Rock Star: Coda, by Karin Bishop

A sequel to “Rock Star”, by Jennifer White

Part 2

A week after that chance meeting with Ted–and a few days of feeling sorry for myself–something happened that was at once trivial and earth-shaking.

I was putting gas in my car. It was a silly big Mercedes that I’d bought along with my house, thinking I was a big–if disgraced–rock star. I wasn’t even sure what model the darned thing was, and it was unused for a long time while I’d played hermit. Once I ventured out again, it was fine for cruising the boulevards at night but impractical for casual shopping. And it drank gas.

I wasn’t paying too much attention to the world because I was still wrapped up in re-examining everything that had happened to me, and raking myself over the coals for being duped. The pump dinged and stopped but I didn’t notice it. Then a voice made its way into my brain.

“Miss? Miss? Your pump has stopped.”

I turned and saw a young guy leaning across from the other side of the pump, gassing up a Volvo. He was tanned and had sandy hair, wind-blown, green eyes, and a nice smile. Of course, I said, “Huh?”

“I said, your pump stopped. I think you’re full.”

No, I’m empty, I thought, as I mechanically went through the completion of my fill-up. Just before I got in the car, I remembered my courtesy and mumbled ‘thanks’.

“No problem. But I just want to say …it’s not worth it.”

“Huh?” I said again.

“Whatever you’re thinking about–it’s none of my business, I know!–but you’re such a pretty lady, don’t let whatever’s bothering you make you so sad,” he nodded to the pumps and grinned. “Now, the price of gas–that’s enough to make you sad!” He waved and got into his car and drove off.

I found that I was relieved that he hadn’t hit on me–and frustrated that he hadn’t hit on me.

Such a pretty lady, he’d said. And he was cute.

Cute?

I had been so fixated on Mike. Mike and Juan, Mike and Julia, Mike being turned into Lisa …And for too long I had been like Mike walking around in a Lisa-suit, cut off from the world in his misery. My misery. But I’d stopped being miserable, first because of my guitar students. Then just coming back into the world, like my first trip to the salon. Interacting with everybody as a woman now. And being–yes, as the guy had said–a pretty lady. I thought about meeting Ted and there was something he’d said. I couldn’t put my finger on it; something …

Deciding to head up the Pacific Coast Highway for the heck of it, I remembered Ted’s comment. Talking about the pills Julia had fed me, Ted had said, ‘maybe your own body’s system reacted exceptionally well or there was already something inside of you’. Already something inside of me? I’d been doing quite a lot of reading about changing gender, or changing sex, or whatever. Medical writing, fiction, biography. Once I’d noticed my reading patterns were typically feminine, I’d read a lot about how the brain could actually be ‘chemically re-wired’ through hormones, and that areas of the brain connected to typical male thought processes and emotions moved to other areas of the brain associated with females. Not with everybody; I think it was a safe bet that all the estrogen in the world wouldn’t have changed Juan from his macho mindset. But in some people there seemed to be a degree of, well, a sort of fluidity between genders. Without going into the long and short of it, perhaps I was one of those folks.

Or had been one of those folks. Being macho never registered on my radar when I was Mike. Because of that lack of interest, I never thought about where I was on the spectrum from masculine to feminine. I’d never questioned that I was male; I’d had a physical relationship as a male with my girlfriend Julia.

But that raised the question …Anybody else? Well, no; I hadn’t really dated anybody. Ever. I had my guitar. And I thought that my music went alongside with my girlfriend, like parallel tracks in my life, and then I thought it made sense to combine the two. Would I have done that if Julia didn’t play keyboards? What if she’d worked in a bank? Obviously, she wouldn’t have been in the band, but would she have come on the road with me–making the assumptions that All The Rage had an equally-proficient keyboard player, and the same degree of success?

I felt a chill that I thought was from the ocean air; I started shaking slightly and pulled into some stranger’s driveway. It wasn’t a breeze; it was more of that damned shaken snow globe, swirling around in my brain.

Did Julia become my girlfriend to get in my band? I formed All The Rage right after high school with Robert on drums and Kayla on bass …and how long was it before I added Julia? I couldn’t remember if we even auditioned anybody on keyboards. That whole period of my life was kind of fuzzy, both from the years and colored memories, and also because it was now an emotional minefield.

Some jogger coming back from a run appeared at my window; he wondered what I was doing in his driveway. I apologized and backed out and headed down the PCH. And maybe because I’d been interrupted in my thinking, my brain had continued processing quietly on its own and came to an answer.

Julia had targeted me as her vehicle into a band.

She was good enough to play with high school bands, but at the risk of stroking my own ego, we were special. We were going places. And she wanted to go there, too.

If I had never been Julia’s True Love, but only her ticket to the Big Time, it was easier to grasp how she’d allied with Juan, who was certainly every bit as fame-hungry as Julia. And it was easier to grasp how she could do what she’d done to me, dosing me from way back when.

Curiously, I felt relieved. Her betrayal had been incomprehensible; it always is to the one betrayed, but Ted was right–‘on paper’, I was the far bigger catch. Ted had also said maybe there was something inside Julia that made her want to dominate me, to feminize me; something completely separate from music. If, as I now was certain, she had never truly loved me, then she’d have no difficulty dosing me.

But the individual elements–my body type, the strength and duration of the dosages, and, yes, perhaps my own ‘internal feminine’, as my guitar girls pointed out–everything combined and I went very far and very fast on that spectrum from masculine to feminine. To be brutally honest with myself, I hadn’t been that far over on the masculine side; taking that into account, it made all the more sense that I’d be so, well, naturally feminine.

And I was, and I was learning to accept it, and even learning to like it. But it still surprised me–

Because I’d thought the guy at the gas pump was cute. The whole encounter had caught me off guard, without my ‘former-guy-named-Mike’ defenses up. I’d just turned and took in the guy’s body and his smile and his …his male-ness and reacted. My reaction had been that of a female seeing a cute guy.

And the cute guy didn’t seem to want to do anything except cheer me up.

That was the end of my self-pity. Even before I got home, I was fishing in my purse for the card Ted had left with me. I called him and drove right to his new studio. We began working together the next day.

***

Surprisingly, it was an uphill battle at first–not working with Ted and certainly not the engineering; just getting out of my own way. After all, I’d been a platinum-selling musician; our clients were struggling unknown bands. They could only benefit from my wisdom and experience, right? I found myself teaching their guitarists, correcting their vocalists, fixing their chords and lyrics. I was still in this mindset that I was a guitarist, I was a singer, I was a songwriter, I was a band leader …

Ted finally asked if I was a drummer and keyboard player, too? He had a way of zeroing in on what was driving me to be stupid. I’d argued with the lead guitarist of a group we were recording and they were this close to cancelling. That incident began a long series of talks with Ted, and then with Brian, the second engineer, as well. Ted pointed out that David Foster, one of the most platinum-record and Grammy-winning producers ever, was a monster keyboard player that could literally play circles around the guys he recorded.

Ted gave me a direct look. “But he knows it’s his job to get the best of out of them, and try to make even better music. He doesn’t play the keyboards, he plays the band. He uses the entire band, the mixing console, the outboard gear …all of that is the instrument he plays.”

It came down to ego–my ego. Did I want to only make my own music? Was I using our clients as the pawns in my own quest? If so, I was no different from Juan erasing me from the mixes. Or did I want to make music?

I chose music.

With the very next client, I dropped my ‘Lisa-that-knows-all’ act and focused on getting their sound recorded. I went for the purity of their vision rather than the brilliance of mine. Brian had a home studio of his own, quite sophisticated, and told me that when some idea popped into his head during a session–a musical idea not related to the client’s sound–he’d make a note of it, sometimes sketching things out during downtime and send them to his home computer. Then at home he’d pursue it, and found that his own music and sound was improving and he was ‘getting his creative rocks off’, as he put it. And sometimes he’d used some of that creation later to improve a client session.

Even though I threw myself into work at Ted’s studio, I wasn’t writing. I wasn’t creating. There had to be that period between Lisa-that-knows-all and Lisa-that-produces, following the advice Ted had given me about David Foster. I focused on getting the best out of our studio and the clients in the studio, and my ears and my mind were expanding with newfound ideas. Before, I’d been concerned with my own individual band’s individual songs, chords, melody, lyrics and rhythm. Now I was finding new ways to listen to the whole sound, the linking of musicians, technology, and the space, learning to fill that space with musical emotion.

I went back and began listening to my beloved classic rock with new ears, working my way up through the decades to the latest electronic dance music. I was listening to the emotions, not the riffs. The message, not the rhyme. And the overall sense of Self that I had when the recording was finished.

There were two side-effects of this period. The first was Ted’s face smiling away as our studio began turning out hit recordings, and we found ourselves completely booked. In fact, several recording industry magazines singled us out for our ‘refreshing new approach’–lovely but vague writing–to the sonic quality of our output. I was justifying Ted’s belief in my ears.

The other side-effect was that my life as a guitarist faded away. As I got busier, I had to cut down my teaching hours–to great moans and whines–but Heather had gotten good enough and serious enough that I felt she could begin teaching the essentials to new girls. I briefly thought of a ‘Rock Chick Guitar Method’ franchise, but dropped it. I was just glad that I had helped music along with the next generation.

