by Renee James
I appreciate the good news. Maybe I won’t have to dip into my surgery fund after all. When I first thought I’d be out for a month, I drew up a financial plan. It was grim. I’d have to live on money I have been setting aside for my sex change operation. It hasn’t been easy to accumulate this money. A little comes from my regular earnings at the salon, and the rest comes from my private customers. None of it comes in big chunks. It was depressing to realize that in addition to the physical and mental damage done by the goons, their work was also going to prolong my time in she-male limbo.
The cheeriest part of Roger’s visit is his assessment of my appearance.
“You look pretty good, Bobbi,” he says after a long once over.
I smirk, a look of disbelief on my face.
“No, really,” he says. “You have some cuts and bruises that anyone would notice, but you aren’t disfigured. You look like Bobbi and your injuries aren’t going to put off any customers.”
He is sincere, and he knows what he’s talking about. I couldn’t be happier if Brad Pitt had just told me I was the most beautiful girl in the world.
“I think whenever you’re physically and mentally ready, you should come back to work,” Roger says. “So, how are you doing physically and mentally?”
Actually, I’m doing pretty well. My ribs hurt like hell if I turn wrong or breathe too hard, but I did an updo on a mannequin this morning and found that I could move easily through the work. Just for fun, I mimed a haircut, then a set of foil highlights. Same deal. No problem.
I don't tell him my rectum is healing. I’m not getting blood in my stools any more, and I can sit and walk with just mild discomfort.
Mentally. Well, mentally it’s more complex than that. The part of me I show to Roger is the part that is dying to get back into the salon. God how I miss doing hair. I miss the smell of the place. I miss the theater of my colleagues’ sexy clothing and creative styles and getups. I miss the customers, the conversation, and the gossip. I miss helping people feel good about themselves. And I miss getting all girlied up to go to work.
Roger is delighted. We agree that I’ll be in Monday morning. They have booked me for half days all week—half, mornings, the other half, afternoons and early evenings. Roger wants to know if I’m sure I can do it. I’m sure. Just as sure as I am that the person who did this to me will be punished.
And that’s the other side of my mental state. I'm homicidal. Not generally homicidal, just absolutely and completely focused on Strand. No matter how good I feel, no matter where I am in my transition, I will settle things with Strand. That will not change, not until the deed is done.
William returns as we finish our business talk. He brings sushi for all and a sound system for me. A sound system! William is a contractor and an electronics whiz. He does reconstructions and remodeling and he’s very successful. Still, I’m speechless when he shows up with a very sophisticated system and sets to installing it. I try to object, but both partners shush me up. It is a spare system and if I don’t like it they’ll remove it but I have to give it a month.
How about that?
***
RAY OUTLASTS MY objections and pays me a visit a week after our cancelled date. He brings a bottle of wine and takeout Chinese, plus several classical music CDs to run on my fancy new sound system.
About midway through Brahms and my second helping of Moo Shoo Pork, I tell him that I wasn’t just beaten up, I was raped too. It just comes out. Ray is very easy to talk to. Maybe the nicest and most sympathetic man I’ve ever known. Kind of a male version of Marilee.
His face clouds over, his eyes squint, his lips grimace in sympathy. "Oh my God, Bobbi!" he sighs. He is outraged for me, and even in his outrage he is as gentle as a saint.
“It appears they used condoms,” I tell him. “I don’t have any signs of STDs, but that’s no guarantee. Neither is the absence of semen. A lot of rapists don’t actually orgasm, I’m told. They’re just in it for the blood and meanness of it.”
Ray nods sympathetically.
“I’m just telling you in case you were ever thinking of, you know…” I struggle to say it, goodness knows why. I’m certainly no blushing virgin.
He looks at me blankly for a minute, then recognition clicks in. “Oh. Oh!” he says. “Okay. Well, thanks.” He’s a little nonplused, stammering for words to say. “Let’s not worry about that right now. Let’s get you better.”
