Hiding in Plain Sight : A Street... | Buy

Kali Thimmesch-Gill was sixteen years old when she started fantasizing about killing her parents. The years of abuse she had suffered as a result of her father's untreated mental illness had well up into a desperate need for escape. Rather than succumb to the psychotic blackouts, she made what was to be the first of many decisions to choose life over death. On a frigid day in the middle of a Minnesotan winter, she ran away. In Hiding in Plain Sight, the author describes in graphic and harrowing detail a life on the streets that was marked with constant violence. She'd always appeared and acted masculine, and this gender ambiguity became a serious liability. The other homeless people attacked her for being a "freak." Amidst the daily struggle to avoid her assailants, find food and a safe place to sleep, she slowly came to the realization that she hated her body just as much as everyone did. When she was honest with herself she'd always known that she was meant to be a boy. Despite the intense pressure of street life and having to come to terms with the fact that she was a transsexual, Kali never used drugs or alcohol, never committed a single crime, and never gave up on her dreams to make something out of her life. While the rest of the street kids were escaping into addiction, she figured out how to put herself through college and finance a sex change. Life slowly improved as Kali became Zane and started settling into his body. He eventually found work at a shelter for homeless youth and started to make friends. But his euphoria was short lived. A resident at the shelter knew that he was a transsexual and became obsessed with making sure everyone found out. A few gang members who were living in the program confronted Zane, and when he was too scared to admit the truth, they decided to get their boys together late one night and prove him wrong. Hiding in Plain Sight is a transformative and ultimately inspiring story of survival against all odds, of pursing and accomplishing your dreams in spite of enormous and often seemingly insurmountable obstacles.

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Chapter 1

The wood was always cool, no matter how long I lay there. I could feel the difference in texture between the rough sections, where the floor had been scratched, and the smooth hardness of the portions that were still covered in varnish. Over the years the smell of the closet had changed. When I was really young the stagnant air was saturated with the odor of mud and grass. After puberty my dirty clothes pile retained a more private scent. Curled in the fetal position under it, I could smell the specific culmination of my oils and hormones and sweat. The part of my body that was smothered in a thick layer of clothing was always too hot. Pressed against the wood, my other side was perpetually cold. The temperatures bled inward so that somewhere in the center of my body there was a place where I was comfortable. I spent year after year trying to fit my whole self into that space.

I’d first sought solace under my dirty laundry on a night in fourth grade. That day I had asked my teacher for a hall pass to go to the bathroom. Whenever I could find an opportunity to be in the bathroom by myself, I seized it. The jeering that I normally endured, the yelling and accusations and pounding on my stall door, made me so afraid that I could barely loosen my bladder enough to pee.

I walked quietly down the hall, listening for any indication that someone was already using the girl’s bathroom. There were no whispers of fabric shifting, metal locks engaging, or toilet paper being unrolled and torn. I held my breath and hesitated a moment longer, straining to detect even the subtlest hint that someone occupied the territory I was about to breach.

Silence beckoned me inside. I quickly slipped into a stall and wrestled to close it. A large gap between the door and frame meant that the arm of the lock barely reached the groove where it was supposed to rest. As I unzipped my jeans I stared at the millimeter of overlap I’d managed to create and prayed that it wouldn’t slip.

I sat on the toilet and fought my tensing muscles for control of my bladder. Even though no one was around my heart was racing. I tried to talk myself down from a panic attack, pointing out that I was alone, that there were no packs of kids that would gather outside the stall, waiting to jump me.

The sound of hurried adult footsteps in the hall did nothing to comfort me. I took a deep breath and told myself to ignore everything except the task at hand. If I could just pee then I would be able to leave and the nightmare would be over for another few hours.

The footsteps got louder. I sat frozen on the toilet, knowing somehow that they were coming for me. The dull clack of high heels against linoleum turned to a sharp report as the principal entered the tiled bathroom. She called out sternly, “I know that you’re in here young man. You come out this instant.”

My pants had slipped down and were bunched at my ankles. The unfamiliar sensation of cold air brushing my inner thighs and buttocks made me shiver. When I was naked I looked just like my little sister. With clothes on no one believed that I was a girl. But I had been taught that I was female and that this was the bathroom I was supposed to use, and I didn’t know how to respond to the principal’s accusation. I stared nervously at the millimeter of overlap between the lock and frame and pushed hard against my bladder.

“You have until the count of three to come out of that stall young man,” the principal threatened. Through the gap I watched her advancing towards me.

“I’m a girl,” I called out desperately.

The principal sighed. “Don’t play games with me. I saw you sneak in here. Come out immediately.”
Before I had time to react she grabbed the stall door and yanked it open. Her righteous expression turned to surprise as her eyes made their way down my body and landed on my exposed genitals. “Oh,” she said. She looked up at my face and then down at my vagina again. Then she hurried out of the bathroom, leaving my stall door swinging in the currents of her confusion.

