“We thumb our red noses. We reveal all. And we have never played the fool.”
—Demitriosa Muen, organizer and spokesperson
The Joyful Port Workers
I dress up as a clown and let people beat me up in the alley behind the cybermotel. The first man who ever did this to me, he was my best friend. He paid me fifty credits and I brought the clothes. I let him do this to me because I liked him.
This other man raises his fist again, and I imagine the dark cobblestones opening their mouths and licking my blood from their lips and then swallowing me whole. The man’s knuckles taste like burning hydrogen. My left incisor is wiggling. I can’t breathe out of my red clown nose.
When the punch hits, the stars sparkle.
My back hits the cobbles. Something crunches in my elbow, a hot dart. And then, I feel it coming on. I don’t know what it was exactly—the turn of his wrist? The way his blond hair caught the light? I was descending already, with every impact time getting slower and more liquidy, and the lights flaring brighter, and the good-bad Feeling in my stomach getting sharper and more nauseating, but this punch really crowned it.
I raise one gloved palm and say, hot wet tongue: “That’s it, that’s it.”
This is the moment of suspension. The client either hesitates or keeps punching. I hate that there’s thrill in the fear of it. If their day got disrupted, with the port strikes, and especially if whatever sim the cybermotel gave them didn't get their anger or boner off, and especially if they’re human, then I’m likely to become ground chuck. Delicate white glove be damned.
The moons wait an eternity.
The man’s boxy shoulders fall, and he lowers his fists.
Ohhh fuck. Relief is a relief. I stagger up off the ground. He doesn’t offer a hand. I never expect them to offer a hand. My elbow burns. My face pulses with each heartbeat. I wipe my mouth with the back of my wrist, and it comes back sticky with blood and cherry lipstick.
The man cusses something incomprehensible, peels a few more credits out of his wallet, and tosses them at me. I’m too slow, and they land in the grimy puddle under my boots. Then, before I can say anything, or even really catch his face, he turns on his heel, mechanic's jacket bunching, and strides fast out of the alley. Fast like he’s afraid. Like he wasn’t the one trying to split my cheek on my teeth.
It's a shame—I wish other young guys lingered. Only the oldies ever do.
Between my boots, rent money is getting soggy. The moons are brighter and more beautiful than anything I’ve ever seen in my life and also vomit is climbing up the back of my throat. I’m half-hard but the Feeling is keeping me at bay, but with the Feeling comes the ache of someone prying my chest open with a crowbar.
Fuck. Gotta go. Gotta go now. An enforcer nearly came across me last week.
I don’t remember scooping up the credits but I do, and then I’m walking up the back stairs, back into the cybermotel with both my gloved hands on the flimsy railing.
My best friend was the best, even when he was pounding his fist up under my sternum and I choked on blood for the first time. Unlike me, he didn’t grow up on the spaceport. He came here when he was nine, and we met five years later. His parents weren’t pilots or ship crew, or asteroid miners who claim ‘passing through’ and stay forever—they immigrated here proper, with permanent visas and everything. Those visa grants, coupled with the fact that he lived around here like me, made his house interesting in my book. It was easy to guess that his parents were supervising the portworkers.
The motel’s dead. I get to the second floor, somehow. Simulation pods remind me of laundromat washing machines, and I never thought I’d weep at the sight of a washing machine, and yet here I am in this long dim hallway lined with pods and tears are pricking my eyes.
I swing one open. My legs slide in easy. Then the rest of me.
I lock it behind my head, then I peel off my bobbed wig, my nose, and get my tights half off before bile is spewing up my blood-clogged nostril-holes. Fuck! God, tonight was really bad. I fumble half-blind for the intravenous needle, and then I’m curled on my side watching the dark cramped walls of the pod give way to patterns that bloom in vivid crystalline whorls.
This doesn’t feel good-bad, this just feels good.
My best friend would always say, If those sissy little Sennoyrs at the port tried this shit, maybe they’d calm down.
