And here I am hard at work in my writer's studio:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSE4ac6gaRQ&NR=1

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I grew up in a three bedroom suburban ranch house in Long Beach, California. My birth had been unplanned and unexpected. I was what my parents called "their little accident", a term they used without malice, but also apparently without considering what this might tell me about my place in the world. Oh well, it was one little fuck up in an otherwise adequate job of parenting. And anyway, in those days people did not chose their words quite so carefully, deconstructing them for any potentially offensive nuance. They can't be held to our more enlightened standards...

Since my sister Carol was almost nine years older than me, we had few of the quarrels between us that a lot of brothers and sisters have. When I was born she was old enough to help take care of me, and she was delighted to have something more responsive than a dumb plastic doll to cuddle.

There was a time---when she was around thirteen---that she seemed to think I was just too strange to hang out with, like I was embarrassing to be seen with in front of her friends, which really hurt, but luckily this phase of hers was short lived.

And as I grew she became my mentor and role model, who always knew such grown-up stuff, like that The Beatles were a legitimate rock group while these Monkees were a pathetic commercial sham; and in years to come she would introduce me to sophisticated writers like Jack Kerouac, Henry Miller, Sylvia Plath- the whole sick crew.

When she turned sixteen and could drive, under the pretext of taking me down to the Foster Freeze for an ice cream we would get on the freeway in her bright red rebuilt Thunderbird and she'd slip on her driving gloves open it up to over 100 mph! This was just one of our nifty little secrets. Or we'd go to East L.A. on Saturday night and drive up and down Whittier Blvd. real slow with all the other owners of nice cars, scrunched down low in our seats, listening to Wolfman Jack on XERB and drinking RC cola with the bottles wrapped in brown paper bags. Like the song says, we had fun fun fun in that little T-Bird.

She was the best big sister a kid ever had, and in ways she never imagined I wanted to be just like her. Or did she?

One night we were talking in the bathroom while she put on her makeup for a date. As usual I was fascinated by the whole girly ritual.

She picked up a type of device that I had never seen before. You worked it like scizzors, but at the front end there was this crescent shaped metal frame containing a part that opened and closed like a sluice gate. It was an eyelash curler, but to me it looked like some arcane surgical instrument they would use on Dr. Kildare...

"What is that thing?" I asked.

"What's this? What's this?" she asked in a playfully menacing voice, snapping it open and shut in front of my nose.

I shrieked and dodged out of the way, "Yeah! What's that?"

She lunged at me, " It's a weenie-cutter-offer! And I'm gonna cut your weenie off and turn you into a little girl!!"

I screamed, and there was a mad chase all through the house, both of us whooping and laughing until our mother cornered us by the washer/dryer-

"What the hell are you kids doing? It sounds like a heard of buffalo running through here!"

"Sorry Mom, we were just playing," said my sister, in a way that seemed to invite Mom to put all the blame on her.

"Well simmer down, both of you! You know better than to get him worked up like that, Carol. It's almost his bed time..."

And in fact I was unusually worked up. This game had thrilled me in some profound way. I knew it wasn't really a weenie cutter-offer, but what if it was? And what if she caught me?!

The next time I was there when she did her face, she picked up on my hints and chased me with the device again, and ended up pinning me against the couch, where I giggled and squirmed until I almost peed.

After about the third time I think she was starting to worry. Of all our weird, quirky little games why had this one become important to me? Somehow it didn't seem right to her.

But Carol did enjoy seeing the delight I obviously took in it, so an unspoken compromise was reached. While most times she would tell me "Not now, I'm kind of in a hurry," or "I think you're getting a bit old for silly baby games..."; once in a while---usually when was I least expecting it---she would whip out the dreaded and coveted device and trot along after me, threatening to make my entire boy's wardrobe obsolete and start me on that new course in life that I was beginning to imagine, and covet.

Then one day she'd had her fill even of this. She sat me down and we had a "talk".

Meaning she talked. She said that she was worried about me, and even though Mom and Dad were so resistant to the whole notion of counselling and psychiatry, somehow or other I really needed to get some some kind of help!

I couldn't believe what I was hearing. My whole face burned with shame! I fled out the front door of the house we had inherited, got in my SUV, cranked up my XM radio full blast, and---crying uncontrollably---drove down to the Surfsider Tavern where I got drunker than I had ever been in my life.

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A caveman might be able to do it, but I've been a total klutz trying to submit my very first story to BCTS. Anyway Chris, everybody, after finally figuring this out, here's my entry into your Caveman Story Challenge:

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Your zen koan for today: What did cross-dressers do before there were clothes? This is the tale of an enterprising young caveman named Og, which illustrates the old adage that necessity is the mother of invention. And sometimes of inversion. . .

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7
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Early October, approximately 188,000 years ago:
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Og was good hunter. Strong. Brave. Devoted to him mate, Leelee. Always helpful around village. Everybody like Og, even if this Og have funny habit of scraping him beards off with sharp rock.

But Og have terrible secret. Him like to go out into clearing late at night and mince. And pout. And throw rocks like girl. And dance around big rock in western clearing. Clearing is special magic place for Og, where Og just let Og be Og.

Then Og discover him can tuck him man-flint between thighs and see is smooth and pretty there like woman. Og feel wonderful! Oh me sexy now, sigh Og! But Og still feel something missing in all this. . . .

Og try "displaying" like females of furry-little-cousins do when them want boom boom. Og jut out butt and looking back over shoulder and make big fuck-me-please face. But this feel weird and wrong, like is big step back to animal-ness. Then boy furry-cousins get wrong idea and try to jump on Og! Run Og!

Og love to play lady, but wondering of just how this playing could be better gnaw at him brains. What has him not thinked of yet?

One afternoon Og napping against him special rock in clearing and have dream that rock speak to him. Wake up with idea! Crazy wild new brilliant wild crazy crazy new idea!

New idea is: If Og has explored all differences between man and woman, and is not enough ....... make new difference!
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Og tell all him hunter friends, “Instead of throw animal hides down hill after is food, you bring to Og!”

“All right,” they say. “Og crazy, but whatever...”

Then many days Og work on something. Act like him have secret.

Ogwife Leelee ask, “Is Og sneak off and see Neenee?”

Him say, “No Baby, is nothing like that. Is something will make Leelee happy.”

Leelee not believe Og, so Og show Leelee.

Leelee think Og's new thing to do very nice.

“Very pretty,” say Leelee. Leelee kiss Og!

========>
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Next full moon Og call meeting, bring Ten Families together around fire (fire latest thing in Grandfathertime...).

Og say, “Big Cold coming soon.”

Everybody nod. Big Cold come every year.

Og say, “Og make something to make Big Cold not so bad. Og and Leelee show you.”

Og and Leelee go in cave, come out wearing skins.

Grog yell, "IS ANIMALS!" and grab spear.

“No Grog, is US,” laugh Og.

Grog goggles. "OG?!"

“These called clothes,” Og say. “Me make clothes for everybody. These kind for mens, these kind for womens.”

Chief Mukimuk ask, “Why are different?”

“So can tell man from woman without dicks and pussies hanging out.”

Chief smile. “Og smart!”

“Wow, Leelee-clothes make Leelee look HOT,” says Mog. “Make tits go up!”

“Make feel better too,” giggle Leelee! “And no flop-flop get in way when Leelee try to cook.”

Everybody like Og's invention, and wonder why not thought of before.

Og hero now. Get many presents, and liver from hunt next day.

========>
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But Og get best present next night, when whole tribe sleeping. Leelee sleeping. Neenee sleeping. Grog sleeping. Dogs sleeping. Good!

Og borrow Leelee's clothes and head for western clearing. . . .

Pretty, pretty Og cavort and prance around him tall rectangular smooth flat shiny black rock in moonlight. Og leap way, way, way, way, way into air!

Freeze frame.

Somewhere in Heaven (probably downtown, where all the freeways come together in a great gleaming golden bow of an interchange...) is an office building the size of Mount Everest, in which angels with massive ledger books and quill pens keep the balance of our sins. When we do or think something bad it is noted in our account summary, and when we go to confession the priest gives us the bill for whatever we declare, and as we do penance our balance is brought back to zero. The Church is nothing if not well-organized.

I knew that the key to ever being able to behold this magnificent skyscraper or any of the other marvels, monuments, rides & attractions that Heaven has to offer was in making sure you didn’t die when you were in the red. But certain thoughts and deeds of mine seemed too strange & terrible to ever admit to, so I confessed to invented sins that I hoped would be bad enough to stand in for those shameful wanting-to-be-a-girl ones. It was a pretty nifty system I had worked out. Until that Sunday when I was twelve, when my whole clever scheme came crashing down around me!

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|||)===[ LAPSED CATHOLICS ]==0==0==0==0==>
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When we lived in town my family had gone to church at Our Lady of the Sorrows every week. But after we moved out to the Badlands my folks started finding excuses not to go. And then after a while they stopped even making excuses. I couldn’t see why, we hadn’t moved that far out into the Boonies-

Or no, actually I had a pretty good idea why. My mom and my stepdad had always been the topic of gossip, of knowing smiles and polite greetings somehow brimming with insinuation, and our moving from town had just seemed to make it worse. We were “those weirdos”, doing God knows what in that miserable little single-wide out at the end of Savoy Creek Road. Ours was a family so rife with dysfunction that even miscreants like the Bagley brothers or the evil Mrs. Krumfelter could look smugly down their noses at us.

“Did you see Sam in church this morning? Half in the bag again, as usual. Almost fell outta the damn pew!”

"God yes! Did you hear about the time-"

My parents had taken to doing the bulk of their shopping in Sutcliff ninety miles away, usually after our twice-monthly pilgrimages to the swap meet at the Big Sky Drive In. It was true that a dollar went farther at the WalMart there, but I don’t think this was the real reason we started shopping there.

“And that boy of theirs. That ‘Jackie’...” (these villagers as often as not supplying my name with quotation marks when they said it.)

“No fooling! First time I saw him, I was thinking: ‘My God what a homely girl!’ And then I realized it was...." (laughs), "Christ, what a little pansy!”

“Well with parents like that it’s no wonder he’s so screwed up-”

“Screwed up” was one of the nicer things these people said about me. In what was still something of a rough frontier town a boy like me stood out like a Bird of Paradise on a turkey farm.
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|||)===[ ALLIES & ENEMIES ]==0==0==0==0==>
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And what the adults usually whispered, the kids at our compact little elementary-through-high-school would shout. Pussy. Homo. Bitch…

There were three boys in particular whose mission in life was to torture me. The teachers and the man who drove the school district’s single bus did what they could to stop them but I still got beat up several times a month, covering for the black eyes etc. that I came home with by claiming that I’d fallen off the jungle gym or something, like I was the clumsiest kid on the planet. I regularly “lost” things too, like when my school books would be knocked out of my arms and torn to shreds. It’s no wonder I cherished those days when I got to stay home with a headache or the stomach flu.

While most of the students shunned me---either because they agreed with these three psychopaths or just wanted to avoid trouble with them---I did have certain kids who liked me. My best friends Sherrie and Janine, and a few others.

It was Sherrie who befriended me first, when we were both nine. I stood watching her sitting on the playground by herself, engrossed in some ritual involving a tiny red ball that she was bouncing, and these spiky metal things she was tossing and scooping up.

This new girl who had recently moved to Hellebore looked up and gave me the huge smile that I would soon come to love her for. She gestured, “Hi! You wanna play jacks?”

“I don’t know how,” I confessed.

“That’s okay. I didn’t know either ‘til my mom showed me. She says this is what they used to do when she was growing up, because they didn’t have PSP's or even Gameboys.”

“They didn’t?”

“No. And she says computers were these big giant things you had to shovel coal into to make ‘em go. My mom, she’s like a hundred years old…”

Sherrie and I really hit it off that day, both realizing that we’d found a valuable friend; And shortly after this she introduced me to Janine, who had been in my class since first grade but who I hadn’t really got to know that well. And now---at twelve---I couldn’t imagine life without these two girls.

And because they liked me, most of their girlfriends also decided that I was okay (except for the three who splintered off to start their own group because of me). When we played together it wasn’t long before they all seemed to forget I was a boy, which was something I would’ve loved to forget myself. Hanging out with these girls felt like coming home, the brightest moments in my basically crappy life.

Of course this female peer bonding didn’t go unnoticed by my enemies, who would distract us in our playground games with taunts and catcalls. And then after school…

”Yoo-hoo! Jackie Girl!” came a mocking falsetto cry as they moved in on me.

“Whoah! Lookit all the books. You goin’ for extra credits, you kiss ass bee-otch?!”

I wasn’t very good with comebacks at times like this, and I’d learned that even when a good retort did occur to me, however gratifying it might be to score a verbal hit, the price I payed in the next moment would be far too high.

But of course for me to not respond wasn't satisfactory to them either, and they soon had me on the ground and were teaching me a lesson for daring to be enrolled at their school.

"What a fuckin' pussy! Look at ‘im, he's gonna cry. You gonna cry, little girl?"

Sometimes they did make me cry. And at other times my eyes remained dry---even when these three boys were whaling on me---feeling hot and tight and burning with useless rage. And sometimes I wouldn’t start crying until later, at home; and then only in the safety of my room, as I hugged and commiserated with one of the ten stuffed animals that dwelled at the head of my bed. Because I had an enemy at home too...
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|||)===[ IT'S ABOUT RESPECT, SEE? ]==0==0==0==0==>
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Or if not an enemy, then at least often and quite vocally disappointed in the sort of son I was turning out to be. And who probably would’ve been a lot happier if I had been one of the school’s troublemakers instead of the main focus of their bullying. And who loved to give me lectures on the ways I should walk and talk and be---on ATTITUDE---that might as well have been in Farsi for as useful as I found them:

“Y’know, when I was stationed at Fort Lincoln back in ’86, there was this one dude---little guy, maybe one-fiftyfive soakin’ wet, I had to wonder how he even made it into the Army, puny as he was---that a couple of hard-cases thought they could fuck with. I tell you, that was a mistake someone only ever made once. He didn’t have the reach or much of a punch, but he made up for it in pure crazy! Used to carry this flashlight; it didn’t work, he’d filled it with ball bearings and ready mix, screwed it back together and let the sucker harden and- Well like one time there was this big cholo, Alvarez I think his name was, who really thought he was some kind of bad-ass. And so one night after Lights Out ...... Hey! Would it be too much goddamn trouble to look at me when I’m talkin' to you?”

I’d had a horrible day that day. The self-proclaimed "Body Count Posse" had gotten to me both before and after school, and all I wanted to do was watch WINX CLUB and lick my wounds in peace.

“I am looking!”

“With what? Your eyes are lookin’ everywhere but at me! This is something you need to hear. It's how the world is. Or do you got somewhere more important you need to be?”

“No. I just…"

“It’s about respect, see? About not taking shit from people, or they're gonna- Just what?”

Taking shit.

I pressed my hand to my stomach, “It’s just I have to go to the bathroom, real bad.”

“Go on then. Make it quick.”

Which I didn’t...
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|||)===[ BOOGA-BOOGA! ]==0==0==0==0==>
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I clunked the seat down loudly. Ran water in the sink. Gingerly took my shirt off and looked in the mirror at the scrapes across my shoulder, the bruises along my ribs. They weren't too bad this time…

I pulled my pants and underwear down, then off, and surveyed my body. Skinny, knock-kneed, not curvy in the ways I’d fantasized, but not conspicuously masculine either. Not terribly unlike the physiques of some of the girls that I palled around with, and not all grossly pelted in body hair- Thank God!

But I knew from my sex ed classes (which had stuck to the mechanics of things and made procreation sound about as fun as peeling potatoes...) that it would start changing---in a few months, a few years at best---in ways that I dreaded. That nasty little wrinkled sack under my willie had plans for me that I wanted no part of…

A knock on the door: “What’re you doing in there, writin’ your damn memoirs?”

I spun the toilet paper roller, ran some more water, “I’m almost done.”

“Hell never mind, it’s useless even talkin' to you. You trying to avoid me? Fine! I’m going…”

The front door opening, closing. The truck starting and pulling out. Off to the Wonderbar, the nearest tavern.

And so I was saved from another dismal lecture about the unforgiving harshness of this world, and what I needed to do---to become---to survive in it.

But was this really the way our whole world was? Women seemed to get along with each other okay without having to carry around flashlights filled with buckshot and concrete. Sure girls could be mean and rotten (especially Luanne Winston and her pinch-faced little splinter group); But to the extent that life was physically dangerous, it seemed like it was because men made it that way. And sure there were exceptions on both sides, like with certain members of my own family, but it seemed like in general...

The first time we went to visit my uncle in the state penitentiary, I was pretty young. As we crossed the visitor’s parking lot toward the great grim seven story building, it seemed to me like a weird place for my uncle to want to live.

“Why does Uncle Dean live here?”

“This is a prison. It’s where they keep bad men.”

“Is Uncle Dean a bad man?”

"Pretty much," chuckled my mom.

I pointed at a smaller structure two blocks away, “What’s that?”

“That’s the women’s facility. Where they keep all the bad women.”

It was just as forbidding, surrounded by the same high fences capped with razor-wire, but it was dinky in comparison, maybe three stories tall and covering less ground. I looked at the one building, then the other. The difference seemed to be telling me something about the natures of men and of women…

It was as if men’s brains were stuck back in some booga-booga caveman era, expecting to be ambushed at any time; looking for violence, geared up for it, and because of this creating it somehow ...... when if they'd just chill the h-e-l-l out, and stop trying to convince each other of how freaking “bad” they were, this world might be a pretty nice place. But this simple and sort of obvious notion seemed beyond them.

In some fundamental way the masculine psyche just seemed so alien to me. It was this as much as anything else that convinced me right down in my bones that I really was a girl somehow.
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|||)===[ IF THY RIGHT HAND OFFEND THEE ]==0==0==0==0==>
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Except I wasn’t. Not according to what I saw in that full length mirror on the bathroom door.

I sighed. Stuffed my cock and testes between my thighs and pressed them together. The sight of my now smooth featureless crotch was strangely gratifying.

It wouldn’t be so bad having nothing at all down there. Maybe not as suitable as what girls had between their legs (which I’d first seen on the day Paul Zeltner shoved that HUSTLER magazine in my face: “Hey Fag Meat! You wish you had one of these, don’t you?!”) but way better than being a male. And I wouldn’t become all gross and hairy either.

My thoughts returned to that massive paper cutter sitting on top of the art supplies cabinet in our classroom. Big heavy scimitar-looking thing hinged to the corner of the gridded oak platform. Sometimes during recess when Miss Kellerman let me stay behind and use the computer I was the only one in there. It would only take seconds, a short burst of resolve.

The harsh electric bell ringing; everyone tromping back in from their kickball game...

“Oh my God! Jackie, what did you DO?!”

Not a very nice thing to do to Miss Kellerman after she’d put such faith in me, but she wasn’t the one who was facing transformation into some oversized lumbering ape.

And being right in the middle of town, our school was just blocks from Great Northern Medical Clinic, where I knew I would need to be taken, a.s.a.p…

“Where’s the boy’s genitals? We’ll try to reattach them.”

“What do you mean he wouldn’t- ”

Then later, after I had been gurneyed off, the schoolroom floor had been mopped and things were calming down, Paul Zeltner opening his lunchbox to find...

This wasn’t the first time this sort of gristly scenario had run through my head. What was WRONG with me???

As prominent and as constant as all this stuff was in my mind, I had never breathed a word about it to anyone. Not with my parents---Hell no!---and not with Janine or Sherrie either- although with them I’d come close several times. And not with our local priest Father Michael or the younger, hipper Father Anthony who had replaced him recently. I just knew this strange conviction I had about my gender was a sin, and no doubt a mortal one.

As was my secret habit of dressing up like a girl, to the extent that I could with the few things I had hidden beneath my dresser, on those days when my folks had made the long drive to Sutcliff and I had the house to myself.

This was something that television comedians reaped great waves of audience laughter for doing. And when men seemed to be doing it in earnest---like on SPRINGER sometimes---the audience laughter turned ugly and mocking, leaving no doubt about how utterly wrong feelings like mine were.
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|||)===[ JOB 37:14 ]==0==0==0==0==>
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Like parents who force fed their infants and toddlers highbrow music from hundreds of years ago that they personally would never listen to (having read somewhere that this would turn their tyke into a genius), my folks apparently felt that my going to church would be good for me, even though they themselves had given up on “all that happy horseshit”. Because when I told them I was interested in going back they were all for it, happy to drop me off in front of Our Lady of Sorrows at a quarter to nine on Sunday mornings; or if they were swap meet bound that day, even as early as 7:00, giving me a couple of bucks so I could go keep warm inside the Dandy Donuts a block away on Main Street.

But today we weren’t early. If anything we were running late, at least (“Goddamnit, wouldja quit whining? We got plenty of time-”) by my standards. I enjoyed the socializing before and after church at least as much as I did the services. Just listening to the adults talk, mostly. It didn’t seem anything like those critiques I would hear about it on the drive home, back when the three of us had gone every week; about how this person was a phony backstabber and that one was downright nauseating with how he was boasting about his new ride-‘em lawn mower.

I did get the occasional funny look or curt reply to my “Good morning”s but mostly people acted nice, on their best behavior and trying to be genuine Christians for these few hours on the Lord’s Day.

I waved as our old tailgate-less pickup truck pulled away from the curb, and started across the parking lot toward the church. I noticed how its wide lawn was starting to turn green again after the long winter, and that the people clambering out of their cars weren’t all bundled up the way they’d been just a few weeks earlier. The pale blue sky was filigreed with delicate wispy cirrus clouds, and you could smell springtime in the air. Pollen I guessed it was, the same stuff that made poor Miss Kellerman’s nose so red and swollen and tender, but it smelled really good to me.

I was in high spirits. It always felt good to get away from that oppressive little trailer out in the Badlands, and it was great that I still had nearly half the weekend sitting between me and whatever hassles I'd face at school on Monday. But best of all was that I would be spending today with Sherrie and her mother. It was a standing arrangement that I'd hang out at their place through dinner, or on nice days Sherrie and I would go to the little park across the street from their apartments, and then Sally (Sherrie’s mom) would drive me home...

I saw them before they noticed me. Mrs. Cagle was standing off to the side of the church’s giant titanium airlock doors, having a quick last cigarette with a couple of other adults before they went in; while Sherrie stood a safe distance away, intently studying one of the hydrangea bushes in the planter box along the curved metal flank of the church. Sherrie, keeping an eye out for my arrival, smiled and waved when she spotted me.

“Hey,” I called out as I approached.

“Hey,” she grinned. “You seem like you’re in a good mood.”

“I guess I am,” I replied.

Sherrie had on a pretty aqua and white party dress that came down to just above her knees, and pearlish white stockings as a concession to the fact that while the sun was shining the breeze coming down out of the mountains had a nip to it. On her feet were those cute shoes I liked, the ones held on by a strap that went across the top of the foot. I wasn’t sure if the clashing yellow cotton hoody she wore wrecked her outfit or made it stylishly funky, but if I was somehow allowed to walk around in such a pretty dress I would be loathe to cover it up. Although I realized you'd want to at least have a coat of some sort along on a day like this...

I seem to remember wanting to give my friend a big huge hug, but I’m not exactly sure if this was the case. At twelve we weren’t hugging a whole lot- every greeting and every departure and sometimes just because. That habit would evolve a bit later in our friendship; after a horrible confrontation at home (in which nearly everything I cherished was viciously destroyed) would cause me to break down crying in Sherrie’s kitchen, and I would wind up telling her and her mom EVERYTHING that was going on with me. But back in Spring I just wasn’t ready yet.

Sherrie smirked, “So are you ready to get your ass kicked playing Super Wii Skyscraper Skeeball?”

“You wish!”

“Hey Jackie, check this out,” she said in a kind of hushed tone, and pointed out what she’d been gazing at so raptly as I approached.

Between the two main branches of one of the hydrangea bushes a little roan spider was finishing the construction of an enormous web; an intricate geometric design, flawlessly executed. Hard to believe that a little thing with maybe a dozen brain cells could create something so perfect. This was one of the things I loved about Sherrie. She saw so many of the same things I did, that other people would walk right past...

The web wobbled and shook in the faint breeze, but our tiny friend had been born to do this, and held on by keeping one or another leg hooked around it at all times. Minutes ticked by as we stood and watched it in silence.

“Stand still and consider the wondrous works of God…” quoted someone from behind us. Sherrie’s mom. “That’s from the Book of Job. I think …….. Ambitious little booger, isn’t she?”

Despite what my friend always said (and what the woman herself claimed where it said “AGE:” on her MySpace page), Sally Cagle wasn’t really 100 years old. But she did seem pretty old for a mom, with long straight gray hair clear down her back and a tanned face crisscrossed by wrinkles of varying depth. But her eyes sparkled like those of a young girl, and her smile was warm and full of mischief. She was wearing a sort of cowgirl outfit, an elaborate red and white shirt with yellow rosebuds embroidered on it over a pair of nice black jeans, a chic soft leather jacket and boots that made her look like she'd stepped right off the stage of NASHVILLE TONIGHT.

And she definitely did hug me, grabbing me in a way that wasn’t going to take no for an answer.

“Oh I swear I could just eat you up, you’re such a sweetie. God, I wish I could just take you home and keep you! Take you out-”

She stopped, not wanting to finish whatever she’d started to say (“take you out of that hellhole you're living in-”) and went into nonverbal mode, growling her affection like a mama bear as she squeezed me tight. I made desperate faces at Sherrie over her Mom’s shoulder but I wasn’t fooling anyone. They both knew I loved this…

“But that wouldn’t be fair to Frannie, would it?” Mrs. Cagle sighed as she pulled back, looking me up and down as she held me at arm’s length, from my hard black shiny ‘church shoes’ to the cowlick that had been plastered into submission with VO5 hairspray, “My, don’t you look nice today?”

“No,” I snorted disgustedly, “I don’t.”

Some adults might’ve bristled at such a response, regarding it as ‘back talk’, but the 60-year-old divorcee was someone who welcomed honest disagreement, even from kids, and considered what I’d said on its own merits…

“No, I guess you don’t. This looks like your dad’s idea of what a proper young man should wear to church. Where do people get the idea that God listens to Lawrence Welk and not Pink Floyd?” she chuckled, causing Sherrie and I to exchange mystified glances (“Who? …….. WHO?”); then she shrugged, “But anyway it’s great that we get to have you over today. Do you like chicken red curry?”

“I don’t know,” I said. "I had some yellow stuff once called curry salad, I liked that."

“Well I’ve got a mess of it simmering in the crock pot at home. I’ve never made Thai before. If it turns out bad I’ll whip us all up some cheeseburgers,” she smiled, then she noticed that we were the only ones still outside- “Oh! We’d better get in there!”
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|||)===[ BODY OF CHRIST ]==0==0==0==0==>
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Built sometime in the 1990’s---after a particularly hard snowfall had totally collapsed the roof of the old building---Our Lady of Sorrows was a really unique looking structure. A convergence of lopsided conic sections that didn’t quite line up with each other, which towered above the prefab and pasteboard houses on the streets around it. It sort of reminded me of the Space Mountain ride at Disney Dominion up across the border in Saskatchewan.

Some of the locals complained about it, saying it was too modernistic for a proper church, and out of touch with our village’s architectural character (WHAT character, I wondered. The McDonalds? The Jiffy Lube?) but I loved it. Especially the inside, which fulfilled everything the dynamic exterior promised. It was like stepping into another world. The sleek cherrywood pews, the ovoid portals leading off to all the anterooms and offices around the perimeter, everything rounded and flowing into everything else; except for that big jazzy asymmetrical cross rearing up 25 feet behind a railed pulpit that looked like a submarine’s conning tower; its jarring lines intended to symbolize Our Lord’s suffering, His abstract form not discernible right at first but sort of fused with it- kind of like Han Solo from Star Wars when they froze him in that plastic gunk. This departure from the usual bloodied Ecce Homo was something else Our Lady’s critics squawked about. And overhead that fathomless vast purple twilight space---mysterious and majestic---which seemed to glow of its own accord; as if with radiation left over from the Big Bang...

Where today as sometimes happened, a bird who had gotten inside was zooming around in a growing panic trying to find its way out, the sermon pretty much a lost cause as we all watched in helpless sympathy, people muttering “poor thing” when it would bat itself against the big angled stained-glass skylights.

The service was okay---the familiar rites, the catechism, the Eucharist, candles and censers, a couple of hymns, Father Anthony reading announcements (“Father Michael is doing well at the alcohol rehab in Scottsdale and asks for your prayers…”) after his sermon, which as usual was both shorter and easier to relate to than those esoteric, scholarly discourses that Father Michael use to favor us with had been.

One Sunday out of curiousity I'd snuck over and tried the service at the Foursquare Pentecostal Church on the other end of town. They had better music---a Christian rock band of all things, and a pretty good one---and their congregation had an energy (“PRAAAAISE JE-SUS!!!”) that ours seemed to lack. But all their manic enthusiasm had started to feel like pressure after a while. To always be “on”, like you were full to bursting with The Holy Spirit, whether you actually felt it or not. And that babbling stuff they did (“Mooshka pooka hooka looka cucamonga temecula shabadoo gaga!”) was just weird! It had only taken me the one visit to decide that this was more where I belonged ……. And I really was a believer- in the grace of God and the authority of the priesthood, which seemed quite well organized with its clear chain-of-command leading right up to Pope Benedict himself.

But in the back of my mind were grave doubts that someone like me even belonged here. If they only knew…
.

.
|||)===[ GUILT ]==0==0==0==0==>
.

The guy and the gal from Animal Control had been standing by outside, and as Bob the acolyte popped the big doors open at the end of the service they made their entrance, to scattered applause, dressed in their short-pantsed khaki jungle-explorer uniforms and carrying poles with nets on the end that I knew could telescope pretty far, but didn’t seem nearly long enough to reach where they would need to.

“Are you going to want to stay for confession again?” Mrs. Cagle asked me.

I shrugged complaisantly, “Didn’t you and Sherrie go yesterday? I hate to make you hang around…”

“It’s okay, really,” she smiled, and Sherrie---who seemed caught up in the efforts of the two with the nets---absently nodded her agreement.

“I’ll try and be in and out first then,” I promised.

A lot of Catholic churches allow for confessions to be heard only during certain hours on Saturday. But with gasoline now at over $3 a gallon, and the distances some folks had to drive to get here, Father Anthony had decided to make the confessional available for an hour on Sunday as well. This began a half hour after the service ended, giving him a bit of time to schmooze with his flock and provide whatever informal counseling anyone might need.

And while neither Sherrie or her Mom minded at all, I did hate making them wait on me. Also, the longer we were here the less time I’d be able to spend with them at their place. But I’d done something earlier in the week that had really alarmed me, and that I wanted to get off my chest.

My chest, oh God…

Like most people probably do, I’d always smugly assumed that whatever other faults I might have, at least I wasn’t a damn thief. But on Wednesday after school I had stolen something.

Not only had I stolen these things, but I had taken them from the home of a friend…

And not only that, but they were items that were quite intimate, and which would’ve marked me as an icky weirdo if I’d been caught hurriedly stuffing them into my backpack, as if I was planning to take them home and sniff them or something (no doubt while thinking creepy thoughts about their previous wearer…) instead of simply wanting them for myself. Every girl should have at least one decent change of underwear, and now I did…

So I really did need to confess this sneaky low-down thing I had done, to make my formal apology to God. Although I didn’t plan to tell the exact truth when I did. I knew it was wrong to lie, but the important thing was to admit to X number of sins and to do penance for them. Wasn't it?
.

.
|||)===[ THE LEVER ]==0==0==0==0==>
.

Once when we’d gone to see my uncle at the state lockup, I was put into a sort of waiting room with some other kids for several hours. I was so little when this happened that aspects of this strange interlude are cloudy to me, like I’m not sure if I was there because of some rule that said I was too young to visit an inmate, or if this was some optional thing that my folks could’ve done more often if they’d wanted to; or even if they had done it more than once and I can only remember the one instance. But certain details do stand out clearly in my mind…

There was a massive uniformed guard sort of keeping an eye on us as he sat reading a paperback, and I remember wondering if my parents hadn’t just dropped me off there and I was now a prisoner myself ……… There was a pile of crayons on a heavy scarred wooden table next to a DETECTIVE McGRUFF coloring book---which I was disappointed to find had been completely colored in---and a ragged basketball net up on one wall that probably hadn’t had a ball to go with it for a long time ……… And there were four brothers---Indians, probably from some local Blackfoot tribe---all trying to nap sitting up in the hard plastic chairs. They looked like old hands at this. I remember fingering my inch-long hair and wishing it was as long and as full as theirs was, although for reasons that had nothing to do with Native American heritage…

And then there was one young guy---not a kid but 17, 18 or even as old as 20---sweaty and stubble-chinned, with these weird buggy eyes, who I somehow wound up in a conversation with. He told me he was studying for the priesthood, which was probably as big a lie as all the other bullshit he said to me that day. But I was terribly credulous at that age, and he sounded totally serious and quite knowledgeable as he told me about something he called THE LEVER…

It was a thing he’d stumbled upon at the priest school he was attending, a church secret that was whispered about by the other young seminarians. Instances where people go into the Confessional booth and never come back out. They just ....... disappear! It’s something that hardly anyone knows about---it doesn’t happen very often---but there’s a short list of a half dozen or fewer sins which warrant a priest’s use of THE LEVER. Every confessional in Catholicdom is equipped with one of these things.

He didn’t know what sins they were, but these deeds were unforgivable; and when an admission of one of them left a penitent’s lips the Father Confessor didn’t waste time suggesting acts of contrition (“Hell, you could Hail Mary ‘til the end of time and it wouldn’t do no good…”), or with any words at all. He just yanked THE LEVER and the poor sinner dropped through the trap door into an interdimensional hellgate apparatus and down a steep funhouse chute to Hell. And the true horror of it all was that you’d never know that you qualified for this instantaneous damnation until it was too late!!!

“Father Michael! Where’s our son?!”

“Where he belongs. Now you must never speak of him again…”

Later in my young life I would figure out that the guy was either crazy or just stoned on something and having a bit of fun messing with the dumb religious kid’s head. But at the time his dreadful story made a tremendous impression on me. The sense of doom I felt on hearing it (and why) might just comprise the earliest transgendered thoughts I can recall ever having; Although these thoughts---and what I’d been contemplating about those Indian kids and their hair a short while before this---clearly point to the existence of even earlier ones; because I remember just knowing somehow that certain things I was coming to realize about myself lie on that list of lever-worthy sins, if not comprising the whole of it. I was utterly terrified!

In retrospect I don’t know where I got this notion that these emerging feelings of mine were some rare and horrible form of sinfulness. Because the message from the conning tower of Our Lady of Sorrows had always been that we were all fairly equal in falling short of God’s grace---mostly because of Eve’s little screw-up in that garden way back when---with Father Michael mainly giving us examples from his own life (although “intellectual hubris” wasn’t a demon that most of our parishoners really had to wrestle with…); and then finally coming clean about his alcoholism on the Sunday he stepped down as our priest. This was an honest, brave appraisal of his flaws and weaknesses that those who heard it had been deeply moved by, but which was often cited as the hair that broke the camel’s back in terms of my own family’s swearing off of church attendance…

”So all this time he was a goddamn lush? Hell, if I wanted to listen to some old tosspot yammering I can do it while suckin’ on a MGD down at the Wonderbar, and be a helluva lot more comfortable doin’ it!”

Although since we’d stopped going long before he resigned the logic of this was a bit hard to follow.

And Father Anthony would mostly illustrate believer’s problems with sin through hypothetical examples (“Let’s call her Mary Smith…”) that usually had a dry Garrison Keillorish sense of humor to them. There had never been any harping on “the sins of Sodom” or “If a man putteth on the raiments of a woman-” for me to wig out over...

I now suspect that I brought the bulk of this shame about who I was into church with me from the outside. The taunts at school and those cutting remarks that The Ogre was always quick to dispense at home filling me with a powerful sense of guilt---the grim suspicion that I deserved this mistreatment for some reason---that I was all too ready to transpose into the spiritual realm...
.

.
|||)===[RAT MAN]==0==0==0==0==>
.

By grabbing my spot long before I would've had to and holding onto it, I had made sure I was the first one up for confession. Not counting Sherrie---who was just there to keep me company---there were four others in line with me and a few more perched on the nearest pews, who would jump into line when it started to move. One was a boy who I didn’t know, who sat thumbing through a graphic novel with a glossy black and silver cover, but the rest were all grownups.

The pair from Animal Control had set up a bird feeder inside a wire cage atop a tall pole on a spindly tripod base. The man had a small remote in his hand that would snap the front of the trap shut if and when the bird entered it.

Sherrie and I were quietly speculating about what comic book the seated kid was reading (it looked to be one of those based on that weird Sci-Fi Channel series DARK CITY, but we couldn’t be too sure from where we stood...), when the man behind us pushed roughly on my shoulder- Nudge! Nudge!

I turned. He jerked his thumb in the direction of the bird trap, “Ya think that’ll work?”

He was gaunt, his pants and old flannel shirt hanging on him like they belonged to someone much fatter, and he had a face like a rat’s that was fringed in long gray whiskers. I didn’t care at all for how he’d selected to get my attention, or the way he was looking at me.

“I guess, if he gets hungry,” I responded in a disinterested and disdainful tone, but he didn’t take the hint.

“You’re that Sam Kaiser’s kid, aren’t you?”

Sherrie whirled to face him. “Leave us alone!”

“Jeez, what’d I say? Can’t a guy ask a simple question? I’m just making conversation,” he keened, all wounded innocence. But his ‘simple question’ had seemed not at all friendly, and now he became openly hostile. He sneered down at Sherrie, “So you’re a damn screwball kid too, huh?”

“Maybe I am,” she answered defiantly, “But at least I don’t live out at the dump!”

