Kenny told that psychiatrist that he would never ever mess with that weird drug again---which was more or less what you had to say when you were in a locked ward and your parents had come down to get you and it was two in the morning and they were furious---but he was pretty sure he needed to give this TGD stuff another try. Because while he was on it he’d been a woman; his body, and what he was wearing, and it was all so REAL!!!! So that part at least had been utterly amazing, he just wouldn’t take so damn much. Because maybe next time he’d become some totally hot babe instead of that obnoxious airhead Lucy, with her creepy bongo-banging bandleader husband Ricky and weird old Fred & Ethel Murtz from next door; the whole adventure so dumb and goofy until it turned so savage and ugly- sneaking around the jungle hiding from what seemed like the whole Communist army, and then old Fred getting stood up against the wall + shot as the plot to kill that dictator dude started to rapidly unravel...

He woke up on that third of May all achy and stiff, assuming from the light outside his window that it was dawn, until he realized the sun wasn’t rising but setting. He’d slept the whole day, missing school, and as a bizarre flood of jumbled memories came back to him he knew he had gotten himself into about as much trouble as he had ever been in. He could hear his family a few rooms away, having dinner it sounded like, but he wasn’t ready to face them.

You sure got some ‘splainin’ to do, Lucy! he thought woefully, then corrected himself- I’m not Lucy, I’m Kenny Fuller. Or am I?

This was Kenny’s first transgenedrine hangover, and it was a doozy! He sat up in bed and stared into the mirror, confirming that yep, he was back to his male fourteen year old self. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that…

Quietly he went to his Dell Notebook, opened it, typed in his password and brought up his diary. Sat staring at the blank page beneath Saturday May 1 2010, the first of the three missing entries, unsure of even how to begin describing the madness he’d been through. He typed:

O.K. Diary,
I know I missed some days writing in you, like I SWORE I was never gonna do, but I was stuck back almost 50 years ago and in a different body so I couldn

He backspaced until the page was blank again. Starting like this had made his recent experiences seem like science fiction, like that old show QUANTUM LEAP his mom loved, when what he’d actually been through was an accident with a new kind of drug called TGD (although the whole notion of “nanoelectronics” sounded pretty science-fictiony in its own right…), tripping heavy and running around Star City lost in some crazy hallucinogenic ozonosphere, completely fucked up, hiding from the Cuban regulars or whatever the hell he’d thought was happening…

Positioning his hands on the keys of his laptop (“Boy we sure didn’t have anything like these back in ’62!”) he started over:

It’s weird Diary- On Saturday morning I’d never even heard of transgenedrine, and then on Sunday BOOOOOM!!!

I didn’t have any big plans for the weekend. I’m sure Mitch & Andy would have been up for doing Red Bulls + playing FINAL FANTASY XV straight thru to Monday, but I’ve been drifting away from them more + more since my own fantasies daydreams etc. went off on this freaky tangent, that I just know they wouldn’t be O.K. about at all. We’re all of us thinking about girls more now these days, but you can bet their not thinking about BEING one! Uncomfortable is how I feel a lot with them, which sucks since theyre suppose to be my tightest bros since back in

Kenny deleted the last paragraph. While it was all true, he realized he’d written pretty much these exact words at some point in the past week or so. And while recording and sorting out his adolescent gender and sexuality issues had increasingly become the point of his diary---causing him to wax philosophic in ways he hadn’t at age twelve or eleven---what he didn’t like to do was repeat himself unnecessarily . He thought again about starting a separate file for all “those” sorts of musings…

His father eased the door of his room open as if he expected to find the boy still asleep, and seeing he was up, said, “Dinner’s ready, if you’re hungry.”

The smile his dad had greeted him with seemed a really good sign. It wasn’t Mr. Fuller’s usual big easy going grin, but at least he wasn’t scowling and calling him ”Stupid! Reckless! Irresponsible!” the way he’d been on the long drive home from Metropolitan Community Hospital at three that morning. It was the sort of smile that might cross a parent’s face in spite of a decision to appear reproachful; like he was relieved to see that his child was not only alive and in one piece but functioning well enough to want to write at his computer, and not one of those dull-eyed young vegetables drooling on their shoes that they showed in that psychem-drug segment on last week’s 60 MINUTES…

“Yeah sure. I’m starving!” Kenny replied (realizing as he said this that it was true…) and followed his father out to the dining room.
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SATURDAY:

