What a Girl Wants, What a Girl Needs
J sleeps under the protected end of the church portico, screened from the many who take offense at her. Our arrangement is that she will be awake and moving by the time the office opens at 9. After hiding her belongings under the bush by the outside basement steps, she comes inside for a cup of coffee and a granola bar.
A dark bruise is visible under J’s right eye as she makes her entrance, gliding in like a Diné Greta Garbo. Nights are hard for a six-foot, transgender, indigenous pilgrim who lets the Bold Rock cider get the best of her, and daylight often finds her worse for wear.
“Yá’át’ééh,” I say in greeting, the one scrap of her tribe’s language I know, and she mimes pushing non-existent glasses down her nose to look at me over imaginary rims. “Well listen to you, Padre. You sound like you just stepped out of the sweat lodge. What’s happening down at the hogan?” She gives me a hard time like that, demanding to be on equal footing, refusing to be patronized.
We shoot the breeze. I’m grateful to be distracted from office work. She’s grateful to let down her guard. Sometimes, she wants to talk about the family that has disowned her or the tribe she left behind after they cut off benefits for reasons never acknowledged. Sometimes, she wants to gossip. Sometimes, she wants a hug.
This is so far from who I’ve been, this western adventure in the high desert among children of Spanish conquistadors and Hopi, Pueblo, Apache, and Diné tribes. I’m a son of the South, babe of the Bible Belt having grown up straight and white in a straight and white culture.
Where I grew up, spring brings an explosion of colors as azaleas and camellias shoulder each other aside competing for best in show. In the high desert, you learn to value the beauty of rocks: shades of ochre, rust, cinnamon, and burnt sienna. You die of heartbreak at the sight of a single, red Indian Paintbrush bloom squeezing up through a crevice.
I work half a block off Central Avenue in Albuquerque, the storied old Route 66. Restless travelers still flow like corpuscles through that artery, rarely pausing, looking for something hard, if not impossible, to find. Some who want a permanent place to lay their burdens down can’t find it, and others choose rootlessness over what they experience as ties that pinch or bind too tightly.
I’m content to listen to J as she tries to uncover the questions at the heart of her unease. I don’t know any good gossip, but she tells me things; things I don’t always want to know. I’m not a big hugger; got to observe proper boundaries and all that shit. But when a girl wants it—needs it—you don’t say no.
