The Last Testament at Hollywood Beach

This is a work of autofiction. All of it is a lie, except for the parts that are true.

I could feel the noise before I heard it. It was a low, whining drone that resonated through the shitty drywall that holds our apartment together, a pulsating howl caused by every siren in the city going off at once. Our phones started screaming next, bleeping at each other like birds struggling to find their mates until my boyfriend lost his patience and dumped them all in our sudsy kitchen sink. We listened together as they burbled and shook, gently clattering our half-washed dishes in their death throes.

It was at that moment I knew it was real. Not when I heard the sirens or the amber alerts, but when I watched my grumpy man huck a bunch of electronics we’d barely just paid off into dirty dishwater. If we didn’t need our phones anymore, that meant we didn’t need anything else either. The day we’d endlessly talked about, panicked about, and jokingly begged for had finally arrived. The end of the world was upon us.

Unsure of what else to do, I open the door of my apartment and look outside. We’re in a garden unit that opens out to the alley, and you can see the train platform behind the building if you stand on your tiptoes. Seeing the elevated platform covered in people and lights reminds me of a Broadway show: the action centered on an elevated plinth, the audience protected by the distance. Surely it can’t be real, right?

But there’s already old blood streaked brown on the red Thorndale sign, and the people trapped at the stop are banging on the doors of the stalled train and begging for shelter. Some words drift down to me from the chaos: the bombs, they’re finally doing it, LA is gone, NYC is gone, of course Chicago is a target, who knows what’s next?

The fear has turned them feral. A woman hunches under the glowing winter heaters, digging wildly through a canvas Trader Joe’s bag and shoveling the canned dolmas she finds directly into her mouth. A gaggle of thick, shrieking men in seasonally-inappropriate shorts throw hockey punches, bro-hooting the other commuters out of the way and pulling their best backyard wrestling moves on each other. I watch a dude execute a near-perfect moonsault off the top of the stalled train, neatly missing his friends on the platform and taking a swan-dive onto the electric rail below.

I hear him scream. I smell him cook. I decide I don’t need to see any more.

I turn to see that I’ve been joined by my partners. My boyfriend is standing on the sidewalk, his feet planted firmly in the cracked asphalt, his mobile dab rig dangling between his lips. He offers me a hit and I take it, gratefully. Our girlfriend stands next to him, tears streaming down her face while she giggles at the weird violent show before us. 

Nobody says a word. We just go.

We begin to walk towards Hollywood Beach. It’s about a half-mile from our crumbling brick-faced condo, and facing the violence we may encounter beats being sealed in a landlord’s special of a tomb. If we are going to die, we want to do it in the presence of Lake Michigan. 

There’s no way we would hear each other even if we wanted to talk. As we turn onto Sheridan, the shriek of ambulances and car horns hits a hellish frequency that vibrates the bones in my skull. This was the yowl we’d heard from the inside of our home: the weeping of a city dying, car by car. 

I vaguely recollect that EMPs will fry electrical systems, and I realize that these cars will all be immobile soon. I wonder if the people in their little tin cans know they will die in there. I am sad to realize I don’t care.

The problem with caring during the apocalypse is the need to feign shock at the tragedy that is occurring. But faggots like myself have been waiting for this day because we have lived in the United States our entire lives. We have watched this society disassemble itself to create the machine that will crush us. It’s never been if; it’s always been when.

We’re walking south towards the city center, a place most of our neighbors fear as the eventual ground zero for whatever attack is coming next. We drift in a dreamlike haze past the glass and concrete high-rises, occasionally catching glimpses of the chaos within. The wide look-at-me windows frame bizarre pantomimes. Some people cling to each other and weep, others hurriedly pack suitcases for a safe destination I know they’ll never reach. A bloodied man slumps on a white couch, his hands leaving rusty stains on the upholstery, nursing on an expensive-looking bottle that will never see the special occasion it was purchased for. 

