Fancy and heavy-hitting anatomy lodges between our hips. Outside, on the skin’s surface, they announce shape, often defining how a body is read; skinny, pear, voluptuous, womanly, or boyish. The hips break onto our flanks, our side body, a site where intimate possession first seizes, someone else’s hands fit into our particular crooks or slide through, wrapping around, connecting one side of our body to the other. The smock causes more platonic, but still deft, sensations.

An extended interaction with the hips figures centrally in donning the smock. After the initial mantling—when the smock is dropped over the head, onto the shoulders, the cloth brushing down past the ears—it hangs like a coverless sack, the sides unsecured, long, flapping, and awkward appendages of bright ribbons. Sometimes the neckline sits too close to the throat. Should this happen, the smock’s shoulders need only a slight adjustment forward.

When the bottom hems of the smock’s front and back balance in length and weight, I gather the front ties in my hands. They duck inside, meeting undercover within the smock’s interior. Under the front of the smock I hide the first tie. Maintaining a tension with the ribbons to knot, slide, and bow them, my hands dip and pull. The knuckles of my right hand brush against the rough weave of the canvas as my fingers fix the ribbons. Done, I sweep my arms back just aft of the backs of my thighs, searching out the second set of ribbons, which secure the back of the smock. Sometimes I locate them at the place my hands once stitched the silky streams into the waist-height hem corners of the smock. From there, by feel, I trace my seamed fingertips out to the middle of the ribbons’ length. Other times, I find their midsection immediately and I start tying, knotting, and bowing. I decide between double or single knotting. Wishing for a day without tumult, I make only one knot.

At the same time, I notice how my shoulders cup, lift, and roll over my chest. The rotation enables this blind routine of motioning, relating hands and ribbons. I am aware of the skin on my collarbones, the apparatus of my upper body shifting. My senses fire in the space between the body—from the bone marrow up through muscle and blood vessels until skin is reached—finding its fit in a decision and the moment of physical adjustment. I notice other bones too. When my clavicles cock and my hands bob through the knot that precedes threading the loops, which make the bow, I pause. I consider how much to cinch the ribbons that now rub together. I picture a woman standing with her back turned to the person tying up her corset. As I pull, tightening, I draw the moment into a consideration of how my stomach lays that day, how the layers of cloth press or sit, how the body of the smock negotiates my body, Surface speaking to Surface, state to country. My pelvis becomes a face. The points of my hipbones declare themselves eyes, arrowheads, acute angles, and peaks. Defiance rises as a shaft of light and dust and edges up through my chest. By now I have found the right amount of tension for the ribbons. That tension spreads into the smock’s fit over the waist, onto the hips.

This next part, the looping and bowing, goes fast. I seesaw the loops, which make the bow, out until they match the length of the ribbon ends. Over time, with the wear of several hundred ties, the ribbons have twisted some, giving them a volume that produces a floppy thwacking sound when I release them from my fingers and they fall against the seat of the smock. My arms move back to my sides, collarbone lowering, everything settling.

I am not suddenly embarrassed at wanting to interpret intimacy in everything. I idealize nakedness, but I often hold it like a weapon. I have talked so much on SmockSmack about the provisions of safety; mortar, stones, trowels, swords, and mesh chain mail made from fiber and hand-stitching. Because of the smock I better see the fearfulness and protectiveness that crops up in my character. The smock has also become the primary implement and symbol of protection. Protectiveness begets itself in large sized litters. Left to layer, it starts to smell. It smells like attempting to wash the human body into a sterile, blanched state. The body defies such treatment, knowing it becomes lifeless and prey the moment a belief in purity tries to smother the body’s ordered and uncontrolled self. The body asserts its paradox when caged. Dissonance and harmony constitute thriving. Meanwhile, control, the orphaned child, runs around shaking loose ends, demanding raw material lay itself into a form and that form make itself busy. None of this is specific enough. The smock is dying of its own accord, but I wonder often if I should put it to death, routing it completely from the wardrobe. Sometimes the confectionary and nutritive qualities of swift drama can feed control’s belly for a long time.

I am attempting to chart the progression of this relationship between the smock and my body. I am wondering why it’s possible to use a word like relationship to appraise a garment? And have I always known that on the other side of protection lies dominance?

I started out thinking about the uses of separateness. I know very little about this. I am young and my heart is not defined yet by volume or round facetedness. But, I can’t stop noticing the incidence of legible development when one involves oneself with something that defies ownership. Do we drive a stake with a tether into the uncontainable counting on it to later free itself, forcing us to release? Do we make up a microcosm of rules and relativity using the stake as something to push and pull against, to fall onto and work alongside?

I recognized immediately that Andrea was appropriately conflating clothes, art and ideas. I felt that she was a giant and I felt the weight and troublesomeness of that. I was in another iteration of identity searching. Pained by the process of confronting my body and dressing it, I took turns embracing the smock as a dress, a respite, a neutered covering, and an antidote to fashion. In a uniform like the smock, I thought, less attention and less perception (and thus misperception) would occur at the site of my exterior. I thought too that it would streamline my outward energy into a steady comportment, effectively closing the enmeshing of body and sexual presence. I wanted to reach a point where someone saw only my head and where I ended, my feet. I wanted to leave the body behind. It was a last resort within a line of thinking that longed for a solution, one that might especially resolve the complicated history of men and women looking and wanting of each other. Resolve it so no one worried or wondered if I were male or female. I hoped the smock could operate post-gender and thus post-sexuality, beyond qualifying our desire in immutable words or titles. Instead of continuing to learn forms of deflection to objectifying, sexualizing attention, which saw my body and my sex first and my personhood either second or contingent upon the first factors, the smock stopped the conversation. Angry, exhausted and exasperated with the matrix of appearance and perception I was trying to map and weave my corporeality through, hopeful of staying abreast of people’s assumptions, the smock offered an alternative. I could mediate one’s perception through a concept, invoking the intellect and encouraging the seer to move past the exterior to explore the whimsical and rustic handmade apron-like piece covering me. I liked the smock’s oddity. And I was terrified of people’s unspoken appetites. I stopped there. Every comment on my looks struck me as something to repudiate. Freaked out by femininity and less interested in my masculinity, I took cover in the smock, sensing its ability to save me from explanation.

For a long time this sufficed. The body, the public, and my mind were quiet and happy. Slowly though, the body realized it was being bypassed and ignored. I began to notice the way highs and lows—the excitement as well as the pain of (mis)perception, the glory and dirt of desire—passed by me. I held to this middle ground and my surface was dull, inexpressive of day-to-day changes. Was this healing or avoidance of something that could only be addressed by learning to walk in it? Just what was so terrifying about people’s appetites? What was so terrible about being objectified if I stayed awake and saw all the times it was a process of devout pleasure? And let anything that was not respectful roll off me? I can never learn this as long as I stay in the smock. Wasting time is how one friend put it. You’re wasting the use of your whole body. The smock has taken up the dubious position of body manager.

