by Renee James
She has been the worst but even many of the ones who have been pleasant or civil have left without booking their next appointment. I’m losing so many people I’m terrified that I will not be able to support myself much longer. I have no safety net. No parents to run home to, no boyfriend, no understanding sibling. If I can’t pay the rent, I live on the street.
As awful as this has been, going back to my male presentation is something I won’t even consider. In fact, I didn’t even think about it until last night, and even then I wasn’t thinking about un-transitioning, I was trying to figure out why I wasn’t tempted to do it.
The answer is, for better or worse, this is who I am. I’m not a man. I’m a transwoman. Ugly, disliked, rejected, whatever, this is who I am.
Over many sleepless nights and tense, ego-bruising days, I have pieced together a plan. My goal is to keep half my clients. To get there, I have to get a quarter of them to pre-book the next service and somehow get one-third of the rest of them to come back.
My strategy is to do something special, something a little edgy—or even a lot edgy—for every service. I’m trying to give them a reason to use me even if they think I’m a freak. You can kind of imagine someone at a cocktail party getting a compliment on her hair, saying, yeah, my hairdresser is a she-male (slight facial recoil to show disgust) but he/she is so-o-o creative! It’s her excuse to keep coming back without endorsing my lowlife gender orientation.
I might get some business from people who think a transgender stylist is exotic.
Whatever. I can’t do any worse than if I did nothing at all, and I might do better.
***
I’VE BEEN SO CAUGHT UP in my own trials and tribulations I actually went several days without thinking about Mandy. That ended today when I had my regular sit down with Marilee in the familiar comfort of her kitchen.
As we sip coffee across the table from one another, I tell her I’m out at work now, and the reaction has been pretty awful. She draws out of me the story of the woman who humiliated me and the others who barely disguised their disgust. Her soft, full lips quiver as I speak. Wetness fills her soft brown eyes. Her pain is somehow reassuring. No one has ever felt my pain before or even asked about it.
“Oh Bobbi,” she says, dabbing a tissue at her eyes and shaking her head with enormous sadness. “I'm so sorry that happened to you. I know it hurts. But as much as it hurts, you need to talk about it.” She comes to my side of the table and embraces me for a long, warm moment, then sits beside me and gestures with her hands for me to talk.
I confess my range of responses: desperate loneliness and isolation; feeling like a hairy ape freak; premonitions of being homeless and starving; trying not to cry in the salon; crying my eyes out at home; anger toward the nasty women. Sometimes I replay the scenario with the horrible woman who called me a “thing” and I respond by asking her why she can’t keep a husband. She is newly divorced. It would be a really hurtful thing to say.
Marilee asks if it would have made me feel better to say that. Yes and no. Making someone else feel bad wouldn’t make me feel better about myself, but it would be fun to see a bully get a face-full herself. In a poetic-justice sort of way. I wouldn’t have felt so pathetic right then and there, but when I thought about it later, I’d be ashamed of myself.
“What would make you feel better?” she asks.
“Being 5'-7" and a size 6,” I say.
She laughs and shakes her head with a wry mom smile, like I was a precocious six-year-old who just said something funny. “What else?” she pushes.
I blush, and she can see it even through my makeup. "I don’t know," I say, wanting to change the subject.
"Come on," she coaxes. "We don’t get anywhere if you keep it all inside."
I fidget and try to find the words. I don’t want to say exactly what I’m thinking because it’s too embarrassing. It’s embarrassing to admit to myself, let alone to Marilee. Finally, I say, “I’ve been having erotic dreams.”
She smiles. She is happy for me. “Good!” she says. “Tell me about them.”
“They involve Officer Phil.”
Mildly awkward silence. “Okay. Keep going.”
“Uh, well, he turns me on. I’ve had several dreams about going on dates with him, him coming into the shop to see me, going to dinner…”
Marilee waits to see if I’ll finish the image. I don’t. She says, “What happens in these dreams?”
