Synopsis: The humorous, story of an eccentric TG author from inception to deception. Discover what makes Dawn so receptive to new ideas, sexual partners, and body parts. And learn about her confusing birth, her stardom at Little Darlings Playschool, her disastrous High School Prom, her formation as an amateur writer, and her prison stint and plural marriage in Nigeria.
 

Synopsis: The humorous, story of an eccentric TG author from inception to deception. Discover what makes Dawn so receptive to new ideas, sexual partners, and body parts. And learn about her confusing birth, her stardom at Little Darlings Playschool, her disastrous High School Prom, her formation as an amateur writer, and her prison stint and plural marriage in Nigeria.

I am nothing like the characters in my stories. I have never owned a moped and I never went “Looking for Hope.” Sorry, Alice, for pretending that your adventures were mine. Alice found Hope; I never did.

In 2001, my muse was already faltering, so I just retold the story that I extracted from Alice with the aid of two bottles of cheap Idaho sherry. After my muse went totally dead in 2003 — actually went into de-tox — one or two of you wondered whether I am still alive. Yes, I am. I’m even ready now to put pen to computer to punch out an autobiography. It’s brief, like my career. But if you ever wondered about the inner being of Dawn DeWinter — and even if you never did — here it is: a mirror view of me in the stirrups.

My parents once thought I was GG — a real girl. It was an understandable mistake, given the ultrasound. It didn’t show a thingee. I actually had one, but it — like my testicles — was afraid to descend. So the gynecologist decided I was a female. I believe he might have changed his mind when I emerged from the womb, but we’ll never know for sure, because he was totally distracted by my parents, hippies both, who were loudly berating him for not being a midwife. “A man has no business being between the legs of a womyn,” shouted my mom.

And I doubt my dad ever got between them. So how did I get conceived? Well, my folks lived in a free-love commune and my mom, a lifelong nudist below the waist, dropped far too much acid to remain a virgin forever. Who knows what sex or species she confused with whatever man drove home his lust?

Still, so totally did she despise men who felt up women for a living that she was hurling such virulent curses at the doctor that he didn’t even look at my privates; he snarled, “It’s another bitch,” as he slapped my bottom as hard as he could. I gasped with delight. Since then, I’ve loved a good spanking.

And so an F for female went beside my name on the birth certificate, my legal name as feminine as one could expect from hippy parents. It would be an invasion of my privacy to reveal that name, but you can be sure that it celebrates Wicca, flowers, the planets, and white-fleshed fish.

Yes, Dawn DeWinter is an alias, er, nom de plume, that I have adopted for my writing career. The name came to me one July morning while touristing in the bushes of a hillside in Montreal, Canada. I had been up all night — well, the men had been up — and as I staggered home at the break of day it began to snow. So you see — it was the dawn de (that’s French for “of”) winter. That’s how I got my pen name. I think.

It wasn’t only my birth name that declared my hippy heritage. So did my early upbringing. Since I was a girl, my parents dressed me in blue denim and loaded me down with trucks and building blocks. They were fighting gender-typing, they said; they were determined to advance feminism by raising me as much like a boy as possible. Thus, when I begged for a doll to nurture, they gave me a GI Joe. When I begged for a more feminine doll, mom gave me Barbie’s Ken. GI Joe and Ken were the only two dolls I had before age 5 (when everything changed). Do you suppose that Ken made me gay?

As my mother did not believe child-raising to be womyn’s work, I was taken home by Luis, a male nanny much smitten with my father — and vice versa. For whatever reason Luis never told my parents that I was actually a boy — or, more to the point, that I lacked a c … er, vagina.

I’ve never learned the reasons for his silence. Perhaps he knew how much I wanted to be a girl (after all, he disobeyed my mother by buying lacy panties for me to wear). Perhaps he didn’t want to incur my mother’s wrath by telling her that a filthy boy had issued from her feminist loins. Or perhaps he didn’t know the basic facts of life — despite the longing looks and sighs they hourly exchanged, Luis and my father never consummated their affair. Indeed, I fear that Luis, a convert to Last-Day Mormonism, will remain a virgin until I have tracked him down. He has been an elusive quarry.