Outside, herds of screaming people charge up the wide sidewalks looking for cover. The flow of panicked Chicagoans points north and so we push against it, parting the panicking masses like a biblical miracle. 

As we walk, I consider the nature of apocalyptic knowledge. When I was in grad school, I read a book by Susan Sontag about the AIDS crisis. It was where I learned that the word apocalypse comes from the Greek word “apokalypsis,” which means a revelation of new knowledge. Sontag explored the idea that the AIDS crisis was an apocalypse visited upon queer people, and the evidence is the knowledge faggots gained as a result of social ostracization and mass death.

I consider apokalypsis as we walk past the still shiny-new express bus stop, one that in happier times would take us to our favorite bubble tea place on Argyle. The first happy Christmas I ever had was in Chicago, at that bubble tea place with the fake pink flowers cascading down the wall next to the Gacha machine. 

I’d never spent Christmas anywhere but with my family before that day. Being from a small town, I thought everything would be dead on a holiday. The internet assured us things would be open, but I had my doubts until I got off the bus. 

I was stunned to see the sidewalks crammed with people like us. There were no glowering mothers pulling their strollers closer, no gawking old men trying to decide if jerking off to my girlfriend’s incredible tits might make them faggots. Just other queer folks with a free day to share, holding hands and laughing and making out under the flashing red-and-green lenticular train stop display. 

We settled into a booth at our boba place. A transmasculine waiter with slicked-back green hair and snakebites came to take our order. He smiled widely, the relief of our company plain on his face. He apologized for the oily fluorescent lights, the endless loop of “All I Want for Christmas is You” on the tinny loudspeaker. He asked if we were all together, and he smiled when we confirmed that yes we were. He wished us a merry Christmas together, and gave us a free bag of cookies for dessert.

This is the core of Sontag’s apokalypsis, to me: knowing that the delusions that prop up society are not true, and operating accordingly. Straight people cling to their shared assertion that Christmas is a magical day of family togetherness. Trans people know that there is no such thing as unconditional love, because our families are often the first to reject us. Once you get through that, you realize that Christmas is actually a chance to enjoy the city while straight people eat dry turkeys in Schaumburg. 

Faggots let straight people have their delusions. In return, we get a single day where we kiss and laugh and give each other free cookies in public without fear.

Our previous lives are the price of this freedom. My boyfriend, my girlfriend, our friends and found family here in Chicago: All of us have been informed that we are dead to somebody. The people who see us as corpses claim the right to mourn our pre-transition selves, neatly ignoring the fact that transition is our most viable alternative to suicide. It feels like they’d prefer it if we’d kill ourselves just so they don’t have to learn a new pronoun.

So many trans people, prematurely mourned and dismissed. We are dead to our families, and dead to the world that hates us. But somehow, we are also still here. 

Once you are killed by the people who used to love you, you either accept your death or resurrect yourself as something new. I injected testosterone into my body, but in the eyes of those I am estranged from, it may as well have been the green monster-making juice from RE-ANIMATOR. The minute I changed my gender, I became a member of the fabulous dead. And since there’s no more room in hell, I chose to wander the north side of Chicago.

As we walk towards the beach, we pass our favorite coffee shop. It’s dark inside, the windows smashed, espresso beans and thick house-made syrups curving brown swathes across the tiny asphalt patio. 

In happier times, it was my home away from home. It didn't look like much from the outside — just a storefront in one of those concrete retail boxes by the park. But inside was a coffee place straight from the 90s, complete with a bunch of comfortably busted leather couches and an honest-to-god jar of biscotti on the counter next to the register. 

I spent hours there back when I was in grad school, nursing a refillable mug of drip and skimming through the piles of yellowing books on queer theory I’d checked out from the library.

Somewhere in the dark shadows of those broken windows is the couch I was perched on when I opened a pale pink paperback titled “We Both Laughed in Pleasure” and learned about the life of my brother Lou Sullivan. 

