Discovering Greatness

From the time I was very young I had this sense that someday I would be famous. It all began in the womb, when my mom claimed to see Jesus in the ultrasound picture. His face emerging from a cloud, His head adorned with a crown of thorns, shining a light down on His chosen child. All of her dreams of greatness for me were confirmed upon the doctor’s inspection of the placenta, which revealed a fibrous ring that surrounded the umbilical cord, appearing much like a halo, sealing my fate of chosavinity. I would be their favorite. Clearly God had blessed me with being the center of the universe, a secret that only my immediate family was privy to. My mom told me that I could do anything I put my mind to. I could be anything I wanted to be....”except a man or a father,” that’s what other children from more “restrictive” homes might have told me. No, no, I could be a man if I really wanted to, but why would I do that? After all, I can do anything a man can do, and many things even better- a belief I still hold strongly. Besides, I never wanted to be a man, and being a transsexual was not the type of fame that I was seeking. I was destined for greatness, and it was my responsibility to the world to discover what my great talent was. I just knew there was this hidden talent, and all I’d have to do is walk out onto the right stage or field and it would happen.

It began at the age of four. I watched my older sister, Ann, do cartwheels, backbends, front hand springs, and best of all splits. It must be in the genes. Sign me up. My mom was supportive of most every sport I ever tried, but she did not find paying $30 for me to sit on a matt sucking my thumb, waiting on the magic to happen, especially endearing. So my gymnastic funds were cut short and I was left with a half a set of parallel bars in the back yard. It was the rusty metal swing set, and about the only thing it was parallel to was the ground. Ann taught me to do a frontward flip on it, but before I could convince my mom to call Bela I had a broken wrist, and I was over the whole gymnastics thing.

When I was just six years old, in the first grade, it came to me like a message from God, over the loud speaker at school. Someone from the Department of Recreation would have a table set up in the lunch room with applications for baseball. That was it. It had to be my calling. Tomorrow could not come fast enough. One might have thought they were serving manna from heaven the way I ran to that lunchroom. Mrs. Seegars, the meanest first grade teacher in the world, declared that anyone who wanted to go get an application for baseball would have to clean his or her plate first. And it was not a pizza day. It was raisin- carrot salad day. Finely shredded carrots mixed with mayonnaise (which I think is the most disgusting condiment ever) and bloated raisins. I ate every bit of it, carried my tray up to the dirty tray window, and proudly strutted my way to my destiny at the table in the back of the lunch room.

“I would like to play baseball.”

“You’re a girl. You’ll have to play softball, and I don’t have any softball applications. You’ll have to get your mom to bring you down to the Rec. Center and sign you up.”

“I don’t want to play softball. I want to play baseball.”

“I’m sorry, but girls aren’t allowed to play baseball.”

When I get really mad I cry, but I hate to cry, so I bit my lip ‘til it almost bled. I wanted to say “Listen buddy, I just ate a pound of raisin-carrot salad. The least you could have done was put a stupid sign on your table saying ‘No girls allowed.’” But that was not the end of it. I was playing baseball. And when I went home and told my mom what that man said to me….OK she didn’t actually do anything, but my brother overheard me and he said, “Here, just take my application, and I’ll tell him I lost mine tomorrow.” We filled it out, and he turned both of them in so the oaf wouldn’t notice that a girl had slipped past the system. I suppose it got stuck in a stack with dozens of others, and we got a schedule in the mail. Not only was I the only girl on the team, I was the only girl in the league. And I take full pride in how well manicured I kept left field, where I often sat picking dandelions until it was our turn to bat.

I started taking dance at seven- tapp and jazz, I figured I could double my chances of discovering my God given talent. Honestly, I don’t know whether or not I was actually any good. I know I thought I was, but I also thought my mullet was cute, and I lived for the recital and a chance to wear lots of blue eye shadow. Looking at the pictures would lead me to believe that getting out of dance was probably a good decision. After all, I had given it a good solid two years, and I was not going to waste my years of stardom being mediocre.