In my mind I feel Officer Phil’s lips on mine, our hands caressing each other’s erogenous zones. My heart pumps faster.
“We make love,” I confess, hoping to leave it there.
“Do you make love as a woman?” she asks.
My heart flips again. Do I? Do I feel him slipping between my legs in the dream?
“I don’t know, Marilee But he tells me I’m beautiful and sexy and it feels wonderful.”
“Close enough,” she says.
***
“WHAT DO YOU KNOW about Mandy’s murder?” Cecelia asks me, leaning across the table and speaking in a conspiratorial voice just above a whisper.
We’re at dinner in a trendy restaurant, a California wine country cuisine kind of place. Very expensive. Very straight. People at several tables cast furtive glances at us, followed by suddenly hushed conversations. I feel like a spectacle. Someone will surely be coming by to exercise their God-given right to humiliate and embarrass us. Or me, anyway.
“All I know is what you told me.” I respond. . “Why? Is something going on?”
Cecelia grimaces. “If you mean, is the investigation making progress, no. I told you, that’s a dead issue. No pun intended.” She sits back in her chair for a moment, contemplative, and then leans forward again. “We’ll talk about that again later. Let’s order and talk about pleasanter things,” she says.
Cecelia compliments me on my attire and my presentation. “How is your transition going?” she asks.
I tell her about coming out at work. The animosity and rejection. The cool distance even the friendlier stylists have taken. Worries about client retention. As I speak, my emotions well up, my voice trembles as I’m caught unawares by how troubled I still am. I thought I had moved beyond these things.
Cecelia asks more questions, almost like a shrink. I describe my recurring feeling of being a giant, hairy sumo wrestler in a dress.
“Oh God,” she says, gesturing broadly with one hand. I fear she is going to respond in her characteristic volume. But when she talks again she reduces her voice for one-to-one communication.
“We all go through that. You know who you are. If someone else has a problem with that, it’s their problem, not yours. And quit worrying about how you look. Just be.”
She continues in this vein for a while. I’m trying to imagine myself doing that.
“I know that’s good advice,” I say, “but it’s so much easier said than done. I mean, what if the man at the next table stands up and comes over here and starts yelling at us, that we’re perverts and faggots and all that? What do you do?”
Cecelia fumbles with her purse. “Well, personally, I either tell him to suck on his own limp dick or I nail him with a shot of this…” She produces a can of pepper spray.
She snickers. “Look honey, everyone deals with it a different way. I’ve always been a big mouth and I decided early on I wasn’t going to apologize to anyone for who I am. I figured if I was the loudest, most brazen idiot in the room no one would mess with me. It works. Of course, lots of people don’t like me. You’re one, I know.”
I start to object but she cuts me off. “No, Bobbi, you don’t need to deny it. I don’t take offense. I really do know who I am and what I am. “I’ll just say that being loud and brash isn’t all that I am. I really do try to give back to the community and every once in a while I do something kind of nice that goes unnoticed.”
I believe her and say so. She beams.
After we order, she pulls her chair closer to mine.
“A few ge
neral hints,” she says. “First of all, don’t worry about your colleagues in the salon. In a few weeks, they will be used to you. People who you were friendly with before will be friendly again. The others won’t be friendly, but they probably won’t be antagonistic, either. It takes too much energy. I also don’t think you should lose any sleep over your client retention. I don’t know any hairdressers who have transitioned, but I have known several girls who were in sales. The ones who conducted themselves professionally did fine.”
Cecelia lets this sink in for a moment.
“For what it’s worth,” she says, “I think you’re going to do very well. You have a quiet, dignified way about you. It makes people like you and trust you. And even though it’s true that you don’t look like a genetic woman, you have an attractive, kind of exotic appearance. I think for every person who leaves you because of your appearance there will be two who seek you out.”
Knock me over with a feather! I really had no idea Cecelia could be so charming. Other than Marilee, she is the only person who has offered any real hope and encouragement to me since I came out.
