A Father’s Debts
A Short Story
By Maryanne Peters

(And another of those stories extended from the short attached as a pdf.)

Do not think for a minute that my father traded me to meet his debts. Some may put it that way. Some may paint him as one of those gambling addicts would sell a family member to pay for his problem. But people cannot be bought and sold. I had to agree.

My father loves me, and I love him. If I had refused, he would have taken a bullet or a ball hammer to his knees. I don’t doubt that. I was just not prepared to let that happen.

His debts were massive, but worse still was that they were owed to the wrong people. “The Red Room” private club was an illegal joint, and nothing short of cash would satisfy them. My father offered to do any work for them, and I offered too.

I worked in the same late night locality as “The Red Room” – in entertainment. It was something that I has always wanted to do. I have loved to sing and dance ever since I was a kid. I got bit parts in various musical productions, but I needed stable work. I ended up with a job in a drag revue that was on 4 nights a week and allowed me absences for big shows if I got a part in any. It may not be much, but I gave that routine my all and I picked up a following.

I had a stage character “Polly Tix” and I did a comedy drag routine based on current events writing my own material – a sort of “Tonight Show” in fishnets. Plus I was in the chorus line and sang a few songs in my pseudo-soprano. My original persona was OTT drag, but I ended up toning that down so I could work the floor as a hostess and pick up tips.

I suppose that most people think that drag performers are gay men, but I was not one, and one of the other “girls” was the same. But I suppose that the more feminine you become the less attractive you are to women, and I ended up unattached.

So, the guy who was owed the money by my father asked him to bring me along to a meeting.

“Your father tells me that you are Polly Tix – you sure don’t look like her,” he said looking me up and down.

“I need the wig and makeup,” I explained. “But at least 4 nights a week I am her.”

“My son has a bit of crush on you then,” he said. “I thought that he was gay, but then when I saw you on stage a few nights ago I was not so sure. You sure seemed woman enough then. Today, you don’t and it looks like my boy is queer after all.” To have to make that statement clearly annoyed him.

“I am not sure how I can help?”

“I’ve got no work for your father, and I got no work for you, but I could hire Polly Tix as a escort for my son,” he said. “I just don’t want to see you out of drag. I prefer to think of myself as normal, and that means you looking less like a performer and more like a woman. Can you do that?”

“What does it pay?” I asked.

“It keeps your father alive,” he said. “He still needs to find the money, but as long as my boy is pleased with you, there won’t be any move towards collection.” And with that he snapped the pencil he had been playing with as he spoke.

“Would this be full time?” I asked.

“Maybe not full time work, but full time woman,” he said. “I can get some work done without any cost to you. We don’t just own casinos and poker games. We have bars and restaurants and beauty salons too.”

I looked across at my father. He looked terrified. He was terrified of this guy ad terrified that I would say no to his proposal. It’s like I say – I love my father. He would have taken a bullet for me and all I was required to do was to wear a frock during the day. It was no great sacrifice.

I said that it was a deal and I extended my hand. He did not take it.

“As far as I am concerned you are a woman now. So get around to this address and lose the pants and the manly behavior. It’s not right for you any more.”

The address was a beauty shop that I later learned was run by an ex-mistress of the old casino boss. Her name was Cherry.

“I can see why you work a drag club,” she said. “You have all the assets – a great figure, wow legs, dainty hands and feet, great bone structure, and good hair. You will make such an attractive woman.”

It was not really news to me, but as I explained my outfits, wigs and makeup were at home.

“No, no,” she said. “You won’t be needing that. We are under instructions to dress you as a woman, not a drag queen. You have a date tonight with young Enzo, and his father would not be happy to see him walking around with a male partner of any kind. There will be no wigs – we will be attaching extensions. You won’t be concealing those eyebrows you will be using them. And those lips with have to be plumped, and your bosom too.”

I had agreed so I had to go through with it. I was assured that the injection into the lips would just give me temporary volume, so I suppose that I just assumed that the injections under my armpits were the same kind of thing, not depositing hormone dispensing capsules.

But it was clear that the combination had resulted in changes that could not simply be removed as a wig could be. The effect would be that I would be living in a female form at least until we could find some other way of settling my father’s debts.