At my mother’s insistence, I was responsible for my own toilet-training. She did not believe in any sort of coercion, except for enforcing gender equity. I was accordingly slow to give up diapers; indeed, I still wear them on special nights with Brad and Cynthia. (I’m their disobedient daughter!) However, don’t get me wrong: the last time I wore diapers to school came halfway during my junior year (after Sven, the elderly school custodian, said that I looked better panty-less.)

Other than taking command of my own potty-training, playing gaily with my male dolls, dressing like a little boy, and (after my third birthday) being limited to an environmentally-correct, 100-yard diet, my life was quite conventional until I attended the Little Darlings playschool at age four and a half. It’s closed now, but its huge neon sign used to dominate the highway into our town. I remember well the towering exclamation marks beside the principal sign: the school’s name in Centaur script enclosed by a pulsating giant, crimson heart.

It was a model school — or so we were told — which explained why the school provided me with so many frilly skirts and dresses to wear, my rough, boyish togs being cast aside until it was time to go home. I had many admirers amongst the school’s daily inspectors, but my stay at Little Darlings ended abruptly when a Senator demanded his money back because I was actually a little boy. Maybe my genitals had finally popped out the night before or none of the school’s previous visitors had cared which sex I was, but that day of humiliation — in which all the teachers checked me out — certainly taught me that girls are more valuable than boys.

I was too ashamed to return to Little Darlings. Fortunately, my mom accepted my invention that the school’s principal, having seen me pee against a closet wall, had figured out that I was a boy. “From then on,” I lied, “they treated me as some sort of low life.”

Surprised, my mother first verified that I was indeed a boy; she then explained that my punishment was just, inasmuch as I had pretended to be better than I actually am. For the next six months I had no time for schooling since I was expected to raise money through odd jobs to pay for a new wardrobe. (Some of you may remember the pre-schooler who sold fake Girl Scout cookies and sticks of gum at the Framingham Mall.)

‘Tis a pity that my mom removed me from Little Darlings, for this was the only time in my life that I hobnobbed with the rich and famous.

On the other hand, I was now able to dress like a girl full-time, for my mother definitely believed that boys had as much right as girls to wear skirts and dresses. In theory, I could even have female dolls so long as they did not have “exaggerated female characteristics” like breasts or wide hips. My mom seemed happiest when I dressed Ken like Barbie. As for Barbie, “that slut” was never allowed into our home.

Kindergarten proved a shock to me, for it emerged that I was already two grades behind my peers. I became known as the school “dummy”, a reputation I still had when I finally graduated from high school as a D-cupped, dyed blonde at age twenty-one. Although the school board had a policy of “social promotion, nobody fails” policy, I was considered an especially extreme case — hence my extended stay in grade eight.

I was rather sad to leave that grade behind after I discovered how “easy” it was to trap pubescent boys. Indeed, I think it was my sluttish behavior that finally got me promoted to grade nine. It was said, in explanation, that I was creating rivalries among the teaching staff, by promising each of them to be their own “exceptionally obedient pupil.”

It goes without saying that I was “all girl” at school — which meant that more than half of my male classmates soon had a “big secret” to confess to their future wives or to a specialist in gender disorders. Because I could not score well on school tests, it was important for me to score as many times as I could elsewhere; hence I joined as many sports teams as I could in high school. (Despite, or because of its loose male students, the school was so uptight that its showers had privacy cubicles.)

Alas, even though I, a natural-born male, should have had an advantage playing for the girls’ teams, I flunked at sports too. I blame the hormones. I was taking them, with parental connivance, not only to feminize myself, but also to bulk up. In the raging ‘roid confusion, I ended up with enormous jugs and tiny nipples, so that my breasts looked like over-inflated balloons. I contended then — and since — that my wobbly breasts accounted for my lack of coordination and balance. An optimistic coach told me that a sports bra might help, but I wasn’t about to hide my lights under a latex basket.

The boys, taking pity on my blighted sports career, nominated me for school mascot. Dressed as a rabbit, I satisfied the male teams at away games. Already ambisextrous, I also brought several of the girl cheerleaders to the height of their game. Caitlin and Jessica even learned the pyramid position from me!

