Ohio, Bahia

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Slant rhyme

“It was an epidemic for a short time,” a colleague remarks. Side-view mirrors were smashed all over campus. Allegedly, it was the woodpecker. Or woodpeckers? No one knows how many. I like to think it was just one. One woodpecker on night watch in central Ohio. It catches a glimpse of movement in its peripheral vision. It approaches a side mirror. An enemy appears in the glass. And it attacks itself. 

US-62 stretches from Kentucky to Pennsylvania, crossing central Ohio on a southwest to northeast trajectory. The one-lane route passes burnt barns and tattered Trump signs, the odd confederate flag waving like a last resort. There are many sheep. Some cows. I would call it beautiful if it weren’t so austere. 

A slant rhyme with Ohio, Bahia features three similar syllables with three cavernous vowels, but from a different side of the equator. Baía means bay in Portuguese; Salvador da Bahia is settled in the northeastern quadrant of the country, Brazil’s old colonial capital, a port city in the transatlantic slave trade. Ohio comes from the Iroquois word for good river, the good river that eventually streamed through the underground railroad. 

In Bahia, the Orla’s one-lane route traces the Atlantic on one side, city on the other. Tinsel echo blares out of an amp in a car parked permanently on the shoreline. When its income inequality is analyzed like that of a country, the city of Salvador ranks ahead of Namibia and behind Lesotho on the Gini index. There are many favelas. Some bars. I would call it erratic if I wasn’t paying attention. 

Salt

“Pay attention,” a colleague in Bahia instructs, “cover the electronic devices.” Doesn’t matter with what. A dishtowel. A canga. A sheet. A blanket. Salt air eats in Salvador da Bahia. It sticks together in great clumps, clogging the shaker. Rust blooms on keychains and paperclips and mold crawls across cardigans and collared blouses. Flanked by the Bay of All Saints on one side and the Atlantic on the other, the city perched on the peninsula has two seasons: hot and wet; hotter and wetter. I lie on the beach reading Russian novels about snow.

In Bahia at twenty-four, I live across the street from an ocean. It’s the Atlantic Ocean. I watch the tide rise and fall. When it rains, the sky clouds. Droplets gather and disperse on the balcony.

In Ohio at thirty-four, I live across the street from a parking lot. It’s a hospital parking lot. I watch it fill in the mornings; empty in the evenings. Pools of gas guzzling SUVs gather and disperse, the traffic a great tide.

When I move to the Rust Belt, I struggle with salt. It falls from the sky like snow and deer leave a matrix of untapped meaning in the backyard. I lie in bed reading Brazilian novels about drought.

Hair 

A humid curtain of dendê greets you as you exit the airport. 

When I lived in Bahia, the only trouble I had with border security was around my birthday. The month and day were listed in that order on my American passport, while my Brazilian visa listed the day and then month. A privileged trouble. I explained the reason for the reversal in Portuguese. Border security looked at me sideways. “You speak Portuguese?” a boy in a uniform asked. 

The first time I have issues getting through airport security in the States is trying to get back to California from an interview in Ohio. The scanner beeps and I’m ushered off to the side. A man in a handlebar mustache begins patting me down, pausing along my upper back. “Do you have something under here?” He asks. “Under my t-shirt?” I reply. “Yes, a bra.” He looks perturbed and calls over a colleague, an older woman with short hair, who lumbers over shaking her head. 

An 1848 ordinance in Ohio prohibited public appearance “in a dress not belonging to his or her sex.” Fines and imprisonment were to follow, criminalizing appearance deemed unbecoming of “his or her sex.” Sex was a problem in both places. There were other problems, too.

A passport—either American or Brazilian—is good for a decade. A photograph is not. 

When I bring my passport to HR at my new job in Ohio, the image barely resembles the body I now inhabit. The woman with the blow dry behind the desk looks down at the passport and up at me, down at the passport, up at me. “But you were so beautiful!” she exclaims.

The next week, the girl processing my TSA PreCheck application at the Staples has purple hair. She looks down at the passport and up at me. She smiles sheepishly. “I like your hair,” she says. And then trips. “I mean, I also like it in the photo but it suits you now.” Thanks? I think. 