That evening I lingered at the table after dinner was over. My father was busy washing the dishes. I knew that he was annoyed by my presence. Usually I tried my best to stay out of his way, but that night I needed the answer to a question that I couldn’t ask my mother. She had told me that no one should look at my private parts. I was afraid that I would get in trouble if she found out that I had let the principal see me naked.

I wanted to ask my father about the last thing that the principal had said, the “Oh” right before she left. Oh. The acknowledgement of a mistake. Was it hers or mine? I’d never made a cognizant decision to dress like a boy. For as long as I’d been sentient that’s how I had moved through the world. For just as long, people had been yelling and lecturing and using physical violence against me.

I’d been called a freak on many occasions. Until that day in the bathroom with the principal, I’d never believed that I was. Freaks were people who were perverted. They did nasty things in gross places. Like getting naked in public bathrooms and letting people look at them. My mom had said that strangers didn’t have a right to see my private parts, except that my principal seemed to think that she did. She hadn’t looked away, had just stared at my vagina and said, “Oh.”

I wanted to know whether my father thought that what she had done was wrong. Rules that applied to other kids didn’t seem to protect me. I watched enviously as they moved through the world with ease. They knew which bathroom was theirs. They had stable pronouns that didn’t break down into radioactive material and burn them. Most importantly, they had friends who shared their interests and experiences. I wished with all my heart that I had someone to share inside jokes with, someone who would invite me over on the weekends so I didn’t have to stay at my house.

My father had finished washing the dishes. He turned irritably towards me and asked, “What do you want?”

His expression reminded me of the principal, self-righteously storming away. I thought about how I had pulled my shirt as low as it would go with one hand while I’d tried to wriggle my pants up with the other. My butt had been exposed as I’d leaned over, a perfect target for humiliation if anyone had walked in. At the time I had been able to stave off a torrent of tears. Sitting in the kitchen, reliving the shameful episode as my father glared at me, I started to cry.

“What do you want?” he repeated, a menacing anger creeping into his voice.

“Friends,” I wailed. “I’m so lonely. I don’t have anything in common with anybody.”

My father methodically wiped his hands on a dishtowel. He folded it in half and hung it under the sink. When he was done he looked back at me. I tried to inhale my sobs, to capture them before they escaped and made me weak in his eyes. Snot and tears were running down my face. My father didn’t have time for emotional outbursts like this. “Did you ever think that the reason you don’t have any friends might be because there’s something wrong with you?” he asked.

Shame pulsed through my body in hot waves. He had answered my question with unequivocal clarity.

“Oh,” I whispered. My mistake. My fault the principal had been forced to confront me while I was naked. I ran for my room. I was desperate to hide myself, to feel an opaque weight protecting me from the claim everyone had on my wrongness. I burrowed under the dirty clothes and curled tightly into a ball until I was sure that nothing of my body was exposed.

Hours later, after my tears had dried into a sticky patch of salt on the wooden floor, I crawled out of the closet. The house was dark except for a line of light under the bathroom door. I thought that someone must have forgotten to turn it off and started to push it open.

My father was standing in front of the sink. He was too distracted to notice that the door had swung a few inches. I quietly watched him through the crack. He was looking at himself in the mirror, his face twisted with the same disgust he’d bestowed on me. I shivered with fear. Something was wrong with both of us, and deep down he knew it.

He lived in a perpetual state of anger towards everything and everyone. I’d heard hushed stories about how my grandfather had chronically cycled in and out of an asylum. My father had always refused to acknowledge that something could have been passed on to him. At that time there were no medical terms to describe the subsuming of collective reality to the demons of the synapses. My father had no interest in being branded crazy. Because he lacked a word to explain why his brain perceived the world differently than most people, he insisted that he was normal and created villains out of everyone else.

My mother kept a steady stream of admonishments aimed at my little sister and me, choreographing our daily existence into a performance in which we did not play kids. Don’t run, don’t talk, don’t laugh, don’t fight, don’t whine, don’t chew, don’t sneeze, don’t skip, don’t sing, don’t splash, don’t forget, don’t ask, don’t tell, because you’ll make your dad mad.

I understood why she was relentless in controlling our movements. When my father’s rage exploded it was my mom who bore the brunt of his wrath. Even hiding under my dirty laundry, I couldn’t escape his seismic fury. He would scream and slam things into the walls. I could feel the floor tremble in submission. Even the house couldn’t stand up to him.

I was terrified during these episodes that my father would kill my mom. I wanted to help her, but my whole body would start shaking and I couldn’t convince myself to leave the safety of my hiding spot. The guilt of not protecting her lodged inside my ribcage and made it hard to breath.

Sometimes I fantasized about becoming a man. Men were strong and could stop violence. I thought often about the moment of solitude I had witnessed in front of the mirror, about the depth of the bond that my father and I shared. Something was wrong with us. We were unnamables. Instead of rendering us partners, our wordlessness had made me his adversary.

