Unpaid Advertisement: Three Cherries
“CAN I HAVE three cherries?” a guy asked me last year.
He is also gay and trans. The specifics of his five decades on this planet aren’t mine to disclose, but they, too, are rife with religious trauma, endemic homophobia, and trans exterminationism. I was raised Catholic in the Midwest during Reagan’s reign of terror, but if either of us were being raised now, wherever or however, it’d still be under a president who doesn’t believe we’re human beings.
There we were, though, drinking cocktails in his house. I’d made myself a Manhattan, with Cocchi Vermouth di Torino—which I can’t recommend highly enough for its incomparable vanilla notes—and Bulleit rye. That was before I found out that the whiskey brand was helmed by an alleged homophobe and sex abuser.
Just let us live our lives, homophobic rapists! And anti-trans rapist homophobic presidents!
When it’s available, I buy Templeton rye, mostly because it reminds me of my late best friend, Rice. Like Templeton, she was born in Iowa. She was also murdered there. I drink it not only because she loved it, but also because it’s delicious. When I can’t find it, now that I’m boycotting Bulleit, I buy Rittenhouse. Both are potentially less-homophobic ryes, though what do I know—what do any of us know?—about booze magnates?
Or about the purveyors of Luxardo Maraschino cherries? Which I insist on using, despite living below poverty, and despite their price tag. That would be $20-$35 per jar. You can usually buy them with EBT. And I brazenly make my drinks with not one, nor two, but three, on long toothpicks topped with little gold balls.
This other trans fag could not believe my audacity. His eyes widened to owl proportions when he saw me drop the skewerful of cherries into my glass. I confess that it wouldn’t have occurred to me, either, to partake in such abundance, even when I still had money ⬇. Not until three years ago, when another trans friend and I walked into a bar in San Francisco’s North Bay.
Gabriel Mac
Gabriel Mac
IT WAS EASTER. I’d quit drinking ⬆ for almost five years, to better focus on finding myself—buried, as that was, under mountains of unhealed trauma and internalized hate. But on that spring day, my friend and I glimpsed the sexy interior of a bar as we walked past and its door swung closed behind another patron.
Exposed brick and red velvet called out to us. We hemmed and hawed on the sidewalk about whether we should go inside. It was unplanned—and noon, for god’s sake! On Easter Sunday! But finally, she pulled open the door and whisked us both inside.
I nestled up to the bar, my body still somewhat new to me, even after four years of transitioning, let alone to its place in the world. I felt nervous as I ordered a Manhattan. The bartender, a friendly guy wearing a buttoned vest (if I remember correctly), told us about the provenance of their artisanal cherries. I remember him talking about the company (?) who made them like it should mean something impressive to me, which it didn’t, and which I don’t remember. In any case, he put three of said cherries onto the toothpick he set in my glass.
“Three cherries!” my friend said. “That’s how you do it.”
You should see me now when a bartender tries to hand me a cocktail with only one cherry in it. I don’t go to bars often, but when I order a Manhattan at one—after verifying that they have good cherries, not the bright-red, artificially dyed ones à la Shirley Temples—I for some reason don’t tell them up front that I require three.
Instead, I wait, watching to see what they’ll do. Maybe it’s to keep making myself practice asking for what I want.
LAST MONTH, I had the extreme pleasure of taking in a sauna.
Two friends of mine hand-built one out of cedar, some of which they milled from a tree that fell on their property. They nestled the structure nearby, among the still-standing trees. That night, one of these friends opened the door of the sauna’s wood stove, stoking its fire with hot-burning oak.
We sweated. We slapped each other with wet eucalyptus branches, in darkness lit only by flames. When I got overheated and stepped outside, standing under the stars in the Pacific Northwestern air, the trees asked me if I was ready to let in life.
Like, was I really ready to let in life?
Yes! I thought. Yes I am! I answered, easily, hastily, as I submerged myself in my friends’ Japanese cold plunge, a stout, round tub they rescued from rich people who’d discarded it. Yes! I said, without hesitation, partly because for me, even one round of hot sauna and cold plunging is the cocaine of bathing: I come out feeling not just reborn, but stoked.
But also, I’ve been working my fucking ass off for the last twenty years to heal enough to let nice things happen to me. To believe that I can have—and deserve—nice things.
Three years ago, the only reason I took three cherries in that Easter-day Manhattan was that the bartender just gave them to me. If he’d have asked me how many cherries I wanted, I probably would have said, “Ohh, I don’t know. One?”
If he’d have asked if I wanted any cherries at all, I might have said no. Even one might have felt like too much to ask for then. Would have felt like a favor, even in a cocktail that cost eighteen goddamn dollars.
Gabriel Mac
RECENTLY, I WAS having a gimlet as I worked on this piece. I made it with Nellie and Joe’s Famous Key West Lime Juice, which is cheaper but better than the organic lime juices I’ve tried. Incidentally, one of those brands was founded by the family of a best-selling children’s author I once made out in my San Francisco studio.
He was the only person who ever put a finger inside of me and then, in immediate succession—and without discussion—another and yet another still.
One, then two, then three, I later told my friend Tana, as we got hammered at a table outside a Mission bar. I held up one, then two, then three fingers, counting off the words, as if this was a matter of arithmetic. Not consent. Not pleasure.
