I knew that living back at home for a few weeks would be kind of strange, but shortly after my arrival it got stranger than I'd ever thought possible. As it turned out my grandmother was a genuine witch who---tired of our constant bickering---put a transcorporation spell on my sister Joy and me, body-swapping us...

On Saturday my gravely ill father cursed me as a godless murderess and banished me from his life forever. Then Joy (who we were now calling Joey...) thought it would be funny to try and sabotage my relationship with my life partner Ricky, which led to the frantic punch-out between us that cause the death of Grandma Rosa's sinister antique cookie jar & drove her to go stay elsewhere.

By Sunday morning the situation had completely fallen apart, and we still had 26 days to go until we'd be returned to our own bodies. Would my brother and I murder each other before then? Or would we somehow learn to...

PLAY . . NICE!
LAIKA PUPKINO ~ 2009
PART SIX: DAMAGE CONTROL

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||| SUNDAY OCTOBER 5 (continued...)

Joey and I spent the rest of the morning dodging each other. I think we were both a bit alarmed over that fight we'd had at sunrise. By how intense it had got.

When he came into the kitchen I grabbed my plate of Eggo waffles and slipped out the front door, ate sitting on the battered old oak porch swing we had hanging out there. And when I came back inside he abandoned whatever he was watching on t.v. and went upstairs. For a while he was making a lot of noise hammering on something up there, which bugged the hell out of me. But after he fell silent this was bugging me too. Just knowing he was up there, doing whatever, with that dopey look on his face.

I was about to trade my kimono bathrobe for the outfit I'd had on last night, to hop in my truck and drive someplace...

When Joey came rushing down the stairs and made a break for the door. I asked him where he was off to, and before he could start ranting about this being none of my business I added, "I just want to know if you'll be gone long, is all."

"Probably. Depends on if anything good's playing at the 16."

The clock on the wall said a quarter to nine. I told him, "You realize the first movie usually isn't until around noon, right?"

"Well no shit, Sherlock!" he snorted, "The bus'll get me to the mall about the time it opens, I can poke around the shops for an hour or two. I really need to get some sunglasses. And then I guess I'd better drop in on Papa. So I'll probably be home around dinnertime. Or not. I hear Jenny Thurston is back from New York. She had a kid back in July, is living with her mom. I might go see how she's doing. See ya!"

Jenny was the one person who had managed to stay friends with both Joy and me all through high school, after our schism back in the ninth grade. But then the brainy basketball player had always had a talent for this sort of thing, moving effortlessly between the various student cliques. She'd never been much of a partier, and with this baby was probably even less of one; and of all the former associates he could be looking up I was glad it was her. I lifted my palm, "Okay, see ya then. And I should probably go drop in on Dad too..."

But not today, I grinned as I watched Joey loping down the sidewalk toward the bus stop. I needed at least one day to recover before I ventured back into that hospital room, and with the house to myself today I would be able to kick back and relax around here.

I wasn't sure how many more times I'd try to visit my father. If all my attempts went like yesterday's it wouldn't be many, but I would take any small improvement in his disposition as a sign to press on. Or perhaps he really had written Joy off for good, and nothing I did as his ersatz daughter would appease him. And if that was the case then what was I even doing here? If all my visits did was drive him into an apoplectic rage then neither of us were benefitting from them. I could leave, maybe go down the coast and do a little gambling.

Atlantic City was no substitute for the sheer absurd spectacle of Las Vegas, but it was a lot closer. Intellectually I knew there was probably nothing to this, but I kept imagining my situation as being something like "astral projection", as if there was some invisible ectoplasmic umbilical cord between me and my own body, which I didn't want to put strain on or have it get tangled up on the corner of some building by venturing too far from where Joey was. Yet putting a little distance between us would keep me and my brother away from each other's throats...

Just about everything in the rather limited wardrobe the swap had left me with needed washing. I tossed it into our old avacado green washing machine and washed it on MEDIUM. This cotton kimono Grandma had loaned me was lightweight and comfortable, much like the one you'd find me lounging around in at home on a lazy weekend day; except for being smaller, and a good deal more colorful than my own rather monkish one; these explosions of cherry blossoms crowding its night sky surface being close enough in color to satisfy Grandma's fuchsia fetish.

The Times sports section reminded me that the Mets were playing the Padres at Mission Park today at noon. There were things I needed to do, but it made sense to consolidate all these trips, do them tomorrow after the library opens and I finally contact Ricky on their public computers. Today I could just be lazy and screw off. Maybe watch another flick before the game started.

I sat on the floor in front of the video hutch and started looking through the movies. All the VHS cassettes from my childhood were gone, except for a set called Build Your Own Bathroom With Bob Villa- a project that Dad had been promising to get around to for years. I couldn't believe how many new DVD's my dad had aquired. They were stacked two deep in most places. He had a dozen Clint Eastwood films, the entire Band of Brothers series, the various incarnations of CIA analyst Jack Ryan, and all the Die Hard movies including the latest one- which I didn't even know was out in video yet.

Then I noticed something slightly off about all his newer titles. The cases were somewhat flimsier looking, the artwork just a touch grainy. And while they all bore the expected trademarks---Dreamworks, Paramount, New Line---each of them also said, in plain black lettering inside a tiny white legend along the bottom: CHEKA FILMS.

Oh Hell. Grisha...

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The phone was ringing, sitting on the table next to the couch. I scrambled over to it, "Hello?"

"Oh good, it's you."

"Grandma?"

"Yep. Hey listen," she said quickly, "I'm really sorry if I got a little hysterical this morning. But when I saw the two of you fighting with that big butcher knife-"

"It was a scizzors," I corrected her.

"Really? Well I was half asleep. Or was until then anyway!"

"I hope you realize we weren't actually trying to stick each other with it," I said, and even as I did I had a strange twinge of doubt about this. "I uh ........ I was cutting my bangs off and Joey was trying to stop me. I was paying him back for shaving my beard off. Did you notice he did that?"

"An eye for an eye ends with everyone blind," quoted Grandma. "All I know is when I stepped into that kitchen I thought I'd made a wrong turn somewhere and wandered into the damned Roman Colosseum! And I realized right then that I needed to be here at Birda's for the spell we're doing, not just dropping in for my shifts as cantress. All of us here need to stay calm, and focused. If we keep chanting and don't break the chain we might actually have a chance with this."

"That's great! But of course when you do the hospital will take all the credit for it," I teased.