We talk about other things during dinner—TransGender Alliance issues and people, Chicago politics, men. Officer Phil, it turns out, has caught the fancy of many of our sisters. “What about you?” she asks.
I feel myself blush. “Yes, he’s hot,” I finally concede.
“Oh come now, Bobbi,” Cecelia chides me. “Confess, you’d love to be with him in a dark room with soft music, right?” She gets more graphic, asks me why I’m squirming. I explain about my determination to remain chaste during my transition, and why.
She arches her eyebrows thoughtfully. “Well, Bobbi, you really are different. I had no such restraints. In fact, I couldn’t move fast enough into my new skin.”
Cecelia tells her story. A high-powered bank executive, a trophy wife, two high-achieving kids. Big stock portfolio. Nice side business as a financial consultant. The country club, company limo. High profile player in the state’s Republican Party. Flew first class. Gave orders, talked loud, apologized to no one. Made a fortune.
“Then one day Mrs. Swenson, wife to Robert Swenson, who was me in a former life, tells me she’s been having an affair. She tells me this not because she wants a divorce, but because she doesn’t want to be sneaky and she doesn’t think I’ll care. She says we never have sex anymore and it can only mean one of two things—that I don’t find her attractive, or that I’m gay.”
Cecelia pauses for dramatic effect, and then shrugs. “You know, she made me deal with it. It was true, I hadn’t been interested in her sexually for years, even though she was beautiful and provocative and a willing bed partner. I never really had dealt with why I lost interest in her sexually, even though I was aware of it. When she told me, I was jealous. But not the kind of jealous a man would be. I didn’t want to make love with her or shoot her lover or hit her or any of those things. I didn’t know what to think or do or say. I didn’t know how I felt. And I knew that wasn’t right.”
Cecelia looks away for a moment.
“So I start seeing a shrink, and a couple weeks later I have a pretty good idea of who I am. I had buried memories of how much I liked my sister’s and mother’s clothes because I had been scolded for trying sis’ wardrobe once. After that, I denied that whole part of me. I buried it because I was also competitive, and you couldn’t win in business or in life if people thought you were a sissy. A month after my wife told me about her affair, I told her I was a transsexual and I was going to transition. I’ve never been more certain of anything in my life.”
Cecelia stops talking. Her silence breaks my ruminations on how different our revelations were, Cecelia's and mine, she struck by a lightning bolt of certainty later in life, me shadowed by a reality from childhood that I still have doubts about.
“How did your wife take that?” I ask.
A sad smile plays at her lips. “She was disappointed. She had hoped I was gay because we could make an accommodation—she’d have her plaything, I’d have mine and we’d carry on. Me prancing around in a dress, borrowing her makeup, playing golf with her and her friends…well, that wasn’t going to cut it. Plus, she wasn’t gay, she said. She couldn’t live with another woman. She was horrified what everyone would think, how much grief the kids would get at school, all that. We divorced quickly, before I began living as a woman. No word to anyone about my secret —just, we had grown apart, it was time for an amicable separation, the kids are taking it well, blah, blah, blah. I got to keep some of the family fortune.
“I haven’t seen her since the divorce and I’ve only seen one of my kids—my daughter. I’m an embarrassment to them.”
For all her bluster, Cecelia is deeply hurt by this. Just like the rest of us. Even though the people in our lives feel like the person they knew no longer exists, for us, we’re still the same person. . We love who we loved before, and we want our friends to still be our friends. Our gender has changed, but not our essence.
I start to ask Cecilia another question, but she holds up one hand in a “stop” motion. “Hold on Bobbi,” she says in a low voice. “I want you to keep watching me while I say something. Don’t turn until I tell you to. Bobbi, directly behind you is a handsome man in a silver-gray suit with a blue tie, fiftyish, silver-gray hair. He’s with another man and a woman in her thirties, long blond hair, big boobs. In a moment, I want you to stand up and look that way as if you’re looking at the bar, then go to the ladies’ room. When you come back you can get another good look at him. Do that, and then we’ll talk.”
