“I didn’t do that to please you,” Berry said. But he felt delight in spite of himself. The rest of the session, they talked like friends about music and families. Berry left Dr. Tamarind’s office chuckling.
Someone in the waiting room threw a magazine over his face as soon as Berry emerged. Berry only glimpsed Canon Moosehead for a moment. Berry walked over. The Canon held his copy of Rolling Stone over his face as if inspecting the Yeah Yeah Yeahs up close. Berry peered over Jem to make doubly sure. The Canon cringed behind newsprint. Berry recognized the meaty face and soft beard, even without a collar. The Canon looked up at Berry, his eyes a plea.
Berry turned and stalked out. It came to Berry what was going on: Dr. Tamarind wanted to spy on Berry, so he was recruiting within the church. Canon Moosehead had obviously come to report on Berry’s movements. So much for Berry’s victory.
Berry took his time getting home. He no longer wanted an ice cream.
But Marco didn’t have an ice cream for Berry anyway. He had “something better, a surprise. Come on.” Marco dragged Berry back out of the apartment. Then they walked a few blocks and waited for the downtown bus. They rode south through darkening streets. Berry’s paranoia sliced deeper. If Canon Moosehead and Dr. Tamarind could plot against him, what could his dad be up to? The neighborhood got nastier around him as they lunged into the darkness. “I told your mother not to wait up for us,” Marco said. “Guy stuff.” Berry wanted to run away, but he wasn’t sure he could find his way home.
Marco led Berry to a big wooden door with a tiny window in it. He pulled the door open and revealed a stone staircase into a brick cellar lined with a bar on one side and small booths on the other. “Surprise,” Marco said. He pulled out a small rectangle and handed it to Berry. In the cellar bar’s gloom, Berry could hardly read the shiny little card. But he recognized a picture of himself from a choir photo, looking serious and mature. And he made out a date that overstated his age by eight years. “It’s not a driver’s license. I didn’t want you to get any crazy ideas about driving,” Marco said. He ordered two beers and handed one to Berry, who held up the fake ID to the bartender. The bartender barely glanced at it. “After this, we’ll go to a strip joint. You’re growing,” Marco said with a smile. Berry started singing, very softly, so only he could hear.
The beer smelled like the woods around the Peterman school after a torrent.
“Drain it,” said Marco. Marco acted scary-jolly, the way he did after one of his rages. Berry stared into his beer. After he drank enough, Marco fulfilled his threat to take Berry to a strip bar. They huddled at the side of a rounded stage with a fire pole at its front. Berry wondered whether a fire station somewhere was missing its pole and the firemen had resorted to jumping downstairs. As the night stretched and woman after slender woman came out and whipped around the pole, Marco put his hand on his son’s shoulder and drew Berry’s head into his chest. Berry watched the women dance from under his dad’s arm until he fell asleep. Then his dad roused him and they took the bus home.
Berry slept through Judy’s first two attempts to wake him the next morning. “You can’t miss school so soon after your big absence. Now get some clothes on.”
Rat sensed Berry’s half-awake state and made him stand in front of the class and explain why Mr. Darcy might be a good match.
At choir rehearsal, the boys overheard Berry telling Wilson what had happened. He started out describing it as an ordeal. “It was ass-dark down there and that beer was so big.” Then Berry noticed the other boys gathering around. They started giving him thumbs up and hooting when he told about the strip club. Berry soon realized this story was best told as a victory.
“Oh man,” Teddy said. “Can we trade dads?”
Berry described all the impossibly top-heavy and skinny women in greater and greater detail, until the boys accused him of making it up. Luckily, Berry had pocketed a strip club matchbox.
Berry sat at the cool boys’ table at dinner. Teddy and Randy kept stroking the curves of the matchbox stripper picture. After dinner, the full choir rehearsed in the cathedral for acoustics. Berry saw Canon Moosehead staring at him from the balcony at the cathedral’s far end. After rehearsal, Berry passed the Canon in the hallway, but the Canon wouldn’t meet Berry’s eyes.
On Saturday, Marco took Berry for a “nature walk” in the basement of their apartment building. “Look, a bug. And there’s some stuff growing under that leaky pipe. And I think I just saw something furry in the corner.”