"Let them. I just want my boy alive and well. But anyway Teddi, I'm glad it's you I got ahold of. I wanted you to have the phone number here in case of emergencies, or anything major you might need to talk to me about. You got a pen and paper handy?"

I jotted down the number she read to me in the margin of the color Comics section and tore it off, along with part of Garfield's right ear. "So you're saying you don't want Joey to have this?"

"Don't start gloating now, because it's really no great accomplishment to be more considerate of other people than he is, but you are. And with your job and everything, you have a better head for what constitutes a real emergency and what doesn't. In a few days I'll give Joey this number too, but we're at such a crucial phase with this spell, I just can't risk getting dragged into some pointless chaos!"

"Do whatever you need to do. I'm really rooting for you to succeed with this thing."

"Thank you! We need all the positive energy we can get right now. I'm glad you're not the skeptic you were a couple of days ago."

"That was then. You could say I've aquired a body of evidence concerning magic since then..."

"Cute," she chuckled, "The girls'll get a kick out of that one."

"So this healing spell. Is that what you were chanting in your room at three in the morning?"

"It was. It's tough working out the pronounciation of a language no one's spoken in a couple of millennea. And I never would've got it using old Aramaic as my starting point. But Francine---an honest-to-God Salem witch, who just joined us this morning---she managed to channel a fellow who was alive back then and was willing to tutor us. Well mostly he just wanted to talk, like the disembodied tend to do. Kept going on and on about the neighbor who used to keep him up all night playing his pan pipes, or some crook of a blacksmith that overcharged him when he fixed his chariot, and then didn't even do it right. You don't want to remind someone that all the things he's bitching about turned to dust centuries ago, but sometimes you have to. To steer him back to the translating. But without Shantazmobobia, and without Francine's being able to channel him, we wouldn't have got to start. This was a huge load off my mind!"

To me their long-dead helper sounded about as authentic as Mel Brooks' 2000-Year-Old-Man routine. But I reminded myself of some of the things I had seen Grandma do. I said, "You seem like you're in a better mood than when you left here this morning."

"Oh I am, I am! And I realized I had to call you. To apologize for being so crabby, and let you know I really haven't abandoned you kids. That I'll drop in when I can. So how is it over there?"

"Pretty frosty right now. I know I'm sure pissed off! You know what started this, don't you?"

"What you were saying. He shaved off his- your beard."

I laughed humorlessly, "That? That was nothing, compared to the shit he pulled on me last night! I have to admit it was inspired, in a sick twisted kind of way. You remember that CSI episode we watched yesterday? The old guy in the diaper?"

She sighed. "Like I said before, it takes two to have a fight. These things are subjective."

"Subjective? This wasn't a fight, it was a mugging! Pearl-fucking-Harbor! Nothing subjective about that: 'TORA! TORA! TORA!' N-nyeeeeeeeeoow- BOOM!! Ratatat-tat-tat! P'koo! P'koo! P'koo! Aa-OOOOOGA! Aa-OOOOOOOOOGA! 'All hands to battle stations!' Joey got on the phone with my boyfriend and-"

"Okay, I believe you! I've seen your sister do some really rotten stuff in her time. But tell me about it later- Please! I'm sorry, I just can't abide any negativity now. This spell has to come first!"

"It's cool," I said, and it was. It wasn't as if Grandma pulled this 'I can't handle you right now' stuff very often. She had always been a thoughtful and helpful listener. Still I wished there was somebody I could tell all this to. And suddenly I laughed, "I just had a wild idea! Maybe I should write about everything that's happened to me since Friday. It'd make a hell of a story, wouldn't it? It's funny, I used to love to write, but I can't remember the last time I wrote something. Or painted, did anything creative..."

"That was a beautiful Eulogy you composed for Elizabeth. Everyone at the funeral thought so."

"That came easy. You don't have to look very hard to find good things to say about Mom. The hardest part was having to take out about half of it, getting it down to five pages. But that really isn't a lot to show for the past decade. I used to always feel sorry for people, older people who'd tell me how they 'used to be' a writer; thinking how could they give up something so rewarding?! But now I know. It just happens. Life gets busy and the next thing you know it's been ten years.."

"So maybe it could un-happen. This change in perspective might just give you the shot in the arm you needed. I wrote some of my best poems during that year I spent as a Scotsman. I was a regular Bobby Burns!"

"Yeah, maybe it could," I drawled. "There's this website where a neighbor of mine posts her stories; it's all body swaps and weird viruses from space changing people's sex. Except for the fact that it's non-fiction this'd fit right in there! I could call it-"

I stopped. Looking down I noticed that I still had one of my father's new DVD's in my hand. A filthy, battered and bleeding Bruce Willis was scowling up at me from the cover of Eat Shit And Die Hard. And now I remembered what I wanted to ask Grandma Rosa.

"Call it what?" she prompted.

"Hell I don't know ......... Say, do you know if Papa is still hanging out with The Russian?"

"Uncle Grisha? You bet he is. They're thick as thieves," she chuckled.

"Grisha's not even a real gangster. He's a phony!"

"Well of course. You'd prefer he was actually mob connected? He's been down to the hospital every day. He bought Jojo this great big bouquet shaped like a horseshoe, ugliest thing you ever saw! But you can just tell Grisha's worried sick about him. So let them play black marketeer. Hell, it's mostly all nickel and dime stuff anyway."

Nor was this "uncle" of mine really any sort of relative. But on our first meeting with this big scary funny-talking, funny-smelling foreigner (with his dark baleful eyes and his massive unruly black beard he bore an alarming resemblance to Bluto from the Popeye cartoons) he'd taken an instant shine to Joy and me, and with the mawkish sentimentality of a booze-hound had insisted that we call him Uncle. At which Papa had shot us a stern look, warning us to humor this weirdo. That here was a fixer who it would be good for our family to be on the good side of.

Like a lot of people up and down this part of the eastern seaboard, my father had always loved the idea of swag. Of saving money and sidestepping the damned government's sales tax through backdoor deals.

The trouble was that Dad never seemed to get in on the real bonanzas but mostly got rooked into buying junk. I think people knew they could sell him just about anything if they kept looking over their shoulder while they did it. Like that horribly outdated word processor he wanted to get to do the restaurant's bookkeeping on, which I saved him from buying at the last minute. And when I pointed him to an actual good deal at Best Buy later, he'd lost all interest in computers. Or those six cases of Argentine salmon that Grisha had sold him at a $1.33 a can. I didn't have the heart to tell him when I saw those same big red and yellow cans on the shelves of the 99 ¢ store a few days later...