He chuckled nastily, “Oh, you’re a toughie! You gonna go all bull-dagger and marry your little pal here, start another fucked up family of freaks?”

This was not the most vicious heckling I had ever been subjected to but it was close, and I despised this man for dragging my sweet friend into whatever problem people had with me and my family. Yet when her eyes flared with anger, and she opened her mouth to really go off on him, I shook my head emphatically- “Don’t!”

“Why not?” she snapped at me, “He started it!”

I pointed. Father Anthony had come back into the church and was striding swiftly up the aisle on his long legs. He nodded as he passed us and went in through the door on the priest’s end of the confessional, unaware of the gigantic fireworks display he’d narrowly prevented here.

“I’ll be outside,” Sherrie said quietly, and then turned to the rat man, “And you, Mister! I won’t even say what you are here in God’s house!”

She left, shooting him a last furious look, and I stepped into the confessional.
,

.
|||)===[UNTRUE CONFESSIONS]==0==0==0==0==>
,

If the lighting in the church had been subdued, inside the confession box it was downright dark. There wasn’t really anything to see anyway. As I kneeled on the little padded shelf the floor beneath me felt reassuringly solid, probably the same thick poured concrete the floor of the rest of the place. No trapdoor here.

Not that I believed in any of that “lever” stuff anymore, but I was still convinced that I could get into serious trouble if I divulged anything about my gender conflict, or the modest stash of girlie things I’d accumulating. I knew our faith’s official line was that anything said to one’s confessor was utterly sacrosanct- a policy that had caused Father Tommy Lee Jones a lot of anguish in WITHOUT A PRAYER, where Sean Penn was this crazy serial killer, taunting him in there. But I also knew that what went for serial killers didn’t always apply to kids. I’d had bad luck before with confiding in adults about stuff.

So I continued my habit (born out of my fear of suddenly disappearing off the face of the Earth...) of substituting my actual wrongdoings for made-up ones of equal or greater value; values that I basically had to guess at given my total lack of information about these matters. So I always made sure that the sins I confessed to were good ones. Or should I say bad ones…

I guess I had been just kneeling there for longer than usual. A deep voice came through the screen, prompting me, “I’m here, Son.”

“Bless me Father for I have sinned. It’s been one week since my last confession,” I started. “I’ve done, uh, bad things…”

I’d had a list of equivalent sins all worked out in my head, but the altercation I’d been in a minute earlier had left me riled and rattled---dwelling on all the things I coulda-woulda-shoulda said to that old jerk---and I couldn’t for the life of me remember what sins they were. I said, “I ….. I stoled something.”

Behind the partition the big priest’s ears pricked up, “Really?”

Yes, a pair of panties because they were so silky and brief and just cute, and that bra because I want to have boobs like Janine’s sister Patty, and if I can’t at least I can put something in there and pretend. Can’t I pretend that? I don’t want to make God mad, but why couldn’t he have made me a girl---or even a boy who’s happy with being a boy---instead of a boy who wants to be a girl?

I groped around in my brain for what I could have stolen. “It was a bicycle.”

“Oh my! Anything else?”

“I’ve, uh, had impure thoughts on maybe ………. seventy occasions.” I calculated. This one was safe, an old standby of mine. ‘Impure’ could mean nearly anything, and he would assume I meant whatever regular boys had for impure thoughts. Willies going into hoo-hoos…

“So that’s it then?”

I would see later how I overdid it. But for good measure, just to make sure that all of my sins for the week were good and paid for, I tossed in an act that seemed particularly awful, “And I committed, I mean- I killed a cat.”

A long pause. Then, “Why are you lying to me?”

UH OH...

“What do you mean, Father?”

“You’re a gentle boy. You love animals. I saw that painting you did that’s hanging in the post office, of the cat and the dog sleeping snuggled up against each other. There’s no way you killed a cat! And I don’t really believe you stole that bike either. What’s going on here, Jackie?”

I’d never considered that my confessions might be cross-examined. Father Anthony’s predecessor had never done this, in fact he’d seemed to dish out the same perfunctory few Our Fathers for everything I ever came up with. And he had never called me by name inside the booth either, but pretended an ignorance of who it was he was talking to that was quite unlikely in a town the size of ours…

“I ...... You see I-”

I’d been caught red-handed lying to one of God’s officials on Earth. What excuses could I possibly make?

“Whatever this is, don’t you think God already knows about it?” asked the Father gently. This was the last thing I wanted to be reminded of…

“I’m sorry,” I babbled, “Okay? I’m sorry. I’m really, really sorry!”

“That’s obvious, but for what? Why would you confess to things you haven’t done?”

My clever sin-substitution stratagem had gone completely to hell, and I feared that I would soon be joining it! The cramped little room seemed to be tumbling crazily through space, like one of those old-fashioned “space capsules” that had been sideswiped by a meteor-

“I ……. I can’t,” I whined.

“Can’t what, Jackie?”

“I can’t breathe!” I gasped, and bolted madly from the confessional.
.

.
|||)===[ CAT'S CRADLE ]==0==0==0==0==>
.

I ran up the sloping aisle toward the tall sky blue rectangle of the entryway’s open doors. No vampire had ever hotfooted his way off of hallowed ground as fast as I was moving! And in my blind haste to escape I nearly plowed into Sherrie, who hadn’t gone outside after all but was hanging out with the Animal Control people.

Sherrie pointed at the bird, who was zooming around the vaulted cupola above us in a renewed frenzy. She said accusingly, “Aw man, you spooked him! He was on top of the thing, was almost gonna go in.”

Then she noticed my own considerable panic. “Hey what’s wrong?!”

“I can’t- It’s no good! I shouldn’t of said about the cat, it was too much!“

“What cat? What are you talking about?”

I glanced back in the direction I’d come from. Father Anthony was marching up the Church’s wide center aisle toward us with the silent determination of a Terminator robot.

“We have to go. We have to go now!” I stammered, trying to drag my friend toward the entrance.

She pulled her arm free of my grip. With a terse ‘Good Luck’ to her new pals and a last glance up at their flittering quarry she followed me to the doors, “Okay sure, but what is this? What’s wrong?”

“It’s a mess, just a big mess! And it’s ........ it’s complicated. Right now I just want to get out of here and go to your place.”

In the same little patio area she’d been standing in when I arrived Mrs. Cagle was playing cat’s cradle with a well-dressed Mexican American woman. Or that’s what it had looked like at first, but now I saw that they were trying to bring order to a big lump of bright red yarn that must’ve got tangled up in her friend’s purse, Sally standing with her palms held facing each other, and Rosa (“Hi kids, you know Rosa, don’t you Sherrie? Rosa, this is Jackie, the great little artist I was telling you about…”) winding the acrylic string around them as she untangled it (“Shoot! How could it get so messed up when it was fine this morning?”) from the Gordian knot it had become…

Rosa had her two daughters with her, and Sherrie’s mom had begun introducing everyone to everyone else when Sherrie stated adamantly, “We have to leave, Mom!”

“Well this might take a while. You mean like right now? What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know, something happened to Jackie. He came flying out of the confessional like the Devil was after him and saying we gotta split! We gotta split!”

Mrs. Cagle looked at me with concern, “Oh no, what happened? Father Tony didn’t try to pull The Lever on you, did he?"

But when she saw my expression go from seriously upset to off-the-scale freaked out her remorse was immediate- “Oh God Honey, I’m sorry! That was just thoughtless. You know that story’s not true, don’t you? They’ve been telling that one since I was a kid…”

“I know! I’m not stupid,” I replied testily. There were way too many people here looking at me and wondering what was upsetting me. It was upsetting. I said, “Do you think you could meet me at the Dandy Donuts when you’re through here? I really need to go-”

A large big-shouldered shadow fell across me. Father Anthony.

He indicated the unoccupied patio area on the other side of the church's big front doors, “Could I talk to you over there for a second?”

I gulped and nodded, and we went to the far end of the opposite patio, which was out of earshot of the women if we spoke quietly. He didn’t seem angry, but then he never did. I imagined him calmly telling me that I couldn’t come here anymore- excommunicating me. Which might finish off my immortal soul but it would save me a good deal of embarrassment. I’d stop doing Sundays with Sherrie and just stay at home with my fucked up family of freaks, which was probably where I belonged anyway…

The Father said, “You didn’t stick around for me to tell you your penance. It kind of defeats the purpose of going to confession.”

Staring at the ground between us I gave the smallest of nods, waiting for the stern lecture.

“So, let’s see ………… For the bike you took, you need to say ten Hail Marys and try to return it to its owner, or else put it back where you found it. For the impure thoughts, six Hail Marys. And for that poor defenseless kitty cat you murdered, seventeen Our Fathers and ask St. Francis to help you overcome these bloodthirsty impulses of yours. Okay, you can go…”

I can go?

“Why are you doing this?” I asked.

He acted surprised, said mildly, “It’s my job, isn’t it?”

“No, I mean ....... You know I didn’t do those things, but you’re pretending like I did.”

“You know, you’re not the first person who confessed to something he wasn’t guilty of…”

“Really?! This happened to you before?”

“No, not to me. Or at least not that I know of. But there’s people, they go to police stations and turn themselves in for murders that they’d read about in the newspaper.”

“That’s weird!”

“I’ve been a priest for fifteen years. Nothing human seems all that weird to me. These people, they’re not criminals, they’re just- Well they have problems. Some reason why they thought they had to do that. If you can get to the bottom of it, people always have a reason for doing the things they do, even if it’s one that wouldn’t make much sense to anyone else. Or sometimes they themselves don’t know what it is. Not consciously anyway…”

It seemed like he wanted me to say something. I said, “Oh.”

“So I figure you must’ve had some reason why you felt you needed to tell me the things you said in there. And I can’t force you to tell me what’s really going on with you. We haven’t been able to do that since The Inquisition. Now those were the good old days!”

Did he really just say that?! I burst out laughing, “You’re sick, Father Tony!”

“I know,” he grinned sheepishly, “But don’t tell anyone, okay? And anything you might want to tell me, I swear I won’t blab it either. What I’m saying is if you think you might want to talk about what’s bothering you, I’m here. Even something really bad, like say ……… if someone was hurting you at home. There’s laws against that, you know that? Some pretty serious laws.”

But there’s no laws against doing everything you can to make someone feel like a piece of shit, are there? I said, “No one’s doing anything like that. Not really…”

His eyes narrowed, “Not really?”

“No. I mean, nothing like that.”

“That’s good. And you know, if you’re not comfortable talking to me I could find you someone else to talk with. It wouldn’t necessarily have to be through the Church, either. Stephanie Campbell is a youth counselor for the county, she’s really good at talking to kids. I could give you her number if you want.”

Though I hadn’t yet attempted it with anyone, somehow I knew I’d be more a lot more comfortable discussing my gender issues with a woman than with a man, even a nice man like Father Anthony. But because he was a nice man and I didn’t want to hurt his feelings I prevaricated a bit, saying: “No you’re okay. I mean sure, or maybe I will anyway ……… I like you.”

“I like you too, Jackie. And there’s somebody else who likes you.”

I glanced over at where Sherrie and her mom were saying goodbye to Rosa and her girls, the yarn crisis either solved or abandoned. But I could tell he was talking about someone else. “You mean God?”

“Exactly. God likes- well in fact He loves you! You know that?”

I sure would like to think so, I thought. I said brightly, “I know! And Jesus and the Blessed Virgin and all the Saints.”

“That’s right. It’s pretty awesome having a team like that behind us, isn’t it?” he beamed as he started walking me back toward the building’s heavy titanium portico. “Anyway, I just wanted to finish what we started in there, and to let you know ……… well that I'm always here for you. I’ll let you get back to your friends now, and I’d better get back to work before they fire me. Say Hi to your folks for me, and that they’re welcome back any time. See you next week?”

“Yeah sure. Bye!”

He started in through the doorway then turned back to me, sort of hunched over with a weird squinty face, and said in a deep growly voice, like he was imitating Detective McGruff, “Oh. And one more thing…”

“What’s that?”

“Try not to tell me any whoppers in the confessional next Sunday. Killed a cat, sheeesh!”
.

.
|||)===[ TURTLES ALL THE WAY DOWN]==0==0==0==0==>
.

Sherrie and Sally and I made our way across the nearly empty parking lot toward their aged Land Rover.

Mrs. Cagle reached out and tossled my hair, deliberately messing up my stepdad’s ministrations with comb and hairspray this morning---There! We’re done with that nonsense for today!---then handed me a brush from her purse, letting me fix it the way I liked it, eliminating what was left of the rigid left part.

“Feeling better?” she asked.

I didn’t have a clue what I might do to get my terrible secret sins absolved now that my subterfuge had been discovered; Father Tony might be far less jovial if he caught me BS-ing him again. I still looked ahead to facing the Body Count Posse at school tomorrow; and my toxic situation at home even before that…

And yet I was feeling pretty darn good. I said that I was.

“That’s good to know.”

“Yeah it is,” seconded Sherrie, and as we got to their car she asked, “Jeez, Mom! Why’d you park way over here?”

“I didn’t want it to get dented.”

We laughed---the thing was nothing but dents---and Sherrie’s mother opened the back door for us, “Monsieur, Mademoiselle, entrez vous! My name eez Babette, I will be your chauffeur zees morn-eng…”

This was a thing she did. Last week she’d been ‘Gundrehild’, with an equally bad German accent. We climbed in and she slammed the door hard- the only way it would shut completely. And as she was getting in front Sherrie asked me, “So what was all that about with Father Anthony?”

“Sherrie!” barked Mrs. Cagle reproachfully, falling out of character.

“What?” whined Sherrie.

“Whatever went on between them it started in confession. Confession,” she repeated for emphasis, “And it’s between the two of them. It’s like your diary; some things are nobody’s business, not even moms or best friends.”

“‘Kay, I see what you mean,” murmured Sherrie, “Sorry Jackie…”

I smiled wide and shook my head, letting my friend know it was no big deal. She surprised me by suddenly grabbing me and pulling me close. She whispered, her breath warm and ticklish in my ear, “I love you!”

I turned to where I was comfortable and leaned up against her. Our hands found each other’s and we both squeezed, connected in what seemed to be more than just this small physical way- as if me and this best friend I’d ever had were communicating our love, the deep admiration we had for each other and nameless other beautiful feelings directly from soul to soul and back again…

Sherrie’s mom smiled at us in the rearview mirror, “So whatever that was, it’s past now. Right? Right?”

“Right!” answered Sherrie.

“Right!” I echoed.

“Okey Dokey then,” she started the engine and proclaimed, “And we’re off…”

This was another of those things Sally always did, so Sherrie and I knew what to say and joined in her cry of:

“LIKE A HERD OF TURTLES!!!”

.
Whatever that meant. Then we drove off into the sequel.
.

NOTES:

The views of my narrator don't necessarily reflect my own. Well, most of them do. But those observations she makes about the number of male and female prison inmates and what she concludes this signifies about the inherent natures of men and women ....... It sounds logical on the face of it, but it's nearly identical to what racist fuckheads say is proven by the numbers of African American and European American prison inmates in the U.S.A. Something wrong with it somewhere...

Having only been to a Catholic service only once in my life (a Christmas Mass that was too jam packed for me to really see or hear anything) I may have made some mistakes regarding proceedure, doctrine or nomenclature of the Church of Rome. So this story is set in an ALTERNATE UNIVERSE (note the Disney park in Canada) in which things are done differently in exactly those ways that I screwed up my facts. And if I didn't then hey, I knew that! Heh heh...

.

Greg looked down at me, love + concern in his serious gray eyes. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

“For the 10th time, yes! Are you gonna keep asking me that for the next 3 days?”

“Probably. I feel like it'd be irresponsible of me not to. I mean-”

“I'm sure! Unless you're having doubts about wanting me underfoot all the time.”

“Never! I want this as much as you do. But I'm not the one being permanently modified here. Because once this GLOO! sets there's no going back.”

“And that's what's so exciting! The thought of being like this forever.”

“In a fantasy maybe. But part of my mind is saying we're both crazy for doing this!”

“Of course we're crazy! Nobody normal does a thing like this. But this is who I need to be if I'm ever gonna be happy. You read my stories, you know what I am!”

“Yes. You're my beautiful mermaid,” he said, cupping my ears in his hands + kissing me gently on the lips. And then not so gently...

.

DAY ONE:

Pete the Uber driver seemed tired. He didn't say much for the whole fifty mile ride up through Diamond Bar and Riverside. On the talk radio station they were going on about the “GLOO! Challenge”, the greatest threat to America's impressionable youth since Tide Pods; people calling in to rant about all the crazy things their kids had attached to themselves with the stuff, and debating whether this adhesive---which had been around for years but was suddenly trendy for all the wrong reasons---should be banned.

The topic was a strange coincidence, considering what I was about to do. I kept waiting for my driver to add some complaint of his own or ask me what I thought about this GLOO-ing epidemic; but I wasn't sure if he was even listening to the show he had on.

We pulled into the driveway of Greg's place at a quarter to six, just as the sun was starting to peek around Mount San Jacinto. Pete-the-driver whistled appreciatively, “Beautiful house!”

“It is,” I agreed. It really was the nicest place on the block. Not as big as the McMansions next door or across the street, but old, well built, and a whole lot classier.

'And my house now too,' I thought with a grin. The new ten-foot redwood fence surrounding the whole back yard and the several hundred thousand dollars worth of construction and landscaping that had been done back there attested to that. I said, “And you should see the pool!”

“Olympic sized?”

“Bigger. But I can't say how big for sure because it's a funny shape and wanders all over the place. But it's really unique, with waterfalls and a grotto; like something out of a fantasy!”

Which was exactly what it was. My boyfriend and I had put a lot of thought into our artificial lagoon, ever since he proposed to me and we started planning to make our shared fantasy a reality.

As I reached for my bags Pete asked, “You need a hand with those?”

“Naw, they're light,” I told him. It was strange to think that these two small bags were all that I had left from my old life. One held my laptop and phone, the other assorted toiletries and cosmetics, my "girl pills", a binder full of music cd's and a few mementos. Almost everything I would need from now on was already here. I'd already added on a gratuity when I payed for this ride online, but I was feeling so good about life (plus I'd gotten more than I expected to when I sold my car for cash a few weeks ago) that I dug into my aquamarine wallet and pressed a $20 into his hand.

“Thank you! And you take care now, uh-” he paused, trying to figure out what to call me. I'd come here with just a touch of makeup on and in boy clothes---the shirt of which was the baggiest one I could find---but Pete earned his second tip when he decided on “Miss.”

“You too,” I grinned, and as he sped off I headed up the sherbet colored flagstone walkway that wound through our sand-and-cactus front yard like a drunken sine wave to the house. If all went well this would be about the last walking I would ever do. I really preferred swimming anyway.

I was standing at the front door covering the nude lipstick I had on with a rose shade that Greg had mentioned liking when the door unlocked and swung open. He was wearing just his pajama bottoms, his curly salt and pepper hair all tousled.“You're a little early.”

“I know you said seven; but I didn't get much sleep and couldn't sit around that empty apartment any longer. This is okay, right?”

“No, it's perfect! The sooner we get started the sooner you'll be done,” he said. He wrapped me in his arms and started kissing me, his lips kneading mine as he jockeyed me inside and pushed the door shut with his foot. He twisted the deadbolt into place, grinning, “Hello, gorgeous! You ready for this?”

“I'm good to go! This is all I've been able to think about all week! So it got here, then?”

“Late last night. Just in the nick of time.”

“Thank God! I was starting to worry. They said express shipping it from Wuppertal would take five days, that was two weeks ago!”

“But it was worth the wait to get this one. It's beautiful! Even better than it looked on their web page!” he said.

"It" was the big prosthetic fish tail that was going to be a permanent part of me in three days time. 72 hours, according to the adhesive's manufacturer. Which to the wannabe mermaid I was then seemed like forever.

“I have to see it!”

“Yes you do. But I've really missed you, and I just have to-”

And we started kissing again.

I'd known Greg for a year before we ever talked on the phone, and then for almost another year before I met him face to face, on our first real date. Which was when we began hatching this crazy plan that would give us each what we most desperately wanted in life. This thing we'd both dreamed of since even before we knew each other wasn't something that any normal person would want, or would even consider possible, but neither of us was normal. It all began at a place called Mer-Mania.

Never heard of Mer-Mania? Neither had I until I stumbled across it.

I was 22 then, and had been at my first and only job for about a year. One evening after work I was at my computer, googling for information about people like me---trying to find out if there even was anyone else like me---when the name caught my eye. At first glance I mistook “mermania” for some clinical term, since it seemed like an excellent label for what was wrong with me.

For almost as long as I can remember I have been convinced to the very center of me that the Universe had made a terrible mistake when I was born as a boy, when what I should have been---and had always been in my heart---was a mermaid. That not only was I the wrong sex, but from the waist down I was also of the wrong biological class. Down there it wasn't so much what was between my legs that bothered me (although I was never crazy about the damn thing...) but that there was a “between” there at all, and I had these two stupid looking human legs that should have been a pretty tapered fish tail! So I clicked onto the Mer-Mania site, hoping it would have information about my unusual body-intergity affliction. Which it did, but not in the way I expected...

The Mer-Mania main page had a border on each side with animated bubbles rising up it past images of fish, starfish and frolicking mermaids; and at the top the site's name in a cheerful font, directly above their motto: “A Happy Harbor for Readers and Writers of Fish-Girl Fiction”

Mermaid fiction??? It wasn't what I'd been looking for but I was definitely intrigued, since I'd written a few mermaid stories myself (mostly of the me-turning-into variety), which I'd assumed nobody but me would ever be interested in seeing.

I started scrolling through story titles, amazed at just how many amateur stories about mermaids they had there. At the time it was almost 10,000, and now three years later it's probably twice that. I'd had no idea there were so many people obsessed with mermaids! Most seemed to be women, and the whole look of the site had a sweet girly vibe to it. I felt instantly at home there.

Not everybody who posts at Mer-Mania is like I was: desperately miserable because they can't be a mermaid for real. I soon came to realize that the sheer depths of my obsession made me somewhat of a minority even there. But there were definitely a lot of site members who enjoyed presenting as mermaids in their stories, blogs and comments; and quite a few had posted pictures of themselves swimming in their fake mermaid tails, or cosplaying Ariel at COMIC-CON; And they at least halfway understood where I was coming from when I poured my heart out about my peculiar form of body dysmorphia in my first blog after I registered under the name Lori Shellcastle. Nobody there tried to make me feel like a freak or a pervert. Unlike when I mistakenly made the same revelation at that transgender support group I used to go to...

“It's weirdos like you that endanger the credibility of the rest of us!” a girl I'd really come to respect told me. “You're what the cis-people joke about when they make fun of us: 'HEY EVERYBODY LOOK AT ME! I IDENTIFY AS A TOASTER!'”

Another accused me of being an 'otherkin'---a word I had to look up later---who couldn't possibly have a genuine issue about this, but was trivializing what they were going through by comparing their gender variance to some bullshit fantasy persona I'd dragged into the real world from Alt.Life or some D&D-type role-playing game I must be into. I wasn't expecting my transgender sisters to just turn on me like that, and it really hurt! I cried all the way home and fell into a deep funk and a dangerous three day ice cream binge.

But at least I learned what not to reveal to the gender shrink I started going to shortly after; who might not have approved me for this hormone regimen or my recent outpatient surgery if she knew I was a mermaid. Everything I told Dr. Jansen was true, I just didn't tell her the whole truth...

I have a lot more to say about Mer-Mania and its community of mostly female wannabe mermaids and mostly male mermaid admirers; but for now I'll just say I learned I wasn't alone there, made a lot of wonderful friends, met the love of my life, and began my journey toward the beautiful 24/7 mermaid life I live today.

We kissed a for a long time, our arms around each other. I was five foot nine and a half and rather scrawny. In anything higher than pumps I looked like a stork, but luckily I was never all that into footwear. Greg was six foot three and big framed, and hugging like this we fit together perfectly. At least it always felt perfect to me. And being away from him for two weeks had made me miss this so much!

Being smashed against him like this was starting to get somewhat painful, with my recent sensitivity issues, but the sweet feeling of being held and loved like this more than made up for a little soreness. My heart was beating fast at the thought: 'This is it! We're really doing this...'

Finally he released me.

“Is the lagoon full?” I asked.

“It reached the top and started flowing out the spillway late Wednesday. At one point I was ready to order a few tanker trucks full of water to help it along but I'm glad I held off. That little spring out back seems to be doing the trick.”

“Unless the aquifer level drops.”

“It never has. Citrus Creek has run about the same year round for as long as anyone's kept records, when this whole valley was some Alta Californio's rancho,” he said, “You need coffee?”

I nodded vigorously and we went into the kitchen, which like the living room had mermaid figurines, paintings and wall hangings all over. The first time I came here I'd chuckled at the front porch's mermaid wind chimes and the hand carved sign over the door with another mermaid on it and the words: ATLANTEAN SPOKEN HERE, but once inside it was obvious that I was in the home of a crazy obsessed fishgirl devotee. Although I already knew this from reading the stories he'd posted at Mer-Mania, and I found their idealization of girls like me quite flattering.

The coffee maker was squoosh-ing noisily as it finished filling the pyrex pot with heavenly smelling coffee. He poured us each a mug, and I doctored mine with a little milk and sugar. My tits were still sore from the way we'd hugged, and this baggy shirt I had on was feeling like sandpaper on the area around my nipples. As I shrugged it off over my head I asked rhetorically, “Do you mind if I get out of this?”

He replied with a great big grin and a teasing, “Hell no! Flaunt 'em if you got 'em!”

“I'm not flaunting anything. I'm sore! And as you can see I don't have anything to flaunt. How can they bother me so much when they're not any bigger?”

“What do you mean 'not any bigger'? Sure they are.”

“Bullshit!”

“You might not be able to see it when you keep checking them every five minutes, but it's been two week for me, and you definitely have more here. If this hurts let me know and I'll stop, but two weeks ago I couldn't have done this-” he pressed his fingers lightly against my rib under my right breast and gently pushed what little fatty tissue I had there upward, until it almost looked like a boob. Unlike my scratchy shirt, his warm hand holding me didn't hurt; in fact quite the opposite. Sometimes whether something is painful or pleasant is all about context.

He took his hand away, letting my verge of puberty-sized tit not so much drop as settle. “See?”

I refrained from pointing out that as a male who was pushing sixty and a bit on the pudgy side his were bigger (and they were hardly the kind of serious 'man boobs' that might elicit snickers or whispered comments down at the gym) but just said, “Well, maybe...”

“And what did you expect? You've only been on hormones for four months. But I'm sure in another two weeks you'll have a little more, and then a little bigger, and before you know it you'll be proudly wearing that starfish bikini top you wanted, like a proper mermaid.”

“I hope so, because right now they're barely visible.”

“Where? Where?!” he mumbled, leaning down to squint at my chest from a few inches away, like that nearsighted old man (Mr. McGloo?) they used to have cartoons about, then pretended like he suddenly saw them, “Great Caesar's Ghost! Ah, there they are... such beauties!”

-and clamped his lips over my nipple, applying suction and tongue to it while running his thumb around the other one. I gasped and started squirming involuntarily. Yes, it's definitely about context...

Releasing my spittle-flecked nipple, he picked me up, one arm behind my back and the other just below my butt. I threw my arm over his shoulders, like we'd practiced on my last visit, to make sure that him carrying me around was practical for when it became necessary, and after another quick kiss he said, “Come on Lori. You ready to go get you GLOOD?”

“God yes, I'm good to go! So where is it? Out by the pool?”

“It'll be three days before you can go in the pool,” he said as he carried me down the hallway toward the bedroom.

“That's right... 72 hours,” I sighed. Why had I agreed to that?

The instruction sheet that came with every box of GLOO! was quite specific about this, mentioning it several times over the course of the instructions plus in a little rectangle at the top that got your attention with 'WARNING! WARNING! WARNING!' Any two surfaces that had been Glood together could be pulled apart within ten to thirty seconds, after which you needed to use the bottle of GLOO! solvent that came in the box along with the two tubes of the binary adhesive. This stuff could un-gloo something or somebody if you used it within eight hours, after which you needed a product called GLOO! Adhesive Super Solvent; which didn't come in the box with the adhesive base and the adhesive activator, and which a lot of the stores that sold GLOO! didn't seem to carry.

Several of the callers on that radio show I'd been listening to on the way here had talked about rushing madly all over town trying to find the stuff so they could get the Tonka truck or whatever unstuck from little Junior's forehead within 72 hours; because after that even the super-solvent wouldn't work, and we're talking surgery and skin grafts.

Greg had bought three jumbo bottles of the super-solvent through Amazon to have on hand, even though I insisted this wasn't necessary. He was cautious like that. Or like how he'd keep asking me over and over for the next three days if I was sure I wanted to go through with this, until I was about ready to GLOO! his mouth shut.

While I was frantically incautious about all of this, and in my need for body/mind integrity wished there was such a thing as an 'adhesive super-accelerator', so I could hurry up and be a mermaid already!

I felt like a bride being carried across the threshold as we entered the bedroom, even though we were technically only engaged. I gazed at the pewter dolphin wrapped around my ring fingered and smiled, knowing that our wedding was about to become a lot closer to reality. We both felt like our special day would be even more perfect if I was already a mermaid when we got married (This was California, there had to be somebody willing to marry us.). And as far as “consummating our union” goes, over the past year we'd been doing that every chance we got.

Lying on the king-size bed was my new tail. The only thing that suggested it wasn't actually half of some very large fish was that it looked a bit too perfect, the emerald green scales descending in size from its top to the semi-transparent tail fin like a tapestry of gemstones. A fishtail by Faberge.

“Holy shit! It's BEAUTIFUL!”

“I know, much prettier than your old tail. And much more well-made, too. It had a tag in there: 'Individually crafted by-' and then the guy's name- Heinrich Schnitzelheimer or something. And it comes with a one hundred year warranty.”

“That's good to know, considering it's gonna have to last me my whole lifetime. I swear, I will be so bummed out if it doesn't fit!”

“It should. They had us take every imaginable measurement---and a few I never would've imagined---and we took each three times to make sure. Give it a dry run while I go fetch our coffee,” he said, and left.

I took off my shorts and slid my legs into the tail until its top edge was gently hugging my waist. Unlike any of other tails we'd shopped for, the inside of this one was filled with some patented material called Vitaform, that had been sculpted to fit the legs and feet of a single wearer. It hugged me as snugly as if it was a physical part of me, and even though my feet were angled so that their toes were pointed almost straight down toward the tail's bottom they felt as at home in there as they had in my favorite fuzzy slippers. The tail's covering of realistic scales and the spongy filling made it a lot heavier than my old mermaid tail---seventeen pounds!---but the Vitaform was “balanced for bouyancy” so that when you were in the water it would neither drag you to the bottom or force you to the surface.

I looked down at myself. The tail looked even more incredible as part of me. I loved its color, its shape, its shininess, and that I finally had girl hips like I'd always wanted! I wished there was mirror on the ceiling above me but I settled for the pair of eight foot tall ones covering the bedroom closet's big sliding doors, rolling onto my side.

Seeing my reflection, I suddenly felt more beautiful than I ever had in my life! I was vamping for the mirror---elbow on the bed, side of my face resting on my palm, hair pulled down over one eye like Veronica Lake and making fishy-kisses at myself---when Greg walked in. He set our mugs on the dresser and stood alongside of me, gazing down at me with an expression of pure bliss on his face.

“So what do you think?” he asked.

“I think I'm a mermaid!” I squealed and flopped onto my back with my arms out, squirming in a way that let me feel that I had a tail now. When I stopped I lifted my head and grinned, “And I don't need to ask what you think.”

“Huh?” he asked, then noticed where I was staring. He looked down at where the front of his pajama pants was sticking out, and tried to move his man-euphemism to a position where it would be less noticeable, with limited results. “Sorry... I just find seeing you like that strangely erotic.”

“Don't be sorry. The day that doesn't happen, then you can apologize!” I laughed as I wriggled over to where I could yank his pants down to his thighs. Gazed hungrily at his beautiful cock. “And speaking of 'strangely erotic'...”

“Let's wait until we're done. Then we'll have the whole four-day weekend to do nothing but play. But I guess I should do this,” he said, pulling his pajama bottoms the rest of the way down and stepping out of them, “I'll probably get the stuff all over me and have to wash it off in the shower.”

“I can scrub it off of y-” I started to say, when I realized I wouldn't be able to do that. Not only because we wanted to wait several days for the adhesive to dry before I got my tail wet; but also because me having a tail would mean we couldn't stand alongside of each other in there. I hadn't considered this. I said, “I guess we won't be bathing together anymore. Unless we put a chair in there for me.”

“Sure we will! Why do you think I got us that new marble bathtub?”

“Oh.” I said. I hadn't really thought about why, other than that he'd been on a real renovation kick ever since I agreed to move in with him---lowering things and raising things and affixing rails to the walls in various places where someone who can't walk might need them---But this tub was more than big enough for both us. “You really do think of everything, don't you?”

“I try to,” he said. He leaned over me, inspecting me, “Well we both love the way this tail looks on, but how does it fit? Is there anywhere that it feels even a little uncomfortable?”

“Not at all. It fits like a dream!”

“But what about when you move around in it? Because once the adhesive hardens...”

“Let's see,” I said, and started rolling around on the bed. I hefted my knees up, twisting and turning every way I could think of, and it was totally comfortable everywhere the whole time.

As dense as the Vitaform was you would think it would feel stiff or awkward trying to move in it, but it was just as flexible as my old lightweight tail. Knowing I would be sitting at the computer a lot in the daytime until my man took his retirement in September I sat up on the edge of the bed, and this was fine too. By hefting and dropping the front ends of my feet in there I was able to slap my my rubbery tail fin against the hardwood floor.

I grinned, “It's all perfect.”

“And what about peeing? You should try using that tube in there to see if it works all right.”

“I should, shouldn't I?”

My penis was cradled by a little pocket in the tail's inside lining that kept it pointed downward. And there was supposed to be a duct that lead to a thumbtack sized hole in the tail's rump, which would supposedly allow me to pee sitting down. Supposedly...

I made a grabbing motion. “Hand me my coffee there, and I'll let you know in twenty minutes. You know me and coffee...”

I chugged down the whole mug like somebody dying of thirst, and fifteen minutes later had Greg carry me in and set me on the potty. The pee-tube system worked perfectly and cleanly, and probably would do so unless I tried to urinate while standing on my head. Greg nodded approvingly when he heard the faint splashing coming from beneath me. I asked him, “Is it sick of me to get this happy over the thought that from now on I'll always have to pee sitting down; or at least when I'm on land?”

“I get sexually aroused by mermaids. I'm about the last person you'd want ask for an opinion on what's sick or not,” he said, and in a more businesslike tone asked, “So is that it? Is there anything else we need to be sure of before we make this permanent?”

“Not that I can think of. I'm good to go.............. fish!”

Greg helped me pull the tail off and I walked the few steps back to the bedroom, again with that rush of excitement, that every second was bringing my dream closer to reality. But first we had some gloo-ing to do...

The GLOO! instruction sheet said to smear the adhesive base onto the body part to be glued, and then put the activator from the other tube onto whatever you were sticking to yourself. But because it was half my body that was being glued into this tail we would apply the activator to it first, then Gloo up my legs and hips and such and I'd slide into it.

A month ago we'd experimented with this backwards application technique. Busting the little pins off the backs of my favorite pair of stud earrings, smearing the adhesive activator on to their backs, and then waiting a half hour before putting a spot of adhesive base right where the holes in my earlobes were and pressing the earrings onto them. I now have a pair of cute little pudgy gold starfish---the perfect earrings for a mermaid---as permanently attached to me as any tattoo. So putting my tail on me the same way should work fine...

While Greg held the tail open for me I started squirting tubes of activator down into it and smearing the stuff onto its inner surface with the back of a spoon we'd Gloo'd to a selfie-stick. Down below where my pelvis would fit into it the opening split into a seperate sleeve for each leg and foot, with about an inch and a half of Vitaform between them, so both these spaces were tight and narrow, but we each had a headlamp flashlight on to help us see all the way down inside there.

“You might be using way too much of the stuff,” frowned Greg as I dumped in another tube; pretty much filling the space where my toes would go.

“Hey... the more the mermaid-er!” I quipped, and went into a giggling fit like this was the funniest joke in the world.

Which was when Greg turned on the ceiling fan and opened the sliding glass door all the way, like he was worried I was getting high from Gloo-fumes.

I worked my way up toward the opening at the top, only avoiding putting it on the bottom of the tail's little penis pouch, and the concealed buttcrack-sized zipper in its back. Greg had a steel tray with a bowl of water, dish towels and sponges on it, and kept wiping adhesive activator off my arms like an OR nurse, and once off my nose...

And when the tail's Lori-shaped cavity was thoroughly gloo'd, PHASE ONE was complete.

We pulled off our headlamps, and while Greg went to wash his hands I positioned myself between the parallel bars that he'd constructed out of steel pipes and elbows left over from the backyard's sprinkler system. Standing nearly level with the tops of my shoulders, these weren't here in our bedroom as some sort of kinky sexual hardware but were simply the best solution we'd been able to brainstorm for the stickiest part of this operation, and they'd be disassembled after that.

When Greg got back he kneeled in front of me and began smearing adhesive base onto me everywhere south of my waistline. Instead of using the crummy plastic spatula included in the box he just squirted some onto his palm and began applying it by hand, which seemed like it'd be quicker. He started at the sides and tops of my feet and worked upward, sliding his goopy hand up and down my ankles.

“My God, your legs are so smooth! They weren't very hairy to start with, but... wow! And you're bald here too,” he said, affectionately patting what remained of my boy bits. Which sort of surprised me. Unlike a lot of men who would love a girl like me, this was far from his favorite part of me; something we both liked to pretend wasn't there. “Did you shave it all off, or did you wax it?”