Sunday’s sermon, by Dean Jackson, was called “The Church is Your Gang.” Hoping to reach out to the inner city, the Dean compared different denominations to rival gangs. “We wear different colors, but we all run with the same crew in the end. We are all homies in Christ.”
When Berry’s solo came, he reached down deep to fill every part of himself with breath. He sang not just from his diaphragm but from his hurt scrotal sac. Berry breathed so deep he could imagine his ball sac puffing like a balloon. He focused on the pain, then released the voice of him who cri-eth in the wilderness. Mr. Allen looked amazed.
Teddy brought Berry a cookie after the service and said his solo had rocked the party. Berry took the napkin full of crumble and said thanks. Then he saw Wilson making his move on Lisa.
Berry caught up to Wilson. Both of them still wore cassocks and surplices. Berry never wanted to take his robe off. In regular clothes, he saw the rust that would swallow him eventually. But every time he caught his reflection in robes, he felt permanently stainless like the knife he wasn’t thinking about.
Lisa stood with her mom outside the cathedral steps. Lisa and her mom were a few inches taller than Wilson and Berry, but Lisa’s mom was way heavier. She wore a thick woolen jacket and skirt, even in the September heat. Mrs. Gartner kept talking to Lisa, even after Wilson approached. “Hello Lisa. Hello Mrs. Gartner.”
“He should be here,” Mrs. Gartner said without acknowledging Wilson. “He’s rationalist about everything except being on time.”
“That was some sermon, huh?” Wilson said. “I guess Confirmation is like a gang initiation.”
“Don’t forget we need dill if we’re going to marinate those mushrooms. Remind me to tell your father.”
“So Lisa, there’s this dance next week, and I was wondering if you’d like to, uh . . .”
A black Lexus pulled in front of the church in a smooth arc. Mrs. Gartner stomped to the passenger side and got in front. She immediately started gesturing at the driver, who was probably Mr. Gartner. Lisa got in the back seat without saying goodbye to Wilson and Berry. The car pulled out and ran a yellow light escaping the cathedral.
“I wonder why Lisa’s dad doesn’t come to church,” Berry said.
“So Lisa’s mom and her friends all hate me,” Wilson said. “It’s obvious she should date me. It’s the most rebellious thing she could do.”
Berry asked Dr. Tamarind about Canon Moosehead in their next session together. Dr. Tamarind merely sighed and changed the subject. Berry could tell it wouldn’t help to keep asking, so instead he went back to ignoring Dr. Tamarind’s questions and attempts at conversation. About halfway through the session, Dr. Tamarind seemed to run out of energy or ideas. The two of them sat in silence for twenty minutes or so. Berry watched the sunlight redden in the window and imagined it was the glow of stained glass.
Berry’s mind wandered and he thought of Lisa mimicking her mom’s deaf act after church. “What do you know about Roland Montreux?” Berry asked Dr. Tamarind.
The question jolted the drowsing therapist. “Why do you ask? No, of course. You ask the questions around here. He was a psychologist who made a splash, pardon the pun, in the early seventies. A kook. Tried to salvage the Skinner box.”
“What was that?”
“Long story. Basically, Montreux believed the maturation process for children recapitulates evolution, from oceans to land. He was into underwater birth, and he thought children misbehaved because their reptilian, or aquatic, bra
in got out of control. He wrote this book called The Shore of Reason that told parents to submerge their children in water until they behaved better. Sort of aversion therapy. You relive the aquatic existence and progress beyond it. Not a very popular theory any more.”
“I saw a diagram of one of his tanks on the Internet.”
“I hope your parents aren’t thinking of experimenting with his ideas.”
“Nah. My dad’s all about Rousseau. My mom sometimes talks about Ayn Rand.” Then Berry shut up before he said too much or sounded too smart.
“You know,” Dr. Tamarind said, “maybe it’s time we got your parents in here with you.”
Berry shook his head slowly.
“Why not?”
“They’d just fight.”
Dr. Tamarind tried to draw Berry out some more, but Berry shut up. The more Dr. Tamarind probed him, the more nervous he got. He still wasn’t sure why Canon Moosehead had been there.