My brother, Jesse, on the other hand, wasted no time finding his fame. He was the star of the tennis team, running a racket stringing business out of his bedroom. I swear I think I wasted the next two to three years living in his shadow as we toured the state going from tournament to tournament. After a few years of hearing me whine my mom put me in private tennis lessons. I was going to be just like my brother…only not. I don’t know what happened. I think if I had actually been considering becoming a man this would have been a good transitional sport…cute short skirts with a place to hide your balls, but that was not part of my plan, and it was really hot outside, so things just didn’t work out.

At age 13 I decided to revisit dance. After all, I had finally hit puberty and was ready to proudly display my femininity in the smallest, tightest outfit possible. If I could have chosen my God given talent, it would definitely be to have been a dancer. Besides, I was only a kid the last time I took dance. Now I was ready to shake my tail feather. I soon discovered, that now that I had my womanhood, I’d either have to use a tampon or quit dance because wearing a pad with a leotard just wasn’t going to cut it. And just as I was getting used to the tampons, we moved.

I can definitely tell you what my God given talent is NOT, and that is geography. I knew when I started 9th grade that we would be moving sometime that year, and for some reason I decided I did not like my geography teacher. I was proof of the statement that “Students don’t learn from teachers that they don’t like.” I determined after the first day, in all of my 14 year old wisdom, that I’d rather be geographically retarded for the rest of my life than to so much as write my name at the top of my paper for that man. And I maintained straight A’s in every other subject. We moved third nine weeks, and I was truly horrified when I found out that my grades transferred to my new school. Having never moved before, I just thought I got to start over. All of those A’s had actually been purely to show my parents and my geography teacher that clearly there was something wrong with that man. The day my grades came, my new geography teacher found me in the hall. He came to me like an angel of mercy, his words renewing my faith that God had not forgotten me.

“Laurie, I see your grades came today. You’re failing geography.”

“Yes sir, I know. The guidance counselor already told me.”

“Have you ever run track before?”

It was the first time anyone had asked me if I was a runner, but I knew why he was asking. It was the same reason that people asked me if I played basketball. I was 5’7” and weighed 104 lbs.

“No, I haven’t, but I bet I could.”

“I’m the track coach. I’ll tell you what. If you’ll run track for me I will help your grade.”

For a half a day I had thought that bastard of a geography teacher was going to win. Just when I thought God had completely forgotten me, not only had I been rescued from having to bring home a failing report card, but it appeared, at the time, to be God’s unveiling of my great and hidden talent, just when I least expected it. It was going to be great. I showed up at the track decked out in my shorts, tank top and Keds. I was ready to run. I worked hard to get into shape, traveling with the track team, waiting for my great debut. It came during a home track meet. Everyone was there. Everyone was there to see Brantly Epps, an 8th grader with legs up to her chin, lap me on the mile. That’s it. I was done.

The summer after 9th grade my mom tried to convince me that it was my destiny to be a great marksman. She had devoted the entire spring season to taming a fox. Every night she would set out a pan of table scraps in the garden, and force us to sit by the window in silence for what seemed like hours until the fox came. And I must admit, it was pretty cool. Something always came. If it wasn’t the fox it was a opossum or a raccoon, but the fox was the best, that is until it began coming in the garden in the middle of the day. One minute my mom would be in the heart of the zinnias, plucking weeds. And the next minute she’d be running through the yard screaming like a mad woman.

“That fox. It’s rabid. I just know it. They’re nocturnal animals. It shouldn’t even be out during the day.”

“Mom, you tamed it. I’m sure it’s just lookin’ for food.”

“Didn’t you see on the news where that woman got bit on the ankle by a rabid fox that was hidin’ under her back deck? I’ve got to do something.”

