Prep for a Night At Madame Fortuna’s

Troy drops his pen and reads over what he has written of the side of himself he calls Tanya. He is not gay or even bi-sexual. Crouched in the chair with his sternum straddling his right arm and his forehead on the edge of the desk, Troy is in pain. Where did it all go so terribly wrong?

Tanya’s personality development started innocently enough. They had thought it would be a kick to go to Sarnia for the “Canadian Ballet”, or strip clubs, which none of the Port Huron crew had ever attended for a variety of reasons, among them age and transportation. It was to be a bachelor party where every one of them would play the bachelor at some point in the night. This scenario was kind of like being in any restaurant and saying it was your birthday when it really wasn’t, but getting the song and dance. They ALL wanted the promise of a song and dance — at least that had been what Troy had thought he wanted, in theory. With every sip off Mike’s flask of rotgut whiskey, Troy actually lost confidence. With every tuck of a $5 bill into the cord of a thong, he had found himself beginning to wrench. The undulating bodies, so much skin, heaved forward with the acid in his esophagus. The strippers seemed to have sensed this in him and had retreated down-line to Paul’s agape and smiling eyes, or Axel’s woo-hoo’s and Kyle’s constant repositioning on his seat. From one strip haven to the next, Troy silently debated with his friends. He mutedly pled his case with them, wordless telling them lie after lie: his stomach was upset from their dinner, and maybe he had food poisoning from the Shrimp Scampi he had inhaled at the Fogcutter; he was tired because he had not slept well the night before from all the excitement of their plans, imaginatively crossing the Blue Water Bridge into the collective destiny that they had talked about for the past few years; he was bored because the women were not “hot” at all, at least not in the way that he had thought they would be, like the Victoria Secret models they had pored over in the catalogues in middle school and high school; and he had to get up early for a job interview that he could not possibly reschedule because he was thinking of finally leaving his high-paying Tim Horton regional assistant management job for an even higher-paying management job in Detroit with Fishbone’s. His lies had become more and more elaborately detailed as they molded themselves into anything he deemed believable to them.

While he had kicked lies about the confines of his overtaxed digest system, his friends led him from one place to another, each place getting successively seedier and dirtier. The fresh-faced, French-looking girls turned into stretch-marked, low-breasted women. The brass poles and stained pine stages turned into PVC pipe and Formica. Troy didn’t even look up anymore. If he kept his eyes on boards of the deck of the boat of their shared experience, and not on the swelling and ebbing lake water of his revulsion, his seasickness would abate. His friends (Kyle the Shy One, Mike the Secret Stash of Swedish Porn, Paul the Metrosexual, and Axel the My Favorite Word Is Fuck Dude) who might normally have had great concern for his physical state had been concentrating on their own desires. So, Troy had ended up The Child On the Leash to Keep Him from Running Away. Each friend took a turn at slipping the loop end of the invisible leash that had been attached to Troy over his wrist. Troy had toed each crack on the sidewalk. I wonder if this really will break my mother’s back. I wonder if this really will break my mother’s spine.

They had come upon a pulsating place. The music was a heart throbbing Donna Summer out into the arteries of the street and the neon flew blue through the veined limbs of the night. Troy looked up to see a star-and-crescent-moon-littered sign that read:

MADAMe FORTUNA’S

SHOWGIRLS extraordinaire

Troy leaped into the lead and pivoted toward the entrance dragging Kyle behind in his wake. Axel exclaimed, “What ya wanna go in there for? I don’t think they take their clothes off! Come onnnnn!”

Before he could think, Troy blurted, “I want to check it out.”

Paul piped in with, “Axel, you shithead, we can do whatever Troy Boy wants. He hasn’t had his lapdance yet and if he wants his chick to be decked out in a tutu, who are we to question why?”

Mike patted Troy on the ass with a go get ‘em, Tiger, sack ‘em, divide and conquer in the pressure of the pat, pushing him into the field, into the game. “Yeah, Boy, go get your Tutu Tootsie.”

