03 Oct Writing: Fellow Traveler

The year we moved into Lupinewood we decided to throw a huge party and invite the whole town to celebrate. It was late spring of 2017, just after the election, with the gears of the current culture war just starting to really turn. As a group of tattooed transsexuals moving into a conservative, well-to-do neighborhood, we were looking to be good neighbors and hoping to signal that we weren’t a threat.

Andrew had made all these pretty paper invitations, and I volunteered to drop them in the mailboxes of all our neighbors. I had on a black dress and a wide-brim hat. I thought I looked like the kind of witch who’d give you a lucky marble instead of a poison apple, and I was enjoying such a wholesome activity, basically skipping from house to house.

As I walked back up the hill, I imagined how excited our neighbors would be to get a peek behind the scenes at the crumbling old manor on the hill.

When I got back home, a couple friends from the collective were out front, and asked me if I had seen the cops.

I had not seen the cops.

I was told that police had gotten a call from someone on our street, complaining about a suspicious “traveler” who’d been “peering through their windows.” This cracked me up because in one sense, okay: I had indeed just finished a long stint of being ‘a traveler;’ I’d been on tour with my band for months. But I definitely wasn’t peering in any windows.

Fast forward 8 years, and I’m standing in the big hall at Lupinewood with a man about my father’s age, sipping a seltzer while he sips a beer. This man is a neighbor of mine. In any other context he and I would have been at best invisible to each other, walking through the same world in different dimensions. But we were just at a block party that got rained out, and last minute the party moved inside Lupinewood instead. So suddenly here we are together, looking at a large painting of a passionate queer kiss.

I’m wondering what this guy could be thinking, surrounded by the fringe art of my freaky friends, standing next to me in a dress. Then he really ankles my assumptions by quietly admitting to me that he’s always wanted to take a drawing class.

I tell him that I hope he does, and I mean it. I’d be so curious to see what he makes.

Story by Ruby, edited in collaboration with Terran