When Berry finally lurched out of Dr. Tamarind’s office without saying goodbye, he found a beautiful woman in the waiting room instead of the Canon. She had long hair the color of altar linen. Her square face shone with natural glamour and cosmetics, and jewelry glimmered from her neck, ears, and wrists. Her jeans jacket and denim skirt showed off a body almost as sleek as the strippers Berry had seen the w7eek before. She gave Berry a starlet’s smile.
“You look frustrated,” she said. “I can’t blame you. He’s such a pill miser. Takes that whole ‘gatekeeper’ thing way too seriously.”
Berry nodded without grasping anything.
“You think you’re ready, right? You sure look ready. It would make passing a whole lot easier, I can tell you. But he doesn’t care. I wish I hadn’t started with him. You know, there’s a much easier way of getting what you want.”
Berry nodded again. He waited for the woman to make sense. She definitely sounded encouraging. But just then, Dr. Tamarind chose to poke his head out and say, “Maura, come on in.” The woman got up, waved at Berry, then disappeared into the spymaster’s lair.
Berry got halfway to the bus stop when he decided he couldn’t go home without understanding what the woman, Maura, had been talking about.
He turned and walked back to Dr. Tamarind’s office building. It had two exits, so Berry had to go upstairs and stand outside the suite door to be sure of catching Maura. He waited around there for half an hour, before Dr. Tamarind and Maura walked out together. They were talking about surgeons.
Berry hid behind a large red donut sculpture. Dr. Tamarind and Maura disappeared into the stairwell. Berry waited a moment, then crept down after them. But by the time Berry reached the ground floor, he couldn’t find his therapist or the mysterious woman. He walked around the building twice, but they’d both disappeared. Berry screamed. Then he ran to catch the bus home for a late dinner and parental questioning.
Maura turned up a couple of weeks later, after an extra unpleasant session with Dr. Tamarind in which the therapist actually sang to Berry. “You see, a grown man can still have a wonderfully mellow and lilting voice,” Dr. Tamarind said between renditions of “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “You’ve Made Me So Very Happy.” Berry squirmed.
In the waiting room, Maura wore a really short red skirt, go-go boots, and talon-like press-on nails.
“Listen,” Berry said. “I need to know about the stuff you were talking about when we met before. What did you mean, there’s an easier way? Please tell me.”
Maura agreed to meet Berry after her session. He took her for a beer at a nearby karaoke bar, using his allowance and fake ID. Berry drank cola and realized being a man had advantages. He could go to places like this bar, buy drinks for people like Maura, and listen to sophisticated grown-up conversations. It proved to be a big change from sitting around the Twelve Step room swapping fart jokes with the choirboys.
“God, Dr. Tamarind is such a nut case,” said Maura. “It drives me crazy that people like that are in a position of power over people like us.”
Maura wore rhinestone barrettes in her fuschia hair and a shiny black lycra dress that stopped mid-thigh. Nobody like Maura ever came to Orlac Junior High or St. Luke’s. “So why do you keep going to him?”
“Well, that’s the point. If it was just for the pills, I’d probably go one of the other routes. But I can’t let go of the idea that I’m going to want the surgery eventually.”
Berry felt he was supposed to know about pills and surgery. It was probably one of those things that came along with adulthood, a body of knowledge that uncoiled in your late teens. So he probed: “What makes you think you’d want surgery?”
“I don’t know.” Maura took a big swig just as a woman in a leather cowboy hat and chaps got up and sang “Macho Man” by the Village People. “I guess I just want to be real.”
“I know. I think about being real a lot.” Berry tried to project his weekly choirboy image onto the plain boy he saw the rest of the week. Even on Sundays, Berry didn’t feel enough like the harbinger he made others see.
“Have you started with the pills yet?”
Berry shook his head. “I’m not sure which pills you mean,” he finally admitted.
Maura shook her head. “Huh. Well, for most people it’s a combination of synthetic estrogen and progesterone, plus a whopping dose of testosterone blockers. It pretty much nukes the masculinity machine and lets that inner woman come out.” Berry nodded.
“I tried to castrate myself. That’s why I’m seeing Dr. Tamarind.”
“Girlfriend!” Maura slapped her forehead. “You are hard core. It takes balls of steel to do that. But, mama, that is so unnecessary. You don’t have to kick out the house guests until you’re a hundred percent sure. I mean, the pills do pretty much the same thing. It’s way less messy.”