“I went ahead and had it zapped off. At the same parlor where they did my face and chest and pits. They're really good there, and quick. A few hours every day after work.”

“Electrolysis? Yeeouch!” he winced in sympathy. “And in the most sensitive places!”

I shrugged stoically. “You know what they say: Beauty is Pain.”

“But why?! No one's ever going to see any of this.”

“Because! I don't want to have hair inside my tail, growing and growing for the rest of my life! Even if no one can see it, it would just be like... ugggh! to know it's in there! I mean would you want to have a bunch of hair growing inside your body?”

“I'm a man. I probably do.”

I reached down and teased the patch of crinkly grey hair on his sternum. “Yeah, but on you it looks manly. You got all the girls swooning over your hairy internal organs!”

“Is that why they do that? I thought it was my charisma...”
.

Who knew that Gloo! could be so sensuous? We were both really enjoying the sensation of him smearing it all over my legs and ass, but I think maybe he was enjoying giving me this goopy massage more than I was...

Or at least his enjoyment was more visible. I pointed at where he was becoming erect again, “I'm glad I don't get those anymore.”

“I'm glad you don't either. But I don't think I've ever seen you with one.”

“Probably not. Dr. Jansen had me on testosterone blockers for a long time before she decided I could go on estrogen. I think she knew there was something I wasn't telling her about my dysphoria, but finally just gave in. But now I don't need those blockers,” I said, hefting up my little wiener to proudly show off my empty nut sack with the little pinkish crease running down each side.

“Those incisions healed nicely. And it really didn't hurt? Your orchamanectomy or whatever it's called?”

“Some, but it mostly just felt liberating; getting rid of something that never should of been there. And that didn't hurt near as bad as getting these done,” I said, wiggling my toes for him. They were all healed but looked pink and strange where I'd had their nails surgically removed a couple of months earlier.

Or not exactly surgically, since I had it done at a piercing and modification parlor in San Ber'doo by a man named Spider, who I thought should've spent less money on getting tattoos and more on dental care.

There had been a hastily drawn sign by front door that read: NO GLOO-HEADS! Apparently the body modification professionals resented how GLOO! was cutting into their business. But this was lucky for us, since it made them less choosy about what they would do for a customer...

“Say that again,” Spider had asked, “You want to get what done?!”

“My toenails, completely gone. The cuticles too, so they won't grow back,” I told him; and thinking he might need an explanation added: “My ol' man Yogi here has a wicked no-toenails fetish! And I think it's kinda hot too...”

“Yogi's” cheeks turned red when I said this but went along with my story. Because as embarrassing as it might be to have a no-toenails fetish it wasn't as flat out crazy as turning someone into a mermaid.

“Oh. I think I might've had someone in here with that kink before,” nodded Spider, and started numbing my toes, using a fresh-from-the-packet syringe he filled with something that might not have been quite legal for a non-physician to have. But whatever it was it did the trick. The pain didn't start until after we got back here...

“I know it was necessary, but that was rough to watch!” Greg shuddered as he smeared Gloo! up the insides of my thighs, “You were so brave; and I was the one who almost fainted!”

“I appreciated the support, but you didn't really need to come along.”

“Sure I did. I had to take you home. You couldn't walk for a week.”

“I could get around, more or less. I just couldn't wear shoes,” I said, “But thanks for taking care of me.”

“I loved doing it! It felt wonderful knowing I had you to come home to every day; like a taste of things to come,” he said and kissed me on the navel, which was conveniently located and didn't have GLOO! on it.

Knowing that I'd be quitting my job at Yoyodyne in eight weeks I used up the last of my sick leave recuperating for a full week, which he'd insisted I do here. It was a surprisingly fun little staycation, although since it was agony to have anything touch my toes I couldn't put on the fish tail (cheaper than this one, but still pretty nice) that I wore whenever I came to visit.

Mostly I read mermaid fiction online while Greg was at work, and watched the workmen finish their construction in the backyard. The little artificial hill with its mermaid grotto and a big wide waterfall that would pour continuously into the new, larger pool- a Las Vegas or Disneyland style fake lagoon with a meandering shape, which even meandered a short ways into the house here; ending in a ramp that a mermaid could wriggle up or down. It didn't have any water in it then but it did now, and I couldn't wait to go splashing into it! But waiting was exactly what I was going to have to.

“Okay, we're almost ready,” said Greg after slathering adhesive base all over my empty scrotum and dick (everywhere but right around the urethra). He went to wash his hands again, and when I lifted myself up by the parallel bars he squirted adhesive base onto a 4” paint roller and ran it across the bottoms of my feet, and PHASE TWO was done.

When I jacked my legs forward he opened my tail wide and quickly slid it up over them before the stuff started turning sticky. The squooshy sensation of the GLOO! on my sensitive hairless legs made me go “OOOOOOH!!”

Greg didn't stop---he couldn't---but frowned, “What's wrong?”

“No, it's nice! Like sliding into a sleeping bag full of warm cream cheese.”

“You've done that before?”

I lowered my tail so that the wide fin at the end was just touching the floor and he firmly pressed my tail's waistband against my hips all the way around, then nodded at the clock on the wall. “Two minutes...”

I had to hang here like this for two rotation of the second hand, which was easy enough with my arms locked straight, even with the seventeen pounds I'd instantly gained. I noticed a strange sensation all up and down my legs and realized the chemical reaction between the two agents was creating heat. It was a pleasant sensation for the first thirty seconds, and then not quite so pleasant; and just as I was starting to worry that the GLOO! would get too hot the interaction was complete and it quickly started cooling. By the two minute mark it didn't feel hot or cold or even sticky anymore. It didn't feel like anything...

Greg grabbed me around my midriff and held me up so I could let go of the bars and hook my arms around the back of his neck. My tail dragged a bit as he walked me awkwardly over to the bed and dropped me on it.

PHASE THREE was done. I was a mermaid!

“Roll over,” he ordered as he clambered onto the pristine white comforter beside me.

'Wow! I could tell he was horny earlier, but this new mermaid-me must be driving him crazy!' I thought as I rolled onto my belly.

Without a word he found the hidden zipper in my tail and peremptorily unzipped it. Was my gentle, considerate lover turning dominant all of a sudden?! I had to admit I kind of liked this new take-charge Greg!

Now he was running his index finger along the space under my tail's zipper, between it and the skin of my ass cheek. Which is not where he usually stuck his finger, but I'd never had a zipper before. New horizons in foreplay, I supposed...

I tried to spread my legs for him and discovered I couldn't. Not as if they were being constrained---which is what I would've expected---but as if my brain had sent the 'spread legs' order down my spine, but the muscles that received this order found it incomprehensible, because a mermaid tail wouldn't begin to know how to separate itself like a pair of legs do; so no part of me responded to it.

Which was baffling, and clearly impossible. I had legs in there, they should have at least tried! But since this was exactly what would've happened if I actually was a mermaid I found this suddenly and overwhelmingly thrilling, like I was that much closer to being the mythological creature I was pretending to be! I was a mermaid, in bed with my human lover, just like in all the most X-rated stories at Mer-Mania! And though I almost always prefer giving oral to being anally penetrated I totally wanted him inside me now. I was halfway panting: “Do it! Just don't grab the wrong tube!”

“Tube?” he asked as he drew the zipper over my ass shut. He sounded perplexed, “What tube?”

“For lube! Use the stuff in the end table, not the GLOO!”

Now he understood.“Oh! You thought I was going to... that I wanted-”

“Didn't you?!”

“No! I was just making sure your zipper wasn't glued shut. I mean if you don't want hair inside your tail you sure wouldn't want it filling up with poop! And checking if there were any major gaps where your tail is glued to you, so we could touch them up. I'm sorry if you misunderstood.”

“It's okay... Really, it's fine,” I said, not managing to sound at all convincing.

“Oh, Honey,” he sighed, lying down alongside me, “You know I want to make love to you. But let's give the stuff a couple of hours to finish adhering before we jostle your tail too much. They say it sticks instantly, but you know how cautious I am.”

"And it's good that you are," I nodded, “This is quite an expensive tail, so it's better safe than sorry.”

He slid his hand over the scales on my hip. “You know I would've been happy to buy it for you.”

“I know that. And you know I couldn't let you,” I said, and kissed him. I waved at the view through the bedroom's sliding glass door, that amazing waterfall out there pouring itself into the lagoon surrounded by tropical landscaping, and way off at the back end of our property those three fully grown palm trees so big they had to be installed with a crane. I said, “You're paying for aaaaall of this! So what little I could contribute, I wanted it to be for all the stuff that's 'me'...”

My electrolysis, my castration, HRT, toenail removal, the GLOO!, and this imported $5000 mermaid tail. The tail could have been a problem, until I got $5500 from selling my car...

“I know,” he said, “And I'm glad, if it helps you feel less funny about the money aspect of all this.”

“It does, a little...”

“That's good. And I'm not going to tell you that you shouldn't feel what you feel. I mean it's-” he searched for the word, “It's honorable that you don't want to be a user and a taker. I'd be a lot richer today if Marcie had felt that way...”

This statement of fact was about the most judgmental thing I'd ever heard Greg say about his ex-wife. But no matter how he attempted to minimize her faults, what I'd learned about their last years together and divorce spoke for itself. She'd done everything in her power to hurt him. To destroy this kind beautiful man. And I hated her. “Fucking bitch!”

“I guess she is,” he shrugged, “But Marcie has demons I wouldn't wish on anybody. And the twelve million she got plus the Palm Springs property hasn't made her any happier.”

I wanted to say stuff like: 'Well GOOD! Choke on it!" but I didn't want to be this spiteful around Greg. And it was this attitude he had, of pragmatic positivity or whatever that helped him bounce back from that whole awful mess, and one of the things that made me love him so much. I hoped I could become more like him over the years...

I snuggled against him as he put his arms around me. He said, “I just wish you could see that having you in my life is what makes me happy. And to be able to pay for this---our life together, you getting to be a mermaid, me getting to be a part of you getting to be a mermaid---it's the best thing in the world for me; and there's nobody in this world that I envy."

“Me too! And me neither! Well except the real mermaids, if there are any...”

He kissed my forehead. A benediction. “You're real enough for me... And you know, there was a time when nobody thought there was anything strange or wrong about a husband supporting his wife. And I guess there was a lot of bad stuff that came with that---'male privilege' and 'entitlement'---but not always.”

I turned to face him better. “Say that again!”

“Say what again?”

“Wife...”

“Wife,” he said and kissed me; “Wife,” (Smeck!) “Wife...”

“Four months?” I asked. His retirement. Our wedding date...

“Four months and a week. Saturday, September second. Not a day later,” he said. And since Greg had never made a promise he hadn't kept I knew I could depend on that.

It had occurred to me after I discovered couldn't spread my legs that I might be somehow paralyzed; perhaps some kind of toxic reaction to the supposedly non-toxic GLOO! that covered so much of my former surface area. And as I tried to spread my legs again I still felt no sensations indicating that they were trying. But I could wag my tail from side to side, and bend it in the places that corresponded with my old hips, knees, and ankles- just like I had a single large leg extending down from my pelvis. A Dufflepud.

This wasn't as good to me as having a real mermaid's tail; which I'd always figured would undulate down its whole length like a fish's body. But moving like that wasn't possible, and at least I wasn't paralyzed; which would totally suck, sitting beside our incredible pool never able to use it. I'd always loved swimming more than just about anything, and swimming in a mermaid tail even more than that!

71 hours, 23 minutes...
.

He looked around for the remote, which was supposed to be on the bed's end table but seemed to be able to teleport itself to strange places when we weren't looking. “Do you want to to watch TV?”

“After,” I purred suggestively.

He raised an eyebrow, grinning. “After what?”

“You were saying earlier you didn't want to fuck me because you didn't want to disturb my tail or move it too much, right?”

“That was the only reason. Believe me, in a few hours I'm going to be pounding that sweet little fish tail like there's no tomorrow!”

“Greg!” I gasped. He never talked like this so it shocked me a little, but I couldn't deny it excited me. I said, “I'm looking forward to it. But until then, what if I didn't move much but you sat up against the headboard there, and I lie on my stomach between your legs, and uh...”

He looked, saw what relative positions this would put us in, and started scooting “Oh yes, that'll work.”

I'm trying to keep this story less than X-Rated, so I'll just say that I'm an extremely oral kind of mermaid, and Greg's a guy, so we both really enjoyed this first of many interspecies blow jobs...

8:37 am: As early in the day as this was, not a whole lot about the remainder of DAY ONE had much to do with me becoming a mermaid (except most of our conversations) so I'm going to fast-forward the rest of this chapter:

We found the remote, and sitting in bed watched TV shows and movies. Our tastes aren't identical, but I did love his 1960's French WWI-escaped-lunatic comedy King of Hearts, and Greg was surprised by how much he enjoyed my Spanish time travel adventure series Ministerio del Tiempo...

When our tastes diverged too much, the other of us would read something, or fool around on line. At different points we each tried to read mermaid stories at Mer-Mania, but we both discovered that this felt sort of redundant since we were in the middle of living one. I wanted to post a blog there about our day, but Greg---concerned with real life notoriety and intrusion---convinced me to just write this diary and post it later as a story...

We committed heterosexual (+ heterospecies?) sodomy...

We watched more TV, and I watched (65 hours... 64 hours... 63 hours...) the clock...

Greg zipped out and grabbed take-out from Thai Me Up, Thai Me Down; a much better Thai place than the weird gimmicky name might imply...

I used the bed pan...

We tried to go to sleep at 11:15, but wound up talking and talking, and when I woke up it was past nine.

47 HOURS to go...
.
.

.

The sound of whispered conversation nudged me toward consciousness. I opened one eye.

Down at the foot of my bed stood a boy and girl out of a family situation comedy from some long gone era.

I opened my other eye.

They stood hesitant, the girl in a pretty dress and the boy in a brown suit that he was obviously on the verge of outgrowing, his hair neatly combed for once. These kids sure looked like my eleven year old Lisa and her brother Matt who was a year older, but they weren’t dressed like them. Where were my two disheveled ragamuffins?

“Whaaahhh?” I groaned, “Were we supposed to go to church today?”

It was the only reason for this that made sense to my befuddled brain, except that I had stopped taking them to church two years ago, a short while after my wife Marjorie had died. You could say I’d developed some issues with God.

Then I noticed the tray that Lisa was carrying. French toast with boysenberry syrup, eggs, bacon, whole wheat toast, juice and coffee. And one yellow rose in a crystal vase.

“Happy Mother’s Day,” they sang out together.

“Um ……. In case you haven’t noticed, I’m your dad.”

“We know that, Daddy,” giggled Lisa as she unfolded the legs on the tray and set it on the bed beside me, “but happy Mother’s Day.”

“Yeah,” added Matt, shuffling self consciously.

The food on the plate looked surprisingly edible, I’d gotten worse at Denny’s. And even if it hadn’t been, the gesture itself…

My heart went into serious melt mode. “Well thank you so much. But you kids, oh really, you shouldn’t have.”

“Sure we shoulda,” said Lisa, “I mean it’s Mothers Day, but like you tell people, you’re like both a dad and a mom to us. Now that, you know-”

I nodded that I knew. Their mother, the woman that should have been there with us, the one who really should have been receive this sunny side up tribute.

“And we’re sorry it couldn’t have been more,” said Matt quietly, “But we didn’t have enough to really get you something.”

“Don’t be,” I said, “I’m the one who should be sorry. Your allowances haven’t been much these days…”

Now they were both hugging me, awkwardly, careful not to upset the tray on my bed.

“But we understand why. It’s not like you wouldn’t want to give us more.”

We were now a single income family, and the house payments and bills that two salary earners had been able to meet comfortably were taking up just about everything I made each month. But this address was what put them in the vicinity of the best school in the county…

“Yeah, it’s all good,” nodded Matt.

“And this, this is the best Mothers Day present I ever got,” I smiled, fighting back tears, and not mentioning that it was the only one I'd ever been given.

“There’s more. Something else we thought we could give you. Maybe it’s right to do, or maybe it isn’t, but we think it is.”

“We sure hope it is,” muttered Matt.

“And it’s not really like a gift, but it’s-” Lisa stopped.

“It’s what?”

Matt said, “The truth.”

“What? You’re going to give me the secret of the Universe?” I joked, but I was feeling apprehensive suddenly. The way he had said that word...

“No, it’s about telling the truth,” said Matt, “How you said the truth is always best, and how you said there was nothing we could ever tell you that would make you stop loving us. Well that goes for us too, you know, with you...”

“We love you Daddy. You’re a great, wonderful parent, the way you'll stop whatever you're doing when me or Matt need something. And this thing you do, you shouldn't feel like ashamed, or having to hide it. It doesn’t matter to us,” smiled Lisa.

“It doesn’t. I mean clothes?" Matt gestured dismissively, "How important is it, what somebody wants to wear? I mean I guess this thing means something to you that it doesn’t to me, but it doesn’t make you anything less to us. Bad or weird or whatever you’d think we would think. And if anyone thinks that, well they don't know you. I'd rather have your kind of weird any day than you hitting us like Sammy Ernstfelter's dad, or being drunk like both of Linda Reynolds' parents. So anyway Lisa and me, we..."

"We talked about this. And decided we should tell you…”

I nodded, meeting their eyes. I wasn’t about to pretend I didn’t know what “thing” they were talking about.

Ideally maybe telling the truth is always best, but we always find reasons not to. Not everybody is grateful to hear every secret thing about you, they would prefer you lied than confront them with something they weren’t able to accept about you. I had risked telling Marjorie about my crossdressing early in our relationship, and miraculously she had been pretty accepting of my female side.

And I had always intended to tell these two bright and good-natured kids some day, but had always feared that before a certain age such a thing could confuse them, and to saddle small ones with something that you kept secret from the neighbors and various relatives, this wasn’t fair to them. Such things required a certain level of understanding and maturity that humans aren’t born with, that only develop with time. And apparently Lisa and Matt had this maturity, initiating something that I thought was still five six years in the future.

How had they found out? Innocently enough, I would find out later. They had found an old letter from Marjorie to me about my "gender issues" and "dressing" that somehow had found its way into the box of family photographs. The rest had been a matter of deduction, and discussions between them about things I had said and done and that they saw in my nature, which suddenly made a new kind of sense...

Finally I found my voice, and managed to squeak out a hoarse heartfelt, “Thank you. This really is a gift…”

They smiled back, nothing but love on their faces. Lisa pointed, “Oh, and there’s a card…”

Tucked into the napkin on the breakfast tray I noticed an envelope. I pulled out the handmade card inside it and read the inscription.

And totally lost it. The next five minutes were a blur of hugs and I-love-yous and sweet happy tears. Then I ate my breakfast in bed, put my rose on the dresser and went into the kitchen where it looked like World War III had been waged, and began cleaning up the mess they had made while preparing my breakfast. And somehow this too felt like a gift…
.

.

.
Beth was jumped and murdered by two guys from a van
for no better reason than that they'd clocked her as trans
Down in Sao Paulo this past year was not so great
for nearly a dozen trans girls who met this same grim fate
They're the reason we've gather here, this November 20
to read this list of victims and fuck no, it isn't funny

These are people who died, died
These are people who died, died
These are people who died, died
These are people who died, died
They were just like me, and they died

Cheree got murdered by her trick and set on fire
They had to use dental records to identify her
The perp did just a year with a “trans panic” defense
There's far too many folks who think this travesty made sense
And far too few came to Cheree's funeral to cry
She was a sister of mine, and she died

These are people who died, died
These are people who died, died
These are people who died, died
These are people who died, died
They were just like us, and they died

Up in Nebraska a kid named Brandon tried
To set out on a new life as the man he was inside
Fell in with some low-lifes he thought were his good buds
Til they found out his little secret and killed him in cold blood
They made a film about it you might've seen called Boys Don't Cry
But trans boys don't cry... they DIE!

These are people who died, died
These are people who died, died
These are people who died, died
These are people who died, died
They just wanted to live, but they died

Transphobes have murdered 53 Americans this year
and many more worldwide, the exact number's not clear
and many who have fallen these statistics tend to hide
cause there's no official count of those who were drove to suicide
In June we can all party, we can celebrate trans pride
But on this bleak November day we light candles for those who died

These are people who died, died
These are people who died, died
These are people who died, died
These are people who died, died
They were human beings, and they died

We must all stand together 'gainst those dark and hateful forces
that would silence our voices and deny us any choices
Fear might be their weapon but love can cast out fear
We stand in light, we stand in truth, and we shall purservere
So though we take this one day to remember those now gone
We still hold our heads up, we still carry on

,

.

Our defeat at the hands of Middledale High's team was humiliating, the bus ride home was even worse.

Coach Williams was furious: “Never in fourteen years of coaching have I had such a pathetic bunch of sissies for a team! Maybe you ladies aren't cut out to be football players! Maybe you'd rather be at home in your frilly nightgowns, putting on makeup and fixing each other's hair! Maybe-”

He droned on like this: Sissies, ladies, girls and every other 'unmanly' term he could think of.

Our quarterback Jimmy Thomson looked over at me in alarm, whispering: “Ohmigod! He KNOWS!”

An old man on a flight from Southern to Northern California tells the stranger sitting beside him about the famous movie villain that had lived next door to him when he was a boy. An actor once well known for playing pitiless vampires and raving mad scientists, but who in real life had been gentle, caring and kind. And while his fame hasn’t endured the way Lon Chaney's or Bela Lugosi’s have, at the time even the movie critics who panned the low budget films he was in would concede that this startlingly ugly man brought a rare sensitivity to the roles he specialized in. As if he knew these monsters’ private pain.

Then the teller’s story takes a weird left turn. A theory about the actor’s supposed suicide which---as preposterous as it might all sound---would be nice to believe. Saying that rather than having drowned himself on that drizzly spring day in 1941 Max Grosz may have found his way to a second chance at life, and a different kind of movie stardom that would win the hearts of a nation...

.

Damn. They really got us packed in here, don't they? These dinky seats, no more legroom than the back seat of a Fiat. Good thing it’s a fairly short trip, huh? So, are you goin’ to the Bay Area on business, or-

Oh. Great place for a vacation. Never? Well you’re gonna love it! Fisherman’s Wharf, the Embarcadero; the bridge, of course; and if you get a chance you should check out the De Young art museum in Golden Gate Park. Yeah I thought you’d want to know about that, you look like an artist or something, I mean with all that, uh ……. Did they let you through the metal detectors with all those in your face, or did they make you take ‘em out? Well that’s good.

Excuse me a second, I'm thinking this should really go in the overhead before we- Would you? Great! Thanks ..... No just go ahead and slam it, there's really nothing fragile in there. And there, that's a little more room for us both.

Me? No, this is family business. Although you could say my whole life’s been a vacation since I retired. I’ll be eighty-four in August.

I don’t? Well I sure as hell feel it! Every damn year of it. Although I know I’m in better shape than some my age, like my brother and his wife up in Pinole. Which is actually who I’m going to visit. She’s not doing so good after this stroke she had. And my wife Donna …… It’s going on ten years since she passed away, God rest her.

But I’ll leave you alone. You don’t need some old fart yammering at you the whole flight. Seems like every comic you see on that comedy channel is doing the bit about the horrible boring jerk they got stuck sitting next to on the plane, so I wouldn’t want- Hey here we go! That's good, I was expecting a much longer line for takeoff. Gets pretty backed up here sometimes. You'd better put on your seatbelt...
.

So what’s that you’re reading? IT’S ALIVE! The Men Who Made the Monsters. Do you mind if I …….. Thanks. I’ll give it right back. I sort of have an interest in these old horror films. There was this neighbor of mine, want to see if he’s in here.

I’ll be damned, they got a whole chapter on him! I’m surprised. He wasn’t one of the more famous ones. He could’ve been, he was as good as any of them. Better, actually. I mean sure I loved Karloff’s Frankenstein, scared the hell out of me when I was a kid. But Max’s monster could talk, he wasn’t just: “ROAAARRRRRRRRR!!” And watching them both later, I'd have to say BORN OF THE GRAVE was a better picture. Better scripted anyway. And Max was ……... You weren’t just scared of his character, you felt the hell he was in. Him knowing exactly what he was; that "travesty of life" speech he gave there at the end, when the whole place was going up and the fire was almost to them. Not many monster movies can bring a tear to your eye like that.

A fellow as talented as him really should’ve been contracted to Warner Brothers, Paramount, anywhere but where he was. His agent Zolly and everybody else told him that, but he had a loyalty to that studio, to his friends there. Everyone was his friend.

Colossus? They were about one step down from Republic Pictures---right next to them in fact, out there on Poverty Row---and his were probably the best films they made. The closest to anything you could call art. Mostly what they made was knock offs of someone else’s successes. They had those Mr. Pontifax mysteries, which was their version of the Thin Man; and Merry and Jerry were their Laurel and Hardy. And they had a Lassie-type series called Mutt, but the thing about using mutts was you could more or less tell he wasn’t the same dog they'd used in the last picture. People used to always joke about that.

So it’s nice to see he’s getting some recognition. 'MAX GROSZ, THE GENTLEMAN MONSTER', it says here. Boy they got that right! He was just a great old guy. Didn’t have any family, so we had him over for supper a lot. No, not Hollywood, this was in Encino, which in those days was way out in the sticks. I’m not sure why he chose to buy a place out there, although I’m glad he did, and that we met him, even with as strange as things got.

I only knew Max that one year. His last year, the last place he ever lived. I was just a kid, and he was… I keep thinking of him as old, seemed older than dirt to me at the time, but it says here he was only 62 when he committed suicide. Although I don’t think it was suicide...

No, not murder. I don’t even think he died but that he- Never mind! You’d think I was nuts if I told you what I thought.

Really? You do?! Okay, but like I say it’s not something anyone would believe. The only person I ever told this to was my wife Donna, and she just shook her head, made some joke about my sanity. At least I hope she was kidding. And I don’t really know if I even believe it myself, it’s so crazy. Like a ghost story, or some kind of do-it-yourself reincarnation or- Hell, I don't know! So don’t say I didn’t warn you. I mean Tammy Kirby, for God’s sake!

Yep, “America’s Princess”. I’m surprised you knew that, it was way before your time they were calling her that. Happy Hearts? Yeah, that was one of hers. And that Tammy In Toyland they show every year at Christmas. And oh yeah there’s a connection between them! And when I tell you, that's when you’ll go and find another seat, away from the loony old man. But what the hell, huh? It’s not like we’re ever gonna see each other again; so what the hell…

The whole neighborhood was excited when we heard an actual movie star had bought and was renovating the old Cooper house next door to us. Because even though we were just over the hill from Hollywood, and it wasn't much further to Burbank, back then in '40, ’41, our little town might as well have been out in Nebraska someplace for as little as any of us had to do with what went on down there. San Fernando Valley was nothing like it is today. Bean fields, orange and lemon groves far as you could see.

Not that my folks and I were farmers, unless you count our vegetable patch. And we did have a few chickens, and our goat Nipper who we’d wound up with somehow, just sort of wandered in from God knows where and decided to stick around. But what my dad did was he owned and managed the Rexall Drug there on Encino’s main drag…

From our front porch we could see the searchlights from those big movie premiers at the Chinese or the Egyptian. In another year or so seein' searchlights in the sky would have a more ominous, uh- You know; looking for those Japanese planes somebody thought they saw. But back then, those beams wandering around the sky had a happier meaning, and used to pull our neighbor from across the street down there like a moth to a flame. Muriel really had the bug for all that Tinseltown stuff; you would not believe how many movie magazines she subscribed to! And she’d come back all excited when she got a look at William Powell, Don Ameche or somebody. She kept trying to get us to come along, go stand out on the sidewalk and watch those stars get out of there cars and go in. And I think my mom would’ve wanted to, but Dad wouldn’t have it. Especially after he read that DAY OF THE LOCUST.

Actually, we didn’t go into LA much at all. Maybe go to Farmer’s Market, the beach a few times every summer. Or some store, like when they opened that big fancy modern May Company down on Wilshire---well it was modern then, it’s “historic” now---although most of what we bought was either the local Five-and-Dime or we ordered it from the Sears catalogue.

So at the time a town like Encino seemed like an odd place for a film star to want to live. But this was what appealed to him about it. That he could have his twenty or so dogs, and those horses that he never got around to buying; things those more prestigious neighborhoods would’ve frowned on…

He sure loved those dogs! Spoiled them like they were his kids. They’d start barking when they heard his Studebaker coming up the lane after his day at the studio, and all go running out to greet him, our dog Buddy running out there too, mobbing him, and him going: “Moody’s home! Moody’s home? Did babies miss Moody? Oh I know you did! And Moody miss you too!” in that weird voice he used with them. I didn’t get that “Moody” stuff. Nobody called him that…

When he bought the place the first thing we saw was this army of guys renovating and fixing it. And my dad kept going: “What is he doing, for Chrissake? Building Hearst Castle?!” He was determined that he wasn’t gonna like our new neighbor. But that didn’t last long, Max was so likeable. He didn’t care about your race or religion, how rich or poor or how educated you were; if he liked you he liked you and you’d have to be a real bastard for him to decide he didn’t.

And the women in the neighborhood all joked how he was gonna sneak into our houses at night and murder us all in our sleep, drink our blood like he really was that vampire he’d played; But with them too this kind of talk stopped as soon as they met him, and then it was “What a lovely man...”

Not physically of course, with that face that’d make little kids start bawling; but even those kids would start to smile and giggle after a minute of him talking to them. Because there was nothing scary about the Max Grosz we knew, except on that Halloween when he put on that show at our high school's auditorium, did all his famous roles to raise money for the March of Dimes.

When he was done fixing his place up it wasn’t elaborate at all. Basically the same except he'd re-plastered it and beefed up the electrical system, and put on a nice new Spanish tile roof. Just a three bedroom house on an acre and a half; You wouldn’t know a movie star lived there except for everyone telling you about him. I mean his car, hell it was even older and crappier than our old thing.

So then my father’s predictions, whatever he’d been nervous about, like this “Hollywood big shot” would be hosting a lot of fancy garden parties---bunch of rich snobs looking down their noses at us Valley rubes, eating weird hors d'oeuvres with their pinkies held up while a string trio played some fussy little Mozart tune---well it wasn’t long before his fears started going in the other direction. The way Max kept bringing home “bums”.

But me, I was in heaven! Ten year old boys love horror movies, and here we had the werewolf from Curse of the Full Moon, the monster in Born of the Grave, the evil space dictator from Jack Hammer and the Sky City Rocket Squadron living right next door and a friend of the family. Because to me he was a bigger star than any of those leading men. Something he could’ve been if it had just been a matter of talent. But as gigantic as he was, and looking like that, I guess Max was born to play monsters. And he obviously enjoyed it somewhat, even though he claimed to never watch his own movies. Because here, this caught my eye, if I could read it to you. Just this, where he says:

It wasn’t that my father didn’t like Max, he did. And whenever he came up with one of his theories he always ended it by admitting we could do much worse than to have him for a neighbor. But to him there was always something “funny” about Max, that he could never quite put his finger on it, so he kept trying on different notions of what it might be. And it wasn’t like he was standing in judgement of him, but was worried for him. Except maybe at first, when he was convinced Max was some kind of socialist.

But it became clear pretty quick he wasn’t one, or very political at all. That Bible he carried around, sneaking a peak at it in the middle of a conversation, and how he talked; not like a straight up Christian but some complicated kind of mysticism. How our souls need to be purified in the fiery crucible before we can be transformed, become who God meant us to be. Or I don’t know, this was a long time ago, but it didn’t sound like any kind of Marxism. So after this my dad was going: “Well he’s not a Red but he’s definitely one of their ‘fellow travellers’. Big hearted to a point where it makes 'em naíve and gullible. An easy touch for any moocher that comes along…”

Because Max really was incredibly generous. With money, time, doing favors.... You’d see him drinking beer and yacking in Spanish with the migrant field hands while a whole pig that he’d bought turned over a fire. And there were a few times when he'd let some ramshackled caravan of those Okies that were still straggling into California camp out in his big side yard, promising us they’d be gone once they found work. And each time his promises proved good before Dad could blow a gasket, although I’m pretty sure Max shelled out a lot of his own money helping these instant friends of his get settled.

Maybe he was giving it away because he knew he wasn’t going to be around long, like in the back of his mind suicide was always his last option. But for real, not faked the way he did.

And every Sunday there were his barbecues, for us if we wanted to come, and his communist movie friends. No kidding though; a lot of them actually were. Talking just like you’d expect they would about “the workers” and “the bosses” and such. But I think he just gravitated toward anyone with strong opinions. Because as often as not you’d find the director Harlan Stone there, who was a big deal in the American Liberty League, and a young actor named Ronald Reagan. Max would stand there with a can of Schlitz in his hand and a boxing fan’s grin on his face, watching the two of them squaring off with those armchair Bolsheviks.

There was usually a few famous people at each of Max's barbecues; My dad was excited to meet the author of Brave New World---who I just remember was English, blind as a bat, and that he seemed to think “cheeseburger” was a hilarious word---but most of his guests were studio employees who had all these obscure jobs my folks and I had never heard of before. We’d never realized what a complicated deal making a movie actually was. And it’s from talking to them that I got my interest in this movie-making stuff. I’d never wanted to be famous, some Barrymore or a singing cowboy, but the idea of getting paid to build something and try and make it look like the real thing, that sounded like fun! I started out as an apprentice and then a rigger and then a foreman at MGM. It was a good job.

And Saul Perleman never missed a Sunday at Max’s, since he wasn’t just his agent but his best friend. We got to know Zolly and his wife pretty good, after Max took us all to the Ambassador Hotel for dinner. It was weird having people gawking, wondering who we were to be eating with Max Grosz, something we didn’t really get back in Encino. Or that one crazy lady who came up to our table and got Zolly’s, Flora’s, Mom’s, Dad’s and my autograph too, just to be on the safe side. Zolly seemed grateful that Max had “nice people” like us for neighbors, who were right there for him.

I remember the day he wandered over from one of Max’s shindigs, telling my folks, "I’m worried about Max. He seems so gloomy…"

At this point we’d only known the fun Max. The thoughtful, considerate Max. My dad pointed over at him---playing his concertina, leading that whole gang in singing some polka---and he just laughed. “You call that gloomy?”

“For him it is," Zolly said. "He puts up a good front, but I can tell there’s something off about him. I’ve known him twenty-five years, and sometimes when he’s carrying on like this, life of the party; that’s when he’s really fighting it. These moods he gets. The other day I tried to warn him about this Emperor Galaxis part. ‘Max’, I tell him, ‘You’re ruining your credibility as an actor with this damned kiddie serial. Rocket Squadron is a joke, they’re laughing at you!' And you know what he says to me? ‘Good,’ he says, ‘It’s fitting then. My whole existence is a joke, why shouldn’t my career be?’ You see what I’m talking about?”

Then there came a day when my mom and I went over to bring him a basket of fried chicken, and we found him crying in the kitchen, in just his pants and undershirt and his Emperor Galaxis helmet, which I’d never seen in person before, only in black and white up on the screen. And I'd never seen a grown man crying like this, or at least not a sober one.

My mom sat down, scooted her chair up to his, “What’s wrong?”

This was the only time I ever heard him cuss. He said, “Nothing! What could be wrong? Things are getting more wonderful every day. Just ask the Poles, the Jews! We have the broken cross flying over Paris- my beautiful Paris! And my Fatherland, lost in that terrible dream. When Herr Hoffman wrote Deutschland Uber Alles it was a tender song, a hymn about loving one’s country. Not this, what they’ve turned it into, about a mad machine running over everything in its path, grinding it all up! Have you read the Chancellor’s book? Every paragraph on every page screaming: I AM COMPLETELY FUCKING INSANE! Yet they believe him. What he says makes sense to them. And now England is next to fall. The Men of Iron are on the march!”

And then sitting there---in that ridiculous helmet with the feather-duster thing sticking up---he started stomping his feet, like he was marching: “Hup two three four! Links, Rechts! Links, Rechts! Hooray for the big men! Big men with big plans! I am the big man! I am ….. A MONSTER!”

Mom put her arm around him, held him. “Shoooosh! You’re not a monster, you’re a wonderful man.”

He looks down at his big shoes, I think he had to have them specially made. “Yes. A wonderful, big man. That child, so sweet and innocent, picking flowers there by the lake ...... I KILLED her!”

“In a movie,” my mom reminded him, but he didn’t hear.

“We’ve got Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin- oh he’s another great leader! The big dreams of big men. Whatever happened to the little dreams of little girls? Whatever happened to nice things?”

“We brought you some nice chicken,” I said, trying to helpful.

He just kept looking at the floor and mumbled, “I'm sorry, but I don't want to be an Emperor. That's not my business. I don't want to rule or conquer anyone. I would like to help people, if possible...”

My mom nodded for me to go, like she wanted to talk to him in private. As I left I could hear Max shouting back there, about how the modern world with all its inventions has made us powerful but more and more heartless. Crying about “machine men, with machine hearts and machine minds-” and begging someone named Hannah to look up to the skies.

When she got home an hour later I asked if he was going to be okay. She said she didn’t know. I asked her what the heck was wrong with Max. It was his heart, she said. I asked what was wrong with his heart, and she said, “Nothing.”

We never mentioned his little breakdown to Dad, who at this point was reading psychology books, and had our neighbor pegged for an involutional melancholic with oedipal tendencies.

For a while after this he was still getting to work on time, to the studio or out to Thousand Oaks or Vasquez Rocks to shoot the Rocket Squadron serial, and he seemed to be holding it together, but not for long…

At his next outdoor meeting-of-the-minds he was arguing against every side, saying we couldn’t hope to find a political system that worked until we were better people; except religions in these “lost times” were in no shape to help us get to that. He pissed off Father Chuy from the Mission chapel, asking him if he could imagine the earliest leaders of the Christian church---those ones who ended up getting martyred in all different horrible ways rather than compromise their beliefs---ever cutting a bargain with the Fascists like Pope Pius did, turning a blind eye to how they were slaughtering people just to stay in business.