Now that I have changed my physical situation, the smock feels like a Los Angeles costume, the costume of a relationship to place, the hood on the tether and stake I drove into that city. The smock is imbued with a stance of bearing. I become a pillar and can forget where my body hinges and opens. I don’t want to forget where I release. Going back into regular clothes, the clothes everyone else manages to love and be loved through, is a way of acknowledging the ripeness in this environment and me in it.

I. Uniforms Chosen by Our Parents.

II. Uniforms Chosen by Activity.

III. Uniforms Chosen by Peers (or is that called Advertising?).

IV. Uniforms Chosen by School.

V. Uniforms Chosen by Work.

VI. Uniforms of Formality.

VII. Uniforms of Respite.

VIII. Uniforms of Choice.

As often as I saw other smock sewers (smockers) who were familiar enough with me to repeat questions they wanted answered, they asked, will you sew yourself a new smock soon? Do you want a new smock? What do you want it to look like? The questions irritated me. And they confused. Hadn’t the smock and the smockshop’s mission made an investment in the sustainability factor of the uniform? Wasn’t part of what we were interested in was seeing how long we could wear the same garment without becoming self-conscious or concerned of its visual status? I had assumed that the moment one’s everyday smock became anything more or less than effortless in its fit and feel, we could note the sensation and move on, building our next habitude. That that moment continued to not occur with the black smock month after month struck me as ideal.

It has been months since I’ve spent much time with the smockers and I think far less about the age and condition of my smocks than I used to. This lets the smock, as an object and garment, think of itself as less a piece of fashion and more an antidote. I guess I only like to hear the world and the clothes on my body conversing when I want to listen. I’ve gotten picky, indignant, or numb about their inevitable relationship. This is strange because I am always aware of the world outside of the space I dress in as an audience, receptive or not. I guess I learned early to look for the moment of impact in any situation or relationship, but consciously teasing a sense of power or pleasure from those interactions, which happen all day every day, has become extremely elusive. Dressing now feels like a newspaper’s schedule of tides. I’m more used to it happening like a gallery’s seasonal exhibition calendar though I am adjusting to the countable eddies, which are natured, but reliable.

I started this entry planning to talk about a light wool smock I’ve been carrying around with me for several months. It’s a red fabric blend that combines, wool, crepe, and plastic. A sophisticated olive green contrasts the smock’s passionate tomato red in the fine stitching along the hem and soft, slender ribbons sewn on tying the front and back. I planned on selling the smock to the smockshop when the next call came for new smocks, but the pace of sales has slowed some and there hasn’t been a need for new material the last several months. I finished the smock in July while spending a month in Maine. I bought the ribbons at a quilting shop in Damariscotta Mills along with some “fat quarters” of retro cotton prints. I folded the finished smock up making sure the ribbons, now attached, were furled at the top so the red and green contrast stood out. I laid it on some embroidery books at the edge of the floss I had spread around the floor near my bedroom window. The smock stayed in the same place until it was time to pack up and head back to California. It was put back into the suitcases for a return trip, sandwiched between stacks of pink and white canvas smocks ironed and pinned but not sewn. I took the red smock out three weeks later during a nondescript weekday afternoon. Called out of the house by errands, I thought to change into something that would remind me I was ALIVE. By then, the smock had developed defined creases straight up the center, which met other creases circling around the waist. They intersected forming a wobbly and long-limbed cross, which instead of looking geometric and structuring divided the un-ironed look into quadrants for clear viewing. And then there was the lightness of the smock. It had no weight at the shoulders, no comforting rub on the hem, no cloth angle making an A-line from the waist, over the buttocks, down to the knees. Instead I noticed the delicacy and slipperiness of the olive ribbons. They were wanting to come undone and the rest of the smock wanted to be airy and unnoticeable at the stomach, legs and coming around the sides under my arms. The fabric was thoroughly concerned with its lightness, but the subtlety that this smock tried to weave over its wearer was not comforting.

Starting in the back, I pulled the ribbons easily out of their bowed ties and slipped the smock over my head. I threw it on the bed making sure it fell lengthwise and not in a heap. I decided again I must sell it.

But, my move North to Washington State a week and a half later leapt on my shoulders and steered me from taking care of such business. I ran into a smocker just before departing Los Angeles. She reminded me that only one smock had sold all summer. I’d already packed the red smock anyway, but the information clocked in as a reminder of its presence amongst the five bags ready for travel.

Up in Washington, unpacking wore on over a week. Throughout, as belongings settled into places, the smock sat folded on the floor atop four small throw rugs from Oaxaca. Something about walking to new people all week, standing and looking over the unfamiliar trying to look familiar, with consecutive days of workspace training in differing situations, and daily trips into town that repeated my feet over certain tracts of sidewalks, past store windows with clerks behind their counters who always looked up; it woke me up wanting to travel through it in fresh clothes everyday so that my body could be as much a situation as any I traversed.

Over the last several months I had worn the orange smock meant for occasions with more frequency. I attempted to keep it away from dirt and any stretches of time in the kitchen. Still, the orange smock is far less worn than my well-used and truly utilitarian brown one. Both of them are made from the sturdy canvas fabric I love so much. When the canvas dries from a washing it stiffens considerably and the corners of the hems almost turn into knobs. The rigidity so sharply contrasts the state that the smock went into the laundry that the subsequent tightening of the canvas’ weave just ends up emphasizing its re-found cleanliness. In this way, the orange and brown appear returned to their original states with each washing even as each cycle through water and suds and then hot air dulls their respective colors. Every laundering reveals more of the fabric’s ghost, its original heather white, like that stretched for paintings before the layers of gesso are stroked on.

I did not realize just how grown into and enmeshed my body has become with this tough fabric. Somewhere around the third or fourth day of living in this new home, when the brown smock smelled strongly of cooking meat on the grill and the orange was twice worn, I decided once and for all I wasn’t going to sell the red smock. Resigned to its creases from sitting folded for so long, I chose a shirt to wear under it from the stack in the closet and underwear a shade that couldn’t be noticeable under any level of sheerness. The fabric was thin enough that when I stood without my legs pressed together, one could see the space between my limbs. This included the length of ribbons left hanging from tying the front. If I tied the ribbon in a bow then you could see the mashed, but protruding shape of it behind the front layer of the smock. To create a seamless front it was necessary to tie the ribbons with no bow and double knot them and tuck the ends into the waistband of my underwear, shorts or stockings. Of course that felt strange and called for attention and adjustment upon any trip to the bathroom. And something about the bike riding motion routinely undid the ribbons. When I dismounted, I had to discreetly hike up the front of the smock and re-tie. Somehow though, that feels less vulnerable than standing still in this color red. Its tomato hue of Campbell’s Soup and commercial ketchup feels louder than a bright orange. What is it about red? I always think of Carmen and a gashly ball of heat, hope, and misfortune. The color’s carrier, the fabric, also holds an effect. The canvas and this wool, crepe, and acrylic blend could not be more different.

