Kaylin

An advantage of homelessness is that you get to sleep in a lot of different beds.

This is called looking on the bright side.

The bed I’m in right now belongs to Kaylin, my cousin. I’m housesitting for her while she’s in Australia. Kaylin is not her real name, nor is it her name on OnlyFans, the website where she makes a lot of money — like, a million dollars a year.

My first, and so far my only, peek into her output as a sex worker happened while Matt and I were living on the road. We were pretty active on Instagram. Actually, Matt used Instagram, and I stayed out of the way.

(We had a pretty good following. @Juliusthevan had 8K followers at his peak and even made it into a television show, “Splitting Up Together.” Now that Matt and I are getting divorced, I understand that title more than I did at the time.)

While we were out #vanlifing, my cousin Kaylin was developing her own Instagram fan base. She struck provocative poses — face-down, ass-up stuff — while dressed in lingerie. From the neon lighting to the outfits to her sultry makeup, her photos were pure seduction.

Matt showed me. “She’s definitely sexy,” I said. I wondered out loud if her family had seen the pictures. That was all we said.

Kaylin texted me last summer. “{DEADNAME}!! I’m coming up to San Francisco! Let’s get dinner!”

“I would love to!!! But can we talk first? I’ve got something to share.”

“Absolutely. I’ve got something to share too.”

It feels somehow pedestrian now to have a conversation in which one of you comes out as trans and the other as a sex worker, and then the trans girl admits she’s curious about sex work, and the sex worker tells you that they’re trans. At some point these hot topics turn into facts.

Kaylin and I went for dinner in the Castro. We sat in a windowed booth — my favorite booth in San Francisco. I had my first passable night here. Hamlet took me out for dinner on a Friday not long after quarantine was lifted. The city was alive. Another trans girl hanging with her gay friends and I clocked each other. Beyond that, nobody gave a shit about me. No one saw me. So this is my favorite booth.

We went for a walk. I bought cigarettes — I was still smoking back then. We talked about her career. I told her about the perils and phases of transitioning — living a new life socially and an old one professionally. We talked about the gap between substance use and abuse, and whether for each of us there was one. We talked about family and how they accept or choose not to accept us. My sister and I have spoken four times in a year, and on two of those calls I hung up on her. Her dad, my uncle, disowned her because of her sex work. We compared our lives, wildly different and strangely parallel.

We got together over Thanksgiving — we had a couple of slumber parties at the house in Guerneville where I was catsitting.

We ate our holiday dinner at the house of our Uncle Mike who lives an hour south. Uncle Mike is the middle brother, six years younger than my dad and six years older than Kaylin’s. Uncle Mike is the cool one. He left home at 20 and drove to San Francisco to set up shop as a photographer. He worked as an usher at the Warfield. He and his wife Rhonda avoided a family wedding by eloping in Las Vegas. I remember the black-and-white wedding photos that Mike shot. He and Rhonda are wearing black Wayfarers. He’s smoking a cigarette. They both have wry smiles. I remember seeing that photo at age nine and thinking… I wanna be like that.

Their youngest daughter Callie lives at home. Callie, early 30s, is smart and disability-level anxious. When we saw her that night, she had just gotten a job at the animal shelter. She’s lost that job since. She showed us a rug that she is making in the garage.

Before dinner, we had a Zoom session with most of our family — uncles, aunts, cousins, cousins’ kids, more than twenty people all-in. Kaylin’s dad, my uncle Tim, was on camera. Kaylin and Tim hadn’t seen or spoken to each other in a year. Kaylin seemed unaffected. She told me that she was expecting to see him, and it wasn’t weird. They have not spoken since.

On Black Friday, Callie, Kaylin, and I — I call us the Misfit Cousins — went thrift shopping. There’s one more Misfit, Adam, a vibrant redhead with a massive, strange sense of humor and a significant alcohol problem. But he’s on the East Coast. In our family, literally every kid is either cis and married-with-children or a Misfit.

(Or dead, I guess. We had two cousins who died young due to substance use — one from prescription opiates, and one from alcohol. That might help contextualize the Misfits. We keep it interesting, but we know our limits.)

While we ate lunch, Kaylin told Callie about her OnlyFans career. Callie told us that she had, on several occasions, sold pictures of her feet on the foot fetish scene. I told both of them that I am a somewhat-prolific author of trans erotica. We’re all sex workers — Kaylin just gets paid the best for it.