I want to say, The juice gives them just a tenth of the immersion it gives to humans like us.
The whorls are getting larger and more three-dimensional, and they’ve started sticking to the walls and floor of the sim in big dark sheets. My body is still loading in. The juice plus my gestating bruises makes my shivering feel like heaven. The Feeling spreads from each bruise and I imagine gloved hands, wrists tawny-brown like mine, sprouting from my skin, cupping my face, holding me down. It was good to call it off then. If that man kept hitting me I think I would have either cried or come and neither would have been good. The sim lurches into focus, and I’m ready. I’m so ready. I’m drifting in, I’m opening up like spread ribs and going down like a spiraling spaceship. My best friend says, A real clown is much tougher than that.
Every week I report to my landlord to pay rent. My studio isn’t much but it’s mine. It's all I have, really. It’s a mosquito sucking the blood from my fingers. I offer my fingers anyway.
My best friend told me that on full planets, far away, things like this are better. That on their spaceports, spaceports closer to old Earth and settled only by humans, rent is done on a month-to-month basis, where each month oscillates around thirty-one days regardless of the moon cycle. I can hardly imagine such a luxury.
By the time I haul my rubber body off of my futon, I’m already ten minutes late to the meeting. I slide into the cramped office on the top floor of the cybermotel with my left eye puffed to hell and my left elbow cold-sharp like tacks. The lights are going out everywhere else in this building, but on the managerial floor, those fluorescents are beautiful, baby. Wires stream down from the ceiling, a gimmicky attempt at foil streamer decoration.
“I’d hate to see the other guy.” My landlord never uses formal tense with me. He’s a mild-mannered-looking human with spiked hair transplants and glasses perched at the end of his nose and his nose bleached, as fashionable. He’s white, too, which he’s got in common with my best friend. (Favorite subject of my best friend—how post-planetary migration never meant post-race.)
Now here is a man who’s never felt the need to use a pod. Now here is a man who also happens to be my boss. I live and work in this building as a janitor.
I’ve been coming to our meetings green around the gills for seven months now. His quip isn’t fooling anyone. I don’t think I’m fooling him—at least, not about the bruises. I’ve been siphoning free pod time using an old manager code, which he remains blissfully unaware of, but he probably has an inkling about my gayfucky masochistic thing in the back alley. As long as he’s the only one, I don’t care. I think he lets it happen because it’s good for business. Shot, chaser.
If my best friend were here, he would have a smart reply. As it is, my head is pounding too badly to try. I just sink lower into the seat and try not to flash my swollen elbow above the desk.
He presses a button on his viz-station (old fart) and the chip in my neck buzzes. My headache spikes, momentarily.
From his viz comes a half-hearted eerk! and he frowns.
Yeah, not enough money linked in there at the moment.
I nudge the stack of cash from last night toward him, then I look up at the ceiling and tongue the spongy seam running across the inside of my cheek. It tastes like clean spare blood. I find myself dreaming again of last night. I realize I didn’t get to jack off.
My boss is saying things in that boring, vaguely uncomfortable old monotone. Bitching about the strikes, probably. If I angered him to arousal, and stuffed him in a pod, I wonder what memory it would conjure for him. My ribs ache like someone took a hammer to them. Then he says, “If they come by, just stay out of their way,” and I catch some hint of urgency that slips away sooner than it came.
I don’t chase it because to ask for clarification would be to admit I wasn’t listening. I always stay out of sight anyway, with my bruised ass. Some of the customers—not the regulars sporting wildly colored hair or cheek tentacles or shoes two sizes too big, or the grief-stricken elderly in old wedding dresses, but the off-world memory tourists and the off-shift enforcers of the steering committee—they get a little titillated seeing me skulking around with my glass cleaner and black light flashlight and extra-strength disinfectant. My ramshackle bruising as tone-setting as a neon light, affirming the ambiance of this shady needle-motel in the port district. If your emotions take aim at what memories your pod dredges up, then just imagine what that poor janitor could see.