My own guitar playing faded away, to some extent. I’d run scales and arpeggios to keep the fingers agile, but also really worked at learning the piano and more music theory. My life shifted from being All About The Guitar, to being All About The Music. And maybe it was a symptom of letting go of my past existence, but I dumped the Mercedes and got a cute little silver Prius. I wasn’t a former rock star any longer; I was a producer.

Until Ted had given me ‘the Foster lecture’, I was using clients as a stand-in for my own music. Maybe I’d been altering their chords as if writing my own song, using the excuse that I was improving things. Silly, stupid ego. Once I began feeling comfortable being an actual producer and not a has-been guitarist, I started using Brian’s advice and slowly began writing again, at home. Needless to say, I had the money and know-how to assemble a quite decent little recording setup at home, and could always use the studio if I had a bigger project in mind.

I had learned enough recently to recognize the limitations of guitar-based composition. I went back through my own songs and tried working them out on the piano–as if they were written on the piano–and the songs morphed into something else. Granted, the originals were perfectly suited for a guitar-driven band, and were responsible for All The Rage’s early success. They were fine for that market, darned fine, in fact. But I was listening to so much now, from the early Grateful Dead to Deadmau5, from Shostakovich to Philip Glass. And I had musical ideas that were exciting and scary.

There was a repetitive phrase that was stuck in my mind and I was tinkering with it while waiting for a vocalist to show up. Ted heard the phrase and we got to chatting. Just before the tardy singer walked in, Ted had given me an odd look.

“Lisa, I think you’re avoiding writing rock. Still hurting over All The Rage deep down, so you don’t go there. But that piece you just did …” He frowned and looked cautious. “Don’t get angry, but it sounded like background music. But I mean that in a good way!” he said, holding up a hand.

Ted really didn’t need the hand anymore; the angry Lisa was gone, the egotistical Lisa was gone, and I was fairly certain any sort of Mike was gone. So I asked Ted what he meant by background.

He pursed his lips. “Did you ever see The Last of the Mohicans? Quite a few years ago, with, um …Daniel Day-Lewis and–it doesn’t matter. Don’t know who did the music for it, but there’s this musical theme that–”

And the client staggered in. I knew a trick or two to sober him up–or at least sober his voice up–enough to get a half-way decent track by the end of the afternoon. The guy put on his sunglasses, gave a mumbled, ‘Thanks, man’ and, yes, staggered out. There had been a time when the casual, slangy ‘man’ pissed me off, knowing that I had been one and never would be again. But that was gone, now, and thank God. I didn’t bristle at the singer saying ‘man’ any more than hearing my girl guitar students say, ‘Bye, guys’.

Ted passed the singing bozo and waved a DVD; he’d gone home and found what he wanted to show me. The film is set in pre-Revolutionary War America. First Ted played me the main theme, a stately grand piece that sets the tone for the brave men and women of that era, carving a future out of the wilderness. The music made me feel somehow proud and humble and yet hopeful.

Ted did a chapter search and came to a night scene of farmers inside a fort. The French and Indians are threatening, so for safety the locals are protected by the British Army. But they’re farmers, plain folk, and bored in the fort, so they are dancing to a theme played on a fiddle, joined by others. It was a simple colonial-era melody, over and over, winding and weaving back on itself as the dancers move about the bonfire. And up on the wall somewhere, the hero and heroine make love, the sound of the fiddles the only accompaniment.

Then Ted called ‘Spoiler Alert!’ and sketched in the plot points as he zoomed forward. At the end of the movie, the hero and his friends rescue their lady-loves from enemy Indians. But it all goes horribly wrong. The hero rescues the heroine, but the hero’s brother is killed by the enemy, in a slow-motion savage way, and the girl he loves, the heroine’s sister, numbed by war and grief, throws herself to her death. The dead boy’s father exacts his bloody revenge on his son’s killer, leaving the hero and heroine shattered but facing the future.

The entire sequence begins with a reprise of the earlier dance theme. Only this time it began with the fiddle but then built, with a full orchestra playing the main theme against it, and the spritely dance music and love theme was now desperately tragic as the other musical theme intertwined, as the brutal deaths mount.

I was in tears. I was nearly shaking with the power. After a respectful time–and handing me a box of tissues–Ted said ‘background’ didn’t have to mean disposable. We were never going to be a commercial jingle studio, thank God, but rather than mourning my past life by not writing rock, I started using the synthesizers and samplers we had and started working on emotional scores. Certainly not as tearful as The Last of the Mohicans, and I did happy pieces, too. I started with Ted’s extensive DVD collection, since I’d never really bought any beyond concert videos. I’d always put movies a distant second behind music, but now I was learning about the synergy, the power when the music underscored or amplified a movie. Within a year we had started working with some of the UCLA and USC filmmaking crowd, many of whom were sure they were the next Martin Scorsese or Steven Spielberg.

Some of them knew the big film composer names like Bernard Herrmann or John Williams. They might know some of the fantastic current generation including James Newton Howard and Danny Elfman, yet they didn’t know that James had toured with Elton John, or that Danny had been the leader of one of the tightest–yet oddest–bands ever, Oingo Boingo. Now he composed everything from The Simpsons to Spider-Man, from Pee Wee Herman to Batman.

Ted’s studio built a good solid reputation among the indie crowd and then we got into feature-film scoring and that was mind-blowing. Our studio had a very good sound and Ted had a brilliant techie in Brian, who kept up competitive with all the best of the newest gadgets. The way technology was going, we were able to partner up with Skywalker Sound, George Lucas’ famous recording studio in Northern California. They could put a sixty-piece orchestra on their floor and we synced up additional players in our studio in LA, everything hooking up flawlessly with nearly-zero lag-time and in pristine digital clarity. We did the same hookup with AIR Studios in London, and while I might still play the classic rock station on my car on the way home, I found my head filled with orchestral sweeps and plaintive reeds, massive kettle-drum attacks and gentle shakuhachi flute melodies.

***

Ever since that anonymous cute guy at the gas pump, I had fully, finally realized that however I wound up as Lisa, I was Lisa. And I was female. And once Lisa began to like being Lisa, and to like being female, to my utter amazement, I discovered that Lisa liked guys! I learned to flirt–awkwardly at first. Melanie, the girl bass player of one of our groups became a friend and began taking me on ‘field trips’. Just nights out and days shopping, learning to relax and just be a girl, damn it! And to flirt with guys.

The first time was sheer terror. We’d agreed to go out for drinks. I thought Mel just wanted to vent about their idiot drummer–a phrase all-too-common. She came over to my place and I met her at the door and she frowned.

“Lisa, babe, you are not wearing that!”

I’d thought she meant I had a stain or spot on something; I had my typical jeans into boots, top and tweed jacket rig. Melanie obviously had something planned for later, after our drink was done and she took off into the night. She wore a tight white ‘bandage’-style dress with lace panels, and had piled her jet-black hair up on her head with loose curls and silver jewelry. I’d only seen her in boots; tonight she wore impossibly high black heels. I wasn’t a fashionista, but even I recognized the red soles as Louboutins.

Mel came from Beverly Hills money but wanted to be known as a musician first, woman second, rich girl dead last, and that’s one of the reasons we’d bonded. But right now the rich girl was in the ascendancy as Mel sailed past me and into my bedroom. There was this quick flicker of wonder if I’d misunderstood a lesbian signal or something, but she homed in on my closet and flipped through and turned to me, making a face.

“Serviceable to cute. Won’t do.”

I was still pondering that as I dumbly followed her to her car and she headed to a boutique off Rodeo.

“You do have some cute sundresses, Leese,” she said, her nickname for me. “I’d like to borrow that yellow one.”

“Sure,” was all I said, thinking how she had the money to buy several yellow sundresses.

Then I realized it was a girl-bonding thing, and the warmth of my feelings for her grew. She knew my past–everybody did–and never considered me a former boy. To Melanie, I was a girl who’d been on a desert island, or a religious community, and only now was in the Big City.

It was a rushed experience but I loved it. Melanie valeted her Porsche and I trotted behind her into the store. I caught a glimpse of us in the mirror and it struck me that we looked like a Hollywood star and her personal assistant–maybe her accountant. I was still confused about how Mel was dressed–since in the studio, she basically wore the same thing I had on now–and how it intersected with her plan for the evening.

The way she was dressed was her plan. Melanie showed an entirely different personality than ‘the chick on bass’ and was more the imperious socialite, directing the saleswoman what to bring. I tried on several dresses that I never would have worn on my own–I mean, I wouldn’t have even gone into the part of a store that had dresses like that!–and wound up in an impossibly tight royal blue number, with one shoulder bare and the other had some sparkly bits. New black Prada pumps. Handbag, accessories. And a couple of grand poorer.

I could afford it, certainly, and Mel knew it, so it was no problem. I struggled with the way to get into her Porsche in my impossibly tight dress, and then how to get out of it at the club, some new place on The Strip.

“Don’t worry about the new heels,” Mel said as we entered. “No intentions of dancing.”

Her intentions were a martini and men, in that order. I was nervous as hell and afraid to say too much to the guys that flocked to us, but that worked to increase my desirability. After one stunningly handsome, stunningly tanned, and stunningly charming guy smiled his stunningly white teeth, nodded, and left, Mel murmured, “Well played, Leese.”