Lou was another writer like me, driven by the compulsion to record the messy details of his life as a trans gay dude before it was too late. He wrote about the joy he experienced in the brief moments he was able to spend sucking cock in bathhouses. This euphoric cruising helped him validate himself as a gay man even as the doctors he was begging for hormones told him his queerness was evidence of a mental disorder. He fought for the right to be exactly himself, and he is one of the reasons men like me are able to be weird little faggots today.

I wish I could have met him and told him how much he meant to me; unfortunately, we only shared about five years on this bitch of an earth. I was a child while he was dying of AIDS. The only real time I ever spent with him was in the now-broken window of that coffee shop, where I barely noticed the sun setting behind the smeary frosted glass as I read his diary cover-to-cover. Sontag’s AIDS apocalypse took my brother Lou away from me, but at least he left me something to learn from. Apokalypsis, again.

I have living siblings, but they don’t talk to me anymore. I was shocked when I received the news that I had died in their eyes, and that they’d chosen to mourn me like I’d been lost at sea even though I was just sitting on my couch playing Yakuza. I emailed my sister to ask if she had any interest in fixing things, and she replied that she had mourned me already. She was uninterested in doing the work involved in resurrecting me. This is the unconditional love most of us are offered by our families, and that’s why we learn to function without them. 

I guess now that the bombs are falling, my sister and I will never see each other again. I vaguely hope she’s sorry about it, but to be honest, I've already mourned her too. We already died in each other’s hearts long ago, so why should I think about her with the time I have left? 

Everyone I know has a story like this. The cumulative grief of transness is a heavy burden. Sometimes when I feel the ache of all that loss, I wonder if the people who abandon us ever feel sorry about it. Surely they remember us, because humans remember their dead. Aren’t they curious about where the bodies end up? Where are all of the corpses that are supposed to be occupying those empty chairs at their holiday tables? 

But we’re all going to be corpses soon. A howling screech snaps me out of my reverie. I watch a Cybertruck speed up the bike lane, knocking out the reflective barriers and attempting to cut around the pile of panicked motorists clogging the intersection. He hits the curb hard and veers wildly towards Hollywood Avenue, narrowly missing the broken facade of Hollywood Deli only to be obliterated by a speeding city bus going the opposite direction. The shiny dumpster car crumples like a stomped-on origami frog. 

We all cheer. I should feel guilty. I don’t.

We skirt carefully past the flaming wreckage, our goal the paved walking path that curves towards the beach. We jog across the street, leapfrogging the traffic jam. 

I catch a glimpse of the death race unfurling over the hump of the highway onramp on Lakeshore Drive. Brakelights glimmering in all directions, the north- and southbound lanes jammed to a complete halt. I hear gunshots bouncing off the metal hulls of the vehicles. Straight people running to or from the suburbs, trying to survive long enough to die together in their hermetically sealed homes. I watch some people give up and exit their cars, screaming and trampling each other, a few jumping directly over the side of the bridge and into the water below. 

I wonder how long the people who choose to stay in their cars will survive. I wonder how long it will take for bodies to start tumbling from the tall buildings that line the highway, and if they’ll fly far enough to strike the traffic below. I decide to stop wondering about things like that.

As we meet the path towards Hollywood Beach, I see we’ve joined a procession of people like ourselves. A huddle of strangers with technicolor hair and weird punk clothes, backpacks full of bug-out supplies. We are surrounded by queer people who have no family waiting for them anywhere else — people like us who are also fabulously dead. This is the only family we all have now, and like the shrieking people trapped on the highway, we long to die together. A wordless understanding, acknowledged only by the passing of water bottles and lit joints between the frightened clusters of faggots marching slowly towards the rainbow pier.

If we were straight, we’d be huddled in basements miles from here, burrowed into the nooks and crannies of McMansions and hoarding the remains of our Costco runs. But faggots have all been living in this apocalypse for so long that we know we won’t survive whatever is coming next. We’re out of second chances. Caring for each other in the time we have left is the only priority now.

