Cross-Dressing Transsexual Does Bump of Caviar

“I feel like we’ve reached Peak hWhite,” my friend Katie said when we sat down at a sidewalk table out front at the champagne-and-caviar restaurant (which is an actual kind of restaurant) in San Francisco’s North Bay last summer. She side-eyed the scene. “I feel like I have to say ‘white’ like ‘hwhite’ here.”

Our grilled cheese sandwich with a wee side of caviar was $40. We split it, but it was still Peak for us. One of the waitstaff, all of whom were supernaturally blond, told us to put a tiny spoonful of caviar onto the back of our hands between our thumb and forefinger, where the hand temperature warms the caviar just right, and lick it off, and that this is called a caviar “bump.” It’s occurring to me only now that the only thing more ridiculous than everything I just said is that there’s a designated place on the hand for this, like if you’re going to lick fish eggs off an extremity, you couldn’t just do it from anywhere on there.

Yesterday, I was standing in a patch of mud wiping RV kitchen blinds free of 24 years of whatever gets on RV kitchen blinds, unless one of the old straight dudes who owned this rig before me undertook this chore at some point, which I doubt. Maybe that sounds unpleasant, but I don’t mean it to. I’d taken the blinds down to repaint, and before putting them back up I laid them out on top of a cardboard box in the yard where I’m parked in Puget Sound. It was cold, but I didn’t feel the need for a coat. I had a little bucket with some water and eucalyptus-scented Dr. Bronner’s, and under my rag the grimy film and food splotches gave way to white plastic with satisfying reliability. I never know (as no one knows) what my subconscious is up to until pieces of it break into my awareness, and yesterday, what suddenly burst into my brain as I cleaned my blinds was: I don’t give a shit what Zac Efron is doing right now.

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