It makes me wonder how anyone copes let alone feels comforted by all the lightweight smocks the Smockshop sells. I’ve sold plenty of light smocks. And now I want to give every person who already owns a smock or wants to buy one a month to know the security and sureness that they can develop when clothed in utter sturdiness. Perhaps I too should take some of my medicine and see what a month in a more delicate smock feels like. Do you get used to your smock reflecting the rise and fall of your belly through mealtimes, hungering, and large cups of liquid? Does the way the fabric falls over the ass, sometimes puckering in just a touch below it and other times lilting out over the shape perfectly, grow less noticeable? Or are our garments not supposed to buffer us with confidence? Am I supposed to be able to provide this on my own?

I think I end up talking about the double edge of protection a lot. I am constantly thankful for it and troubled at the same time. Sometimes I feel like the canvas smocks have thickened me, not physically in my flesh, but rather hinders flexibility. Sometimes the smocks speak to me saying, “you’ll never have to worry about fitting in again!” But that’s unreal and useless I should say. No one can have that forever without being corrected. It’s a rule of nature. Nothing is going to protect us from having to change. So before I become too dull…

Wearing the smock is not important. I don’t need the smock. The smock is uncomfortable. I have the wrong colors. It’s plain and says too much at the same time. I don’t know what it says (in Damariscotta, Maine). I’m too tired to change. The smock does not fit. Canvas is the wrong material. There are permanent stains on both smocks. A brown working smock. An orange playing smock. I am not working or playing at the moment. I am resting.

I don’t have a quick or ready answer for Kim’s question. I too have noticed I am not wearing the smock. I have felt embarrassed about not wearing it as though I weren’t holding to my word, as though I were neglecting it; neglecting all the things it keeps held, sealed, steady, and organized. It’s been the finest armor made from not thinking while avoiding, hopefully, obliviousness. Now, away from California, from Los Angeles, and before other homes start or audition, many of those things held, sealed, steadied, and organized by the smock have been unpacked and laid around my wonderfully object free room in Maine. (An upstairs room, its all ceiling, walls, floor painted powder blue.) And now, there’s very little to occupy the smock. I suppose, it too is resting. But, what about the powers of a garment? The needs and experiences we imbue it with. Don’t these get worn into a piece of clothing, kept living by the familiarity of our skin and our smell? Way beyond any kind of laundering or dry cleaning? With wearing, do our clothes rise to be our equals, wielding memory and association for arms and legs, which can wrap around us? Perhaps even smothering us? Only if memory scares you or there are unbearable associations.

What I am really wondering is whether the smock, like me, has used this July in Maine to slough off all the demands made of it, whether it will take me back to what June, May, or March felt like, whether it’ll walk with me back into the hottest month in Los Angeles, and move through it all painlessly?

Eli came home to his mom’s house in Mt. Washington at five in the afternoon after spending the weekend with his father. The house is a mess. The construction paper, which sticks out from otherwise white paper stacks, slices as the starkest form of organization with its color and thick texture. Eli might spend so much time with the material at school he doesn’t notice it out when he looks around him. He sees disarray. I think we need to do some cleaning he says.

I wrestle the trash bag from the garbage can while Eli watches. Together we pull the recycling from the trash, the kitchen counters, dining room table and settle it into two paper grocery bags. Eli heads down the house steps first. I balance my legs right to left, listing up and down on the balls of my feet the way Eli does with his testing, evaluative walk, until we arrive at the pumpkin. The pumpkin makes the space between the garage wall and the rise in the ground, which borders the house steps, into a width measuring roughly the size of two shod feet standing still, pressed together. It’s not a lot of room for maneuvering. From the street the pumpkin’s a “hark” spoken in color and shape. It’s a nice greeting. Eli stops momentarily to maneuver the small amount room at the end of the steps. I watch him from the waist down and echo his movements, holding the trash and bag of recycling out from my body and pulling them higher to pass over the perched pumpkin without touching it.

The tops of the garbage and recycling containers are still open from last week’s collection. It’s dark and the fog that gets so thick in the canyon makes the edges of Eli’s body fuzzy. The air pulls at my cheeks and eyes like it’s slick. I make out the handles of the bag Eli’s trying to hand to me. He’s pushing it up, up, up, beyond an outstretching of his arm into a reach a reach for my height. We’re silent and when we hear first one bag, and then the other, hit the bottom of the blue bin, I turn left and he turns right to face up the hill back towards the house.

Back inside, I suggest other tasks for our cleaning time. Eli’s not that interested in unloading or loading the dishwasher or tackling the laundry. He’s got his head angled down, eyes on his toes, on the ground, somewhere between ambivalence and searching for something better to do.

When I met Eli, I wore athletic shorts and a sweatshirt.

While dressing to meet Eli and his mother for dinner at their house, I thought about how to look and feel relateable for a five year old boy I didn’t know yet. I wanted to look like I could run around and do anything with him. I didn’t want “girl” to cover his first thoughts, but pictures of us sprawled on the floor with toys or kicking legs above our heads or marching with high kicks home from school.

Walking up the hill in my smock to meet Eli at his school for the first time, I worried that the smock would kill the closeness he seemed to immediately feel with me at his house. I didn’t notice any difference in his behavior towards me. Maybe when so many people are larger than him there are large swathes of information that just can’t or won’t be dealt with because there’s no time in his world. He did notice that my footwear, clogs, were no good for running down hills with him. And then he began to notice and point out appropriate alterations in my attire that would make trips faster and more exciting on slippery, dry dirt, through dusty clumps of grass. I should wear shorts and sneakers he said. I protested. I can’t I said. I wear always wear the smock. Its my uniform. I wear it every day. He asked why and inquired whether I washed it regularly. I lied and said I did.

We’ve had this conversation roughly once a week for two months. It starts where the canyon we walk down to reach his house, narrows. At the narrowing, he likes to grab one of my hands and begin running, pulling me behind him. My body acts as a ballast. Eli can run wildly, off-balance, swaying and leaning downhill as long as my arm and attached body weight follow him. Momentarily, Eli defies gravity.

First, I feel led into his joy. Then, I realize the use of my body to this joy. Finally, just ahead of my hand, I see the necessity of my body in that joy. That scares me. I feign the conservatism of a parent. I balk as though I’m too old or too tired from my day to join him. But, really, I don’t feel comfortable being at all responsible for a shred of his happiness. Fearfulness fools me into thinking that if we stay unattached, I can’t hurt him. Also too, there’s the steely streak of independence in me that wants him to be able to create and balance his own pleasure and joy. Half-way down the inclined and now narrowed path, I slow our bodies, and let go of Eli’s hand telling him to take off as fast as he wants and I’ll meet him where the path empties into the road. And he always takes off, yelling, which makes me smile at my feet.

I got out my smock pattern several days ago. It has been waiting at the foot of my bed for the canvases to finish washing and drying. Each night in the meantime, getting ready for bed has included putting the paper pattern on the floor just after I’ve placed the bed’s extra pillows in a stack next to my nightstand. In the morning, after I’ve put on water for tea and come back into the room to make the bed, I place the paper pattern back on the foot of the bed. Yesterday, the pattern rested on top of a pillow separated from the rest while it waits for its orange sham to come out of the colors wash.

