by Renee James
“Well, I guess just the obvious one,” I say. “Do you think they’d really consider a transsexual for this gig?”
“Yes I do,” he says. “If you’re good enough, they’ll pick you. Come on, Bobbi! It’s a hair show, not a football game. You’d add to the atmosphere.”
I can see his point. Some of the platform work at beauty shows is very far out—dos in geometric shapes that rise a foot or two above the model’s head, backcombing demos that create huge beehives of hair, colors that blow your eyeballs out of their sockets. And in the crowd you see wild clothes, wild hair, wild colors, and gay partners holding hands. It’s civilized, but wild.
So yeah. There are times when being a colorful freak can work for you.
***
THIS IS MY SECOND SOLO workout in the gym. I have an audience, but it’s very small and I don’t think they find me very interesting. I’m not wearing makeup and I have my hair in a ponytail. I’m wearing all gray sweats and between my baggy T-shirt and tight athletic bra, I look androgynous and boring.
I do ten minutes of light aerobics, ten minutes of stretching, twenty minutes of weights, and ten minutes of more intense aerobics. I finish by walking on the little track on the perimeter of the gym to cool down for five minutes, then my final stretching.
As I finish my workout, I notice a man standing at the edge of the stretching area, watching me. He seems brutishly masculine, almost as wide as he is tall, hairy, super thick musculature, a mean looking fat face with squinty eyes. My worst nightmare is about to happen. I brace for the humiliation as I attempt to exit the stretching area. He steps toward me. He is about 5’-9,” maybe 5’-10.” He has to weigh at least 250 pounds. He looks like an Olympic weight lifter. “Are you Bobbi?” he asks. He sounds and looks like Ernest Borgnine on steroids.
I could be cagey, but that would just forestall the inevitable. “Yes,” I reply. I focus on his thin, nasty lips, waiting for the sneer to form and the vile words to follow.
He steps forward and extends his hand. “Thomas,” he says.
I stare at his hand, then his face. Then it dawns on me, he’s introducing himself. I reach out with my right hand somewhat tenuously. “Bobbi,” I say. His hand feels like a huge slab of beef. I’m sure my effete, fingertip handshake inspires disgust in him, but really, even if I still remembered how to do a male handshake I wouldn’t have been able to get much squeeze into his big, hard hand.
“Your trainer, Kevin, is a friend of mine. He said you were worried about getting hassled here,” Thomas says. I nod. I can’t think of anything to say.
“Well, this is a pretty friendly gym,” he says. “I don’t think you’ll have any problems. But if you do, let me know. I only work out here, but sometimes when I talk to people it can be pretty effective.”
I try to think of what to say. Of all the possible things that might have happened when this large, ogre-like man presented himself, this is the one I would never have guessed.
“Thank you,” I finally utter. Before I can stop myself, I add, “That's so sweet!”
Well, it is sweet, but what an asinine word to use for a man who could go trick-or-treating as an ogre without buying a costume. I kick myself for being so femme. This can only offend a macho guy like Thomas. But he breaks into a wide smile.
“I’m not as nasty as I look,” he says.
Point taken. Of all the people who should know better than to judge someone by their looks, I should be a leader in the field.
“You don’t look nasty,” I lie. “You look…strong.”
“Good one!” he says. “If you’d called me handsome I would have never trusted anything else you said.” He beams for a minute. “So, what do you do when you aren’t pumping iron?” he asks.
“I’m your classic gay hairdresser,” I say. “Except instead of being gay I’m trans.” He doesn’t seem to mind my effete diction and I’m feeling more comfortable talking to him.
“How about you?” I ask.
“Believe it or not, I’m an R.N. A registered nurse,” he clarifies.
I’m sure I gape, just like those disbelieving souls who gawk at me. “I’ll bet they love you in the psych ward,” I say, wishing immediately that I hadn’t. It’s just that I once dated a nurse in my Bob days and she had terrifying tales to tell of her stint in a psych hospital. Strength might save lives there.