I am only partly mystified by Cecelia’s cloak and dagger. I’m mainly concerned with going into the ladies’ room in a nice straight place like this. I can just feel some society matron screaming that there’s a man in the ladies room, followed by me coming out in handcuffs.
Fearful as I am, I am also under Cecelia’s spell, at least for tonight. Trying to be as bold and self-assured as she would be, I rise on cue and pivot slightly, looking to the bar as I smooth my skirt and straighten my blouse. I see the gentleman Cecelia described right away in my peripheral vision. He looks like a mafia don, or maybe a senator. The two people with him listen raptly as he talks. He glances at me as I stand, looks back to his audience then looks at me again for several beats.
As I walk to the ladies’ room, I focus on walking in a feminine manner and not tripping over anyone. He made me as a transwoman, of course, that’s what the second look was about.
Another woman is in the ladies’ room when I enter. She has just finished drying her hands. As we pass closely by each other in the narrow entrance way she glances up at me. I am nearly a foot taller than she in my heels. She reads me instantly, swallows the surprise, looks grimly straight ahead and is gone. I face a roomful of the same reactions when I go back to my table.
When I return, Cecelia looks at me with her sly smile. “So, what do you think?”
“He’s very handsome,” I say. She gestures with her hands to say more. “He looks like he’s wealthy and powerful.”
“Very good!” says Cecelia. “He is wealthy and powerful, and he is good looking and knows it." Her face hardens. “He’s also the bastard who killed Mandy.”
***
He’s holding court with his wit and charm. It is so easy. They are so simple. He is so powerful. This one is too easy.
The Cocker Spaniel. Strand has already named him. He rolls into town with his slut of a wife, intent on contesting a billing from Strand's firm, ready to get the fee reduced and show the silly MBAs back home what an asset he is. As if a company lawyer like him would have any sense of what it takes to go to court. As if a real meat-eating litigator would be intimidated by a jelly-spined bureaucrat like him.
Strand overwhelms the fool in minutes with a few numbers about the costs of winning and losing, delivered with a little attitude. Winning is cheap, Strand concludes. Losing is expensive. Other firms do their best. We win.
The Spaniel has been eating o
ut of his hands ever since.
Now, in the bar, Strand lays on the charm, reciting his courtroom war stories. Funny, interesting. A little self-deprecating humor to sharpen the focus of the picture he is painting: we always win. That’s what you pay for. Other law firms do their best for you, we win. The Spaniel hangs on every word, laughs at every punch line, giddy that his company can’t lose, having the time of his life. Mrs. Spaniel is locked in too, face flushed, lips parted. Phony, snotty bitch. All store-bought airs with her designer clothes, gaudy jewelry, surgically enhanced skin, bulbous plastic tits. Arrogant on the outside, hungry on the inside. Coming on to him. He can feel her heat. She is imagining herself with him. He has this effect on women. She disgusts him even more than her simple husband. . It would be fun to fuck her hard in the ass. Until she squealed. Until she bled.
The thought doesn’t make him horny. It makes him angry.
“Balance,” he reminds himself.
As he begins another story, a movement in his peripheral vision causes him to glance away from the Spaniel and his bitch. A tall woman dressed almost entirely in white has just risen from her table. She is trim, unusually athletic. She glances at him while she straightens her skirt and top, then walks toward the restrooms. He turns back to his guests and begins to speak when he realizes the tall woman isn’t a woman. He glances back at her. Yes, a tranny. And familiar looking, too.
He tells his story without a hitch, but part of his mind is working on a mental picture of the tall tranny. It comes to him. She’s the one he saw going to the trans meeting.
She returns to her table as he is finishing a story and he gets a good look at her. Handsome face, masculine, but hot. Nice cleavage. Plump breasts that jiggle as she negotiates the restaurant tables in short strides. Nice legs. Nice ass. Boyish but shapely. He feels heat in his loins. Pictures pop into his mind of the tall tranny servicing him. His body parts can feel her touch. He feels himself mounting her.
