If You Only Knew (14 page)

CHAPTER 32

ON SEPTEMBER 2, 2000,
Danny was behind the counter rearranging some rings underneath the glass case when Vonlee walked into the store.

“Why the hell ain't you answering your phone?” Vonlee said upon greeting Danny.

Danny knew what she meant. Vonlee had called him that morning at 9:47, 11:06, and then that afternoon at 12:43. Each time, Danny watched the phone ring, but he did not pick it up.

“I just got into shop,” Danny said. “Listen, I been going through a lot of emotional issues. Come on.”

Vonlee was curious. Something was up. She could sense it.

“Everything will be okay as long as you don't talk to nobody about what I told you,” Vonlee said. She stared at Danny.

“Okay . . . okay—” Danny tried to say something before Vonlee cut him off.

“If you have a nervous breakdown and decide to go to the police,” Vonlee said (according to notes Danny made of the visit and conversation shortly after), “I will tell them I was lying and the only reason you're doing this is because I stopped seeing you!”

Danny looked around his shop. There were a few customers meandering, checking out necklaces and bracelets. He walked out from behind the counter. Put an arm around Vonlee's waist.

“Let's go outside there and talk,” Danny said.

Vonlee appeared dazed and upset.

“It's okay,” Danny said, sounding as reassuring as he could. He kissed her. “I need to work right now.”

“If you want to go out with me, call me,” Vonlee said.

“Okay, okay.”

As Danny stood by and watched, Vonlee got into her vehicle, started it and took off.

CHAPTER 33

SHE STEPPED OUT OF
the shower. Grabbed a towel, dried herself off. Fixed her hair and makeup. Then she gently tucked her penis underneath and in between her legs to hide it completely. She stood in front of the body-length mirror, staring at . . .

A woman.

“I just wanted to see her,” Vonlee recalled, speaking of herself in the third person. “It's like she was in there . . . but I was constantly fighting on the outside to fit in somewhere.”

Being transgender was a frightening thought. But there was very little Vonlee could do about it. She'd go through trends, trying her best to do “what guys are supposed to do,” and then go back to being female. At one time, it was a continuous battle, rooted entirely in the way society viewed her.

Living in Nashville, going to the clubs that accepted her, Vonlee felt “the easy thing for me to do was to be a gay boy.” She would not go against the grain and force herself onto a world that wanted to keep her confined inside drag queen clubs. Even in a city that was conservative but had liberal foundations, it was a constant struggle for her to live as a female outside of the box. Some did not want to accept the fact that there were people without a choice in the world, living lives they did not want.

“People really didn't understand transgender then,” Vonlee explained about the mid-1980s. “So it was so much easier just to be gay, and date gay men.”

But it felt wrong. She was fighting internally with herself. Vonlee had many of the parts of a female, except the one that mattered most. What stopped Vonlee all her life about getting the final operation was not the money, as some would come later to believe (she could go to Montreal, Canada, and get it done for twenty-five thousand dollars or less—and had already picked out the doctor and had spoken to him), but the finality of it all.

“Look, I knew who I was and who I wanted to be, but I thought then, okay, this is enough for me. I'm attracted to men. So I could dress up every now and then and just live as a gay man. I thought it would be enough. ”

Every time she wanted to complete the transformation, she'd go back to the fact that it was irreversible, and that thought overpowered her feelings.

There was a chance that after the operation, Vonlee explained, she could lose her sensation of ever having an orgasm again (either as a male or a female), and it played heavily on her decision.

As she entered the gay scene, Vonlee was attractive to many of the more “manly” gay men that liked effeminate guys. She'd always go for “older men that happened to have a lot of money,” she explained, but not as a shark on the hunt. It just happened that those were the men she was attracted to, she claimed.

“They took me on trips and showed me things I had never seen before,” Vonlee said.

She found a happy medium, one could say. These guys did not mind her dressing up as a female from time to time, but all of them were unified in that they did not want her to ever change her body completely. They wanted her to stay male. Anytime she mentioned the words “transsexual” and “operation,” she would get an argument.

“They wanted me to be a feminine
boy,
” Vonlee said.

The claim that Vonlee sought out men with money and made it a routine to land them was, at best, farfetched. “I never gravitated toward men with money,” she said with a sarcastic laugh. “Men with money gravitated toward me.”