Kenny didn’t have any big plans for the day. It was just going to be one of those lazy hang-around-the-house Saturdays; the kind where you change out of your pj’s into real clothes in your own good time, watch a lot of television, smoke that fat roach you’ve got somewhere if you can find it and probably jerk off a couple of times (It seemed weird---downright paradoxical in fact---to be stroking your penis while fantasizing about not even having a penis, but maybe there’s a cock or three in you, churning away, while large strong calloused hands grope your big ol’ titties and harsh voices taunt you for needing this so desperately- making you even hotter!), and then write that paper for your American History class that you had weeks to finish but is due on Monday…

At 11:30 he had watched a funny show about skateboarding accidents, smoked that stub of a joint and poked around on the internet a bit for ideas for his paper. He was heading down the hallway to the kitchen to get a Dr. P. when his brother opened the door of his room a bit and said, “Hey Kenny, could you come in here a second?”

Kenny didn’t suspect that anything was wrong, Jim hadn’t sounded upset, but when he went in and saw the expensive looking little digital scale and those rolled up baggies of chronic scattered all across his brother’s oversized desk (the ones he wasn’t even supposed to know about) he knew he was seriously busted!

“Oh. I mean, uh …….. What’s up?”

“I think you know what’s up. You’ve been helping yourself to my product, haven’t you?”

Feigning total ignorance seemed like the most sensible response, but instead Kenny hung his head and said, “Okay, yeah, I have. But just a tiny little bit every once in a while. Really!”

“I know. I could tell,” nodded the freshman drug dealer, and still he didn’t sound very angry at all. “I mean I almost couldn’t tell. It’s smart the way you’ve been doing it, just a crumb from each quarter bag. I wouldn’t have found out if I didn’t buy this new scale. I’m just glad to know the damn thing isn’t messed up. And I really don’t think you should be smoking pot---You’re only fourteen, for God’s sake---but if you’re gonna do it you’re gonna do it. And…”

He lit up a fatty, took a toke and passed it to Kenny, who inhaled from it with calculated nonchalance. It was cool to be getting high with his brother for the first time, but still he had to wonder: That’s it? No getting my ass chewed out for ripping him off?”

Jim let his hit out and said, “Well now that we have another reprobate stoner in the family, I have a ……. Well a sort of proposal for you.”

“What’s that?” asked Kenny apprehensively.

“Here’s the thing. I’m pretty sure Mom and Dad are getting suspicious about all this,” said Jim, waving the blunt’s glowing cherry at the expanse of ziplock bags. “They’ve been nosing around in here, I have a few things set up in a way that lets me know. I knew about you a month ago. So I was wondering. How would you like to earn what you’ve been pilfering from me? I’d give you a couple of buds now and then if you help me hide all this shit.”

“I’m my room?” asked Kenny skeptically, “So I’d be the one who gets busted?”

“That’s the thing though. It wouldn’t be in your room, or even in our house anymore. You know that little hatch up in the ceiling of your closet?”

“Oh yeah,” drawled Kenny. That was an excellent hiding place. He’d been thinking about what he himself could hide up there, but didn’t want to cross that terrible line into active transvestitism. Not a second time anyway. That one spontaneous adventure with crossdressing in his mom's clothes after he'd raided the liquor cabinet had been enough. It was better---safer anyway---to just fantasize...

Jim smiled craftily as he ground out the joint in his ceramic bloodshot-eyeball ashtray. “There’s three other units on this floor besides ours, and my guess is they all have a hatch like that. Up in that attic space there’d be no way to prove it was ours…”

Kenny pictured old Bob and Gladys Williams from next door being dragged down the hall in shackles and chains, befuddled and terrified, and found himself tittering in spite of the cruelty of the image. “Okay, sure. But I’ve got cottonmouth really bad and need a soda first. You want one?”

He ran and got them each a Dr. Pepper and met his brother back in his room. Jim held a stack of three lidless shoeboxes, one with the scale and empty baggies in it, the other two brimming with $10, $25 and $50 bags of marijuana. Kenny climbed up on the dresser in his closet and slid the trapdoor aside, “Jeez, it’s kind of noisy!”