When at long last it came time to graduate, I believed at first that I had a multitude of choices for the Senior Prom. Alas, both sexes decided that “my reputation” did not make me a suitable prom date. Consequently, a local bookmaker gave 4-7 odds against my finding anyone in town to go with me to the dance. I wasn’t fazed: I had already picked out my date, a student from a nearby Catholic seminary. So certain was I of Kirk’s asking me out, I even placed a $40 bet on myself.

Kirk had long been our paperboy, and naturally I had flirted him from early morning one. No, no, you with the dirty mind, not because I was trying to seduce a twelve-year-old. I have my scruples, even when it comes to a muscled, freckle-faced blonde with a cowlick and a turned-up nose, black Converse sneakers, and tattered jeans that hugged his bubble butt; hence, I flirted with Kirk because I thought he, like every male I knew, needed some help with his self-respect. Who doesn’t like a harmless compliment about their looks?

In any case, Kirk was too innocent to know how to flirt back. For example, the rocks he playfully threw against my bedroom window were far too heavy; they not only broke the windowpanes and a lamp, but they nearly brained me. Twice. Even the smallest gesture he’d get wrong — instead of my alluring, limp-wristed, five-fingered wave, he’d naively use a single figure or fist, and when I’d moisten my high-gloss lips ever so casually with my flickering, salamander tongue, Kirk, still ignorant about the art of flirtation on his thirteenth birthday, foolishly stuck out his tongue. One other time, when I waggled my derriere in playful flirtation, he didn’t realize that mooning was not the appropriate response. Well, not from the door of a school bus.

However, by the time of his eighteenth birthday Kirk finally yearned to return my attentions properly. It seems that he had discovered that he was the only virgin at his seminary. Not only that — but his fellow seminarians were getting sex regularly, and in some surprisingly kinky ways. Even by my standards!

And so Kirk thought of asking me to my prom. While I was sure that commonsense — and uncommon lust --would eventually bring him round to inviting me, to make sure that he did not get so wrapped up in his studies or seminarians that he forgot to reserve the evening of the prom, over the course of a month I left him thirty casual reminders in his mail slot and sixty-nine casual reminders on the dorm phone.

Prom night did not go well. Indeed, it was a horror film. First of all, Kirk was too timid to neck, even though I made certain that he was aware of my “availability” from the start: As he opened the shotgun door for me, I pulled him onto the car seat and tried to French-kiss him. But, inexperienced, he fell face forward onto the gear shift, while I ended up sucking on his Adam’s apple. Fortunately, he didn’t put out his eye, but the shiner and hickey dulled his passion. As for his nose, it only looked broken.

By the time we got to my High School, I was having second thoughts about this date because my left hand was downright bruised from being removed so many times from his crotch. Jeez, I muttered, if he’s going to be standoffish, why did Kirk ask me to the prom?

At the prom Kirk acted like a freaking virgin. He swore off slow-dancing after our first time on the floor because he said he didn’t want me to put my hand inside his boxers in public. Talk about uptight! Jeez, my hand wasn’t grabbing his meat — that I never do before the third dance — and while my fingers were admittedly caressing the inside of his crack, probing for the honey spot, I definitely had made certain, for propriety’s sake, that I had pushed his pants and briefs only halfway down his butt. Yet he overreacted. Not only did he refuse to slow-dance, but even fast-dancing quickly became taboo because, he said, I danced too “wantonly”.

Wantonly! What does that even mean?

So, after parking Kirk beside the punchbowl, I asked Rod Haskwell to dance. Why Rod” To prove a point to Kirk — that some boys would let me strip them naked in front of the vice-principal if I got the two of them hot enough. I set to work. To my amazement, Kirk ran towards us before I had tugged Rod’s briefs down more than a couple of inches. As for Rod, while his fingers were clasping my one and only, we were being discrete.

Kirk, bellowing that he must defend his date’s honor, lowered his head and charged like a bull into Rod’s gonads. (Oh, I guess I should have informed you that Kirk was — but by less than a foot — the shortest boy in the room.) Rod collapsed over in agony, toppling another dancing couple as he fell. Vice-principal McGregor made a lunge at Kirk in an attempt to restrain him. But Kirk, his head still down, ran around the portly chaperone, and accidentally bulled into the crotch of our quarterback, who keeling over, knocked down several couples like bowling pins. It was then that the mayhem began.