“That’s there for me any time,” Thomas says. “But my heart is more in emergency care, or surgical recovery. I actually worked with children for a while, but it was too heartbreaking.”
The vision of this massive, Neanderthal-like man crying over a suffering child plays in the movie screen in my mind. First, unimaginable, then, unimaginably touching. We chat like old friends. I have to cut it short to get to work.
“I wish you had longer hair,” I say. “I’d love to get you in my chair so we can keep talking.”
“We should have coffee some time,” he says. I agree. He gives me his gym schedule, a widely variable sequence of morning, noon, and evening sessions—the curse of the shift worker. I will adjust my schedule so my workouts coincide with his.
***
IT’S HARD TO SAY HOW my audition is going.
Platform gigs demand that you work fast, lightning fast, with great technical proficiency and theatrical flair. A lot of hairdressers can do the speed and technical proficiency, but not so many have stage presence or the ability to produce the over-the-top glam styles that look good on stage.
Those qualities aren’t absolutely necessary for the colorist role I’m auditioning for. Whoever they pick will do the work while the big name star stylist—the one people pay to see—does the talk. Still, they use these roles to develop new platform artists. It’s necessary. Platform artists tend to burn out after a while. It’s brutally hard work—high pressure, time constrained, and you work in front of sophisticated audiences that see every tiny misstep you make. Plus, most of them work full time as hairdressers in a salon on top of their show gigs. One of my favorite showmen told me he worked a hundred hours in weeks when he had shows, because he still ran a full appointment book at home.
Why do they do it? Really, I think most of them just love doing hair, like all of us, and they love having an audience. But the practical reason is you build a fantastic reputation. Depending on their home market, top-rated platform artists might get $100 or maybe even $200 for the same haircut for which I charge $60.
My color exercise goes pretty well. They give me a unique foiling pattern to follow, and ten minutes to do it. The trick is to memorize the pattern and not stop to look at it after you start. If you do, you won’t come close to ten minutes. You end up using the diagram as a crutch, stopping constantly to refer to it. I try to memorize it as if it’s a piece of art, with the foils like chevrons used to create a geometric design on the head. When I transfer the design to the model’s head, I do it artistically, adapting it to her hairline, head shape and face.
I finish in just under eleven minutes—good enough, since we all know I’ll get faster when I get more familiar with the pattern. My color coverage appears perfect to me—no runs or bleeds on uncolored hair, no uncolored splotches on the colored hair, no big gaps at the roots. The pattern looks right and the color falls beautifully. If that wasn’t the pattern, it should have been.
They don’t tell me how I did, and I don’t see anyone else’s work.
The updo exercise is much more challenging. At my station are two SuperGlam hair care products that I am to use to create a large, sexy updo in thirty minutes. They want to see lots of backcombing for volume and a style with motion and class.
Well, motion and class are very much subject to personal taste, and when it comes to hair, what’s beautiful to some is butt ugly to others. So you just have to be who you are and do what you believe in.
My model has shoulder-length, light brown hair with a few highlights in it. The hair is fine textured with just the tiniest hint of wave, and there’s a lot of it. The texture is a bitc
h to work with for a big-hair up-do. It will resist holding the backcombing, it will take forever to curl with a hot iron and it won’t hold up very long.
As I regard my model and think over the different updo designs I’ve used, I keep coming back to the bridal updo I did in January for my Pakistani-American client. When they give me the start signal, I go for it.
I cut corners on time in my curling iron work by focusing on the first few inches of the hair; the rest just gets loose curling. Then I section out the pieces for a two-strand braid and alternately tease and spray them until they rise like curved horns from the model’s head. I do not spare the hair spray. I use it like so much cement, to lock in the teasing. Her comb-out is going to take a long time and a lot of care.
After I do the sectioning and teasing I go back over her head, carefully brushing smooth the outer surface of each section and arc it into the braid.