Good answer. I don’t want to think about sex right now and I don’t want to talk about it. In fact, I think I brought it up just now to invite him to walk out the door and not come back. I’d rather get the bad news now than later. Plus, if he dumped me now I wouldn’t have to worry about whether or not my libido will ever come back. I’d hate to string along a nice guy if there was no hope.
Oh, hell. Like Cecelia says, I worry too much.
***
NO ONE RUSHES UP to gush over me or anything on my first day back, but everyone greets me and a couple stylists give me hugs.
Roger comes out of his office to give me a paternal hug and a warm welcome. He makes a show of examining my face and pronouncing me beautiful. I’m not beautiful of course, but I’m trying to feel beautiful, in a defiant sort of way. I’m wearing a short skirt, black hose, black heels, and a low-cut black top that shows plenty of cleavage and the top of my lacy black bra. My hair is up in a loose updo. I’m wearing red nail polish and red lipstick. I’m doing my best to recreate my appearance on the night I was raped. I feel like I need to face down all the phobias that were produced by that experience. This is one. I have the right to try to look sexy if I want to. I’m not going to let the rapists take that from me, too.
My first client is a referral. She knows about me from another customer. Her original appointment had to be rescheduled because of my recovery, but she went along with it, thank goodness.
“I’m so glad you could get me in today,” she says. She asks about my scrapes and bruises. I reiterate the mugging story. “I hope it’s not related to your, uh…” She struggles to find the right word.
“No,” I say.
She tells me how she heard about me, that she first noticed how cute her friend’s cut was, then she was blown away by the color I did on her a month ago and I immediately remember the client she is talking about. We talk about that as I cut her hair. This is a get-acquainted visit. She doesn’t say so, but we both understand it. If she likes me and my work and the salon, she’ll be back for something fancier in the future. For now, it’s a trim, but the trim needs to give her a subtly different look than she had before.
Her hair is a medium length bob, the perfect cut for a middle-aged professional woman.
The old Bobby—the male one—would have just given her a trim or he would have spent another ten minutes trying to get her to agree with his ideas for improving the cut. The trans Bobbi has learned to just do it. If it’s really a good idea, ninety percent of the time the customer will be elated and will come back again, and that’s twice as good as I did the other way.
As I work she asks me questions about what it’s like to be a transsexual. She's polite but very curious. I change the subject after a while to find out about her. She’s divorced, one child, great job, lousy social life, house in the suburbs.
Her words fuel my vision for her cut. I add layers and sculpt the front so the sides taper away to her ears. The layers give her hair more movement and body. The opened front takes years off her face and shows off her nice eyes and bone structure.
She is very happy. She lays a big tip on me and books a color appointment for a month from now. I am even happier. God it’s good to be back doing hair! And what a wonderful first client.
The morning goes well. I have only thirty minutes open from nine to two pm.
My last client is a character test. I’ve been curious all morning to see how this is going to go. She’s the same lady who flew off the handle the first day I worked as a woman. “My God, Bobbi! You have boobs!” I’ll never
forget her saying that, or how stupid I felt.
I always knew you were light in the loafers, but this! This!
Now I can’t wait to find out why she came back.
I ask the assistant to seat her for me so I can sneak a quick trip to the bathroom. When I come back I come around the chair in front of her to say hello and shake hands. She smiles as I do so, and her eyes pass over all of me, from my teased, red-streaked permed hair to my swollen cleavage to my mini-skirted legs to my sexy heels.
“Very cute, Bobbi,” she says after her visual tour of my body. “You look very cute. I’m still having a hard time with this, but I have to hand it to you, you do a lot with what you’ve got, honey.”
I take this to mean that she still views me as a freak, but an acceptable one, not a monster. It’s a start. Later, she says she came back because no one can do her hair the way I do.
Well, she’s a nasty, vulgar, opinionated jerk, but she’s my jerk.