“What are you talking about? If I said anything at all, I sounded like an idiot.”

“Gives you mystery,” she said, running her finger around the rim of her martini glass. “Look, babe; I know this isn’t your scene, and that’s precisely why I dragged you here!”

It was such a simple concept that I’d overlooked it. Although this world could certainly be Melanie’s if she wanted it–we’d already been approached by half-a-dozen guys that she’d been to Beverly Hills High with–Mel’s heart was in music. And that was how we’d first bonded, and why I loved her. And I loved her for doing this for me. She knew that it was awkward for me, having been Mike, to think romantically about guys now that I was Lisa. At one point I’d told her about the gas-pump-guy and she’d told me it was only a matter of time before I suddenly wanted to go on a date with some guy. It might be a musician, or producer, or, heck, the FedEx guy; but Mel knew that the very prospect of the date, and any potential for disaster, would be enough for me to chicken out.

“And you’re ready, babe,” she said knowingly.

It wasn’t a throw-away line, or to get me to get drunk and sleep with some Sunset Strip Stud. She was fast becoming my best friend, although I had so few friends to begin with and little experience. She would get on me about that, too. This wonderful girl, this wonderful contradiction of wealth and rock music, wanted the best for me. So she’d taken me to this completely alien environment, so that when and if I was interested in a guy in my regular world–a musician, producer, or FedEx guy–I might actually go on a date with him.

And so it came to pass that I had my first date, ever.

***

In high school, I had …Mike had …loved the idea of the girls backstage, but had only had one girlfriend, ever–Julia. And by leapfrogging all the hurt years and looking back on my teens, I couldn’t even remember a date as such; we’d met at a rec center dance, checking out the band, and by the end of the night we were together.

That was interesting, in view of my recent epiphany that she was using me. It was also interesting because as I was to learn, dating is when you learn about the other person, and about yourself. I’d never had that time with Julia, that ‘getting-to-know-you’ period. Perhaps I might have seen something there that would indicate that she’d be pilling me into girlhood in just a few years? I had to admit, keeping passion out of it, that the Julia that I’d left in the studio when I’d dropped the damn tambourine was not the Julia that had set off touring with me. And yet, she was; there was a direct line all along, even discounting Juan. Something dark and twisted and maybe even tormented within her, perhaps.

Putting aside gloomy thoughts of my past was hard, and Mel came to the rescue again. Unlike the night of bandage-dress shenanigans, we were in the studio alone, dressed in jeans and boots and tops as usual. I’d just played her the romantic crescendo of a score I’d done for a USC boy, truly a possible future Scorsese. And before he’d left for the night, Ted handed over a half-a-bottle of Patron tequila, a gift from a client. I teased him about the missing half and he chuckled out the door. Neither of drank much or did drugs, and I knew that Ted figured Mel and I were just in the mood for the drink.

After the second shot, we began sipping. Mel asked me to play the score again and was nodding during it. I thought she’d been fighting sleep, because it wasn’t an in-tempo nod. I was wrong.

“Leese, I just thought of something. That music–and it’s effing gorgeous–isn’t even on the same planet as what you used to write.”

She rattled off the names of some of my All The Rage songs. I felt that painful twinge of memory that I always had when I was reminded of my past.

Melanie went on. “You’re not the same person. Oh, yeah, boy, girl, all that,” she said, waving a hand. Then she took another sip and after the ‘ah!’ she said, “And I think you’re hung up by that past. By that past. Mike, and the whole Julia-Juan circus, and all that, but about Mike. And I don’t mean this in the sense of being a boy and being a girl; God knows we’ve talked that subject into the ground.”

“Sorry, Mel,” I said contritely. And I was contrite; when we’d first started chatting I’d worked overtime to be ‘up-front’ with everything–to the point that she didn't want to waste time talking about it anymore. “It’s just …my life, you know?”

“Yeah, babe, I know; but I’m going in a different direction. Because one thing I’m sure of.” She pointed at the speakers. “The person that wrote that did not write ‘Take It All’.” She’d named one of the harder All The Rage songs I’d written. “The ‘Take It All’ guy couldn’t begin to come up with that piece–and it’s effing gorgeous; did I tell you that?”

“You did, actually; thanks.” I grinned and then shrugged. “Well, growth,” I said loosely, pouring us our fourth shots, even though we were sipping.

“Different person,” she shook her head. “Person. Not the boy-girl thing. And I know you told me about your guitar girlies telling you about the feminine in Mike’s songwriting. I’m not talking about that. And I’m not talking about musical growth like you are. A different person,” she declared again, nodding to herself.

I’d have to think about that later, minus the tequila, so I just nodded with her. Then she startled me.

“The point is, that person,” she said, pointing again at the speakers, “shouldn’t have to be saddled with the All The Rage guy’s past.”

I stopped, mid-sip. “Huh?”

“You’re in an enviable position, Lisa. Think about it. I’m Melanie Bronson, of the Beverly Hills Bronsons, and that whole world? Remember some of the guys we met that night on The Strip?”

“Your classmates, right.”

“Right. They know Melanie Bronson, of the Beverly Hills …” She waved a hand. “All that crap. But not one of those guys knows Mel Brown that plays bass. And I’m perfectly happy with that.”

“You’ve got the best of both worlds.”

“Well, yeah, I do. And I’m not going to pull any ‘boo-hoo-hoo; I’m rich and lonely’ nonsense. I like my life. My duality. And, yeah, the money,” she nodded as she took a sip. “But here’s what I’m thinking–you get to totally reinvent yourself, Leese. I mean, you already are reinvented, but I mean your history, your …whatddya call it …backstory.”

That was pretty much it for any heavy discussion; if she couldn’t come up with ‘backstory’ she was getting loaded and very soon we were collapsing in giggles. I made sure she left her car and got her a cab home, and then decided I’d better not drive, either.

The next morning, nursing a stupid hangover and promising to never drink again–or at least to limit to three shots–I began thinking about what she’d said. Later in the week, when we were shopping–and sober–we began talking about it again.

So Lisa developed her own history, her own backstory. Obviously, if somebody knew my reality as having been Mike, there was no need for it. But I found that I wanted to do it for myself. I wanted to create a girl who grew up to be me. I’d had an okay home life, parents and all that, but had been totally focused on success as a rock star. Take away that rock star urge, the central drive in my life, and replace it with …what? Well, making music, certainly.

So, okay. Play the game; start life over. Born a girl; born as Lisa. Same family and life. Whoa! It couldn’t be the same because a girl’s growing-up period includes …well, her period for starters. But little girls do ballet and horses and princesses at Halloween. And there were little boys to contend with, and awkward middle-school dances, and a First Kiss, and on and on …

I actually made notes. I was doing this for myself, not to trot out on a date to lie about myself. I was building up a whole person, from the girl I was imagining to the woman I was now. I would come up with something, like a special birthday dress, and write it up. Then edit it out and change it to a special dress for the holiday season. And then rewrite it so I could have both!

I was careful to violate as few realities as I could. I wasn’t the heiress of a huge fortune, or had super-powers. From what I knew, from what I read, and from what I thought about, I constructed Lisa’s girlhood up until high school graduation. Then things got suspended.

***

His name was Dave and I never got the hang of his last name; it was Polish or Ukrainian and he said it fast and all that was important were oh my God those eyes and that smile was for me and before I knew it, I was on my first date.

Dave worked for a company that made audio consoles; one of the boards in one of our rooms was his company’s brand, and he came to talk to us about updates to the hardware and software. Part salesman, part techie, but he was way above a FedEx guy–with no disrespect to the many wonderful and hunky FedEx guys out there.

It was Brian and I at the meeting, and Brian immediately sensed something in us and began working the angles, like suggesting times when Dave ‘could drop by and show Lisa’, and even suggesting that Dave and I meet to go over some problems we’d had with the old software.

So, okay, yeah. Dave and I went out.

A real, honest-to-goodness date, where he picked me up at my house in his Lexus and whisked me to a Malibu restaurant. I found him charming and damned good-looking but by the coffee-and-cognac, I knew he was a nice guy, it was a nice date, but there was no spark there. No zing.

That led to the fleeting thought about sex; what if we kept things nice and friendly and just slept together, as is common in Hollywood? I decided that I didn't want to do that, but not for the ‘saving myself for marriage’ reason. Now that my life and Melanie and, heck, even Brian had shown me that I was a woman that was interested in guys, I wanted to try out my equipment, so to speak. Dave was a nice guy and maybe that was the problem.

Dave knew that I’d been Mike and said that it didn’t bother him but I knew that my first time would be wonderful or awful. I wanted my first to validate me as a woman, as a female. My first time would have to be with somebody who had no connection to music or my past or anything. I was intrigued by the idea of having sex with the charming and damned good-looking Dave, and I was sure he would be damned good in bed, too. But I wanted to lose my virginity with somebody who only knew me as a woman.

Dave and I went out once more, to a concert at the Hollywood Bowl, and agreed that we like each other but …and we made the obligatory jokes about ‘and I like your butt, too!’ but that was it; the new console came in and was debugged, Dave was out of the studio and out of my life. But he’d broken the ice; I’d dated a man.

A month later, I went on a date with a guy I’d met at the car dealership. I was getting my first scheduled maintenance with my pretty little Prius, and we got to talking and that weekend we went out for drinks and by the next weekend, I was no longer a virgin.