It isn’t really a braid. The model’s hair is too short to braid when it’s teased like this. So I pin the tip of each strand in place. I’m done in twenty-eight minutes and use the last two minutes just to primp and spray and fuss over the geometry of the do.
I don’t know what the judges think, but I think it’s so sexy I can hardly breathe. God, how I’d love to get an updo like this myself for a night on the town, maybe in a slinky black dress and three-inch heels.
Just like in the color audition, they tell me thanks, we’ll call you, and I’m out the door. I have no idea what they really think, or if they’ll call at all.
Well, that’s show biz.
March
T.S. ELIOT CALLED April the cruelest month I guess because of its variability wherever he was living when he wrote that. That's one of the few things old T.S. wrote that I understand, and I disagree with it.
In Chicago, March is the cruelest month. It comes in like the proverbial lion and goes out the same way. The only lamb in our March is served hot in an upscale Greek restaurant. March is the part of a Chicago winter where the rain is colder than the snow, when howling winds drive the bone-chilling air through any coat, when any given day can bring any kind of weather—or all kinds.
My work with Kevin has made me a fitness nut so I walk to and from work even in this crappy weather. I walk briskly in athletic shoes and carry my glam shoes in a shoulder bag that doubles as a purse.
I’m dodging puddles on my way to the salon, wrapped in a trench coat over a hooded sweatshirt. My hair is down in scraggly curls, still wet from the shower, so I wear the hood over it. It turns out the women’s locker room at my gym has private shower stalls, so my lack of perfect female body parts goes unnoticed. Which removes one phobia from my list, even though there are many more to go.
When I get to the salon, I hurry to the employee bathroom. I say good morning to everyone I see. They return the greeting. Most do it with a smile. Two of hairdressers who have never accepted me because I'm an abomination in the eyes of their god don’t go so far as to smile, but one nods and the other emits a non-committal “morning” to me. This is all fine with me. I’m really happy here again. My colleagues don’t love me but they don’t dislike me either, except for maybe the two Puritans. What I get from all of them, including the Puritans, is a sort of tacit acceptance. I’m just Bobbi, a hairdresser. If I need help, they’ll provide it. If they need my help, they’ll ask for it.
My role in the little personal conversations has diminished somewhat since I began openly transitioning. Not because they tune me out, but because I don’t have much to contribute. When we talk about boyfriends and girlfriends, husbands and wives, children, parents, relatives, I can only listen. I’m not married, I don’t have a lover, and my family disowned me long ago. So I ask a few questions and do a lot of listening.
I have mentioned my dates with Ray a few times. This seems like safe ground since it’s not a sexual relationship. I don’t share with them any personal stuff, just how nice the concert was, or the movie, or the restaurant. Only my shrink Camille and my friend and shrink Marilee know what I think and what I feel. And even they don’t know everything.
What they do know is my body is healing rapidly. I don’t know if I’ll ever become a blithe spirit in this world. But I feel good and I enjoy my life. I still have nightmares about the rape, and sometimes about my “date” with Strand. And I have nightmares that are based on those experiences but move off in fictional directions. In some, I am killed or just brutalized. Bones are broken. Foreign objects shoved up my vagina or my rectum. In others, I do the beating and killing. When I speak of my dreams to Camille and Marilee, I share the emotions, but I never identify Strand. That is my secret.
These dreams are all troubling, even the ones in which I have my revenge. I don’t sleep well. But my body and mind seem to have adjusted. I have lots of energy during the day. I get off on doing hair. I usually have a fun night or two each week with friends. I’m back to full-time at work and my billings are decent. I'm pulling in quite a few new clients from all the promotions I handed out, and from referrals. I hope to be back to my peak by summer.
I’ve even shared with both Camille and Marilee that I’m getting really horny again. For a long time after the rape, I just couldn’t think about sex. It’s not that I associated sex with rape. I just wasn’t interested. . That’s changing. I even dream about sex some nights now. I still have the nightmares too, but I also dream about sex. It isn’t Jane Austen material. It’s sex, not love. But it’s fun, not mean. Mostly it’s with men, but sometimes with women. And I'm always a woman.