The thing about Vonlee then was that she came across as extremely intimidating: Most insecure gay men were afraid to approach her. She had a visceral, almost glamorous quality to everything she did. It was evident in the way she dressed and spoke, the things she liked, even the exotic drinks in her hand.

“Why wouldn't you come up to me earlier?” she'd ask a man who had kind of lurked around her for hours in a club before introducing himself.

“Because you're beautiful and intimidating” was the common response.

The guys with money—the confident ones who were happy in their own skin—were less intimidated by her, however.

On top of that, “I did not want to date a bum,” Vonlee said, again laughing at herself. “Why would I want to do that?”

As Vonlee forced herself to get used to the Nashville gay scene, she wound up working at a salon (she had gone to cosmetology school outside of Nashville after relocating from Maryville), where she did hair and nails. She also managed a few restaurants and bartended. She had no trouble making money and supporting herself.

Back then, life was comfortable and quiet, Vonlee explained. Still, living as a gay man, dating only gay men, was not what she wanted deep down. Vonlee yearned to live her life as a female, completely. That meant dating heterosexual males and getting the final operation.

A relationship she soon entered into with a gay man, however, turned into more: Vonlee fell in love. It was a time when she had amped down the female hormones, and the transformation was in a sort of holding pattern.

“I had these little bitty titties,” she explained, “and was very . . . um, androgynous—people would look at me and say, ‘Is that a girl or a guy?' Kind of like that Jodie Foster look.”

But her body and attitude changed as she took her medication and soon got a job traveling, selling cleaning products.

“That job was perfect for me.”

She was in New York one week, Los Angeles the next. Big cities. More accepting. Bigger scenes. Different people.

Then she traveled to New Orleans one time and met a man. He was gay.

Generally, whenever Vonlee went out, she did her makeup and hit the clubs as a female. One night, while in New Orleans, the power was out and she couldn't convert herself into a female, so she went out as a male.

A man walked up to her. He was manly. Gay, but truly a “guy's guy.”

“Bill, good to meet you,” he said. There was an attraction almost immediately between Bill (pseudonym) and Vonlee. An energy.

It was love, Vonlee said. Maybe not at first sight, but shortly thereafter.

They began a relationship.

“I really,
really
loved this guy,” Vonlee explained. “The sex was good. We connected on just about every level.” The problem was that “he did not want me to become a female.”

Her hope was that after she explained that her life's desire was to complete the transformation, he would accept her and they could continue. But there was no way. He wanted to be with a guy. He was a homosexual.

Vonlee loved him enough not to go through with it. They moved in together. The years added up. Now heading toward her midtwenties, having lived in a gay relationship (as a gay male) for three years, Vonlee sat Bill down and got honest with him to see if perhaps he might change his mind.

“I cannot do this anymore.”

“What?”

“Us.”

“Us?”

“Yeah. I need to be who I am. . . . I need to get back on track.”

They lived another three years together as Vonlee went back to focusing on taking the hormones and working toward the operation.

Bill finally said one night, “Look, I love you, but I will always look at you as a boy in a bra.”

By this point, they owned a home together. Yet, when Bill mentioned how he would always view her as a boy, “something just clicked for me,” Vonlee remembered.

They sold the house. Split all of their assets equally.

“And we stayed really best friends,” Vonlee said. “I just . . . He never looked at me the way I wanted a guy to look at me—which was, you know, that look of me being the girl that I was.”

Vonlee now faced a blank-slate future she could write for herself. This would require a substantial move. She had a friend who liked to dress up, but had not made the transformation with hormones like she had. They'd worked together.

“Denver,” Vonlee's girlfriend suggested. “I used to live there.”

Vonlee had heard there was quite the transgender scene in Denver. And on top of that, she needed to break away from her memories in Nashville. Also, she was thinking about starting a new business with several “girls” she had met and befriended, along with several more she was told lived in Denver.

“What kind of business?” one of the girls asked as they prepared to leave.

“An escort service,” Vonlee said.

CHAPTER 34

Vonlee had called Danny and he was returning her call. He didn't want to make Vonlee any more suspicious than she already was, so he'd decided to touch base and see where she was at. It was near the end of September. They had not spoken for seven days.

“Hey . . . hello,” Vonlee said. She sounded strange—her voice, her tone.

“You got a cold or something?” Danny asked.