It’s the last year of the old passport photo and I’m back in Bahia for the first time in nine years. I’m going through security when an officer opens it up. He looks down at the passport and up at me, down at the passport, up at me. “O que aconteceu?” he asks. What happened?

Dirty beauty 

That was the opening oxymoron of the personal statement that got me into grad school. I thought I was going to explore the relationship between cultural hegemony and travel discourse. The Portuguese verb explorar means “to explore” and “to exploit.” I obsessed over oxymorons. There they were in Charles Darwin (“savage magnificence”) and Jonathan Franzen (“adventureless adventure”), even Walter Benjamin (“rich barbarism,” “blissful confusion”). Oxymorons aestheticize ethnography, I learned, they transfigure the global south into a spectacle beheld by imperial eyes.

I was trying to avert my own gaze. That part got edited out.

What makes beauty dirty is disparity: sharp lines cut across class and race and gender etched into clumps of salt and sun. Queerness rarely registers but to mark otherness. 

It is hot, grimy. Unscrupulous and infuriating and inexorable and enthralling. The spectacle trope envisions the expat as audience and director, consumer and creator of North’s theater of the South. Retrospect swoops in and the stage glows like some kind of burnt-out barge, light years away on the Atlantic, spread beneath a balcony overlooking Buracão.

Buracão

The beach was a hole called Buracão, which means big hole. There are holes in my memory too. 

The strangest part of returning to the beach is that I couldn’t figure out how or where we had entered the water. The waves were massive. Nine years later, I was afraid. How did we swim? 

A friend in Bahia suggests that climate change has impacted the tide and the shore. Perhaps the beach is smaller than it once was, the terrain rockier, the waves less forgiving. I’ve become more forgiving, I’d like to think. But sometimes in the shower I think about that one thing or another I said at a dinner nine years ago, wrote in an essay, typed in a text, and have to scream stop it. 

I strategically forget. I shamefully recall.

I didn’t remember the community living in the rocks. The woman with the headwrap and the bucket. The carcasses washing up on shore. A whole fish, its body slashed in several parts. A bird, only its legs. Then, a few waves later, its body. I walk down the beach. Feathers. Whose body is that? 

Fishing

I’m at the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles with a friend waiting on a green card. He’s just moved to Ohio. Same as me. The BMV won’t accept his lease as proof of address to get a driver’s license. But never fear. Across the street is a Walmart. And, the woman chewing gum behind the counter explains, you can get a fishing license at the Walmart. A fishing license? Yes, the BMV will accept a fishing license with an address on it. The fishing license will be proof enough. We cross the interstate and walk quickly past the rifle display and make it to fishing and my friend tells the woman behind the counter (also chewing gum) his address, no proof necessary. She prints the fishing license and hands it over on the spot. Go fish, she says. 

Ride or die

Marcelo is driving. I get in the back of the Uber and memory slams. Is that the Marcelo I fucked twelve years ago? Was it here in Bahia? Or was that in Argentina? Was I back in the closet or did I think I was bi? Is that him driving the car? I examine my knees. They’re sunburnt.

When I was back in Bahia for research, I was riding the metro with a boy almost a decade younger than me. He was examining the backs of my knees, also sunburnt at that time. When I caught him looking, he asked, somewhat sheepishly, if he could peel the dead skin off the backs of my knees. I said yes. He bent down and did it right there, kneeling behind me in the subway car, racing through the dark between Retiro and Glória.

How can you tell if a memory got lost due to trauma or time? “I can tell the difference,” a friend in Ohio interjects. “One feels foggy and one feels fractured. If I lost something I once remembered: time. If my brain never wrote it because I was in acute pain: trauma. The latter parts of my marriage? Fracture. The early parts? Fog.” 

What if I can’t tell the difference? 

Does it matter? 

Men look at me 

In the grocery store. In the post office. On the bus. At the airport. At the school. At the bar. On the beach. In the park. In Ohio. In Bahia. 