Camille thinks this last point is important. She thinks I’m beginning to accept myself as a woman now, and as I progress I will be much less self-conscious about how others see me. I wish I could be as certain. Those doubts still nag at me almost everywhere I go.
***
MARILEE AND I ARE IN her home office, the door closed. We’re friends, but this is a counseling session, full force.
It starts out as just coffee talk between two girlfriends. I tell her about the hair show audition and my new workout schedule and a little gossip from the salon. She tells me about a couple of new clients—no names, of course—and a romantic weekend with hubby. She asks about my love life, and I tell her everything is still on hold until I transition, or decide not to.
“You still have doubts, then?” she asks.
“More like I still have options,” I say. “I think of it as a certainty. I will be scheduling the surgery as soon as Camille gives me the go-ahead. I think of myself as a woman. I dream of myself as a woman. I love my body. I love my clothes. But you know, until it’s actually done, I have the option of backing out.”
We spar over this for a while. My point is simply that lots of girls back out at the end. To make the final journey to womanhood, you have to be castrated, and then the surgeon crafts a vagina for you from the spare parts. It amazed me the first time I met a transwoman who just couldn’t do that. She lived successfully as a woman, preferred life as a woman, but just couldn’t take the final step.
“Are you hedging because you have issues with the rape?” she asked. That put her in full shrink mode. I'm an unwilling patient, but I love her and I don’t want to offend her. I try to brush the issue aside. No, the rape didn’t change my gender identity. I was raped as a man, after all, or a she-male at best, I point out.
“Bobbi,” she says, “when you think about the rape now, what do you think?”
I look at her, confused. “I remember it. I remember how menacing they were, how brutal. I remember getting hit and feeling blood and swelling. I remember having my skirt lifted and having them shove their cocks in my ass. I remember being left in a puddle of blood and the stink of my own shit to die in an alley. Is that what you mean? Did you think it would go away?”
“No,” she says. “I wanted to make sure you're still dealing with it.”
“Dealing with it?” I echo. “If I could find those two goons I could deal with it. Since I can’t, I just have to suck eggs.”
�
�What would you do if you found the two rapists?” she asks.
Talking about the rape has tapped a rage deep inside me. Now it's intruding on my most precious friendship, causing my friend for the first time to become my shrink. The thought of that makes me even madder. I know I should censor my response, but I don’t.
“If I could find the people responsible for my rape and beating I would find a way to kill them. Very slowly. I would make sure they were still alive when I cut off their penises, and still alive later when I cut off their balls.”
Marilee watches me intently. “You have a lot of anger, Bobbi.”
I make a pained expression, like a teenager. “Marilee, I was raped! Does anyone just walk away from that with no anger?”
“Of course not,” she says, gently. “Have you thought about castrating them before?”
“Pretty much every time I think about the incident,” I answer.
She brushes an imaginary speck of dust off her lap. “How do you feel about other men?” she asks. “Do you want to castrate them too?”
“No. I'm angry, not psychotic,” I answer.
We go into what I think of as a shrink cycle. She presses me on the issue. Am I abstaining from sex because men and/or male organs disgust me? No. Do I fantasize about sex with men? Yes. Do I like it? Yes. What do I see in my fantasies? I try to pass off romance-novel generalizations, but she pushes me to be graphic. When I finally relent, I hold nothing back. I know my fantasies are different than a genetic woman’s fantasies. Mine are the product of both male and female urges. My sex dreams are often raunchy. I describe them in a non-stop monologue, like a rebellious adolescent. Go ahead, hate me, I’m thinking. I tell her that my sex dreams include lovemaking with other women. Angry as I am, I hope she doesn’t ask me who the women are. I’m not sure if I can lie right now, but if I tell the truth I fear I’ll lose a friend and a shrink in the same breath.