The bed from which I am writing is affirmingly feminine. The bed linens are pink: flamingo, crepe, rose, blush. Even the weighted blanket is pale pink (note to self: when you get home, dye your weighted blanket pink)(note to self: get a home). Both the flat and fitted sheet are stained with menstrual blood. I am not disgusted. I feel closer to the sacred feminine.

Around the house you’ll find the tools of an industrious sex worker: dildos, a receipt on the fridge for a strap-on harness, books on sex and sexuality, jeweled booty plugs, a cross-stitch that reads “It’s not a whore house, it’s a whore home.” Kaylin has two packages of soft-bristled toothbrushes, and she probably uses them for the same reason I do — to brush the back of your tongue in order to decrease your gag reflex.

I remember when all of this was titillating.

Kaylin has post-it notes up the post in her kitchen that bear affirming thoughts that must have originated in a therapy session.

“I don’t get to grow for FREE!”

“Fall in love with the process”

“Love has a tendency to multiply rather than divide”

Kaylin is in recovery. Why are all my friends in recovery? Why am I not? She brought me into my first AA meeting. I sat off camera and said nothing. The meeting ran until 8:30pm, and at 8:33 I poured myself a glass of wine.

This house… it has the most spectacular views of Los Angeles. I read that astronauts gain a unique feeling about humanity once they see Earth from space. That’s how I feel about Los Angeles until I go for a drive.

You can see Santa Monica to Beverly Hills, West Hollywood to Culver City. On a clear day, you can see Catalina Island. I can point out UCLA, the Hustler Building, the Beverly Center, Museum Row, Nakatomi Plaza from the movie “Die Hard,” the Pacific Design Center, and SoFi Stadium. The Stahl house, famous for its gorgeous profile against the city skyline, sits below us.

It’s hard to believe the City of Los Angeles maintains the road that takes you here. It’s bumpy and uneven, with two major switchbacks that remind me of roads in Greece. Near the end, it turns into a one-lane road that requires cooperation. A couple of days ago, I witnessed two men try to get into a fistfight, their vehicles face-to-face in a standoff. One guy punched the other’s window. That guy got out of his truck and started pointing in the other one’s face. This guy started filming with his phone. That one grabbed the phone and threw it up the hill.

I do not miss testosterone.

Once you’re here in the house, you are safe. The house is totally exposed, with glass windows that open to, I don’t know, one million Angelenos? Yet it’s private. I can stay here, all by myself, with no interference. I’ve stayed here for half-weeks at a time, only opening the door to reach for the groceries the delivery person left on the mat.

I stay because it’s safe. Or do I say here because I feel unsafe? My people aren’t here in Los Angeles. Or are they? I have friends, trans friends, people who love me. They’re hard to track down. Gina is weary, beaten down from taking care of so many other trans girls. Maci has long Covid and can’t leave her bedroom. Drea was interested in coming up to the house to make music with me, but she never arrived.

Kaylin comes back on Thursday. In the two months she’s been gone, I’ve tended the plants, brought in the mail, and done odd jobs. I can’t help it. I installed the legs on her dresser. I secured doors that were falling off her cabinet.

(One characteristic I cannot stand in trans women is acting like a man. Moving through the world with entitlement. Speaking with superficial, unfounded authority. So I am concerned about this particular behavior of mine — a trans woman acting like a handyman. But my goal with these projects is to make my cousin’s life easier. To make her home more homey. So I’ve given myself a pass.)

I leave Wednesday. Before then, I will get rid of as much stuff as I can. Ticket stubs. Maps from national parks. The poster from my senior prom (theme: “Hold on to the Night”). Men’s clothing I could not bear to get rid of last year. Everything must go.

I was supposed to be here for two weeks. It’s been two months. I was supposed to have a new face, but I don’t. I’ve made friends and lost them. I’ve had big nights out, and I’ve hid from the world. I’ve had moments of intense intimacy. I’ve had sex depersonalized and dehumanizing.

My main job was to keep the plants alive. The orchid makes me nervous. My track record isn’t good — I’ve killed every one I’ve had. Orchids thrive on neglect. I don’t thrive on that.

I want to think I can tend to this exotic flower, one who grows in the air with striking, tentative beauty. I need to be near it, observe it, pay attention. I need to change myself. Can I become gentler? Can I free myself of unkindness? Can I thrive on neglect?

The plants are flourishing — full of new growth, with deep, dark green leaves. I’ve learned which ones want more water and which ones want less. I’ll water tomorrow, on Tuesday. Then, on Thursday, they’ll joyfully welcome home their mother, Kaylin.

The orchid? She has one bloom left.

That one bloom is thriving.