I’m at the Bom Preço again. Disorder reigns. Fluorescent lighting bounces off cereal boxes and pasta packets while people veer down geometric lanes. In the supermarket, it smells of Draino and dried fish. Broccoli materializes for the first time in eight weeks on the same day the chocolate vanishes. On Monday the tomatoes are round and taut but by Tuesday they have swollen to a purple pulp. One Wednesday there is no line, and on Thursday you wait an hour and fifteen minutes to go through the check out. An hour and fifteen minutes later, it turns out they’re out of change, so they’ll have to pay you back in packets of gum and mints.  

I’m standing in the grocery store line again. I’ve been standing in this line my entire life. In the short story version of this experience, I begin by describing the disturbance of my oh so American bubble of personal space in the oh so Bahian lack thereof. In the line, two older men pop open two older cans of beer and argue about the strike, a group of teenagers crank up pagode on speaker phone, and the family behind me nudges me into a cart of groceries I don’t want anymore.

I’m sitting at the bar again. I’ve been sitting at this bar my entire life. In the short story version of this experience, I begin by describing the disturbance of my oh so American bubble of personal space in Ohio. A rotund, bald man sits down on the stool next to me, too close. When the couple on my other side leaves, I sidle down two stools. Now I’m up against the wall. The bald man eventually leaves and I return to grading papers. Until a different rotund, bald man appears at my side. “Hey,” he spits inches from face. “We saw how buddy over there sat a little too close to ya and I’m gonna win forty bucks for encroaching on your space too.” Encroaching. That’s the word he chooses. I’m two whiskeys deep and roll the dice. “Well do I get twenty since it’s my space being encroached on?” Bald buddy laughs and backs off.

I drain the drink and pack up. Goodbye neighborhood bar. As I peel off the stool, bald buddy reappears. He slips me a twenty. “Way to be a good sport,” he leers. 

On the walk home, I lose the twenty. 

Fog fractures and fractures fog. 

This is called chiasmus, I tell my students in Ohio, I tell my students in Bahia.

The students

You’ll find plenty of them at places like the school in Bahia, like the school in Ohio.

The ones in Bahia taught me something about plot. The English turn of phrase “as the plot develops” turns out to entail the verb “desenrolar” in Portuguese. Literally, to unfold. But the kids always translated it as “the plot unravels.”

I try not to unravel.

Contact, contract

On Wednesday I will sign the contract to stay another year. I will slide it into a mailbox with a sinking feeling. I will sleep with a stranger who will be my arch nemesis and also my doppelgänger and also the dour meanderings of an inquieta id. I will wake up under another shroud of heat. 

“Then there is the loneliness that roams,” Toni Morrison murmurs. The coffee pot groans and she will remind, “No rocking can hold it down. It is alive. On its own.”

Toni Morrison was from Ohio. So was Charles Chesnutt. I teach them both in Bahia. Jorge Amado was from Bahia. So was Castro Alves. I teach them both in Ohio. Judith Butler is from Ohio too. Eve Sedgwick grew up partially in Dayton. Gilberto Gil is from Bahia. So is Caetano Veloso. I teach all of them in Ohio, all of them in Bahia. 

It’s “a dry and spreading thing that makes the sound of one’s own feet going seem to come from a far-off place,” Morrison concludes.

Ride or die, take two 

On the ride to the airport in the Uber with the driver whose name wasn’t Marcelo, I try to work out how a Portuguese speaker would pronounce the word “Ohio.” I’m always asked where in the States I live, and usually launch into some kind of story: well I used to live in California but now I’m in the middle of the country, the interior. What I mean is the Midwest, the Mega Walmart, but in Portuguese, o interior means heartland, countryside, outback, gauchos, cowboys. How do I explain Ohio? There’s the Heartlands Bank and a cross tall as a barn. I decide the pronunciation in Portuguese must sound something like “o-ee-o.” Two more vowels and we’ll have ourselves an Old MacDonald.

The one time I went through the McDonald’s drive-thru in Bahia was the one morning I took the morning-after pill. A friend drove me in her boyfriend’s big black SUV. I ordered French fries and a milkshake.