Terry was the typical good-looking LA guy, full of himself, proud of his success in commercial real estate, proud of his penthouse view of the ocean, and proud of his Lamborghini. He’d been in the Toyota dealership for his ex-wife’s Camry. He seemed to exist on sound bites from the entertainment shows, like Entertainment Tonight and Inside Edition, about movie stars. He could talk about what Brad and Angelina were up to, Lindsay’s latest crash, or whatever, and it was fine with me; I understood that his interests and knowledge worked with his real estate business and clients. His musical tastes ran to the new Nashville stars, as opposed to actual country music. I found him ignorant of and uninterested in classic rock groups–including more recent ones like All The Rage.

Perfect.

That first Friday night, we went to a trendy new downtown restaurant. I found that all of my meticulous detailing of Lisa’s girlhood was useless; Terry certainly didn’t care about my ballet classes when I was ten. But I had to talk about myself somehow, and I just winged it. And I found that by doing my own preparation, creating Lisa’s girlhood, I leaped into the world of complete and utter lies with ease, using the foundation of the girl-that-was.

I had gone to a state college, I told Terry. I’d tried cheerleading in high school one season but they demanded too much time so I didn’t make the same mistake in college. This was improvised on the spot, in response to his line, ‘You’re so pretty; I bet you were a cheerleader.’ Through a misunderstanding at the Toyota dealer, Terry thought I was the manager of the studio, that I scheduled and ran budgets and was, more or less, ‘a suit’. Because of the show business industry, there were many like that and it wasn’t an exotic career any more than running any small business. So my college years yielded a broken heart–Bill, another Business major–and a degree in business. I knew that nobody sits around discussing their time in college business schools and I was right; Terry was completely uninterested in my college days.

There were several fictitious businesses that I’d worked at, thinking of people I knew. I told Terry of my time working at Gap at the mall–although I’d never had such a job. He bet that I made manager quickly. Assistant, I told him with a smile. Then on to a company that made camera equipment, and now the recording studio. It was neat, made sense, and was completely false.

I suspected that Terry’s resumé was padded as well, but what was not false was the glory of his apartment, and the Great Moment that second weekend, when we wound up at his apartment. The one essential part of my false story was why I wasn’t sexually experienced. Anatomy, pure and simple. I told him about a birth defect of sorts–my mother had it, too, I added–that had to be corrected surgically. The ‘mother’ line worked to completely remove it from any hint of the truth. I’d recently been able to take the time off and had the money to ‘repair’ my body and Just Hadn’t Met The Right Fella. He fell for it, completely.

After white wine and ocean-admiring, we turned from his windows and he undressed me. I’d worn a Little Black Dress, my first LBD, chosen by Melanie. It slid off my shoulders and my lingerie made his eyes widen. Maybe it was my body in the lingerie; either way, I was grateful for his response. Under his wolfish stare, I slowly removed my bra and resisted the urge to rub under my breasts as all women do. I hooked my thumbs in my panties and did an entirely-unnecessary amount of shimmying to remove them. I stood proudly naked.

Terry was also standing proud; his pants were so tented they must have been painful. I had already figured out that having the naked girl wait on him was part of his psyche, so dutifully I undressed him. When I pulled his boxers down and his penis sprang back, I grasped it with both hands.

This was the first of three Mike Moments that I knew would come. I was touching a man’s penis. The second was what I did next. In keeping with Terry’s nature, I knelt and took his penis in my mouth. I just did it. And I knew what to do, although it was amazingly different being on the other end of things, so to speak! Fortunately, I was able to gauge his excitement well enough to not wind up with a mouthful of Terry. I slid down onto the bed and, having already lubed myself with my own saliva, I was ready for him.

After the surgery, there was a period of using ever-larger dilators to keep my new vagina open and, uh, accommodating. Then, a year ago, thinking that I had a vagina for the rest of my life and never thinking a man might be on the horizon, I’d shyly bought a vibrator. Melanie’s suggestion, of course. Since then I’d learned that masturbating as a woman–having a masturbatory orgasm, I mean–absolutely smoked masturbating as a guy. And since there was a corollary of sensation, so to speak, an escalation between a guy’s orgasm while masturbating and his orgasm inside a woman’s vagina, I had a sense that if the female masturbation orgasm was sensational, having sex with a guy must be mind-blowing. But I was resigned to not knowing, and to getting to know my vibrator. And among the things I learned was that I could lubricate. The doctors had done marvelous work; I never got dripping, like I’d read about in novels, but I was better than average, post-surgery, at lubrication.

So my third Mike Moment arrived–Terry the real estate braggart entered me. A little pain at first–his angle was wrong, unlike my well-trained vibrator–and then, oh my. Oh, yes. And finally oh, God! And I was no longer a virgin. I’d had sex with a man and I’d liked it and I’d had an orgasm and, yes, Terry was largely a stand-in for my vibrator but I’d done it and done it successfully. He came inside me and was so pleased with himself for some reason that I had to chuckle–in so many ways, he could be described as a dildo, himself!

That night was the last I saw Terry; even if I hadn’t planned it that way, I knew it was his game plan all along. Once I ‘put out’, he was on to the next conquest. All I could think was that his ex-wife hadn’t gotten out fast enough; I hope she got some goodies out of the divorce besides the Camry.

Ted and Brian had no knowledge of my out-of-studio experiences, but Melanie absolutely knew, the first time she saw me after that weekend.

She hugged me. “Oh, the boys in LA are in trouble now!” she darned-near cackled with glee. Then we went back to her band’s mix.

Thus began a strange time. On one hand, it was perfectly normal for girls to go out clubbing, for drinks, dancing with cute guys, and bedding some of them. Mel and I did this, often accompanied by one or two other girlfriends. On the other hand, this was not only unlike Lisa, it was unlike Mike–I now had more friends than I’d ever had in my life, even counting band members as friends. Lisa liked to be alone with her music and, well, her misery. First Ted, then my girlies, the gas-pump-guy, Melanie, Dave, and then Terry, all reduced Lisa’s misery to a type of scrapbook memory. I left it in the closed pages of the book of my old life. And without that misery, I didn’t need to be alone. I had friends and I had music and I had a life.

***

And then I was invited on a date with one of the hottest new film composers. Luke knew all about me and didn’t care; he said he liked ‘the music in me’–he said it was like a beautifully-written letter–and he also liked ‘the envelope’–meaning he found me attractive.

I found him attractive. It was distracting, trying to keep focused on our work. Luke had booked the studio for some special sessions for a film he was scoring; he’d found exotic Asian instruments and when they cranked up, our studio sounded the 15th Century in Samarkand. At first I just knew that I was hopelessly lost, as I watched Luke out on the floor, changing a melody line in their music and expressively gesturing with his hands how he wanted the music to flow.

He was wonderful. Trained in both Juilliard and in New York bars, where he’d played lounge piano. He’d connected with the NYU students, the way we had connected with the UCLA-USC crowd. He’d scored a Sundance winner, and then gone to Europe and films he’d scored won awards at Venice and Berlin, with the music singled out. He was on his way to being one of the greats.

Luke seemed like he belonged on the cover of one of those outdoor magazines, minus the tan. He wasn’t dead-fish white, the infamous ‘studio tan’ that professional musicians often have. He had nice coloring, wavy brown hair just a little long, green eyes, and was built! Not like a bench-pressed fitness geek; he looked …rugged, sort of, in a Big City way. Like he had always been active, was strong, healthy, and could take care of himself.

And he was so nice! At least to me; I heard two musicians on a break complain that Luke demanded long hours and they were session guys, used to in-and-out. I thought of the local burger chain, In-And-Out Burgers, and that these guys lived like that, doing session work around town; sometimes a couple a day. Play the notes, leave. I couldn’t have done that; the notes had to be played, yes, but the notes had to have emotion. Luke was demanding, alright. He was demanding excellence and commitment to getting the music right. I was thrilled working with him and only hoped I wasn’t too fawning. Or too bumbling.

Then we finished the Asian score and he turned to me and asked if I’d like to have coffee. Just that, coffee; it was the great low-commitment date. I could feel my heart thumping as I tried desperately to look casual and, my throat tight, said, “Sure.”

We had coffee. Then we had dinner. Then we had dinner the next night. Then we met for lunch. Then he had to leave for two weeks–up to Skywalker, ironically–and I was miserable. Luke and I talked every night, but it wasn’t nearly enough. Melanie’s eyes widened when I’d reacted to her simple, “How’s things?” because things without Luke sucked. She gave me the lecture on too-much-too-fast and all that and I agreed but oh God I wanted to see Luke!

Seriously strange at this point? We hadn’t kissed. The dinners had been public; I’d used the Independent Woman thing of driving myself and meeting him at the restaurants. The Good-Byes were while waiting for the valet to bring my Prius around, or among the busy café patrons at lunch. Yet without anything more than little touches here and there and a good-bye hug at lunch, I was aching with missing him. Missing his presence. Missing his Luke-ness.

He came back from Marin and I met him at the airport. I was almost frantic with worry that I’d be late–traffic to LAX is a nightmare–but I was running and then there he was and we were in each other’s arms and we kissed and it was the most perfectly natural thing and the most exquisitely perfect kiss. We broke apart, startled; neither of us had been expecting that or planned it. We didn't talk about it as we got his bags and I drove him to his apartment. I carried one of his bags in, with him protesting. Then I turned to face him.