“We’ll fix that. Some carpet or something,” Jim assured him. He pulled a bag with a big X on it from the top box and tossed it onto Kenny’s bed. “This one’s yours. Go easy on it, and don’t fuck with the others, okay? You have to promise me you won’t turn into some raging druggie, start flunking classes and all that miserable stuff…”

To Kenny this didn’t seem like a thing that anyone could promise with 100% certainty---no one started out with the intention of turning into some unregenerate wasteoid----but to point this out right now would not be in the best interest of this sweet deal he’d stumbled onto. As he hefted the first shoe box through the hatch and slid it toward the no man’s land between their condominium and the Williams’ he said solemnly, “I promise. No partying until my homework is done.”

“That’ll work, if you stick to it,” said Jim, and from the next box he held up a ziplock bag with a mass of tiny pills at the bottom. “And I DON’T want you getting into these either. I’m serious little bro’. I’ve counted them, so hands off! You wouldn’t like ‘em anyway…”

Kenny peered down at them. They looked like miniature pink Mentos. “What are they? Some kind of tweek?”

“God no! I don’t have anything to do with that shit, or even want to know anyone who does! Any kind of speed is bad news. What these are is something new. They’re called transgenedrine.”

“So they’re some kind of hormones or something?”

Jim gave his brother a long, funny look---like how did Kenny know about transgender and hormones---but let it pass. He said, “No dummy, they make you think you’re a chick. You hallucinated it. Or if a girl takes TGD she’ll see herself as a dude. You’ve heard of cartuinal, right?”

“You mean Toontown? Sure,” grinned Kenny. The kids at his junior high school were all talking about it, and a few were doing it. Toontown turned you into in to a cartoon character, and everything around you into a big 3-D cartoon. Zach Underwood had been taken away---never to return---after he smacked the assistant Principal with a 2x4 and went bouncing around the cafeteria laughing maniacally (thinking he was Woody Woodpecker, from the sound of it!), but most of the kids who took it just quietly had a good time with it, watching the teachers turn into cartoon clowns and have pie fights, or enjoying the sensation of having fur, funny ears and a tail. And Kenny had wanted to try it, but never seemed to have the $20 whenever someone was selling it…

Transgenedrine is the same sort of thing, Jim explained. Same class of drug. He personally didn’t think there was anything to the rumor that was circulating on the internet, that all these new street drugs with such specific properties were based on something called psychem, that the government was plotting to put in the water supply, to make everyone think the economy and such were going better than they were; driving around in Cushman carts and thinking they were Mazerattis or whatever…

But what was true was that these substances weren’t drugs in the same way that LSD and heroin were drugs. They went into your brain and downloaded software into it, which was how they could give you just the one kind of hallucination. There was one called scifiazide (That might drop you into DUNE or BLADE RUNNER), and also pyratine (made you go ‘AAAAAARRRRRRR!! and engage in severe swashbuckling), megalomanium (“I’m King of the World!”) and omnipotor (Thou Art God) ……….. And you could guide the sort of hallucinations you would get by staring at a picture---or better yet a movie or t.v. show---as you came onto it. Whatever you were seeing when the drug took effect would determine the course of your trip. ‘Imprinting’, this phenomenon was called. And it was also true that all these drugs had come out of nowhere, so suddenly that they weren’t even illegal yet, so that lawmakers were rushing like mad to make possession of anything that employed nanoelectronics a serious felony- but for the next few weeks or months it was actually perfectly legal.

As he slid the next box into the hidey hole Kenny made a disgusted face, and unconsciously deepening his voice said, "Well I sure as fuckin' shit wouldn't want to trip on bein' some ho! Why the shittin' fuck couldn't you have got one of those other kinds? That motherfuckin' pirate shit sounds way-the-fuck cool!"

"It's what my guy had. And it turns out there's a great market for transgenedrine. I can charge thirty-five for one."

"Who the fuck to?" snorted Kenny, "Fags?!"

Jimmy grimaced. What kind of trash was his little brother hanging out with that he was turning into such a homophobe? They had both been taught tolerance from an early age. And what was with all the cussing? Was he coming down with Tourette's Syndrome all of the sudden?

"No, actually the gay community-" he stressed the term, "-is more into this stuff called machomanitol. The guys anyway, I don't know if there's a lesbian one. But where TGD is really popular is at raves. I'm going to one tonight, supposed to be a big one, at that old closed up amusement park down along the Mercantile District piers. I'll probably be able to unload all twenty of these," he said patting his shirt pocket with the little bag in, then he began sliding his hand around his chest in a slow languorous fashion, "And yeah it is kind of weird, seeing some dude sprawled out there, smiling like Christmas morning and feeling himself up like he's got a big ol' pair-"

"Ewww gross!" exploded Kenny.