I set the DVD down. "Grisha's selling pirated movies now?"

"Sure is. Between his weekends at the swap meet, supplying all six of Raji's liquor stores and the stops he makes with his van down along Industry Parkway, this is the best he's done for himself in a while. This isn't one of his scams that he can only pull on someone once. These are quality bootlegs and people like them. He sells them so cheap, I can't imagine what he's paying for them. Probably cost more to ship over here than they do to manufacture. It looks like our Russian's finally found his niche in the underworld."

"If the Feds don't get him. This isn't like dubbing your friends a few films off of cable."

"He's a big boy, he knows the risks."

"I hope so," I clucked. "And as weird as this sounds I can almost picture Uncle Grisha enjoying being in federal prison. Playing chess, watching his Judge Judy, bullshitting any con who will listen about jobs he's pulled off that are a whole lot heavier than anything he really ever did..."

She thought about this. "Maybe he would at that. I've never got the same story from him twice, but I don't think he's eligible for Social Security. It'd be a kind of retirement for him. And he was raised in a police state after all---someone telling him where he could go, when he could eat---so you might just be right. Will I see you around the hospital some time?"

"Definitely! Not today, but I'll be there tomorrow for sure. I can't just hide from Dad. He's the whole reason I'm here."

"That's my girl!" she said proudly, "I'll see you tomorrow morning. I love you."

"Okay. Love you Grandma-"

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Between reading the Sunday paper and channel surfing between three different television preachers (all in outfits that made them look like some weird breed of superhero), I never did put a second movie on. And I wound up not watching the game either.

Passing the dining room hutch on my way back from the kitchen I caught sight of myself in the mirror behind it. I really shouldn't have taken those scizzor to my hair. I had bangs over the one side but not the other now, like Hitler. I didn't want to just lop the rest of them off, in case there was another solution. There was a salon called Sirens a few blocks away that had always given me a decent haircut as a guy. I should drop in there and see what they had to say.

Pushing the torn fringe of hair this way and that, I saw that my face still looked as pallid and burnt out as it had yesterday. I leaned in toward my reflection and moaned hungrily, "Br-a-a-a-a-a-ins!"

Okay, not funny. I decided that this was a perfect time to start experimenting with Joy's makeup. Since I was just going to hang around the house no one would see it when I screwed this up.

I went upstairs and into the bathroom. As I opened the big clear cube-shaped plastic box adorned with pop art daisies and started exploring what all Joy had in all there, I wasn't shooting for "fabulous", just marginally presentable and not strange looking.

There were various lip pencils, which I wasn't sure about the use of, but the regular lipstick seemed simple enough to put on. The one I picked had a purplish tinge to it that I didn't much like, but both "Truckstop Hooker Red" and "Pyrotechnic Pink" seemed far too bright for my pale skin. When I twisted the tube and the glossy little bullet emerged I thought: Yuck! Joy was using this. Do I really want to put it on my mouth? I'd had this same thought before when I first went to use her toothbrush, and again I had to laugh when I realized, Hey idiot, you ARE Joy! Any germs that are on this are on you too!

I might have put it on a bit thick (Too late, I remembered the trick I'd seen Mom do, where she would only put it on the top lip and then sort of kiss it onto the bottom one. Or was it the other way around?) but I was satisfied, having colored nothing more or less than I should have.

These super-thin eyebrows I was sporting almost looked like I didn't have any. I always thought Joy had looked better when they were just a bit bushy, giving her face a certain unassuming innocence .......... I chose an eyebrow pencil that was a shade or two lighter than the Magic Marker black of my hair, and carefully did one brow then the other. And now my eyelashes looked pale by comparison, my eyes too small.

This seemed like the phase of the operation that I would be most likely to botch, but luckily her tube of mascara was nearly depleted, so it didn't go on all goopy but took running the little brush over them several times to give my eyes some definition. I knew there was something Joy did to her cheeks to disguise the residual roughness from the terrible acne she'd suffered as a teen, but the whole pallet of available skin stuff and eyelid stuff seemed a bit daunting right now, and I thought I should quit while I was ahead. I was pleased to note that I only looked half as anemic as I did before. That my modest efforts had worked to bring out what was pretty about this face.

Though it was alien to apply this term to myself I recognized that pretty would be the name of the game for the next month. And really, it wasn't all that alien. Hadn't I always enjoyed looking my best? Just as pink and blue weren't really all that far apart on the total spectrum of radiation, "pretty" and "handsome" were not entirely different things, but points on a continuum. Or something. So it would be plain neurotic of me to fight the pleasure I got in acknowledging my own beauty---a sense of security or what have you---out of some goonish macho principal.

So I hadn't made the total mess of myself that I'd expected to. I was satisfied that I could actually go out like this if I had to. Which was fortunate, because a half hour later I did have to...

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As noon approached I turned it to the channel that the game would be broadcast on. In one of the commercials that came on two adorable moptop college students---a boy and a girl---were flirting via text messaging, using computers that sat a few feet apart in some funky little cybercafé, shooting each other quizzical expressions and grinning smugly to themselves as they composed their messages. The girl didn't understand the boy's acronym YDABT at first, but it turned out to mean "You Deserve A Break Today", and she responded with unbounded enthusiasm and the message ILI ("I'm Lovin' It!") before they hurried off across the street to the McDonalds that had suddenly appeared there. "YDABT" and "ILI" were flashed on the screen, both apparently registered trademarks of the burger chain.

A vapid and unremarkable ad, except that it gave me a fantastic idea: Isn't there's an internet café down near the university? If there is I won't have to wait until tomorrow but can contact Ricky right now! A quick look through the yellow pages told me nothing conclusive. I decided to gamble on my memories, hoping that the place hadn't closed down with the spread of laptops and WiFi.

The laundry I had tumbling in the drier wasn't quite done yet but I went ahead and put on the panties and bra, the jeans and top I'd had on yesterday afternoon. As warm as it was today they would finish drying as I wore them.

I grabbed the big red purse I'd inherited from Joy, which had my wallet and a brush in it and not much else, jumped in my truck and jammed down to the neighborhood of used record stores, places that sold Tibetan prayer flags and Ché Guevara t-shirts, and smugly hip student taverns at the foot of the Princeton Palisades. Found the internet café and then a parking space further down the block, with 25 minutes still on the meter. Loaded it up with coins until I had the maximum four hours on there, just to make sure I wouldn't have to log out suddenly at a bad time.