“Luke, about the kiss …I didn’t plan that,” I said, wishing the ground would swallow me but knowing that I had to get this said. “I don’t want to scare you off; I’m not trying to rush things …” I wound down.

Luke came to take my hands and I was scared to look at him.

“Lisa? Look at me, please?” he asked and slowly I looked into those wonderful green eyes. “I didn’t play it, either. And you can’t scare me off, and as to rushing things …I think we’re taking them at their own pace.”

I chuckled slightly. “Coffee, two dinners, and lunch in three days? Kind of rushed.” I grinned.

“Yes, but then two weeks of nothing.”

“You were working,” I said.

“No, I mean two weeks of nothing. No Lisa. No wonderful Lisa. At least I got to talk to you, but to see you, to be near you, to …kiss you …”

And we kissed.

I wanted him. I wanted to make love to him, I wanted him to make love to me, I just wanted …so desperately. I was going to lead him to his own bedroom and make love to him and …

And he refused. Out of respect for our future.

I was stunned and he said we knew, didn’t we? That what we were feeling was partly due to the separation, but it also indicated that we were meant to be together. There was no need to rush something that we both wanted, but I had to be back at the studio later in the day and he had to unpack and make calls. And so we should plan something, maybe?

So even though my body yearned for Luke, I left him and went to work. We had dinner that night, and we planned to spend the next weekend together, our first as a couple. I went to the spa and got as absolutely prettified as they could make me and was so nervous. I was shaky and giggly on our drive up to Santa Barbara. I knocked over a glass of wine at dinner. I ran out onto the balcony and cried. Luke came out to me and put his arms around me, saying nothing.

There’s being a virgin and being a virgin. There’s the usual before-and-after of the first time you have sex. And then there’s the more-rare experience of making love. I had only recently lost my virginity but I knew that I had not made love; I’d had sex. I’d learned about my body and my mind and the process but I was nervous because I knew I was falling in love with Luke. I was pretty much there already, truth be told. And I so wanted to make love to him and I wanted it to be great and I wanted him to like me and I wanted him to make love to me but Oh God what if it’s not good and Oh God what do I do then because I want him …

We stood there in the dark and something happened. Something shifted, something realigned, and all of my nerves and my doubts vanished. I turned to face Luke, took his face in both hands and kissed him and told him to take me to bed; I was going to make love to him.

It was overwhelming; it was simple. We fit. Parts of my body perfectly fitted his, and all of him felt perfect to me. And we fit emotionally; the rise and fall, the ebb and flow of our lovemaking. I thought of how some birds absolutely mirror each other in flight, in perfect formation. Luke moved, and I moved to accommodate him. He sent me somewhere, and was there to meet me. Somehow, that night, it became absolutely obvious how the Universe worked: It worked with one purpose only–to get this marvelously sexy naked man inside of me. That was it, end of story. I was gloriously, hopelessly in love with him.

We spent even more time together. Although he did a lot of work at some of the huge studio soundstages, he wanted me along and it was, as he said, ‘for your ears and …whatever they’re attached to!’ Ted didn’t mind–it was publicity for his studio. I thought of Tina, the manager of All The Rage, saying there was no such thing as bad publicity.

Luke and I were actually ‘an item’–even making it on Inside Edition and E.T. because two of his movies were up for Oscars. We did the Grammys together and he won one–the one that I’d helped engineer over at the Sony Studios–and he thanked me from the podium. At the Oscars we were pretty sure that he was going to cancel himself out, with two nominations, but got one for the same movie and thanked me again and thanked me for bringing love into his life. From the podium!

The next year, we were still together, and I won three Grammys; one for a song I wrote for a new band, and two Grammys, for Producer and for Engineering, only the second time anybody had done both!

If we go on as we have been, it’s only a matter of time before Luke and I marry.

End of Part 2

Rock Star: Coda, by Karin Bishop

A sequel to “Rock Star”, by Jennifer White

Part 3

I was at the bar in a Sunset Strip hotel, the new posh British place, waiting for Luke and Ted. Several people in the music business were there; a few nodded to me–as a multiple Grammy winner, I was in a rarefied atmosphere. And I felt wonderful. I had dressed extra-special that night, to tease Luke during dinner and then to drive him wild later, in bed. I wore a shimmery ice blue minidress that showed that I had a genuine tan, courtesy of time spent at my pool, listening to mixes, demos, and composing. My skin was bronzed and oiled, and my hair was loosely up and held with silver pins to match my silver dangle earrings and bracelets. I had the most gorgeous French Tips on all my nails, and silver strappy sandals with high, high heels.

Somebody called out ‘Mike?’ and I had this strange mix of reactions. Instinctively I turned to see who’d called, due to my two-plus decades of reacting to that name. Also, the instinctive clenching that somebody was deliberately calling me that old name, as an unwelcome reminder of my past. It turned out that the call had been for somebody else; some guy stood and waved; he was Mike.

I’d thought, ‘Of course he is. I’m not Mike anymore; I’m Lisa’ and I chuckled as I mentally slapped the back of my hand for reacting to the name. I wasn’t Mike. I felt strong and feminine and glad that I was Lisa. I had certainly come to terms with my new sex and my sexuality and was happy being female. It was almost a cliché, the classic Broadway song–I really and truly did enjoy being a girl!

And I was a girl who was impatiently waiting for her guy. Probably because of my silly reaction to that guy calling ‘Mike’, but I tried to remember the last time I’d even thought of Mike.

Well, aside from my talk with Kayla.

***

She had finally walked from All The Rage and had been picked up very quickly by an up-and-coming alt rock group out of Tulsa and I saw her at the Grammys. That night was the exception to my blocking of all things connected with All The Rage. It had been pure chance that we’d gone to the restroom at the same time.

There was that immensely awkward moment where I was at the mirror, touching up my lipstick, and a stall door opened and there was Kayla. She looked startled, her face showing the ‘fight-or-flight’ response and there was this intensely painful moment made even more so because there were women all around us. Neither of us could gracefully fight or flee. Nor did I wish to. Seeing her made it plain to me, in an instant, that I bore her no ill will and it was behind me.

“Hey, Kayla!” I said brightly, and then leaned slightly away so she could come to use my mirror space. “Congratulations!”

I really meant it, too; her band had just won a Grammy for Best New Artist. Even though the band had been around for years, it was losing two members and adding Kayla that had created them anew, with her solid-yet-dancing bass and her vocals.

I’d also worked so hard to put everything connected to Mike and All The Rage behind me, and wanted to be genuinely glad that she was moving forward, too, despite what she’d done to me–because the betrayal hurt, but the end result, being Lisa? I couldn’t be happier.

She made her decision and smiled and came up, opening her purse for her brush, blush, and lipstick. There was that nervous Kayla giggle that I remembered. “All of my life, dreaming of getting a Grammy. I get up there and all I could think of was how badly I had to pee!”

We laughed together and then did that mutual-sigh thing. Knowing her category had already been awarded meant that she didn’t necessarily have to get right back to her seat.

“Wanna chat?” I asked casually.

I nodded to the lounge area, with tables and chairs and benches–the Ladies Lounge was huge. There were a few women clustered closely and talking; they could be working out an album collaboration or discussing childcare, whatever. Since everybody in the room–in the building–was in the industry, there was a sort of truce regarding Ladies Lounge gossip. As long as we kept our voices low and heads together, Kayla and I could talk relatively freely.

We moved to a newly-empty bench as two women rose and exited. Kayla and I sat slightly facing each other sat; she rather stiffly so I tried to be more relaxed. I was in a tight black-and-white halter dress, with Louboutin pumps. She was in a bright red tube dress, at odds with the scruffy image of the band. By unspoken but mutual consent, she texted her band that she was okay–she said they were probably already celebrating–and I texted Luke that I was talking with an old friend.

Then Kayla laid her phone on the bench next to her and folded her hands primly on her lap. She was so uncomfortable as she cleared her throat.

“Wow! Uh …congratulations! I can’t, uh …you’ve done so much, and, uh …”

It sounded forced, no matter how genuine her comment might be. I took a chance and reached over and placed my hand on the back of hers.

“Kayla? It’s okay. This is supremely weird, the two of us here talking, and we both know it, but I’m telling you, at every level, it’s okay. Okay?”

“Um, okay …” She swallowed and nodded once, finally looking me in the eye.

She still had the widened eyes of ‘fight-or-flight’.

I smiled as warmly as I could. “Kayla, however it came about, you have to know this–I am absolutely delighted with my life. I love my life, and where it’s going. Okay? So, yeah, it was …odd how I got here–”

“Odd?” she snorted. “God, you could work for the State Department with that understatement!”

“We both know there are more words we could use, but–”

Kayla interrupted me by putting her hand over my hand, which was still over her closer hand. “Lisa? Please. Let me talk. This has been …there’s been this total crap inside of me and I thought I was stuck with it until I die but I finally get a chance to …” She chuckled bitterly. “Like all roads lead to this bench, huh? All those years we dreamed about winning Grammys and we never thought it would be the two of us here, looking like this, with Grammys and not at all what we dreamed …”

She shook herself, almost like a dog shaking water, a full-body shake. Then she nodded, as if to herself. “Lisa, let me say my piece and then we’ll see what we see, alright?”