Whatever my landlord’s spewing I couldn’t give less of a fuck. I need to get to clocking in. I need to get my shift over so my shift will be over.
I’m picking out a used fleshlight from a simulation pod with my tongs when I turn around and come face-to-face with a portworker.
My soul nearly ruptures from my body. One of her rainbow cheek tentacles almost brushes my face, and I jolt back. Her eyes blink in apparent surprise—at my hellish appearance? She’s just a tiny bit shorter than me, with her extra limbs tucked behind her back. I’m immediately scrambling to remember when the last time was that I held a proper conversation with anyone who wasn’t my best friend. Much less someone from the Sennoyr nebula.
She’s in full protest getup. The usual drab port-mechanic’s jumpsuit has been foregone for a red nose, with old-Earth Victorian neck ruffles ringing her neck and everything. In lightning association it reminds me of the alleyway, and I immediately realize: no matter what happens, this will be a bad conversation for me.
For a moment we just stare at each other, and we don’t say anything, anything at all. I see it dawn in her eyes, inescapably, like the white light of an imploding ship: this is the man who we’ve heard dresses up as a striking portworker around here and lets men pay to beat him.
It has never struck me so completely and infinitely, wanting to die.
No, worse.
As quickly as it dawns, it does not leave. It stays weighted in her eyes as she hands a flyer to my useless free hand, and says in smooth hums, with her sober manner and tactful formal tense: “We’re organizing a strike, district-wide. Not just for portworkers. But any worker in the port district. Gathering signatures, credit pledges, or verbal commitments. Not for tomorrow, but the day after. Midnight to midnight, no labor. We clown instead. Use bowties as flowers, vases as hammers. Show the bossmen, and the spaceport steering committee, that we’re worth more than they’re bargaining for.”
I’m still holding the used fleshlight with my tongs. My heart is pounding so loudly I’m convinced she’s sensing it off her whiskers. Her eyes are boring into me, the weight in them, the silence stretching so expectant—
I say something like, No, no, yeah I won’t work that day.
(What?)
And then she’s saying, Great! and I stuff the fleshlight into the trash bag at my feet, quickly, and when I look up she’s disappearing around the corner. Eager to make her escape.
The relief is beautiful and then a backhand. For her to go like that …
The open pod reeks of stale lonely sex. Though she’s gone the weight remains.
The last night I spent with my best friend, we passed a spliff back and forth on the roof of the motel, and the blood from my split lip was wetting the end, and he smoked it anyway.
We’d both gotten off our shifts, and just hustled out of the alley. In the distance began the high keen of the curfew sirens. The wind, up that high, was cold and bracing, and we swung our legs over the street below and gazed at the port in the distance.
It was just a craggy mass of darkness jutting into the night sky, distinguishable from the black space beyond only by its lack of pinprick stars. Usually it was dotted with yellow and red lights, port authorities and radio towers and shored-up old immigrant restaurants, but that night it was as silent as a void. The workers, humans and all other species, had hung clown paraphernalia from the railings and riggings and gone to bed. Prohibited polka-dot jumpsuits, shuddering on flagpoles outside supervisors’ offices.
Weren’t clowns supposed to be jolly?
I searched for his tension still, beside me, even though tonight he reeked only of weed, not his favorite cherry liqueur. I was fifty credits richer and yet it seemed more distant than the port. I could feel the outline of his knuckles under the skin of my sternum, webbed in the burst blood vessels there.
Each word stung hot-sharp over my lip. Swollen vowels, stumbling. “Was it like the real thing?”
My best friend brought the spliff to his lips, and his chest rose and fell with the exhale. He was wearing his bartender uniform with the top three buttons unbuttoned, and the distant light made the edge of his blond chest hair catch white against his shadowed skin.
He said, “Well, you’re human.” And you look stupid in that polka-dot dress.
I didn’t let that pang touch me then. I swatted it away and into the night wind.
He stretched out his arm and tapped ash over the street below, his eyes unwavering on the distant outline of the port. I watched the light shift over his red knuckles.
