You Only Live Twice

Sex, Death, and Transition

Mike Hoolboom, Chase Joynt

• Publisher: Coach House Books
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781770564497
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

"Chase Joynt and Mike Hoolboom here give each other the gift so many people only dream of: ample, unhurried space to unspool crucial stories of one's life, and an attentive, impassioned, invested, intelligent receiver on the other side. The gift to the reader is both the example of their exchange, and the nuanced, idiosyncratic, finely rendered examination it offers of biopolitical experiences which, in many ways, define our times. I'm so glad they have each other, and that we have this."
– Maggie Nelson

" You Only Live Twice is an intelligent ode to enchantment, to the possibilities that arise in their 'second lives' when all past expectations have been foreclosed."
– Chris Kraus

"The writing is out of the park — strong and surprising, a relay race of brilliant twirling, tossing thoughts back and forth like balletic rugby bros. Joynt and Hoolboom's dances of disclosure are so courageous and generative, gifts to us all."
– John Greyson

What if it's not true that you only live once? In this genre-transcending work of true fiction, trans writer and media artist Chase Joynt and HIV-positive movie artist Mike Hoolboom come together over the films of Chris Marker to exchange transition tales: confessional missives that map out the particularities of what they call "second lives": Chase's transition from female to male and Mike's near-death from AIDS in the 1990s. Chronicling reactions from friends and families, medical mechanics, and different versions of "coming out, ' YOLT explores art, love, sex, death, and life in changed bodies.

The unspoken promise was that in our second life we would become the question to every answer, jumping across borders until they finally dissolved. Man and woman. Queer and straight.

Mike Hoolboom is an author and filmmaker based in Toronto. He has written four books, received more than thirty international film prizes, and enjoyed nine international retrospectives of his work.

Chase Joynt is a Toronto-based moving-image artist and writer who has exhibited his work internationally. He recently received a Mellon Fellowship in Arts Practice and Scholarship at the University of Chicago.

2.0
Café of Silence

They decide to meet each year in the Café of Silence, as they like to call Ten Belles now, the modest bistro parked just outside Marker’s last apartment, where they sat only last June without two words to rub together. Mike is tired – some mornings it feels like he was born tired, and he welcomes it, it produces exactly the feeling of homecoming. Each sugar cube in the bowl, each wobbly reflection in the stainless-steel flatware, appears like display items in a golden museum. He is so used to hearing Chase’s words inside his head that it is startling to hear them occasionally launched from across the table.

A commotion at the counter, angry words, a cup drops. Heads turn while they savour the perfect French coffee. Mike wants to take his accomplice’s hand and lead him to the back of the resto where they can curl up together like cats, home at last. He wants to tell Chase how often he pores over their correspondence, how his letters are more real than dinner, but he’s seen in the past how any kind of needful expression can be met with a sudden and irreversible withdrawal.

‘It’s good to see you, but I can feel my heart running double-time. If I was writing you a letter, the words couldn’t hit the page fast enough, but now I’m trying to find…’

‘Yes, I know.’

Chase reaches a tattooed limb across the table and steadies Mike’s hand, which keeps moving back and forth as if he’s trying to erase something.

‘I care about you very much, you know? How do we work so you can feel…’

A single shot rings out and a shuffle of exclamations. Chase turns his head and Mike follows the gaze toward the cash where a heavy-set man is emptying the register with a Richard Nixon mask on his face. An errant sunbeam catches the safety on the service revolver and they look away.

‘I guess they really hate Americans here.’

Mike starts to laugh but Chase cuts him short; everyone else is already crouched underneath their tables along with their dogs. The sour smell of fear. The inhalation from the head of the room. The collective project of waiting. Footsteps across the tile and then the door swings shut again. A hiss of profanities. They watch Richard Nixon jump onto a scooter and fling his mask off, the sagging plastic jowls hitting the pavement and rolling until the face looks up into a blank and incomprehensible sky, frozen into a smile. As they brush themselves off, they know two things for sure. That they will never come back to this café, and that they’ll never write about the event, it’s too precious to leave a record. Chase squeezes Mike’s hand into his. They don’t move for a long time, though the conversation around them rises to delirious levels as if to make up for the silence everyone observed without having to be told. They don’t say a word.

2.1
Funeral

Chase

For years, my mom kept asking me to accompany her to see my grandmother. At the time, my grandma was living in an assisted-care facility on the outskirts of the town in which I grew up, a rich, white, Stepford Wives–inspired place. I never wanted to be in that town again, let alone its outskirts. I had left home for California at eighteen as a blonde-haired, over-achieving girl with a boyfriend, only to return almost a decade later as a tiny-moustache-sporting, tattooed man. Such a transformation rendered details like my prior overachievements and past boyfriends narratively insignificant to the majority of people I encountered thereafter. And other than acknowledging awkwardly obvious and unnecessary statements – ‘Heeeeeey, you look so different these days!’ – I hadn’t felt the need to explain anything to anybody.

