Becca Blackwell (22:32)
Almost a year after I stopped drinking, I learned about a population of crickets in Kauai. They were Pacific field crickets, Teleogrilis oceanicus, and their song was round, bright and sweet, four loud chirps culminating in a husky trill. Several decades ago, a biologist named Marlene Zook discovered that the males but suddenly stopped singing. Zuk started studying the crickets in the 1990s, when the insects would bleat together. But one year into the new millennium, she heard only a single male call out in the entire field season, an orchestra replaced by a soloist. The silence might suggest that the crickets themselves had vanished, or at least absconded. But when Zook and her team returned to Kauai in 2003, they found crickets abounding in the fields. The males still went through all the motions, scraping mute wings together, but their wings had slickened rid of the corrugations that once allowed them to sing. The culprit was a mustard colored fly, Ormia orchitrya, only slightly larger than a pea. The fly cannot attack the cricket like a typical hunter. Instead, it is a parasitoid. The fly listens for the cricket's song with its highly specialized eardrums, which waggle like a teeter totter to triangulate the insect's location. Then the fly unloads A heap of maggots atop the cricket's back. Babies that burrow through the exoskeleton and curl up inside the cricket as if its body were a womb. The maggots develop inside this walking, singing incubator, and when they hatch, they erupt out of the body and eat their way out. In singing their old song, the male crickets had unknowingly condemned themselves to a gruesome death. The crickets had lost their song and might now survive into the future. For generations, the mute flat wings hopped around the island, freed from the flies but scarcely able to find mates. But in 2018, biologist Robin Tingatella overheard a population of Pacific field crickets in Hawaii singing a new song. It sounded nothing like the species signature chirping, but rather like a cat's low, throaty purr. To the careful ears of female crickets, these calls are crude imitations of the old one. The alchemy of the first, crafted by eons of evolution, remain lost. But these new songs, however coarse and tuneless, may be the cricket's ticket to the future. When I wrote about the Hawaiian crickets from my day job, I recognized what seemed like parallels between us. We were creatures who had traded some original ability to sing for something else. Survival and a newfound masculinity. But I am not so obtuse as to conflate our situations. I had no life threatening predators around to silence me, no flies dumping a litter of maggots on my back to remodel my body into a nightmarish womb. Thinking about our situation side by side only reminded me of my luck. I had simply fallen a little out of love with karaoke. What once had been an outlet for rage, love and desire had now become a site of discomfort, even fear. It was no longer a place I could go to lose myself. In fact, I was running out of places to lose myself. Perhaps this was the point of stopping drinking. But it did not halt my yearning for times when I could step into a karaoke room, pick up a mic and become someone else for a few minutes. Now I'm much more myself. This is sometimes a relief, sometimes a restriction. When I used to sing Lips of an angel at karaoke, I often found myself reading the lyrics off a simple blue screen. But the fancier bars would play the actual music video. It opens with Austin John Winkler, the former lead singer of Hinder, a quasi tatted white guy with the dark stringy hair, talking to his old girl on the phone as his new girls in the next room. The video, like the song is quite literal. When I duetted lips with the video, I mirrored Winkler's affect as I wailed, holding up my own quasi tatted arms, nodding my own head of dark stringy hair. When I revisited the music video for this piece, I came across an interview with Winkler where he talked about reaching three years of sobriety after being hospitalized for liver and kidney failure. He talked about addiction, a string of stints in rehab, and saying goodbye to the person he was. He talked about coming back from the other side, going to therapy, picking up a microphone again, and feeling alive. I was struck stupidly by how this man I'd only ever seen lip syncing in a cinematically jaundiced music video about the romance of cheating on your girlfriend was a real person trying to overcome something unimaginable. Something I didn't realize before quitting drinking is that sobriety is not a single decision, but an ongoing one. I didn't realize that every sober person I know has achieved something close to a miracle by choosing survival. I didn't realize how many of the sober people I know are also trans. In my early days of testosterone karaoke, I listened to a podcast about a trans singer who had also recently started testosterone. He talked about how he always feared the hormones would ruin his ability to sing. Instead, he feared killing his sweet old voice. This framing made me bristle, as does anything that frames transition in the language of death. Even after my worst vocal cracks, I never felt any grief over a voice that was becoming less accessible, less familiar. I didn't see myself as killing anything. Puberty, even delayed, is the promise of more life. Instead, I found a better resource. I called my friend Siobhan, a singer early in her own transition, and she coached me through the cracks. She told me to drop the song an octave down, to switch between octaves in a single song. She told me, when in doubt, I could always sing Elvis. But I wonder if I'm being unfair to that singer. Maybe I never thought of my own voice as something I could lose because I could never sing in the first place. The further I move in my medical transition, a journey that has not been without some regret, the more it has made me rethink what loss means and if it is always something to be mourned. Loss accompanies life in any body, trans or not. Our bodies are always in a state of change, strengthening, crumbling, breaking down, and repairing themselves in thousands of ways. Part of the wonder of medical transition is that you know to expect these changes, and yet each manages to astonish you in its particulars it is a gift to wait with bated breath for your body, which seems so solid and immutable, to surprise you, to constantly become strange to yourself, re encountering the wild slicken animal of yourself each day. And I am even more grateful to be wholly present so that I can experience these changes in their full vibrance. My voice is still changing, still dropping, still breaking. Singing remains a work in progress, but speaking has become a pleasure. Recently, when my partner heard my voicemail recording from several years ago, they thought they'd gotten the wrong number. I listened to the recording and felt no pang of remembrance, only shock. Surely there was a mistake. Could that really have been me? That old voice was beautiful in its own way. One time a girl from college referred to me as that bitch with the this American life voice. An insult come compliment that I carried with me like a badge of honor, proof that I had cleared some objective standard of beauty. But isn't survival more astonishing than beauty, especially with someone else's conception of it? Hormones and vocal training may not win you any voice you want, but they'll get you much closer than doing nothing at all. Perhaps this is the real joy of karaoke. Not hitting all the notes or nailing a vocal run, but giving yourself permission to be another person, another voice, just for the night. In these rooms, I now workshop future versions of myself. I sing low, I swagger. I'm learning how to tame a voice that is still unfamiliar, yet inconceivably my own. I've started singing pop songs in octave down. Kylie Minogue, if she were a baritone that I have always avoided, scared off by a feminine register that seemed out of reach. I still go back, sometimes the only person in the room without a drink in hand. Even if I only manage to sway in the back of a room as someone else wails into the mic, I'll sing along, my voice breaking, croaking. And if the song is good enough, screaming, I sing until at the end of the night, I lose my voice. But now I trust it to return. Turn.