And then it's there: the shelter house that marks the sidewalk to the rainbow pier, and the crumbling concrete stairs beside them. For a moment, it looks no different than any other summer day at the gay beach. The long concrete structure is crammed with desperately partying faggots and the air is thick with anticipation and weed. I hear the bass of those ten-inch woofer speakers that look like rolling suitcases, shaking the weirdly hot air hanging over the rainbow pier with Chicago house music. A call to action dopplers past us, harmonizing with the car horns and screaming on Lakeshore Drive: It’s time for the percolator. It’s time for the percolator. If there’s ever been a time for the percolator, it’s right fucking now.

A pile of metal and glass lies shimmering at the top of the concrete steps that lead down to the pier. Familiar logos wink up from the carnage — the Marlboro man twisted up like a pretzel, the Newport logo no longer alive with pleasure. The faggot from the nearby Shell station had liberated the cigarette display, and him and his friends were tossing the remnants to everyone heading towards the apocalyptic rave happening in the water.

I nab a pack of Camel Crushes, the ones with the menthol bead, because I know they’re my girlfriend’s favorites. The last cigarette I’d ever smoked had burned between my lips a half-decade prior, the butt stained with the bright red lipstick I used to hope would make me feel like a girl. I was a smoker well into my thirties, but I was able to put my American Spirits down at the start of my transition. I made a promise to myself to do everything I could do to survive as a man for as long as I could, including giving up cigarettes for good.

Until now. I wish I could tell you that it tasted disgusting, or that I didn't smoke it after all. That when my girlfriend took a long drag off a lit cigarette and held it out towards me that i shook my head, remained chaste and tobacco-free until the moment I died. I wish I could tell you that it wasn’t worth it, that it made me puke or cough up a lung or caused some other horrifying reaction within my body to confirm the ways I'd purified myself. 

I lick my girlfriend’s spit off the butt and it tastes like her chapstick, smoke lingering on the edge of the bright menthol snap. I breathe the smoke in deep, imagining it scarring and pitting my lungs with tar, and felt nothing but relief. It tastes like never having to pay rent again. It tastes like never having to argue with a doctor again. It tastes like Sallie Mae, Freddie Mac and all their twisted fucking friends at the fed going up in the inferno they made of the world.

Crossfaded on weed and my first hit of tobacco in several years, I stop walking. I take my partners’ hands and feel the tears streaming down my face. The jolt of nicotine in my bloodstream after years of abstention has jarred me into accepting what is happening now. It has reminded me to weep for myself and the people I love, and everything we are about to lose. My girlfriend is a streak of wet red next to me and I gather her body into my own, letting her thin hands wander my body as she weeps into my thick shoulder. My boyfriend is tall and wide and his big warm arms circle us both. 

“I’m so glad we’re together,” he says, and I sob my agreement. All we ever wanted was to be together at the end of the world. We thought we’d have more time, is all.

We stare across the white sand beach leading to the red pier, taking in the cheerful chaos caused by every trans person on the north side of Chicago showing up for the same impromptu living wake. Lake Michigan is our mother, large enough to have her own weather system to warm and comfort her orphan brood of freaks. It should be colder today, but somehow it’s sunny and warm. I do not know if the warmth comes from a false spring or growing levels of radiation. I do not have time to care.

Neither does anybody else. There are blankets everywhere, pinned to the drifting sand by bodies making the most of the life they have left. Piles of faggots weeping, groping, bleeding, and fucking the remaining time away. I watch a trio of thick, sweaty bears driving their cocks into each other’s mouths, alternating who is held down to receive and who is released to give. A crowd watches, cheering, maybe waiting for their turn. A few feet away, a skinny twink with a massive strap-on is taking all comers. They’re hips-deep in a fat femme who is struggling to stay on her hands and knees while she gives them her ass, her delighted giggles somehow cutting through the whine of sirens behind us.