She said no, but she'd had some dental work done and wasn't feeling all that great. The entire right side of her face was still numb.

Danny was asking why he hadn't heard from her in so long. It had been a week, he told her, and she disagreed with how long it had been.

“Listen,” Danny said. He sounded different. Hyper and anxious. It was like he wanted something, but didn't know how to ask. “You okay? You sound so different?”

“Yeah . . . ,” she said. “You do not sound like yourself, either!” Danny wasn't prone to talking fast. She could tell he was nervous and—strangely enough—she had picked up on something wrong with him.

Danny was recording the call for the TPD, of course.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“You sound
funny,
” Vonlee said guardedly.

“Maybe the phone—”

“No . . . ,” she said. It was more than that, but Vonlee couldn't put her finger on it.

“What do you mean?” Danny asked.

“I don't know. It's weird.”

Vonlee talked about the dental work she had and Danny interrupted, asking if she had a new boyfriend yet.

“Hell no,” Vonlee answered, her sassy Southern accent clear and pronounced.

Danny asked about Billie Jean. How was she doing? Had Vonlee and her aunt gone to the casino lately?

“She's down there right now,” Vonlee said.

They talked about menial things: Vonlee's car, the casinos Vonlee and her aunt had been going to, how she was doing. Danny wanted to know if Vonlee was planning on going down to the casino anytime soon. He gave the impression that he wanted to meet her there.

Vonlee wasn't sure, she said, because she was taking painkillers for her teeth and she was tired and loopy all the time.

As they continued, Danny became more comfortable, and Vonlee opened up a bit about what was going on in her life. She was conflicted about her aunt, she explained. Billie Jean was spending like crazy. She was her same old self, going to the casino and gambling her nights away. Vonlee said she was thinking about getting an apartment and moving out, but worried Billie Jean might need her help around the house. She was torn over whether to leave or not.

“I think you helped her enough already,” Danny said with a modicum of sarcasm. It was as if he were saying:
“What more does the woman want? You helped her kill her husband
.
”

Vonlee was mumbling, probably because of the drugs. Then Danny asked what happened when “those people” (the cops) came to the house. What did they want?

“Oh, they wanted to ask about Don's best friend.”

“They questioned his best friend?” Danny asked, sounding confused.

“Yeah. . . .”

“Why would they question his best friend?”

Vonlee explained that the cops wanted to know about Billie Jean's marriage to Don, the business, and why the kids (Don's) would say the things they were. Apparently, Don's kids had been putting pressure on the TPD to investigate.

“He [Don's best friend] told them,” Vonlee explained, “that Don was slowly going downhill. He never had a problem with his marriage and the will was written when he was of sound mind, and that the kids were evil.... And [the cops] said that as far as they were concerned, it's over with. . . .”

The problem arose when Billie Jean had told Don's daughter that she and Vonlee had gotten home around eleven o'clock on the night they found Don, but the widow had told the police it was three in the morning. The discrepancy in times was enough to arouse some suspicion, according to what Vonlee had heard from Billie Jean recently. But Vonlee's aunt explained to the police that she only told Don's daughter that because she didn't want to admit to being out all night gambling.

“It don't matter,” Vonlee said, when Danny mentioned how they would have to account for that missing time. “They have us on film down there [at the casino], and the detective said that Billie probably thought it was none of the daughter's business what she was doing.”

“I just hope everything is okay,” Danny said after the two of them chitchatted some more about Vonlee's car and how she and Billie Jean had wanted to return it to the dealer, but the dealer was fighting them and would not take it back. Billie Jean wanted “her money” back for Vonlee's car, Vonlee had told Danny earlier in the conversation. There were mechanical problems, along with warranty issues, and they were extremely unhappy. Vonlee was especially pissed off after the salesman, laughing, had said to her, “You think this is Kmart and you can get a refund?”

“You should have showed him how much money you gave and shown him that checkbook of yours,” Danny said, laughing.

Vonlee laughed back.

They chatted about life in general and Vonlee's teeth and what time Danny was closing his jewelry shop. Then, after hanging up and calling each other back a few times, they made plans to meet for dinner. Danny claimed he needed to go home and shower after closing his shop. Vonlee questioned why.

After a bit of discussion about that, Danny agreed to close the shop early and not go home. Instead, he'd meet her at the casino.