As his flight descended into Hobby Airport, Chuck could see a good chunk of Houston, Texas. Not all of it, not even close: the city took up the size of a small country. But he could see a lot of it; the bayous, the skyline, the Toyota Center, which announced itself with neon lettering on its domed roof. All landmarks he recognized from a school trip he had taken in middle school. The relatively short flight from Chicago was a much more enjoyable experience than a charter bus from the Rio Grande Valley. When he was a kid, Houston had taken on a mythical status of true culture. East coast culture. That probably contributed to his decision to apply to postdoc work at Rice.
In Chicago, Chuck had gotten pretty fed up with wannabe cowboys. All his friends, all tboys of course, dressed in camo or wore fancy little bolo ties in pursuit of some old-timey, chivalrous western aesthetic. He hated it. They were just playing with things they didn’t even pretend to understand. He had been raised near the border by more wannabe cowboys and big men with big trucks, big hats, and big guns than you can shake a stick at – he didn’t need any damn more. Chuck was an iconoclast. He wasn’t sitting around talking to these fake men and fake cowboys. He was serious about his business: mainly masculinity and post-Kantian continental philosophy.
Flying in to Houston, Chuck got a pretty clear idea of the city from above. Freeways defining the landscape, fencing in each individual sector on all sides. A city intersected at every possible point by infrastructure that provides pathways out of its limits. The lack of zoning in theory presenting an exciting frontier or urban design, but in practice creating desirable and undesirable areas dictated by the fascist delineations of homeowner’s associations. Despite what Hunter S. Thompson might’ve said, Houston hadn’t been a town of cowboys, let alone pansexual ones, for quite some time. But there was something irresistible about Houston to hucksters and big money. While the cotton and sugar were sold in Dallas, the slaves who harvested it were sold here. While Colonial Pipeline was headquartered out of Atlanta and exists to this very day, Houston had Enron. If you want to be a respectable, long-term crook you go to Dallas; if you want to fuck the world and yourself, Houston’s your town.
Chuck exhaled the last of Chicago, and the boys he’d left behind, as the landing gear came and the plane descended onto the runway. His stomach jumped in his throat; he clenched the armrests. Before they even opened the door, he could feel the oppressive humidity. The department had sent some pretty boy in his young twenties to drive him to campus. About forty cops stood just outside the baggage claim area, which seemed to be in utter disrepair with chunks of ceiling missing.
Rice was absurdly collegiate: ivy growing up old brick walls, gorgeous southern architecture, tree lined pathways, and this big iron gate that may as well have been marble. It was Columbia by way of the bayou. Houston was a product of the capitalist class’s rabid investment in Texas after the Civil War. Some hungry New York financial engineers by the name of Allen decided to build a city on the malleable clay of a swamp. A complex network of bayous like the tunnels of a cave serving as the flood relief for surrounding plains, completely flat as far as the eye can see. Now four million people live on that clay, slowly sinking into the earth and getting flooded out every other year.
Chuck’s first semester at Rice passed by breezily. He made friends with a tboy PhD candidate in earth science named Milo, Milo’s boyfriend Art, and even some of the younger humanities professors. His peers, ostensibly. But by November he was almost out of T. This was catastrophic. T was the most important thing in his life, every Monday evening a time of meditative ritual. A needle, an alcohol wipe, a band aid, and a vial. He tried to contact his old doctor in Chicago, but there was nothing he could: there’d been a prescribing pause in Texas, so everyone was shit out of luck.
“We don’t have any extra, Chuck. No one does. Milo said, genuinely apologetic. His apartment was nice, but small. A one bedroom on California St. he shared with his boyfriend, Art. Less than a block away from the clinic that had once been created to treat AIDS patients and, for decades, prescribed hormones. Until they couldn’t. Art and Milo had a 2018 ‘Beto O’ Rourke for Senate’ poster framed, which Chuck found extremely embarrassing. He bit his tongue.
“What the hell am I supposed to do, drive to Oklahoma?” Chuck said, running his hands through his short, upright hair. “I can’t miss another dose.”
“No, you won’t have any luck there either.” Milo said, putting his arm around Art. “What about those online services that’ll mail them to you?”
“Those are illegal now, baby.” Art said. He was doing an MA in policy at the University of Houston and had a way of making it feel as though he thought you were deeply irresponsible for not knowing as much about politics as he did. Most impressively he did it without even saying a word.
“You could always go down to Mexico.” Milo said.
“Seriously? Would it work?”
“Tell me you’re not seriously considering that; I’m not hearing this conversation.” Art got up, putting his hands in the air and walking out of the room. He swished his hips like a woman, Chuck thought. He wanted to run for office, and refused to be photographed with a glass of wine.
“They’ve got premium stuff. Plus! It’s what our forefathers did.” Milo melodramatically placed his right hand on his heart and his left on his forehead in salute to the brave trans men of days gone by.