Kyle merely tugged back on the invisible rope that bound him to Troy, but Troy already had his wallet out to pay the doorman the entrance fee. “Loonies or dollars?”

Troy pulled out a $20 from his wallet and the doorman said, “I’ll need another five. It’s five apiece.”

Kyle exclaimed, “Hey guys, at least we can drink in here and lay off of my whiskey for awhile.”

The platinum blond, rhinestone chokered, sequined siren had been just finishing the final lines of “The Woman In Me” (That I’m feeling so free/To be the woman in me/It’s so easy with you/To be the woman in me) and Troy was wrapped around the song. The singer’s cheekbones were high with blush and her lips were pink and pouty, parted with the notes that gushed from her breast with the vamping style he had so longed to have in his life. Her arms opened wide and invited him to peek into her secret soul as an intimate friend or a prodigal lover who has found that what he really wants he cannot buy with money. Troy longed, pined, ached to enter those milky and slender arms, to tenderly stroke her back and whisper, fatherly, you will ALWAYS be the woman of my dreams.

For the first two months, Troy had found himself at Madame Fortuna’s nearly every Saturday night. Near the third month, he began coming to the club on Friday nights, as well. At first, he only spoke with the person who took his drink orders. I’ll have a gin and tonic with very little ice and a lemon instead of a lime, please … thank you. He always sat by himself at a high-topped table just to the left of the stage. From this vantage, he could observe every angle of the performers without calling too much attention toward from the other patrons. He watched how the performers would lean forward and sing out the songs in a compressing wave of notes that would flow around the room rocking, padding and lulling the listeners into niches of happiness and well being. The performers had been well aware of Troy’s attentiveness to their performances and they began to join him, one-by-one, at his table for a little conversation. Sometimes, he found little presents of a caricature of himself on a napkin leaning on an elbow at the table and smiling, or once there had been a couple of handmade cufflinks with Frankenstein’s monster on one link and the bride of Frankenstein’s monster on the other. These were always left for him either in, or propped against, the ashtray and they made him warm with pleased amusement. Troy enjoyed these chats and gifts immensely. He had begun to feel comfortable with asking these men questions such as, How long have you been cross-dressing? and Did you ever take voice lessons?

Renata, a willowy, brown-haired man of thirty or so, stood with Troy before performing a little Ella (My old flame/ I can’t even remember his name/ But, there’ll never be a gent/ So sophisticated or elegant/ As my old flame) and said, “Just so you know, Troy, I’m not gay. I just really enjoy this. I suppose it’s kind of quirky, eh, but come over here once and listen. There’s something so liberating in becoming another person for the night. I’m not gonna tell you where I work during the day … or even what I do. But, you’d just never believe me if I told you … ‘cause you wouldn’t recognize me. That’s all. You just wouldn’t elsewise. Hell, my own mother probably wouldn’t even recognize me until I said ‘Hey there, Ma’am.’ Even then, I’m not so sure that’d work. She might say ‘and who might you be, young lady?’ Wouldn’t that be somethin’? I think about that a lot. I must admit … it ALWAYS makes me laugh.”

Around the end of the fourth month that Troy had been going into Madame Fortuna’s, the guys were grouped around Troy’s table when he arrived. At first, he developed queasiness in his gut akin to what one might feel if one were approaching an intervention. But, all the fellows were smiling with good-natured welcome and an obvious readiness to ask him some question, “So, Troy, our ‘Ever-present On Any Given Friday or Saturday’ friend,” Simone lisped, “how’s your singing voice?”

Troy was a bit taken aback until he noticed that everyone was still smiling at him. Their eyes delved into his psyche. It was not too difficult for him to answer, although he had a little trouble getting started, “Well … I … uh … I guess it’s pretty good … I mean, I sang in a chorus in middle school. I sang in a classic rock band in my first couple years of college. I still sing in the shower, of course, but doesn’t everybody?”

Everyone laughed and CeeCee chucked him lightly on the shoulder and said, “How ‘bout a little test drive … a little dry run shall we say there, Tanya?”