“Alright,” I nodded, smiling encouragingly but absolutely clueless what was to come.

Kayla sighed. “Back in …I’m pretty sure it was London.” She nodded; that had been the first stop on our first European tour. “Yes, the hotel with the funny cheese stuff.” That had been her phrase at the time.

“Devonshire Cream–oops!” I said, pulling my hand to cover my mouth. “Sorry! No interruptions!”

She smiled. “I know what it’s called now, but, yeah, that hotel. First stop. I don’t know where you were–a bath, maybe–but Julia got me and we went to Robert’s room. She was doing this …” Kayla sighed and looked up at the ceiling. “You know, it’s hard to think back to what really happened, because there was then, in the sense of things unfolding day-to-day. And there’s now, with knowing everything that was behind everything.”

Kayla’s sentences were sometimes as sinuous as her bass lines; I’d long ago learned to follow them. Maybe that’s why we’d played so well together.

Her head came down from the ceiling into a nod to herself. “Yeah, got to tell it this way, knowing both then and now.” She looked at me. “Julia told Robert and I that you were transgender. That you always had been. That–don’t say anything, please?”

Instinctively, my mouth had opened to refute Julia’s long-ago statement, which had been a lie …But with all that I’d learned about myself over the last few years, was it a lie? And I’d promised to not interrupt, anyway.

Kayla made sure of that with a firm nod and continued. “Look, I know now that every other word out of her mouth was a lie, and I’m not even sure of the other words.” Her mouth twitched in a bitter grin. “I can only tell you how it went down. Julia said that you wanted to be a girl, that it was your deepest desire, your fondest wish, and that all you wanted to do was make enough money to get a sex change. She told us that you–I should interrupt myself and say that I didn’t know you as well as Robert, but neither of us was totally buying into it at first, but she can be persuasive.”

I nodded–not really an interruption.

Another sigh. “And I know now it was crap–we both do. If you ever get a chance, let Robert know that we’ve talked, alright?” I nodded and she went on. “Julia said that she loved the person you were too much to not let you achieve your dream. She said she loved you as a boyfriend, but said some stuff about how you were ‘a gentle lover’, but making it like you were submissive and she wasn’t crazy about it, but she’d endure because she loved you.”

She said this last in the breathy tones of a Brontá« heroine, then giggled at her own voice.

“Anyway, she was setting us up, of course. She told us that you were pretty much a girl in bed, that you were already wearing some of her things, that she knew about but hadn’t confronted you because she loved you so much.” She shook her head again. “After that night when she told us, every day she’d casually mention something in passing, to reinforce the whole thing. Like she’d say so Robert could hear, ‘I’m not a lesbian but it certainly feels that way, especially when Mike’s in his nightie.’ Or I’d be with Tina and Julia would sigh and say, ‘Mike’s so into this Lisa thing that we don’t even make love anymore. We’re in that big bed, just like sisters.’”

Again, my mouth opened automatically to respond but I closed it.

Kayla’s sad smile twitched at that and she went on. “Remember, this was all before Juan joined. But she was setting it up already. She’d play it all reluctant and say, ‘Sometimes …oh, you’ll think I’m terrible,’–and she’d look all bashful– ‘but I miss having sex with a man, you know?’ And all the time she was seeing Juan. I can’t believe I never saw that! I mean, I’m not blind, and they spent so much time getting together–before he was in the band, I mean. I didn’t know about it, though, I really didn’t. I’ve thought about it over the years, and I think it was because I didn’t ever really bond with Julia. You’d think we would, being the two girls in the band.”

Realizing what she’d said, her eyes widened. I grinned and chuckled. “I know what you mean, Kayla.”

“Sorry,” she said, almost like a little girl. Again a bitter smile. “And here’s the kicker–she said you needed help. Not like psychiatric, but that you needed our support. Robert and I looked at each other and we both really liked you and were totally buying Julia’s crap so we said we would, of course we would. I mean, it wasn’t even about the band; we just liked you.”

“Thank you for that, both of you,” I said, squeezing her hand. “And that doesn’t count as an interruption, just a comment. But thank you.”

Kayla smiled thinly. “You’re amazing, after what we did to you …” She sighed heavily and shook her head. “The key to this whole thing with Julia was our support, that we wouldn’t question what started happening. It was driving Robert crazy to not yell at you–‘Look what’s happening to you!’–but we’d all agreed it was the only way that you could–no, not the only way,” she corrected herself frowning. “I said that was the key, but the real key was that you were reluctant. I mean, that’s what Julia told us–that you still had this problem giving yourself permission to be a girl. That there was still this male life that you’d lived that made you feel guilty about wanting to be a girl. So what we had to do was persuade you. Persuade you …”

She trailed off, her mouth souring. “I’ve felt sick for years about how I bought into that. We were both played, Robert and I, but you were played a lot worse. I was so stupid believing …I mean, all I had to do was just come out and talk with you about it, just ask you, and her whole scheme would have collapsed.”

“I’m interrupting now,” I said. “Kayla? We both know how convincing she can be, how persuasive. It might be her greatest strength or skill; I don’t know. But, please, stop raking yourself over the coals about this.”

“You’re really sweet to say that, but …” She balled her hand into a fist and thumped her thigh. “I should have been a better friend. A real friend. There we were going along with her lies because we thought we were being true friends, and I wasn’t even friend enough to ask you even once.” She shook her head and took a deep sigh. “So I persuaded you. I went along with every step of her plan–Robert too, although his main contribution was keeping quiet. But I helped get you into the clothes, the makeup, the whole Lisa thing …” Her eyes glistened and she sniffed.

Gently, I said, “And I’m telling you that Lisa is very, very happy now, okay? So, for God’s sakes, don’t cry, because there’s no room at the mirrors.”

We both looked across the room and every inch of mirror space was filled with women. Kayla gave s sniffy giggle and nodded.

I said, “Kayla, I’ll get formal for a moment. I hereby absolve you of all guilt or worry about what happened. Any further unhappiness about that time is purely your own choice, okay? But we all got taken and you and I have moved on. So we’re better off, however we got here.”

She nodded. “Robert’s doing sessions, New York and Nashville. I think he hated touring but he stuck it out. Took him forever to quit, though.”

“He had some …” I sighed. “His family was never well-off, and his sister has some medical problems–”

“Had. She died last March. I never even knew he had a sister.” Kayla shook her head.

I nodded. “God, poor Robert.” I was silent for a moment, sending a prayer for his sister and him. “He was very private about his sister. Her care cost a lot of money his family didn’t have, and he knew that he stood the best chance of making good money playing music, and he was right. I could never blame him for that; even with all the stuff we went through, he stuck with the band for the money. Not out of greed, but for his family. And he’s a great guy, and if you see him before I do, please tell him everything’s fine and I wish him the best?”

She nodded and a thought occurred to me, belatedly. “What about Tina?”

“What about her? Oh, you mean, in Julia’s scheme?” I nodded and she went on. “Not sure what Julia told her; I think it was the same thing she’d told Robert and me. Knowing Julia–and knowing Tina–I’m sure it was pitched more about the longevity of the band, the publicity for the band. Like your …operations and everything …”

She was once again nervous.

I couldn’t resist. I gave her a huge grin and said proudly, “Made me the man I am today!”

Kayla was shocked, open-mouthed, and then we both dissolved in giggles, tears, and hugs.

Then she shrugged. “You know, part of what made Julia’s plan work was that I didn’t really know her, how she really thought. Like I said, we never bonded. Julia was always with you, and then she was always with Juan. Even more, once you were gone. There wasn’t that much time when the two of us …” She straightened. “You remember that night in New York? We took the limo and went shopping?”

“A great night,” I smiled. Since I’d come to accept things, that memory now was of a great night.

“Yeah, it was,” she smiled with me. “You know, that was the first night that I ever spent, really spent, with Julia? Without a guy around, I mean?” She realized again what she’d said and stared.

I laughed. “God, Kayla! Chill, okay? I’m fine with it; and it was a great night. Yes, I’ll admit that I was still mostly feeling like Mike-inside-of-Lisa, but that was the first night–really important, this–the first night that I relaxed and enjoyed myself as a girl. So, back to what you were saying, you and Julia weren’t hanging out all along?”

“No. Thought you knew that,” she shrugged. “But you were always focused on the music, and Julia, and the music you wrote because of Julia …” She frowned. “And then you were kind of …unfocused.”

I nodded grimly. “Kayla, you know that Julia had been feeding me female hormones since, well, since we first moved in together.”

“I thought …Huh,” she said to herself. “I thought it was once we were on the road. But, yeah, it would have to have been longer. That far back? Huh!” she said again, nodding to herself.

“And here’s what you don’t know.” I told her about Ted’s revelation about the ‘extra ingredient’ in the pills, making me passive, submissive.

It took me awhile to calm Kayla down. She was outraged, and I loved her for it, because she was outraged on my behalf, not out of a guilty conscience. Outraged at the cruelty of it, the calculated evil of it, and said several things about Julia that weren’t proper in a Ladies Lounge.

On the other hand, it might not have been the first time such words had been spoken in there!

Afterwards, both of us healed and cleansed, we hugged and truly wished each other the best in our lives and then returned to our men.