I packed the smock pattern into a file folder several months ago. It ended up in the middle of some unfiled bank statements, several scraps of fuschia tissue paper and some Christmas cards I’m not ready to throw out. Its easy to pick out because of the light pencil lines that run along the edges that peak out from the top of the folder. I’m getting ready to leave Los Angeles for a month of respite in Maine. I am nervous about not working for a month though its the largest point of the trip. I’m reminded of Smockshop’s primary meaning to me. Money. That sounds dirty. But, how nice to have a mobile source of supplemental income. When I get nervous I’ll sew.

The smocks will be simple and bold. Bold sounds like a word used in a women’s TV advertisement for hair dye or Pantene shampoo. But, I’m thinking the boldness of brightness and contrast. Happiness from orange streaking down pink or spills of geometric applique winding down on white.

Tomorrow I’ll ride down Broadway to the knife store and have my cloth cutting scissors sharpened. By the time, the sun’s pushing in my West-facing windows I’ll have the canvas squares and rectangles unfolded and draped at the foot of my bed ready for cutting.

Fewer moments of dialogue crop up between the smock and me, its wearer, regarding the surroundings we share and confront day to day. Or perhaps I note them less. This isn’t to say we’re mute. Increasingly, I have had trouble interpreting the interactions of the smock, myself, and situations, especially those situations that involve other people. I’ve often mentally noted the smock as a character when entering a new situation as though the smock were in a series about itself. “The Smock Takes A Bicycle Trip,” “The Smock Attends A Wedding In Mexico,” “The Smock Goes To Work At A Restaurant,” or “The Smock Stays At Home And Sews”. Though the smock and I experience the adventure together, separately, I’ve also assumed that it’s actually been me introducing the smock to each new environment. In other words, I have been the one in ultimate control. I know in the past I’ve also noted how the smock variously protects and carries me. I’ve though I could have it both ways, but the protecting service of a fortress wall has two figurative sides. And beyond those two sides extend a series of feelings and needs which make up the back story describing why the wall got built or why the smock got donned.

I began to think about this while sitting out in front of the American Cement Building at MacAruthur Park on New Years Eve. I’d gotten dressed up to meet New Years at a party in an acquaintance’s apartment in the American Cement Building. A friend was visiting from Georgia. We had taken the train from my house, walking down the hill a little less than half a mile to the station. The walk circled my awareness from the front clasp of my pants around the side and back towards the front of the waistband with a mental, “Huh!?” The skin and nerves around my waist experienced confusion at the waistband and reacting, directed dislike into the fabric. What I felt was a slight squeeze, like the skin of a wrist, unused to the clasp of material, finding itself encircled one day by a bracelet and left to contend with what only felt like a constriction. At a certain point the claustrophobia and strangeness usually wears away, but first there’s a lot of itching, sweating, and even redness. My waist read the waistband as a cloth manacle. Quite suddenly, a separation materialized between my legs and upper body, making this tiny strip of skin responsible for interpreting, building, and holding an arbitrary division of the body.

What was the smock hiding me from that caused such disorientation and distractedness when I pulled on a pair of trousers? Why, after a year of what I thought was healing from the strictures and associations of clothes, am I disappointed when I put on almost anything else but the smock? Sitting out in from of the American Cement Building I realized that as much as the smock freed me of associations between clothes, memory, and body feel, it also shielded me from confronting the entire spectrum of physicality and imagination of my body. I’ve spent the last year mostly wanting to transcend the body, to forget my breasts, my smells, my waist, my stomach, my hair, etc., not so much out of shame, but out of frustration with all the associations and perceptions that go with each part. In actuality, I’ve been ignoring the body more than transcending it. Part of the problem lies in wardrobe. I’ve kept clothes from middle school, high school and college and bought few clothes in the last couple years, feeling like it’s a wasteful to spend money on any clothes that aren’t absolutely necessary. It’s hard to live in this physical body knowing one’s neither man or woman when you’re wearing a pair of pants that reminds of the time when they fit tightly and you went out to dinner in Philadelphia with a couple college crew team teammates who were your best friends at the time and now you don’t talk to them. Or two years later, wearing the same pants, though they fit looser, and going to a dyke bar in Washington D.C. and being concerned that your only shoes to wear with them are clogs. Or remembering you bought those pants at an Express store in the University Mall in Burlington, Vermont that always made you uncomfortable even back in high school when it was the only place to find pants long enough for your inseam. Not that it’s horrible to travel those memories. But with the memories so palpable and made from matter that only knows a male/female, white/other, skinny/fat, masculine/feminine, straight/gay world, almost all this clothing has more of a past than I know how to contend with. I end up wearing the past on my body, the present of here and now being far outweighed by the present captured in memory and assigned into the past where all gone-by present moments live out the rest of their lives.

Thoughts about what the smock allows me to avoid and shirk and wonderings on why I’ve been so interested in wearing a garment that acts so defensively as to protect me, came to the surface again while hanging out one afternoon with a friend. We were talking about the enjoyment of one’s body. She’s older than me and was talking about her regret at not enjoying her body more when she was in her teens and twenties. Her feeling that she wasted time and missed pleasure by worrying and fearing what her body meant to others caught me. I’ve certainly been doing this. I don’t enjoy my body. I’ll have small and far and few between moments. And I’ll know this is silly. But, curious at skinny jeans and one day trying them on just to see what they look like, I decide it’s too much information for the world about my body. Really though, it’s that I don’t want to know I’ve got hips or an ass. I’ve been fooling myself thinking I’m reaching for what’s beyond the shape of the body. Meanwhile, I catch myself looking longingly at my coworkers wearing dresses and skirts, flirty tops and shape-baring pants, wondering how could I wear those things and get away with it. “Getting away with it” in a dress being an experience where one is rendered only more human rather than more woman (if you’re female that is for a male body with a dress on it often seems to reinforce what would be called the reality of the wearer’s maleness rather than what’s perhaps male about the dress or so-called feminine about the wearer other than the desire to wear the dress). My friend I talked about the experiences one can start to have as we try to avoid being misunderstood. I have spent so much energy cataloguing what behaviors of mine beget negative attention and learning to anticipate and respond to every detail of (mis)percption before it even happens. And when I do follow a desire, to say, look sexy, I wonder what’s looking sexy about and who has made those ideas and do I want to interact with them and is it possible to do so in an authentic way? And on and on. So go by what feels good…
My interest and longings that lean for fulfillment in the direction of fashion—the kind that wanders curiously, searching, finding and creating a way to honor, care, and shelter the body with imagination—won’t go away. I’ve been trying to avoid and change perception at the same time. An about face might start with disposing all the ill-fitting clothing that’s heavy with the past.

Supposed.