Chuck left their apartment, walking twenty minutes through Montrose after dark, a little tipsy. A few weeks prior he had caught a tree branch that had grown through the sidewalk and busted his lip. He had to cross under 59 to get to the light rail that would take him back to campus. He gripped the taser in his back pocket as he stood at the station. Behind him he could here jazz drifting out of a bar. He’d grown up near the border, he knew how easy it was to cross. But was it worth it? If he was stopped on the way back, how would he explain the T? He passed, would that be enough?
Later that week the governor came down to Houston to do a ride-along with immigration officers on a raid. The attorney general came with him and served subpoenas to the two major hospitals that had been prescribing hormones before the pause went into effect. While everyone was having a little Houston trip, the governor also brought some rangers down and they raided a trans house out by the Astrodome, uncovering a stockpile of T imported from some guy who synthesized it in the PNW. They had estrogen too, mountains of vials. Photos of the governor smiling with vials stacked miles high behind him, with rangers stood on either side of him, adorned the front page of the Chronicle. The state said they were going to pursue the death penalty, seeing as these were drug traffickers.
After missing another dose, Chuck boarded a Greyhound. He had sent a Signal message to a guy he’d known growing up, from the San Antonio queer group. The friend gave him the name of a pharmacy outside of Monterrey that all the tboys who lived closer to the border got T from. He’d also offered to accompany Chuck on the trip, but he had no interest in spending thirty hours with someone who’d seen him naked back when they were both teenage lesbians. He crossed the street from the East Houston transit center and entered gates guarded by armed immigration agents, into the Greyhound terminal. The terminal was deep in Houston’s predominantly Hispanic east side, formerly referred to as the Second Ward but now known as East Downtown (EaDo). He sat on one of the deep bucket seats inside, which was sweltering even in November, and waited for his bus to arrive.
It wasn’t long before he arrived at San Antonio. One of the oldest cities in Texas, inaugurated by five Franciscan missions along its river. The city’s soil was drenched in generational blood, serving as a center of the 19th century’s successive bloody revolutions. At the center of it all, The Alamo, which Chuck could almost see from the Greyhound terminal while he waited to transfer. The Alamo became a national symbol of the struggle for slavery and the lie of state’s rights. Chuck had spent most of his high school weekends here, and the smell was making him nauseous. The soil beneath the pavement rejecting his presence.
It was another hour before he boarded the bus to Monterrey, but they finally set off for the border. As the Greyhound rode through the streets of Laredo, he finally finished Lonesome Dove, which he found tedious. When they arrived at the border, they were taken off the bus and put into a separate single-file line next to the pedestrian crossers. Chain link fences dividing the bus passengers from the pedestrians, who were in turn divided from the vehicles.
“How long will you be in Mexico?” the customs agent asked. He had a goatee and mustache, light brown. His voice sounded young, and his eyes betrayed an inexperience, but he looked older.
Chuck affected his deepest possible voice, while still sounding like a human. “Just tomorrow.”
“What’s the purpose of your visit?”
“I’m seeing a friend who lives in Monterrey.”
“Where are you coming from?”
“Houston.”
“Great, next.”
On the other side of the crossing, his bus was waiting for him. As he crawled back on and pulled out his next book, Noon Wine, he looked over at the rust-colored fence that marked the border. This border which is supposedly a site of such unnatural violence. A border he’d heard described as a wound in the earth. A cut across humanity’s nature. It didn’t look like much of anything to him.
Monterrey was uneventful. Besides the fact he’d been off his hormones for two weeks, Chuck was also now deeply sleep deprived. Monterrey was nestled at the foot of a smattering of great mountains and hills, cradling the city in their loving arms. The streets smelled of mouthwatering grilled meat, and open-air kitchens showed off headless kids, that is young goats, with skin stretched thin over their rib cages and legs, roasting over red coals. The city was awe-inspiring, but Chuck felt nothing at all.
He called an Uber and rode from the bus terminal to the pharmacy, and then back again; his driver spoke perfect English, but there wasn’t anything to chat about. The pharmacy itself was completely uneventful: he picked up ten vials and left. Upon his return to the bus terminal, he sat and twiddled his thumbs until he could leave.
Once boarded, he dozed off. Sleeping as the bus wove its way through north Mexico’s mountains and hills. Even as the bus started and stopped, he slept deeply, and dreamt. He dreamt of an army of cowboys, vaqueros, surging from beneath the rocky orange earth on horseback. Their steeds leaping over barbed wire, and galloping toward the bus. They rode through a river, their horses emerging coated in dark, red clay. They ride, on demonic red steeds, revolvers drawn, led by General Santa Anna toward the bus. Chuck is shaken awake by the bus driver. They’ve arrived at the crossing.
“What was the purpose of your trip?”
“Visiting a friend in Monterrey.” Chuck stifled a yawn.
“What was the duration?” This agent was much older.
“Just today. Got there this morning.”
“Where are you travelling?”
“Home. Houston.”
“My daughter’s in Houston.” The agent didn’t look up from his form. “Anything to declare?”
“No sir.”
“Is that right son?”
“Yes sir.”
“I need to check your bag.”
The agent glanced in Chuck’s backpack, the vials obscured by his Rice sweatshirt. The agent patted him on the shoulder, sending him back over the border. Back into America.