Choir Boy (7 page)
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 identified 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.
Berry walked out of his session and saw Maura in the waiting room again. “Okay,” he told her. “Tell me where to go.” She handed him an address.
The Harry Benjamin Clinic was a mile south of downtown in a former noodle-stretching factory. It offered hormones and other treatments for young transgender people on a sliding scale basis, nobody turned away for lack of funds— depending on whether it had funding this week. “Medicaid won’t touch trannies, but if you’re ‘at risk,’ there’s a safety net made out of old drawers,” Maura explained. Being “at risk” sounded sort of like a Goose intervention.
Berry called three times before he got an appointment, on a Friday afternoon. Even sprinting from school, Berry barely had time to visit the clinic before rehearsal. Berry almost missed the steel door set in one cement wall, with its tiny sign. Inside, a man at a bulletproof window took Berry’s name and glanced at the fake ID. Berry sat in a tiny waiting room where the television buzzed and the plastic bucket seats crunched his butt and made him glad he had no ass. All around him sat men with leather gear and swastikas tattooed on their heads and arms. Berry folded his arms and closed his eyes.
Maura had coached him on what to tell the triage nurse. “Just remember, you hate your manhood. Your body blows chunks. You were born the wrong shape. You want to live as a woman and wear the pretty. And if they don’t give you the hook up, you’re gonna get silicone injections from Tijuana.” As long as Berry said all that stuff, they’d give him the pills.
It only took a few moments of recitation before the nurse scheduled him for a “psychosocial intake.” Then the social worker, Marsha Joyce, listened blearily as Berry recited his spiel. “Blah, blah, blah, wrong body, black market, etc., etc.” Marsha nodded a lot. Then she started asking how long had Berry felt like this and did he know what these pills would do. Lots of unsafe sex questions. She scribbled notes. Then she made an appointment for Berry with the clinic’s staff physician, who weighed him and took blood and urine samples.
It took a few weeks before Berry clutched scrips for spironolactone and some other pills that Maura said were pure horse pee. “They get a mare pregnant so she’s pumping female hormones like a fucking faucet, then they collect her piss and use it to make these pills. No lie. Then they give her an abortion and start the whole shitty process all over again.” Maura stuck her tongue out. “But my boobs are worth a horse’s pain.”
To fill his prescriptions, Berry had to ride the bus even further south, to City General again. The waiting area had a floor that smelled like the Twelve Step room the time Jackie had drunk communion wine mixed with toilet cleaner and thrown up on the Temperance Shroud. Berry waited on a sticky chair, surrounded by people who looked homeless and who Berry imagined were there for HIV meds. Another collection of tattooed punks and skinny girls in Hot Topic knockoffs. He had to take a number and wait at one window to place his prescription. They wrote down stuff from Berry’s fake ID.
Then he had to wait at a second window to fork over his choir stipend. Then back to the first window to turn over the receipt and pick up a paper bag full of pill bottles. Berry thought the bag looked like a take away bag from a fast-food joint, except for the receipt stapled to it. He took the first set of pills with drinking-fountain water that tasted rusty, then ran to church.
5.
Berry masturbated in his bedroom and stared at his poster of the choir of King’s College, Cambridge, England. As he worked his grip on his half-hard dick, Berry imagined joining the incandescent boys in their frocks. Berry’s cock twitched slightly as he imagined a chapel full of people shivering in their seats, breathless and raw with the urge for Berry to sing some more, to make a joyful noise unto the Lord.
Berry didn’t realize he was singing until he’d reached halfway through the treble solo to Edgar Bainton’s “And 1 Saw A New Heaven.” He projected, pushed his voice into his “mask,” the space between his eyes, and focused.
“And God shall wipe awaaaaaaay all tears ...” The world ended. Lovely sorrow orbited mere space. Berry’s voice soared through flaking paint and eroded brick. It had the chime of a good treble voice, but also a gospel warble on some high notes. “And there shall be no more pain, neither sorrow nor dying . .
,
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'
Berry lost himself in his vocal crescendo as his orgasm built. He slathered his now-erect dick with his own spit. In Berry’s mind, he stood out front in an enormous cathedral. Swathes of light bathed him from stained glass windows and a congregation gazed at him.
Berry’s voice splintered like a toothpick. That worried him until he saw pearl soup splash onto his stomach. Berry had been so focused on the sound of his own voice, he’d almost missed the intensifying pleasure when he came. His voice wasn’t breaking like George’s. It was okay. The drugs were working. Berry’s heart sounded like a metronome on top speed, either because of his orgasm or because of the fear for his voice. He stewed in sweat, sperm, and rallentando.
Berry wiped himself off with last Sunday’s church program and pulled on a sweatshirt and jeans. The sweatshirt more than hid Berry’s chest buds. When Berry came out the front door of his parents’ apartment, Mrs. Franklin came out of the next-door apartment beaming. She’d obviously lain in wait for his approach. Her gray hair hung loose and she wore a big apron. “Your voice is so lovely, Berry,” she said. “You’re like a little angel.” Berry looked down at Mrs. Franklin’s bunny slippers and smiled. He mumbled something.
Mrs. Franklin talked a bit more, but Berry was too busy thinking about that word “angel.” AH of a sudden, it was like all his hopes and fantasies crystallized around that one word. Berry desperately wanted to be an angel. Berry decided to tell Marsha Joyce at the Benjamin clinic he’d been called an angel. She’d like that.
Berry skipped into his follow-up interview with Marsha Joyce and talked to her about his life in the choir: “Mr. Allen said I had to look at him when he’s directing me. Mr. Allen liked my posture and intonation. Mr. Allen kept yelling at me for coming in late and finishing early.” It was only when Marsha started asking questions that Berry realized she thought Berry was a prostitute and Mr. Allen his pimp.
“Does Mr. Allen want you to be happy?” Marsha asked. She wore granny glasses and had her blonde hair tied back around a number two pencil.
“Mr. Allen wants me in tune,” Berry said.
Marsha knew that Berry lived with his parents, and that Berry’s parents didn’t know about the hormones. Marsha spent a lot of their second session prodding Berry to tell his parents the truth. “You have to be able to live as your new gender, and that means being honest with the people around you,” Marsha said. Berry nodded without promising anything.
Two days after his second session with Marsha Joyce, Berry went back to Dr. Tamarind. He didn’t tell Dr. Tamarind about the pills or the tits he was growing. Dr. Tamarind talked about “staring your destiny in the face and making choices. You can’t will yourself to stay dulcet and hairless forever.” Berry jerked his head a lot and hoped it looked like nodding. He wished he could lock Marsha Joyce and Dr. Tamarind in a room together and go for pizza.
The first few days on spironolactone, Berry felt woozy and like he needed to pee all the time. He’d felt panicky, either because of the estrogen or because of the new secret. A couple of times he felt like he’d throw up and pass out at the same time. But he only felt really woozy when he ran fast, and that made his crotch lacerations angry anyway. He hardly talked most of the time, so now he hardly moved either. He just stayed close to the boys’ room between classes and squirmed through Rat and Toad’s lectures, until finally the hot bladder cooled off after a couple of weeks.
Berry folded his arms or turned his back whenever people paid attention to him. He slid down so far in his chair at school that his chin grazed the speech balloon of desk. The girls at school used tank tops and tubes to display their own personal growth, which didn’t look much bigger than Berry’s. He hunched his back in the school hallways. In the locker room, he avoided showers and cringed whenever he had to change into gym clothes. The locker room air felt stickier than summer.