A pile of backpacks, duffle bags, and reusable totes lay at the top of the crumbling concrete steps. Everyone has brought something to share at this stone soup funeral for Chicago’s fabulous dead. Some people remain with the supplies, rummaging through them to meet the needs of the refugees joining the beach party. 

A willowy girl with long pink hair picks through the bug-out bags, handing a box of bandaids to a similar girl made of elbows with a cut over her eye. A big hairy guy next to her is handing out tabs of acid while his gay twin shakes a small tupperware tub of mushrooms at the crowd. They hold hands as they bicker over natural versus chemical highs, trying to determine which hallucinogen will provide better visuals during a nuclear blast. I almost tell them it won’t matter, we’ll all be blinded if we’re close enough to see it, but why ruin the fun?

My bear of a boyfriend darts away from us. I whimper as I feel his hand leave my shoulder, but I relax as I realize he is not leaving me here for good. He just has something to contribute to the medicinal potluck. He reaches into his voluminous beat-up black backpack and pulls out a squirt-bottle of testosterone gel. He waves it over his head, inviting anyone who hasn’t tried T yet to get a dose. A dozen pretty-eyed boys mob him, and he hands the bottle off. They shout triumphantly as they spray the chemical goop across their soft freckled shoulders, waiting to feel it. They’ll never get to feel it again, but at least they’ll have done it once.

I understand why my man had to run away for a second, because his big giving heart is why I want to spend my last minutes on earth with him. He held my hand at Planned Parenthood while I got my own prescription for T, and I did my first shot in the bathroom of his old studio apartment. He knows that every trans person deserves a moment to feel like themselves, at least once. 

I got to feel it for five years, thanks to him. Some people get an entire lifetime to feel it. Some of us only get a day, or an hour, or a moment on the beach before the curtain falls for good. 

It is not enough. It has to be enough.

Me and my throuple drift into the crowd as one. People start to come up to us: ex-lovers, old friends, even folks from the coffee shop we used to go to. We all embrace, cry, laugh, make the kinds of gallows jokes trans and queer people have been making to survive the apocalypse since the decades before we were born. Family units stay clinging to each other. Nobody is alone. 

I vaguely wonder if we should join the entwined bodies on the beach. I ask my girlfriend if she wants me to let go of her hand, if she wants to tag into one of the orgies raging before us and get thoroughly gangbanged before she dies. She considers briefly, then shakes her head. The idea of being separated when it happens is too frightening for either one of us. We don’t want to lose a moment together when there aren’t that many left.

Suddenly my girlfriend straightens, pulls away from my side, waving and yelling hello. An ancient trans woman stumbles through the crowd. She's wiry and small, a tight network of skin and bones swathed in sweatpants, with a shock of box-black hair tumbling into her weary eyes. I do not know this woman, but my girlfriend receives her as one would a prodigal child. 

I watch baffled as they hold each other, bodies shaking with laughter or tears. My beautiful girl beams at me, her hazel eyes shining. She tells me this is Ruthie, a friend from the train station. My girl used to help her sneak around the turnstile and then they'd make small talk on the platform. The way Ruthie clings to my girlfriend makes my heart twinge, reminds me of how lucky I am to be in love with someone who cares for other people at the same natural cadence as her breath.

Then Ruthie lets go. She asks us if we have food and water and drugs. She tells us to go and enjoy the shores of the lake before time runs out. She teases us about pretending like we’ve created some new kind of grief with this ersatz funeral. After all, aren’t we all already dead? 

My girlfriend points her towards the pile of backpacks. She tells Ruthie she loves her, encourages her to make the most of the time she has too. They embrace briefly, my girlfriend’s slim arms crushing the older woman’s ribcage so closely that I wonder if either will survive. Then they separate, tears glittering in the corners of both of their eyes. 

The crone winks at me and walks away, and I know I will never see her again. I let myself mourn her for an instant, letting all the love I have in my heart for her burn out in a brilliant burst. Then I push my body towards the water, urging my partners to follow.