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I had thought I might get back home in time for the second half of the Mets game, but one little side trip led to another that day. As I focused on my errands, being out and about in this body was starting to feel a lot more normal than it had just 24 hours earlier. Although some aspects of this existence were going to take some getting used to...

As I approached the place, this 40-something academic fellow was stepping out through the door and held it open for me. As I slipped past him he ran his eyes up and down me, clearly liking what he saw. I felt myself smiling---he looked like Robert Redford at that age---and I was both flattered and attracted to him, if not officially interested. But to me this had seemed a fairly brazen thing for him to do. Guys didn't usually check out other guys as openly as this, right out on the sidewalk like this, unless it was at the entrance to a gay bar or a business in some entrenched homosexual neighborhood like Christopher Street...

But as he wandered off down the street and I stood letting my eyes adjust to the subdued light in coffee bar I realized that since I wasn't a guy now there had been nothing homosexual about what just transpired, and that he hadn't been particularly libertine for acting like he had. In purely mechanical terms he was a straight man checking out a female. And if this was true then my private flush of arousal (uncharacteristically, the fact that he was so much bigger than me had been a serious turn-on) was straight too; meriting us both the Heterosexist Seal of Approval from those who put themselves in authority to grant or deny this approval on the basis of what they deemed "normal".

It's hard to explain why this all felt so strange. Maybe it was that I had been this gay person for so much of my life---the object of either "homophobia" or "tolerance" from the hetero majority---that the notion of suddenly being just a normal person in the world of normals was disorienting. Without that sense of existing counter to something I felt oddly adrift. It was a so much larger world that I occupied here all of a sudden. If existence was a pie graph, then I had moved from the slender LGBT-slice out into that whole damn rest of the circle. I was like a bird that longs to get out of its cage but once it does feels overwhelmed by so much open space. 'Existential agoraphobia' or whatever...

And in some weird way I almost felt like a traitor to my faggot and dyke brothers and sisters. I'd escaped my people's marginalization and victimhood, just like if I'd been offered a 'straight pill' and greedily gobbled it down- "Nyuck! Nyuck! Smell ya later, losers!" It was a good thing this was temporary or I'd need to become a lesbian, just out of obligation...

Okay I'm kidding, but these reflections did make me wonder if I there was anything lesbian about me. But as I considered this bubbly little buxom blonde who was welcoming me to CAFበGIGO---and whose gorgeous smile alone should have made her desireable---it seemed the most I'd want to do with her would be to hang out with her, learn about her life and what she thought about stuff, and if we did hit it off hang out with her often; in short about the sort of relationships I'd always had with my women friends, plus whatever extra closeness our shared experience as females gave us (although since I'd been a girl for all of two days there wasn't much of this...).

So that was that, apparently. We don't get to choose who or what we like, and if I could choose it wouldn't be either a strictly gay or a straight orientation but the inclusiveness and egalitarianism of bisexuality. I had always felt this, and I envied Ricky for being bi, although he claimed it had made for a twice-as-confused adolescence...

I walked up to the counter, "Hi. I've never been here before. What do I do? Do I just go grab one of these machines, or should I buy a coffee first?"

"We'd prefer it if you did," replied the girl, whose name-tag read BARBARA. "And I need to give you your pin number. What can I get for you?"

"I see you have raspberry truffle syrup. Can I get a medium iced latte with a shot of that in it?"

Dragging a strand of hair behind her ear she grinned ruefully, "It's gonna be a day for iced drinks, I can tell. I'll be glad when fall gets here, if it ever does. The steam off these machines feels kind of good when it's cold out. I haven't seen you in here before. You go to Princeton?"

I told her my dad-keeled-over-and-is-in-the-hospital/sure-is-weird-being-back-here/my-brother's-a-dork story while she efficiently whipped up my drink.

"God, that's awful," Barbara sympathized, and showed me where my pin number was on my receipt. I stuffed a buck in the tip jar and went to find Station #18.

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The computers were down inside these twenty-five individual tables, the screens at a 45 degree angle under glass tops that protected them against coffee spills, the keyboards on little pull-out shelves. Fewer than half of the machines were in use. Mine was in a cozy corner with no immediate neighbors, although this didn't matter much today. The noisiest thing in here was the Metallica blasting out faintly from around some longhaired guy's earphones across the room. I logged on to AOL and dumped all my accumulated spam (It wasn't likely that any miracle penis enlargment drug would help me at this point), then composed my e-mail to Ricky, trying to make it sound spontaneous when it was anything but...

Ricky Love-
Things are crazy here like you wouldn't believe. I didn't even get a chance to call until last night, and I'm sorry about...

I sat staring at the screen, sipping on my too-sweet beverage. What could I possibly say about Joey's bizarre performance?

...that appalling attempt at humor last night. I realized the second I hung up it wasn't funny. Just shows you what a weird weird space I was in. After a rough day at the hospital me + Joy were playing quarters over a bottle of Tuaca before I called. You know my issues with her, and drinking with her was an attempt to bond with her but it didn't work. As usual she was a total shit. Would you believe she smashed the phone at the end of all that? Even drunker than I was. So I'm stuck e-mailing until I can run out & buy us another one //// Also Papa has been just awful- like being sick gives him a right to treat people like dirt. For some reason he is right back where he was with me when I was a teenager, calling me FUDGEPACKER etc. etc. etc. & acting like being in the same room with his gay son might give him AIDS //// Makes me wish I hadn't even bothered coming. I have to keep reminding myself how seriously ill he is.

Lying my ass off here, and maybe it was unfair to Dad to make him sound like more of a homophobe than he was, after the progress he'd made-

Aw hell, who was I kidding? His "progress" had amounted to his condescending to shake my fudgepacker boyfriend's hand and grunt some nominal greeting to him so long as we all pretended that Ricky was my roommate. Compared to the mazel tovs, the loving insistance that I was family that I got from Ricky's parents it was pathetic. And after the vicious things he'd said to me as his stand-in daughter, he deserved a little baseless slander.

But who didn't deserve all this mangling of the truth was Ricky. I absolutely hated lying to him! But if I told him what was really going on he'd never believe it, and I had to explain Joey's insane stunt somehow. This was damage control- battening down the hatches and running the pumps at full blast just to keep my relationship afloat until I could get back into port. The truth could come out later, hopefully. In the meantime it would be lies and more lies...

And oh. To show how totally drunk I was + how out of control Joy is, after I passed out she decided it would be funny to shave my beard off. I was out like a light the whole time she was doing this. So when I do come home expect that I'll either be clean-shaven or just starting to grow it back.

