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says. “I feel they can see through me for what I am. I don’t feel like the other men. I feel if I was a woman I could let myself go.”
    The doctor has a test for him, a game really. Free association, no wrong answers. The way it works is the doctor starts a sentence and Bobby finishes it.
    The doctor starts.
    “If I had ten thousand dollars …”
    “I would buy myself an operation,” Bobby says.
    “If I were invisible …”
    “I wouldn’t do anything.”
    “If I were an animal I’d be …”
    “Bird. I like birds and flying.”

    One early memory. Bobby is five. He wants to be Tinkerbell, from
Peter Pan
. She is trailed by magic dust. She can always fly away.
    Even as a boy, looking in the mirror at his legs, which he thought were too shapely, Bobby thought he could see the woman inside him. He snuck into his mother’s dresser and placed his hands among her bras and panties to feel the fabric. Alone in a room he tried them on. Later, he slept in them.
    His dreams were of men on top of him, pushing themselves into him. Sometimes Bobby put the family dog on top of his groin. He told the dog to sit and imagined the weight of the dog was the weight of another man.
    Another early memory. He can see the airfield in Long Beach. The planes have propellers, fins, and wings—just like birds. He can see them coming in for landings and can hear the scream of their engines. He watches them scurry around the taxiway. How can these aluminum contraptions manage to fly?
    Bobby looks through the airport fence. An older man is cleaning his plane. Bobby shouts to the man through the fence.
    “How about a ride?”
    The man shakes his head.
    The next day Bobby comes back. The next day too.
    Finally the old man hands Bobby a rag and Bobby wipes down his plane. In exchange, Bobby gets his ride and discovers a purpose in life: to fly.
    “I don’t like being under someone else’s control,” Bobby says years later. “In my plane, I feel like I’m totally inside the sky, totally free.”
    During his psychiatric evaluation, the doctor asks Bobby to describe his employment history.
    “I’m a job jumper,” Bobby says.
    He dropped out of high school and picked lemons with migrant workers for a quarter a day. He drove to Oregon to pick tomatoes and then found higher pay in the logging camps of the Pacific Northwest. When he was old enough he enrolled in the Air Force. He wanted to learn how to fly for free. But the exams required a background in mathematics. Doctors also noticed a problem with his eye. He didn’t qualify for flight school.
    He vowed revenge. He would not give the military the satisfaction of good service. He would be a terrible, incorrigible soldier. He joined the Merchant Marines.
    On Merchant ships, Bobby wrote home from ports that were hard to pronounce, names he tattooed onto his arms and chest. Eniwetok, Alang Alang, Kara Gara, Barugo, Batangas, Cagayan, Agoo, Tabao. He was in the South Pacific. He was in South America. He swam in shark-infested waters. He hunted with natives.
    He was a violent case. He drank fifths of bourbon in gulps to impress other sailors (then wandered off to vomit). He followed other sailors into brothels and forced himself to have sex with women. Anything to protect his secret. In the dead of night, under the moon and adrift in the ocean, Bobby would crawl out from his bunk and sneak toward the front of the ship, where he would slip on his dress and his heels.
    “You can’t live if you don’t do it,” Bobby tells his doctors about his cross-dressing. “It’s like medicine.”
    After the Merchant Marines, Bobby changed jobs every month or so. He’s had more than 150 over the years, he tells the doctor. He can fix cars, washing machines, vacuum cleaners. He was a mechanic at Ford, Bethlehem Steel, Continental Can. He worked at Yosemite National Park.
    He knows how to plaster and cement too—just like his father, Elmer.
    “I can do anything he can do,” Bobby says about