As I entered puberty I seemed to have become everyone’s enemy. A group of kids at school came up with a plan to corner and beat me. The girl who had hurriedly whispered a warning had said that they were going to pummel me until I was unconscious and then lock me in a locker. They wanted to see how long it would take for someone to rescue me.

For two months I moved through the school warily. At lunch I sat close to the woman in charge of monitoring the cafeteria. During pass time I insinuated myself into large groups of people, floating along with as much anonymity as possible. Other kids were busy learning Algebra and English. I was studying the art of hiding in plain sight, dragging my metaphorical closet with me wherever I had to go.

The pack of would be assailants quickly became frustrated by their inability to calve me from the masses. My existence perturbed them so intensely that they came up with a new plan of attack. Either they were smart enough not to tell anyone this time, or the girl who had warned me before was too nervous to risk being caught, because I had no idea what was coming.

I walked into Social Studies one day and found two of them hovering around my desk. They smiled insouciantly and walked back to their side of the room. My teacher yelled for me to sit down. He was always yelling at me. The bell hadn’t even rung, but he never waited for a valid reason to express his animosity.

On the first day of class, before I’d ever said a word to him, he’d made it clear that he had nothing but disdain for my presence. He had called us up to his desk in alphabetical order to issue textbooks. When it was my turn he had waited for me to reach out to take the book, then he’d dropped it on the floor.

Confused about why he’d done that, I stared questioningly at him. I watched as he wrote “Pristine Condition” next to the textbook number. He leaned over his desk to look at the book, already ratty at the corners, and said, “Looks like you’ll owe money at the end of the semester for mistreating school property.”

I completed all of his assignments on time. I did well on the tests. There was nothing else I could do to positively impact how he felt about me. When he barked at me to sit down even though the bell hadn’t wrung, I complied.

About ten minutes into class he asked us to open our books. I had set mine on my desk when I’d slid into my seat. I tried to pull the textbook closer, but it didn’t move. Disoriented by its immobility, I yanked harder. Muffled giggles filled the classroom. I looked closer at the desk and realized that superglue had been smeared all over the surface. I tried to lean forward to grasp the top edge of the book, but I couldn’t move. I had been super-glued to my seat.

Laughter erupted. The teacher looked at me and smiled maliciously. I tried to feign nonchalance, to pretend like nothing was wrong, but he wouldn’t let me get away that easily. Usually he just lectured at us, but for the first time that year he announced that we were to break ourselves up into groups to discuss the homework assignment.

As kids got up and moved around the room, he kept grinning at me. I tugged at my clothes, trying to extricate myself from the chair. Everyone was starting to settle into groups on the far side of the room. I was desperate to avoid becoming conspicuous, my isolation announcing my shameful impotence. I flung my torso forward, using all of my weight to rip the fabric away from the chair. Once my back was free I twisted left and right to break the bond between my jeans and the seat.

Everyone was watching me struggle to escape. I knew that they were especially savoring the view they had of my bra and underwear now that I’d been forced to tear large holes in my clothes. All pretense of composure gone, I openly wrestled with the textbook to free it from the desk. The back cover tore off. As I ran past the teacher’s desk he laughed and said, “Now you’re going to owe even more money at the end of the semester. Shame on you.”

That day I took a long walk after school. I didn’t understand what force in me was so powerful that it made hatred giddy with desire. How could the fact of my existence be disturbing enough that I deserved the knives pushed into my belly while their bearers demanded to know whether I was a boy or girl? Why did women summon security guards to drag me out of the bathroom, adopting expressions of pious authority as they watched my arms being pinned behind my back?

Whatever the root of their contempt, their need to eradicate a malignancy, my father agreed. He had started telling me that I was ruining the family. Any time I made him mad he would scream this accusation at me, driving the words into the walls until everything was saturated in his loathing. I couldn’t go anywhere in the house without feeling his indictment crushing me. It haunted every waking moment. I didn’t want to ruin the family.

I returned from my walk to discover that yet again I had undermined my father. He had called before I left and asked me to leave a key under the doormat. I had meant to comply, but the embarrassment of being super-glued to my chair had left me in a daze. When he’d gotten home he’d been forced to go to the neighbor’s house to borrow their copy of our key.

I tried to apologize when he outlined my failures as a daughter, but he stalked away without acknowledging my bid for peace. At dinner when I asked him to please pass the milk he grabbed the carton and put it back in the fridge. As soon as my mom asked how my day had been he jumped up and started washing the dishes, banging the pots into one another to drown out my voice.

I fled for the comfort of my closet. As I lay under a thick layer of clothes I started humming, trying to drown out the words that were looping ceaselessly in my head. I fought to keep myself calm, but my voice started to waver, balancing on the precipice of tears. I could hear the taunting words through the cracks in the melody. Are you a boy or a girl? Hey It. Hey Freak. There’s something wrong with you. You’re ruining the family.

(cont.)