So with all this shit going on maybe I was unconsciously taking my aggressions out on you with that strange joking around. I can't believe I was doing that. So goddamn sarcastic, acting more like Joy than anything I ever thought I would do. That's the only reason I can think of for me doing that and I know it's no excuse. All I can say is I'm humongously sorry + somehow I'm pretty sure it'll never happen again, all those same circumstances aligning in that same way. PLEASE E-MAIL ME A.S.A.P. I love you so much and any message from you will lift my spirits. Even if you're angry. I'm angry with me too after that!!

Grandma Rosa still about the same. Visiting with her is the one bright point in all this. She still seems healthy for her age + is still as wacky as ever. Less into the yoga thing and more into her witchcraft thing. She and her coven are performing a "healing spell" for Dad, this whole rigamarole with ancient languages and eye of newt, and in my less skeptical moments I can almost think there might be something to it. She ask about you + sends you her love.

Kiss Kiss-
Teddy

I almost took out the part about being a bit less skeptical of Grandma's beliefs. It was out of character for me, but it was a first step toward the incredible claims I hoped to be able to make someday. I pushed SEND.

Ricky must've been on the computer when I sent this e-mail, because his response came just minutes later. He wrote:

Teddy Bear!
I understand you might be very embarrassed. A secret like you told me must be hard. Coming out sometimes a multi-step process. As life goes on we find out new thngs about ourselves, or we admit them. Like the layers of an union. I ♥ you no matter what. So please don’t be afraid I will reject you or that you have to pretend you were joking. Was researching age related identity disorders last nite & it is nothing to be ashamed of. They say 3% of population have this. We are who we are. If u want to be DIAPER BABY sometimes that's OK. We can work something out. I ♥ you & want U 2 B happy!
Kiss kiss kiss, Ricky

As I read this, and re-read it, I thought: Jesus! After three years together how could he think I was into such a thing?

Well maybe because he'd heard me say it. I had known in advance that it was Joey he would be talking to, and had seen the fake Teddy grinning and smirking and rolling his eyes. But there's no way Ricky could have concluded that he was talking to my sister, who through an act of magic was inhabiting my body. Faced with hearing me acting so loopy and talking about stuff I never had before, Ricky had to process this, running this freaky behavior past everything he knew about me, and he must've figured I was carrying on like that---with that bitchy undertone of hostility---out of anxiety. That I had lived with this all my life and it had burst forth during a sort of nervous breakdown, the awful secret that I could no longer keep inside. This sort of thing is hardly unknown in LGBT circles...

And God bless him, he was trying to be understanding! To accept this about me because he loved me. I was deeply moved. From behind the counter Barbara the Barista noticed me grinning and sniffing back tears, and cocked her head. A subtle gesture, curious but not pushy about it.

"Boyfriend," I called out, just loud enough for her to hear. She locked eyes with me and smiled that beautiful smile of hers, happy to see a sister in love. Ain't romance grand?

Sure is, I beamed back, and fired off a response to Ricky, assuring him that I had no desires whatsoever along those lines. I explained how we'd watched this cop show episode with a theme of adult infantilism, and then that Jim Carrey flick about experimental comedian Andy Kaufman, which in combination with many many shots of Tuaca had inspired my ill-concieved flight of improvisation...

Ricky's next message was twenty-five minutes in coming. I bought a café americano to cleanse my palate after that last drink, hunted up an e-postcard to send to my friends at work, and read a few articles in Utne Reader Online before I saw that I had mail. For as long as it had taken it was brief.

OK if you say so. But are you sure? It sure sounded like you meant it! Your people do have that saying- IN VINO VERITAS...

More like IN VINO STUPIDUS, I responded. Really + truly just a weird lame attempt at humor. But if you honestly did think all that shit was real, then you were wonderful about it. Almost makes me wish I did have some wild kink for you to be so cool about. LOL. So much love and acceptance is wasted on my mundane vanilla sexual tastes. You know the sort of things I like. The only thing true in all that was when I said I wished you were here. Or considering how things are going with my father, I was back home with you...

We sent each other a half dozen more e-mails. I still wasn't sure if I'd completely convinced him that I wasn't some baby-man in denial. Denial was a big thing to Ricky. He was convinced that most of the world's conflicts and the blight of terrorism all stemmed from hung-up people who had gone kaboingo trying to suppress their true natures .......... But as we wandered on to other topics I was fairly certain that I wouldn't arrive at home to find a nursery full of oversized baby stuff assembled in my honor.

It sucked having to restructure everything I told him. It sucked not being able to just talk to him, and to hear his voice. But seeing his words on the screen here was better than nothing...

.
~ || ~~ || ~~~ || ~~~~ || ~~~~~ || ~~~~ || ~~~ || ~~ || ~
.

When I got home that night Joey was sprawled on the couch with the remote dangling down near the floor in his hand, this other hand flicking ashes into the ashtray on his stomach.

He held the cigarette up, grinning sleepily, "Sorry..."

"It's fine," I shrugged. I wasn't his mother, I couldn't stop him.

He saw my shopping bags, "What did you get?"

"Just some clothes."

"Can I see?"

I started to say no and to actually move the bags to behind my back, like this was something to be embarrassed about, then decided why the hell not. I nodded, and he got up and followed me through the arch to the dining room table, where I pulled everything out, holding up one item after another for him.

"Jesus," he marvelled, "You still dress like a Mormon. That skirt's kind of nice though."

"You can have it when we swap back. All the rest too."

"And you can have these," he said, tapping the pair of sunglasses that sat hiked up on his hairline, "I don't think they're gonna fit my head. I mean your head. Our head ..... You know what I mean."

They were these face-hugging things with purple lenses set at a weird angle, which if they'd been over his eyes would have made him look like some freaky mutant insect man. But as grotesque as the were, I knew from their little designer's logo they must have cost him most of the $100 Grandma had given him. I couldn't imagine myself wearing them, but smiled, "Hey thanks. So did you go visit Jenny Thurston?"

"No I never got around to it. I did see Dad though. He's doing a little better."

"Really?"

"I couldn't really tell but Grandma thinks he is. Something about how his aura looks."

"That's great!" I smiled, and started stuffing my purchases back into their bags, "I'm going tomorrow, that's what all this is for. But I just needed a day off."

"He really tore into you yesterday, didn't he? I'm sorry you had to go through that," he said, almost looking like he might start crying.

"Yeah. And I'm sorry he's so down on you. All that shit he said to me really pisses me off. To you, really. I get mad at you for crap like you pulled last night, not for something that's your own business. Having an abortion, it's ....... I'm not a woman and it's not my place to judge."