Kirk did lose his virginity that night — but it wasn’t to me. Of that he’s certain, but in the general scrum that ensued, the only other thing of which he’s certain is that he lost his virginity on that very dance floor to a male. Or to a vibrator.

No, it wasn’t mine, for I was using mine twenty feet away on the vice-principal — oh, did I tell you at McGregor was female? — to persuade her not to demand my expulsion before graduation. Fortunately, for all concerned, they had dimmed the lights to one light candle more than total darkness when I had started my fast dance. That darn Kirk had eyes like a cat! But never again for me.

Some people later blamed me for his “special friendships” with altar boys — you know, because of my supposedly bad influence on him from age twelve onward. Yet that’s not fair — I did no more than flirt. I figure Kirk ended up (repeatedly) breaking the law because he was looking for males shorter than himself. To end this vignette on a happy note, he did eventually get out of prison and he is now happily married to a little person his own age. who, cross-dressed, had starred as “Dorothy” in the Tiny Town revival of “The Wizard of Oz).

It was, as I recall, that very same quarterback who first sheepishly asked me why I didn’t have an operation to complete my gender transition. Not that he really minded my half-way state! I brushed off his question because sexual-reassignment surgery was something that I could neither contemplate nor spell while still in high school. When I finally got my diploma, I briefly thought about “the operation,” but given the fact that I looked like actor John Lithgow in drag, I decided that SRS wasn’t yet the surgery for me.

Instead, I put $50,000, every penny I could raise over the next ten years by peddling my wares (I sold Avon products door-to-door), into cosmetically-enhancing my face. Naturally, I had my Adam’s apple shaved, my lips augmented, and my face rounded, but most of the money went to improving the one or two places that every woman enhances: nose, ears, eyes, eyelids, cheeks, forehead, chin, warts, scars and moles.

Having turned myself into — from the neck up — a presentable woman at age 32 and knowing that I had perfected so many sexual techniques (fifteen more than the Kama Sutra) that most people didn’t give a fig about my gender once I lured them into bed, I decided against any further alteration of my body. That was possibly a mistake for now I look like Vice-President Dick Cheney in drag.

Yes, for those of you trying to guess my age, I will now confess that I have passed my thirty-ninth birthday. But it wasn’t always so — I used to be younger.

I shall also admit that I have, unlike the stars of TG fiction, never been a classical beauty. Despite my sexual prowess, I have had to live by my wits rather than by my looks. It has been, as a result, only half an existence at times — especially since Avon fired me for sexual harassment.

I blame my employer; after all, they should have known better than to have assigned me to a gay neighborhood. How was I to know that five of the male householders would, by foolishly believing that I was, as advertised by my clothes and demeanor, a genuine girl (okay, a woman of a certain age), that these lovely young things would actually be traumatized by a firm but tender grasp of their ball sacks?

Although I was arrested, none of the men pressed charges after learning about my birth sex; they claimed that they feared retribution from the T in the GLBT community. Or so they said. However, a Deputy Sheriff cattily told me that the men were keeping their silence because they didn’t want their photograph to be seen beside mine in the newspapers. I’m sure that she said that out of malice — because she had ended up in the hospital after our jailhouse pyramid unaccountably broke upon erection.

Out of a job, living on welfare under three assumed names, I decided it was time to educate myself by going to a school of learning for kids so extraordinarily cute that any parent would feel compelled to invest extra money in their education. “That’s the place for me,” I announced to the mirror, after seeing the school’s thousandth commercial. After four years — of surprisingly good behavior on my part — the school announced that they had taught me as much as anyone possibly could and showed me the road.

Was it true? Had they done their utmost? I think not. I think I got an early heave-ho after they caught me “learning” a tween, Sylvain by name, how to cross-dress. Hey you, you with the dirty mind, I touched him only to take his dress measurements.

A graduate now of two writing programs, I was at last ready to embark on a career as an amateur writer. I looked around for subject matter. I know, I know. As a novice, I was supposed to look to my own life for writing material, but as you have learned by reading my narrative (post-structuralist enough for you?), you can well appreciate that I considered my own upbringing a dull literary source. (Yes, I appreciate that the last sentence led with my chin — but if you have put up with my autobiography this far, I figure that you are kind-hearted, and so laughing with me, rather than at me.)

