmth from other people.

There are many, many memorable scenes in this movie, such as the one where Dil comes to visit Fergus at the construction site during his lunch break a couple of days after he’s found out she’s still physically male. The construction-site manager, a fellow called Devereaux in a pinstriped suit and bad, racist attitude, tells Fergus to “get his tart out of there”, to which Fergus stands up abruptly and looks Devereaux straight in the face, saying “Have ye e’er tried pickin’ up yer teeth with broken fingers?” … in a thick Ulster broque. It’s my favorite movie threat of all time, and some of you may recall it’s the same question Marvin asks Theodore after crashing him through a table in Transitions.

It’s one of the best films ever made in my opinion, for a long list of reasons, but my favorite quote of all is when Dil looks sadly at Fergus, also after he’s realized the truth of her situation, and says “Can’t help what I am.”

I sat there, in the darkness of the theatre, and tears began to run down my face. I was seventeen years old, and for the past two years, I had tried pretty much everything to convince myself of my own masculinity, just to escape the dreadful, awful, horrible, TERRIBLE knowledge of what was wrong with me, and all for nothing.

And there she was, on the screen.

This broken angel.

This … imperfect statue, draped in sadness and pain and suffering.

“Can’t help what I am.”

I wept. I didn’t even try to hide it.

By then, the room had half emptied. MOST of the guys who had swooned over Dil when they first clapped eyes on her, had stormed out in horror when she disrobes into a full, frontal nude scene, revealing the truth of her condition to Fergus. They reacted like he did in the movie, with loathing, fear and disgust and ran away. It had brought a storm of laughter from most of the women, may I add. But when she said that line, I just gave up fighting back.

For days … DAYS … I kept hearing her voice in my head.

“Can’t help what I am.”

The next week, I cancelled another roleplaying session on another group and spent the last of that month’s pocket-money to go watch the film a second time.

The room was nearly empty. I think I saw four guys in there in all, and at two of them were holding hands. There were about twenty other people there, all female.

And I watched the whole thing again.

And I fell in love again. Like I had the first evening. Not so much in the character as in what she stood for. She had the guts to admit to herself and to the world what was going on with her.

I watched it, and I wept again.

A year later, I had my own apartment and I was sitting on my bed, amidst boxes of stuff I hadn’t yet unpacked. Boxes of stuff I couldn’t bear to unpack.

I sat there, all evening on the first evening in my new home, and I realized I had a choice to make.

There were three, simple options.

Firstly, to live my life on a lie. To be everything I detested and remain in my prison for the rest of my life. That meant I could have a family, have children and a “normal” life. I could “fit in” and be what everyone expected of me.

And I would hate myself. Loathe myself to such an extent I knew I wouldn’t survive it for long. At the age of 18, I knew this to be an absolute, undeniable fact.

The second option was to live another kind of lie. To live half existences. One one hand to be what people expected of me in public, and in the comfort and privacy of my own home, behind locked doors, I could be myself and not hide from myself who I actually was, deep down.

Down that road lay insanity. Not only that, but it was such a dishonest way of living that it really turned my stomach.

The last option was the most terrifying.

It was to act. To do something. To finally get help. To confide in someone … and to say those three most difficult words any human being can ever say to anyone:

“Please, help me?”

I sat there, and once again, I had tears rolling down my cheeks. I didn’t sleep until it was nearly three in the morning if I recall correctly because it terrified me. Not to sleep in my own home for the first time, but the realization that with the freedom of having my own place, came the responsibility to take charge of my life.

It took me five long, horrible years to get there. Five years of failure, pain, insecurity, loneliness and deep madness.

They were the worst years of my life, and they came so close to destroying me that these words can’t possibly describe it. I lost myself.

I lost my sense of identity. I tried to replace it with a fictional identity, because anything was better than being who I was. I alienated people I loved and cared for. I scared people half to death. Old friends told me they had no idea who or what I was anymore, and that they never wanted to see me again.

Others stuck around me because they, by their own admission, couldn’t bear the responsibility of being the person who, by leaving me by the wayside, pushed me over the edge and into perfected self-destruction.

And all that time, I had this vision of a broken angel with me, looking straight through the movie screen …

“Can’t help what I am.”

I ranted … I raged. I fought back.

I stood on rooftops in ??rhus, at two thirty in the morning, screaming at the injustice of the world, raging at the moon and a starry night sky. I hurt myself. I tried destroy myself slowly. I lost my mind so completely I can’t even remember what I did for long periods of time.

I became more of an animal than a human being in some ways. Took pleasure in the discomfort I realized I was causing others. Why should they feel good … when I was in so much pain?

What right did others have to happiness?

I hated everyone who smiled. Literally. I wanted to claw their faces off. Gouge their eyes. I wanted to make them scream and bleed.

I never did, thank the Gods. But in my sickness … in the deepest, most twisted and darkest recesses, I sat there, on a roof, overlooking the trains coming and going to the station late at night, like a Golum craddling his preciouss, hissing at the world and sneering and snarling.

Wanting to jump off, to see if my wings would carry me.

Wings I didn’t have.

I wanted to fly away. From my own insanity. From my pain. From the whole world. To throw myself off and for a few … glorious seconds, feel like I had no weight. Like I could just fly away, and then hit the ground, ninety feet down.

And then … I would truly fly away.

I sat there, talking to my voices. Listening to them as they answered me. Prodded me. Tried to lure me.

“It’s easy,” they said. “It’s so easy. And it’ll be swift. You won’t feel a thing, and then you’re -free-.”

I’d bite myself until I bled. Suckle at the blood from my palm for a while. I’d sneer and spit, hiss and snarl like a beast. Once, someone saw me up there and came up to try to talk me out of jumping.

I scared the poor guy off. I think he thought I’d throw him off instead.

And then, the next day, I’d waste the hours of daylight on ennui or make-belief.

Only to repeat the pattern at night. For long periods at a time, I stayed with a group of friends. I slept on their couch two weeks in a row without going home, to stop myself from being alone with the darkness, my voices and the dreadful knowledge of what was wrong with me.

The fear of myself. The fear of the TRUTH.

I all but dropped out of university. I changed to another course. Dropped out of that, too.

Tried to get some semblance of a social life up and running. I started going to GBLT clubs, where at least I felt like no one stared at me.

Where at least I didn’t feel like a freak.

“Can’t help what I am.”

And finally, I broke down. Fell out of college. My mind couldn’t take it anymore and I looked up information on how I could “get fixed” as I called it then. I told my parents I had done so … and lost them, as you all know. Lost my family.

Most of my friends.

And I didn’t even have myself to fall back on, because … after all … who was I?

I ended up moving away from ??rhus. Back to Aalborg where I’d come from.

And finally … finally I said those three, terrible words.

“Please, help me?”

Not to someone who couldn’t help. I said it to a doctor.

So I got help.

The rest is history.

But Dil has been with me through all these years.

“Can’t help what I am.”

But now I don’t have to apologize for it anymore.

Now I just am.

And that is good enough.