A decade later, I ride through the Dairy Queen drive-thru in Ohio and sit in the strip mall parking lot nursing a soft serve. Across the street the panoramic expanse of the Mega Walmart glows. It’s -2 degrees outside. 9 inches of snow on the ground. 

A decade earlier, I sit at a plastic table in Bahia in the sand eating açaí. It’s 102 degrees outside. 9 feet away waves roll.

Health insurance

The girls, my colleagues at the school in Bahia, decide to get laser hair removal treatments. “You’ll never have to shave your legs again!” one remarks. It’s covered in our insurance. Perhaps because I grew up in a household where dad insisted that the microwave live in the basement, that we leave the laundry room immediately after turning it on to avoid radiation, and then mom got radiation for cancer, maybe that’s why I didn’t want laser hair removal. Or maybe I was just gay.

The school health insurance also covered laser eye surgery and a host of other plastic surgeries including breast augmentation and reduction. Brazil has the second-highest rate of plastic surgery in the world. I doubt they would have covered top surgery.

The year I arrive in Ohio, Roe is overturned. The school health insurance only covers abortion “if the life of the mother is threatened.” I begin grinding my teeth in my sleep. The insurance covers the first of three mouth guards. 

On the listserv, an argument breaks out about the difference between reproductive rights and reproductive justice. I walk into class and teach No Future.

God

“With God, all things are possible,” announces a billboard overlooking the field of RVs on the unlit road, road a red sea stretching toward tomorrow. Apparently, Ohio’s is the only state motto lifted directly from the bible. Adopted in 1959, it “survived” a constitutional challenge in 2001. A faint watermark on my driver’s license echoes the juridical defense that the motto’s optimism trumps its religious reference.

I’m driving ninety miles an hour on my way to the third mouth guard when I see it for the first time. Ohio’s iconic “HELL IS REAL” billboard has won its own GPS coordinates and about fifty Google reviews. “I didn’t believe in hell until I entered this corn-laden underworld. Miles of highway and sadness,” one notes. “Can attest to the accuracy of other reviews,” another concedes, “corn, corn corn corn, soybean, corn, corn, corn, corn, Gramps’s Cheese Barn, Dollar General, corn, corn, corn, Dollar General…corn, soy, corn, cow, corn, corn, corn, Lake Erie.” And, in doom scrolling summary, “Great sign, does not lie. perfect location. 10/10.” 

Down the road dawns more signage: “Holy matrimony is between one man and one woman.” I remind my students that gay marriage wasn’t legalized in Ohio until the Supreme Court ruling in 2015. Meanwhile the Corregedoria Geral da Justiça of Bahia managed to legalize it back in 2012, a year ahead of the nationwide legalization in Brazil, three years ahead of Ohio. 

Doesn’t change the fact that Brazil continues to host the highest LGBTQ murder rate and the fifth highest rate of femicide in the world. The average life expectancy for trans folks in Brazil is thirty-five. 

“I’m thirty-five,” I tell my students in Ohio, pressing play on a 2017 documentary titled Meu corpo é politico (My Body Is Political).

Mrs. Chaplain and Mr. Mayor met as undergraduates at the school in Ohio. They have 10,000 followers on TikTok. Mr. Mayor appears at my door with a pride pin and a business card. I’m yelling at the Bahian health insurance company in Portuguese on the phone. Deer scatter. 

In São Salvador da Bahia de Todos os Santos (that is, Saint Salvador of the Bay of All Saints, otherwise known as Salvador), I buy an acarajé from a barraca on the side of the road. I notice immediately that I’m being paid special attention by the rainbow Havaianas. I watch her move her foot discreetly so I can see the rainbow poking out from under the sole of her foot.

A friend in Ohio asks ChatGPT how to look especially gay at her sister’s wedding. What she has in mind is something all black from Zara. ChatGPT suggests a rainbow pin or some other discreet symbol.

It’s been twenty minutes. I’m still waiting for the acarajé. I shift my left foot slightly. It’s just black rubber beneath.

Bahia’s state motto? “Per ardua surgo,” through adversity I rise. 

The great democratizer

I walked dozens of miles in flip flops. “Havaianas are the great democratizer in Brazil,” I learn over parent-teacher conferences. 