***
PEOPLE ARE STARING AT ME. They look away when my gaze turns in their direction, but no matter where I turn, some of the people in this crowded gym are looking at me.
My doctor suggested that I start working out with a personal trainer who does physical therapy, partly just to get my body working again after the trauma of being raped and beaten, and partly for my general health.
“Bobbi,” he said, “you’re middle aged, you’re changing genders. You’ve lost muscle mass and you don’t have much tone. You’re in a business that’s hard on the body—carpal tunnel, bad backs, bad knees, bad hips, you name it. You need to learn some exercises for toning and stretching. You should do some weight lifting, too, to strengthen your frame and your bones. It will help your recovery, and it will help you for the rest of your life.”
I fought it. Maybe I could find a book and work out at home? No. Maybe I could get in-home instruction? Yeah, an hour for what I make in a day. Maybe I could put it off until after my transition. I could, but it would be stupid.
So here I am in a crowded North Side gym that also serves as a meat market for the twenty- and thirty-something straight crowd. It’s a Thursday lunch hour slot. Most of the people in the gym are young professionals, getting in a mid-day workout and looking for social prospects. Many of them are attractive people, in good shape and working to stay that way. The aerobics area is evenly split between men and women. The free weights and machines are predominately male populated and I sense that most of them are straight.
I don’t think many of them have ever seen a transsexual before. Not from the way they variously glance and stare at me.
Kevin, my trainer, demands that I ignore the others. “We have work to do,” he tells me, over and over again.
I try to focus on his instruction and the exercises, but it’s hard. I am self-conscious to the point that I’m on the verge of a nervous breakdown. And it didn’t just start when I came in the gym. I spent hours thinking about what I would wear and shopping for the outfit—it’s just a black tank top, sport bra and gray sweat pants—then about where I would change. No way could I shower in a public place! The thought of the stir I would create in the women’s shower room was the stuff of nightmares for me. How could I get in the session and still get to work in a timely manner?
But in the end I am more serious about my health than I am about my inhibitions, and I call Kevin. He at least has worked with a couple other transsexuals and wasn’t the least bit hesitant about taking me as a client. He was also familiar with the body changes we go through and had an exercise regimen that worked pretty well, he said.
The big drawback was that he only works out of one gym in the city, a north Loop emporium that caters to corporate workers during the day and upwardly mobile in-crowders at night. Definitely not a transgender magnet.
We start with some warm ups. A few minutes on the treadmill, light stretching, a few minutes of modified step-aerobics. My breasts seem to jiggle like melons. This is completely irrational—I’m not that big to begin with, and I’m wearing a firm sports bra. Really, it would be hard for anyone to tell I’m a woman except for my hair and makeup.
But I feel conspicuous about everything. I fear that all the physical movements will cause my penis and scrotum to shift outward, giving me a male bulge—and giving my many onlookers something to laugh about. This is almost as irrational as my jiggling breasts fear; my male organ has shrunk so much from my months of hormones it couldn’t create a noticeable bulge unless it was fully erect. Still, like an amputee who senses the presence of a limb that’s no longer there, my tiny she-male penis still feels like Bob’s member as I exercise.
My fears and inhibitions make me focus all the harder on Kevin’s instruction. My form is perfect on everything. Stretching. Lunges. Curls. Presses. I’m working light weights—ten, twelve, fifteen pound dumbbells, lots of reps, short breaks between sets. Abs, back, torso. Balance. Aerobics. Finish with stretches.
I’m grateful it was only a forty-five-minute session. A full hour would have killed me.
Kevin finishes by taking me through the routine verbally. I need to do this at least three times a week, he says. I should do aerobics once or twice a week, too, he says, but not until the soreness is gone from my ribs. He recommends several classes.
“Come on, Kevin,” I say. “What do you think is going to happen when I walk into a women’s aerobics class?”
“What do you think is going to happen?” he asks.
