Tango by Justin Vivian Bond

Tango is a memoir by Mx Justin Vivian Bond. You might know Bond from Shortbus (John Cameron Mitchell, 2006). Or maybe you know V's music, or performance? Or, maybe you are wondering about the V and Mx, have no idea who I am writing about at all, in that case - try, if you want, this video (V tells a few stories that are in the book so you get a feel perhaps for that) or if in a readerly mood you can have a look at this interview with V in the New Yorker to get clear on that pronoun and prefix stuff and get more about the book than I am going to tell you here (Bond suggests T for trans as a designation alongside M and F for official documents with the quip that for V to identify as man or woman would be a lie, a statement that might trouble some while being applauded by others. & Bond has no issue with using the "T word" either, though for those in doubt I suggest extrapolating from who is able and who isn't to use the "N word"). 

a n y w a y

I picked the book up in the local malevolent mega-chain book store and bought a coffee and started it - none of the links or any of that stuff above are needed to appreciate the book at all and you won't even have any pronoun stumbling. Sometime later it was a buy it or steal it moment and we left together, the book and I, only for me to finish reading it an hour or so later in a more congenial coffeeshop in Decatur (my train ride between filled by… readingreadingreading). The central relationship that the text is in a sense about - between Justin and this relatively evil neighbor kid - is pretty gripping, weirdly twisted and yet somehow emotionally comprehensible in Bond's telling, for me at least. Which might just be to say that it feels real, not in the lacanian sense of course, I capitalize then (and someone called me an idealist for doing that, go figure) ((though, there is something to think about with the Real in aesthetics) but that's not in the cards right now).  The book is in the other room on the shelf now, and I am unable to remember the name of the other kid 

[*export to self-analysis, parapraxis, forgetting of name]

but at the end there is a detail about how he was arrested as an adult and that links to the name Tango and back to the childhood storyline - Tango is a code name I think - and this provides an effective sort of partial closure for the narrative even if many questions remain about the other kid's thoughts and of course - what else happened? what does Justin do next? the book is so short and I wanted more. It was somehow exactly the right book for me to have picked up at that moment (and I'd looked at half a dozen before I opened it). I'd cheerfully read another of V's books when another just right moment arrives.