A Hot Evening With Miriam
In the spring of 1981, when I was nineteen, a woman named Miriam Roston moved into my building. At least I initially assumed that she was a woman. In New York, people generally were non-judgmental and left other people alone. But this was in the East Bronx, not Manhattan, and after about a month, my family started speculating about her. They used terms like “tranny” and “shemale” to describe her, although they didn’t exactly dislike her either. But neither did they go out of their way to socialize with her. She lived on the fourth floor and we were on the sixth, so I often met her in the elevator. For some reason, she seemed to like me, and we often chatted a bit, sometimes for a short while in the lobby or out in …