"Well you kind of are now. And you could get knocked up," he grimaced, like this alarming thought had just occurred to him.

"Don't worry, I won't get you pregnant. I'm not cheating on Ricky, and he's over eight hundred miles away. But I'm going to be e-mailing him a lot, I found this internet place down by the campus. And oh, while we're on the topic, don't you go making me a daddy!"

"Yuck! Don't worry, I'm still only into guys. I guess that makes me queer now," he chuckled, and chanted stridently, "We're here! We're queer! Now where's the fucking beer?!"

Moronic, but it had struck me as funny. "That's not how it goes," I giggled.

"Well I'm kind of new at this whole gay-lib thing. Grandma sure did a number on us, didn't she?"

"That she did. It's sort of interesting though, isn't it?"

"I don't know. Being tall's a trip, and I like not having guys hollar shit out of car windows at me, I don't feel so vulnerable or whatever out walking around at night. But there's other stuff ......... There was this little old lady coming up the sidewalk toward me today. She acted like she was scared of me and I couldn't figure it out. But then I saw my reflection in the window of a store and I knew why. I was frowning, thinking about something or other, and I looked this big mean guy!"

You are a mean guy, I thought, That bullshit you pulled last night! But I didn't bring this up. The frontal approach doesn't work with Joey. All that defensiveness when you try to talk to him, it comes from insecurity, a hidden sense of shame that goes right to the bone. What he really needed was therapy, but I had suggested this a few times over the years and he'd scoffed at the idea.

He pointed at the t.v. "Pulp Fiction is coming on at nine, if you want to watch."

"On broadcast t.v.? How the hell are they gonna do that? Cut out every third word? Naw, I'll pass. I've got this," I said, reaching into my purse and pulling the Ed McBain Precinct 57 paperback I'd bought. "But maybe we can watch one of Papa's movies tomorrow night."

"Okay, sure."

I gathered up my bags and went up the stairs. If by some miracle all our conversations over the next few days went as nice this I would think about starting to forgive him. The anger that had welled up in me at the mere sight of him this morning had been replaced by deep sadness for the way things were. Which didn't feel any better but it seemed an improvement somehow...
.

.
|||MONDAY OCTOBER 6~~~

Thinking that my visits with Dad might be helped to some extent by my wearing something feminine and totally un-Joylike, I had grabbed $500 out of an ATM and stopped at Hutchinson Brownmiller on the way home yesterday and bought a few items of clothing. Not that I spent all of it, but as long as I didn't have ID with my real name on it I would need to carry cash.

There were a lot of cheaper places I could've gone to, but I knew that I would probably need help, so I picked a store where the sales people worked on commission and would actually help you shop, instead of the big-box store approach of showing you to the approximate proper aisle then taking off running before you could complicate their day at work any further. This tactic paid off. I got everything I needed and got out of there fairly quickly and painlessly (Even with this female cerebrum and the estrogen in my veins I still considered clothes shopping a necessary evil...).

Calling up vague memories of things my mom had worn that my dad seemed to consider nice; I decided to go with a long skirt and a long sleeve blouse. I explained to Debbie and then to Camille that I wanted to look fairly demure without suffering for it in this weather, and they helped me in choosing light colors and heatwave-friendly fabrics. I was so clueless about what I needed that I think they gave me a little extra help because they assumed I was a bit retarded.

The blouse was a shiny pearl colored rayon thing with big squarish upholstered buttons (which Camille assured me were not funny looking), lightweight but not so light that it was at all transparent, since I recalled that time long ago when Papa got all bent out of shape over being able to see some "tramp's" brassiere through her top ........... The skirt was this wonderfully soft cotton material called crepe that really breathed, in a desert tan with a dull maroon pattern of tiny figures on it, like Neolithic cave drawings of random mundane objects- cars and tea cups, clouds, grinning cats and tennis rackets .......... When I stepped out of the dressing room Camille had produced a wide glossy black leather belt; which gave the skirt and blouse a pert separation, and removing the outfit even further from the realm of anything that Joy might wear. And I had to admit it did make my waist look nice and trim...

I didn't want to give up my comfortable sandals but I got talked out of them and into a pair of sleek black pumps---the first pair I tried on that didn't pinch---and then into buying hose in several different hues; which sent me out to the drugstore last night (right about when Messrs. Travolta and Jackson were driving around arguing with the headless guy in the back seat of their beater...) for shaving gel and Venus razors, after I discovered that the stubble on my legs had reached the rough-as-sandpaper stage. I shaved them after a long soak in the tub, and tried on the chocolate brown pair I'd decided on for this morning. And yes, the sensation of sliding the slippery stockings up my smooth legs was awfully nice, though a bit short of the mind blowing ecstacy that my neighbor Elsa describes in her transgender stories. Maybe because for me this wasn't a symbolic act, some expression of my me-ness, but like all the rest of this was done for the grim and very specific purpose of trying to get a dying man to stop hating me...

Then this morning I got a bit more adventurous with my sister's makeup, trying to make my face match the sophistication of my outfit. This time it was such a disaster that I didn't have the heart to try again. I looked like The Joker. But as I was scrubbing the mess off my face it occurred to me that I could pay someone to do this for me; someone who knew what the hell she was doing.

Recalling how helpful the girls at Hutchinson Brownmiller had been when they saw how ignorant I was about women's fashion, I found a beauty parlor on the way to the hospital (not Sirens, they would know my sister there...), parked around the corner and went in. I explained that I'd run away from an Amish community down in PA after coming into some money, and was excited about starting my new life as an Anglish woman. I had cooked my very own microwave burrito in my motel room last night, then watched that telemavision thing. Surely the Lord would not begrudge us such marvelous devices.

They actually bought this horseflop, and they loved me- thrilled at the prospects of introducing an escapee from that oppressively backward culture to the wonders of civilization! Talking slowly so I would understand, they told me everything I'd done wrong with my attempts to shape my eyebrows and dye and cut my hair (I had to grin, because the gangsta bitch eyebrows and bad dye job had been Joy's doing). They fixed my bangs for me, angling what I had left into a sharply postmodernist doo-dad like some 80's pop star might wear, gave my hair some subtle highlights and shortened it by about 25%, resulting in a style that could be worn down on my shoulders (As unfamiliar as this felt I was tempted to re-ponytail it about a million times that day...). And then as the girl did my face she explained the rudiments of cosmetics to me from the foundation up. This all took longer than I thought it would, but it was worth it. I looked five years younger, my rough cheeks now baby smooth and glowing rosily...