He said maybe these big men who had brought the world to the state it was in should all step down, and just let the women run our governments, before we destroyed everything- whole cities wiped out with those Tesla ray-gun cannons he was sure they were about to start producing.

This went over better with the women there than the men; at least until he jumped up and started dancing around all crazy, carrying on like he had for us that day in his kitchen. Screaming, “You ask me about the war? Don’t believe what anyone says. The doctrines, the manifestos, they’re all lies- They know not what is in their own hearts! The real war is between ugliness and beauty. Because ugliness, with a jealousy it cannot even admit to, can only destroy whatever is good!” And then he started singing that stupid song that was a big hit on the radio that year, about the three little fishies who swam all over the dam; real loud and in a voice like Baby Snooks---“Boop! Boop! Dittum dattum wattum- CHOO!”---over and over and over until everyone left.

My dad shook his head. Sad that Max was so obviously a “hophead”, the dope making him act like this.

All Max’s seriously political friends had stopped coming around, but he was inviting new batches of people. Different religions now, a weirder one each week, until the day his yard was full of these men in robes and bowler hats, all bowing to a guy they’d carried in on a sedan chair. The Great Samson, who had been a wrestler until he realized he was the Messiah after landing on his head in the ring. We knew there had been some strange cults springing up in California but we’d never seen anything like this bunch. Max tried to call us over to meet his new friends, but Mom wouldn’t go over there and wouldn’t let me go either.

But I guess the Samsonites didn’t have what he was looking for either, and after them he stopped having anybody over, and stopped coming by our place. He’d wave back if we waved but seemed too lost in his thoughts to do it first. We’d see his lights on at all hours, and pretty soon he was missing work more days than not.

Zolly knew the studio was about to sack him and find themselves another Emperor Galaxis, but he talked to them and they agreed to let him try and get help for Max. Max went along quiet when Saul drove him to the sanitarium, but they sprung him after a few hours. Said he was fine. Max was a good actor, and I guess could act as rational as he had to. Until he could get out and get home and be crazy again…

Our dropping in on him had turned into checking up on him, trying to figure out how bad he was, what we could do. We’d go in to see him reading some huge heavy book that looked like it was so old Gutenburg himself might of printed it; which he would put away quick, smiling like everything was fine. But you could tell he wasn’t sleeping.

A few days before he vanished we found him with a book that he didn’t try to put away. He wasn’t even trying to pretend things were normal now, he was so beat down. Almost like he was in a trance, which with that face of his was very spooky. He said it was about Hinduism. That he was looking for a way out of Hell.

And when my mother said he didn’t need all this weird stuff for that, just Jesus, he said 'Not that Hell, this Hell!'; and he thumped his chest.

He said that he believed this book, translated from something written before the Egyptians started building pyramids, about how when we die our soul gets reborn. Sometimes better, sometimes worse, depending on our karma. When I asked him what he would want to be in his next life he just shook his head. And then he started crying again, like even this book was just a bad joke. Saying what good was it to be reborn if you wouldn’t remember? You weren’t really you anymore if you didn’t remember.

My mom pretty much repeated what she’d said the first time, to not give up on God. The real God, not that weird one with all the arms. He smiled and quoted something Jesus said in the New Testament---humoring her---and we left.

And two days later, on March 21st, 1941 he walked off the set in the middle of a scene, dropped his helmet and metal vest there in the parking lot, got in his car and drove off. That was the last anyone saw of Max Grosz, dead or alive.

When Zolly called us that night asking if we’d seen Max, what Max had said to me that morning suddenly made sense. And I went uh-oh…

It was a school day and I was up before the sun, going out to get eggs from the chickens, when I spotted him setting up a strange device that I couldn't see too clearly but would get a better look at it later in the day. It was a 12 foot stepladder with an electric motor bolted to the top and a big copper washtub on top of that, with wires leading into his house. I waved and he waved back.

"So you going in to work?" I asked. Casual, trying not to sound like I was pressuring him.

"I'd better," he chuckled, "And there's not much more I can do around here."

I pointed, "What is that thing?"

"It's a starlight collector."

"Oh that's good," I said. Later during the war I would see radar antennas that looked something like his homemade gizmo, and nowadays just about every other house has a satellite dish on the roof; but at the time it was just some crazy thing that I couldn't see any use for. A starlight collector? That sure didn't sound like anything real. I asked him, "So how have you been?"

I could sense him smiling there in the dark. Hear it in his voice, “Wonderful. Truly wonderful! I’ve found the key!”

This was good to hear. He hadn’t been “wonderful” in months. I said something encouraging.

He jumped our picket fence and came toward me, excited. “There’s an intersection. Where alchemy and the Vedas come together. These passages, from books thousands of years and continents apart- they line right up. That can't be coincidence! They both talk about transformation being attained by means of 'a flower, made of light' that the Great Phoenix carried across the night in her bosom, the Hindu text telling about how the flower 'sings in a voice no man can hear', And for the longest time I would just skip over all that stuff---the phoenix, the flower singing to us in its 'silent tone'---thinking it was just more of the poetic sort of mumbo jumbo those old books are full of. Until I realized it was trying to describe something they didn't have a name for back then: Radio frequency! And suddenly it's all so obvious! I mean isn't it?!"

I didn't know what the heck he was babbling about, but with the way his emotions had been lately it seemed like agreeing with him was the thing to do. I told him yes it was.

"And the Phoenix, that's the constellation Phoenix, and her 'bosom' means right in the center of those six stars. So now I know the 'where' and 'when' of it, and through tuning my device I've found the wavelength. It really is a voice. Not a human voice, but like a-" There was a pause where he realized he didn't have a name for whatever it was, then decided the name didn't matter---it was something beyond words---and he said: "My life, it starts today! Or tomorrow at the latest; whenever I've collected enough of the signal. The song- that's the catalyst! I just need to be ready for it---mentally and spiritually---when it starts; The process... I will be reborn, and I will remember!"

Crazy, and talking so loud he was practically shouting, but on the plus side he'd showered and shaved and was going to work on time. I told him 'great!'

"You have no idea," he laughed.
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I was ten years old, for Christ’s sake! It seems obvious to us now, but THE 10 WARNING SIGNS OF SUICIDE wasn’t the kind of magazine article they ran back then, and I didn't have a clue. Not even when he handed me that roll of bills.

He’d done this before, and my folks didn’t like me taking money from him, but they weren’t around and if he wanted to give me a few bucks, then hell yeah! And later, when I saw it wasn’t a roll of ones but well over a thousand dollars I figured he’d made a mistake, and was going to tell him. That he’d handed me the wrong bunch of bills.

“Take care of my babies,” he whispered, meaning his dogs. And I said sure, we’d keep an eye on them today.

“No, take care of them,” he said. He got in his car and off he went. And still I didn’t get it. Just thinking he was hating being away from them for eleven hours, the way they must’ve hated it too from how they carried on when “Moody” came home.

That’s something else that came to me years later, when I was with the Occupation forces in Germany. He hadn’t been calling himself Moody when he talked to them, it was Mutti. German for "Mommy"…

His car was found two days later, clear up in Pismo Beach. Parked on that ugly gray rocky sand, the only car out there on that drizzly day, with an envelope on the dashboard.

The powerful rip tides around Pismo made the search for his body difficult, and they gave up and ruled it a suicide pretty quick, especially after that note they found in his car in his very distinctive handwriting, and everyone they talked to having some “last days of Max” story for them…

The sheriffs went through his place with Zolly, and Colossus Studios’ press agent, all showing up together. They did this sort of thing back then.

Following the wires that led into the house from Max's radio telescope thingamajig one of them found the secret room he'd had built. The hidden door behind the bookcase there, that they told us had lots of very large dresses and sun bonnets, women’s things. And I don’t know who all got paid off, but nothing about this got leaked to the press. That’s something else they did then, the studios the cops and even the press all in bed together. And in this case I’m glad they were, so that nobody was saying the late Max Grosz was anything but a fine actor and a very nice person. Which is exactly what he was.

And they sure didn’t have to tell us not to say anything. He wasn’t related to us but over the past year he’d become family. Although privately my dad was pretty shook up about the skirts and things. And now he was saying, “So that’s what his problem was. Max was a fairy!”

Which you know, that was the times. Gay, transsexual, whatever, we lumped it all together. And to tell the truth I probably still wouldn’t know there’s all these distinctions---that they're not all just different degrees of the same thing---but after knowing Max, and especially later when I started putting this together I looked into the psychology of all this more than I would’ve otherwise.

Poor guy. I don’t care what you think about that stuff, you have to feel sorry for him. Feeling like a woman and looking like that, it must’ve been killing him. My mom had thought it was odd how Max didn’t had one single mirror in his house. It must’ve been too painful a reminder.

In that same hidden room they found a bunch of weird old books in Latin, a blackboard scribbled with more latin, and a modest-size Frankenstein's labaratory set up on a workbench; pots full of sulphur and mercury; plus a Cockroft-Walton generator---which at the time was a state of the art atom smasher---hooked up to some kind of big iron cooking apparatus. They didn't know what to think of that, whether it was a bomb or maybe a still for making booze; but when they found the doll in the chamber they wrote it off as just more craziness.

I’m not too clear on what alchemy even is, but I figure that’s what it was. Some kind of way to change himself. And I hope it worked.

A very beautiful empty coffin was buried at Max’s plot in Forest Lawn Memorial Park. It was the very first funeral I ever attended, and it was a “gala event”. Lots of movie stars there at Forest Lawn that day, both above and below the ground.

Mourners took turns remembering him. His kindness, his optimism (at least until recently), younger actors saying how Max had encouraged them when they were first starting out; and no one mentioning having seen him out in the moonlight in his skivvies two weeks before, signaling to something up in the clouds with a flashlight. Zolly read the eulogy, just weeping openly for his friend.

Nobody noticed it when she showed up uninvited, this eight year old girl. Everybody must’ve thought she was with some adult, since she was dressed for the occasion, black. The smart little hat with the veil not quite hiding those adorable curls she’d wind up being so famous for-

Right, Tammy Kirby! The girl he turned himself into---however he did it---and now for these past two terms a Senator from the state of Wyoming. Didn’t I warn you this was gonna sound crazy?! I mean, hell ....... And it must’ve been a real irony for her, to be decked out like that at her own funeral. Exactly! “Greatly exaggerated”...

And it’s all circumstantial, the evidence, but there’s so damn much of it! The things I saw and heard, the habeas corpus, all the irregularities about where this kid supposedly came from. Her birth records “lost in a fire” like that, and her having no parents. I mean, there’s six or seven biographies on her, two of them by her, and even those two don’t quite match when it comes to her early years. And it’s a known fact that this funeral is the first place anyone remembers seeing her; except for that so-called aunt that Tammy was keeping in furs and Cadillacs. But even if I had evidence, I wouldn’t try to sell this story. As deep dark conspiracies go it’s a pretty harmless one, don’tcha think?

I only noticed her when she came up to me and my dad and Zolly after his eulogy. My mom was someplace, I’m not sure where. There was a rifle party, five guys in powdered wigs and Redcoat costumes firing blanks as they lowered him into the ground. I don’t know why, it’s Hollywood! And she came up to us, right up to Zolly and said, “Mr. Perleman, I understand you were Max’s agent.”

He nodded, “I had that honor, yes.”

“And I hear you’re quite a good one,” she said.

So now he seemed suspicious, or like his ulcer was kicking up. The way he said, “I’ve had some success for my clients. The ones with talent. I just wish Max had taken my advice more…”

She giggled at this, and said, “Well I’m an actress, and despite my tender years I’m quite good. And I’m in need of an agent. If you would see fit to let me read for you-”

That yarmulke practically went flying off his head when he started yelling, “This is a FUNERAL! Have you no decency?! I just lost my best friend…” And he said, “Listen Girlie, you might have the ruthlessness it takes to go places in this town, and you might even be talented---the next Shirley Temple---and will make some agent a rich man. But I’d sooner be a rag picker than speak another word to you!”

He stomped off across the grass, through the tombstones and the palm trees, just wanting to get away before he really lost his temper. And she took off after him. Caught up with him over by Tom Mix’s big monument.

He turned, I could see their mouths moving, their arms flapping. After a while they were just talking. Then he gave her a big hug. So you can call this story crazy but I saw this! I mean Zolly didn’t hug someone just because he’d become their agent. But when they returned it was like they were best friends. Had his arm around her…

I noticed she had a slight German accent, like Max’s- I swear to God! And her losing that was one of the first things they worked on. He didn’t announce her as his newest client, I mean this was a funeral, but he would soon. Mostly he just kept shaking his head. “Well I’ll be a son of a bitch …… I’ll be damned,” and like that.

We found my mom---that’s right, I remember now; she was hunting up autographs to take back to our Hollywood-crazy neighbor Muriel---and as my folks and I were getting into our car he was opening the door of his Rolls for her- “And you don’t got a place to stay here in town? No I guess you wouldn’t. But I’m sure the Missus will love having you as our guest. She’ll want to feed you, put some meat on those skinny little bones…”

As it turned out Tammy Kirby did have what it took to succeed in Hollywood. And it wasn’t any ruthlessness either. She was about the nicest girl you ever met. Zolly and Flora brought her around to visit us a few times...

Flora had always made it a point to stay out of Saul’s show business dealings, she didn’t much care for the kinds of people you met. But with their new daughter starting out on her career she took a big interest in whatever film Tammy was working on. A proud mom, that was for sure. I don’t know how they managed the adoption, getting it squared away legally, but I suspect it’d cost them.

I didn’t immediately go: “Hey! This little girl must be my sixty-two year old neighbor come back from the dead!” Who would? Even after his dogs---our dogs now---went running up like they just loved her to pieces, and our own dog Buddy, who doesn’t take to people immediately. So there was a lot of things I could of asked her on those times they brought her by to play with me, the only kid she knew, to try and trip her up about knowing something a girl her age wouldn’t, or vice versa. But I didn’t put the pieces together until years later…

I had fun with Tammy, playing catch, playing Monopoly---she slaughtered me---and exploring the groves and the canyon where the LA aqueduct goes through. But this only lasted until she got busy making movies. Promises were made to stay in touch, but theirs was a busy world, and with our famous neighbor no longer next door, none of us begrudged her or her folks when they didn’t. They were Beverly Hills and we were still Encino.

Tammy never did work for Colossus Studios. And she never signed a real long term contract like Max did. Warner Brothers did try to mold her into “the next Shirley Temple” with her earliest flicks, which were fairly successful, until it occurred to someone that her talents were being wasted on these sugary wide-eyed and innocent roles.

If she had a sweetness to her, and took a real delight in a lot of girly stuff, there was also something oddly grown-up about her. Odd because it didn’t seem odd, but totally natural for her. A “wisdom beyond her years” that she carried off without seeming vulgar or annoying. Like in that one about the army base brat, The General’s Daughter. That song she sang for those GI’s up on that table in the mess hall, “America’s Fighting Men”. Like she knew all too well what they were facing when they shipped out, and she respected the hell out of them. Or taking on those Nazi saboteurs with those cherry bombs and her slingshot? That look on her face- like Bruce Willis! Like it was personal…

Or that screwball comedy she made with Tracy and Hepburn. Everyone was amazed at how she could go toe to toe with them both, never missing a beat, just a total professional. That picture there was when folks started to see that she really had something. And after that she was everywhere. Going on the radio to sell war bonds, everywhere! And then a teenage role model, setting the style for that whole Bobby-Soxer generation...

And the people who were predicting: ”These child actors, they never last long”; they had to eat their words. I mean there she was, twenty years old, getting the Oscar nomination for that Tennessee Williams one she was in. It was another eight years before she was nominated again, but that’s when she got Best Supporting Actress. Yeah! The Stepchild, with Betty Davis and Anne Bancroft. Spooky wasn’t she? Terrorizing those two poor old women like that; and then so innocent, so convincing when the police detective came around; until she got the drop on him, rammed that pitchfork through his gut!

But that’s when it clicked for me, this crazy idea! Or maybe it was always in the back of my head, but two things put it all together. First was her acceptance speech for that. Nobody remembers it, it was so short; how she just said, “It’s taken me two lifetimes to get this. Thank you!”

And the other thing was reading the VARIETY review of that same picture. Something like: “Who would have thought that the girl once known as America’s Princess could convey an evil screen presence not seen since the days of Max Grosz?”

I tell you, the hairs on my neck went straight up! And I knew. I mean logic, all the things everyone says can’t happen? Sitting there on the can reading that, it all went out the window.

I didn’t tell my wife, not yet. And she never knew I went to visit Tammy. I don’t know why, maybe so it wouldn’t feel so crazy. I wrote her a letter, care of Zolly’s agency. And it got to her, and she remembered me. Sent me her phone number.

I called her and I went up into the hills, that big place she had. All modern. Meeting each other, both grown up now, a lot of water under the bridge. But at first it was okay, it was nice. Small talk, remembering Zolly and those few times we’d hung out as kids. But then...

Maybe I was coming off as a little nervous, so she knew something was up with me; that I wasn’t just there to reminisce. A whiff of something obsessed about me, because believe me stars had “stalkers” back then too.

So then she started to get nervous herself; all of the sudden remembering she had someone she needed to meet in an hour, trying to run me out of there. And so I just asked her, ‘How much do you know about Max Grosz?’

And then she knew. She knew I knew. And she was afraid. She jumped up: "OUT! OUT OF MY HOUSE!"

And I did, I started moving away, toward the door. And I told her I didn’t care, I just wanted to know, that I wasn’t imagining something or crazy for thinking this, but it was too much for her. She’d buried Max, anything to do with that life, and my just being there was…

I didn’t want for this to threaten her. I told her if she ever wanted to call, I was someone she could talk to about this, and I’d keep her secret. But just saying that word "secret" made things even worse. Like I was some blackmailer now. And she started threatening me then, with cops, that they’d lock me away in the booby hatch if I went around telling people she was Max Grosz- Which, you know, I’d never even said.

So I left. I told her she’d never hear from me again, and she hasn’t. There wasn’t any point. You could see how unhappy she’d been as Max. And this girl, this woman, she was so in love with life. Did good things, and still is. Being a mayor and now a senator …… You know, she practically singlehandedly got that anti-discrimination law passed, in a state where they said something like that would never happen. “Her people” I guess you could say, even if she’s way back in one of those closets they have about it. And other things, the charities, I’ve got one of those search engines where any news about her pops right up, and it's usually something good.

And so the last thing I said, in that second before I stepped out the door was, “I’m just happy for you.”

She locked eyes with me, still scared but I saw just the tiniest smile creeping onto her face, and she nodded like: 'Thank you Jimmy. You’re a good boy…'
.

And I still don’t know if this is real. Maybe I am just crazy. When you’re crazy you’re usually the last one to know. But I do know that if she did use to be him, and she did whatever she did and got a second chance in life, one that felt right to who she was inside, well it would be nice. I mean ...... good for her!

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NOTE: In the nine years since this story was first posted several versions of the Max-Grosz-became-Tammy-Kirby legend have appeared in various form. There have been conspiracy blogs, YouTube videos and recently even an episode of the paranormal speculation series Weird Hollywood on TMC. One of the more disturbing of these is the supposed “deathbed confession” of Tammy Kirby herself, which with its claim that Max's transformation required a human sacrifice to take place paints him in a far less innocent light.

Which is the “real” version of this astonishing tale? Decide for yourself.
AMERICA'S PRINCESS by Maryanne Peters appears here:
https://bigclosetr.us/topshelf/fiction/86052/americas-princess

And Lo, the traveller came at last to the sky's edge. He put down his staff + poked his head thru the fabric of space, beholding the mighty clockwork of the cosmos, the great turning gears, the merry go round and the ferris wheel. He smelled the heavenly corndogs and heard the calliope music. And he said, "Hey wait for me you guys!"

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6EBsLOJv-yI

It was my sixteenth birthday and all my dreams were coming true. We were in my uncle's spaceship, traveling at Warp 8.5 to the famous pleasure planet Risa, where I was scheduled for a miraculous makeover in a modified transporter that would make me a real girl at last!

The 24th Century was a wonderful time to be alive. Trans people like me were understood and supported, medical science had advanced to a point where changing your sex on a genetic level was possible; and all the wars, famines + bigotries that had plagued Mankind since the dawn of history were a thing of the past!

But the Universe was still a dangerous place. And unbeknownst to my two mothers and I every lightyear we traveled was bringing us closer to an unscheduled encounter with the greatest menace anyone in the United Federation of Planets had ever faced... The Borg!

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000.000 DEBRIEFING

Another debriefing? Sure, if it helps. Especially if you say all you want is a summary. I've been away so long, and finally seeing Mother Earth down there every time I look out the window is making me anxious to beam down and get back to my life, to my family. Or what's left of it...

I didn't expect to spend a whole week up here getting scanned and questioned, but I do understand why you had to be so thorough. You had to make sure I'm safe and won't go running around assimilating people. Which I don't think I'd be able to do even I wanted to.

As the Enterprise was bringing the six of us home that nice Dr, Crusher did a surprisingly good job of getting me out of that damn rubber suit, removing as many of my implants as she could and deactivating the nanoprobes in my blood. Except the anti-graft rejection nanoprobes, those need to stay functioning for the rest of my life. But I know she could only do so much, and I'll never pass as completely human; Some of this hardware is in me too deep, too integrated with my biology. If you took it all out my head would probably fall off. I'm a bit of a Bride of Frankenstein even by Borg standards.

Although the whole head-swap thing wasn't actually the Collective's doing. That happened later, when we were struggling to survive on that planet. It was our resident mad scientist's best idea for bringing me back to life, and I'm actually pretty happy with it. The female body I'd always wanted, although not in the way I was hoping. A much cruder and more piecemeal version of the transformation my parents and I were on our way to have done when all this started. But I guess that's me now, Little Miss Piecemeal.

And I really can't complain. The Borg took everything from me but I got back the most important thing, the thing that if you don't have it nothing else means anything; or if it does mean something there's no one there to know it; like that tree falling in the forest everyone talks about.

After five years and eight months of being nobody and nothing I'm glad to be me again. Mia...
.

.

001.000 MIA

001.001 Appointment on Risa

I don't know what the Stardate was when we set out on our trip, 45363 point something is about as close as I can guess. If I still had my internal chronometer I could work it out in a heartbeat but I'm glad to be rid of it. The less of this circuits and solenoids garbage I have in my body the better.

And I can tell you the exactly day it was by the Common Era calendar we still use here on Earth: May 11, 2368; A date I'd circled with a red heart on the old-fashioned plastic calendar I had hanging above my desk in my bedroom. A day that seemed like it would never get here as I waited to turn sixteen and be eligible for the procedure.

It would've been exciting just to be taking my first real space trip; not just to the Moon but into actual outer space; clear out of the Solar System and across all those light years to the Risian system. Risa is a lot of folk's favorite tourist destination---Christmas, honeymoons, hornymoons; and I hear it's a total zoo during Earth's spring break!---but for me going there meant so much more than just taking a vacation.

We could've booked passage on one of those Jamaharon Express flights that depart from Earth almost daily. But people go to Risa mostly to party and get laid, and a lot of Terrans have exaggerated notions about how much of an “anything goes” culture Risa actually has. The Risians are the most mellow people in the galaxy until you start acting like a total jerk, then you're on the next ship home without a refund. But too many people headed for Risa don't know this. They start pounding down the Risian Sunsets and hitting on the other passengers before the ship even goes to warp, because ir's Risa, where “everybody fucks everybody all the time and stays totally blitzed 24-365; So why not start now?”

Which can make the three day trip pretty annoying for anyone who's headed there for some other reason.

So my moms and I were glad we'd be traveling in our own ship. Or not our ship. It belonged to my Tio Ignacio, who's general manager for the Lancaster-Victorville Fabrication Hub, where they make hardware that's needed in space by just about everyone in the whole Federation. Yeah Uncle Iggy's our family's big shot, but he's just a big kid at heart, and when he learned where we were going and why he insisted we take his private ship; hugging all three of us over and over and saying, “I can't wait to meet my new niece when you get back!”

My uncle had already known me me as his niece for a third of my life---he threw me a big quinceañera for my birthday the year before---but I knew what he meant by his new niece. The next time I saw him I'd have a freshly made body that would be different in so many important ways.

While we did plan to take a quick beam-in from the Risian Transport Center to some of the planet's must-see scenic wonders, and to spend a day at that famous beach resort before heading home; our main destination was an ordinary looking hospital high in the forests on the southern continent, the Sexual Wellness Institute; where I had appointment in its gender medicine wing to be treated with a device called a body restructuring transmaterializer.

A BRT is basically like a transporter, except it doesn't beam you across space or even across the room. It converts your body into energy like a transporter, but while you're bouncing around in there without a body it rewrites the godzillions of bits of information that make up your 'pattern', a mathematical blueprint of everything you are and know; changing all your cell's chromosomes from XY to XX or vice versa, and reconfiguring your anatomy to one that's appropriate for your new sex. Of the handful of places that do that kind of restructuring they say Risa's the best. Their technique, the staff, and all the fun stuff you can do on their planet as long as you made the trip there anyway. Risa's not just for horny people, it's for families too.

This procedure could easily done on Earth, but since technically it's doing genetic engineering on people it's illegal here, because of- You know, that whole mess back in C-21 with the Eugenics Wars and that crazy asshole Khan Singh that still has ou planet afraid of “tinkering with Nature's handiwork”. But I think Nature must've been asleep on the job when was born a boy!

But at least this is one type of modification they'll let you travel off world to have done since it's not trying to make you into some superman, just an ordinary man or women who's comfortable in their own body. But they still check you out, map your new genome against your original one to make sure you didn't get yourself augmented somehow; kind of like the way your doctors here checked me out to see if I was dangerous. I guess that's one part of our original plan for fixing my dysphoria I got to experience...

Sixteen of our years old was Institute's minimum age for using the BRT on Earth people, but my birthday happened on our second day in space so I'd be old enough when we got there. I'd had my first name legally changed from Danny to Mia when I was ten and had been living as a girl ever since. And I'd seen all the doctors and counselors you need to see to have this procedure done. But the specialists at the Institute would evaluate me again when we got there, and could refuse to treat me if they weren't 100% convinced it was what I wanted and needed.

Everyone at the Wilshire Gender Clinic assured me there was zero chance I'd be refused. Their doctors weren't quacks with fake medical degrees on some dodgy little jerkwater planet, but were known and respected by the ones on Risa. And two minutes with the Institute's Betazoid counselor would show her that I hadn't been tricked or pressured into doing this; which is the Risian's other big concern. You can't bullshit a Betazoid. Their species has that emotional telepathy that can tell exactly how you feel, sometimes better than you can yourself. And the next morning I would lie down on the transporter bed, disappear, then be reassembled in the body I'd always known I should have.

Both of my moms, my Uncle, my friends from school; all of them were totally supportive and excited for me. Even my dad, living way the hell off on Setlik III heard about me getting this done and sent me his best wishes. But no one was more excited than I was!

What none of us could have guessed was that Mom, Nunu and I would never show up for my appointment, or that my journey to having a female body would be a lot stranger and darker than the one we'd started on.
.

001.002 SPACEDOCK

On the morning of the 14th we caught an air cab to the Palos Verdes spaceport and then the ferry up to Earth Spacedock. We stopped for lunch at the replimat before heading out into the black, more for the gorgeous view of the planet below than for the cuisine, especially since the food materialized by the replicator on Uncle Iggy's ship was so much better; Being not-quite-legal reproductions of dishes created by some of the best chefs on Earth.

“How's the empanada, Nunu?”

“Okay, but not as good as your mama makes,” she said, smiling at her wife.

“How's yours, Mom?”

“I had a better slice of pizza on Nimbus III, where I think one of the toppings was rat...”

“Ewwwwww!”

When you have two parents of the same sex it can get a little confusing when you say “Hey Mom!” and they don't know which mom you mean; So we worked it out that I'd call my biological mother Carmencia by Mom; and would call Edi Zijaan, the woman she married Nunu, which is the affectionate short-form word for Mother on her home planet Trill.

“How's your corn dog, Mee?” asked Nunu. My name is Mia but they call me Mee, which means something in Trill. Pet, beloved, precious; something like that.

“It's a corn dog,” I said, wondering why I'd even ordered it.

Earth Spacedock's main hangar bay was enclosed but it wasn't pressurized, so it was basically just an unbelievably huge room full of outer space. Smaller vessles lined its walls while Starfleet's mammoth Galaxy Class Yamato floated untethered in the center. The Yamato was breathtaking sight, but I wouldn't have traded it or any of the other ships in here for my uncle's gorgeous little space yacht.

The City of Industry was wider than it was long; a streamlined configuration kind of like a giant boomerang that he called a “flying wing”. The bridge was located top, front and center inside a big teardrop-shaped view dome and there was a warp nacelle aat each of the big wing's ends. Uncle Iggy had said that in theory it should be able to enter a planet's atmosphere and land unpowered, like a 20th century space-shuttle; but he hoped he would never have to attempt it. We crossed the forcefield-protected open gangway to it, and as Mama punched the combination into airlock hatch's key pad she muttered, “Let's hope Iggy didn't leave us any booby traps...”

By booby traps she didn't mean anything dangerous, but her brother was quite a practical joker. Like the time he brought a piñata for my eighth birthday that he'd filled with red gagh, making us kids all scream when one managed to bust it open and the big hairy squirming blood-red worms came pouring out. Then he pretended to be surprised that we weren't all delighted with this alien delicacy.

“What's the matter, don't you like gagh?! Good Klingon food! Make you big strong warrior!” he said in some kind of cave-man accent, thumping his chest. But he did have candy for us all, he wasn't that mean!

And two years later when I came out as trans his birthday surprises lost any trace of grossness or teasing, and he had my mothers worried that he was spoiling me with extravagant gifts and events. Uncle Iggy and his wife had already raised three sons by then; but from the way he started treating me I think he'd always wanted a daughter, and it was like he'd finally hit the jackpot having a young relative he could treat like a princess.

I know none of this has anything to do with my time as one of the Borg, but it's important to me to remember who I was before that happened to me; which I'm still in the process of doing. And that's something you do need to know about the few of us who manage to return from being something so inhuman. It doesn't all come back at once.

The first thing we did when we got inside the City of Industry was turn the heaters on. Small ships get cold when they're powered most of the way down, and we hadn't brought along any heavy jackets or gloves on our trip to the climate-controlled tourist planet. When our breath didn't make little clouds anymore my Human mom sat down at the helm and began powering up all the rest of the ship's systems.

It had been a decade since she'd last flown those massive freighters that carried all the stuff her brother's company made to places all over Federation space and a bit beyond. But she'd kept her helmsman's license current, a Class 3 license that made Mom more than qualified to pilot a little private ship like this.

As Mom went through the pre-flight check I noticed a phaser of some kind sitting on the console off to the side of her. It didn't seem like the kind of thing my uncle would even own, much less leave just laying around. I picked it up. I didn't know much about particle guns but to me it looked cheaply made; the kind of weapon they call a "zap gun" and that you might procure from some skeezy-looking Orion in some alley in the bad part of town; only to have it blow up and take your arm off the first time you fired it!

“Be careful with that, Mee!” warned my Trill mom.

“Really, Nunu? I thought I'd start firing wildly at the bulkheads.”

“Don't be a smart ass,” she smirked, and took it from me. She looked the phaser over and went: “Uh oh...”

“What is it?” asked Mom as she adjusted some control or other.

“This doesn't have settings!”

One thing I did know was that if a phaser only had one setting there was no just stunning someone with it; it was permanently set to kill. Which made it an even stranger thing for Uncle Iggy to have.

“Then just put it away somewhere. In those cabinets back ther,” Mom said, and as her wife did this she spoke to the control panel, “Spacedock Control, this is the City of Industry. We're ready to depart. You have our course plan, right?”

“Sure do, Industry. You're clear to go,” said a male voice from the comm, and as the hangar bay's giant door opened he added wistfully, “Man, I wish I was goin' to Risa... Have fun!!”

Mom flew us smoothly through the opening, and when we were a safe 100,000 K from Earth we went to warp.
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001.003 Warp 8.5

The ship would be flying itself until we got to the Risian System, so Mom wouldn't be stuck sitting behind the controls for the whole trip, but just had to stay close enough to get back to them if a warning sounded. If she had to go take a shower or use the head one of us would stand watch, and hope we would know what to do if the ship's computer's voice alerted us to some danger. This wasn't too likely to occur; but if it did, you can bet that's when it would happen. In space all problems seem to come up when you're on the toilet.

This was how you did things when you only had one qualified pilot for a multi-day trip. There was a couch sitting in the bridge, a replica of an ugly old plaid pre-war thing from the late 20th or early 21st that my uncle loved for some reason. This was his bed when he flew solo somewhere, and would be Mom's bed for the next three days. Nunu and I would probably sleep in here too, dragging in mats and bedding so the three of us could treat the whole trip like one long slumber party. And if Nunu or I needed some alone time there were four cabins to chose from.

With the computer flying the ship we all sat down on the couch and watched the stars outside the big dome streak past like glowing white parallel lines. Traveling at warp was something I'd only done once before (Our vacation to Nix Olympus Planetary Monument, when Mars was clear on the other side of the Sun + getting there on impulse power would've taken all day...) and the sight had been utterly mesmerizing, even through a much smaller window at only Warp 2. It was just mind-boggling and a little scary to think that every time I blinked we were taking a thousand trips around the world.

Sitting snugly between two moms I felt like a mom sandwich. At home they usually sat together on the love seat but they were letting me know this trip was all about me. Each took one of my hands.

“Are you excited about getting your new body?” asked Mom.

“It's all I've been able to think about all week! I'm pretty sure I did crappy on that history test yesterday. Things I should of known. Things I did know, but not when I needed them.”

Nunu made a Pssshhhhh!! sound. “The day you get less than a B on a history test I'll eat my spots! I've looked in on you from the parents room down at the holo-arcade. While the other kids were battling demons with magic wands in Tales of the Sorcerer Knights, you were attending the second Continental Congress. The real one, not the version with the zombie attack. Or marching down Pennsylvania Avenue with Alice Paul and the National Women's Alliance giving Woodrow Wilson the finger...”

“My little Suffragette!” said my 'real' Mom proudly, like I'd actually done something.

When I was six years old my father had wanted our family to move to Setlik III. The settlement there needed civil engineers, and he'd needed a challenge- to help build infrastructure on that rocky windswept planet at the very edge of Federation territory. But Mom didn't think any planet that close to those warlike Cardassians was a safe place to raise a kid, and after a couple of bad fights about it she told him to go follow his dream---no hard feelings---but we were staying here; And when I was seven he did.

Shortly after that Mom met and fell madly in love with a beautiful Trill woman, and they got married fairly quickly. My father had been a reasonably good dad, and I knew he loved me, but my new mom really seemed to understand me. We were the same in so many ways, and she was so much fun!

My moms both laughed when I took a printer-pen and painted two rows of spots all the way down my body from my temples to my feet; and they let me go to school that day as a Trill girl, in the cute party dress I had fallen in love with when I saw it in a shop's window and wore around the house sometimes. M y three best friends at school---Dawn, Hanami and a really cute Orion girl named Givvi---were delighted, and said I made an adorable girl!

As I was turning ten I had a huge revelation: That my “I feel like a girl sometimes” thing was actually a “Who I was, period!” thing, and my name was Mia.

“You know it's okay to just be a feminine boy, right?” said Mama when I told her about this.

“I know it is,” I told her, “But I'm not a feminine boy. I'm a girl.”

She still had doubts though, wondering if I only thought I had to be a girl because the whole rest of our household and most of Mom and Nunu's friends were females. Probably something she had read could happen in one of those ebooks she had about single-sex parenting. But my Nunu believed in my ability to be the best judge of who I actually was pretty immediately. At least about something that came from as deep inside a person as gender identity did. We'd had an amazing rapport right from the start, and I think she had seen this coming.

If you only know one thing about the people on planet Trill (aside from the fact that they look mostly human but have those spots) it's that they have a symbiotic relationship with another sentient species, these eyeless sluglike thing the size of a baguette that live in underground lakes on their world. When a Trill is selected to be “joined”, the “symbiont” is placed inside their abdomen and lives there for the rest of the humanoid's life, if it's ever removed both of them die. The host and the symbiont have a mental link, and the slug's first host's mind is influenced in subtle ways by the symbiont's consciousness.

It's when the symbiont's host dies that things get interesting. The slug-creatures can survive if it's quickly placed inside another Trill. And suddenly the new host remembers the whole life of the symbiont's previous host. They say it can be disorienting for a male Trill to suddenly remember what it's like to have a baby. The new host also takes on abilities, tastes and personality traits from the previous host, becoming a slightly different person. Each of the symbiont's new hosts remembers more and more previous lives. It's a way for Trills to live on a thousand years or so past death, or sort of. ..

If you only know two things about Trills, the second is probably that there are a lot of Trills and very few symbionts, enough for about 1% of the people on Trill. It's a status they consider a sacred honor, and every Trill dreams of the day when they might be chosen to become joined.

Every Trill except my Nunu, that is. She'd never had the slightest desire to be joined with a symbiont, and in fact found the whole idea deeply repugnant.

“I like being who I am,” she told me when I asked her about it, “One life is enough for me to figure out. Who I am and a how to become a better person. I don't need a bunch of dead people being backseat drivers in my head; telling me what I feel, what I like or don't like, what I think!"

Nunu took her personal credo from one of those long fancy speeches in Hamlet: This above all: To thine own self be true. I'm sure this philosophy had a lot to do with how quick she was to support me in wanting to be true to my girl self.