His voice came, low: “And a real clown is much tougher than that.”
Oh.
I looked down and exhaled. Then I kept swinging my aching legs. My tights shushed against each other, and my knees pulsed, damp with blood where the cobbles had torn nylon. “But you don’t feel like crying anymore?”
Funny how that works. He knew, I knew, that I was talking about his parents.
Smoke escaped over his top lip. I wanted to lean in.
He said, quietly, “No, I don’t feel like crying anymore.”
I thought about the imprint of his knuckles, again, and I felt a bit high. He leaned to the side, toward me, and I leaned toward him, so our shoulders pressed against each other.
I rested my head on the crook of his neck, and against his warm skin, my swelling ear pulsed so badly I almost blacked out. I watched him lick his bottom lip, unconsciously. My blood-smear, rubbing off on his tongue.
The flyer is crumpled up and tossed away from when I crumpled it up and tossed it away. It peeps out from behind the foot of my futon. I stare at it out of the corner of my eye and brush dinner off my teeth harder. The paper’s pale-yellow demeanor is pissing me off.
My elbow is still crunchy and useless. I’m starting to think I fucked the bone when I landed on it. My credit balance isn’t high enough to afford a visit to the clinic. And rent’s coming due next week.
The portworker’s eyes come to me, again, and I want to double over and close my eyes.
Fuck her. Fuck her.
I don’t have a list of regulars. I pick up people from the motel or sometimes on the politically hostile anon forums. On a dating app I could probably find someone who’d be thrilled to bloody me, with niceness behind it, but that’s not what I need. Times like this I wish I could just text someone and arrange the alley on the low, but instead I rinse out my aching mouth and use my good hand on my viz to start a new forum thread: 22, male. any1 looking to beat up a clown tomorrow night?
Then, I realize it looks like I’m proposing to jump a clown during their general strike, so I add: (the clown would be me).
My left eye throbs. I contemplate ending my post with going toward medical bills but decide against it. The anti-progress guys who respond on the forum don’t care about that shit. I tongue my aching incisor, then I hit send.
Usually I only do this once a week but desperate times call for desperate measures.
I can be tough. I can do this.
From the corner of my room, the flyer glares at me. Suddenly, I’m like the ships haunting my dreams, hurtling passengers toward earth instead of the atmosphere. I’m craving the Feeling so bad I could die with it.
Fuck weekly. How can weekly be enough for me?
Weekly? When we used to hang out every single fucking day?
A vision comes to me, as if I’m watching my old self in a sim: me, curling into a ball on the floor and letting out a scream so loud my mouth tears my body in half.
Scheduling isn’t enough. I need someone with ready fists. If I could conjure a guy out of thin air and shuck on my tights and get pounded into the tile of my room, right now, I would. Then I could just saunter down to the pods, and slip inside, and see him again.
My parents hated my best friend. They were hosting him at dinner one night, when we were sixteen. This was back when they were only unsettled by him. He ate quietly and watched them talk about the beginning murmurs of the unrest at the port: thinly-worded work missives issued by the steering committee, increased enforcer presence but the enforcers didn’t even tip well during lunch rush. My parents both worked in a restaurant in the port, in an old-Earth diner shaping the same kebabs and kotlet they made at home. They were sympathetic to the aliens’ multicultural resolve, even as they called the aliens derogatory names between asking to pass the salt. (Insect comparisons were nearly a compliment, my dad said in passing, what, with the droning speech and extra legs and resilience like they wore chitin armor.)
I glanced at my best friend; he glanced at me. Then he picked up his fork and began poking holes into my parents’ conversation. Asked if they’d want more enforcers if they tipped better. Asked why they called Sennoyrs by their slurs when they respected them so bad. What about their prowess at the port? Did they think the big burly ones were tougher than men? When my parents got fed up and kicked him out, we shot them the middle finger and ran down the dark street in just our socks. It was disgusting. I’d never felt so alive.