I don’t know what the great democratizer of Ohio is. A friend suggests monobloc chairs. 

From my monobloc chair across from the parking lot in Ohio, I add a footnote about rubber tree tapping and sustainable extraction advocacy in Bahia. Where the rubber in my Havaianas came from, where the plastic in the monobloc chair came from is another note.

Back in Bahia, I’m at the bus stop trying to fix one of my Havaianas. The toe post has popped out of the sole. A boy with the same haircut as me sits down like a side-view mirror and offers help. He produces a nail from a back pocket and weaves the rubber parts back together. “Jeitinho, né?” He winks at me. 

Jeitinho 

Jeitinho is diminutive for “way.” Literally, it means “little way.” There’s a little way around everything. Not just utilities like gas and electricity, but social conventions, like gender. 

“The gas valve is closed,” a colleague remarks, “keep it closed when you’re not using the stove.” But I am using the stove. Just to make coffee in the mornings. And when I open the valve the studio fills with the smell of gas, even stronger than the sticky salt ocean smell. I boil water and close the valve. It takes two days to realize that although the refrigerator was plugged in, the cold dial is turned off. No hot water either, though at least there’s water.

Jeitinho is a resource, a cunning DIY solution to bullshit bureaucracy. One colleague suggests “jerry-rig” as a translation. It’s street-smart savvy, it’s going rogue. It means corruption and creativity both. It’s dirty beauty. It’s how I learned to reconstruct a rust-eaten toilet chain with paper clips from the school’s supply closet. It’s how, a decade later, I did the same in a snowstorm in Ohio. Different paper clips, same rust. Still from a school supply closet.

I used to get gerrymandering and jerry-rigging reversed. Then the Operação Lava Jato scandal happened and I moved to a swing state. 

It’s electric

The school was paying rent. I was twenty-four. I didn’t ask if I had a mailbox, or if I had a key to the mailbox, or about the utilities bills. It’s November and I go away for the weekend. I return and there’s no electricity. I text the school’s handyman, also the local weed supplier. “Have you been paying your electric bill?” he asks. What electric bill? The bills that come in the mail. I don’t have a mailbox. It’s 1am. He’s in the neighborhood. He comes over. Hooks up my electricity to the neighbor’s apartment. Two weeks later, I am given a small key and a number. I open a small mailbox and discover months of unpaid electric bills.

Friends who have lived in Bahia come to visit in Ohio. A storm comes too and we joke about losing the power. We lose the power. Seconds later, the lights flicker and return. But from the ceiling light in the bedroom a high-pitched wheezing begins. One asks in partial jest if there could be a bat inside. A pecking sound resounds.

Not so small

The size of a sound. The size of a flag. The size of an SUV. The size of a storm cloud. The size of saudade. The size of an ocean. The size of a parking lot. The size of a barn, decrepit. The size of January 6. The size of January 8. The size of spray kicked up by a sixteen-wheeler whizzing past on the one lane road. The size of spray kicked up by a speed boat whizzing past on the water. The size of a mailbox. The size of a key. The size of a side-view mirror. The size of a shattering. 

Buracão, take two

The night we fucked was a case of homosexual panic, probably for us both. I’ll never know. What I do know is that we had both comido água. We had both eaten water, which is to say we were shit-faced because in the years I slept with cis men, I felt nothing. But this one had the musical tastes of a queer and I thought: someone who loves this music must be okay (he was not). 

I could hear it from the room. Waves, the sound of breaking, what washes up on shore: a fish, gills aslant; a bird, only its beak. Then, a few waves later, its body, the sound of bone, foam. 

Colchão. That’s how I learned the word for mattress. I already knew the word for stain.

Nine years later, I look on Google maps and learn that the walk home that night must have taken about seventy minutes. Seventy minutes in Havaianas. Same as my commute by car in Ohio. In many parts there were no sidewalks. Just the shoulder of the highway on one side, ocean on the other. That road called Orla: the shoreline. That beach named Buracão: the hole in the road, in the memory. Motos whiz past. Traffic signals are more like suggestions and hell is real, anyway.