***

After my fantastic talk with Kayla, I did some further research. When I’d left the band, I’d been in such agony that I avoided the merest mention of All The Rage. I’d avoided all media on the off-chance there’d be something about them. So until recently, I’d never learned what had happened to All The Rage when Juan totally took over …

The day that I dropped the tambourine and walked out of the studio was the beginning of the end for Robert and Kayla. A few months later, Robert left in disgust as Juan’s steamroller continued. He’d made as much money as he could for his family, but I think the method of making the money–as a puppet for Juan–soured him enough to quit. Plus, by moving into session work, he could be closer to his family and especially his sister, to be with her in the time she had left. I’d like to think that somewhere in his list of complaints there was something about me. But as I’d told Kayla, I truly wished him well but doubted we’d ever see each other.

It had taken Kayla longer to quit for two reasons. I got some of the information from her, and some from industry articles. First, she wasn’t a threat to anybody–she didn’t snipe at Juan the way Robert had taken to doing openly after I’d left–and because she’d made the decision to find another group, but to ride All The Rage as long as it was working and keeping her visible in the industry. She had put her heart and soul into the band right from the start, but already it had become just a vehicle for making money by the time I was kicked out. And as I knew from our ‘girls night out’ in NYC, Kayla enjoyed the high life but rarely lived it. So she lived frugally on the road, kept her head down, stayed out of Juan’s way, and listened to demos until she found the band to jump to–which led her to her Grammy.

I wondered what music reporters would make of the All The Rage story, or one of those behind-the-scenes VH1 specials. Stage 1: Obscurity to Big Break. Stage 2: International touring. Stage 3: The Mike-becomes-Lisa episode. Stage 4: The Juan Band, still called All The Rage, now with Jeanne. Stage 5: The Juan Band with only Julia from All The Rage. Stage 6: The Juan band with session players. And finally, Stage 7, whatever happened to All The Rage?

With my departure from All The Rage, Juan was totally in the drivers’ seat. He managed two things. The first was that he managed to alienate the people he needed. Robert quit and was replaced. The band remained media darlings. While they didn’t headline every arena, they were at every major festival. Everybody loved them. Then Kayla managed to find her Tulsa boys to join, and was replaced.

All The Rage continued, with only Julia remaining of the original group. And then, out of the blue, Julia found out that–according to Juan–she couldn’t play as well as the band needed; she didn’t sing as well as the band needed; she wasn’t as sexy as the band needed …

Juan brought in a keyboard-player, a very accomplished session player, who signed a short-term contract. And Julia was relegated to the Linda McCartney position of playing a note here, a note there.

And tambourine in-between.

Then the news hit about the band’s ‘stylist’ being pregnant with Juan’s baby.

While all this was happening, Juan had managed to get everybody to fire Tina, claiming he could self-manage better. In a supposed ‘financial’ move, Julia was let go; the session whiz could play her notes and the tambourine wasn’t really in the mix anyway.

Gigs started drying up. The oldies, retro circuit seemed to be the only venues booking All The Rage. The replacements for Robert and Kayla quit and were replaced. Jeanne was fired and replaced. Even Julia’s replacement was fired and was replaced.

Finally, finally, the band expired and there were some major breach-of-contract lawsuits; thank goodness Kayla got out before all of that. In a lovely bit of karmic payback, Juan had made himself the leader, legally, of the musical group All The Rage–that is, the business affairs of the corporate entity–but the name was still legally mine. So when the lawsuits stripped him of everything, all sales of anything bearing the name All The Rage came to me. All The Rage ‘the band’ was sued by concert promoters and Juan had to pay; but All The Rage t-shirt sales still put money in my pocket because I owned the name and logo. Once I’d begun regrouping, coming out of my recluse period and starting my new life as Lisa, I’d paid a lawyer to do all the legal name-changing and was fully documented as a female named Lisa, even with my drivers’ license and passport. And our record label and songwriters’ union were aware of the change so any income due Mike came to my bank as Lisa.

Even though Juan had wiped me out of the mixes, I’d written the early hits and still got songwriting royalties every time they were played, anywhere in the world, and they were played–even more so as the platinum-machine version of the band crashed and burned. And of course, I still got royalties for all the music books, posters–and of course the t-shirts–of anything that said All The Rage.

Then Juan tried to recoup his losses with a stupid–stupid–stupid idea of smuggling dope for the Russian mob inside of tour equipment. He’s in a Russian jail, if he’s still alive.

And Julia …

The word on the street followed her; over time she became viewed as some sort of Dragon Lady who double-crossed her boyfriend and killed his band–killed the music. Nobody would touch her. And while the money had been coming in–especially with the extra income once they cut Tina loose as manager–Juan and Julia partied very heavily. They already had established drug connections–to get the stuff they used on me–but their personal drug use escalated. By the time Juan tossed her aside, her looks were fading, but due to heroin.

***

I’d stared at the photos on my screen, stunned. She was unrecognizable, as far as I was concerned. I had the hope that if I couldn’t recognize Julia in the scrawny, hollow-cheeked, dark empty eyes of the image–screaming and using both hands to flip off the photographer–then it couldn’t be Julia, right? It was some other Julia Knowles, or just some wasted junkie that came out of the door of the hotel where Julia was staying. Mistaken identity.

Right?

But there were other photos, backdated, showing the decline, and I felt sick to my stomach.

I’d never gotten involved with drugs–outside of the obvious, the pharmaceuticals that Julia fed me as ‘vitamins’–although they were always around. I never dealt with the ravages, the dependency, the …demons that drove somebody to destroy themselves with drugs.

And with all I’d learned, I had to admit that Julia had demons, demons that drove her to feminize me, to betray her band, her music, and her own body. What they were, I would never know. Her family had always been stiffly polite to me, at first when Julia and I moved in together because I wasn’t much of ‘a catch’ at the time; just a wannabe rock star. The other time I’d seen them, she was Juan’s girl, I was Lisa …Juan’s bitch, I supposed bitterly. How Juan and Julia must have laughed, but even Juan had no idea of the depths of Julia’s twisted soul.

In a way I could understand that she was never truly my love. My lover, yes, in the sense that we made love in a bed together but she was never in love with me. Never. That had been a hard truth to grasp but once I did, pain dissipated and healing began. I’d thought that Julia had, at least, been my friend. But she never had been, of course, but there was another factor.

Truth be told, I’d never had a real friend–I had a guitar. I had music. I had dreams. I was friendly with musicians I played with, and the closest to a friend would have to have been Robert. We’d gotten along great, playing together, before forming All The Rage. He’d warned me repeatedly about the path I walked with Julia, and I ignored him. Understandably, he pulled away, retreated, and then when he and Kayla learned about ‘my lifelong desire to be a girl’–never dreaming that it was Julia’s scheme–Robert’s last act of friendship was to allow me to have ‘my lifelong desire’. He kept his mouth shut, shook his head, and observed.

It wasn’t until I was close friends with Melanie that I realized I’d made a friend. I owed her so much; in a way, she’d saved me as much as Ted had. At first we’d talked about music, but that eventually became Girl Talk, and over time she became my guide, my mentor, and my shover-out-the-door when I was scared. Over the years we became tighter and tighter.

It was unusual to have any amount of time to make friends because I was so busy at the studio. I did strike up a potential new friendship with Suzie, the leader of The Weston Group, a phenomenal jazz group from New York that was drawn to our studio because of our sound. Suzie is also the most amazing, profoundly talented guitarist I have ever heard, bar none. She made me question ever going near mine again, and any pretensions I may have had that I was ‘God’s Gift to the Guitar’ were dispelled just listening to her warm-up.

And, to make me crazy, she’s an absolute sweetheart! We had three days recording together, with dinners afterwards, and just seemed to bond. After listening to the final mix, Suzie and I lost all track of time talking; Luke came to the studio with food and joined us. I think we’d still be talking music, but her group was headed to Sydney the next morning.

I hope we can get together again but we’ll keep in touch, I’m sure. I’ve been on the road so I know how intense and insane it can be. And I’m missing Mel, whose band got picked to open for the new Bon Jovi tour; I’m missing her fiercely. I have some non-musical friends, girls that I’ve met outside of the studio–like the yoga class that Mel had talked me into and then promptly dropped. But at least I developed a friendship with Kim, a realtor.

The more I thought about it, the more it came down to liking myself. In a way, Mike didn’t. That is, Mike never thought about it; all that drove him was the guitar, the song, the band, the dream …Perhaps that’s how he never noticed that Julia wasn’t really a friend, let alone a girlfriend. But I’m not Mike; I’m Lisa, and I like being Lisa–actually, I love being Lisa!–and I guess that maybe it radiates or something. Other people pick up on it. And yes, I know that a pretty girl gets more smiles than, well, just about anybody else, but it’s more than that. I’m happy, and I get happiness back. And so I have friends.

***

Thinking about differences between Mike and Lisa led me to, let’s call them ‘alternative tracks’. Like recording different instruments soloing on parallel tracks; which track you select changes the feeling of the song. When I was a recluse, with Mrs. Hernandez my only contact with the world, I ran through all sorts of bitter ‘What If?’ and ‘If Only’ scenarios. Of course, I had no knowledge of what had truly been done to me; it wasn’t until I ventured out into the world and bumped into Ted that I found out. There was a time of trying to view things with the new information, but that casual comment from the guy at the gas pump got me looking forward, not backward. And thank you again, Volvo-driving cute guy!