She tried for several weeks after that to kill it. My dad went out and bought a Gamo 1000 pellet rifle with a scope on it. Being a witness to this series of events was like a daily matinee to Caddy Shack. My mom was Bill Murray, and the fox, the gopher. Each day she became more and more obsessed with putting an end to her foe, eventually dragging me into her plot. I was to hide out on the deck, armed and ready while she plucked ripe cucumbers and tomatoes. I would be a perfect marksman. She just knew it. I’d sit on the deck for an hour or so every day while she gardened. I took it as an opportunity to darken my tan. I became a crazed bikini wearin’, gun totin’ fox killin’ machine. The fox would come. My mom would scream, and I’d jump up, wave the gun around wildly, shoot in the air a few times, and the fox would run away. We musta’ looked crazier than a rabid fox because after several days of this the fox never came back.

I found church basketball to be a great outlet for the resentment and hostility I had built up over apparently not having any “real” talent after all. I was no longer a child who believed that I had some special quality that just needed discovering. My sister had managed to debunk the whole chosavinity myth by becoming a labor and delivery nurse and discovering that a fibrous ring was not in fact a halo, but rather a thick ring of fiber, which can sometimes restrict blood flow to the uterus and cause mental retardation. I wasn’t the center of the universe. I was just a girl who liked to play sports that I wasn’t especially good at. Lots of girls in our school played church basketball, and I took great pleasure in landing an elbow to the face every opportunity I got. I was number one in rebounds because after the first quarter no one would come near me if I was under the basket.

In spite of my love for sports, I hated school and rarely ever went. I could maintain As and Bs every nine weeks while cutting classes two to three times a week. The school called our house relentlessly, but no one could convince me of the necessity of attendance. My parents decided that I needed to be in a smaller setting where it would be more difficult for me to sneak away, so they enrolled me in a small private Christian school across town. I agreed to it because I had always wanted to be a cheerleader, only I was about as flexible as a dried up twig and about as strong as one too, but I figured everybody probably makes the team at a Christian school. I was right about one thing, anyone can make the team, but I was already enrolled when I learned that the cheerleading uniform included skirts that went past their knees. Now there just wouldn’t even be a point to that. I skipped cheerleading “tryouts” and went straight to softball. I actually found that I wasn’t too bad at softball. I played first base and batted fourth. Our team as a whole wasn’t bad, if only we had had a pitcher. In two years we never found a single girl who coulda’ pitched a rock into a pond. The last game of my senior year we traveled to Greenville to play a double header against another Christian school. It was the bottom of the third. My team was in the field, and I was on first. The pitcher walked the first player, the second, and then the third. The bases were loaded, and I sighed as the fourth player leisurely walked to first. I gritted my teeth and rolled my eyes. She dusted off her hands and chuckled as she looked at me and said, “That was easy.” Without giving it a second’s hesitation, I stood up straight and glared at her and said, “That’s what I hear about you.” The next three minutes would be the most uncomfortable three minutes of my life as I truly expected her to beat me up, but thankfully I think she got walked to second before she figured out what I had said. We won the second game of the double header, the only winning game in two years, and then my high school softball career was over.

I went on to college, not on a sports scholarship or anything, just on full tuition. I worked hard, went to class, took notes and studied. It had become clear that getting through life was going to take hard work and perseverance. I was smart and well rounded. Having such a wide variety of experiences helped me to relate to most anyone. And I would go on to learn new things. I walked on to the girl’s club soccer team, played intramural ultimate Frisbee, and spent a summer rock climbing from Georgia to West Virginia. But it wasn’t until my sophomore year that I found my true passion, one that would lead me on a journey of self discovery, like a mirror to Narcissus, allowing me to be center stage. All I had to do was write the play. I got back an essay that I had written in English class, not one of any significance. I can’t even tell you what the essay was about, but there it was, at the top of the paper. It might as well have been written in golden calligraphy, “You have nice voice in your writing.” That’s it. I was hooked.