In his old bedroom, at his parents’ place, he flicked on his lurid purple lamp and downed the rest of a half-open beer, then shoved aside a stack of precalculus homework to start packing a joint. I’d spent so much time in here, and still, I couldn’t help but notice how all his things were nicer than mine. Even his weed. But he never rubbed it in my face. He always shared.
He said, Your folks are hypocrites. At least when I shit on Sennoyrs, I mean it with everything in me.
I always brushed away his asides on other species. What did they have to do with us? I told him about how my mother had slapped me when she found me, at four, smearing her missing eyeshadow across my lips.
My best friend laughed hard when he heard that. Then, he sobered up, handed me the joint, and said, Your old bitch isn’t shit. They rarely ever are.
I wake to my boss standing next to my futon, looming above me with his fists on his hips.
My soul nearly separates from its mortal tethers. His eyes are dark. The pre-dawn light makes his bleached nose almost glow in the shadow.
From his right fist, his master key dangles casually.
I can’t move. I can’t startle, or think.
Just, stare up.
His lips move. “Are you striking today.”
Behind my eyes pricks something horrifying. If it were to come out I know it would never stop. I swallow and blink. My throat seizes, and it comes out as a pitiful little noise.
His face doesn’t change. But I change. Like he forced me down and shoved his hand down my throat and turned me inside out. I become something beyond recognition.
Not-me whispers, No, I’m coming into work.
He says, “Good.” Then he leaves. That’s all he does, say “Good” and leave. The key jingles. Not-my door slams shut behind him.
For another moment Not-me can say nothing, do nothing, just lay there like a dead animal.
Then Not-me gets up, grabs Their coat, and takes the back stairwell, out into the alley, out into the rousing city.
My best friend’s bar IDed at the door. At seventeen still, I couldn’t afford a fake one, and he claimed management would kill him if he backdoored me. That one thing, he couldn’t share.
So on those late nights, I started probing around needle-motels, and their pods, for fun. I only had enough money for little recalls, but little recalls were unpredictable. Interesting. Enough to make me relaxed and giggly: my mom making her hand into a dog-shaped shadow puppet and tickling me; my best friend sneaking me into his parents’ hotel room they’d booked for their anniversary, before they arrived, so we could replace half of each wine bottle with water; his heel, jammed against the revolving lobby door so I could walk in without fidgeting.
After visiting the pods, I’d bike to his place and use the fire escape to climb up into his bedroom. The lights all off. The curtains blowing ghostly. Me, lying upside down on his bed, head spinning from the juice. I’d rub my inner elbow, sore from the pod IV, and drift, waiting, wondering whether we’d smoke tonight or what shampoo he used to have it sink into his sheets so completely.
Those visits stopped after the night I met his parents. Before, all I’d known about them was what I pieced together from his little snipes. They hated this spaceport. They’d hate my floppy, busted-looking sneakers. On inspection days they came back and drank, a lot. He told me once that they installed that fire escape ladder on the second floor of their brownstone so he could come home without them having to see him. In the evenings, their muffled, raised voices seeped up through his bedroom floor like tar.
I met them. It was dark, and I was scared, and they ripped through his room. They’d picked his lock first; they tore aside his clothes, his drawers, searching for something without even turning on the lights. His weed? Or maybe the destruction was the point. They yelled at me, there on the bed—I think they thought I was him, and then they made out my brown skin. I lunged toward the billowing curtains and half-fell down the ladder. Then I cowered under a bush of Sennoyri begonias until their banging ceased.
My best friend ended his shifts drunk, more often than not. I’d hear his clambering hands on the rungs of the ladder and my heartbeat would rise. Those nights would turn into him picking a fight with me—or me, picking a fight with him—then we’d edge closer and closer to violence, but we’d never cross it. That’s how it worked. That’s what made it fun.
That night when he saw his parents had gone through his shit, and worse, that they’d seen me, he took two steps across his room, balled his hand into my shirtfront, and then I was hanging out the open window, looking up into the windy void as he screamed in my face.
