Dec 17, 2024 14 min read RV Diaries

What to Get for the Man Who Has Everything

The Whenever’s bougie homeless gay gift guide 🎁

Photo of sexy silk ombre pillowcases taken at a sewage dump site, which happens to be surrounded by gorgeous forest.

I HAVE EIGHTEEN gallons of clean, beautifully cold water. That’s half of my RV reserve tank, which I filled four days ago.

I have late-afternoon sunlight pouring golden through my windows as I write this, parked on the side of a street where—like most streets—it’s not legal to live in an RV.

I have access to a sewage dump site, where I can empty my 30-gallon black tank. It’s just a few miles away, and it’s surrounded by vibrant green cedars. It also has a potable-water faucet, to which I can hook up a hose to refill my 37-gallon freshwater tank.

I have working plumbing. In my previous life, I couldn’t have imagined living without it for five minutes, but I survived not having it for the past two Januarys in a row.

I even have a little filtered pitcher I can run water through if it looks or tastes weird. I’m not trying to brag.

I have a working refrigerator, which I didn’t have for more than a month earlier this year.

I have two refrigerator drawers full of produce: lemons, limes, pears, oranges, peppers, some of them organic, all of them free, from a food bank for which I waited in line on Saturday.

I have a box of free onions, potatoes, and sweet potatoes as well.

It wasn’t my regular, stellar food bank I went to. Still, I got free-range chicken drumsticks and chicken stock and mushrooms, all of which are in an Instant Pot with rice and seasonings (which I bought) right now. It’s plugged into my house, which is plugged into an outlet outside a friend’s house, via a very long extension cord I just bought.

I have a very long, brand-new extension cord.

I have a big container of dollop-able garlic herb feta, also from the food bank, that I never would have bought from a store and that I can spoon on top of the already rich, filling, fulfilling chicken and rice I cooked.

I’ve moved. Actually, I fled. Two weeks ago, a dysregulated neighbor on the farm where I miraculously landed two years ago, shortly after moving into this RV, turned his dysregulation in my direction in a way that I will not suffer. The next day, I woke up and knew that when I left for a planned weekend of visits and appointments away, I would not return.

Social services already considered me homeless, because I live in a vehicle. Culturally and generally legally, you’re not supposed to live in vehicles. This move makes me extra-homeless—more homeless than I was before, but not nearly as homeless as many. I have shelter. Last year, I had my leaky roof rebuilt, paid off with sex-abuse reparations from Ohio’s Victims Compensation Fund and a super generous donation from a super generous reader I’ve never even met (hi, you 👋😘). When it rains here in Northwest Washington—which it often does—I hear it hit loud on the ceiling just above me, and I tense before breathing, knowing: I will stay dry.

I have access, sometimes, to a buoying, breathless sense of adventure surrounding my circumstances. My friend and work-husband Seth (wait till you see the tiny film we made) says it makes me more of a legend, following my heart and needs and destiny without knowing where I live, however weird and scary. I have more creative ideas and flow than I have time to tackle; they seem to increase in direct relation to the weird and scary in my life.

I have the most perfect-for-me cat. He is healthy—right now. Thanksgiving week, his health cost me $893.71 in an emergency-vet bill I charged to a credit card when he suddenly came down with an alarming fever. Formerly, when I used to see homeless people with pets (usually dogs) asking for change, I would get so mad. If you can’t feed yourself, I would think, why the fuck would you also be trying to feed a dog? Now that I have a cat, who on a regular basis is one of the best things about my day, I understand. This morning, Thomas and I curled together in the squish under several blankets, while mist shrouded the trees outside. December is a super-hard month for me. I’m not, right now, having a hard time.

I have my own health—or my best version of it. I have free health insurance! Medications, paid for by Medicaid, make my pains bearable enough to keep my precious trans body on this planet, doing important work like terrorizing people in men’s rooms.

I have a friend who is letting me run the aforementioned very long extension cord across 100 feet of his front yard. I have friends who in general awe and inspire me. At the food bank on Saturday, I ran into another friend (trans); he was there to help a friend carry groceries, despite a back injury and living without running water or electricity himself. The friend whose yard power is traveling through (also trans) to run my 12-year-old laptop is disabled and spent all day Sunday making dinner with food bank supplies—big pots of hot, creamy potato and leek soup—to feed the people in a homeless encampment in town, which he does every week. When it rains here in Northwest Washington—which it often does—the wind sometimes kicks up and destroys their tents.

Both of these friends are also artists, who travel rural areas performing acts of resistance and beauty. I’ve always thought of utopia as a place that doesn’t really have any problems. I think of it today as a place where more than anything, people care, as a verb.

Today, I’m in that place.