At so right around noon---freshly coifed and made up and dressed to the nines---I drove to Princeton Plainsboro Hospital and made my way through the labyrinth of lifts and corridors to my father's room. I stood there a second, took a deep breath, and went in.

.
~ || ~~ || ~~~ || ~~~~ || ~~~~~ || ~~~~ || ~~~ || ~~ || ~
.

I guess they're trying him out on solid food again. Or maybe he was laying in wait for me with his roommate's lunch, because as I stepped through the door he greeted me by hurling an entire plate of food at me!

It fell way short, landing closer to his bed than to me, and skidded face down across the linoleum trailing goo. The way he was glaring at me with his deeply sunken eyes was utterly demonic, and from how he was wheezing and had suddenly grabbed his bicep I was afraid he was having a heart attack. But then I realized he'd only strained his pitching arm.

"Oh Papa! Did you really have to-" I started to say, but he was having none of it. His face grew redder and redder as he repeated, trying to blot out the sound of my voice, my insufferable presence- "Get out! Get out! Get out! Get out! Get out! Get out! Get out!"

I got out.

.
~ || ~~ || ~~~ || ~~~~ || ~~~~~ || ~~~~ || ~~~ || ~~ || ~
.

These visits seemed to work better when there were more of us. If I tried to see him again I'd need Grandma to run interference for me. Downstairs in the hospital's lobby I called her up.

I wasn't even going to mention what had happened, and I was fine when I was talking to the woman (Birda?) who went to go fetch her, but as soon as I heard her voice I started crying, unable to speak.

"What's wrong baby? Come on, talk to me..."

"He threw his foooooooood at me!" I whined miserably.

"Who did? Joey?"

With effort I managed to control my voice enough to get out: "N-no, Papa. He went crazy on me! I'll call you back, okay?"

"Hold on, wait!" she commanded as I started to hang up, in a way that made me put the phone back to my ear, "Now tell me what's wrong."

"It's just. Just Dad. You know, the same old shit. I- I didn't know I was gonna cry, I swear! I'm sorry..."

"What do you have to be sorry about?" she asked gently.

"Because. Because of what you said. This spell thing you're doing. You don't need me calling you up all hysterical, putting chaos on you!"

"Listen Teddi, I never said that. I was talking about pointless chaos. Piddly little stuff. But this isn't piddly, okay? Your father needs me because he's so sick, but it's not like you're some lower order of priority to me. You went to see him and he- What did he throw at you?"

"I don't know. Some kind of macaroni junk. Corn bread. Jello. He just ........ He didn't even let me say hello," I sobbed, "He hates me, Grandma!"

"I'm glad you called then. Do you want me to come down there? My shift here doesn't start 'til six."

"Don't bother. Like I say, it's nothing new. And after I bought clothes, I shaved my legs, went to a beauty parlor- I did everything!" I wiped under my eye, saw mascara on my fingers, "Oh shit, I'm wrecking my face!"

"So you got all gussied up for him, huh?"

"Yeah," I laughed through my tears, "I always dress up nice and go to the salon when I know I'm gonna get Spagetti-O's thrown at me."

She laughed, sighed, said, "Maybe you shouldn't try to go see him alone anymore."

"I know, that's what I was thinking. Why I called. Could you go in there with me tommorrow?"

"Absolutely. This morning I was down there around ten-thirty. Is that a good time for you?"

"Sure," I sniffed.

"I'll see you then, then. And afterward we can go to lunch someplace if you want."

"That's- that sounds great! So at ten-thirty I'll be down here in the lobby at ten-thirty, watching the- What is it with this place?"

"What do you mean?"

On the big screen t.v. it was 1924 again. Harold Lloyd wearing heavy pancake makeup and hanging from the hand of a giant clock a hundred feet above the ground. A tall, scruffy man with a scuzzy-looking beard was braying his head off at the silent comedian's mortal predicament, banging his cane on the chair in front of him to the general annoyance of everyone around him...

"Nevermind, it's not important," I said. We I-loved-youd and hung up.

.
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.

So here I was, all dressed up with no place to go. What did I do now?

I went to the mall and saw a movie. Bridget Jones 3: Bridget Goes Hawaiian. I laughed louder than anyone else in the place. Then as I was leaving I impulsively bought a ticket and went back inside to watch another one. Clint Eastwood's Grand Turino, which was a good film but not such a good idea, since it reminded me of how Papa and I used to watch him in all those old Sergio Leon spaghetti westerns. The nameless character Eastwood played never said much, and as we watched neither did we. Unencumbered by the awkwardness of conversation, those had been some of our best times together...

I swung by CAFበGIGO again on my way home, in hopes of chatting with Ricky, but while he had emailed me that afternoon he wasn't online. I sent him an edited-for-gender account of the food chucking incident and the rest of my day. Spent a few hours fooling around browsing the net as I kept checking my mailbox for Ricky's response before finally giving up and leaving.

.
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.

Driving home it occurred to me that I'd drunk more coffee than I intended to--- way too much caffeine for so late in the day---and by the time I got home I needed to pee in the worst way!

Joey was in the bathroom, the water in the sink running. I hopped around doing a pigeon-toed little dance (What the hell's he doing in there? And WHY hadn't Dad ever got around to building that downstairs bathroom?!), and after ten painful minutes I rapped on the door.

"Don't be banging on the goddamn door!" he shouted angrily, "I'll be done when I'm done!"

Finally---just about the time I was convinced I would have to go squat out in the backyard---the door opened.

He stood blocking the door. Shaking his head. "You poor bastards."

"Could you get out of the way? Who's a poor bastard?"

"All of you," he said as I pushed past him, "Guys..."

I slapped the door shut, hiked my skirt up, my panties down. Sat and let fly a urethra-stinging torrent of pee. "Why's that?"

He laughed disdainfully, "You call that an orgasm?"
.

.
||| TUESDAY OCT 7th, 2:00 A.M. ~~~

It's two in the morning and the most amazing thing has happened! It's so different this way. Like nothing I'd ever experienced, any fantasy I'd ever entertained...

Now I know why I hadn't found Ricky online last night. He was coming here!

Still not convinced that I was okay after our weird telephone conversation Saturday, and sensing that there was something going on here he was not being told about, he had hopped on a plane for Newark, took a cab from there. Rang the doorbell just over an hour ago.

The fake Ted had gone out on some mysterious midnight errand---to Ricky's disappointment and my relief---so my boyfriend had to make do with being entertained by the weird kid sister, who he found he was getting along with surprisingly well.