“Really?”
“Nobody would know looking at me that I still have them.”
“You’re a man?” Berry jerked back in his chair and almost knocked over a dancing lesbian.
“Sit down.”
Berry sat.
“You are confused, aren’t you?” Maura put her hand on Berry’s. “Just relax. Yes, I was a man. Emphasis on ‘was.’ Goddess, what has Dr. Tamarind been doing with you in those sessions of his?”
“Singing to me.”
“Now I know he’s a quack. Listen, I know a place where you can get started on the pills. Your singing shrink won’t even have to know, for now.” Maura raised her Corona bottle. Berry clanked his soda against it.
That week the choir worked on a trippy Benjamin Britten piece for the big concert in October. Mr. Allen growled at the boys when they started sharping on some of Britten’s weirdest riffs. The whole time, Berry thought about Maura’s advice—to get the pills, even from the easy-going people at the Benjamin Clinic, you had to say you hated your body. This shell doesn’t represent me, I’m making my way through this world in a false case.
Canon Moosehead gave the sermon that week, and he actually talked about people who hated their bodies. Cutting off your right arm, plucking your eyes out, casting out pig-demons . . . the “secular world” was just coming around to an idea Christians had known about for millennia: your mind, your essence, wasn’t separate from your body. Rather, the two were intertwined. But did that mean you should go around lopping off body parts that behaved awry? Wouldn’t we all end up mutilated? Maybe instead we should reopen the lines of communication between thumb and brain, try to adjust our self-image to reflect our physical selves? What would Jesus do? Maybe give us the mind-bogglingly contradictory and dictatorial advice to war with our bodies’ urges while simultaneously owning up to their essential “us-ness.” And repent, repent, repent, of course.
After that, the choir had a sleepy anthem by Herbert Howells, who probably never worried about whether he was his body. After church, Lisa vanished before Wilson could speak to her again.
That week, Berry showed up early for his session with Dr. Tamarind. He heard a voice coming from inside, which he iden
tified after a moment as Canon Moosehead’s.
“I’ve tried so hard, so horribly hard, to control it. But it won’t obey. The other day it rose up during a meeting with the Downtown Association. I had to stay behind my desk, even when they started getting up to go. I mean, for years it hasn’t stirred since Ronnie left me. Now this. What’s it coming to?”
Berry couldn’t hear what Dr. Tamarind said. Maybe he sang to Canon Moosehead. If so, the song was short. Soon, he heard the Canon again. “But this is all I know how to do. I’m a man of God, and a damn, sorry, a really good one. What if you had to quit therapy just because you got a stiffy every time somebody talked about his Oedipus complex? Well, whatever. I don’t care if you’re a Jungian or a lesbian.”
Before Berry was ready, the door opened and he had to dash for the sofa and hide behind a Reader’s Digest. Canon Moosehead stalked out, apparently too upset to notice anyone.
“Why does Canon Moosehead keep coming here? Is he giving you reports on me?” Berry asked Dr. Tamarind in their session. Dr. Tamarind said no, but he wouldn’t say anything else. Berry found that pretty unsatisfying. “He probably spies on me because he’s jealous. The other boys and I look much better in our robes than he and Dean Jackson do in theirs. And we actually know how to sing. You’re lucky you’ve never heard Canon Moosehead try to do the whole Cantor thing. Yuck. The truth is people just sit through their boring raps to get to our music. So what is it with guys who want to be chicks?”
The sudden change of topic startled Dr. Tamarind but didn’t upset him, since Gender Identity Dysphoria was a topic he knew something about, unlike religion. He explained about the smorgasbord of anxieties that makes people born one sex want to take another. “Imagine if the way people looked at you and treated you felt all wrong. And you couldn’t wear the clothes or act the way you wanted,” he said. “You’d do anything to change.”
Berry reflected. “Suppose I wanted to be like the game show babe who stands by the big wheel or holds out one palm towards the picture of whatever vacation or appliance the person has won? Would that make me gender dysphoric?” Dr. Tamarind said Berry might not have grasped the whole “smorgasbord of anxieties” concept.
Choir Boy Page 5