For further dictating dictionary clarification, wanton means immoral or unchaste; lewd. We’re supposed to live, speak, and think beyond understanding and describing a female configuration of physicality with such morally-lined and body-hating strictures. Meanwhile, ‘impudent’ and ‘flirtatious’ characterize other dictionary word lists used to define the word minx. It’s a confusing jumble of loaded words, words that hold sex in them, perhaps even the sex I have, so that the word’s flavors still have a present succulence. When I whisper minx a strong image comes to mind (and I guess it tastes a little like iron): a female body bathes in white furs, which pull and cover, massage and tickle her. She smiles as her cycle seeps out onto the hairs. I like to imagine that some man has given the furs to her. Even better, he thinks he’s fulfilling a fantasy of her’s (diamond, fur, cash loving hussies), but it’s probably just the opposite. And she puts on a good show. Her liquid pools and she moves onto its warmth, ruining the expensive material below. She smiles. Minx.

In high school I completed a project that involved learning everything one could possibly know about a word. I referenced that assignment–which took the word “gait” as its subject–several years ago to consider all the connotations surrounding “pink”. The whitened, less saturated red hue held curious contradictions. For instance, a girl’s clothing section in a department store uses pink carpets, pink furniture and glittery pink writing on the signs and tags, but pink is also the color of a bride’s wedding dress if she takes a second walk down the aisle. I think it’s the connotations of pink, rather than its dictionary definition, that carry the meat of the color’s meaning(s). In other words, pink is a layered and evolving subject and object. This is one story of pink, which ends in a smock and maybe a new word…

Pinx
n. a grrl who sticks her tongue out while wearing pink.

Pink marks memory. Or, I remember a moment because pink was there. Pink helps the memory’s contents stick. But it’s not quite that simple. Let’s say pink is a character. They’re the kind of character you like, but they keep showing up at the most painful times. You begin wonder; is it pink that causes the pain? Does pink have baggage? Or is it just coincidental that each time you recall a visit from pink that you also recall something bad happening to both you and pink?

1. I had this killer pair of pink trousers with an elastic waist and straight legs. They were precious. They were “the pink pants”, the kind of clothing that’s important, but not necessarily only reserved for special occasions. My parents were fighting. I was less than six I think for my hair was still white-blond and cut in a page-boy style. These memories are muddy. For instance, I’m not sure if this is also the time I got thrown down the stairs. The fighting rose. One of them had to leave. I had this feeling of panic. Mom was taking all of us, my three siblings and I out of the house. Or were we being thrown out? Our father was so angry, the direction of his rage was lost on me. I was wearing the pink pants, my favorites. They were clean. I’d just put them on. And then it was out, out, out. It seemed like each of us kids was hurled out the door to my mother, who he’d pushed out first. There was still no stoop under the side door and my mom stood several feet below the door sill. I was the last one out, which felt appropriate because I was the youngest. To me that meant I was supposed to be the least touched, the least affected. But, he kicked me out, right on my butt and when I fell on the ground and my trousers were immediately soiled, I passed into another place. It was a slow moment. Nothing had ever felt so wrong. And I knew this because my pink pants were hurt.
2. A little older, I owned a pair of pink and white striped shorts with little pleats. The cotton belt was a deep pink color and it gathered into stringy, cloth fists to fit through the loops, expanding as it came out and snaked around my waist. Unlike the pink pants, I reserved the shorts for special occasions. The white in them made them harder to keep clean. My parents regarded light-colored clothing as impractical. Taking care of our farm, its herd of cattle and stretches of commercial garden, tended to carry soil into every part of our lives. But, special occasions usually meant leaving the house, which promised some hope for the clothes made from lighter shades.

It was summer. After a day of putting hay away in the barn’s hayloft, the whole family retired to clean away the tiny grass fibers that mixed with our sweat running down our necks in concentric circles, behind the ears, and at the ankles, just above the ridgeline of our socks. It must have been about July because that’s when Middlebury’s Festival On the Green happened each year. The week-long event gathered together folk, blues, jazz, and world beat musicians for long nights of picnicking, sound, dancing, and socializing spread over Middlebury’s Common, an expanse of green situated at the center of town. My family usually made it out for at least half the shows though that depended on the music playing that night, how much work we’d gotten done that day, how tired my parents were and/or how up they were to seeing folks they knew. If there was time, my Mom and Dad might pack a picnic.

With five of us home, showering and making ourselves presentable took time. My sister and I volunteered to go do our washing in the river adjacent to the house. We brought towels, soap and shampoo, and changes of clothes. I excitedly packed my pink shorts in with my river bundle. I loved wearing them and the thought of doing so made the evening’s events that much more exciting. We waded out to the middle of the river where a thick, flat chunk of sandstone sat with enough surface to hold our belongings. At best, the water came midway up my thighs in the deep parts. To wash our hair we’d either bend over while standing up in the water and dunk our heads into the current or we’d swivel onto the flat surface of a human-sized rock, belly down, like a snake. We’d flip our hair over our faces, drop it into the water and use our hands to wet our heads all the way down to the scalp. Once I was washed up and getting dressed, I discovered I couldn’t find the shorts anywhere. I picked up each piece of clothing, looked underneath and around it, set the piece down, looking left and right and finally, down the river. Somewhere between toweling off my hair and beginning to dress, the shorts must have dropped out. I imagined them falling onto the top of the water where they’d hover still dry for a while as they were currented downstream, only gradually getting waterlogged, moving closer to the bottom, but still moving farther and farther away. Moving very fast in fact. As soon as I pictured all this, I started running, tripping, splashing, walking fast, pushing through, and slowing down when I realized I was out of luck. I can’t remember if I cried, but god, I was upset. When I got back to my sister, I started asking where our river, the New Haven River, led to next. The Otter Creek River my sister replied. And then? Lake Champlain she continued. I could picture the lake well. I saw my favorite piece of clothing at the bottom, under heavy, dark water with green and brown sludge growing particularly well on the white area of the stripes. When I pressed my sister all the way, she admitted that the lake eventually emptied into the ocean. No solid mental picture of my shorts came into view with this final information.

I knew from looking at maps that Lake Champlain didn’t directly connect to the ocean, but that the water my family would sail their little yellow sail boat on would eventually end up in the Atlantic did somehow resonate as sensible. Working in the dirt and listening to my father try to explain the water table over and over–it had taken me forever to realize he wasn’t talking about a dining room table made from water–taught me how porous the earth was. I understood in a simple way that everything flowed into everything. And so finally I pictured my shorts disintegrating into strips and fibers and wriggling through the earth to rest in the big blue ocean. That’s where my imagination stopped.

With our towels around our necks, my sister and I made our way back to the sandy patch at the foot of the river. She put her arm around my shoulder to lead me up to the road, across it and back to our house. The world had just gotten a lot bigger.

_______________________________________________________________

I brought pink into my life in a conscious way years later to help understand a photograph of my mother. A school project asked me to find a photograph that variously carried, weighted, formed, resonated with or explained me. I chose a photograph that captured my mother standing next to a woodblock. She stood between poise and leaning, finished with resting and starting a hand grip on her axe that would send the edge sailing down through the air to meet the wood’s grain. I chose the image for the way it failed to look like the woman I knew as my mother. She looked uncharacteristically majestic and strong.