I didn’t learn the term “homosexual panic” until graduate school. I’d read James Baldwin, but I’d never read Eve Sedgwick. I had never heard of her. I knew what it meant from Giovanni’s Room, from the narrator trapped in his own reflection, trapped in the room, trapped in his body, in his desire, trapped in time. I think I read it in Bahia but I can’t be sure. How can you tell if a memory got lost?

Jaguaribe. That was the name of one of the neighborhoods I walked through, alone in the dark. Me and the travestis on the Orla, the only trans folks I knew there at the time. They probably knew. That’s how clocking works.

A clock counts fracture, fog. I didn’t remember the word colchão until I was driving through the neighborhood years later. In an Uber. Thankfully, this one wasn’t driven by a man named Marcelo.

Ride or die, one more time

When I wake up, the bus is catapulting down the Orla. A man sitting next to me screams numbers into a cell phone. Something about women and Wednesday. Light bounds off his skull. I try to make my body smaller. We whiz past a motel called Saudade and another called Clímax. Neon signs blink like neon portents. We hurtle past an abandoned circus, lights spasming all over the road. The bus drones like an upset stomach.

When I wake up, I’m catapulting down OH-661 at dusk. Florence & the Machine screams out of the stereo. Something about hunger and making a fool of death. Light bounds from my headlights. I try to unclench my body. I whiz past a barren field and then another. No streetlights. I hurtle past Suburban Propane, Flora’s Diesel Repair Shop, Hempy Water, Amazing Meats, Ron Potts RVs. My stomach drones like an upset engine. 

The plastic seats on the Bahian bus shudder and shake. We thump under an overpass where people roll along like conveyor belts. We thump past a McDonald’s, golden arches winking from beneath eyelashes false as the federal police, who worship America as if it were a dream. An organ in my chest echoes and hums. We pass a deserted shopping mall that looks like it might have partially burned down once, a woman or two in trench coats, a three-legged dog, a dusty rectangle where goal posts sway, erect in the night. 

The plush seats of my Subaru warm and wane. We roll over a hill and around a corner where horse trailers line the road. We slide past a McDonald’s, golden arches winking from beneath eyes wide shut to a world that worships its ax-throwing and that is no dream. An organ in my chest echoes and hums. I pass a deserted barn that looks like it might have partially burned down once, a cow or two with utters on the loose, an untilled field, and a barren tree where no limbs or leaves sway, erect in the night.

One must be careful at dusk in Bahia. One must be careful at dusk in Ohio. Ohio, Bahia: vowels abound, consonant with accidents. Catch a glimpse of movement at the edge of your peripheral vision and it might be a deer, or four or eight. Memory slams the breaks when you catch sight of them from a distance. You manage to stop and watch as three bound across the road in the dark. Their hooves pound the pavement like an organ in your chest. The fourth falters and takes a fall, its legs collapsing under its torso in the middle of the road. Skidding. I skid. A hard fall. A second of eye contact before the momentum picks you back up so you bound away following the pack. 

From a dry and spreading far-off place, we ride this ramshackle rattle into dawn. The bus rumbles along the Orla. We rush past morros and nightclubs and packs of teenagers roaming the streets with blunt knives and dogs. The night wanes dirty and beautiful. I look at the sand and try to remember snow. I try to imagine what and where and how my next stop might be, as the bus hurtles through the night.

I never imagined it would be Ohio.

Gone Fishing 

Farmland scrolls past, fog like a belt around the barn: the decrepit barn, the barn with the confederate flag, the barn on the unlit road, which I drive in the dark. Movement flickers in my peripheral vision. 

There was a person standing thigh high at low tide, fishing pole poised, ready. You don’t see people fishing at night in Bahia all that often, but there they were. Standing like a dark lighthouse, like an allegory in the night. Son of a gun in a foggy old drizzle, bearing witness to my numbness.

Morning dawns dark. The drizzle lingers and the sky turns the color of the parking lot, the asphalt, the ocean. Gray on gray on gray. Through the fog, a moto light blares through the monochrome. A lone rowboat glides into the lot. A fishing pole is cast. This line I tend to unraveling.