At this point, Troy really had been thrown off kilter. CeeCee had called him Tanya. He could not get a grip. He had felt vertigo and confusion. He looked down at the floor past the pearly buttons of his light-blue oxford shirt, over the knees of his khaki Dockers, finally resting on the tips of his cordovan tasseled loafers. He took a deep and lasting breath and looked back up to find all the guys wide-eyed and expectant of an answer. Something welled up within him that made him shiver. Troy was excited. Something had been stimulated and he didn’t understand it. He tried out a small smile that stretched into an enormous toothy grin and blurted, “Yeah! Yeah! Okay! Sure! … uh … When?”

The guys all gave each other waist-level high-fives and other such physical contact signs of success as a team and moved to herd Troy into the back room, “Why NOW, of course, no time like the present!”

“Oh no, I couldn’t, or do you mean I’m gonna sing for you all back there? I could do that. That’s fine. Happy to. What do you all want me to sing, huh? I’m not too shabby at Chris Isaac’s stuff, or maybe some Tom Petty, how about that?” He questioned them, eyeing all the while the bait they had been trolling across his sense of reality.

Gina grasped Troy’s elbow with a playful squeeze to the funny bone, “Why, Tanya, now you know those two you just mentioned are men. We just CAN’T have you singing the likes of THEM in HERE, now can we. It’s simply IMPOSSIBLE.”

“Yeah, Honey,” Noelle said, kicking the back of Troy’s right loafer with the toe of his left silver sling-back, “we were all thinking more along the lines of hearing from you the more contemporary artist … possibly some Norah Jones … or Diana Krall … now there’s a voice, wow!”

Troy blushed a deep crimson and tried to halt the crew just before entering the area backstage, but he was swept into the space previously off limits to him and the other patrons. The guys quickly dispersed to their respective stations against the walls and left Troy frozen in shock by a rack of silky and satiny ladies’ things. He reached behind his back and began rubbing the cuff of a satin blouse between his thumb and forefinger. He had started to sweat profusely and was lightly hopping from right to left, left to right, knees bending forward and back and his eyes snapping from the door to each face of the performers and back to the door again. He had already agreed to sing for them, so he knew that there was no possible way to back out of his promise. After all, they had given him gifts and friendship. What harm could it do to humor them a little? We’ll all laugh about it years from now, anyway. I don’t know any of this Jones girl’s songs. Who the heck is Diane Crawl? I’ll just have to hurry up and come up with a female singer I like. I like them all. Oh God, help me figure out a goddamn female singer NOW! Oh God, all I can think of is Karen Carpenter and hate Karen Carpenter. Didn’t she die of anorexia? I don’t want to sing a dead lady’s shit. Oh God, oh help! Think! Think! Okay, I got it! How about Madonna? No. Cher? No. Ah, yes, got it. Shawn Colvin.

Shawn Colvin. He LOVED Shawn Colvin! (Sunny came home with a list names/She didn’t believe in transcendence/“It’s time for a few small repairs,” she said/Sunny came home with a vengeance) He had known from previous shower time experience that he could get his voice high enough to emulate this folk/rock/pop diva. He cleared his throat, closed his eyes, and let loose at a tamped down volume. By the end of the song, he had opened up full-throttle and was swaying around and gesticulating dramatically while remaining close-lidded. Following the finish, he opened his eyes to a nodding and clapping audience. Natasha kept yelling, “Fabulous. Just superb! But, you need to open up those baby blues, darling. Those eyes! Don’t let ‘em know you’re scared!”

He laughed, bowed, and was basking in the glow of their compliments until Simone and CeeCee began grabbing garments off of some of the racks around the room and holding them up to his chest. Involuntarily, he had started hopping back quarter-step by quarter-step from their limbs that dripped various fabrics like the canvas of sails. Troy tripped backward over the lower crossbar of the clothes rack behind him and tore the elbow of his shirt open as he went down on a loose screw jutting out of the rack. Gina and Simone helped him back up and made a show of dusting him off and smoothing his hair back down. Whereas, if these had been his high school buddies, they would have been laughing at him, but when Troy looked around him, all he saw was concern in the faces of these good-natured people. “Oh, Troy, we’re all so sorry!”