“As you go through life a lot of people will try to tell you who and what you should be. And there are things you should at least listen to someone's advice about, and think it over; if that someone has earned your trust. But even your Mama and I don't get to tell you that. Nobody gets to decide who you are but you!”

[Which made what would happen to us the next day ironic on top of all the other ways it was horrible. In twenty four hours none of us would have a self to be true to...]

But it didn't take my Human mom long to trust that I knew what I was talking about, especially after a real professional counselor who specialized in adolescent gender issues backed up what Nunu and I were saying. Because it's not like she was against me being a girl for some weird moral reason, like people used to have back in the Dark Ages when being gay or transgender was considered a mental illness and having homophobia or transphobia wasn't.

And I guess some people think like that even today; on those miserable religious-colony planets that have cut themselves off from the rest of this sinful, wicked galaxy and have all kinds of weird barbaric laws. Anyone like me or like my moms who's living there must be going through Hell. I know the Prime Directive has to be what it is but sometimes I wish Starfleet would make an exception, go into these places and start kicking ass and taking names if they're abusing people.
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001.004 Sulok

After a dinner from the replicator of copyright-protected meals by famous chefs---starting with Greek salad and ending with a desert of Thai sticky rice and mangoes---we were in the mood for some holographic entertainment. Iggy's ship did have a holosuite (more like a holo-broom closet) but none of us felt like running around in some imaginary place interacting with imaginary people and having to figure out what to do next. Sometimes you just want to sit on the couch and watch something made by a good director, with a music score and better actors than just you and your goofy friends in there playing King Arthur or Zephram Cochran. And that's why good old fashioned holofilms hadn't died out as an art form like they were predicting would happen when holosuites became a thing. Watching 3-D scenes projected into the air in front of you is something people will be doing for a while.

Iggy had the bridge set up so he could watch holoflickers from this couch and keep one eye on the helm. We had the computer dim the lights and put on a flicker that my moms and I had been meaning to see but none of us had yet in the nine months since it came out. This one seemed appropriate with where we were going; Rendezvous on Risa, the holofilm that seemed like it would be the last one created by the beautiful young Vulcan actress Sulok.

People on Earth loved Sulok as much as the Vulcans hated her; Although they'd never admit to something as blatantly emotional as hating someone. But they definitely denounced her---in strictly logical terms---for her rejecting her culture's values and embracing emotions, then moving to Earth and becoming a writer, director and star of four holofilms in that most un-Vulcan of all genres of fiction, the comedy.

To the Vulcans everything from her fashion sense to her Holo-wood lifestyle seemed like a great big slap in the face; even though she was never one of those "dangerous radicals" who wanted to change Vulcan society and liked to go giggling through the streets as a form of protest. She'd merely done what she needed to when she realized she would never fit in there; Finding a world where she could be happy and try to make other people happy with her art.

Watching her first flicker I'd had a 13-year-old's crush on the gorgeous twenty-something starlet, and a 14-year old's when I watched her second. But her third production was my favorite, because instead of playing opposite a male romantic lead like the first two her third was a lesbian Rom-Com, and when she kissed the girl I dreamed she was kissing me.

As her comedy recorded on Risa began my 16-year-old's crush was in full bloom...

“You like her, don't you?” teased the mom on my left.

“I love her,” I admitted, “She's amazing!”

But then didn't everyone? Me, both my moms, Uncle Ignacio, the critics; and she had fan clubs on some of the most unlikely planets. Even Qo'noS; where her flickers were banned for some reason. And here on Earth, the way she saw our world with fresh eyes and that SMILE she faced life and its challenges with made us remember to appreciate what we had here- our lives, our loves, our freedoms; all the things we valued.

Rendezvous on Risa had Sulok's character arriving on Risa for an archeological symposium, where---thanks to some magical artifact no one knew was magic---love was in the air, and she found herself suddenly torn between falling in love with a charming Bolian male, a cute soft-butch half Human/half Klingon female, and a person from that androgynous race the J'naii, who suspected that they had a gender but couldn't decide which it was.

In the final act the holoflick got kind of weird, ending more like an art flicker than a rom-com. She didn't chose any of her three suitors and seemed conflicted about her life in general. She went for a late night walk on a lonely stretch of beach under the Risian moons, where she met a Medusan- those energy creatures that live in a containment chamber and are supposedly so hideously weird looking that anyone who looks inside their levitating box will instantly go crazy and never get sane again.

Sulok and the Medusan got to talking, and you could tell they were falling in love. She asked the Medusan if she could see what it looked like, but it didn't want to drive her insane. She talked it into it, opened the cover on its container and peered inside, and we saw what she saw. I assume it was special effects but swirling in the air on City of Industry's bridge it was both totally abstract and pretty damn disturbing; until the swirling chaos of the fake Medusan began to change, and somehow became incredibly beautiful, like a hundred rainbows of pure goodness and joy all making love together! And we heard Sulok's voice say “Oh wow... You're beautiful!” and right then the story ended.

“What the Hell was THAT?!!” cried my Earth mom. She thought this was the most weird, stupid, pointless, out-of-left-field ending it could have had, and that it wrecked an otherwise charming flicker.

And my Trill mom just said, “I'll have to think about this one...”

But this ending moved me in some way I couldn't explain and I thought it was a pretty good holo all around, but not as good as her lesbian one. And it seemed like a shame that this would probably be her last venture into holofilm making.

Right after completing Rendezvous on Risa Sulok posted a message saying she needed to get away for a few days to think about some stuff, and then vanished.- A few days turned into a few weeks and by now it had been nearly a year since anyone had heard from her. There were all kinds of crazy rumors and theories. One said she'd reconciled with her people's culture and was at a monastery on Vulcan, and another claimed that the Vulcan government had assassinated her; and some were just plain silly; but no one had a single shred of evidence to back these theories up...

And as our talk turned to the missing Vulcan star I speculated, “I wonder if she'd been planning it a while; and the reason this flicker ended like this is it's a clue she was trying to give us...”

“That's it, she ran off with a Medusan!” said Mom, and she and Nunu busted up at her joke.

“No, not that!” I said, “But maybe it was like... symbolism. About finding beauty in something most people are afraid of. Or maybe she's saying she was sick of her life and wanted to disappear, and got a job as a waitress some little town where nobody will find her. Or- Oh hell I don't know!”

“Maybe,” admitted Mom, “Her just dropping out is more plausible than these articles talking about time travel or evil alternate universes. I swear, they'll publish any old crap these days!”

But of all the weird theories circulating the one I never heard mentioned seems so obvious now. The same reason billions of other from all over the galaxy have disappeared. Maybe the notion that such a beautiful, lively intelligent young holo-star was now shambling around a Borg ship without the slightest glimmer of individual awareness inside her was just too ghastly for anyone to want to think. It might be fun to spin wild theories about Unit 31 or parallel timelines since there's mystery and glamour in those; but being assimilated by the Borg is about as mysterious or glamorous as hitting your head, landing face first in the toilet and drowning.

Before bedding down for the night I took a nice long bath, grateful that my uncle had splurged on a real sit-down tub and plenty of hot water for his ship instead of just the usual sonic shower. People say they're relaxing but I hate everything about those things, and the fact that sonic showers is all they have on those big fancy ships like the Yamato or the Enterprise is probably the main reason a career in Star Fleet never appealed to me.

As I toweled myself dry I looked at myself in the full-length mirror and wondered what my new body would look like. Probably not that much different than the one I had now except it would be curvier where this one was flat and flatter down where it needed to be.

My face probably wouldn't be too different either. I know it's what's on the inside that counts, but I always liked it when girls at school said I made a pretty girl. I was lucky that I'd inherited my mother's delicate features, her cute nose and straight raven black hair; and not my dad's wide squashy nose, big square jaw, his ginger-ish hair and complexion. He wasn't ugly, but no one ever assumed he was female and I'm sure he was glad of that

But my wanting this genetic makeover on Risa had never really been about how I looked so much as needing to be a female in every way I could, inside and out. And I'd always had this sort of ache inside me to be a mom myself someday, and I was happy that it would soon be possible; although if and when I did it wouldn't be until some time after college at the soonest.

I slipped into the favorite nightie I'd brought along, white lace and very pretty but not some skimpy little thing designed for showing off your curves, which this scrawny androgynous body of mine didn't really have. I dragged a mattress and blankets in from one of the cabins, while my moms grabbed the bigger one from the captain's stateroom.

Our “slumber party” on our first night in space wasn't quite the giggly all-night gabfest I'd assumed it would be. Me and both of them were all fairly talked out and sleepy and didn't really say much more than good night. There would be time for giggling tomorrow.

I lie there watching the hypnotic sight of the stars streaking past at many times faster than lightspeed. It put me right to sleep. My last thought before I conked out was I could get used to a sight like this. Maybe those sonic showers that Starfleet ships or the commercial freighters had wouldn't be so unendurable after all...
.

001.005 Grace

I slept soundly all night and woke up sort of wondering about my day at school, until I opened my eyes and saw the stars warping past us around the bridge's dome and knew this wouldn't be a school day for me. Then I remembered it was my birthday, and where we were going, and why. And I smiled.

Mom and Nunu's mattress and bedding were rolled up and leaning against the bulkhead. Nunu was sitting on the couch in her jammies reading something on her PADD. She glanced up, “Ah, you're awake. Good morning, Sweet Sixteen! Breakfast will be ready in a half hour.”

“A half hour? What takes a half hour to replicate?”

“You'll see,” she said, and held up her PADD, “Your uncle left a message saying he has a whole day planned for us in the holo-room since he couldn't be here today. You know how he is about your birthdays and all the Earth holidays. But today is your day and we don't have to if you don't want to.”

“No, it sounds fine. What's the program?”

“It doesn't say, Mee. Just 'American Fun, 1963' and that it's six to eight hours long.”

The only event from American history I knew for sure was in 1963 was what happened in Dallas that year. Uncle Iggy might have some weird notions of fun but it wouldn't be that weird! Maybe we'd be watching one of those old chemical reaction rockets get launched from that first spaceport in Florida, which they must've been doing in 1963 if we got to the Moon by 1969. That would be fun.

A voice called out from the dining nook. “Come and get it!”

The little table was set with three real china plates, each of which held two eggs cooked sunny side up, frijoles refritos sprinkled with cheese, a spoonful of chile verde, a big warm tortilla with actual scorch marks, a few slices of avo and some salsa ranchera. Good old North American comfort food.

“What restaurant's this from?” I asked.

“Velasco's in Santa Monica,” said Mom.

“You cooked this? But how?”

She slid a big hatch in the wall open to reveal a little refrigerator and an oven with four burners on top that I never knew were there. As she pulled her chair out and sat down she said, “I can cook.”

I stabbed some eggs and chunk of pork with my fork, ran it through the refritos and popped it into my mouth. I swallowed it and said with a big grin,“I guess so!”

Mom cleared her throat like I'd done something wrong. I looked over and saw she had her hands clasped together.

“You're kidding!” I said. This really was an old-fashioned breakfast.

“My cooking, my rules,” said Mom, and after Nunu and I put our hands together she addressed the stars dopplering past overhead, “Heavenly Father, we thank you for this meal, for this spaceship and for bringing us together as a family. We ask you to keep us safe on this journey, and bless and guide our beautiful daughter on her journey to being complete, and all our days ahead. Amen.”

It was odd that Mama had insisted on saying Grace, which we'd only ever done when we had meals with my Abuela, who wasn't a Quantum Catholic or Church of Christ, Metaphorical but the real deal. And now years later I'm wondering if my mother hadn't somehow sensed that we were in danger and in need of divine protection. If she did I guess we were just too far out in space for God to hear.

We finished our huevos rancheros and as we all headed for the holosuit I realized there'd be nobody to keep an eye on the helm and asked, “So how are we gonna do this, in shifts?”

“We'll be okay in this stretch of space,” said Mom, “The ship will alert us if anything goes wrong, and even in 1963 I 'll still only be thirty paces from the controls.”

I realized I was still dressed in my nightie and said. “I better go put on some clothes.”

“Why?! she laughed, and with a nod in her wife's direction said, “If those NPC's in there won't notice she's an alien they're not gonna care if we're in our pajamas.”
.

001.006 A Fistful of Ignacio

Nunu told the holosuite what program to play and we stepped into a whole simulated world. The ground was flat and covered in that black stuff they used to make roads out of--covered with neat rows of automobiles slotted between painted white stripes--that stretched off as far as the eye could see under a beautiful blue summer sky. The ground vehicles of 1963 were all big bulbous whimsical looking things. A lot of them were painted two different colors, a few looked like they were partly made of wood, and they all had what looked like weird shiny metal mouths on the front of them, sparkling and gleaming under the bright summer sky.

I said, “Wow, these are GREAT! Can we drive one?”

“You might find one with the keys in it, but then you'd probably get arrested,” said a familiar voice from behind us.

I turned around and there was Uncle Ignacio, dressed in a bright blue shirt with pink hibiscuses on it, goofy looking plaid shorts, and sandals with socks. I threw my arms around him and hugged him tight. He hugged me back, saying, “I'm not really here, remember? But thank you anyway, Sobrinita.”

“Oh right,” I said, realizing I wasn't really hugging anyone, and let go.

“Sorry I couldn't get the time off to be here or I would've flown you all to Risa myself.”

“That's okay,” I told him, “So where are we?”

“This is a place where people went for fun in 1963 called an amusement park.. And this is just the parking lot,” he said, “the fun starts over there!”

I turned, and there at the end of a parking field was a building that was supposed to be a bunch of buildings, like a shining green metal city. Of course everything in here was fake, but the city-building was supposed to look fake or he would have done a better job with the trick perspective and the smaller buildings toward the top would have actually looked farther away instead of obviously just being built smaller. Between the outermost tall green towers at each end was a huge sign that arched over the whole fake city, with cutesy green neon lettering on it spelling out: MIA LAND.

“Wow,” I said.

“And that's just the entrance, wait'll you see the rides! But here comes your tram, so...”

“Tram?” I asked the space where he'd just disappeared from.

A thing like a gasoline-powered fiberglass Chinese dragon pulled up alongside of us. Its seats were full of holo-characters in period clothing. The driver, who was Uncle Iggy in a clean white Mia-Land uniform said to hop on, and it took us to the green metal castle-thing, where the the lady selling tickets---who was also my uncle minus his mustache and goatee---told us we were already paid for and to go on in.

Which was a good thing, because I'd only ever seen money in a museum.

“Remember to stick close together,” said Mama as we headed for the entrance, not because of any danger here but because if any of us got more than a few meters apart one of us would bump into one of the holosuite's walls, which were invisible to us but very hard.

We hopped on the shiny gold moving sidewalk like everyone else was doing, and it carried us into the simulated city, past a scene where a bunch of fake looking robot Ferengis and a much larger fake robot human girl in red shoes were dancing around singing about a dead witch.

“What's with the Ferengis?” I asked.

Mom laughed. “Those aren't Ferengis. 1963, remember? Those are Elves.”

The golden sidewalk took us past some pretty rainbow fountains and a bunch of other scenes with more singing and dancing robots that didn't make much sense either, to the far end of the building where where the moving sidewalk ended, where all the rides all were, hundreds of them extending forever to our left and right, but not as far in front of us because they were on a big wide pier sticking out a kilometer or so into whatever ocean that was supposed to be out beyond it.

One thing we didn't have to do was stand in line for the rides like everyone else was doing. They all treated me and my moms like royalty and insisted that we go on ahead of them. But it didn't take long for the way all these strangers were going “Yay! It's Mia!!!” and wishing me a happy birthday started to feel kinda creepy.

“We've got to stop meeting like this,” said the Uncle Iggy in lederhosen who helped us into the little bobsled-shaped car of the first ride we got on, a sort of roller coaster that zoomed around and through a big fake plaster mountain.

This was what people did before they had holorooms. they actually built their fantasy worlds. We rode a simulated parachuting experience that dropped us on a wire from a high tower, then rode the “Jetsons” ride that was supposed to show the twentieth century people what the future would be like, but from the way the other guests were laughing I think they knew it was pretty inaccurate. We traveled deep under the ocean on the “Irwin Allen's Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea” ride, then rode another submarine ride called “Fantastic Voyage” that was just bizarre, because our little three-woman glass sub had supposedly been miniaturized and was taking us on a tour through a human body! Each ride was bigger, wilder and more imaginative than the last; and my moms and I agreed that Uncle Iggy had really outdone himself with this program...

While out beyond the walls of this little holographic fantasy land the City of Industry was wandering farther and farther off course, and for reasons I will never know the ship's computer failed to notify us of this.

What finally made us leave the holographic amusement park was hunger. None of the food that was for sale everywhere in here was actually edible; so we decided to halt the program, go eat and have my birthday party then come back and see the rest of Mia-Land later.

A clown in a rainbow wig who was selling balloons with my picture on them overheard us and said, “Be sure to come back tonight for the fireworks and the Princess Parade!”

”There's a princess parade?” I asked.

“You're in it, Mee. On the Big Float!”

I remembered something I'd been wondering about since yesterday and asked him. “Hey what was the deal with that phaser that way laying on the helm controls?”

“A phaser?! On my ship? I have no idea! You'll have to ask the real me,” said Iggy the Clown.

Then we saved and exited the program, revealing the tiny empty room with grid-patterned gray and white walls we'd been in the whole time.

“I love my brother, but I think I'd go crazy if I kept having to see him everywhere like that!” said Mom.
.

001.007 THE LAST BIRTHDAY PARTY

We had Indonesian for lunch, then following the instructions on her PADD Nunu told the replicator to make us “Mia's Sweet Sixteen Cake.”

It somehow materialized with sixteen already-lit candles on top. My moms brought it over to the table singing the song, I did the wish thing and we dug in. It was a white chocolate mango ice cream cake from some bakery in Seattle, and it instantly became my favorite kind of cake! (I'm having some at that bakery later today when I beam down to Earth from here; if they'll serve someone who looks as much like a Borg as I do...)

I didn't get boxes and boxes of presents but the two envelopes I got were exactly what I needed. Uncle Iggy gave me a bunch of downloadable replicator patterns (probably one of his “fell off a truck” acquisitions, whatever that means...) for clothes I could have our machine at home make when we got back from our trip and I knew my new sizes for sure. And from my mothers I got gift cards for a clothing botique and a jewelry store on Risa.

Then I saw the cash amounts the cards were for, “That's a lot of zeroes. Are you sure we can afford that?”

Mom laughed. “Where else are we going to spend it but on a planet that uses money? Don't worry about it, Sweetie!”

“We'll then thank you so much,” I said, and hugged them both. And where did they even get money??? If I live to be 150 I'll never understand 24th Century economics...
.

001.008 Anomaly

My moms and I planned to go back to the holochamber for the rest of the amusement park program but we were feeling stuffed and sluggish after one too many slices of rich ice cream cake and all wound up back on the couch, listening to an old pre-War Earth musician Nunu liked named Miles Davis, who could make his trumpet sing like an angel.

As I sat gazing at the stars out beyond the view dome, stretched into blazing white lines by the warp effect I saw something strange. One of the lines was a whole lot fatter than all the others. It was pastel pink and blue instead of white, and not quite as bright. I squinted to make sense of what I was seeing. “What is THAT?!??”

“I think that's what a nebula looks like when you're moving at warp.” Nunu said; then asked her wife, who had logged a lot more days and weeks in space than she had, “Isn't that a nebula?”

Mom gawked at it. “It sure is, but I don't know how it got there! There shouldn't be any nebulae that close by on this course we're taking.'

“Maybe it's a new one. Not on the charts,” I said. It didn't happen that often but sometimes they had to update the maps because an aging star had blown up and become a nebula.

“Then it wouldn't be that big. It takes years for them to spread out that far,” said Mom, who I guess could tell how big it was even when it looked like this. She asked the ship, “Computer, what are the City of Industry's current coordinates?”

“Unknown,” replied the ship's female voice flatly.

“What the f-” Mom lept off the couch like we were in Moon gravity, rushed over to the pilot's seat and started hitting buttons. The stars outside shrank from lines to points of light and came to a stop.

Now I could see the dead star off our port bow in its true shape. I had never seen one with my own eyes before. A glowing pink and blue cloud in space bigger than a solar system, it was shaped like a butterfly and astonishingly beautiful, but I wasn't enjoying the sight. Something was seriously wrong here.

Mom scowled at the console's star map display, muttering, “Coordinates unknown?! We're only two days from Earth, we have to be somewhere the stupid thing would know!”

“Maybe the new nebula has it confused,” suggested Nunu,

“It's not a new nebula!” snapped Mom. She was clearly worried. She said, “Computer, run a diagnostic on-”

Suddenly the bridge was flooded with an eerie light as an enormous jagged hole opened up in space, with ugly whorls of black and purple energy churning inside of it. There was something unwholesome about it that reminded me of the special effects in that Sulok flicker we'd seen, the part where it was showing what a Medusan supposedly looked like. But I doubted if this angry wound full of surging and spasming energy and lightning hitting itself was going to become beautiful all of a sudden.

“Okay that's not normal,” said Nunu, “Some kind of wormhole?”

Mom said, “If it is it's not a natural one.”

“Then could it be one of those artificial ones the Zonn left behind?” asked Nunu. The Zonn Empire was a half-mythical civilization that had conquered half the galaxy and then disappeared long before Humans or Trills had even evolved. The legends described a race that was as wondrously technically advanced as they were ruthless and cruel, making whole worlds just vanish for minor infractions of their rules.

“Except no one but the Zonn ever figured out how to open those wormholes,” said Mom and began backing our ship away from the opening, “I don't know what that thing is. Unless it's a transwarp conduit.”

“Let's hope not!” gasped Nunu, “Let's hope the Zonn are back!”

“Why?” I asked. (What could be worse than the Zonn?!!)

“That's why!” said Mom as something came creeping out of the hole at impulse speed.

Something impossible huge, and square, and black. The gigantic vessel moved silently in the vacuum of space, but if this was a holoflicker deep ominous sinister music would be thundering.

It was the Borg.
.

.

End of Part O01. NEXT: Assimilated

.
THE AFTER-THE CLOSING-CREDITS THINGY:
(Deleted scene)

I fell asleep and dreamed that I was serving on a Federation vessel, a big exploration ship, but this was back in the past during that brief period about a century ago when the top ranks of Star Fleet had been infiltrated by a secret cabal of lecherous old men who made all the women in the fleet wear dresses so short that their panties were always at risk of showing. But I was female now and had the legs and the boobs to pull off such an outfit, and unprofessional as this outfit was I liked how I looked in it. And I was having fun flirting with a cute blonde yeoman named Rand; probably more confident and forward than I would be when I was awake.

Our ship was on a humanitarian mission, carrying thousands of tons of grain to some starving planet. Which seems weird because they've always had freighters for that, but dreams never make any sense.

And there were tribbles everywhere.

.

“OK, we get it! We're not in Kansas anymore...”

I forget who said it this time. Probably my sister Joy.

My father had cracked his “I don't think we're in Kansas anymore, Toto...” joke the instant we crossed the state line into Oklahoma; and then again in Amarillo, Albuquerque, Gallup, Flagstaff, the Grand Canyon, and several times in Vegas. And now as he steered our rented Winnebago down this twisty two lane highway out of the coastal mountains and I saw the Pacific Ocean for the first time he said it again.

It was driving my little sister nuts. But at least it had broken him of saying “Let's get out of Dodge!”, and he hadn't said anything about showing “steenking badges” since Arizona. I don't know if my father invented the dad joke but he sure refined it...

He had decided to use up his annual two weeks' vacation time his job with the USDA gave him all in one big lump, taking us on a grand tour of the American west. And he'd decided to do it in February, pulling me and my sister out of school. We would both have a lot of catching up to do when we got back to school. But the fact that it felt like we were playing hooky made everything we did seem that much more fun.

Plus all the national parks and tourist destinations we were visiting would be a lot less crowded than during Summer or on Spring break. And Mom had really wanted to see the desert while the wildflowers were in bloom, and these few weeks were about the only time of year for that.

California's rainy season was a bit of a gamble, but we managed to make the whole trip in a gap between two big Pacific storms. My dad couldn't actually take credit for this but of course he pretended to, declaring himself the mighty Mystic Mooja and demanding “tributes” from the RV's snack cabinet.

I was blown away by my first glimpse of an actual ocean. It was so blue, and it went on forever. Photographs and movies just hadn't done it justice. And the coastal town of Santa Teresa spread out below us was as picturesque as you please. Everyone was awestruck by the view except my dad, who cried out, “Oh Lord, they RUINED it!”

In the mid-1980's when we took this trip we didn't have the internet to research things on, so he'd brought us here to his old home town based on what he remembered it being like in the early 1960's, when he'd lived and surfed here. A carefree beach bum's life in a clapboard bungalow that he rented with two other young guys, right next to a big noisy pump jack that ran continuously sucking oil out of the bedrock; with those sets of perfect waves just a short run from their front door. Where that funky little shack had stood were blocks and blocks of tract homes, not that different than some of the suburbs we had in Kansas. Except this one had palm trees.

“Where did all these houses come from?” he groaned, “That mall? That golf course? My God it's all so built up!”

“I'm sure it'll be nice. It might not be just like you remember it but I'm sure we'll find things to do. The kids can go to the mall,” said my mom, the eternal optimist. She pointed, “And is that a roller coaster?”

It wasn't a huge roller coaster but it was big enough to try riding a time or two; sitting down by the beach amid some plaster pavilions that were trying to look foreign and exotic- Turkish or Arabian or something. The sight of it cheered him up. “That's the Little Dipper. At least Wonderland Boardwalk didn't get torn down so they could put up condos! The place was old and run down even back then, but me and Skip and Fritos had a lot of fun there.”

“You see?” said my mom, “And I know you miss the ocean, so this will be fun. I'm sick of driving all day, day after day. It'll be good to stay put here for a few days.”.

Four and a half days to be exact. From this morning through Friday at noon space #22 at Santa Teresa State Beach would be our home. This would be the longest we'd be stopping at any one place, because for my dad this had been the real point of our whole trip---a pilgrimage to the land of his youth---before we continued on up the California coast, catching all the usual must-see stuff, and then heading home by way of Lake Tahoe, Utah and the Colorado Rockies.

And as it turned out Santa Teresa would be the part of our trip that really stands out in my memory, a lot more than any of the more famous destinations. Because this is where I met Nova, and spent most of my time here with her.

I can't claim it was love at first sight. At first this girl had seemed interesting, intriguing, unlike anyone I'd ever met before. And kind of challenging- she had a way of keeping me on my toes. And then I realized how much fun I was having with her, even doing things that shouldn't have been fun. And by Wednesday I cared for her more deeply than I'd cared for anyone outside of my family. I'd had close friends back in Littleton but this felt different somehow. And I remember almost every part of those few days we spent together like it happened last week and not thirty eight years ago. Certain things in life just stick in your mind like that.

And in your heart...

.
MONDAY

By the time we got to Las Vegas we all had clothes that needed washing but somehow we never got around to it during our two days there. So the first thing we had to do after we checked in to our camp site was to pull right back out of it and find a laundromat. A park ranger told us where the closest one was.

On the drive there my mom said, “I'm not sure it'll be safe to just leave our clothes at the laundromat. I'm noticing a lot of homeless looking people wandering around town.”

“That's something else that's changed,” frowned my dad.

Mom said, “So I'll stay and do our wash. But you three should go find something fun to do.”

“No Mom,” I said, “We're all on vacation and you should be too. You go with them, I'll stay.”

“Yeah Mom, Kevin can do it.” said Joy. She had actually been the one who pointed out to me that while me and her and dad were all goofing off, Mom was still doing all her normal duties- shopping, cooking and tidying up our little house on wheels. I might not have noticed this otherwise.

I gestured with the trade size paperback I'd picked up in Flagstaff and said, “I'd just be reading this wherever I was, I might as well read it here. I'm pretty sure I know how to work a washing machine."

And when Dad concurred with us Mom knew she was outvoted and gave in.

We lugged in two laundry baskets, my duffel bag and a trash bag with dirty clothes in them, and Mom handed me a plastic tub full of quarters that she'd had since Vegas, and said I could keep however many were was left. They left, looking for a place where Dad could go rent a surfboard, and then did whatever before swinging back by here to pick me up. It was like having to take your house with you everywhere you went.
.

None of us had brought clothes on this trip that needed any special care, so I just threw everyone's stuff into its own machine, and settled into one of the plastic chairs until it was time to use the dryers.

The clock on the wall was busted but the NASA watch I'd gotten for Christmas said nine fifteen. I was surprised at how early it was until I remembered how ridiculously early we'd gotten on the road this morning. We were one time zone over from home so we woke up at four, our bodies insisting it was five a.m. already.

I cracked open my book, a novel everyone was raving about that was supposed to be some groundbreaking work of a whole new genre of science fiction. I was partial to the classics---Asimov, Bradbury, Clark---and wasn't sure I'd like something as gimmicky-sounding as “cyberpunk” but I was willing to be won over...

I was the only one in the place so I assumed there would be no distractions while I read. But I was only three pages into it when I heard a girl's voice say, “I'm pretty sure it's you.”

I startled. “Huh?!”

The first thing I noticed when I looked up was an enormous pair of eyes. I don't mean they were freakishly large but they instantly made a huge impression on me. Beautiful eyes that would have looked even prettier if she hadn't gone nuts with the eye shadow and mascara.

It seemed like she was trying to do something Egyptian with her eye makeup. Her eyelids were saturated with rich colors that modulated from forest green into aquamarine and then to peacock blue; and each eye had a thick black horizontal line jutting from its outside corner, and a curly black thing jutting down from underneath it; so her eyes resembled that eye symbol that the famous hero of the comic book series Indiana Jones and he Order of Anubis kept seeing, which lead him deeper and deeper into the mystery of the missing scientists.

I briefly wondered what sort of mystery these eyes might lead me into. Hopefully it wouldn't involve a staircase that turned into a slide, a room full of snakes or an ancient secret society with an insane plot to bring about the end of the world...

The girl cocked her head sideways to study my face from a slight angle, then announced. “Yeah it is you! I can tell!”

She didn't seem angry so I knew I wasn't about to be accused of something, but her gaze was so intense it felt unnerving. I stammered, “What do you mean 'it's me'? What's me?”

“The sticks told me I would meet someone today who'd play an important role in my life, and here you are!” she said, breaking into a big radiant smile that lifted the shiny gold foil stars she'd affixed to each of her cheeks. They were like the stars my first grade teacher used to stick on assignments she liked but at least twice as large. And she had a beautiful smile, but what the heck was she talking about?

“Sticks?!”

“Yeah, They're better than the coins, but what the sticks say can still be pretty darn hard to interpret.”

“I'll bet it can,” I said, while wondering what I could say that would make her go away.

Insane people were always coming up to me at the store or on the bus and babbling whatever nonsense was in their heads; telling me how they were getting messages from the future in their alphabet soup or whatever. And trying to make sense of their gibberish always gave me a headache. Although they weren't usually this young, or this pretty...

“You seem skeptical,” she said with an amused grin, “But the sticks and the hexagrams have guided millions of people for thousands of years. Emperors, Generals, and nowadays millionaire businessmen all over Asia consult the I Ching, although they probably do it on computers somehow.”

“I Ching?! Do you mean that Chinese fortune telling deal?”

“'Fortune telling deal' is a pretty crude way of describing it. It's also a meditation deal, a philosophy deal, a psychology deal,” she said,” But yeah, I meant the I Ching . What did you think I meant?”

“I had no idea! All you said was you had some sticks that were talking to you and telling you I was the Chosen One or something!”

She burst out laughing. “I guess I did, didn't I? Oh Lordy! No wonder you looked like you were about to run away! I'm crazy, but I'm not that crazy. Sometimes my mouth just gets way out ahead of my brain!”

“It happens,” I said, relieved to know she wasn't hearing voices from sticks. From what little I knew about schizophrenia it seemed like it'd be a miserable disease to have.

“And I didn't say you were the Chosen One. But our lives and our fates are cosmically entwined.”

“Okay. Now you're starting to scare me again,” I told her. I was sort of surprised that I'd come right out and said that. This kid was having an odd effect on me, making me feel sort of pleasantly disoriented.

“Well it is scary to think that things are as predetermined as they are.”

“And that's why I don't think that,” I said, “Because they're not.”

She looked to be about my age. 'What kind of junior high school kid rattles of a word like predetermined?' I wondered, 'I mean besides me?' Which was when I could tell this girl was probably somebody worth talking to.

And not a total looney-tunes---despite the way she was dressed and made up---but just another person who thought they had some gimmick for telling the future. Which might technically still be a delusion, but if over half the Earth's population believed in stuff like this- gods or unseen forces guiding their lives, I couldn't take this by itself as some proof that I was vastly smarter or saner than that many people because I didn't share their faith in such things. To me that's just trading one delusion for another that's just as bad. It might not start holy wars or jihads, but once you start believing you're that superior to everyone else there's no limit to how big of an asshole you can become...

I asked her, “So if your sticks said you were meant to meet this important person, how can you be sure it's me and not the next random stranger you come across? I'd hate to waste your time and disappoint you when it turns out I'm nobody and your destiny guy's doing his wash at the laundromat across town.”

“You're not nobody. There's some things I just know, and I know that. We're destined to become very close and have some epic adventures together!” she said.

“I'm going to take some convincing on that,” I said.

“You'll see,” she smiled and stuck out her hand like a guy does (except guys don't have long oval nails each painted a different color) and said, “So hi there! I'm Nova... Nova Nightbloom.”

“Kevin,” I said as I shook her hand, “Kevin Brown.”

Nova had on red corduroy pants, white sneakers that had been given zebra-striped all over with a black marker, a sort of hippie-ish loose blouse in a patterned fabric that looked like it might have come from India or Indonesia or somewhere. It was a strange combination of clothes with too many different colors and patterns but somehow it worked for her. It was a consistent sort of chaos...

Her hair was rather short, but it was a very girlish short haircut (which my mom told me later was called a pixie cut) that went with her delicate features and made her seem even cuter. I even liked the fact that it was bright turquoise. Being the science fiction nut that I was I imagined her as some exotic being from another planet that I would have to explain the ways of our world to and then would probably have to help her evade those government agent who are always out to capture and dissect good-hearted visitors to our world. Despite the danger it was something I would be glad to do for this strange and beautiful creature.

Over the next couple of seconds a whole little movie about my adventures with this alien girl spun through my head---beginning, middle and end---which was not a normal thing that happened with me when I first met someone; but I knew this wasn't a usual sort of first meeting. It felt-

I wasn't sure how it felt, other than that there was something about this Nova Nightbloom I really liked.

Which considering my beliefs and my personality seemed totally counterintuitive. I should be taking a very strong dislike to anyone who came up and started talking with such certainty about divining future events and having some sixth sense about my destiny and hers being connected; but I found it oddly charming. And I couldn't even say what it was about her I liked besides her smile and her all-around adorableness...

It wasn't that I was in love with her; or not yet; And lust wasn't really a part of this feeling I had; or if it was it was vague and unfocused. But I was definitely infatuated. And somehow just her presence here in front of me was making me feel good in a strange new way.

Being this mesmerized by a girl was kind of a new experience for me, and it was still only happening to me sporadically. At 14 I wasn't yet watching TV shows that I otherwise felt were barely watchable because they had an actress in them that I couldn't get enough of.

You could say I was kind of a late bloomer when it came to women. I talked just enough of the talk that was expected of me around my male peers---a bunch of pimple-faced virgins all bragging about how much PUSSY they were getting---but I wasn't interested in finding a girlfriend, or desperate to lose my virginity as soon as I could. Not that I was seriously intent on keeping it either, I just didn't think about it a whole lot. But I was starting to appreciate a pretty girl when I saw one.

Nova looked at my four machines chugging away, “You have a lot of laundry going.”

“It's not all mine. I'm doing the wash for my whole family.”

She grinned, “Say that again!”

“Say what?”

“'Doing the warsh...”

I said it again. She seemed amused by my pronunciation and asked me where I was from. I told her. She asked how I liked living in Kansas. I said I hadn't lived anywhere I could compare it to but I guessed it was OK. She peered down at the book in my lap. “William Gibson. Neuromancer. Is it any good?”

“I don't know, I just started it. But it's supposed to be. It won him a Hugo.”

She frowned.“That sounds like a lousy thing to win.”

“Really? I've never heard of an author turning down a Hugo.”

“They must be hard up for transportation then. Those things are supposed to be like the worst cars ever made!”

“No not Yugo, Hugo,” I said, and was starting to explain what a Hugo Award was when I noticed the little 'gotcha!' smile on her lips.

I groaned, “That was as bad as one of my dad's jokes!”

“Really?” she asked, “Your dad's a fan of the bon mot?”

“If that means joke then yeah. But they're really, really bad.”

“Bad jokes are the best. Tell me one of his! A real stinker!”

“All right. But don't say I didn't warn you,” I said, and told her his joke about Moses and the burning bush.

She laughed like I did the first time I heard it. “Oh Lordy, that was awful! Your old man's a genius!. I'd love to meet him!”

“If you're still around in-” I checked my watch “-an hour and a half you'll get your chance to.”

“Oh no, I'll be gone by then. I'm just passing through,” sbe said, “But we'll meet again. And I'll have to check out that book you're reading. I just finished reading The Pinkwitch Chronicles for the second time and I'm looking for a good story to get lost in.”

I had started reading those Pinkwitch books when I was ten and never made it through the first one. It was just too unbelievable, with no attempt to explain how The Realm's magic worked, and when I got to the part about the mermaids I gave up. Trying to keep my disdain for the genre out of my voice, I asked, “So you're into fantasy fiction, are you?”

“I am,” she admitted, “But recently I've gotten into fantasy non-fiction.”

“What the hell is that?”

“It's when you get so far into it you go right through and came out the other side! And now I'm living my fantasy!”

I had no idea what she was talking about. I said, “Well then good for you.”