"You don't seem at all like I remember you, Joy. Or like what Teddy was telling me."

"Well actually there's a very good reason for that."

I put all my chips on #7 and spun the wheel. Told him the truth. And so far things have gone a hell of a lot better than anything that Grandma's pessimistic warnings had suggested would happen...

Ricky looks me up and down. He has been interrogating me for nearly an hour, more and more amazed at how completely the real Teodoro had prepared me for this stunt of ours, that he was gamely playing along with...

"And our dog's name?"

"Anyone who's met us knows that. We get so carried away telling people about him sometimes. It's Mike."

"Mike what?"

"Okay, when we started out you were totally stuck on the idea of some classic cliché name like Rex or Fido. I thought that was just an awful idea! Still do as a matter of fact-"

My masturbation fantasies have always started out heavy on dialogue, as realistic as I could conjure up, building to the good stuff slowly- and this one is no different in that department. Fast forward as I recount the whole drawn out dog-naming process for him, name by rejected name, detail by uninteresting detail, surprising both of us with how much of it I remember...

"-until finally we just went to the white pages directory and picked a name at random. And that's how our spoiled baby got to be Dr. Michael Langhorn, D.D.S....

He laughs, stops. And finally I start to see acceptance the truth dawning behind his eyes. Amazement. He takes my hands in his, looks into my eyes, searching them. I nod, nervous and hopeful, not saying anything. Please Darling, please! Throw away everything you know about what's possible and just believe!

"Our dog," he says in a slow, dazed drone. "That day at the ice cream parlor. The birthmark on my perineum. And what our landlord Jim confessed to us."

"I know," I laugh, "Him and that Army buddy didn't really even do anything, but that was such a big huge deal to him. Probably would've taken it to his grave with him if he hadn't been so drunk..."

Ricky slides his fingers down my cheek and murmurs, "I don't know how could this happen. But with everything you've said, and something---I don't know, just the way you act---I mean MY GOD! It really is you in there."

The tenderness in his voice. Oh how I've missed him! And then I'm in his arms, this all feeling so familiar except for how my face is bent upward as we kiss. [This passage gets more and more graphic, and if you want you can skip ahead to the break (~~||~~~||~~) without missing much but my description of my fantasy and what I'm doing here; doing with one little dancing finger what used to take my whole fist and a lot of wrist movement to accomplish. I had scraped myself painfully with my nail one time before learning to be careful...] And his beard is so much rougher against on my smooth skin, but this feels wonderful somehow.

A furnace door opens deep inside me, sending a delicious heat up my belly, into the soft undersides of my boobs. As if by telepathy he touches me right there, gently hefting my breast was his large hand. "Such pretty tits!"

Never having been a tit man, I had no real way of judging. "Really? I thought maybe they were kind of small."

He traces over the edge of my ariola with his thumb. Shakes his head, "Not at all. Maybe they're not like the girls you see in porno, but for your build they're just right. And your face! If you had to be---what was that you called it, transcarnated?---you could've done a lot worse. I met Joy that time, and I might've had some passing thought that she could be kind of nice looking if she didn't act so hard. But I never saw just how-"

"Let's not talk about her."

He nods in agreement. Leans in and starts flicking his tongue across my nipple. I spasm and inhale sharply!

"You always dug it when I did this," he purrs, "I'll bet it feels even nicer now. You like that?"

"Don't do this to me," I moan.

"Do what?"

"I'm so fucking horny!"

"That's a problem?" he laughs gently.

"Yes! No! I mean …... I just don't want to start anything we can't finish."

"What are you talking about? You know I'm bi under the right circumstances. And I'd say the circumstances are about perfect. We'd be nuts not to do it this way while we can ........... Oh, we're gonna finish this!" he asserts. "I mean unless there's some reason..."

"No! No reason," I say, grabbing onto his shoulders and mashing my whole body up against him, and then we're kissing again.

His lips grazing mine, he asks, "So then you want to?"

"Ung-gawd, yes!" I gasp. I'm a churning mass of need. I want him in me NOW!

His face pulls back and he asks casually, "So d'you wanna be top or bottom?"

Smiling smugly. He knows how crazy horny I am and he's toying with me.

"You bastard, just fuck me!"

His fingers slide into me, wiggle the soft flesh back and forth, "You mean here?"

I try to answer but it comes out an animal noise. I nod frenziedly.

"Oh my God you're wet in there!" he declares, and as he pushes me back onto the bed he threatens lovingly, "I'm gonna fuck you like I've never fucked you before!"

There's no need for a condom. Being imaginary, this is the ultimate in safe sex. I am just one big squirm as he climbs atop me, slides into me and starts pumping. My back arches, I raise my pelvis to meet each thrust and he fucks me harder and harder, his hand (well my left hand, actually...) greedily kneading my breast!

And then---both in my fantasy with Ricky and here in bed alone---I come, a thunderous waveshock of ecstacy rushing outward from the epicenter of my clit, every spot it touches melting and then solidifying in its wake- leaving me intact but totally limp, overwhelmed by the intensity of it.

'MORE!' screams my body. And the tip of that finger is still at work, fingertip whorls catching nerve endings on my little raisin until my Bodily Seismic Warning System cries out as another one builds and erupts-

.
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.

It was phenomenal. Female orgasms were everything Elsa wrote about in her stories of transformation by various means (even though she herself had real way of knowing this, except for maybe some instinctive knowledge of what it should be like...). If you're a guy and you've never been body-swapped you can still do the math, three orgasms in a few minute's time are better than one in however many hours. And as the literature claims, each of them really does feel more---shall we say comprehensive---than my little pop gun going off had.

And while it's sort of a shame that I'll be returned to my old form without ever getting to make love to Ricky like this for real, I am still eager to be go back. Bigger and more frequent orgasms are nice, but they're not enough to make me want to be a woman for the rest of my days. As a gay male I'd taken pleasure in both fucking and being fucked, the sweetness of surrendering to penetration and the power rush of being some raging Bwana Dick cocksman. So while this is better in many ways I've lost out in terms of variety ......... I want my little pop gun back!

But more importantly, life is about a lot more than sex for me, and on some hard-to-define but quite fundamental level a female just

isn't

who

I

am...
.

.
To be continued . . .

.
[Note: Bwana Dick is a song by Frank Zappa, an anthem of penile self-aggrandizement. I didn't know what else to call it. That part of Teodoro's personality is a bit of a stretch for me...]