Deciding that a failed Avon lady had little to say about the meaning of life, I looked to the Fox Network to guide me to a Truth that I might share with a vast following. After five hundred hours of continuous viewing, an inspiration struck me: What about a scenario where fluoridated water turns children into transsexuals? A great premise, right? But then what? One linkage does not a plot make.

Convinced that Fox had nothing more to teach me, I started listening full-time to talk radio. With its help, several plot-lines whirled through my head: The transsexuals could pilot black helicopters whose constant buzzing would confuse Congress into spending the USA into bankruptcy; or the transsexuals, having taken over the public schools, will impose a dress code on schoolboys, thereby turning them into sushi-eating, commie-hugging sissies; or an American transsexual, high on fluoride, starts WWIII by blurting out her secret love affair with the president of Iran, who tragically humiliated, nukes Hollywood’s water treatment plant.

As alluring as these scenarios were, my mind kept returning to a plot in which fluoridation transformed an all-American, Anglo-Saxon boy into a giant-lipped, transsexual actress so desperate to have children that she smuggles dozens of them out of Africa, thereby triggering a crisis on two continents — first, in Africa, amongst forlorn parents, and in America, amongst native-born children who may one day be denied the chance to pick fruit for a living.

When my mind loped into Africa, I found Calliope, my muse, figuratively trapped by a watape tree. (What luck! — otherwise my mind might never have caught her.) You might think that at this point I hurried off to Africa or that I feverishly read African novels — like Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth or Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom. No, I am proud to say that I did neither.

Not only did I continue my practice of reading as little as possible, but I also stayed home: I did not want to clutter my mind with superficial observations from the seat of a Somali tuk-tuk or the hump of a braying llama in the Kalahari. I wanted my vision of Africa to be as fresh as the dawn over Newark, New Jersey, my abode at the time.

While I tried to keep my mind as blank of preconceptions as possible, I could not help but read the letters filling my email inbox. While carefully putting aside the ads for Viagra and penile enhancement for future reading (as I still fretted whether a failing of my mine had harmed the Deputy Sheriff), I read closely all the mail I was receiving from Nigeria.

I know I shouldn’t have paid so much attention to it, for there was a risk that this mail would somehow distort my vision of the Dark Continent; but I couldn’t help myself. I mused, “These missives don’t come from the elites — from the highbrow people who write novels or direct films about Tarzan or Saharan tigers. I figured that the literati — the people who spend their lives drinking champagne at book fairs in Cans, France or Venice Beach — had lives so aloof from the common folk (like me) that they could never know THE REAL AFRICA. Seriously, had any of them eaten a bagel with a Saudi tribesman or shared a home-made croissant with a Hottentot?

Yet the simple, heartfelt letters from my Nigerian correspondents — these, I decided, were the authentic voice of the African people. Indeed, they gave me unique insight into the singular mind of the African masses wherever they lived -- from Albania to Belarus, from Yemen to Zurich.

Eureka! I suddenly knew what it was like to discover an exotic new land — like Chris Columbus rounding the Cape of Good Hope or Ronald McDonald seeing his first hamburger!

What intrigued me most about the letters coming out of Africa was their common theme that I might, by handing over a few thousand dollars to a perfect stranger, share equally in a fortune. Shades of Treasure Island! Daringly, I decided to play this tune backwards. Instead of replying to the letters I received from Nigeria, I would compose letters of my own … asking Nigerians for help in getting my fortune out of America.

It was at this point that I chose Dawn DeWinter to be my pseudo name; I needed one now that I had set out to compose the most famous letters since Eisenstein wrote Teddy Roosevelt about the atom bomb.

In brief, I wrote and published the first Dawn DeWinter Letters; the details varied, but I sent them all to Nigerians informing them that I was a filthy rich American anxious to get my fortune out of California before Governor Arnold Schwarznegger muscled it away from me. (He wasn’t governor then; I was just looking for the least likely gubernatorial name I could find.) I wasn’t greedy: my Nigerian correspondents could have half of my billions if they sent me $2000.

Unaccountably, months went by without a reply, but then, just as I was down to my last two credit cards, Ima Constable offered to pay me $2000 plus airfare if I flew to Lagos to collect the money in person. I was on the first flight to Portugal! After sorting out the geography, I arrived in Nigeria one month later under a welcoming tropical hailstorm.