I decided to look at my past in a different way–Jenga. Yes, that silly-but-fun game of building towers with little wooden blocks until they collapse. Our studio green room has a bunch of ‘musician diversion kits’, as Ted calls them; games and puzzles and of course a video game console. I was playing Jenga with Brian; he was telling me about a session he’d just engineered and it was my turn but I was staring at the tower. He knew me enough that after ‘Lisa? It’s your turn?’ had no effect, he went off to have a sandwich.

The Jenga tower …if you take out this block, the tower stands. Take out that block, the tower falls. Take out this block and put it here and the tower is taller.

Mike was going to be a rock star. No ifs, ands, or maybes. He–it was easier to think of this in the third person–he had the talent and the drive, and the luck. So at some point, no matter what, Mike would be on the road, on tour, with a rock band, much as Melanie was right now.

The other absolute, I truly believed, was that Julia was equally driven, but by whatever dark and twisted thing is within her. As much as Mike would be on tour right now, no matter the path that led him there, Julia would be a junkie right now. It had to be so; it had to be. It was in the cards, in the stars, written in stone.

Mike had a girlfriend–or so he thought–so there were blocks that could be moved around. Remove the block where Julia joins the band–maybe Robert talked Mike out of it–but Julia would still be feminizing Mike. It’s possible that without the band, she would have joined another band and left Mike. In which case he continued on his way to be a rock star.

Remove the Juan block–the band doesn’t cancel; he never targets Mike–and some form of All The Rage continues on the road, Mike’s a rock star, blah-blah-blah …

Because at that point, I gave up on the exercise. Maybe it was because I’d been a rock star, but what I was doing now, musically, was so much more fulfilling. Not just because of winning Grammys; all alone in the studio listening to playback, it was better. I thought of the old saying, ‘I’ve been poor and I’ve been rich. Rich is better.’

Everything is better! I am happy with the person I am, the human being I’ve become. I love being a woman; I love being Lisa and I’m in love with a wonderful guy who loves me and why on earth would I spend even a minute more doing mental Jenga towers of ‘What If?’ when there was so much life to be lived?

***

That night at the hotel restaurant, I was a pretty and happy and contented girl. Successful, too. As I’d told Kayla and long ago accepted to myself, however I’d gotten here, I was grateful. Agony along the way, yeah, but now such happiness. And just thinking about how I felt made me think of Luke and smile. I was so lucky!

A few minutes later, I smiled even wider at seeing Luke coming through the crowd, Ted at his side. But I noticed that they were a little subdued. Luke and I kissed briefly and then there was an unusual, awkward moment between the three of us, broken by the hostess arriving.

“Your table is ready,” she beamed. “Please follow–”

Ted held a hand up. “Could you just give us a moment? We may have …we might have to change our plans.”

“Certainly, sir,” she smiled graciously, untroubled. “I’ll watch for when you’re ready.”

We watched her go and then they turned back to me. Looking between their uncomfortable faces, it was obvious that there was something that neither wanted to tell me about, and neither wanted to be the one to do it.

Finally Ted cleared his throat.

“Lisa, there’s something you need to know …” He ground to a halt, looking miserable.

“Geez, Ted,” I forced a chuckle. “Whatever you want to say, you can say in front of Luke!” I looked at my love, but he looked so sad.

Oh, God! I began to worry. What could be troubling Luke so much?

Ted squirmed and began, “And, uh …I have to be the one to tell you this. Uh …It’s about Julia …”

Reluctantly, but with a grim sense of purpose, Ted began telling me what he’d learned. Apparently he’d confided to Luke, who now quietly held my hand as Ted told the story.

Just an hour before, the news had just reported that Julia’s body had been found in an alley in Detroit. She’d been trying to buy some heroin and something had gone wrong. It wasn’t known what triggered it, but her throat had been slashed and she was lying in filth.

I was unable to process the information. I stared and my mouth tried to work but words wouldn’t come. Having dinner was out of the question, of course. Luke gently put his hand on my shoulder, the back of my neck.

“Lisa, honey?” he asked softly, worried.

“I’m …” I shook my head. “Obviously, I’m stunned. I’m …” My mind sputtered. “I’m things that begin with the letter S. Shocked, staggered, sickened, saddened, and so, so sorry …” I shook my head again. “I can’t process this all right now.”

“I’ll take you home,” Luke said.

“I love you, Luke,” I blurted, startling myself. “I love you so much …” I smiled and sniffed; tears were stinging. “I know this is hard for you; just …thank you for being there for me.”

“I always will be,” he smiled, so sweetly.

I stood and we hugged. Luke hugged tighter when the first shake hit me; two more and I controlled myself, nodded, kissed his cheek, and we separated. I looked at Ted, feeling somehow embarrassed by my shakes, but then I impulsively hugged him.

Close to his ear, I said, “Thank you for telling me the news. You’re right; it had to be you. Because you saved me five years ago. Bless you, Ted.” I kissed the back of his head. “See you in the morning.”

We went to get Luke’s car–and were swarmed with paparazzi. Over the years I’d gotten used to them being around but I was pretty small potatoes so they’d never really bothered with me. That night, unknown to me, a movie starlet who was in the newest Bourne blockbuster was supposed to be dining with another starlet and the paparazzi had gathered, drooling, ready for some salacious lesbian gossip. The ‘other starlet’ turned out to be the starlet’s sister from Omaha, dying of leukemia. If there was one thing the paparazzi was not interested in, it was a real human interest story.

They were disgusted, about to either hit the bar or troll the Strip for stories, when somebody had spotted me in the restaurant. They always had minute-by-minute newsfeeds so they had just heard about Julia. They saw me …and it was Feeding Time.

The lights, microphones, and cameras were all turned on Luke and I and the valet, who smiled and gave his name only to be rudely shoved aside by a burly TMZ reporter. The questions–all of them yelled–were all over the place.

“Lisa, can you tell us what you know about Julia’s death?”

“Lisa, what about the stories she and Juan drugged you?”

“Lisa, are you still a boy?”

And so on. I turned to Luke. “God, I’m so sorry, Luke.”

He smiled sadly. “They should leave you alone. But they won’t; we both know that. But please know, I’m here for you. Always. I love you, Lisa.”

And then, in front of the cameras, Luke kissed me. I was stunned, and I was blessed, and I was grateful.

I opened my eyes to see his smile.

Luke’s smile was warm and supportive. “You can do this. Go ahead.”

I was stunned by his so-public declaration of love and support under the circumstances. Over the past few years any media reference to me had been about my recent accomplishments, with only the occasional footnote about how I came to be Lisa. It was only in direct connection with All The Rage that anybody bothered with the details. Now, with the death of Julia and the paparazzi thirsting for scandal, it was all front page stuff again. Anyone associated with me would be dragged into the sex change story.

And yet Luke stood by me. He squeezed my hand as he turned me to face the paparazzi.

They were still shouting but I held up a hand, looking them in their cameras until they quieted.

“I will make my statement, and then we are going home and no further questions. Understood?”

Since I wasn’t in the talent stream that needed the paparazzi, I didn’t have to court them. I was in the driver’s seat for a moment. They murmured agreements, keeping the cameras on me.

What could I say about Julia? That she betrayed me and everything I loved?

That she ultimately betrayed herself?

I cleared my throat.

“Like all of you, I’ve only just learned of the tragic death of Julia Knowles. And it is tragic; I’m not using the term lightly. She was a beautiful and talented musician, and the loss of her music is the world’s loss. Who knows what she might have been capable of, had she gone on as a mature artist.”

I cleared my throat again.

“There was a time when Julia was one of the great loves of my life. Things change, people change. But she always remained in my thoughts and was instrumental in …”

I cleared my throat once more, to cover my hesitation. Suddenly I realized what I was going to say, what I was going to declare. What had to be said. It wasn’t the truth, but it was right.

“Julia and I were so close for so long that she recognized the female within me. It was only through her encouragement that I could become, fully, the person I am. The tragedy is that Julia herself did not get the opportunity to fully become the person she could be.”

I frowned. How far to go into it?

“There are all sorts of rumors and …facts …” I used air quotes. “…about what happened to me in my band All The Rage.” There; I’d said ‘my’ band. “I can assure you–as anybody reasonable can–that they can’t all be true–despite what you believe about the world of rock ‘n roll!”

That got chuckles, a good sign. I gave a weak smile.

“Music is strong and powerful. Sometimes people are attracted to that power and forget about the music. I think, without truly knowing, that Julia got distracted along the way. I’m sorry I wasn’t there for her, but our lives went in different directions.”

I paused and swallowed.

“I’d just like people to think of Julia in the first year or two of All The Rage. Listen to her singing; listen to her playing. Listen to the life in her, and remember that instead of the circumstances of her death.”

A final pause.

“I’m going to go home now and cry for my lost friend. Thank you.”

I stood, resolute and silent, until the camera lights turned off, microphones were holstered, and the mob moved away. Then I gratefully folded myself under Luke’s waiting arm and put my arms around him. I was starting to shake again. Instead of walking, he stood there and held me, keeping me centered.

Finally, I smiled sadly, leaned up and kissed the lips of this wonderful man I love, and we went home.

The End