"Hey, whatever floats their boat. It's not hurting anybody is it?" shrugged Jim and handed Kenny the box with the scale in it.

"Maybe not," Kenny conceded grudgingly as he closed the hatch.

All of which was the exact opposite of how he actually felt about this drug and what it promised, and for the rest of the day he couldn't stop thinking about that bag with the eighty tiny pills in it. He cursed the fact that they were pills, and not some powder that he could cut with Nutrasweet or whatever so his brother wouldn't know he had taken some. Jim's reaction upon discovering his thieving had been so unexpectedly decent and forgiving that Kenny felt ashamed, and had resolved to be strictly on the up-and-up with his brother from then on. But that was before he'd learned of the existence of transgenedrine. That he was now ready to go back on his resolution showed what an iron grip this drug had on his imagination...

TGD seemed to be perfectly tailored to his fantasies, his erotic obsessions. If it really was the feminizing equivalent of Toontown it would give him exactly the sensations he craved- from the caress of his long honey blonde hair against his smooth graceful shoulders down to how that pair of sexy red high heels---which "Kendra" would be able to strut around in like she'd been born wearing them---held his feet at an angle that was unfamiliar yet oddly thrilling; and all without really changing him in any way physically; and all without leaving him with shaved legs or eyebrows thinned and shaped just so, that he would find himself having to account for when he came to the next day (With his light colored and rather sparse body hair the legs hadn't caused him any real trouble, but the eyebrows had proven far more problematic. He'd ended up having to dispense with them entirely, sticking to his pilot-light-in-the-oven story {"I dunno, Mom. Something sure exploded in there!" even after it was revealled to him that they had an all-electric kitchen...). Kenny just knew he had to try this stuff, even if it meant venturing down to Deepstar and subjecting himself to the knowing smirks of the Avenue Y pushers when he told them what he wanted.

Jimmy and Kenny were on the couch debating what movie they wanted to watch on cable when there was a knock on the front door. It was Mrs. Williams from next door, checking up on them for the second time that day, and inviting them over for breakfast. Or "brunch" she called it, although it was a bit late for either.

The brothers looked at each other, silently concurring that whatever she was offering had to to be better than the Hot Pockets they'd each be nuking for lunch, and went with her over to #904.

After the feast---fluffy light crepes with whipped cream and every kind of fruit and topping you could think of---Jim cited some obligation of his and beat a hasty retreat, but Kenny stuck around to play Scrabble with the Bob and Gladys; and wound up having more fun than he'd expected to, staying far longer than the token hour or so he had intended to give them. It was sort of like hanging out with his grandparents, except that the Williamses didn't spend the whole time bitterly busting each other's chops...

For whatever reason the old couple had never had kids of their own, and Kenny could tell they wished they had. Which might have been why when his mom and dad had asked the elderly couple to sort of supervise their offspring for the weekend they'd jumped at the chance; seeing this as a fun and different thing to do for a couple of days...

Which it sure turned out to be. Different anyway. If Kenny had done even half the things he feared he'd done when they came over on Sunday and found him out of his brain on TGD---in full Lucy Ricardo mode, pouting and simpering and flouncing up a storm, wailing "WAAAAAAHHH!! RICKY WON'T LET ME BE IN HIS SHOOOOOOOOW!!!"---it was going to be pretty embarrassing the next time he saw them.

And he never did finish that paper for his history class.
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NEXT: EARLY SUNDAY MORNING...
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HI ALL. This as you might be able to tell was going to be my May Day Contest Story entry. But the odds are exceedingly slim that I'll finish it by the 31st. PART TWO will appear in a few days, a week at tops. After the two Jackie Kaiser stories I didn't want to do another first person narrative by a sweet-natured transgendered young person, and decided to try having this character not be a case of straightforward transsexuality but instead one with a gender divergence more muixed up with sexuality- my impression of what an autogynophile would be like. The teenage drug use is not something I condone, but it reflects the sort of world I grew up in back in the seventies, and it's the set-up for the weird drug trip in the third & final segment, which I'm gonna go write right now...

And if anyone is curious, I will be resuming work on PLAY NICE, right after I finish this one...
~~~Laika