Alas, it was a police sting! How was I to know? I was a babe in the jungle when it came to international relations when I arrived in Africa. However, after thirteen months in a Nigerian jail, I became an expert in international relations, having persuaded most of my fellow inmates to help me devise a sixteenth addition to the Kama Sutra. It’s been my favorite ever since, since either sex will do, so long as there are at least seven players and twenty-one banana leaves.

As many of you readers know from personal experience, it’s not possible to survive thirteen months in the jail of a developing nation without outside assistance. To wit, I had to pay for my own food to be brought in daily. Hence I would soon have starved to death (my fellow inmates being unwilling to pay me for what they were certain to get for free) had not my mother sent me the money to pay Anna Maria, a middle-aged refugee from Burkina Faso, to cook and care for me. By this point in my life my mom and I were unaccountably estranged; however, mom upon learning somehow that I had been jailed for my opposition to female circumcision, was willing to provide my basic sustenance.

The services of Anna Maria did not cost much, even by Nigerian standards, since she was a widowed refugee from Congo — and refugees are never much liked — especially when they have three unmarried, dowerless daughters to feed. Anna Maria further estranged herself from the good people of Lagos by wearing a Burqa — you know, the Islamic dress that covers all but the eyes. This outfit did not go down well in Lagos, possibly because she alone was wearing it, or more likely because Anna Maria was a Christian who adopted the veil out of feminist conviction — no man was going to ogle her body! — rather than out of Muslim tradition.

Yet I could tell from the way she walked that Anna Maria might be a hot babe, and so I proposed marriage to her after my third bowl of Nigerian Chicken Stew. Bashfully she demurred (I swear her Burqa reddened), but thereafter I got guinea fowl and goat!

Upon release I moved in with Anna Maria and her triplets Gloria, Edith and Archia. To avert scandal — well, actually to get the torch-carrying mob to back off — I married the three girls and asked the mother — for I have catholic tastes — to join our wedding bed. But Anna Maria refused, which, alas, took some of the spice out of my marriage. She wouldn’t even watch! Though gravely disappointed, I, true to my feminist upbringing, generously allowed her to be our cook, gardener and housekeeper.

As a point of information for those of you with a dirty mind, the “girls” weren’t kids; they were 24 years old -- but still virgins until they met me. Since there were three of them, I found myself living in paradise with 72 virgin years. (Of course, I — like a lot of men who wish upon a genie’s lamp — forgot to specify that the virgins should be beautiful. Still, in most positions I could not see their face — nor they, mine. So all went well.

Yet, just as all flesh will corrupt (I couldn’t afford sunscreen!), my idyll could not last forever. My mother, upon learning from the Lagos police that I had lied about needing money to open an orphanage for girls and was in fact using it to support a ménage a trois plus house servant unaccountably — can anyone truly predict the reactions of a feminist dame? — informed me that I was “to get lost” and that she would send the money directly to Anna Maria so that the four women could open a school to teach the plain truth to plain girls.

I got more than “lost”. I got deported. The US Embassy, unfairly declaring me to be “a national embarrassment,” even paid my way home (in a cargo plane with twelve prize-winning goats), but naturally I was expected to repay them as soon as “I could find some honest work.” Broke, my reputation and clothes in tatters, I had no choice but to lower myself to working for a phone sex line. Some of you may have talked to me — I was the “Buffy” with the gravelly voice, Nigerian accent, and exotic sexual appetites. If you phoned me, you really got an education. Too much of one, it seems, for there were complaints about my lowering the tone of the sex service. The prudes actually fired me for being too dirty-minded!

It was at this point that I, hearing that rent was cheap in the heartland, moved to Iowa. As I was earning my livelihood bagging sheep manure, I learned about a teenager named Kyle who had, it was said, become the first person in the state’s history to accidentally change his sex. But after I talked things over with Kyle, now Demi (I swear I never touched the girl!), I became less sure that Demi’s butterfly emergence from the cocoon of the boy had been entirely an accident. Maybe Kyle’s femme name told us all we needed to know.