I do not have a bathtub. I didn’t have a bathtub even in my last Bay Area apartment, $2,000 a month in rent be damned. Last night, I asked my friend if I could cross his yard to come take a bath in his sweet, cozy little house, which is paid for by an emergency shelter voucher from the county—he was formerly homeless as well. When I walked into his bathroom, I found that he’d lit candles and set out grounding stones; he’d washed the tub and placed a little table next to it, adorned with my favorite tarot deck, which I don’t own, palo santo, and a thermos of hand-blended herbal tea—“Sore Heart,” it’s called.

I don’t have an address. Even when I did, I couldn’t share it because of threats to my safety from rapists and trans-exterminationists who are obsessed with me, though my dream was to make one of those cute online wish-list/registries full of the gift guide recommendations below so people could also send them to me! I do already have trust that a place to live—to park more permanently—will arise and be more nourishing and interesting and joyful and wild than I’ve ever imagined, and I have patience to wait. I have more compassion for myself than I thought remotely possible, by a long shot, by the longest shot. I have clarity about what is right for me and what is not. I have the fewest arguments with myself in my head about what that is. I have less stress than ever about getting my needs met without having to strive and hustle and breakneck-pace my way through things I don’t want to do so I can buy an overpriced house that would not come stocked with any of those things. Nor would a husband. I have the knowledge that I need so much less than I thought. I remember when I still had and/or made “good” money—whatever it cost my personhood or truth—and I heard people say things like “You’d be surprised how much less you need than you thought!” and I always thought: No!

I didn’t want to hear or even consider that. I didn’t want to know it. I didn’t want to give up striving or become money-poor in the way that would be required to know it.

Despite what I wanted, I know it. Or at least, I’m learning it. I don’t believe it’s a coincidence that I have the most loving, generous, kind internal dialogue I’ve ever had, by a million miles. A kind of loving and generous interior dialogue that I didn’t even know existed, and now I have it with myself.

SO WHAT TO GET for the man who has every material thing he needs, which is probably every man you know?

“I need a new laptop,” I said to someone the other day. When I bought mine in 2012, it was refurbished already. It is, I have to believe, the oldest working Macbook Air on the planet. I need a new one especially now, I thought to myself last night, because it’s too old for its already-once-replaced battery to hold a charge, and at some point I won’t be plugged in via a 100-foot extension cord. And there’s not enough sunlight here, in the winter, to charge my solar panel enough to charge it.

I need it. Or do I? Or will it outlive us all, and will the borrowed outlet or sunshine arise as I need to plug it in?

I have everything I need right now, I’ve chanted to myself at night with some regularity for some time. Every time this computer freezes, I freeze, too. I have debts—an $8,200 one in particular that I worry about, a loan I had to take out to rebuild my shower—

I have a shower! Put it on my list of haves!

—and I sweat the amount of propane I’m burning to keep from freezing in this weather. But right now, heat is blowing through my ducts, and the chicken and rice will be ready soon. Thomas is taking a nap on my feet. I’m listening to a pretty piano song on repeat through the powerful little rechargeable speaker that fills my house with sound. My family is safe tonight, and so am I.

For the person who has everything—and for the person who doesn't, for whom gifts aren’t just nice but are humanizing—I recommend gifts of care. You can take my word for these personally tried, tested delights (which aren’t paid endorsements, just personal faves). But I could also provide many references and receipts regarding my expertise of bougie shit.

I recommend under-eye masks that leave you both looking and feeling like a princess.

I recommend sheet masks that claim to leave you looking anti-aged and moisturized—and actually deliver.

I recommend absurdly sexy silk pillowcases. I bought mine in memory of my dead bestie Rice, who, shortly before she died, told me she’d ordered some to keep her kinky hair soft and her skin wrinkle-free. I got the luscious ombre shown above, and even my friend Ryan, whose discerning gay approval rarely descends upon my shopping choices, was impressed by them.

I recommend Mozart chocolate cream liqueur. I recommend this perfect martini recipe: one part Mozart, one part peanut-butter whiskey (Skrewball is the easiest to find), two parts whole milk or heavy cream, shaken or poured over ice. I’ve yet to make this for anyone, whether they drink a lot or never drink at all, who doesn’t love it.

I recommend gift certificates for salt baths or float tanks, which are available in a lot of places and findable by google. Other types of spas, saunas, and massage therapies are available in others. You cannot, in my experience, go wrong with a hot stone massage, even from a mediocre or unvetted bodyworker.