My grandmother was a wicked woman. It’s a strange thing to try to remain sympathetic to someone so cruel. Something about cycles of abuse and realizing that she was acting out on her kids in the ways she was acted out upon. As if her manic hysteria were somehow the only available resource to her, and therefore we, as her kids and grandkids, were supposed to forgive and forget. In the most recent request for my company, my mom told me that Grandma was dying, and while yes, she had ostensibly been dying for decades, the time to visit was really now or never.

We drove out to the nursing home together on a frigid, snow-blown January night. A dutiful daughter, my mom had been making these trips periodically, all the while acknowledging that such care for her would have never been reciprocated. On the drive, mom warned me that Grandma was uncomfortably thin and not particularly lucid. The Sunday prior to our visit, she got angry about the lunch options, and clogged the toilet with her dentures in revolt. Her teeth had not yet been replaced.

The walls of the home were painted a mute green and smelled of alcohol swabs. Walking down the hall to my grandmother’s room, I felt my stomach contract involuntarily. The silent combination of anger and potential shame was only mitigated by what felt to me like game-day adrenaline. If Grandma was going to fuck with us, I was going to be ready.

My mom and I locked eyes knowingly and shared a deep breath as we approached the curtained-off area. But before we could turn the corner, a nurse sporting oversized scrubs and a seventies lesbian haircut stopped us in our tracks.

‘I’m so sorry … but she just passed.’

We froze.

‘Right now?’ I asked quite genuinely, even though I’m sure it sounded extremely sarcastic.

‘Just moments ago,’ she said.

As if we were trapped in the second act of a Neil Simon play, my mom’s younger brother and his wife surreptitiously emerged from the elevator to join us for the news.

‘Right now?’ my uncle asked in disbelief.

‘Just moments ago,’ the nurse repeated.

Outside every room at the nursing home were small glass vitrines filled with trinkets and memorabilia specific to each patient behind each door. Walking the corridors, one might assume that everyone infirm was a war veteran, or in love with one. I gazed upon the gold frames, tiny ceramics and fake flowers staged in the box on my grandmother’s behalf. Even if she hadn’t been dead, her memories certainly were. My mom reached for her cellphone, and my aunt followed the nurse down the hall.

‘Well, Chance, I’m not really sure what to say,’ said my uncle.

When I changed my name to Chase, I did not consider its associative similarity to the word chance. Nor did I understand the confusion that would ensue when Chaz Bono decided to transition and choose something so phonetically similar.

Anyway, my mom returned from making calls and excused me from talking to my uncle by requesting that we speak for a moment in private. A generous, soft-spoken woman, my mom’s conversion from Christianity to Orthodox Judaism in the year prior continued to intensely inform all of her choices.

‘In my faith,’ she said to me quietly, ‘we never leave a dead body alone.’

‘Okay,’ I responded quite plainly, as if I had just been given the weather report.

‘And I have to go make arrangements for the funeral home to come pick up her body, so I need you to go sit with her.’

Walking through the curtain, I wondered what it must have felt like to call that room home for so many years. Turning the corner to see her, I was immediately overwhelmed. The staff hadn’t unplugged her from the ventilator yet, which meant that a machine continued to rhythmically pump her chest up and down. She couldn’t have weighed more than eighty pounds. Her lips looked dry and her fingers were purple. I sat down and held her hand.

‘Well, now at least we know,’ said my aunt as she walked in and sat beside me.

Nobody wants to admit the limits of their labour when taking care of a dying person, but everyone knows that those limits exist.

My uncle followed her into the room with my mom just a few steps behind.

‘So, I guess it’s probably time we bring out Bill,’ he said.

Bill was my grandma’s second husband.

‘Bill?’ asked my mom.

‘Grandma has been hiding Grandpa in the closet!’ exclaimed my aunt.

Crossing the room where Grandma still lay, my uncle shuffled through boxes of clothing and shoes in the bottom of her closet to reveal a large, bronze-plated urn cast into the shape of a golf bag.

‘She wanted to have him close to her, so we hid him under the shoes!’ they said proudly.

My mom looked as if she were attempting to contain a mouthful of marbles while sneezing.

The urn was set on the side table now, making us a room of six: aunt, uncle, Mom, me, dead-but-still-breathing Grandma, and dead-but-in-a-golf-bag Grandpa.

‘It’s a very nice urn,’ I said.

‘It is,’ said my uncle. ‘I wonder if we could put her in there too?’

‘In the golf bag?’ questioned my mom.

‘Well, they wanted to be together forever,’ said my aunt.

Without so much as skipping a beat, my uncle reached into his pocket and revealed a Swiss Army knife attached to his keys.

‘Do not open that urn in here!’ yelped my mom.

We laughed. The anxiety in my stomach was momentarily replaced with such excitable glee that I could have opened that urn with my teeth.