The crux of the school project rested in writing an extended piece about the photograph that also incorporated several smaller studio based assignments. One of those assignments asked the students to take the primary photograph and link it to another image of our choosing. With that choice made, we were to build a visual bridge between the two images. I decided to do all this work through more photographs, linking the picture of my mother with a family portrait taken in the pastures of our family farm by creating a series of Polaroids that took my body in pink as their subject. I pulled these ideas together on Election night in 2004. A group of friends had gathered to drink beer and watch the electoral results roll in. My friend Susan was visiting from Atlanta. While our friends watched the states turn blue and red, we sat cross-legged outside and shaved one another’s heads. In between pieces of falling hair, we conferenced on how to carry the pink project off.

The following day Susan wouldn’t get out of bed. Bush had won. But, when Bush still wasn’t re-elected, Susan had promised to take my always car-less self to Joanne’s to buy pink fabric. She picked me up late in the afternoon. While Susan stayed out in the parking lot to talk on the telephone with her father about the election, I went inside the store and bought 3 yards of a cheap fuchsia cotton blend and 1 yard of princess pink tulle. I came back outside and she looked more morose than when I left her. As she spoke to me about about the revolution we had to build now, we raced South on the road trying to catch the sun before it dipped below sight. I guiltily lent her only half my hearing, the other half winding through the remaining logistics of getting the right shot. I wanted to stand in front of a sinking sun like the picture showed my mother standing. I needed the same kind of expanse of complicated ground she’d had underfoot. A field of green shoots mixed with taupe and heather stalks and tufts left over from previous grass cuttings.

When we arrived at the right landscape just off of Maryland’s Route 5, I sprang out the car, my bag of fabric in hand, and ran ahead of Susan to claim a setting. It happened fast though Susan walked out to join me slowly, looking from side to side every other step. While I took off my shirt, bent over and began pulling the pink fabric out of the plastic bag, Susan loaded the Polaroid film. It was chilly and a hundred feet away cars slowed and accelerated, but where we were in the field, Susan with the camera, I, shirtless and barefoot, we commanded the radius between us. When I looked up from pulling all the cloth from the bag I saw that she’d already started taking pictures. I began to wind the yards of thin fuchsia cotton-poly blend around me starting with my legs. Intermittently, I’d reach out and touch my palm against the top of the stubbly grass or yank the trail of pink so my arm extended straight up towards the sky, then turn around and face the diving sun, bend over, and push my arms out in a line parallel to the ground. The shortening stretch of fabric followed each movement and in turn, Susan froze each change of direction, dropping the Polaroid that shot out of the camera onto the grass to develop.

The series that landed on the ground traced an envelopment, my body moving from its human form into a sculptural, amorphous shape the color of pink. The fuchsia lasted from foot to shoulder and there the princess pink tulle took over, making a bulbous festoon that reached and then covered the crown of my head. The volume of the tulle had the appearance of creating weight in Susan’s photographs. The heaviness seemed to finalize my slip and tumble from my body into fullness. It was a moment of pulsing monochrome, of being and then seeing all one color in two hues, two weights, two textures. Then the tulle and cotton-poly culminated, motioning pink in a continuous wrapping, stretching, reaching and folding. Unto a new shape.

The Polaroid pictures changed pink from living as the character I’d bump into, at random, who made me wonder, was I interrupting or did they always rush away—the one who was so sweet, who left weight, not lightness after exhalation—who was a good deed like donating blood, which gave, or was it took, life force—who lived on the cusp of bones and nerves, at the spine along my neck where powers like morphine flood, releasing a cover.

Out in front of the powerful image-maker of wholeness that the camera lives as, my temporary pink tent ejected from the Polaroid’s front slit revealing a more eternal state where I always occupy pink, the character, who now comes and goes at my will.

_______________________________________________________________

Late in February I decided to make a smock out of the pink fabric I purchased three years ago. I liked the idea of taking an object that materialized a personal sublimation and putting it to use again, but this time, altering the actual material ingredient without needing to do the same to myself. It became the pink smock.

Truthfully, the pink smock never really worked though it had pretty, pert intentions. French Blue top stitching ran along the edges and crimson ribbons tied it together. At the breast, I pinned on a large blue tulip button. I wore the pink smock to Andrea’s L.A. Critical Space opening reception dinner with orange knee highs, an orange trucker cap, sneakers, and a light pink button-up underneath the smock. With me was Mark, also all in pink. These were pink uniforms with boyish accessories. Together, it all made me feel like a tough tartlet. And in turn, the tart part made me think of a minx and people, places and things that are vulnerable and strong and who live in habitats they experience as home. The smock is a home though maybe more recently it’s been a second home I spend a lot of time in.

I wanted the pink smock to work because I discovered when I wore hot pink tights that the level of attention focused on me, and my appearance specifically, increased. Some days, visibility and attention is abhorrent, but I thought maybe on the days that I felt extra strong, it might be nice to have a smock to wear that wasn’t black, that shoved me out there, that used my body, that displayed boldness and power in a vocal, girlish, bright, cheerful, pushy and giggling way. That’s a pink smock. That’s also a pinx.

When I bought two swathes of differently gauged linen, I intended them for one double sided smock. One side would be a reddish, chocolate brown, woven firmly with thick fibers. The other side was a faded, deep red formed out of fine thread with a looser weave than the brown side. The red cloth had a wormy quality to it. It liked to wriggle into textile gathers and get stuck there in a crease as linen is wont to do. This made cutting the material difficult. Shaping ineffable fabric that looks well-defined into crisp lines that mimic the exact shape of the smock pattern and the brown fabric it was about to be married to for life became a little like chasing the wild rabbit who’s eating all your garden’s lettuce around the already fenced backyard. You want to respect both the wiliness of your prey and your ability to do with them as you like. But, I did finally dispose both the red and brown rectangles of fabric I’d brought home from Michael Levine’s into the appropriate smock pattern. They were slightly mismatched at the neck because the flimsy red linen did manage to trick me for a portion of the cutting, but I lined up all the corners of the red and brown and began to pin. Making a double sided smock required I sew the two pieces of cloth together inside out. Then, when both parts were fully fastened together, I’d pull the sewn smock right side out through the still unhemmed and raw neck. Beyond vague images that saw me ironing the new smock’s edges into long lines—linear stretches that ended in points when the cloth’s shape changed direction heading, say, from the side body of the dress into the hem or from the hem up into the the long sweep of the torso, over the shoulder and back on down to place where the smock’s back fastener held the garment closed—I didn’t forsee much of the work that might come after I sewed the two initial pieces of cloth together.

With fabric markers and a long ruler, I drew lines onto the inside of the smock, which currently faced out, to make sewing a straight line easier. I threaded the smallest needle I owned with a brown cotton-polyester blend of thread and began to sew the red and the brown linen together by hand. In and out, on and on.

Sewing by hand you can take your project anywhere, pull it out and on work on it. I kept the linen smock in a thick, clear plastic bag left over from Christmas present shopping at OK Furniture. The plastic bag lived in my bike bag. And when I wasn’t biking or otherwise occupied, I’d put a couple more inches of linear fastening into the linen smock.