I recommend Vital Body Luminous CBD Facial Oil for anyone with a beard. I don’t find it that great for a face moisturizer—for that, I never went wrong with any product from Eminence Organic Skin Care—but I discovered accidentally that it makes a spectacular beard oil, smoothing the hair but also soothing the skin underneath it. Mine hasn’t itched since the day I figured that out. Also, this oil’s smell is best described as “expensive earthy spa,” so if you’re kissing or sniffing a person with a beard, you’re doing yourself a favor with this gift.

If you’re really trying to spend some money on someone who cares about their face, I recommend a wildly expensive eye cream that I only tried because of a little free sample. I’ve used a lot of spendy face products in my life. This one, the moment I put it on, I see how much fresher I look, and I put it on the morning after some heavy-drinking nights. When I looked it up and saw the price—which made me gasp—I saw why. And while many spendy eye creams make you look—and feel, with the cool freshness of them on your face—better, they often also get a little burny in your eyeballs later in the day. This one: It does not. And honey, if you want to buy it for me, donate the dollars, or email me and I will find a friendly address where you can send it.

If you know people who love pets, I recommend in-name donations of pet food to local food banks, which in my experience are often running out of it. My last ex-boyfriend, who was homeless, told me that asking strangers for change always paid more when his pets were present, and now I get why. There are also local programs—just google “low income pet assistance” and your city or county—that give financial assistance to low-income pet owners and take donations. One of them paid to treat the horrific ear-mite infection Thomas had when I got him.

I recommend this stupidly adorable cat bed I’ve had my eye on. Any cat, and I imagine any bougie cat-owner, would be psyched to have it.

LAST WEEK, I had an unfamilar thought.

I thought: I’m so happy to be alive.

I’ve done a lot of amazing things in my 44 years. I remember a day, 20 years ago now, when I lay in the shallows of a warm ocean in Fiji with my best friend. We were on a break from scuba diving, a “surface interval” between dives to let the nitrogen in our systems dissolve. In other places, we’d sat out the surface interval on the boat. In Fiji, our captain ferried us to a nearby deserted shore. We disembarked onto soft, bright sand; our divemaster pulled out containers full of sliced tropical fruit. He might’ve also handed us little foil packages of fresh sweet bread—banana, if I remember correctly. Which maybe I don’t. Maybe that was somewhere else.

But I remember for sure floating next to my favorite world-traveling buddy in a few inches of perfect sea. I remember feeling the perfectness of the moment. Feeling, even, how amazing life was. What I don’t remember is a first-person subject in that sentiment.

I was striving and hustling for decades to get myself into more objectively perfect moments than I can count, which probably helped me survive, buried under grief I wasn’t ready to touch and an identity I couldn’t fathom existing.

But last week, the I in I’m so happy to be alive struck me, soon as I thought it, as utterly novel.

I wasn’t so happy about being alive today. Today, I could hardly bring myself to stand up, and when I did, I did it with the explicit agreement that I was bringing my grief with me, intentionally swimming in it as I moved about my house to do chores. There are material things I needed to do this: Multiple kinds of alcohol (Hendrick’s gin and Aperol) and mixers (lime and sparkling water). A candle that I bought when I was out with a friend yesterday, expensive for someone in my income bracket, technically unaffordable but necessary for the crying I was doing.

It’s called Dark Altar. It smells like Christmas, but goth. The “Lost Forest” flavor that was available in the store also smelled spectacular, and I’m curious about the rest of their line, but as someone who has smelled every candle I’ve encountered since grade school, I recommend these as two of the best-smelling candles I ever encountered.

The candle was $40 plus sales tax (this isn’t Oregon, for fuck’s sake). It helped hold my sadness. In that holding, it also helped, as it filled my house with intentional, sacred scents, my learning that I might use my grief as fuel.

I smiled to think about the possibility of it. If I figure that out

—when I figure that out—

there will be no limit to what I can do.

I want all of the above material things. I need them, to function at my best—massage therapy, soak therapy (you can send gift cards, pretty pretty please, to headwitch@fwwhenever.com). I need my nails. They cost money to maintain, but they’re as integral to my gender as any trans-affirming surgery I’ve had. When I see pictures of myself without them, all I see is incompleteness: What happened to my fingers? Where are the rest of them??

I need—as many of us underpaid need—things I can’t afford that help me feel like I deserve softness and care, and that in turn help me care for myself and my family: a live-in cat, a host of magnificently trans beings who need—and give—a lot of care, too. Things that help hold the bodies we’re out here trying to live in while the Trump campaign spent $215 million dollars on anti-trans commercials and then won. By a lot.

And yet.

I have so many things I’ve never had before. Things that many of the housed and homed, even extravagantly so, don’t have. I wouldn't, couldn’t rank them. But probably the most priceless is that I know I am exactly where I’m supposed to be, doing exactly what I’m supposed to be doing, right now.

🖤

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