“Yes, good for me,” she smiled, “It's been a perfect adventure so far” she said as she shrugged the canvas rucksack she was wearing off of her back and set it on the chair beside me. “But every great adventure needs funding, so...”

It was a big pack with patches sewn onto it all over. Some bore wacky slogans, one said Yosemite, another was one of these things (/ http://www.horizonview.net/~beeryb/illusions/impossible/bliv... ). But most of them were butterflies with brilliant colored wings. She had them swarming all over it. She unstrapped its top flap and and started pulling things out of it...

A bamboo flute, a Swiss Army knife, a rattling plastic box of cosmetics, a badly bruised banana,a Raggedy Ann doll with the head of a rabbit on it, a baby blue stuffed bunny with Raggedy Ann's head on it, a bundle of colored markers held together with a rubber band, a paperback book called The Berkely Press Portable Anarchist, a Wendy the Good Little Witch comic book, a plain-covered hardbound book entitled Spaying and Neutering- a Veterinarian's Guidebook, a king-size Abba-Zaba bar, a tennis ball, an Academy artist's sketch pad, more colored pens, and finally a scrap of denim and a pair of heavy long-handled channel locks.

The pack looked like it still more stuff in it but she methodically put everything but the tool and the rag back into it. Then she said, “Time to get to work!”

There were two back to back rows of top loading machines down the center of the room, four of which I was using. She went to the first machine on the lefthand row, opened the top, and began taking it apart. She seemed awfully young to be a washing machine repair-person so I went over to watch.

“I suppose you're wondering what I'm doing,” she grinned, “Well check this out!”

She wasn't exactly taking the washer apart. It had the usual big plastic agitator thing that rotates back and forth to jostle your clothes around in the sudsy water. On top of he agitator was a stainless steel knob. She tried loosening the knob by hand but it wouldn't budge. So she loosened it with the channel locks until she could unscrew it the rest of the way with just her fingers. She grabbed the agitator and worked it back and forth like a bad tooth until it popped free. Lifted it off its axle and set it on the next machine over, announcing: “Behold- The mother load!”

There on the bottom of the washer's basin was about $3 in quarters, dimes, nickles and pennies. She said, “If today is anything like last Monday some of these machines will have more, some less. But it's all nice clean spendable US currency. Well except for the pesos and Chuck E. Cheese game tokens. I really need to get serious about expanding my wardrobe. And it would be great if you wanted to help, but I really need to go clothes shopping so I'm afraid I can't cut you in for more than taking you to McDonald's or for a big bean burrito at Super-Mex.”

I said, “I wasn't doing much anyway, I'll help. And you don't have to buy me lunch.”

“Thank You!” she exclaimed gratefully, “You're a true Hero of the Revolution!”

We went down the row side by side. I had a bit more heft to me than Nova did so I went ahead of her and took off the knobs that I could with just the rag and loosened the agitators. She came along behind, using the channel locks on the more stubborn ones and scooping up the coins. I stuffed the rest of my laundry quarters in my pant pockets and gave her my mom's slot machine bucket to put the money in.

“This is so cool! Can I keep this?!” she asked about the gaudy plastic bucket. It had STARDUST CASINO on it crazy space-age lettering and colorful stars and planets all over it- exactly the kind of thing someone as flamboyant as her would love. Since my Mom didn't seem to want it I said sure.

I asked her, “So this is how you get your spending money? Don't your parents give you an allowance?”

“I'm sure they would, but they were lost at sea when I was eight,” she sighed, “Drowned, crushed or ran out of air- nobody will ever know which.”

“I'm sorry. I know how much it hurts,” I said, because I did; and losing your parents would have to be far worse.

“It was pretty awful,” she said, “And maybe even moreso because there were no bodies, no coffins; It was just: 'When the clock runs out we'll know they're gone...'”

I made a sympathetic noise.

I wanted to know what she meant by all this, but I didn't want to be one of those people who need all the gory details about a tragedy like this. I got too much of that after my best friend Tyler Pittman drowned in wheat while horsing around in a grain silo, disappearing right in front of me in mid-laugh. It was my most painful memory ever, and the people prodding me with questions about it seemed to be doing it for entertainment purposes. (I swore I was going to just haul off and slug the next person who got too ghoulishly nosy about it, with no warning; but I never did...).

“And then there was the question of what to do with me, because I didn't have any other family. And I was freaking out, wondering what kind of orphanage or ugly foster family I might wind up in. When out of the blue this aunt I never knew I had---my Aunt Mimi---comes swooping in and does the legal stuff and gives me a home, right here in beautiful Santa Teresa. Aunt Mimi's amazing, a real free spirit! I never would've believed someone so old could be so cool, I mean she's almost sixty. Like an old hippie or something but a rich one. Way richer than my parents were! Not that material stuff matters that much to her, she's all about culture and the life of the mind. And all her friends are artists and intellectuals, philosophers and architects and beatniks, Wobblies and feminists and Trotskyites, dadaists and poets and free thinkers and theosophists; and they stay up smoking and drinking absinthe and talking about really interesting things all night!” she said, and finally took a breath.

“Wow,” I said, taking in what a life like that might be like.

“And a lot of nights I'm right there with them. Not the smoking and drinking part, but they all want to know my 'perspective' on stuff and treat me almost like an adult. Some nights we're so into it someone goes: 'Hey, the sun's coming up!' and we all go out for crepes or huevos rancheros and lots of good black coffee, because I don't even have a bedtime...”

“You don't?”

“No. Aunt Mimi says bedtimes are small minded and bourgeois. So I don't have my dear parents anymore, and I miss them, but I have an amazing home and an amazing life. But there's one thing that's starting worry me. My brilliant bohemian aunt might be getting a bit scatterbrained in her old age. Two weeks ago she went to Europe, to hit all her favorite spots along the Riviera, and she forgot to leave me any money.”

I gasped. Suddenly this aunt of hers went from sounding oddly cool to being a criminally shitty provider for a girl Nova's age. “You're joking! Two weeks?!”

“She's supposed to wire me a thousand in a few days when some mysterious deal she's working on goes through. Maybe more than a thousand. I'll be rolling in long green then!”

Nowadays if someone told me a story like this I would think they were running a game on me, and I'd be waiting for the part where they promised to pay me back tenfold for the hundred I “loan” them after their absolutely 100% guaranteed big score happens. The classic short con. But at the time it never even occurred to me that this could all be some bullshit story. For such a supposedly smart kid I could be extremely credulous sometimes. Mostly I was just shocked at her aunt's irresponsibility, and wondering if I should call the authorities on this woman.

I shook my head, “I can't believe she stranded you like this. How old are you?”

“Fourteen.”

“I'm fourteen too.”

Well lucky us,” she said, “Aunt Mimi let me stay home last year too, when she did her Asian tour, but she left me a cookie jar full of twenties. This time, until that money order gets here she's counting on me to be able to use the survival tricks she taught me to get by on.”

“Like stealing money out of washing machines?”

“It's not stealing. The people these coins belonged to don't even realize they lost them, and it isn't money owed to the laundromat for the use of their machines. Busting open the coin boxes would be stealing. This is more like salvage. You know, maritime law. It belongs to whoever gets it,” she said, and rattled her Stardust bucket full of coins at me, “This'll hold me over for a few days, and I have a few other ways to get money too. Aunt Mimi expects me to use them all and to report to her about them and what I learned when she gets back. She said to just think of this as my 'urban walkabout'.”

We'd reached the front of the laundromat and were starting down the other row of washers. My four machines were on their final spin. Out on 3rd Street a yellow school bus rolled past us. I smiled as I remembered that if I wasn't on vacation I'd be in my third period algebra class right about now.

I asked Nova, “So why aren't you in school, anyway?”

“I don't go to school,” she replied, “Or I mean I do, but not at a junior high or anything. Aunt Mimi's home schooling me.”

“What do you mean 'home schooling'?”

“Just what it sounds like,” she said, “When a parent or guardian doesn't send their kid to school but takes on the job of educating them herself, and they have school at home."

I'd never heard of such a thing. “People can do that? That's legal?”

“Totally legal. Lots of parents do it. Usually it's super-religious people who don't want their kids to learn about penises and vaginas and evolution. But Aunt Mimi's doing it for the opposite reason. She doesn't want me to learn less than other kids, she wants me to learn more. When she isn't off jet-setting around the globe she gives me an assignment or two every morning, and then she grades it when she gets home. Only it's more like we discuss it because she doesn't do the A-B-C-D-F thing. She calls it fascistic.”

“Whatever she's doing it seems to be working,” I said, “You sound pretty smart.”

“So do you, for a product of the American education system.”

“What's wrong with the American education system?”

“My aunt says everything. She calls our schools 'breeding ground for mediocrity'. But then she doesn't like most public institutions. Aunt Mimi's an Anarchist.”

“An anarchist?” I gulped. Now I really wondered if I should report this woman to the authorities.

“Yeah, but not the kind that goes around blowing things up. The good kind.”

“There's a good kind?”

“Sure there is. Anarchy isn't some bratty punk rock 'Fuck You!' to the whole world. You're free to do that of course---because it's all about freedom---but you'd better be equipped to survive on your own when the world Fuck-You's you right back and no one wants to barter with you. Aunt Mimi says the only way we can expect to have no government is for people to govern themselves. It's about respecting other people's thing, whatever that might be, and taking responsibility for your own life.”

“Responsibility like leaving your kid alone without money for two weeks?”

“Even Anarchists can screw up,” she said defensively, “Tia Mimi;s responsible enough to admit how bad she screwed up, And she's not only sending me that money, she said she's gonna make it up to me for screwing up by buying me my own computer when she gets back home. Probably whatever kind's the most expensive.”

This made me a bit jealous. My parents said they would get me a computer when I graduate from high school, so I could take it to college with me- which was like a million years away.. It was a sensible plan, but I really wanted to play Donkey Kong.

My washers all clunked to a stop- 1, 2, 3, 4. I stuffed the loads into four seperate dryers and started them; and suddenly the place was full of people. A Mexican woman with three kids came in through one door just as a twentyish homeless couple came in through the other. Twenty seconds later another guy came in,

Nova said, “Let's call it a day. I don't like working with an audience.”

“Do you have enough?” I asked.

“I have enough to do this,” she said, and went over to the homeless couple.

They were debating whether they could wash both their sleeping bags in a single giant front loader. Nova gave them enough of her salvage quarters to use two machines. She came back and said simply, “Karma points.”

“So are you taking off?” I asked, “You said you were just passing through.”

“I was, but destiny had other ideas. Let's sit and talk.:

Her 'Destiny' might have been all in her head but I was happy it told her to stay.

I'd just put all the dry clothes into their respective containers when our Winnebago pulled into the lot. My dad hopped out, came in through the front door. “Sorry to stick you with doing this. How's that book?”

“I didn't really even start it. I was talking to my friend Nova here.” I turned, and she was gone.

“I have a friend like that. His name's Harvey and he's a pooka.”

“She was just here. Hang on a sec-” I said. I went to check the bathroom, it was open and empty. Went out the back door, and found her outside in the alley. “Are you hiding?”

“No I- uh, saw a cat. She looked scared and lost. She's gone now.”

“Oh,” I said, not really believing her, A lost cat wouldn't explain why she'd been pressed flat against the wall like that. And then my dad came out and found us.

“Oh there you are. And you must be Nova. Hi, I'm Kevin's dad,” he grinned, “Holy Cow! That's some hair you got!”

“Welcome to California,” said Nova sheepishly, “Land of the Weirdos.”

“Oh, I'm from here,” said my dad, “So what does that make me? Grew up right here in S.T. as a matter of fact. Being ahead of the curve about fashions was a Cali tradition even back then. There'll always be something that seems freaky and shocking to everyone else, until it doesn't,,.”

We all went back inside. I asked him, “So did you find your surfboard?”

“Sure did. I've got it rented through Friday. The guy at the rental shop said there's a big swell today, so you know where I'll be 'til suppertime. Although these new boards, it's gonna be like going from a Winnebago to a sports car. I hope I don't embarrass myself.”

“You won't. It's like riding a bike,” Nova assured him.

“That's what they say. But back in my day bikes had that big giant wheel in the front,” he said. He asked me, “So you coming back, or did you kids have plans?”

I looked at Nova.... Did we?

“I promised to show Kevin the sights,” she told him. She gestured at the pay phone on the wall, “ I talked to my aunt, and she's invited us to afternoon tea.”

“Okay, then have fun. Just be back at the State Beach by six, Mama's making her seven layer Mexican Casserole,” he said, and told Nova, “And you're invited too, of course.”

“I might,” she said, “I'll have to discuss it with Aunt Mimi.”

“Alright, we'll see you then, Sport,” he said to me. “And Nova?”

“Yeah?”

“Keep your Freak Flag flying!”

To me this sounded like an insult but she broke into a huge grin. “You too!”

“I'll have to find it first. I think it's out in the garage someplace.”

Whatever all that meant.

As Dad and I lugged the clean laundry out to the RV I stuck my book in with my own clothes. I didn't want to be carrying it around all day. After our Winnebago rumbled off down the block Nova said, “Wow. He wasn't at all what I was expecting!”

“Is that why you were hiding?” I asked, “What you expected?”

“I guess,” she shrugged, “What can I say? I'm just a weird girl who has Daddy issues...”

“I can see why you would,” I said, thinking she meant her grief over her father and mother dying.

“And also it's just force of habit. The whole laying low thing. But luckily that's just until my Aunt Mimi gets back.”

“For high tea.”

“I know,” she said, admitting she'd lied, “But I felt like I should let him know I'm not running around unsupervised like some street urchin out of Dickens.”

“Which you are...”

Her sweet smile suddenly looked rather feral. “You'd better believe it!”

“You told him you were going to show me the sights. I hope that wasn't a lie.”

“No! I really want to!”

“So what sights did you have I mind?”

“Everywhere you look there's sights. Let's just walk and see where we end up.”

We went out onto the sidewalk. I peered up the block and then down it. “Which way?”

“Eenie, meenie, miney-” Nova wagged her finger back and forth then announced in a comical put-on accent, “This vay, Dollink!”

“DOLLINK?!” I laughed, “Who are you, Natasha?!”!

It had been 20 years since they'd made the last Rocky & Bullwinkle cartoon but almost everyone under fifty knew the show's main characters, like the two inept Soviet spies Boris and Natasha. She said, “I'm not tall enough to be Natasha. I just called you Dollink because... I don't know why. You just look like a dollink, Dollink.”

“Thank you, I guess.”

“And besides, I couldn't live like Natasha and Boris do...,”

“Being a Communist?”

“I meant always having to wear black, I would defect in a heartbeat!”

We headed south down this most ordinary American Third Street, lined with houses and small apartment buildings that looked like they'd been here since my father had lived here.

Nova asked casually, “So am I your first girlfriend?”

I almost managed to do a spit take without anyhing in my mouth. “WHAT?!”

“I'll take that as a Yes.”

“NO!”

“So then I'm not your first girlfriend?”

“I- gurk! You're NOT my girlfriend! How can you be?! I just met you!”

“I don't know 'how'. How is anything possible? Some things just are...”

“And some things aren't,” I said, “And to call you a friend wouldn't be unreasonable, as much as two people who just met can be friends. But not 'girlfriend' in any definition of the word that makes sense to me; Desides just how my mom and my sister use the word to mean a female friend.”

I was relieved to see that my honesty hadn't hurt her feelings a bit. I don't know what I would've done if Nova had burst into tears. In a cheerful and reasonable tone she said, “Okay.”

“'Okay' you're not my girlfriend?”

:Okay I am, you just don't know it yet. But you will,” she smiled, “Before you leave Santa Teresa you'll look at me with all the love in the world and say: 'You're my girl!'”

Oh for God's sake! I said, “And you just know that.”

“Yep.”

“I won't say it's not possible. Not like if you told me that before Friday we'd both grow wings an fly. I mean I like you, even if you're half crazy. But please don't pin all your hopes on that!”

“Okay,” she said in the same tone as before, smiling like she knew something I didn't

People sure were noticing Nova's colorful outfit, her face paint and and turquoise hair.. Nowadays even in the midwest you see teenagers running around with all different crazy colored hair and you don't even give it a second thought. Or at least I don't. And it wasn't completely unheard of in 1984 but it definitely got people's attention. She sure couldn't be confused for anybody else. And although my own haircut and clothing were stodgily square and normal. just being seen walking with this magical creature made me feel adventurous and brave.

Motorists honked.

Old people stopped dead in their tracks and gawked at us.

A three year old girl toddling along hand in hand with her mother gasped adorably and asked Nova, “Are you a FAIRY?!”

Her mom shot my friend the dirtiest look---as if Nova was intentionally putting subversive ideas or something her daughter's head---before dragging the girl roughly off down the sidewalk by her arm.

A police car cruised past us in the slow lane, a bit too slowly for Nova's liking. She said, “If anybody asks why we're not in school, tell them we're from out of state and on vacation, staying down at the campground.:.”

“I already am all those things.”

“I know. But if they ask, include me in that story. I'd really appreciate it.”

“I can do that,” I said,

“So where are we from, exactly?”

“Littleton Kansas. Near Topeka,:''

“Golly, Toto! I don't think we're in Kansas anym-”

“Please don't do that!”

The same cop car came back the other way, checking us out.. Nova flashed them a peace sign and a big sweet winning smile and they drove on.

I asked her, “But doesn't it kind of suck to always be having to think about stuff like that, and always be looking over your shoulder?”

“Like I said, it's just until my aunt gets back from Europe. And even with the no-money thing it's totally worth any little hassles; to finally be able to live my lifelong dream, my greatest adventure! I have never felt more ALIVE!” she exclaimed. Then she screamed- a loud triumphant whoop!

If people weren't looking at us before, they were now. I laughed, “You sure know how to keep a low profile!”

“Sometimes it's best to hide in plain sight. Acting like you don't have anything to hide is lss suspicious than skulking around acting all nervous and fidgety.”

“Screaming your head off like that might be slightly overdoing it.””

“But it felt so good!” she said, “Haven't you ever felt the need to just throw back your head and holler, just from the pure joy of being alive”

“I don't think so,” I said.

“Well that's just sad...”

And then I remembered that night.

I said, “Well there was one time. But I was drunk.”

She laughed in disbelief. “You?! Drunk?!!! You no-good juvenile delinquent! Tell me about it!”

“It was last summer. The only only time I'd ever had more than a sip of table wine. My two best friends were Jimmy Barnes and Tyler Pittman. Tyler was kind of crazy, always doing stupid stuff on a dare. And Jimmy actually was—is--pretty much a juvenile delinquent. But his whole family's like that, his dad always going to jail and all that. It was him who stole two 12-packs of Bud from his dad one night and said we should climb up to the top of the Littleton Co-op's grain elevator and drink it all up. Wed had about three apiece when the moon came up over that totally flat horizon. It was full, it was huge! I don't remember who started howling at it first, but it until every dog and coyote for fifty miles around was howling with us!”

“That sounds amazing!”

I sighed. “It seemed that way. But then it turned into the worst night of my life...”

“What happened? Did you get sick from all that beer?”

“Oh God, was I sick!” I lied. I didn't want to talk about how tragically that night ended on a beautiful day like today. Or even think about it.

“You see?” she grinned, “That howling... that was you letting your primal self out. People are so emotionally repressed and shut off---beat down by by school, the church, their parents, and the psychiatrists their parents send them to---they can only get in touch with that part of themselves by getting drunk. That's why alcohol is a gazillion dollars a year industry in this country,.”

“You think I'm emotionally repressed?”

“You do seem pretty square,” she said.

“I am pretty square.”

“But I also sense you have hidden depths. But society's conditioning might be so ingrained in you that you're just not capable of being that free or spontaneous-”

I cut her off with a mighty Tarzan yell.

“Well it's a bit of a cliché, and I'm not sure it came from your innermost self, but it's a start...”

The residential neighborhood gave way to a trendy commercial district with botiques and restaurants, and one of these new juice and smoothie bars I'd heard about. I thought about getting us each one until I saw the prices. You could get a whole gallon of Sunny Delite for that much.

The biggest building on the block was a new looking movie theater, a tri-plex; three auditoriums sharing a snack bar and bathrooms. There were other titles on the marquee, but in plastic letters twice the size of the others were in was the word: DUNE.

They made a movie out of Dune? Why hadn't I heard about this? I rushed over to the poster in it's glass case. It was that Dune all right. There was Akarris, and a sandworm looming over a bunch of Bedouin-looking guys the size of ants.

I asked Nova, “How would you like to see this? It'll be my treat.”

She looked at the poster for a long time before saying, “I don't know. I don't think I could sit through another Star Wars.”.

“It has nothing to do with Star Wars,” I said, “It's Dune. It's from a novel that's a classic.”

“It looks like Star Wars to me. And I know this makes me an oddball but I'm the only person I know who didn't like it and didn't see the second one,” she said, then added, “Well besides my Aunt.”

To some of my friends those would be fightin' words, but I could actually see why someone might not like Star Wars. The three films were exciting and kept you on the edge of your seat, with lots of amazing visual stuff to go WOW! over; but when it was over it was just Buck Rogers with a budget. Good guys fighting bad guys, with the only question being who would win in the end. It didn't do what science fiction at its best does: present novel ideas and ask questions no one ever thought to ask before.

Unless her objection was just that she just didn't like robots and spaceships on principal; which might be a chick thing because my mom is kind of like that. Or how I roll my eyes at wizards and dragons...

My Nasa watch said five 'til noon. The first show was at a quarter after, and there was a good sized line at the ticket booth.

“Oh what the heck,” said Nova, “I'll try anything once.”

As we got to the front of the line the old man selling tickets turned up the volume on his speaker thing and announced to us and everyone behind us, “IF YOU WANT THE SNACK BAR IT'LL BE A WHILE. I'M THE ONLY ONE HERE TODAY.”

“How come?” Nova asked him.

“There's a big surf today. My whole crew's out on the waves,” he said, and tapped the NOW HIRING sign in the window.

“Is there a storm coming?” asked the guy behind us.

He shook his head. “It's headed for Mexico, but it's kicking up the waves all down the coast.”

“You should have hired girls,” suggested Nova.

“They're all out there too.”

Tickets were $4.00, a bit higher than matinee prices at home, We could have smuggled in turkey dinner for four in that pack of hers but I bought us each a pop, and a large popcorn to share.

“Thank you for the bevvy-rage,” she sang when I handed her her Sprite, “You're so good to me!”

As we settled into our seats Nova sighed, “How romantic... Our first date!”

“How is this a date? I just didn't want to say 'I'm gonna go see this now, bye!' and leave you standing there.”

“I'm a girl, you're a boy. You asked me out to the moving picture show and I said yes. It's a date.”

I couldn't fault her logic. I said, “Fine, we're on a date. Joy will be thrilled.”

“Joy?”

“My little sister. She's twelve. She's always telling me I need some romance in my life.”

“Do you? Need romance?”

“I don't know,” I shrugged, “I know it's something I should want at some time in the next couple of years; but is 'because I'm supposed to' a enough of a reason to start dating? I figure it will happen when wanting to date feels genuine. But I worry about what happens if I never do feel like that? Like what if there's something wrong with me?”

I'd never shared this doubt with anyone. Why was I saying it now?

She patted my hand. “Don't worry... Before this week is over we'll be head over heels in love with each other, and you'll be mad for my kisses! I know these things. But since you're leaving on Friday we'll have to say goodbye and we'll be heartbroken. We'll promise to write and we will for a while, but eventually we'll both move on. I'll get knocked up by some guy I don't even like and have to marry him to avoid a scandal. I'll be trapped in a loveless marriage and start drinking. You'll marry your high school homecoming queen and think you're the luckiest guy in the world for a while; but she'll gradually change into a mean hateful hag. We'll both look back on each other as our first love, and often wonder whatever became of old what's-her-name. In a strange twist of irony we'll both commit suicide at the same exact moment, and our souls will touch briefly as they drift through the aether before-”

There was a loud harsh BzzZzZTTTT!!!; like someone plugged a jack into an amplifier turned up way too loud. The lights dimmed and the coming attractions started.

I was pleased to learn that Nova wasn't a movie talker. Back at home I won't go to the movies with my friend Jimmy Barnes anymore, because he seems to think the point of a movie is to crack jokes and make sound effects noises, not even really paying attention to what's going on up on the screen. Like he's the entertainment, but he's not as funny as he thinks. And then there's the throwing things. So a trip to the movies with him is a waste of both time and money. Nova made a few comments, but once DUNE started she got into it.

Really got into it. Twenty minutes in she made herself comfortable by snuggling up against me, I wondered if I was supposed to put my arm around her but she seemed content to use my biceps for a pillow. She communicated her reactions to the film to me wordlessly through the changes in her body tension, and by squeezing my arm during the intense parts Her eyes only left the screen when she dug through her pack to find her big Abba-Zaba bar and an extremely squashed Rocky Road and split those with me.

She ate quite a bit of the popcorn. For a small girl she could sure put it away, I thought, but then I realized this was more or less her lunch for today, and maybe her breakfast.

Two hours later as the ending credits started to roll she shook herself out of her trance and sat upright, exclaiming, “Holy Shit! That was AMAZING!!”

“Really? You liked it that much?”

“I loved it!” she said, “Didn't you?”

“Well it wasn't very true to the book. I mean the bare bones of the story was there, but a lot of it didn't even really make sense.”

“Well I didn't care about that, I was just blown away by the look of it! That was one of the most strange and beautiful things I ever saw!”

It was definitely strange, but I didn't see how she could think it was beautiful. I found a lot of it just plain disturbing. I said, “Well I'm glad you liked it...”

“I think that was the first movie that really made me feel like I was in another world. Or not the first, but I can count the films I've seen like that on one hand. And I'm sorry you didn't like it, I know it really got you your hopes up when you saw it was playing.”

“It was okay, I guess. I just wish they'd used a different director. This guy was trying to be way too artsy.”

“Oh Honeybunch,” she said like she was terribly sad for me.

“What?”

“There's no such thing as too artsy!”

Out in the lobby Nova glanced at the reader board above the next auditorium over and cried out, “UNDER THE VOLCANO!”

I looked up. That's what was playing in it. I said, “Never heard of it...”

“You haven't? But it won a bunch of awards at Cannes.”

“At what?”

“Cannes International Film Festival. .In France!”

“Never heard of it..”

“It's like the Academy Awards with a brain. If something wins there you know it's good. We HAVE to see this!”

I pointed at the red box with the letter R in it next to the title. “But how? Neither of us is seventeen.”

“Like this,” said Nova and walked right into the auditorium, leaving me standing there.

The cinema's lone employee was busy selling Flicks and Jujubees and Goobers. I followed her in.

“What took you?” she asked.

“So we're going to watch this without paying? Isn't that like stealing?”

“I don't see how. The movie's going to be running whether we're here or not. And look- we're the only ones in here!”

Which was true. And since she'd been willing to watch my “Star Wars” movie I sat down next to her. This movie had a volcano in it, how bad could it be?

We'd missed the first ten minutes but it wasn't hard to figure out what was going on. It was about a drunken English guy in Mexico just before World War II. He'd been somebody at one time, some kind of diplomat, but now he was just a drunk. Most of his old friends were avoiding him and his ex-wife knew he wa beyond any help she could give. His life just kept getting drunker and more out-of-it...

About a third of the way into it a couple that looked to be about a hundred years old came in, talking loudly about where they should sit like they were both hard of hearing. But they settled in and stopped shouting, and during the quiet parts I could hear them unwrapping the hard candies they'd smuggled in.

“That's us when we get old,” whispered Nova. Which presumed a lot about our futures but I liked the idea of it better than her story about us each having a horible marriage and committing suicide...

I won't say I completely hated this film. But parts of it were almost excruciatingly slow and talky. During these parts I just watched Nova's face. She was watching it so raptly, and seeing the emotions play across her face was as fascinating to me as the picture was for her. On an impulse I found Nova's hand with mine and took hold of it. She smiled and squeezed.

I perked up when the Nazis entered the story. Movies always get mre intense when the Nazis show up and this one was no exception. These Nazis were there trying to spread Nazi-ism into Mexico like some messed up kind of missionaries, and they were gaining some converts.

The film ended with the drunk guy having a confrontation with some Mexican Junior Nazis. Oh Sweet Jesus, it was heart wrenching! I remember that movie's final scene to this day.

Nova was crying. She knew what was coming. The main character was in danger from these guys but he was too drunk to know it; and kept mouthing off and babbling about “insinuoedos” like a silly drunken fool- in love with the sound of his own voice and amazed by his own cleverness because of his stupid made up word; his sense of how clever he was,

I won't spoil the movie by telling you how it ended but I'm pretty sure there won't be a sequel.

Nova and I just until the credits ended.

“So did you like it?”

“I didn't hate it,” I said, “That ending made it worth it! It was like watching a car crash- you don't want to look but you can't look away!”

We left, and had gotten as far as the lobby when Nova noticed what was playing in the tri-plex's third theater- “Ohmigod! It's Splash!”

“You want to see another movie? I can't.”

She rattled her tub of laundromat salvage at me. “I have money. It'll be my treat!”

“No, I mean we're out of time. I said I'd be back for supper at six, and if I leave now I shold just make it.”

At the time I felt like I had really dodged a bullet getting out sitting through Splash. A romantic comedy with such a strong fantasy element (Is there anything more ridiculously unscientific than a half human/half fish creature?) did not sound like my kind of movie at all. But now I wish I had seen it with her. I bet Nova would have been a hoot to watch a silly comedy with.

We said our goodbyes on the sidewalk out in front of the theater..

“I sure had a lot of fun today. That was a great first date,” I kidded.

Or was I kidding? I just knew that even though we hadn't really done much it as the most fun I'd had on this vacation, because I'd done it with this strange and interesting girl.

“Me too!” she said, “Plus, any day I don't have that creepy psycho following me around is a great day, I really hope he's gone away.”

“What creepy psycho?”

“He's been following me around. Everywhere I go, there he is. I call him 'Joe Howdy' because he looks like he saw Urban Cowboy one too many times. Or I see him tailing me in that Cadillac of his. It's a very unmistakable car, like it saw that movie too many times too. The guy's ludicrous, but he's not one bit funny.”

“Are you sure he's following you? Maybe he thinks your following him around...”

“It's not a coincidence. He's following me, and he really scares me! I think he might be a serial killer!”

It was 1984, and I'd never heard the term before. I said, “A cereal killer? We'd better tell Captain Crunch he needs to watch his back!”

“I'm serious, Kevin; He's dangerous!”

I could tell she was serious. If she wasn't she would have liked my joke, or reacted to it in some way. I said, “Okay I believe you. But what do you mean cereal killer?”

“First of all, it's serial with an S, not the kind you eat. They've been around forever---Jack the Ripper, the Boston Strangler---but there's more of them now. Enough that the FBI is looking into catching them by studying similarities in their crimes, in their behavior, to figure out how they think. Of course these guys are totally crazy, but they're still thinking something. It's called forensic psychology; I read a book about it by a woman psychologist who works with the Bureau. A real simple example would be they'll dressing a female agent up like the kind of victims the guy prefers and put her where they think he's gonna go next.”

“And you really think you have one of these killers after you?”

“I don't know what this creep is. Probably not, it's not like there's that many true serial killers and I haven't heard of any murders like that around here. He's probably only a rapist, looking for his chance to get me cornered someplace alone.”

“Jesus!” I said, a serious shudder running through me. Whatever this creep was I could tell how vulnerable he was making her feel, and I hated him for it. I said, “Well let's just hope he's moved on then. And he does show up when I'm around... Well I'm not Rambo, but I'll do what I can.”

Nova pounced, and grabbed me in a hug. In a tiny voice she begged me, “Hold me?”

I put my arms around her. “I can do that.”

“He's after me, Kevin! I thought I would be safe here, I th-thought I could- But he's after me!”

“You don't know that,” I whispered, “Like you say, he's probably not some killer.”

“No, he's worse! He wants- They want... It's worse than death!” she whimpered, and some other stuff I couldn't make out with her face buried in my shoulder. I just held her.

A minute later she unhooked herself from me. “Sorry....”

“You don't have to be sorry for that. If it helps I'm happy to,” I said. Although I hated seeing her so upset it had felt weirdly nice.

“Yeah, but some date I turned out to be. The Crying Crazy Girl!”

“You're a great date,” I told her, “This was the best date I've ever been on!”

Her mouth puckered into a wry grin and I could see the old humor returning to her eyes, “This was the only date you've been on!”

“But it's gonna be hard to top,” I said, “I had fun.”

“Me too. You're a beautiful soul, Kevin Brown..Thank you so much for the movies.”

I'd never been called an beautiful soul before and I wasn't sure how to reply. I didn't just want to say 'You too'...

“And there's something else you can do for me, if you wouldn't mind...”

“What's that?

“Before you go, tell me your dad's joke about Moses again.”

“You're kidding,” I said, but she wasn't so I told it: “Mose was walking through the desert and came upon a burning bush. And Lo, it spoke to him. It said... 'HEY BUDDY, GET A FIRE EXTINGUISHER! QUICK!!”

She laughed as hard as she did the first time. “A classic!”

“That joke is why he doesn't get to teach Sunday School at our church anyore:”

“He lost his gig over that? That's stupid.”

“That was Mrs. Witherspoon, mostly. She's only really happy when she's tearing somebody down or trying to get everyone alarmed about something. The kind of person who gives Christians a bad name,” I said, “And let me give you our phone number in case you need something, or just want to talk.”

“There's no need. Like I said we're gonna find each other tomorrow. And Wednesday too. I know these things...”

“Still, with this crazy guy after you I'd feel better,” I said. She dug out her sketchpad and a felt tipped pen and I wrote it down for her.”

She looked at it. “That's too many numbers.”

“No it's not. My dad has one of these new mobile phones. It's not like a regular phone, more like those old radiotelephones. And could I have your number?”

She wrote it on the same sketchbook page, drew a heart around both numbers. tore the page in half and handed me her number, so we each had half of the heart- like those cheesy matching half-a-heart lockets couples wear.

“Okay then, I'll see you tomorrow,” I said, “Since you're so sure we're gonna do that. Do you happen to know where we're gonna bump into each other?”

“You'll see...”

On the walk back to the state beach I noticed a flyer stapled to almost every telephone pole about a missing child. He ws a boy my age and there was a picture of him filling most of the xeroxed page. At first I thought he looked kind of familiar, but then I realized he looked like every third boy at my school, nothing really distinctive about him, except he had about the saddest eyes I'd ever seen.

Whoever he was, wherever he was, I really hoped that serial killer hadn't got him.

I got back to Space #22 just as Mom was pulling her Mexican casserol out of the RV's oven. As usual it was delicious.

After dinner my sister and I noticed that our folks were getting ready to go out. Not getting super dressed up but Mom had stunk up the Winnebago with hair spray and Dad was wearing slacks and sports shirt instead of his cut-offs and hole-y BULLWINKLE t-shirt.

“So is it Date Night?” asked Joy, “Great! We'll run amok.”

“I don't think you two would know how to run amok,” said Dad.

“And thank God for that!” said Mom.

'Date Night' was something they had been doing once a week since Joy turned twelve. A night out with just the two of them, leaving us kids at home to fend for ourselves, and trusting me and Joy to not do anything stupid. I can't say if this was something they'd come up with or if Mom had got it from some “How to Keep the Fires of Love Burning After You Have Kids” articles in one of her women's magazines, but they always came back in a good mood. And they deserved that.

Joy asked, “So where are you taking her, Dad? Some place romantic?”

“Just to the movies,” said Dad.

“Splash is playing. That's supposed to be romantic,” suggested Joy.

“Neither of you would like the movie we're seeing,” said Dad, “It's called Under The Volcano.

“Never heard of it,” said Joy.

“It's supposed to be good,” I said, “And I heard it won like the Golden Poobah Award or something at Cannes,” I said, showing off what a well-informed cineaste I was.

“I'm not surprised. John Huston has made some of the greatest movies of all time,” he said, and rattled off some titles. All very famous films, and I noticed that about half of them seemed to have Humpfrey Bogart in them. I also noticed that more than a few of them had been the source of some of his most cherished and oft-repeated dumb jokes, including his favorite “We don't got to show you no steenking badgess!” . I wondered if after tonight we'd be in for a month of him hiccuping like a drunk and babbling about insinuendos...

Dad said to me, “So until I return you're the man of the household.”

“All right. I'll kill a grizzly bear and have it roasting over a fire when you get back>”

“You'd better.”

Joy didn't mind this tongue-in-cheek patriarchal stuff. She knew I wouldn't take it seriously and would be fine with her doing whatever she wanted. She really didn't need any supervision. And tonight was her night to hog the RV's television (or actually it was ours, from our living room) so I knew she'd be happy. Since we didn't like any of the same shows it was easiest just to do it by night; although we swapped an hour in Albuquerque when there was a music special Joy just had to see, some guy named Prince. And tonight there was nothing on that I even remotely wanted to watch. I planned to finally settle in and read my book.

Just as they were leaving Dad said, “Tomorrow night we'll have a movie night right here for all of us. “There's a video rental place about three blocks away. We'll walk down there and each pick one.”

“We'll be here,” Joy and I promised...

A few days later I confessed to him and Mom that Nova and I had snuck in that afternoon and seen that same movie they'd gone to on their spouse-date. They weren't too upset; this small act of thievery didn't seem like such a big deal after everything that happened on our last night in Santa Teresa. He was surprised that I'd enjoyed Under the Volcano, and he liked my analogy about the main character's life being like a slow motion car crash- grotesque and terrifying yet horribly fascinating.

Although I know now that lives that turn into car crashes aren't nearly so entertaining when it's someone you love going off the cliff and exploding in a gruesome fireball. I would do almost anything not to have my last glimpse of Nova as they dragged her away burned into my memory.
.