I finished sewing the red and brown pieces of the smock together late in the afternoon of a smockshop meeting. It was a particularly social and sewing oriented meeting. The day was cold and drenched with thick rain and gray drafts. The shop’s heater wasn’t working, but many of the smockers stayed for most the day, chatting, sewing, cutting, ironing, pinning. With the brown and red sides sewn together only a few finishing elements remained. I needed to outfit the smock with fasteners, resolve the raw neck, tease the corners into 90 degree angles, and iron the entire garment one last time.

Meanwhile, someone asked me why I insisted on hand sewing a garment that was so much more appropriately made on a machine. At first I carried on about the intimacy that comes from spending so much time with an object. When I make a smock, it takes up residency in my life. It grows gradually, built from a mixture of the time passage I carry it through and the developments I directly apply to the material. This is the sweet, nostalgic side to obsessiveness. I choose to sew by hand because it’s slow, slow enough to blur mistakes and spontaneous discovery. I sew by hand to instill a value I am still unsure I can impart if I produced more quickly. By hand, the value more explicitly incorporates not just the cost of my time, the cloth and other materials, but the traces of the thoughts I had while making the object and the smells and particles of the many environments the garment traveled through. There’s the specific impact on the fabric of the multiple needles I used at different points along the hem. The smock that will be new again as soon as I sell it previously lives a full life under my hands. Finally, when enough time passes, impact begins to synonymize with value. And in turn, I feel a little more comfortable putting that object out into the world. There are several parts missing from this answer though, which would address the fragile relationship I personally have between my ability and the value of that ability’s product. If I grow my ability, that definition of value can evolve and change so long as the intricacy of my intention correlates with a consciousness of ability. On the other hand, there’s also this sewer’s journey I’m on. It starts with me working by hand, touching everything, taking huge amounts of time until I somehow organically step into the next stage. Maybe that’s the point at which I learn to use a machine. For the moment, I’m still not there.

I took the double sided smock home from the rainy smockshop meeting thinking I’d finish it in a few short shifts. A month and a half later, when the next smock gathering rolled around, the double sided smock was still in its plastic bag, pushed underneath a rack of clothes, buried further by several loads of clean laundry. I’d taken to swearing at the piece of clothing. And I’d stopped taking it out to even consider next steps for its completion. The neck seemed hopeless. Leaving it raw was impossible with the way linen can unravel. But, sewing the disparate parts together didn’t look possible either with the two necklines lacking sameness. I tried to imagine how to bring the two together without doing another 15 hours of embroidery. The solution needed to account for and correct the crookedness of my initial cutting from the pattern nearly two months ago. I had to bring the red and brown necks together in a way that looked complete and aesthetic, but also did the practical job of making sure the smock didn’t fall apart the first time it was washed.

Finally, the double sided smock became a single sided piece of clothing, best worn with the brown side facing out. I applied a skewed and crooked line of black stitching around the neck, making sure it ran counter to the weave of the linen to stop unraveling. I sewed two buttonholes into the back. It started with making two sliver cuts parallel to the line of the hem. Those cuts were lined, swathed, and completely surrounded with more stitching to make them extra sturdy. Fine, brown thread made the first round followed by a layer of embroidery floss until the hole became stiff and flared in its tear drop shape. Through the two button holes I slipped a kilt pin, successfully pulling the smock closed in the back. For the hidden, front fastener, I sewed skinny, brown satin ribbons into the edge of the linen, where red turns to brown or brown to red. Last, I threw the smock in the washing machine to get an idea of how the neck might fray. Afterwards, I dried it part way in the dryer, pulled it out and let it air over night, slung over the ironing board. The following morning, the morning of the next smockshop meeting, I ironed the dried smock and carefully folded the warm cloth into a square and placed it in a bag to travel up to the smockshop. Now it’s done, gone, sold, living another life with new objects, friends like clothes hangers and other smocks, bolts of fabric, and rows of embroidery floss.

I thought of this as I began to prepare a proper appareled approach for a combination brunch-date/metro-riding/biking/hiking excursion with my sister to Eaton Canyon in Altadena. When I imagined grinding up the town’s mountain setting on my bicycle and pulling into the canyon entrance off Altadena Drive, a pair of leggings with a windbreaker didn’t sound quite right. I routed around in my bureau for a black pair of bike shorts I bought years ago in Vermont after a summer of riding around the state for VPIRG convinced me maybe I loved biking enough to buy gear for it. I found the shorts underneath a stack of spandex left over from rowing. The foamy bubble in the butt made the biker shorts easy to feel out amongst the pilled, cotton-blend rowing spandex. I pulled the black bottoms on and then fished around for a bra and shirt set good for sweating in. Once I had all that on, I dropped the black canvas smock over my head and and fastened it tightly in the front and back. I added tube socks to my feet and chose jogging sneakers to finish. This combination felt special, like I was taking the smock somewhere new today, that it had steady reinforcements underneath made out of technical wicking fabric, which would work to address the issues of sweat, a broad spectrum of movements including sitting, river crossing, rock hopping, biking, climbing, and regular old hiking. The dry-weave sports bra in conjunction with a similarly dry-woven white t-shirt left over from a highschool tennis uniform, and a REI zippered turtleneck handled all the physical activity while the smock could hang out on top, allowing dresses tied with long wispy ribbons to work successfully in the rugged outdoors. It was a complete success. Utility and fashion came together while balancing on wobbly rocks to cross the Canyon stream, hoisting my leg up a ledge, and almost sliding down a rocky chute slick with rain.

******
I wore pants yesterday. Not the oversized Wranglers I’ve worn twice since the smock became my uniform. No, I put on close-fitting, potentially punishing pants. One of those pairs I bought in high school to use in the uniform of khaki pants and polo shirts, so not only are they tight, they’re from another time period when I still had some of my adolelscent body left. The kind of clothes item I occasionally look at and wonder if I should just throw away to keep my wardrobe relevent to the present, to stop me from feeling like I need to adhere to a past self, a past shape, a passed moment.

Trouser thoughts started several weeks ago. I met this person who inspires pants wearing. We both have this physical-fantastical-seismic-if-not-superlative relationship to the corporeal story told in Brokeback Mountain. In the nearly three and a half months I’ve been wearing the smock, I’ve only wanted to wear trousers when I traveled into a place or an environment of people, a community of some type, that I’m still forming or figuring out an identity for; a rounded, variously feminine, masculine, utterly genderqeer, sometimes butch and hyper feminine identity. Encompassing all that in one moment with just the surface of my body is impossible.

When I came out at 15–beyond the sensitivity and curiosity I had been aware of all throughout my childhood and encompassing the heterosexual aspects of my desire that were easy to recognize because all of society assumed them for me anyway–I put the feeling of empowerment I got from meeting a set of queer siblings to practice in the form of a relatively butch physical presentation. In conjunction with an intense weight-lifting and exercise program I was doing to ready myself for Varsity Basketball tryouts, I began to move my body differently. I bought carhartts in dark blue and the classic yellow-brown color. I culled through racks of mens shirts in thrift stores, picking out Henley tops and striped long-sleeved collared shirts from the 1970s that used musky oranges, reds, browns, and blues for a palette. I wore the hiking boots my brother had gifted me several years back when my feet had stopped growing. Until then, I’d hardly touched them.

