former Motley Crue drummer and all around bad boy Tommy Lee

(The following story originally appeared in Shinan Govani’s gossip column in the January 31st, 2006, issue of the National Post. Shinan was the first to break the story of my Crying Game-style collision with former Motley Crue drummer and reality TV star Tommy Lee. I will finally be telling my full version of the events of that night in the upcoming production of The Silicone Diaries, Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, Nov 14-21, 416-975-8555 for tickets. MY SIDE OF THE STORY ISN’T WHAT YOU’RE EXPECTING…)

If she talks like a woman, but walks like a man …

Is Tommy Lee hoping to star in a remake of Twelfth Night?

Motley Crue met both gender confusion and the body politic on Saturday night when the ex-Mr. Pamela Anderson dropped into the Ultra Supper Club on Queen. With the much-tattooed rock hooligan causing a constant hum in the restaurant — particularly among the touchy-feely lady-skeletons poured into Rock and Republic denim – one particular woman was singled out by Mr. Lee.

The woman — a knock-out, by any definition — shared more than a few moments with the rocker. They talked. They flirted. They did some tequila. She sat on his lap.

Jealousy, meanwhile, spread through the room like Raid being unleashed, ferociously, from a can. Why — you could see the bubblequotes over the heads of all the many bimbionics — did she get to sit on his lap, and not them? Why, why, why?

Others smirked.

For it was only later — many moments and metaphoric lifetimes later — that somebody clued Tommy into the fact that the woman on his lap had not come into the world that way. That this woman used to be a man. And not just any woman who used to be a man.

“My body looked incredible, if I do say so myself,” Nina Arsenault, the certifiable transsexual, told me yesterday about her walk on the rock-star side. Besides being Canada’s most famous she-male, she is a Zelig on the club scene, a Tiger Woods of cosmetic surgery, a columnist for Fab magazine and even a former GO train rider. (She once had a story arc on Global’s now dearly departed Train 48!)

She’s also the beauty queen who, not long ago, revealed in Fab: “I’ve had sex with two professional athletes, a movie star, two TV personalities, the CEOs of two Fortune 500 companies, four guys who worked for the mob, a string of strippers, many male models, a bunch of body builders, loads of night clubbing suburban guys … all of them straight.”

Nina says that she was approached twice by Lee’s “people” before she finally decided to go and meet the famous musician and reality-TV star. She “crouched” on the floor beside and looked up at him. “An old tactic,” she says, discussing her technique. He then told her she was “extraordinarily beautiful.” You, she told him, “look better in person.” After that, they ordered two shots each. She downed hers quickly, while he, she says, “gagged” on his. She wasted no time, then, in calling him a “p—y.” He apologized, telling her: “I’ve been drinking tequila since 7 a.m.” Excuses, excuses.

Things, you see, were going just swimmingly, when somebody took it upon themselves to tell Lee’s bodyguard about the Nip/ Tuck-ness of it all, and the bodyguard then whispered something in the star’s ear. “That’s when he took a good, long look at me,” Nina recalls.

A bucket of cold water seemed to come splashing down. “You know what? I’m dying for a cigarette,” Lee was heard to say, as he got up from the table with his posse. “Great!” said Nina, as she trailed behind them. As they were approaching the “smoking room,” however, Lee’s bodyguard put up his hand and laid down the law. “You’re not coming with us,” he told her.

Too good to last? Peut-etre. But it certainly gave people something to talk about — both at Ultra and at This is London, the revamped downtown club responsible for bringing Tommy in for an appearance, and where the rocker dutifully headed later.

After keeping the crowd eager and begging for hours, Lee climbed a stage at the packed club — finally — at about 1:40 a.m. It wasn’t a concert, by any definition. What it was, instead, was a surreal spectacle whereupon the performer flailed his arms for hours like a banshee, moving to the music being spun by the DJ beside him. Every so often, he would let loose with some “air drums” and let out a squeal.

And what happened to the notorious Nina? She decided to just give This Is London a pass. “What,” she asks ruefully, “was the point?”

(Shinan Govani)