Since tenth grade Jane had dreamed an impossible dream. Bobby Dukakis was the hearthrob of her high school, and though she loved him madly she knew there wasn't a chance in hell that he would ever be interested in anyone as plain & uninteresting as her. But now on Halloween night of her senior year, in the light of a full moon and with the help of a strange book she'd found at a garage sale, she would recite the spell that would turn her from a dumpy little nobody into...

.

.
If she had thought about it at all, Janey would have realized she wasn't the unhappiest kid at her high school. There were misfit kids whose weekdays were a nightmare of bullying and ridicule from the other students. And there were those who found anything that might happen to them at school preferable to the horrors of parental abuse that waited for them when they got home. And then there was one bright young student whose rapidly deteriorating immune system made it doubtful whether he would live to see graduation day. Any one of these kids would gladly have traded places with Janey.

But with the intense self-obsession of teenagers, she never stopped to consider their situations. She was certain that no one on Earth had ever been dealt a crueler fate than she.

Janey's problem was that she was shy and wholly unremarkable. Everything about her was as plain and boring as her name: Jane Smith. If her classmates never bothered her it was probably because none of them really even notice her. As if she wasn't important enough to even pick on (something she might've appreciated if she ever had been seriously harrassed...). This girl was so spectral gray and anonymous that teachers she'd had all year tended to forget her name. Janey hated being such drab little mousy nothing, but her crippling shyness prevented her from adopting a more flamboyant persona, a new hairstyle, anything that might render her visible.

In her imagination though her world and her life were far different. Janey was beautiful, she was confident and charming and witty and tremendously popular. And the best thing of all was that because she had all this other stuff going for her, in these dreams of hers she was Bobby's Girl...

It had all started on her second or third day at Princeton Heights High School. As self conscious as she was, Janey had decided it was important that she know how many squares of linoleum tile lie between her first period English class and her second period homeroom in the same building. She was looking downward, diligently counting them, when she ran smack into someone, dropping all the books she had clutched to her rather modest bosom.

The boy she'd collided with had been standing in the hallway talking to a circle of his friends. She marvelled at how they were only a few days into their freshman year and already he had all these friends. A couple of of the boys started to snicker, but one look from this tall handsome young man made them stop. That's not cool, guys!

He helped Janey gather up her books and then incredibly he apologized to her, for how they had been blocking the hallway. And as he handed them to her he had smiled, his sexy mouth set in a disarming, friendly smile, his soulful gray eyes looking at her with concern, the shock of dark hair dangling down his forehead with graceful insouciance. And whoever this teenage hunk was, he had noticed her. Which was all it took for Janey to fall madly in love.

She found out his name---Robert Dukakis---and while she never got up the nerve to talk to him again, she watched him from afar, happy for him when he made the school's football team and clipping out the newspaper articles about him in the local newspaper's sports section for the BOOK OF BOBBY she started, which also contained candy bar wrappers he had dropped and other precious Bobbinalia. And though she didn't dare sit anywhere close to him in the cafeteria, she did find a group of girls who talked about him a lot, and would sit unobtrusively nearby with her back to them, listening to the latest speculation about this Greek Adonis, and dreaming of the day she and Bobby would be together...

She knew it was a ridiculous dream for a Plain Jane like her to have. There were probably a hundred other girls at Princeton Heights High School with this same dream, and every last one of them would seem to stand a better chance of becoming the football star's girlfriend than she did. While Bobby Dukakis wasn't going steady with anyone, Janey had seen the kind of girls he tended to date, and none of them were stocky little things with stringy no-color hair and heavy plastic glasses with even heavier lenses.

But this hadn't stopped her from enjoying her dreams. In her daydreams, and the fantasies she spun at night as she was falling asleep she was a total fox- tall and slender and with a nice figure, wearing a beautiful evening gown that cost more than her entire frumpy wardrobe as she glided into the senior prom on Bobby's arm, the envy of all the other girls and probaby some of the boys too.
.

Then one day during the summer vacation between her sophomore and senior years, she had come across something that might turn these impossible fantasies of hers into reality...

One Saturday in August the family across the street had had a garage sale. She was the first one there, and actually helped old Mr. Farannino's thirty year old daughter set the sale up in their little driveway and put price stickers on all the different items. The woman had always been kind of weird and rude to Jane when Jane was little, but in the past few months seemed a lot nicer. Jane's parents used to warn her that she was a drug addict and a thief, and to stay out of her way, but since sometime last fall they'd been remarking that this not-quite-young woman was finally getting her life together. And she really did seem like almost a whole different person, a smile on her face where there had never been one before...

One of the things they brought out of the house was a large box containing 20 or 30 cookbooks. Jane loved to cook, and when she mentioned this fact the woman said, "Yes, those belonged to my Grandma. You can have the whole box for eight bucks..."

This seemed like a real bargain to Janey, and she gladly paid the $8, happy that she'd gotten to them before anyone else. As she was shlepping the heavy box home she imagined trying all the recipes in these books when she was married to Bobby.

When she got them home she hoped that Bobby would turn out to have an adventurous palate, because she discovered that the books had recipes from all over the world. German, Peruvian, Indonesian- all kinds of crazy cookbooks!

And one of the books proved to be even crazier than the others. The dust jacket was for BETTY CROCKER'S ITALIAN MADE EASY, but the book underneath was something entirely different. The pages were lined paper, and instead of being printed the recipes were handwritten in fuchsia ink. Only they weren't recipes for food, but for what seemed to be magic spells, interspersed with short essays about witchcraft.

She thought about bringing this book back to the family across the street, they probably didn't know they had sold her something of the grandmother's that was far more personal and private than some old cookbook.

But if it really was what it claimed to be, she needed it much more than they did. They seemed happy enough; or happier than Janey anyway. The daughter was getting married to her boyfriend from the Midwest and seemed all excited about that, and the dad was busily preparing to open his second Italian restaurant down by the university. The 30-something son acted kind of crazy, but he only came by once in a while...

Could this book really be what it claimed to be? Deep down Janey had always half-believed that magic was for real. And apparently the neighbor girl's grandmother---who Janey had talked to a few times, and who had seemed a bit peculiar but sane enough---had believed in this stuff in a big way, so maybe it was real to some extent...

Jane had found a number of magic spells that seemed like they'd be able to make Bobby fall in love with her. There were recipes for love potions, nine of them, but the old self-described witch had written a little paragraph before them that somehow seemed to be speaking directly to her:

And Janey had to agree with the woman about these potions. She didn't want some mindless zombie whose attraction to her was chemically induced, that wasn't love. She wanted Bobby to really love her for herself. And if her self had escaped his notice she would change that instead, becoming the sort of girl he would naturally want to get to know. The HEART'S DESIRE TRANSFORMATION SPELL seemed like it would be just the ticket for this. The spell she would say aloud wasn't like one of the magic book's the many weird tongue-twisters but short and simple with a fill-in-the-blanks part at the end, and potion she would drink was mostly made of things you could find around the house, and didn't seem terribly toxic...

And to make sure the spell would work she waited two and a half month, which felt like years to the lovestruck teen, so she could perform it on Halloween night, which the spellbook's very first essay said was the best time of the year to do magic. Soon Janey would find out if there was anything to all this witchy stuff besides the babblings of a crazy old lady.

And if there wasn't, she wouldn't suffer the embarrassment of being so foolish, because she had never told anyone about the spell book. The worst that could happen to her would be a slight upset stomach from all the vanilla extract in the potion.

Her parents were going to an office party on Halloween night, her mom dressed like an old time gangster again this year, with a little drawn-on moustache, carrying a toy tommy gun and acting all tough, and with her dad once again wearing the beaded skirt and bobbed hair of a flapper, hanging all over her like a lovestruck ditz and calling her "Lefty".

And once again Janey had volunteered to stay home and hand out candy to the neighborhood kids. Which her aunt Phyllis had come over to help her do last Halloween, but now she had been deemed old enough to do this by herself. The previous year she had felt a bit glum over the fact that her dorky parents had more of a social life than she did, but this year she was glad to have the house to herself.

And last year she'd just worn her regular boring everyday clothes to answer the door and hand out mini bags of M&M's, but tonight she had on a cheap witch's robes and conical black hat from K-Mart, since she was more into the spirit of the holiday this year. This costume was a private joke that (like most things in her life) she shared with herself. Because as soon as the kids stopped coming at around 8:30, she was shutting off the porch light, going upstairs to her room, lighting some candles and becoming a real witch for a few hours, hopefully changing her whole crummy life in the process...
.

This is stupid. Nothing's gonna happen, she said to herself as she lit the circle of candles and sat in the center of them on a pentagram made from electrical tape that she'd stuck right to the faux hardwood floor, in the light from the big yellow moon spilling in through her window. Then she thought, Gee, maybe I shouldn't be dressed up in this stupid witch outfit. Maybe the magic spirits will think I'm making fun of witches and stuff...

Yeah, right. Like there really is such a thing, she thought as she dragged the spell book into her lap and opened it to the page she had marked, began to chant: "Mumbo Jumbo Rhubarb Rhubarb, Frikkity Fubar, change my shape..."

It sounded nothing at all like she thought a magic spell would sound, with references to Lemony Snickett and the Pep Boys, but since she'd really only ever had books and movies to tell her about such things she said it anyway, just like it was written, until she got to the part that she'd had to write herself...

Then she quickly hefted the heavy wine glass (the closest thing she could find to a chalice) and in a single gulp downed the concoction she'd blended and then chilled for 3 hours. And immediately she felt funny. Janey barely managed to blow out all the candles and flop down onto her bed before she passed out.
.

As she came to the next morning she could tell immediately that the spell had worked. Or at least that something had happened. But what?

When she reached for her heavy glasses on the table beside her bed and put them on her vision became completely screwy and distorted. When she took them off again she realized she had been able to see just fine without them.

"Wow," she exclaimed. If nothing else, at least she was rid of those awful things. She hadn't asked to have her vision corrected, but of course Bobby wouldn't want to see her wearing big coke-bottle glasses that had made her eyes look all dinky and weird. What guy would? As she jumped out of bed her feet hit the floor before she expected them to.

"My God!" she gasped, in a strange but pretty sounding voice, realizing that her stubby legs had become much, much longer. Unsteadily she crossed the room to the mirror to see what other changes had been visited on her.

She saw a beautiful head of fluffy blonde hair, and a face that was nothing like her old one...

"Oh my God!" she sighed, staring at the face of a cheerleader from some television show about high school. Cute little nose, gorgeous cheekbones, big blue eyes, perfect white teeth and big sexy lips.While Janey thought there was nothing so beautiful as a sultry Mediterranean beauty with an graceful aquiline nose, she was happy to be a WASP princess, if this rather conventional image of a button-nosed, blue-eyed blonde was Bobby's ideal woman.

She pulled off her witch's robes, and surveyed the long legged and curvaceous body she now possessed.

"OH MY GOD!" she cried, when she saw just how large her boobs were. While she found no fault with the rest of her oh-so-feminine physique, these gargantuan, gravity-defying things looked absurd to Janey; totally out of proportion to the rest of this body. But really, what had she expected? Bobby was such a guy, of course he'd have the standard guy's obsession with great big breasts. And she would wear them proudly when she was Bobby's Girl...

These shorts she'd put on yesterday were almost painfully tight on her now. Her hips and the twin moons of her derriére strained against the fabric of the pants that had fit her as plain little Jane. And oddly they seemed to bulge slightly in the front, which she couldn't figure out until she pulled them down her gorgeous hips and saw...

Because as it turned out Bobby's taste in women wasn't so conventional after all.
.

.

Janey's story continues in IT'S MY PARTY & I'LL CRY IF I WANT TO,
which can be found HERE: https://bigclosetr.us/topshelf/fiction/81630/its-my-party-il...

My horribly modified body fit snugly into the cylindrical space of the garbage can, nestled in among the old newspapers, the eggshells & coffee grounds. Martinette loomed above me in the moonlite. With that trashcan lid and pooper scooper in her hands she appeared to me as a fierce Barbarian warrior queen brandishing her shield and battle axe. Her beauty still took my breath away...

"Goodbye Gregor. There's just no place in my life for you anymore. With all the remodelling we're doing, and how ratty you've gotten- you're embarrassing! You're headed for Garbage Island now, a fitting end for a worthless thing like you. You were a poor excuse for a man, but perhaps you'll make adequate landfill..."

She laughed evilly as she emptied the pooper-scooper out onto my head and locked the trashcan firmly into place above me, plunging me into absolute blackness...

.

.
My origins, you ask. How did I become an incorporeal diety worshipped by millions? It's like nothing you may have heard, or might imagine. Once I was a man much like you...

Or no, probably nothing like you. I was never very decisive, or assertive; there was a crucial element of manhood that I always felt I lacked. I had "issues", as we used to say in those chaotic confused times, and my dear wife Martinette struggled futilely to understand. Hers was a personality that was the diametric opposite of mine. Strong, confident, she never once seemed to doubt herself. Good traits I suppose for one of our state's top surgeons. Gradually I came to defer to her in regards to every decision within our household.

Then when I lost my job at the dildo factory (I was quality control, I had to shove every tenth dildo that came down the conveyor belt up my ass and assess its various qualities...) my self esteem reached its all-time low. I put in a few resumes here and there, but there didn't seem to be much call for an industrial butt boy...

So mostly I hung around the house and indulged in my secret hobby---you see I was a crossdresser---always being sure to be back in my drab male garb and get all the makeup off my face when Frau Doktor Martinette got home from the hospital at six...
.

.
CHAPTER ONE: SISSY SURPRISE
.

My story begins more or less on the morning of December 22 1998, back when such a date had meaning. Martinette had suddenly announced that she would be leaving for a few days, flying off to some emergency preparedness conference in Las Vegas.

"Another conference? But you just went to one last weekend! That TRIAGE AND TRIBULATION seminar."

"I know. But the new millenneum is just over a year away. My hospital has to be ready for it, and this seminar, CARING THROUGH THE CHAOS is vital to that."

"If you ask me all this Y2K business is just some Chicken Little story. I really don't think all this terrible stuff is going to happen because of a little confusion about the date in some computers..."

"But I didn't ask you, did I? Do you really think some stay at home dad knows more than the top experts in the field? Than the keynote speaker, Dr. Recshaun from the Thanatos Institute, a close personal friend of mine?"

"You're right Dear," I sighed, suddenly chagrined at my unwarranted arrogance. "I really shouldn't have an opinion. But I had really hoped we could spend Christmas together."

"Oh shut up! Of course we'll be spending Christmas together. I'll be home on the morning of the 24th. You know, not everybody starts celebrating the holidays in September. Believe it or not, some of us have responsibilities."

I cringed, "I just meant .............. You know, for Bruni."

"Well of course it's for Bruni. I said I'll be here. Now shut the fuck up!"

As soon as I dropped Martinette off at the airport the next morning I picked up a Christmas tree at the Boy Scout's lot, one of the last few sorry-looking trees they had left, then rushed home and changed.

Into Regina. A long bath and then shaving every part of me, and when I stuck on my long acrylic nails I didn't skimp on the glue. I wouldn't be going out or even answering the door until it came time to go meet Martinette's return flight...

As I waited for my nails to dry I lit up a JEZEBEL MENTHOL 200 and posed in front of the mirror with it. I thought I looked pretty sexy with the cigarette in my mouth so I stuck another one into each of my nostrils and one in each ear before deciding this was a bit much and removing these.

When I finally reappeared from the bathroom---my third cigarette in hand---our two year old was delighted. Brunhilde just loved Regina! That first night at dinner that she'd started babbling about this "nice lady" who plays with her I started to panic, until I realized that Martinette---barely glancing up from her LANCET magazine---had decided this Regina must be some imaginary friend of Bruni's...

Still, to be on the safe side I decided it was nap time for Brunhilde. I put her into her crib and taking great hits off of a fistful of ciggy-poos I blew smoke in her face, until my little darling got all confused and sleepy looking and went to sleep ..... Awwwwwwww!!

I was in my favorite backless blue dress, decorating our little tree and singing SANTA BABY along with THE BETTY BOOP CHRISTMAS ALBUM, when the front door opened.

"Well well, what have we here?" chuckled Martinette. It was an ominous sound. Cold and mocking.

"I can explain," I stammered.

She laughed evilly, "I don't think that'll be necessary. I always knew you were a little sissy faggot-"

"I'm not gay," I whimpered, "I like women."

"So do I, on occasion. And I have to admit you make a prettier than I would've imagined possible," she said, standing imperiously in front of me. Carressing my cheek. Exciting me. "But when I'm with a woman I have to be the one in charge. Oh you like that, don't you?"

As she cruelly squeezed my mouth in her fist I nodded as best I could, my eyes lowered submissively. This was a scene right out of my favorite, most forbidden fantasies.

"Do you promise to be an obedient little female plaything? Doing exactly as you're told?"

"Yes, I-"

She slapped me hard, "Your voice destroys the illusion. We'll need to work on it. Until then you will not speak unless I tell you too. Otherwise you must only nod or shake your head. Understand? Good. Now upstairs with you. My room, I think."

I nodded meekly and scurried up the stairs, where I was dressed in a corset so tightly confining that I not only could barely breathe, but my heart seemed to be struggling to function properly. I was tied spread eagle to the bed, and then she pretty well destroyed my man pussy with a Swiss Army strap-on dildo; stopping every fifteen minutes to engage the various attachments and laughing evilly.

When we were both spent and sated, she said, "You may speak now. Did you enjoy that?"

"Yes, Mistress," I said. For this was what I'd been instructed to call her.

"And I suppose you want me to untie you now?"

It had been incredible. An exquisitely terrifying and painful role-play experience. But now that I'd been brought to climax---my minescule 'clitty' of a penis having spurted its meager load of 'sissy juice' into the bedding---I'd had enough of being trussed up. "If you would."

"I wouldn't. You're going to stay my sissy slave forever. Mine and anyone I choose to give you too. And as far as you claims of not being into men ....... I think we'll have to expand your horizons in that regard," she said, and laughed evilly.
.

.
CHAPTER TWO: MY YEAR OF SPIRALLING AGONY
.

JANUARY

The new year was rung in with an evil laugh...

I spent my days in service to Martinette's every whim, and nights locked in the closet, while from the basement came the sounds of hammering, drilling, sawing and what might have been blasting with dynamite.

At last the basement was ready and I as I was led down there in my shackles I felt a mixture of curiousity and deep dread. It was about what I'd expected. The farthest, dimmest third of the basememt---farthest away from the steps and the room's one high little window had been sectioned off with iron bars and a jail cell door, with various manacles and eye bolts in the floor, ceiling and concrete walls.

"This will be your home now," announced the woman I was already thinking of quite automatically as Mistress, and laughed evilly.

I should have been aghast at finding myself locked in what could only be called a dungeon but I was relieved because it was so much more spacious than the closet I'd been sleeping in. There was even a bed here, to which my collar was attached by a chain. Mistress made me kiss the locks that went onto either end of the chain before she snapped them shut.

There was also a cold-water shower and a galvanized bucket for me to poop in. I was so happy. My own bucket!

"Thank you, Mistress!" I squealed, deleriously grateful and hating myself for my own submissiveness.

As she was leaving the basement, one foot on the stairs, and just before she flicked the wall switch off with an evil laugh---plunging the room into darkness---I noticed that another large part of the basement had been sectioned off, completely and rather professionally with dry wall spackle and paint. A stainless steel double door leading into it was labled OR.

"Or what?" I wondered. And since no one else was around to do it I laughed evilly.

.
FEBRUARY

I should have realized it wasn't the "or" but Operating Room. It is state-of-the-art, clean and brightly lit and full of gleaming machinery and fancy monitors with an operating table in the center. This is where Martinette and her mysterious male assistant---tall with rather nice hair and cold pitiless eyes, the two of them naked except for their surgical masks---realigned the bones in my feet and held them fast with pins, resulting in Barbie feet- so that I can now only walk in heels of no less than five inches. This is where my bottommost ribs were removed so the corset could constrict my waist to a frightening degree. And this is where I was given two saline breast implants, that had been cut out of a dead junky hooker by a friend of hers who works in the morgue.
.

MARCH

I was finally formally introduced to Martinette's assistant- Dr. Hugh G. Recshaun of the Thanatos Institute, who is now living with us, screwing my wife, and who I must address as Master.

I was given a second pair of breast implants, which make my tits look rather funny, bulging out at the sides, but I was assured that as more are added they will even out. Apparently there's no shortage of drug-overdosed hookers showing up at the morgue.

There was no kindness in Hugh, but at least I gained a sense of being useful for something. I was proud when I heard his grunts of pleasure, this implicit praise of my cocksucking abilities, that I had learned to do this so well- after being flogged into unconsciousness whenever I didn't...

But mostly I have to stand alongside the bed in my french maid uniform with a tray held out all night while they screw, drink absinth and snort cocaine, rubbing it all over each other and licking it off. I get to eat their cocaine boogers.
.

APRIL

I'm really coming to hate the OR.

I was on my hands and knees giving Master a blowjob when Mistress maliciously ground her cigar out on my ass. I couldn't help flinching from the pain.

"OW! THE BITCH BIT ME!!" screamed Hugh.

Martinette grinned from ear to ear as she took his coiled whip from the end table and offered it to him.

"No," he hissed, gingerly rubbing the dents in his pecker, "It's too late for that. If the little whore hasn't learned to control herself by now she never will. I think it's time for a more permanent solution. Let's get her down to the OR."

They took me down to the basement and yanked all my teeth out. I guess they did an okay job considering all the nitrous oxide. I wish they would have given me some.

"Oh thit, I have a lithp," I said the next time I tried to speak some hours later.

"I like it. You talk like a pussy. A pussy accent for a soft little pussy-hole like you!" said Martinette. And then she laughed evilly.
.

MAY

Do you like my earrings? They were my testicles, chromium plated, to match my new collar.
.

JUNE

Yesterday was Bruni's third birthday. I heard her party going on through the basement ceiling, Martinette and a bunch of moms who had brought kids from Brunhilde's age up to about six, is my guess, playing Bruni's SESAME STREET'S GREATEST HITS cd and sliding chairs around. Eating and playing kids' games.

So weird that a monster like Martinette would have such normal friends, and that none of them suspect the depraved miniature universe that lie beneath their feet, in which the mad Doktor keeps me as a slave and a sinister sort of art project.

Knowing I had missed the party, and realizing how long it'd been since I had seen my baby girl I started crying and couldn't stop. I cried all through my whipping and even when Mistress fucked my sissy ass with her authentic SS ceremonial Dildo (slavishly lubricated with I CAN'T BELIEVE IT'S NAZI BUTTFUCKER), which usually cheers me right up. Finally she couldn't take the fact that I was crying over something that had nothing to do with her, and she relented.

"All right. I'll let you see Bruni for a little while."

Then even though this is what I had thought I wanted, I was suddenly dreading the idea-

"But she'll see me like THITH!" I lisped, "Thith hideouth toothleth big-titted fweak you've turned me into!"

"Don't worry, Bruni won't love you any less for it."

Which was true, because she neither loved or remembered me at all. I was shackled to the floor of my cell on my hands and knees. Bruni was brought in, wearing the most adorable little dominatrix outfit and carrying her own little whip.

"You see, baby? This is what we do with men. Men are scum and need to be subjegated and sadistically tortured for no apparent reason," said Mommy as they whipped me together, and she introduced her to the finer points of laughing evilly.
.

JULY

In a moment's insolence, when Mistress complained that I hadn't cleaned a part of the floor good enough enough I threw my toothbrush at her and told her to do it herself. She said if I didn't appreciate it I could do my cleaning without it. I now have to clean the whole house top to bottom with my tongue. I think Hugh deliberately misses the toilet because of this.

Also, to symbolically remind me that I must never attempt to stand up to her, my legs were lopped off about six inches above my knees. I was given a break from housework for most of this month while my stumps healed, but now that I'm back at work I find that being much closer to the ground I can perform my cleaning chores much better.
.

AUGUST

But apparently my mistress doesn't agree with me, for she has hired a cleaning woman. And this month my arms were removed as well, reduced to useless nubs the size of beer cans, and my duties have been reduced to those of footstool, doorstop and of course big-titted sex toy, toilet and ashtray for Hugh, who finds my total helplessness incredibly exciting. The Bitch With The Built-In Bondage...

"Just think," Martinette taunted me, "Your life is no longer about what you do---since you can no longer do anything---but only about what is done to you. You're now not only not a man, but not even a human being anymore- just a sissy thing that lays there and gets fucked!"

And then guess what she did.
.

SEPTEMBER

I became very apathetic at this point, my body responding to pain but my spirit dead and without hope. Which meant I couldn't be humiliated. Which caused my two tormentors to tire of me.

Work was done on the front porch and I carried out there by Hugh, my first glimpse of the outside world in the better part of a year. The air smelled so clean, the sky looked so blue but only for a moment.

Directly in front of the front door was a rectangular wooden pit, half filled with wet concrete. As I was held over it and realized I was going to be pushed face down into it I began to squirm.

"Relax, we're not going to kill you! Do you think I want you rotting and stinking up my porch?"

And true to her word, as I was shoved into the cool grey muck---my head entirely submerged---there was a dildo positioned right where my mouth was, through which I could breathe. Water and liquified Spam would also be fed to me through this (except on the days when Martinette forgot), and my poop was blasted off of my ass and I imagine down into the rose bushes beside the porch with a high pressure hose...

There was the faint prick of a hypodermic in my ass cheek, which knocked me out so I wouldn't squirm while the cement hardened. Only my shoulders, back and ass were exposed to the world- presenting a relatively flat surface which the screen door just barely cleared.

Time did weird things in this sensory deprived state. I tried to tell time by the comings and goings of feet across me, but soon gave up, finding the evening cold and the morning sun on my ass much better indicators. I couldn't see anything now but I could hear, sort of. And a loud buzzing noise told me there was someone seated or kneeling next to me- in the instant before the whirring thing began digging into my shoulder, jabbing me a hundred times a minute.

In the Kafka story IN THE PENAL COLONY, the condemned were placed in a machine that would spin them like a hot dog on a roller while it slowly carved them up- a steel stylus working its way deeper and deeper into their body; in a pattern which they would come to realize was writing something. The judicial system in this Kafka tale is rather- well Kafkaesque; so that these men wouldn't even know what crime they'd been convicted of until the deciphered the words being carved into them as they died (Franz Kafka would later go on to write three excellent Beach Party movies for Columbia Pictures...)

Luckily for me my tormentors had never read this story, and what I was being subjected to was nothing more sinister than a tattoo gun, which would permanently etch seven immense letters into my entire exposed surface. Before the initial W was completed I knew what was being written on me. I was to literally become a door mat.
.

OCTOBER

It must be Halloween night, the feet walking on me are much smaller, and there are a lot more of them. Mostly bummed that the people who live here have stiffed them by going out for the night, none of them seem to notice anything unusual about me; until later in the evening when one loudmouthed older-sounding kid exclaims, "Whoah- Check it out! This thing's got a asshole!"

I'm glad it was only a modest sized firecracker they stuck into me and lit before running off down the steps and away from the scene of the crime, laughing evilly...
.

NOVEMBER

Cold, very cold at night. I don't like being a door mat.
.

DECEMBER

They tired of me as even a doormat. Decided they needed something classier to go with all the remodelling they were doing. Busted up the concrete around me and pried me out of the porch with a crowbar. Martinette marched alongside as Hugh carried me out to the trash and dropped me in.

Nestled amid the banana peels and shitty diapers, the coffee grounds and cigar butts, I looked up at my wife of five years.

Martinette peered down at me pitilessly, "Goodbye Gregor. You're going where you'll finally be of some use in this world. The Garbage Island landfill..."

This was the first time she had used my actual name since this whole ordeal started. But rather than being encouraging it pronounced this moment a terrible farewell.

The duct tape across my bright red and obscenely-collagened marshmallow lips kept me from responding. I had long ago given up any hope of mercy from Martinette, but since she was in essence murdering me here I made one last attempt, the only way I could, imploring her with my eyes.

"Weak," she sighed disgustedly, then dropped the galvanized steel lid onto the trash can, plunging me into darkness. Sealing my fate. I buried my face in my soft squodgy beachball-sized tits with their five implants apiece and sobbed uncontrollably...
.

.
CHAPTER THREE: RESCUED ......... NOT!
.

The next morning I was woken up when the lid was yanked from my steel prison and I was dumped into the back of a garbage truck.

"Well lookie here," cried one of the burly Negro sanitation workers, "A sissy!"

By rubbing my face against a soggy soiled diaper I am able to loosen the duct tape over my mouth. I look up at them, and pleaded, "Help me..."

"Sure Darlin' we'll help you. This looks like a two man job," says the big one, "Gimme a hand here Otis."

"I just cain't figure out these white folks. Thowin' out a perfectly good sissy like this!" said the other, and they both climb into the hopper, wading thigh deep into the garbage, the big one in front of me, the bigger one behind me.

They're talking about me like I wasn't here. I repeat my plea: "Help me!"

"Don't worry. We'll give you what a sissy bitch like you needs," leers the one in front of me as they pull down their pants, "Give ya a good send off! HWAAAAH! HAHHH! HAHHH!"

After their large negroid penises spew their spermy loads into me they clamber out of the back of the truck---"You got to love this job sometimes!"---and without so much as a goodbye to me one of them pushes the big button labelled GARBAGE SQUISHER.

A huge vertical metal plate slides forward on hydraulic pistons, pushing me and the rest of the refuse in the hopper back into the recesses of the truck- a packed mass of waste material.

And this is how I die, I reflected, their manly evil laughter still ringing in my ears, and knowing that as more and more garbage is pushed back into here and compacted I will sooner or later---probably sooner---be smothered and crushed. Odd that I find myself so resigned about it; but really, what's one less snivelling castrated amputee sissy cuckold in the world?

But after three more houses we've reached the end of the block, and apparently this garbage truck's route for today. Because now we're tooling down the boulevard, and then climbing the ramp onto the freeway. Crossing the bridge to the harbor. And I also somehow survive the rear of this truck being upended on hydraulic jacks, dumping its load onto a waiting automated barge. I am one of the first objects to tumble out, and before the entire load can land on top of me find myself rolling off into the corner of this barge, where I land face up.

The sky is blue and beautiful. Graceful white sea gulls whirl above me. One alights on my left tit, his bony toes digging into the soft flesh, and seems to regard the nipple of my right one as something tasty. But my shout scares it off, and for the rest of the eighty mile journey the gulls are wary of me...
.

.
CHAPTER FOUR: MY LIFE AS THE WILLENDORF VENUS...
.

Sunburned and poop-spattered, I arrive at Garbage Island, and again manage to survive as these many tons of garbarge are dumped onto the dock and pushed a hundred feet inland by one of the swarm of robot bulldozers that inhabit the island. I lay on my side this time, parked up against an old washing machine or something, and figure my fate will be to die of thirst and hunger out on this forsaken isle. It would have been an easier death if I had been squished.

Already I am hallucinating from the heat and thirst. Some of these heaps of trash seem to be moving around, scrambling over the mountains and valleys of garbage...

But as one approaches me I realize it is a human being---or sort of---wrapped head to foot in a random array of rags and torn polythene bags, and decorated with little broken toys and other colorful bits of trash. He is gathering whatever he can find that might serve as food, most of it in such a dreadfully decomposed state that I wouldn't feed it to a dog. After my encounter with the garbage collectors I am hesitant to call out to him, but after a while his wanderings bring him to where he spies me.

And when he does he staggers forward, the filthy bearded face peering out from his deflated beach-ball helmet regarding me with disbelief. He drops to his knees before me, gasping, "Looba Loo!"

"Do you speak English?" I ask him, "No I guess not..."

"Looba Loo ........ Looba Loo," he repeats in awe, pointing at my tits and then at my useless dangling cock, and starts patting his head with one hand while the other rubs his belly in a circular motion.

Oh great! After he fucks me this loony tune will probably eat me. Clearly he's in awe of how much fresh meat he has stumbled across here, I think, but I couldn't have been more wrong.

Finally he staggers to his feet and bellows skyward, "O Sooshbah! Dizdah blishday fromma olee propsees! Looba Loo see commid! Alooja! Alooja!"

Which is how I met the wild Bumsmen of Garbage Island. The others come running, and seeing me they too fall to their knees and start patting their bellies and rubbing their heads, which I would learn later is a gesture of utmost reverence) and crying "Alooja!"

A makeshift stretcher is brought for me, the top of a busted card table, and two of them are appointed to lift me onto it. They gaze at me beseechingly, apparently wanting my permission before they'll touch me. I smile and nod and they gingerly load me onto my litter.

One runs off ahead, so that when I am carried into their little village in a valley between two great drifts of trash I am given quite a reception, the whole community of fifty or sixty people lined up on either side of the central road between their garbage shanties, while two young girls scatter plastic flowers in my path, along with music CD's (these shiny silver disks were highly valued, being used as currency here...).

The processional stops, and the oldest inhabitant of the village, who being covered only in royal blue cloth scraps, plastic and trash must be their chief, brings out their holy book (an amputee she-male porno magazine!) and---after comparing me to the photographs in it for several minutes---falls to his knees before me. The whole village follows suit, and they all perform their peculiar form of genuflection. Sooshbah! Looba Loo! Alooja!

I am set down in the exact center of the village, the spot where my temple will be built. This society must have originated on the mainland United States, and no more than a few decades ago, so it seems odd that they speak this totally unknown language, and seem to know nothing of life anywhere but Garbage Island. The priest asks questions of the group that found me.

Everyone in that foraging party was made a saint of some sort, especially the two women who loaded me onto my litter. They and the doctor are deemed the only ones who can touch me, and it is they who give me my bath. Water is scarce here on the island, so it's a real sign of my status as a living goddess that I am gently washed and my hair shampooed and conditioned with the dregs of plastic bottles of hair cair products; not just once but nearly daily from then on. Reverently the two girls---who's names I discover are Oona and Loona---make my face up, and tend to my injuries with a nearly depleted tube of antibiotic cream. After being tortured and abused and called a worthless piece of crap so long it's kind of weird to find myself pampered and worshipped and prayed to...

A great feast is held in my honor, where I am fed the choicest bits of garbage, but being so soon after Christmas there are garbagy treats galore, and everyone gets their fill. There is singing and dancing long into the night---to a percussion band of steel drums and trashcan lids smashed together---the music and dancing reaching a creshendo at exactly midnight.

Not that we use timepieces here, but I know when midnight arrives the same way I know that it's now January 1st 2000- the new millenneum and the end of the world as I had known it...

I was really getting into the party, rocking out on my little stumps and just as I shouted "HOOOO-YAAAAH!" there was a tremendous flash in the sky, followed by a terrible rumbling, the sight of a towering mushroom cloud on the mainland 80 miles away.

The Y2K bug has proven far more disasterous than even the worst disaster junkies had predicted; not just shutting down all power plants and telecommunication but accidently firing off nuclear missles all over the globe. Goodbye Martinette ....... and my poor baby Brunhilde...

And of course this was seen as something I had done. The music stopped, and everyone looked fearfully at me. Was the goddess Looba Loo angry?

"Hey don't worry about it, let's keep on dancing! We're gonna party like it's 1999!" I laughed, figuring that we would all be dead of radiation poisoning within a few days, but the steady norwester winds somehow kept us safe...

Were there any survivors? Yes. But in our immediate area and for the rest of my mortal life there was one that I knew of- Dr. Lenny McAllister, a plastic surgeon that had been out sailing solo on New Years Eve and landed on our island after seeing what was left of the city.

When the garbage barges stopped coming our society was forced to change radically, from being garbage scavangers to learning to fish and growing corn from the popcorn we planted (Dr. Lenny was very helpful in this, becoming not only our medicine man but an all around advisor in many practical areas. And he was a real wizard with machinery, building a still for the desalination of seawater and salvaging generators for our wind farm made out of old umbrellas...)

Over the next few weeks my temple is constructed around me. Columns of old tires capped by a dome made from a fiberglass satellite dish- one of those really old models that are ten feet in diameter. It's here that I will live out my days.

Oona and Loona become my preistesses, my handmaidens, my hands and feet, the ones who and bathe and feed me, wipe my ass for me and take my poop off to use as night soil in the sacred orchard; and as I learn the language here they become my very best friends, although since they regard me as something far more than human they never completely relax around me.

Bones was a friend who treated me like a normal person, at least when we were alone together, playing chess and fooling around (!), but I found his endless nostalgia for the way things used to be quite depressing...

My favorite duty as a hermaphrodite diety was when babies were brought to me for blessing. I missed my daughter, and hoped she had died quickly when the end came...

And speaking of endings, as my 83th birthday approached and Bones informed me that as near as he could tell my sudden drastic weight loss was a symptom of cancer (which as you might suspect was endemic on our semi-irradiated little island), it was becoming obvious that I wasn't going to be around much longer. And since my people regarded me as immortal this was a real problem. I'd been settling more and more disputes between the island's four main families lately, the only thing preventing outright war being that The Goddess' word was deemed final. But luckily I thought I might have a solution...

Sili was a young transgender person who had been sneaking into my temple in private for years, praying for the great Loobaloo to turn the male form she'd been been born with into that of a girl, or even a halfling creature such as myself.

Sili was fortunate that her parents and the rest of the village here abided by her wishes to be considered female, but she was quite traumatized as her body began developing along masculine lines. It broke my heart that I wasn't really a goddess, and couldn't perform any magic for her. And also as her adolescence progressed---either through identifying with me so strongly or some quirk that would have happened anyway, she developed a serious amputee wannabe fetish. I was told how she'd been found several times having buried herself in the garbage up to her thighs, smiling down happily at where her legs appeared to end. Neither of these body-image conundra were something that a young person should have to go through, but they were there. They alone wouldn't have prompted me to go forth with my plan, but she was a bright kid, and very compassionate, who I felt would make an excellent Goddess Loobaloo. It was almost as if she'd been delivered to us by some providence far greater than the bogus god I was...

I met with Sili, who leapt at the idea of never being able to leap again.