The windowsill dug into my tailbone. The moonlight caught his snarling nose; the curtains whipped on either side of his face like beating wings. His breath reeked of something cherry-sweet and vodka. Every shift of his fist in my shirt was crystalline, and I always remember my only thought. A vacant thought, silvery-bright, among the fear and the shame and the ringing in my ears: On my birthday, he better mix that for me.
In the rousing city, in the early morning and the slow, here is what Not-me finds:
There is a wall of flyers inside of a bar that once held a best friend. Stapled at the fore of the layers-thick, abject detritus are three identical yellow papers. At the top of each paper is an elegant illustration of a two-headed clown. Here is what the papers say:
STRIKE CALL! TO ALL PORT DISTRICT WORKERS. All day tomorrow, on the FIFTY-FIRST of the TWIN MOON CYCLE, A GENERAL STRIKE IS IN EFFECT. DON COLORFUL ATTIRE. COME IMPROPER. COME AND PLAY.
The demands of the workers ARE:
- INCREASED PAY, FOR BOTH SKILLED AND SPECIALLY-SKILLED WORKERS
- PROTECTIONS FOR SELF-DETERMINATION OF GENDERED EMBODIMENT, GENDERED DRESS
- DISSOLUTION OF THE SO-CALLED ‘PORT IMMIGRATION AND QUALITY AUTHORITY’
- RIGHTFUL RECOGNITION OF ‘THE JOYFUL PORT WORKERS’ AS A NEGOTIATION AND BARGAINING ENTITY, OF WHICH SPEAKS FOR THE BETTER WELFARE OF ALL PORT WORKERS AND SPECIES
The picket stretches from CYTRIT STREET to PORT REFUEL GARAGE B. For any worker who wishes to strike but would undergo substantial financial risk in doing so, a STRIKE FUND has been established and IS HEALTHY. Reach out to DEMITRIOSA MUEN at the following viz ID:
Then, the ID is listed.
Not-my body aches. Not-my legs tingle. Not-my eyes are glued to the ID.
Not-me whispers, No work at all. No motel, no alley. You don’t want to work in the alley. You don’t want to go back to the alley. Tell me you don’t want to go back to the alley again. Tell me you don’t want to go back to the sim.
Tell me it’s not worth it to see him again.
Instead. Instead. You can still don the tights, the dress, the nose. Then you can go ask for the money. You can go ask for enough to fix up your elbow. You can join the workers, then. Spend all night with their open arms. Spend all night with them. Even if you used them in the alley. Even if you used them in the alley. You can do it. You can do it.
My best friend says,
My best friend says—
A real clown is much tougher than that.
The last time I saw my best friend was in my room, in the cybermotel. My breathing was all ragged. The city lights threw shifting shadows across my ceiling.
He slowly laid down on the futon, next to me, and my head lolled onto his shoulder, where his armpit met his chest. I couldn’t control much anymore. My nose was bled out and crusted, and the adrenaline was all gone. I was just so tired, so, so tired, and in pain from all the pain of it.
Each inhale, shallow and hitching. My tights balled on the floor.
(I thought, distantly, One day I’ll own more feminine clothing than this. One day.)
Then, his voice began to hum against my ear.
He said, softly, Listen. Listen to me. I decided I’m leaving. I’m getting out of here. Earliest ship in the port, tomorrow. My parents had the right idea. This whole place—the committee, the district, the spaceport—it’s all going to shit.
I wasn’t following him all that well. I’d gotten fixated on that word—parents. I’d agreed to do this so he’d stop feeling so sad about it. And here he was, still talking about it, and it was like he was sticking a pin into me. And I was all confused, too, because I knew what he’d done was wrong, and I wasn’t supposed to have agreed, and I wasn’t supposed to like what he did to me, but I could feel his handprints sinking into me like I was toffee, and there was no going back to the way I used to be.
I waited for him to offer to take me with.
My IV pinches and drips.
Dripping blood from my mouth, I watch myself wait.