The nurse returned to the room with paperwork that she needed everyone to sign. We asked if she could turn off the respirator while she was there, and with a flip of a switch, the room went silent for the first time.

‘I’m gonna need some whisky after this,’ said my uncle.

We said our goodbyes in the parking lot before the funeral home people arrived to take grandma away. According to the care staff, watching a body leave the building in a bag isn’t good for anyone. Driving out of the parking lot, my mom and I were quiet.

‘They are going to put Grandma in that golf bag,’ she said, ‘and I bet she’s going to fit.’

2.2
Mark

Mike

In the second life, we can remake family according to preference, like countries that swap bloodline successions for democracy. We can vote for our new brothers and sisters and create a second family, even if we wind up acting out the same old routines. Your final grandmother visit reminds me of one of my oldest habits, the way I reserve so much of my intimate life and affections for those who are no longer around. Mark became a family member soon after he took his last step.

He would always greet me with a wave that came fromthe end of his scarf, and a hiiii that drawled a vowel so long we could both land on it. He was a front-line care worker, an animal-rights activist, and when he partnered up with a trans activist, he became a tireless supporter of all things trans. His second or third job was working as a movie editor, and we sat together through six winters, sieving pictures through the video co-op’s computer, his large capable hands interfacing with bewildering softwares and diva machines that worked according to their own schedules. I wasn’t able to see then the way his lightness was also a way of erasing every step, as if he were walking backward through the snow with a broom, leaving no traces. Now you see me, now you don’t.

There’s only one other person I know who has Mark’s talent for relentless optimism. It was so consistent that I realized quickly that this was something Mark had worked on, the way others work at making a perfect cup of coffee or getting down a blues lick on the guitar. Almost every day I saw him, Mark would offer some recipe for cheer, which he applied like a bandage. He did it so well that it gave me a hint of a darkness that was all his own, a darkness that he performed with an airy lightness, insistently turning it into something positive and affirming, ensuring that no one would notice. In your words, he always looked like he was ‘doing okay,’ especially when he wasn’t. So much of his behaviour seemed a kind of cover story, like most of us perhaps.

He was a large man with a crooked beak of a nose and soft brown eyes that were better met when the light was low. They were so admitting they hurt to look at sometimes. The way he held himself shrank his stature, even when he was a hot breath away, showing me, again and again, how to make the impossible work. His touch was so effortlessly light that it seemed like I was practically alone, figuring it all out by myself. It was an old magician’s trick he practiced, the fine art of disappearance.

We made a portrait of my friend Tom, and then a collection of shorts that signed off with an extravagantly stuttering Porky Pig announcing, ‘Th-th-that’s all, folks.’ Mark had a thing for these farm animals; like me, he was born in the year Chinese folks mark with a pig. And I couldn’t help thinking about the ancient woman rooming over the bun shop who reads foreheads; she warned me that every time the pig year rolled in – one in twelve – it would be time to face the music. To face what couldn’t be faced.

The year 2007 belonged to the pig, and despite all reasonable warnings, I came to the cinema one April night with no sense of alarm. My whole life used to happen inside movie theatres, every love and hope and failed dream lived and died there. After settling into the frayed velvet seats, my friend Aleesa leaned close and said she had something to share when the curtain closed. Sure, why not? When the film was over, she told me that Mark had hung himself with a dog leash. He was thirty-five years old.

In the following months I was fortunate to meet with some of his friends and family, and in these encounters he would flicker alive in our mouths and then cruelly disappear. His best friend from public school, had his arm tattooed with Mark’s birth and death dates on it. His partner told me that Mark had become a spider, and the next day a coworker said that the balcony plant she’d potted in his honour hosted the largest spider she’d ever seen.

For many years Mark and I were busy gathering our small picture harvests and bringing them back into the computer where they could be endlessly re-edited and keep our own secrets company. Sometimes we succeeded too well. In all those years, how many stories did we refuse one another, or never admit even to ourselves?

There had been no previous attempts, he left no note, there was no obvious reason why. When I met his stunned parents in a nearby parking lot and took them into the service, they were convinced that everyone else in the room knew exactly why he was dead. We wanted to know the reasons why, the progression of events, the narrative clasp that would assure us that his death was meaningful, maybe because that would assure us that our lives weren’t a random collision anthology.

As long as I’d known Mark he was always telling me, ‘No problem.’ One leg kicked up behind him, his arm bent into a backward wave, head raised up in the air. There were no difficulties that belonged to others that he wasn’t busy patching, mending, attaching himself to. Which made us wonder how someone who had spent his life in service should have left so little for himself. He was busy feeding feral cat colonies around the city. He organized rallies against animal testing, provided years of research and technical support for a weekly animal-rights radio program, working always with the poor and disadvantaged. He has been a model of kindness for me these many years, a kindness it seems that he was able to extend more easily to others tha...