“We really didn’t mean to scare you! We just thought … well … you know …”

“You’ve just always seemed so interested … and well …”

“We just wanted to help …”

“You have a fantastic voice …”

“But … if you’re not comfortable, we really understand!”

He caught his breath and resisted the urge to flee that place forever. Why am I still here? He could not answer any of his own questions. He simply began uttering in a mild voice, “It’s okay. I’m all right. I wasn’t scared … I just … I hope you all understand that I didn’t expect this. I think I just need a drink now. If you all don’t mind I think I’ll go sit down. Thank you for the compliments … really … thank you!”

He could not keep his mind on his friends’ performances the rest of the night. He kept envisioning himself on the stage under the celled lights and the cold microphone mesh so close to his lips, singing Shawn Colvin and rocking back and forth. Even in the daydream, he could not open his eyes. He could not see himself as he was garbed, nor could he see the reactions of the audience to his performance. He had been completely unable to envision himself dressed in women’s clothing, wearing makeup and high heels. He had, however, thought about how he would have to shave his face so very close to the skin and how the chest and leg hair would have to go. He had owned a linked bracelet for a while, but had removed it after it had painfully torn half of the hair off his wrist. He had never felt that he had come off as particularly masculine, yet he did not feel especially feminine, either. His main concern had revolved around the variety of persons who would most probably notice the physical change he would inevitable have to undergo to make this work: Tim Horton’s management, employees and customers; his family; his buddies Axel, Kyle, Paul, and Mike; and so the list lengthened.

Even with the list of concerns also growing ever lengthier and more explicit, by month number seven in the thick of the winter snow, Troy decided to “go for it” and develop Tanya. He knew that he would have to leave Tim Horton’s in order not to have to explain the slight physical changes to his facial features that were inevitably to occur. Troy knew that he would have to abandon hope of seeing his high school friends as often as they, too would notice anything different and would be much more likely to say painful things to him. He avoided his immediate family almost entirely anyway, but he had known that he would still have to go through a little extra effort not to bump into them as he sometimes did while out and about.

Friday, February 12, 2010

try as i might, they just won’t come to me. i call them, lightly, distinctly, though with a slur of sorts, but they elude me. all my words seem negated by the undertones of Her words. i try to speak for myself and Her words are emitted from my mouth. i do not like Her at all. She is wicked, vindictive, mean, and so thoroughly wrong i cannot comprehend what goes through Her head. my battle is always lost before i can throw up the white flag.

She is an alcoholic. She spends money unwisely. She judges people for their outward appearance. She gossips. She tells lies to Herself. She lives alone. She cries. i now understand frida and her two hearts. it was not just because one was sick with heartache; she was torn between her two selves.

every day should not be a battle with Her. i want to be me. i want to understand and love those around me. She won’t let me. She buries them beneath contemptible thoughts. all She ever seems to want to know is how She can get back at them for the wrongs they commit that affect Her. She is the blight of my life. She’s holding me back from all that i might accomplish. damn Her! i want to expel Her, but how? She loves me and loves to ruin my good things. She has tunnel vision. beyond what is good for Her is inconsequential. what is good for me is invisible. She conducts invasive procedures upon my relations with others.

always, when i believe that i have conquered and won my territory, She rears Her ugly head and busts my chops. everything becomes breakable in my life when She is around. She pulls the skin around my eyes so tight that i cannot keep them open to new possibilities. She yanks downward on my hair so hard that i cannot keep my head up. She squeezes my neck so restrictively that i cannot speak with clarity. She hobbles my ankles so completely that i cannot walk without Her as a crutch. She socks me so hard in the stomach that i am unable to digest all that i perceive. She is abusive and cruel.

if there was a way i could tell Her to leave, i would. but, i can’t do it; She defines me. She is the only one who can show the world how good i am by comparison with Her. my sweetness, sympathy, and care shine forth after She’s been around. She is my life and i lead the barest existence.