“I think the instructor is going to gag and half the class is going to leave,” I say. “This is Yuppyville here. Home of white bread and Republicanism.”
“You’re a wuss, Bobbi,” he says. “When you come to the gym, it’s all about you. What you can do for yourself. You're not supposed to look around to see who’s watching. You get to work and do what needs to be done. No one will mess with you. The classes are for anyone and everyone. Men, women. Gay, straight. We have people who are a hundred pounds overweight in those classes. We’ve had amputees and cripples. How do you think those people feel when they start? But nobody hassles them. Mostly the other people in the gym are impressed that they’re taking care of themselves. “This isn’t about what other people think, Bobbi. It’s about what you DO. What you do for yourself.”
Good pep talk. We make an appointment for the same time next week. I take out a three-month membership, promising myself I will come Saturday after work and Tuesday before work for stretching and weights, and Monday for aerobics. Monday will be the acid test because I’ll have to come in the evening after work. Rush hour in the meat market.
***
MY AFTERNOON HAS BEEN slow since the usual lunch-time rush. I have cleaned all my tools and gone over my workstation like a cleaning machine. Everything sparkles, even the base of my chair. The whole salon is quiet. Just one customer in a chair, and two stylists in back.
Roger calls me into his office. Our supplier rep is there, the one who sells us our main line of color and hair care products. He’s an okay guy. Short, stocky build, fortyish, good-looking guy. He has always been nice enough to me, even though he works hard at projecting himself as a straight guy. I was openly gay when we met and I think he was trying to make sure I didn’t mistake him for a kindred spirit. I’ve only seen him a couple times since I started transitioning and those were just in passing. Not even enough time to complain about the weather.
“Bobbi, you know Steve,” Roger says as I enter the office. It’s a tiny space with just enough room for two chairs on the other side of Roger’s desk. Steve stands as I walk in and holds out a hand.
“Hi, Bobbi.” He smiles a salesman’s smile.
I return the greeting and shake his hand. He glances at my hand and wrist for a minute. I’m wearing several rings on that hand and a black leather wrist band studded with silver ornaments. It goes with my black jeans and black top.
“You’re certainly going through a lot of changes these days, aren’t you,” he says as we all sit down. In my peripheral vision I notice that h
e looks down my top as I bend into my chair. I wonder what he thought about what he saw. I’m not wearing a bra today.
“Yes,” I say, smiling. “Big changes. Thanks for noticing.”
I don’t know why I said that last part, but I’m glad I did. You can be too serious about this stuff.
He nods and smiles.
Roger picks up a brochure on his desk and clears his throat. “Bobbi, Steve was just telling me that SuperGlam is looking for some local hairdressers to work their exhibit at the hair show next month. They want a colorist and an up-do artist, among others. They’ll work with SuperGlam’s platform artists doing three shows a day. I nominated you.”
I’m speechless for a second. My boss has just told me I’m his best hairdresser, in so many words. This is a very big deal. Plus, the SuperGlam platform shows at the Chicago Beauty Show are high theater. Everyone goes to them, partly for their sheer theatricality and partly because SuperGlam is on the leading edge of new styles and techniques.
“Thank you,” I finally blurt out.
“Would you like to audition with them next Wednesday?” Steve asks. “It’s in the morning. They’ll have models there and you’ll be asked to do a color and an updo. You’ll need to bring your tools, but they’ll supply everything else.”
Obviously, they’ve been talking about this. Wednesdays I come in at noon. No conflict. No lost billing time. No rescheduling of clients.
“I’d love to,” I say. It’s not something I have to think about. I’d reschedule the First Lady to get a shot at doing platform work at the Chicago Beauty Show.
The audition is in a suburban salon near a commuter train station. I don’t get compensated for auditioning, but if they pick me I get a nice daily fee and lots of digital photos and film clips showing me working on the SuperGlam stage. That’s gold in my business. The more we talk, the more enthusiastic I get.
“Okay, any questions?” Steve asks, closing the meeting.