Then I met my first love. She out-butched me. Or rather, in my limited, though historically based understanding of queer being, I saw that Lauren was butch and that to be her romantic counterpart, I’d have to be the femme. I didn’t know of another configuration for our coupling. We fell into our roles quickly. I stopped wearing the boots and shapeless shirts so much. I put blonde highlights in my hair. And off I went down a grooved road of femininity I already knew plenty about from years of reading of Vogue and W by monthly installment.

I only began to get balance the hyper-femininity about four years later. The men I had dated after Lauren doted on the way the femininity and the athleticism and strength in my body had enmeshed. Suddenly intimate and in the world with a transgender-identified individual, all sense of surrounding and setting flipped and fell. On the upendedness of the world’s eyes, I walked past fingers, nasty, nasty words, gestures, invitations, and condemnations. I sagged, trying on and parading wigs, lipstick, a bosom flattened under a chest binder and facial hair. I moved out of that relationship, into a thesis on desire, unlearning, re-learning set after set of assumptions based on matrixes of gender, sex and pleasure, tearing it all down, falling down, reading a little more, talking to someone new, writing a few lines until finally I finished school and moved out to Los Angeles. I applied to live in a cooperative house. In my letter to the house I said was genderqueer and a tranny fag. I said I was V, Vee, or Vi not Vera. I didn’t even mention the Vera. I went to the interview bound. A month and a half later, I began to gain weight. The jeans and pants that had made me feel so boyish over the past 16 months just started to feel uncomfortable and doubling up the chest binders in the city summer heart just got unbearable. So I started wearing dresses and skirts because they were more comfortable. I felt shame, like I was betraying something, mostly myself and any chance I’d had to not be seen and treated as a straight woman and/or a femme. I clung to my shaved head and occasionally donned a wig to remind others, or was it just myself, that this was all still a performance. Then, last fall, I began to run distances again. It wasn’t long before an old bout of tendinitis in one of my knees came back. But, before that happened and through the miles I was putting in on L.A.’s pavement, I began to comfortably find my way back into pants.

Just as the seriousness of my knee problem loomed large, I decided to start sewing smocks. The first one I made would be for me and I planned to treat it like one of Andrea’s 6-month uniforms, wearing it exclusively, seeking freedom from the bother of thoughts and choices surrounding clothing, which by this point had become an incredibly taxing, even debilitating emotional cattle call of politics, ideology, dogmatism, body-hating, body-loving, body-obsession, body-denial, reception, perception, audience awareness, identity, identity, identity UGH!

So, the smock was a relief, simple, easy, all the qualities promised from the multiple conversations Andrea, Tiprin and I had about the garment. All and more, the more being a sense of peace, a stillness that really started to feel tangible about three months into daily smock wearing. I began to forget to know my body–its well-being, ability, and state–through the way it fit in clothing made in sizes with meaning and memories attached to each of those sizes. The rubric of the waistline began to wear away. Finally, my sense of the body could come from a simplified relationship between body and brain. Rather than including and/or having that corporeal-cognitive relationship that is physical awareness be mediated by a piece of clothing with society (its wants, strictures, and ideals) attached, it could just be me and my smock. It cups me just enough to feel flattering, but mostly it just hangs there, doing its job to cover me and keep it all decent.

And after all that, well into month four of the smock I want to wear pants. Not just that, it’s a desire that’s arrived relative to another human being, an intimate, who makes me want to flex, reach around, up, and down. The pulling lets out a part sigh, part shriek, “oooooooh, i can/want to be a boi again.” We can be boi’s together.

Here, now, again, this matter of making impressions, which easily figures so mythically for/in me, looms large. If I’m implicated in something romantic and queer and it’s about what my body and heart will do together, then god damn it, I still, still (unfortunately don’t know how to) belong! I still enter the gateways of queerness—its social form of shared stories, experiences, institutions, etc. rather than one’s more personal relationship to liking/loving non-heteronormatively though not necessarily heterosexually—through archaic means. Is it archaic or just unconfident? to still draw intensely from butch/femme signifiers as a way to start relating my body and its identities to people variously perceived by me and by themselves as queer. It comes down to this. I continue to enter overtly queer situations butched up, when in almost all other circumstances I wear the smock. I change out of the smock (which is probably the closest I’ve ever come to finding a garment that really fits my shape-shifting desire) believing I’ll lose any chance I have at playing with perception if I immediately present my female body as woman.

I want assumption to have to chase me. I want to make that creature work. And the more ground I cover, hopping from passing as male to stalking around in stilettos and running my sneakers into the ground, maybe the better the possibility of physically showing that assuming much of anything about gender (and sex) is a waste of time.

But that still doesn’t really explain why I want to present as surpassing my female body with self-identified queers and/or folks with political sexualities (be they hetero, homo, bi, pan, poly, bending, etc.) but not with passive sexualities. I’ll have to think about that more.

I think that often the smock carries me.

The extra-long ribbons hang down like spindly legs, swishing through the air in graceful, sighing staccatos. The motion stops just short of letting me know I don’t have entire control on another spot that says it’s good to feel like one’s got the possibility of control (if power does enter an equation).

Some days the smock’s smart black shape moves me through each geographic location made up of building surface materials, various hair colors, skin treatments, people, their look, their holding, bearing, levels of light, the time of the day in each part of the city, and whether that light changes or never changes those city parts. Another time, I remember a bike messenger referring to their bike as a pet of types. Or was it a kid and not a pet? That’s the other way I think about the smock. It’s with me day in, day out. I prepare it for various occasions with changing colors and accessories. I feed it detergent and hot water. Sometimes we have one-on-one exchanges, just me with my wetted, soapy rag and that damn dense, white spot on the back of the smock. The smock really is a pet. We go all sorts of places. Sometimes it feels like the most steady object/ingredient in many moments and most of those moments contain much unsteadiness. But the smock always holds its shape; covers, flatters, frames. It’s an accomplice. It handles the aesthetics and I do the talking.

I’m still not sure whether wearing the smock everyday actually allows that talking to focus more or less on the way one looks. I think it allows me me to focus less, but I do think an extra element of watching enters into the relationship of others to my clothing, whether that means paying attention to how this constantly worn garment ages (does it still look as good on day 35 as day 3?) or shifting a heightened attention to those aspects of my dress that do change like tights, socks, and their colors and textures. How careful should I be in choosing those accoutrements. Maybe this whole smock thing isn’t as freeing as I thought?

No, no, no.

The color of each legginged-led and socked-foot are only tangential spokes to a larger mass that doesn’t change, the smock. Well, it’s not that it doesn’t change. As I said earlier, sometimes it’s the pet I carry everywhere with me or otherwise the fraying ends of the ribbons become feet and those bundles of thread carry me.