The hair extensions were long and blonde, and I was supplied with shaping underwear and a red dress to wear, and my ears were pierced for the ornate jewelled earrings – “A gift from Enzo”. The heels were actually not as high as the ones I normally wore.

I waited for Enzo in the bar of the Intercontinental Hotel as had been arranged. I got into character by chatting with the girl behind the bar and leaving her wondering if I might not be a man dressed as a woman at all. I seemed to be doing well, by not being Polly but Pauline, a regular woman waiting for her man to meet her. We talked about nail polish, something that she understood I was familiar with.

She looked over my shoulder and I could see her smile.

I turned around and there he was – Enzo. In some ways I had an image of him and short teenage kid with a spotty face with a confused pubescent crush on somebody who projected an extreme “bimbo” image, but instead I found a very tall and very handsome man, my age of slightly older, with short hair and a designer stubble and bright intelligent eyes.

“Polly?” he said.

“Pauline,” I corrected him, and I offered to shake his hand.

He smiled and took it tenderly, kissing it gently. He said: “You’re even more beautiful offstage than on.”

People remember first meetings like that. I do. He did. It is not love at first sight, but there is something that happens. It is like a penny dropping as they say. It drops into the mechanism and It starts to wind, and the process is ongoing and irreversible. It is not love at first sight, but love will follow – it is only a matter of time.

What seemed all the more strange was that Enzo was not gay, or rather not particularly gay, and I was not female, or at least I wasn’t then. It was just that something clicked, and after that we simply decided that we needed to be together.

That night I think, was a little confusing for both of us.

He told me that he was attracted to my intellect and my humor, as it was on display as Polly. He said that he enjoyed the company of smart women, but he found that generally women did not have a sense of fun that matched his own – and less so if they were smart. I simply said that I was a sucker for an admirer, and the more they admired me the more that turned me on.

He laughed. It was a joke, but it was not far from the truth. I cannot be alone. I don’t think that there much better in a partner than adoration. You can feel it and it is like basking in warm sunlight, or bathing in a warm bath.

At the end of that evening I had to remind him that I was a guy under all of this, but when I did that I felt extremely sad, and by that point we had become close enough that he knew that, and would be able to read me like a book from then on.

“We’ll find a way through this,” he said, and he kissed me on the mouth. I welcomed that, in every way.

He said that he had an apartment nearby but that he would book me a suite at that hotel for a week, so that I did not have to go back to any “past existence”. To be honest my place was a bit squalid, so I said yes. Or was it just because that was what he wanted? I just felt that he was right not to want the spell broken – Cinderella should not go back to her fireplace straight from the ball.

He arranged for a nightie and peignoir set to be delivered to my room, and a day outfit for me to wear the following day when we went shopping and to visit the art gallery. Enzo was a man who wanted to spend his father’s ugly and dirty money on things that were beautiful, and he included me in that.

Having a place in the hotel put me under no pressure, but in fact I could not wait to move in with him. I knew that I first night together in his bed would involve sex, but I was ready for that by then. It would be anal and a little oral by me, but in a few days I had come to realize that it was just an extension of what I had become – a woman.

Surely that means that neither of us were gay? Certainly his father was satisfied. He had an older son who had his own son and another on the way, so my inability to bear children was not an issue. And Enzo’s father had a similar appreciation of humor and satire – I now performed for an audience of just the two of them.

When Enzo proposed, I had only one condition and that was that my father’s debt be expunged.

He had only one condition, and that was that I get a vagina made just for him.

I have pointed out to my father more than once that this father’s debt is now much more than it was – not just the money but the loss of my manhood and all that could have brought me. I only did it to ensure that he would give up gambling forever, and so far he has.

But I think that you can guess the truth. My father owes me nothing. My life is about as close to perfect as you could imagine. I am married to a man who adores me and who is rich and intent of keeping me happy and meeting every material and sexual desire that I may have. It turns out that I have plenty of both.

The End

© Maryanne Peters 2020

Author’s Note:
This comes from my short “My Father’s Debts” from a captioned Image by Think Pink