It was in Ottumwa, where Kyle/Demi attended an all-girls’ school, that I finally got my lucky break. Actually, two breaks. I was riding a borrowed pink moped — I swear I intended to return it — along Highway 34 when I got sandwiched between two police cars. Two broken legs — that was the bad part, but the cops were unable to convince a jury that I had stolen the bike or that I had caused the collision by exposing my privates.

And so, I was awarded enough money to retire to my true métier — writing epics for Sapphire, Crystal and Fictionmania, three excellent babes. (Admittedly, Fictionmania was the only one I’ve gotten to know carnally, but that girl had enough moves for an entire collective!)

The rest is history. I am too modest to write further about my own oeuvre. (I hope you appreciated my use of this pretentious, Latin word because it’s a bitch to spell correctly.) Besides, does an author know the true meaning of her creations? Is not the beauty of a story found in the eyes of the beholder? Anyway, I’m not sure I understand the stories myself. It’s hard to recreate the exact combination of drugs I was taking at the moment of conception.

I will admit this — I’ve never had the imagination to cut my stories from whole cloth. All I have ever done is to embroider a few whimsies onto dresses spun and sewn by others. That is, to the extent that I could remember or comprehend them, my stories are simply tales conveyed to me to you from the people who actually lived them. Each is a highly moral — indeed, earnestly moral — tale. Demi wanted to warn me about the risk to teens from mopeds; Nate, about the perils of hitchhiking; Todd, about the downside of liberation; Josh, about the potent effect of Brandy Alexanders; Samantha, about the need for perseverance; Jack, about the evil of bigotry; Sherry Zade (with the kind permission of Big Sue), about the folly of adultery; and Alice, about finding Hope in a post-911 world.

And so you see, I am more a reporter than author. I do my best to relate the stories I hear during my three-martini “coffee breaks” or nights sharing Mary Jane with the fellows. (On these occasions I usually smoke some grass or weed as well.)

The only story that I actually conceived myself was entitled “Caught in the Oval Office.” I gave up writing it after one chapter in 2001 when I realized how ludicrous was its basic premise — imagine a Black president from Chicago in the White House! If people couldn’t buy into the premise, then how could they remotely imagine a transgendered teen living also in the White House? There was just too much of a disconnect with reality! I might have started a second chapter had I more sensibly set the original story in the Utah governor’s mansion.

“Caught in the Oval Office” was not the only writing project I aborted Samantha’s story might yet be resumed. As for the tale of Nate, the brazen little hitchhiker, it is, as the first story I transcribed, clumsily written — even by my standards. I will either revise the existing chapters or, demand lacking, give up on the story entirely.

After all, not everything is worth finishing: I gave up on Sherry’s stories when an astute reader warned me that Sherry was ripping off fairy tales such as Snow White and Rumpelskiltin (heck, I can’t spell it). I wrote an angry letter to Big Sue, politely begging her to give Sherry a licking. I have not heard from Sherry since. So be it -- I will not abide plagiarism, unless I do it myself!

You may be wondering — is this autobiography the last word from Dawn DeWinter? After all, one usually writes an autobiography at the end of one’s career, when the creative juices have dried up. That’s not entirely true in this case, for arguably my juices never flowed … at least, into my writing. Am I now dessicated, even my breasts too withered to give milk?

(Those of you interested in learning the answer can phone me at 1-969-555-6969. And now the small print: There is a small charge for each 10 seconds of a call. No minors without written permission from their parents or parole officer. While federal lifers are my best fans, no calls from punks, catchers, may tags, roll ups or diaper snipers without written permission from your bone or bull dagger. However, Cheetos call for free. An autographed photograph from 2001 of Big Sue, in leather drag and latex gloves, and of Sherry and me, both nude, demonstrating the 58th position of the Dawna Sutra is available for free, plus a small fee for shipping and handling -- of $666.)

I await some advice — should I finish one of the existing stories, start a new one, or return to my current project (undertaken when I gave up fiction-writing in 2003) of composing a sex manual? It’s already taken up a lot of my time, even though it has only reached page 989 and I haven’t yet written a single word about aphrodisiacs, root vegetables, or rubber chickens.

Decisions, decisions. I’ve never been very good at them.

Oh, I just remembered that autobiographies are supposed to end with a word about the meaning of life, as learned by the author through long and bitter experience. Life’s meaning? Damned if I know!

 © 2009 by Dawn DeWinter. All Rights Reserved.