Not violation: Under no circumstance would I want that many fingers that fast.
Sigh.
Sob.
Pause. For grief, that he was taught, I suppose, not to ask how many fingers or if any at all. That much of the population was taught the same, and/or, like I was, that they couldn’t object.
In addition to 1 part Nellie and Joe’s, I use 1 part organic agave syrup in my gimlet. The rest comprises 5 parts of Bombay Sapphire, a mid-range gin that, despite being founded in the 1980s, was named after British colonialism. The brand is now owned by Bacardi, which was founded in the 1800s by an active Spanish colonialist—and which, I’m realizing as I research this in real time, donates more to Republicans than I feel comfortable with, given that they’re trying to eradicate my existence.
Sigh.
Heartbreaking, knee-dropping, garment-rending sob.
Even before I knew all that, as I neared the end of my gimlet, my torso had started churning. Burning. Flushing with rage. About Texas trying to felonize transness. About the exhaustion of having to do unjust amounts of work because perpetrators and bigots didn’t or don’t or won’t. Never have and never will. Some trans people I know are, in addition to managing their interpersonal traumas, preparing for the possibility of hiding or being rounded up. I am so. fucking. upset that my own doctor is preparing for the possibility of my health care becoming illegal ⬇, and that my insurance has repeatedly denied coverage of the surgery I had in April despite the fact that, because I live in one of the “good” states, it is legally required to pay for my gender-affirming care.
For now, anyway.
Gabriel Mac
“People called things at you,” my work-husband, Seth, said after we walked down a local, liberal street recently. “Not in a friendly way.” To most people, I look like a man wearing “women’s” clothing, which is what I am. “Even walking around with you,” he said, comparing it to his straight-looking, gender-conforming, cis-white experience, “I can feel how many more eyes are on you.”
It often takes alcohol for me to be able to feel my rage. I feel it almost every time I drink. Famously—as well as in my experience—it arises when many men drink, many of them being prone to unleashing it on their loved ones. I’m proud to say that I hold mine responsibly, despite enduring abuses and denigrations that my perpetrators could not even begin to fathom. I’ve forced myself to let anger and hurt and helplessness rip through me without projecting it onto others, despite the deep trenches of oppression I have to inhabit.
Straight cis white men could n e v e r. But as much as I hate to say it, many queer and/or trans people also cannot.
I struggle to access my rage because even hints of it still feel dangerous. In addition to being unacceptable per my entire female socialization, it was also punishable by extra torture in my childhood and prolonged abuse in shitty relationships as an adult.
Just keep quiet. Just keep him happy. Don’t make any waves. Don’t piss him off. I thought it incessantly as a child; I thought it for years-long stretches as a grown-up, when I’d long been the supposed owner of my own autonomy.
Nine years ago, I threw my second husband out of our one-bedroom cottage, where I paid the rent. The night before, he’d spent Thanksgiving evening standing in our room, drunkenly yelling at me, as I tried to sleep, that rape is sometimes a woman’s fault. It wasn’t until he was gone that I could start unleashing some of my own suppressed rage, with the help of bodywork and journaling and therapy. Alone in my now-empty room, I yelled and cried. I screamed in the shower. My belly erupted in untamable rashes, irritated red bumps that coincided with nearly unbearable feelings of wanting to skin myself alive, skin myself whole, anything to escape the awful blood-heat that made me want to kill someone—the kind that, I can only guess, must have motivated my abusers.
“Why are you a life-ruiner?” my dearly departed bestie, Rice, said to my unreasonably popular abusive boyfriend one night, outside another bar in San Francisco. It was some ten years before she would be murdered, along with her dog, by an angry male.
My boyfriend was so upset that she said this. He spent months letting me know, in bed, close and scary and whiskey-breathed, that he was upset that she said this. I was too afraid to say that she had a point. So I swallowed my anger, and I swallowed his, too, like so much bigot-owned booze.
USUALLY, A BARTENDER who makes me a Manhattan spears just one cherry with their cocktail toothpick.
Deep down, I let myself get a little appalled. I let myself, for once and in this small way, believe that I not only deserve to be here, but to enjoy it as much as I can.
Three cherries, I tell them, finally. I hold up not one, not two, but three fingers.
Recently, I made a mezcal Manhattan. The recipe calls for a roughly 2:1 ratio of mezcal to sweet vermouth. For the latter, I used my Cocchi Vermouth di Torino. For the mezcal, I’d treated myself, on a rough day when I was getting groceries, to a bottle of Del Maguey Vida. On its own, it turned out to be a bit too smoky for my taste, but mixed with the vermouth, the result was grounded and delicious. Complex.
The ingredients listed one maraschino cherry, “optional.” But you know what I did.
*POST-SCRIPT: As I was about to send this last night, my friend and landmate knocked at my back window, where I’d been working in the squish.
He was wearing an apron, having just pre-made dozens of burgers for his kid’s birthday party today. He had an earth-toned, ceramic sake glass in one hand, and a gallon glass jug in the other. Every year, his family salvages apples from trees all over town, then presses them into cider. Some of it, he ferments and distills.
“This is apple brandy,” he said of the brown liquid in the jug, holding it out to me. “We just bombed Iran.”
Member discussion