The sky is turning green and the air is getting thick with smoke. I hear gunshots and screams rattling down from the beautiful private balconies I used to daydream about owning one day. I used to resent how impossible it felt to live among these people, but now I am simply grateful that they live in a different world than me. I feel nothing but relief that for at least these last few minutes, straight people will finally leave us alone.

I can feel the heat from the burning city beating down on my shoulders. I ask my partners if they want to take one last swim. We strip ourselves as quickly as we can, tripping over our rags as we jog into the icy blue waters.

And then the city is lost to me for good. I cannot make out the shoreline, can't even see the wink of the sun on the skyscrapers downtown. We’re used to the haze from the forest fires in Canada, but now the usual smog is fighting the fallout from Detroit. It coils and hangs in the air, a green-grey mist that melts into rainbows when it catches the light. 

The air and water meet before me and I can see nothing but glitter and smoke. All around us are bodies, a writhing soup of bodies finding release; nobody panicking about forgetting their trans tape or neglecting to tuck around somebody's precious goddamn kids. The bass pounds from the speakers parked on the pier, a remix of Sabrina Carpenter punctuated by grunting and laughter and wails. 

Everybody's naked and laughing, sobbing in each other's arms because we made it to the end, knee-deep in Lake Michigan, stoned and delirious and full of love; and isn't it a relief to be together still?

If you are reading this, you may wonder how and why I stopped to write our eulogies in the split-second before we died.

(And I have to hurry now because I can see the winking lights of bombers rushing across the water as the sky gets darker, their twinkling lights mirrored in the eerie goopy surf as they head downtown for the grand finale.)

All I can tell you is that my brother Lou Sullivan published the FTM Newsletter throughout the AIDS apocalypse, not even stopping when he learned it was about to kill him too. He only slowed, acknowledged with this meek mea culpa in FTM 13:

“NEWSLETTER LATE FOR A REASON. This issue of FTM is over a month late. As many of you know, I have AIDS and spent several weeks in the hospital, weighing in at 88 lbs. I’m home and on the mend, now, though my energy level is very low. Look for changes in future editions of FTM as volunteers help produce the newsletter.”

Fraglie as a twig, dwelling in his own demise, his main concern was that his newsletter would continue. His quarterly collection of opinion columns and personals and endocrinologist recommendations and comics clipped from the newspaper; ephemera collected to give his trans brothers reassurance and connection and an occasional laugh. I read every newsletter he published, long after he died and his journals were published posthumously, because what he did matters. It mattered then, and it matters now.

My brother Lou is mostly known for his diaries, published as a single volume after AIDS finally punched his ticket and sent him somewhere he couldn’t write new words for us anymore. Where he darkly mused after his diagnosis that if he could not live his life as a gay man, he would at least die as one.

And I know what he speaks of because I was somehow a gay man and a corpse at the same time too. I had the best years of my life living as a faggot while I died in the eyes of everyone who couldn’t bear to know the man I’d become. I have lived as a gay man and I have died as a gay man, and death does not scare me anymore. 

If I died before now, I would have been buried in a dress and she/her-ed at my funeral. I got to spend five years being the man I am, and now I will be immortalized in the arms of people who understand me and love me. When you die, you deserve to be remembered as you actually were. 

I talk about Lou because he deserves to be recorded and remembered, just like me, just like every other faggot that is going to die on the altar of the world that burns us for its sins.

And all of us on this beach right now deserve to be remembered too. Every faggot floating in the murky water, sobbing with joy and loss and acceptance as the twinkling bombers overhead seal our fates. I have one arm wrapped around my boyfriend’s thick waist, our girlfriend crushed between us in the tepid bath. An entire world in my embrace. A thing I would keep forever if I could. A thing I will record, right now, so the world can keep it when I am gone. 

I want the people I love to be remembered. All of us. We deserve to be seen as we are, we deserve to be loved for it, we deserve to immortalize every second of the lives we fought for until the flash blinds us and burns our writhing silhouettes into the rainbow pier—

We deserve to be remembered—