"You're sure you want to do this, Sili? This isn't some fantasy. Once this is done there's no going back."

"Oh my dear Goddess, it's all I've ever wanted! You don't know what it's like to have all these horrible arms and legs and testicles!"

After this I conferred with her parents, and then with Dr. Lenny, outlining my plan to each in terms they could understand. The doctor was the hardest sell, saying that to remove perfectly good limbs would violate every ethical standard of medicine, but I finally convinced him, citing Sili's Body Image Integrity Disorder ("Is it really that different than removing 'perfectly good' nose flesh in a rhinoplasty? Or breasts for a female-to-male transsexual? Who are we to judge what's good for Sili?") and saying how chaos would descend on the island with my passing (remember Islam after Mohammed died?) if we didn't do this. Then I called the whole community together.

The Goddess announced that her physical shell was wearing out and would soon die. And that just as she had been born a male (I'd given my people an account of my life before the island, which they garbled and mythologized almost as quick as they heard it. I particularly liked the part about my trials in the "underworld" at the hands of the terrifying she-demon Martinette, and how she was being evoked to explain the presence of evil in the world!) so would her successor be. That upon my death my immortal spirit would pass on to Sili, who would from then on be the Goddess Loobaloo, until such time as she would need a successor, if one should voluntarily (I stressed) come forth.

Bones' outdoor operating theater wasn't the best there ever was, but it was fairly clean, and Sili was able to save up her own whole blood in the community refrigerator a few weeks in advance of her operation, in case it was needed...

Sili was anesthetized, castrated and her humeri and femora were truncated while the largest of my several left and right breast implants were being removed and sterilized, and then placed inside Sili's chest. Upon awakening she squirmed ecstatically at the sight of her sexy boobs and her bandaged stumps, at knowing she was so gloriously and permanently immobilized...

Over the next week as we recovered (or rather she recovered, I got worse) we continued our lessons, just a couple of sexy torso gals perched side by side in the temple, me trying to impart what little I knew about being a goddess while I still could. Sili loved what had been done to her but complained to me how much her chest hurt from the implants (wracked with cancer as I was, I wasn't terribly sympathetic about this!)

Then came the rigamarole of the goddess's transmigration into her new host. A scrap lumber funeral pyre was built for me, and I was set on top of it wrapped in flammable greasy cotton. Wires trailed from the spaghetti strainer on my head down to a bubbling lava light, which the villagers regarded as magical, and from there to the spaghetti strainer on Sili's head, who was perched on the Sacred Wheelchair looking far more scared about all this than I was. But I could see why she was. My journey was nearly over while she was facing the responsibilities of godhood...

As my pyre was lit, Bones secretly gave me a shot. I'd really had enough of pain for one lifetime. Before the fire even reached me the morphine knocked me out then paralyzed my heart and lungs, killing me deader than shit.
.

.
CHAPTER FIVE: MY DEATH AND BEYOND
.

My people thrived. Over the centuries they multiplied, going forth into more and more of the world as it became inhabitable. I'd like to say that wars and oppression were never perpetrated in my name. The most upsetting to me (maybe because we're otherwise pretty good about respecting sexual and gender self-determination) is a thing I'd feared from the outset- those few times when a less-than-willing candidate was railroaded into being feminized and mutilated and ensconced in the Temple as the Goddess for political reasons, for who their families were or whatever. But I really think Loobalism has had a much better track record than the other two big emerging religions. They're pretty darn mean (they're patriarchal- EWWWWW!).

Sili made a very good Goddess Loobaloo. 60% of the time she seemed to know right what to say, and the rest of the time she would pray to me for guidance. What's weird is that if I think really really hard, seven out of ten of these times I can communicate my decision to her, not like a conversation but more like a note folded and wedged between the slats of a park bench I knew she'd be sitting at later. I only seem to have this ability with my successors and the occasional Saint like you. And when the goddesses eventually grow old and die they all come HERE, wherever this is, since people are praying to them too. I never much though of it this way but Sili tells me that she finds being completely incorporeal even sexier than being limbless. Silly Sili!

It's a funny thing about death. You might have heard it proclaimed at some funeral, 'As long as we remember his wonderful deeds, his loving spirit, his humor, Joe So-and-So will never truly die...' And if you're like I was, you probably considered this some atheist's weak metaphorical grasping at straws in the face of our inevitable nonexistence; and you might have thought, 'Aw bullshit! The dude is DEAD! We can remember him all we want to, HE'S not gonna know about it!'

Well from what I've experienced, this statement seems to be right on the money. Moreso than any Heaven or Hell or reincarnation the religions promise. So that at your funeral you're right there in the room with them all, and can practically pick up and gnaw on one of the Buffalo wings at the reception afterward. And then little by little, as people stop thinking about you constantly, there's these intervals of nothingness, which you're jerked out of whenever someone misses you or recalls what an asshole you were and gloats over your dying. But finally, as memories fade and those who knew you die off themselves, the nothingness is pretty much all there is, interrupted only when someone walks by your gravestone and wonders who this long-ago person might have been. People instinctively know this, which is why so many want to be famous. The best thing, for those who value being sentient after death, is to have a monument in your nation's capitol or a museum they drag busloads of school kids through...

So now imagine that you're being revered as a diety. People all over the world are praying to you, asking your help. After a while you can almost start to believe your own press.

Maybe I don't deserve this---it was a case of mistaken identity that made me a goddess in the first place---but I deserve this more than I did Martinette's reviling me as a worm. Maybe we all deserve to have our godhood recognized. I have never felt so loved.
…..

“I guess I'm supposed to lie here, am I? Hoo-boy! Me on a psychiatrists couch, who'd a thunk it? Well Doc... Can I call ya Doc? I guess so, wit those degrees on the wall. Oxford, University of Heidelberg, Anaheim Asuza and Cucamonga Junior College, you must really know your stuff! Anyway. It's about this thing I do. I dunno if you'd call it a fetish or what; I'll leave the diagnosticatin' ta you, Doc.. But I'm never really happy, I never really feel like myself unless I'm all dolled up and feminine. Like the song goes, I enjoy bein' a goil. And I'm comin' ta hate more and more runnin around like a nekkid boy bunny. It just feels wrong! And it's feelin' wronger and wronger every day...”

“It didn't start out dat way. For years I thought I was doin' it for a laugh. To hoodwink dis chump who was givin' me grief all the time, by the name of Elmer Fudd. Always after me with dat big ol' blunderbuss he carries around like he's compinsatin' fer sumthing, if ya get my meanin'...

“I'm a pretty good quick-change artist, and when he would be chasin' me, I'd grab a conveniently placed dress or a nice skirt and blouse, some cute shoes and pretend to be some dame. It fooled him every time.

“But he wasn't the one I was really foolin'; I'm startin' ta see dat now. I'm confused, Doc. Or maybe I'm not confused. Maybe I'm just a coward. Me who could face down a charging bull, an abominable snowman, hunters, cannibals, Martians in Roman helmets- any weird sorta predicament or peril without breakin' a sweat. Maybe I was throwin' myelf into dese dangerous sitchyashuns ta prove that even though I present kinda androgynous sometimes I wasn't no little sissy-bunny; which growin' up in a tough boig like Brooklyn in the 1930's was somethin' ya really didn't wanna be! And also takin' on all them big dumb mooks who needed to be taught a lesson helped me avoid confrontin' what I was most afraid of all this time... Myself. My real self.

“But fer all these wacky adventures I kept havin'---I went to the moon once, did I ever tell ya that?---it always got back to Elmer. And sure he made it easy, bein' such a perfect sap, but there was more to it than I was tellin' myself. All that kissin' him right on the smacker and runnin' away I done over the years? I told myself I was just doin' it to be sarcastical; But I sure did it a lot! And since I been getting' in touch with my goily self and all other defenses is comin' down I can finally see why...

“What can I say? I'm in love with the big lug! I know, crazy, huh? I fought against admittin' that by fightin' him fer damn near a century! I kept on droppin' anvils on his head nad stuffin' dynamite down his pants even after he tried to reconcile. He gave up hunting, apologized, and gave me those lovely tapes of classical music. Vivaldi, Haydn, Mozart. I never took him fer a classical music fan but he's not the total maroon I thought he was, I'm seein' that now. Under that gruff and corpulent exterior lies a beautiful soul, the heart of a poet...”

THE PSYCHIATRIST NEVER SAYS A WORD, BUT BUGS TALKS ENOUGH FOR BOTH OF THEM, ANSWERING ALL HIS OWN QUESTIONS, EMBRACING THE GIRL-BUNNY INSIDE AND HIS TRUE FEELINGS FOR HIS PERENNIAL ARCHNEMESIS; UNTIL HE REALIZES HE'S SAID ALL HE NEEDS TOO....

“By gosh, Doc! You've really helped me understand who I am. All that defensive sarcasm, my smugness, that blithe attitude toward everything; pretendin' I don't give a damn about nothin' was masking a fear of any real commitment, keeping me isolated. I see now it was all just me being in denial about the girl bunny I am, that I always knew I was. I'm gonna stop pretendin' Doc. From now on call me Caitlyn! Caitlyn Bunny! Even though I haven't aged since 1938 I know life is too short to live a lie!”

“And my war with Elmer. Dat was another lie. I was pathetic, Doc. So afraid of rejection I masked my love behind a thousand acts of hostility and violence. I only hope that he can forgive me, and least let me tell him how much I love him! And if he'll have a used-to-be-boy-bunny for a girlfriend, I'll be the sweet and loyal goil a man like that desoives!” he gets up, “You can keep the rest of your fifty minutes Doc, I got things ta do! My life, my real life starts now. I'm so happy I could kiss you, but there's only one man I want to kiss from now on!”

As the door closes behind Bugs Doctor Kookinheimer turns toward us. He pulls his beard down revealing it was only attached to his face by an elastic band. The face is none other than Elmer Fudd. He says: “Say what you will about the weliability of ACME pwoducts, their subwiminal message tapes weally do the twick! Uh huhuhuhuhuhuhuh...”
.

Notorious hatemonger Fred "God Hates Fags" Phelps gets a visit from those loveable Warner siblings Yakko, Wakko & Dot, who adopt him as their "new special friend". What can I say? Some people just really need to have an anvil dropped on their head.

.

A room someplace. It is night time, or perhaps the windows have all been covered, but all the light in here emanates from a few scattered lamps; these large swaths of darkness creating a stark expressionist composition of light and shadow. The place has the drab functional ambience of the office in a warehouse or some makeshift military command center. We see a desk with a gooseneck lamp and assorted junk on it, and racks of steel shelving against the the wall on either side of it, between which hangs a signed photograph of Freddy Kruger ("To Fred- Keep giving people Nightmares! All the best; XXX! Freddie") in a cheap little ugly frame and a large bulletin board crowded with sheets of paper, their messages all indistinct scribbles and exclamation points...

The silhouetted form of a little old man in a suit and an oversized cowboy hat is standing with his back to us, speaking into the handset of an old fashioned telephone on the desk. His tone is serious, astonished. "What's that? Horribly murdered you say? You mean just walking down the street?"

A tinny voice buzzes from the earpiece and the old man nods, his hat going up and down.

"Oh I see, the victim was a cross dresser. So it was a hate crime then .......... Dear Lord! They did that? Oh that is just brutal! ............. And then they joked about it later? Simply beastly! So where and when is the funeral? Could you spell that?"

Taking up a pencil, he starts scribbling on a pad of paper. His voice becomes slower and quieter, his posture sagging more with each new revelation: "Closed casket, you say? I can see why, I mean if they- Oh Mercy, that is just vicious! That is just senseless! That is just..."

"WONDERFUL!" he booms, and now that we see his haggard face from the front (above a bolo tie with a clasp representing the skull of a Texas longhorn) it becomes clear that the ghastly news he's been hearing is making him very, very happy. Crazy-happy. He throws his head back and laughs maniacally. As his laughter builds and builds his hard beady little eyes grow into big whirling red spirals; and his teeth are revealed to be (at least for this one scene...) triangular and razor sharp.

This man is the Reverend Fred Phelps, leader and patriarch of the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka Kansas, and an actual person, unfortunately ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Phelps ). As his hand hangs up the phone we briefly see the contents of the desk: Coffee mug. Pencil holder brimming with chewed up yellow pencils. A bobbing plastic novelty "drinky bird". A scale model of a guillotine. A slim paperback book called 101 DEAD U.S. SOLDIER JOKES and another entitled DROWNING PUPPIES FOR FUN & PROFIT...

He jumps up, agitated, and starts rushing around the room. "The pervert's funeral is tomorrow! That's not much time to get ready. Okay now, let's see ........ What do we need? What do we need?"

He reaches up and grabs his hat to make sure it's still on his head, "Stetson hat- Check!"

He hurries over to a bunch of rainbow-colored picket signs leaning up against the wall, and flips through them, quickly surveying their venomous messages, "Hate signs- Check!"

He pulls a scroll of paper out of his pocket, unfurls it and glances at it. "List of the true faithful who will join me on my holy crusade tomorrow, all seven of 'em! Check! No wait, make that six," he corrects himsef and crosses off one of the names with a pencil, "Cousin Jasper is in jail."

He zips to another table where a loud hailer is lying, picks it up and says through it in a harsh booming voice, "Bullhorn, with batteries charged- Check! Oh man, do I love taunting funerals with this thing! There's just nothing like mocking people when they're at their lowest!"

An outside view of the house reveals that it is daytime. We sees a weedy dirt front yard decorated with a busted toilet, assorted half buried car parts, several plastic milk crates and a spooky skeletal dead oak tree, from which hangs an effigy of Uncle Sam, with a noose around his neck and X's for eyes, wearing a crudely lettered cardboard sign that says I'M A BIG QUEER!

Three intrepid Girl Scouts (who with their floppy doglike ears and cherry-tomato noses don't appear to be quite human...) make their way up a walkway almost completely hemmed in by signs on posts stuck into the dirt, bearing messages such as "BEWARE OF GOD", "GO TO HELL!". and "GOD HATES AVON LADIES". The middle scout, who is carrying a large stack of boxes, has on a backwards red baseball cap instead of the beret-like hats her two friends wear.

At the front door a white gloved hand on a tubular black wrist puts its finger to the doorbell button.

Back in his gloomy lair Fred hears the DING DONG! and sets down the bullhorn, "Hmmmmmmm, now who could that be?"

Phelps's house may be run down and desperately in need of a paint job, but it has a nice porch. Or at least it's a large one- with a pair of sculpted wooden columns holding up the roof above it, a rusted iron hibachi and a couple of large clay pots with the shrivelled dead remnants of plants poking up from them. The three Girl Scouts---who are in fact the Animaniacs: Yakko, Wakko, and Dot---are crowded around the door, which is opened by a white hatted old man who isn't much taller than they are.

Yakko---the tallest of the three, and every inch the confident salesman---snakes his leg out and sticks his foot in the door, "Good Day Sir, we're selling girl scout cookies for our troop."

"No time to talk. We're getting ready to go picket a funeral," says Phelps dismissively, when suddenly his sweet tooth kicks in and cookies start to sound good to him. He steps out onto the porch, pulling at his lower lip, "Well I am rather partial to those peanut butter ones. Do you have those?"

"Do-Si-Dos? Yep we sure do! Right here," answers Yakko brightly.

Wakko has been delegated to carry all the cookies. He is staggering under the weight of the pile of boxes he's holding, which is so tall that we can't see his head. As Yakko lifts the top four boxes off the stack Wakko's face is revealed. The preacher stares suspiciously at Wakko then takes a closer look at Yakko, "Hey waaaaaait a minute! You can't be Girl Scouts, you're not even girls."

Dot, the smallest Warner, puts her hands on her hips and growls ferociously, "Hey watch it, Buster!"

He looks down, noticing her for the first time. "Okay well you are, Miss. But these two ......... Why, you're boys!"

Yakko pats his chest under the sash festooned with merit badges, then pulls out the front of his red pants and peers down into them, "Well son of a gun, he's right. How did we wind up in the Girl Scouts, Wakko?"

"That's a gooooood question," drawls Wakko in his gluey Liverpudlian accent.

"I'll tell ya how," declares Phelps fiercely, "It's the DEVIL!"

The Warner siblings gape in horror and in a flash they have clambered up onto Phelps' back and shoulders, as if he's some kind of defensive stronghold. They are all wearing army helmets, except that Yakko's is a long-handled kitchen pot and Dot's is pink with a big daisy on the front. They are pointing popguns in various directions- "WHERE?! WHERE?! WHERE?!!"

Phelps shakes himself and the Warners tumble off of him. He points a gnarled finger at them and warns, "The Devil is everywhere. In the culture, the schools, the media, spreading sick depraved ideas-"

"You mean like Windows Vista?" asks Wakko.

"Worse than that even. I'm talking about the one-world faggo-feminist Catholic secular humanist crypto-homo Zionist Occupied World Health Organization transmorphodite liberal Fox News agenda!"

"WHERE?! WHERE?! WHERE?!!" cry the Animaniacs in alarm, and leap up onto him again for protection.

"Stop doing that," hollars Phelps as he once again dislodges them, "And get offa my porch! You know, I figured this day would come, the Girl Scouts letting boys and mutants and furries in. I mean, they're already allowing those disgusting lesbians to join! Evil is what it is! The Girl Scouts are evil! Your cookies are evil-"

"No," moans Wakko forlornly, "Not the coooooookies!"

"YOU'RE evil," concludes Phelps, hunched forward, his face right in close to theirs.

This is too much for Wakko. He burst into tears and buries his face in Yakko's shoulder, sobbing hysterically. Yakko pats his back, while Phelps crosses his arm and grins at the distress he's caused Wakko.

Dot glares at the old man, "Shame on you, Mister! Picking on a bunch of kids and making my poor brother cry! You are a very bad man! Why are you such a big old meanie?!"

"I'm not a meanie," protests Phelps, sounding wounded.

"Hello, Earth to Nutbag," says Yakko in a sarcastically 'reasonable' tone, "You go around picketting funerals. Who the heck does that? They even passed a federal law on account of you."

"But those people at those funerals deserve it! They're sinners! They just don't understand how important it is too hate queers every second of every minute of every hour of every day. That makes 'em fag enablers, and for that their souls are damned."

"So that's why you're a preacher?" asks Dot, all wide-eyed innocence, "To try and to keep all those misguided folks from going to hell?"

"Nope. They're beyond any sort of help. All I can do is console myself with the fact that they'll be spending forever and ever having a really, really, really bad time. This country, and probably the whole world, why they're just wicked! And there is no doubt at all about where they're headed," smiles Phelps, relishing the notion.

Yakko scratches the side of his head, "You mean to say everybody's going to Hell?"

"Just about. And it's their own damn fault, for refusing to do what I- I mean what God tells 'em to!"

"Then who isn't destined for that fiery place?" asks Wakko.

"Well me, that I know of."

Yakko, Wakko and Dot all cry out together, "JUST YOU?!?!!"

"Isn't that enough?" asks Phelps in a timid voice, surprised at their surprise.

Now the Warner kids are stepping cautiously backward, edging slowly away from him. Yakko stammers nervously, "We're gonna go fetch a nice doctor for you now, so you can uh ....... have a little talk. The doctor is your friend. H-he wants to help you..."

Phelps ignores him, declaring, "I have it on the highest authority that The Lord is mighty P.O.'d at all his children down here on Earth, and is fixin' to bring the Divine Sledge-o-Matic down on this planet any day now! But I know that I'll be saved. Because you see..." He removes his hat and holds it reverently in front of him and sings slowly, at the higher reaches of his voice:

"Some people think that God's a wimp
forgiving everything;
A God of love and kindness
But that's not who's praise I sing.
Because I know, he speaks to me
and expounds with great clarity,
that psychotic brutality
is just ....... his ....... kind ........ of thiiiiiiiiiiiiiiing!"

The tempo of the music quickens, becoming a snazzy soft shoe. A hunched over, toothless old woman with a humungous nose is walking with the aid of a cane down the sidewalk past the house. Although she is meters away from the porch Wakko somehow snatches the cane away from her and flips it to Phelps. The preacher leans on it jauntily, dipping his knees in time to the music as he sings...

"When bad things happen to nice people;
That's music to my ears!
If those people are sodomy-ful;
That's music to my ears!
As fags and freaks there's nothing so evil,
So when they meet with something lethal
Their anguished wails make me quite gleeful-
That's music to my ears!"

In a moment of abandon he throws his hat aside. The old lady had been rather indignant about having her cane stolen, but then curiousity got the better of her and she has wandered up onto the porch to see what all the fuss is about. She now has fallen victim to Spontaneous Musical Interlude Syndrome, as she and the three Warners sway back and forth behind Phelps, singing "Bobba Buh-Bomp Bomp Bomp" in accompaniment to his:

"Pain and suffering, sorrow, grief;
That's music to my ears!
For those who don't share my beliefs;
That's music to my ears!
And the one belief that I hold dear
Is God hates all degenerate queers,
And when they die, if you should cheer-
That's music to my ears!"

"An earthquake in some foreign land
That's music to my ears,
The murder of a transwoman
That's music to my ears;
A busload of dykes going off a cliff
makes 'Little Fred' grow strangely stiff,
And the gruesome fate of Doctor Scratchensniff-
That's music to my ears!"

The Warners are somehow now out of their girl scout uniforms and back in their trademark garb. As Phelps concludes his song they cheer wildly, Wakko leaping into the air and whistling with two fingers wedged in his mouth. They shower the reverend with roses, who nods and bows his head, blushing and yet loving all this praise.

"Thank you, thank you, you're too kind," gushes Phelps, "And now for my next number, I'd like to do-"

Yakko---wearing the minister's cowboy hat---yanks the microphone Phelps has somehow aquired away from him, saying, "I'm sorry! We'd love to hear it but we're really kind of busy, we just don't have time. Everything just moves so fast these days; what with instant messaging, minute rice, speed dating, quickie divorces, rapid transit, hyperactive children, zoom lenses, Jiffy Pop-"

And as if to illustrate, while Yakko is saying this his two sibs are slipping a merit badge sash over Phelps' torso and sticking a Girl Scout beanie on his head, working so quickly that he doesn't seem to realize what's going on as they pile all the boxes of cookies into his arms.

"...flash drives, quick-sand, fast forward, bullet trains, Wikipedia, Swift Boat politics and Speedy Gonzales." The eldest Warner concludes his spiel by patting him on the head and saying, "But we'll certainly enjoy the cookies young lady, and good luck with selling the rest of them."

"Gee thanks, Mister!" grins the old man childishly as the trio withdraws into "their" house, leaving him standing there on the porch, looking at first complacent, and then confused. And then---as he realizes that he's not a Girl Scout and has been tricked---quite angry! He drops his pile of boxes, tears off the sash and beanie, and starts pounding furiously on the door!

A strange little round shuttered window high on the green wall next to the door opens and Yakko appears. He is wearing a very fake looking green wig and a long drooping green moustache.

"Nobody gets in to see th' Wizard! Not no way, no how! So scram!" he snarls in a keening old-codger's voice, and then abruptly pulls the shutter closed!

Even angrier, Phelps raises his fist to pound on the door again, but then gets an idea. He storms down the porch steps and around the corner of the house...

Inside the Phelps home Yakko turns away from the odd little hatchlike window and steps down off the chair in front of it, dusting his palms against each other in a "Good Riddance" gesture.

In the parlor---a cozier looking part of this house than we had seen before---the Warners quickly settle in and make themselves at home. Dot is playing Ragtime Cowboy Joe on the old upright piano.

Wakko walks in from the kitchen, licking his chops and carrying an improbably tall sandwich, that seems to have everything from asparagus to pizza slices hanging out from between the two slices of bread. His mouth expanding alarmingly, he consumes the towering sandwich in one gulp, swallowing noisily.

And Yakko is posing in front of a big mirror in Phelps' giant hat, pretending to be the man himself, "Oh gawd I hate queers; Uh-HATEM-uh-HATEM-uh-HATEM-uh-HATEM! And God hates them too! That's why he made 'em, jest so he could hate 'em- Yup! Yup! Yup!"

"Relax brother dear, he's gone! Let us enjoy the spoils of victory," grins Dot.

"Right," says Yakko, brightening. "I can't believe he fell for that old gag. What a sap!"

"I know, what a chump!" titters Dot.

"What a dolt!"

"What a maroon!"

"What a dumb cluck!" Yakko smirks.

"What a dip-thong!"

"What a fondue skewer!"

"What a rama-lama-DING-DONG!" Dot giggles.

"What a sick, twisted piece of-" Yakko stops in mid-sentance and changes his tone, offering a big fake toothy smile to someone we can't see, "Oh .............. Hi there!"

A square trap door has opened in the wooden floor, its underside labelled SECRET ATF ESCAPE TUNNEL. The top half of Fred Phelps protrudes from it. His brow is a heavy dark ridge and he's literally fuming: a greasy mottled little cone shaped cloud churning above his head.

From a worm's-eye vantage point out in the house's front yard we see the front door opening and the three Warner sibs being ejected from it. They fly toward us side by side by side, almost as if sitting on an invisible couch, and then grimace from the impact as they hit the ground and skid to a stop directly in front of us, looming gigantically.

After locking the front door Phelps walks to his study, slapping his palms across each other in the same exact gesture that Yakko's had used earlier, satisfied that he is rid of the three pests.

He sits down at his computer, turns it on and says, "Well now, the World is sure gonna hear about this! I'll post another of my blogs, tellin' how the Girl Scouts are the Daughters of Satan, and every last stinking one of 'em is goin' to Hell!"

He begins typing frantically, cackling evilly from time to time, and muttering, "Stupid Girl Scouts, with their friendship bracelets and their cootie catchers and their Bingo-was-his-name-O!"

When suddenly a spooky, wavering voice is calling out, "FRRE-E-E-E-E-D-DDD ...... PHE-E-L-L-L-P-PPS!"

The bogus preacher jerks, and looks around, "Huh? Who said that?"

"FRE-E-E-E-E-E-E-D-DD PHE-E-E-E-L-L-L-P-PPS!" calls the voice again.

This time we see the source, a slotted vent on the wall alongside his knee, but Phelps is looking up toward the ceiling for some reason, "Who is this?"

On the outside of the house is another vent, which Yakko and Wakko kneel in front of, Yakko struggling to keep a straight face as he moans eerily, "DOST THOU NOTTEST RECOGNIZE ME? I AM THY LORD-ETH GOD-ETH IN HEAVEN!"

Phelps cocks his head, "You sound different somehow this time..."

"THOU DAREST TO DOUBTETH MY WORDETH?"

Phelps bows and grovels, "No, of course not, Your Utmost Extremity! Never!"

"THEN PROVEST THYSELF ................................................ ETH!"

"Yes, anything! How?"

"GO THOU TO YONDER NEAREST LAMP AND REMOVETH THEE BULB OF INCANDESCENCE."

Beside Phelp's desk is a floor lamp. He removes the lampshade and then unscrews the bulb, and addresses the ceiling again, "I have done as you asked, Your Highest Divinity..."

"IT IS GOOD. NOW TAKEST YE THY FINGER, AND PLACETH IT-"

Wakko leans in close to Yakko's ear and whispers something. Yakko snickers nastily and tells him, "I like how you think, but we'd never get it past the censors. Let's go with the finger..."

"What was that, Lord?" asks Phelps, confused by the muffled indistinct conversation he'd just heard.

"I SAID: TAKE THY FINGER AND RAMMEST IT INTO YE OPENING FROM WHENCE YE LIGHTETH BULBETH HATH BEEN REMOVETH'D FROM!"

"But wait a second! You want me to put my finger in here?"

"RI-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-GGGHHTTT," intones the voice of God throatily.

Phelps gulps, "But there's electricity in there!"

"R-R-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-GGGGGGHHHHTTT."

"Uh ...... But won't I get shocked?"

"OH DOUBTFUL CUR, DOST THOU BELIEVE IN ME OR NOT?! WITH FAITH THOU SHANTEST BE HARMETH'D!"

"I believe! I believe!" whimpers Fred, and jams his finger into the receptacle.

Tethered only by his finger he rises off the floor, bouncing rigidly, his skeleton flashing inside his flesh like a neon sign, before slumping at last to the floor. He looks rather singed.

Phelps staggers to his feet. Feeling betrayed, he groans, "But you said I wouldn't get hurt..."

"AND WITH FAITH THOU WOULDN'ST HAVEST NOT SUFFEREDETH! UNWORTHY SERVANT, THOU HAST FAILED ME! I SHOULD SMITE THEE WITH UNCONTROLLABLE SODOMIFIC URGES. I CAN DO THAT, YOU KNOW..."

The bogus minister falls to his knees and wails, "OH PLEASE NO LORD, ANYTHING BUT THAT! Just give me another test ...... I'll be worthy!"

"VERILY WELL THEN .............. DOTH THOU HAVEST A WAFFLE IRON?"
.

Meanwhile, Dot is quite frustrated not to be able to see the show. She has been running up and down the outside wall of the house trying to find a window to see in through, but they are all covered up with aluminum foil. Finally she locates a clear one, on the side of the house's attached garage. It is rather high on the garage's wall but there is a stack of wooden crates and barrels, patched tires, iron bedframes and other 1940's-vintage cartoon crap right next to it, which she scales easily. From her perch she signals to her siblings farther down the side of the house, pantomiming: Get HIM into HERE!

Big brother nods at the logic of this. Forms a circle with his thumb and index finger and signals his agreement.
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Back in the house, Phelps gulps loudly, "A waffle iron?"

"NEVERMIND THAT! I HAST CHANGED MY VAST AND UNKNOWABLE MIND. GOETH THOU OUT TO THINE GARAGETH, AND AWAITETH YE THERE," decrees Yakko, before he and Wakko abandon their primitive intercom.

Phelps exits his study.

Phelps enters the garage. We see a rusty Ford Edsel with a very crooked radio antenna, a drill press, table saw, lots of benches and tools. We also see a high window with the three Warners huddled behind it, grinning mischeviously; but he doesn't notice them...

The Reverend looks around, "Are you here?"

"OF COURSE, I AM EVERYWHERE," calls Yakko, his hands cupped around his mouth, "OR DOST THOU DOUBTEST THAT AS WELL?"

"But I don't! Really, Your Infiniteness! Let me prove myself!"

"RI-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-IGGHT! THEN PICKETH UP THE ANVIL THOU SEE-ETH ON YON WORK TABLE, AND LIFTETH IT ABOVE THE CROWN OF THINE HEAD!" says Yakko over the top of the window. It's a transom style window, a grid of square panes---hinged at the bottom---that opens into the garage. And to make themselves comfortable first Dot and then her brothers have lain down on the angled window, which is held in place by a chain in either top corner...

The reverend is not a powerful man, but he manages to drag the anvil off of the table and hug it to his chest. Then---straining, arms quaking----he manages to raise it into the space above his head. Sweating profusely, he grunts with effort, "Are you sure about this?"

"THAT SOUNDS LIKE DOUBT TO ME," chides Yakko, "AND DOUBT PUTS ME IN A SMITEY MOOD. YOU KNOW, THIS TIME NEXT WEEK YOU COULD BE DANCING IN THE BALLETS TROCKADERO!"

"No, PLEASE!"

"THEN DROP THE ANVIL!!"

"Oh God I don't wanna be gay," whines Phelps miserably, and releases the anvil.

And at the instant he does, he sees the three Warners---watching raptly from their transparent perch, their chins resting in their palms---and realises that he's been had. With a loud

The Warner's laughter is so raucous and out of control, all three of them pounding on the panes, that the chains holding the window up snap and it drops forward- sending them all sliding off of it and into the garage. Uh oh.

Agonizingly and with great effort, Phelps removes the anvil from his head and drops it. Being a cartoon character his recovery is quite rapid---his head popping back into its regular shape with an appropriate sound effect---and after shaking it a bit he can once again focus his eyes.

"YOU!!" he roars, in a rage-choked voice that promises terrible and immediate violence. As does the large and heavy axe that he is now picking up.

The Animaniacs take off---bouncing up and down at a rate that is almost a blur---while hooting crazily in high pitched voices: "HOO HOO! HOO HOO! HOO HOO! HOO HOO! HOO HOO!"

They bound out the door and into the yard like this, until all at once they stop in midair, perfectly stationary. His siblings wait patiently as Yakko addresses us, "You will note that we are performing a signature bit from the immortal Daffy Duck. The scriptwriters wanted us to do a Bugs Bunny bit, but there's no way I'm kissing him!"

Then---just as abruptly---they resume their hooting-and-bouncing escape. Axe in hand, Phelps chases them.

Running normally now, they and then their pursuer vault over the low picket fence, into the backyard right next to Phelps's, where his neighbor has hung an immense amount of laundry out to dry. Clotheslines zigzag every which way, forming a maze of bedsheets and clothing. Phelps chases his prey all through these fabric corridors, the soundtrack cueing "Here We Go Gathering Nuts in May, Nuts in May, Nuts in May..."; And at times there seem to be more than one of each Warner kid appearing here and then there as they flee through the maze.

They emerge from the maze's far exit, which has a carousel style-clothesline on a post directly in front of it. The Warners---being shorter---duck down and zip under the stuff hanging from it. But Phelps blunders into it with a loud OOOF!; causing the whole clothesline to spin like a brightly colored pinwheel!

When it expels him a second later he is missing his weapon, and appears quite dizzy. Too dizzy to notice the attrocious pumpkin-flesh-orange-and-pea-soup-green checkerboard dress he is wearing, or that somehow he's aquired four brightly colored jumbo curlers, rolled inside random bunches of his whispy hair. But as his vertigo fades he looks down at himself, and lets loose a high pitched shriek!

"Oh Girlfriend, you are adorable!" gushes Dot, "That wasn't so hard, now was it? Now you can give up all that being-a-big-stupid-crazy-man stuff, and embrace the cute girl you always were inside! Cuteness rocks! We're gonna have such fun together!"

"B-b-but this isn't mine," rasps Phelps, grasping a handful of the front of the dress, his expression wild with fear.

Wakko looks up at him and declares with solemn ernestness, "I want you to know I don't think of you as anything but a real woman."

"No! Really! This isn't mine! It's ........ it's..." Phelps notices Slappy Squirrel stepping out onto the house's back porch with a basket of linens, and points, "It's HERS!"

Slappy makes a disgusted face, "Nice try, Sister. But I wouldn't be caught dead in a schmatte like that!"

"I swear, I didn't do this. Look, I've got my regular clothes on under this," stammers Phelps, and grabbing the neck of the dress he yanks it off over his head, "See?"

But underneath he is wearing shiny black hose, garters, panties and an obviously empty black brassiere.

"GAAAAAHHH!!" cries Phelps, and wriggles out of the lingerie in a frantic blur. But now somehow he is dressed as Little Bo Peep, complete with bonnet and shepard's crook.

He tears this outfit off, becoming 7-of-9 from Star Trek: Voyager, with Borg hardware is imbedded in his face, and a set of conical falsies poking out from the two-tone uniform that tightly hugs his frail and bony male physique.

His hysteria mounting, he begins removing garments in rapid succession! For a split second each, we see an 80's businesswoman's knee skirt and serious jacket, a white nurses uniform with a cap, a colorful party dress, a bustled evening gown worthy of an Oscars attendee, a delicate silk kimono, a goth chick's leather skirt, boots and long striped stockings; and so on...

When he stops to catch his breath---panting loudly---he is wearing Bjork's infamous 2005 swan dress.

This causes him to scream even louder, and he takes off running, tearing off outfits at such a tremendous rate that no single one is distinguishable; which causes him to leave an impressive mass of them behind himself as he runs. Seen from a vantage point a hundred feet up it's an impressive sight- a great multicolored mound of fabric materializing behind him like a jet's contrail.

Now we see him in profile, in what is probably a park, gasping laborously as he runs up the crest of a oddly-shaped little hillock that looks like it might've come from a Dr. Seuss drawing. Phelps is clearly quite fatigued. For the last dozen or fifteen changes he has slowed way down from the superhuman speed his panic had given him earlier, each outfit now taking twice as long to remove as the previous one...

And we notice that with each dress he removes he is shrinking, as if he's jettisonning his own body mass along with the outfits. He is morphing, his features softening, becoming not just increasingly female but younger and younger, smaller and smaller; becoming a teen, a tween, an 8 year old, a 5 year old, a toddler, and finally---reaching the summit---a diapered baby girl, with one big pink bow in the hair on top of her head. There are no more outfits to take off...

The three Warners are waiting there for her, bent over with their hands on their knees, going "Awwwww!"

But the baby is having none of it! She screams at them, "What have you done to me?!"

"Hey, don't blame us," shrugs Yakko, "We were holding out for the 'Slick ramp to Hell' ending."

"You can't do this to me! This is Identity Death! BWAAAAAAAHHH! I'm forgetting ........ Forgetting how to taaaalk," she shrieks, "And oh no! Is forgetting how to HAAAAAAAAATE! Waaaaaaah, wwwaaaaaah, waaaaaah! My mind is going, Dave. I kin feel it, I kin feel it .......... Oh! Whadda world, whadda woooorld, where some dum-boo kinda Warnerguys kin destwoy my boodiful hateful-nish! AGGUM GAGGUM BUGGUM BWAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!"

The ability to stand seems to be eluding her as well. Her stubby little legs start to wobble, and then give out, dropping her onto her diapered bottom- "WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHH!!!!"

"There there. Oh you poor thing," sighs Dot as she scoops the yowling infant up and slings her across her shoulder. As Auntie Dot rocks her and pats her back the infant calms right down. The burp that escapes her is loud and deep, a belch worthy of a large man; and from the way Yakko and Wakko are waving away the stink we know that what has been outgassed is the last of the evil that was Fred Phelps.

"Izzum wizzum woozums!" intones Yakko, shakes a rattle that the fascinated baby tries clumsily to grasp.

He relenquishes the rattle to Wakko, and lifting the clipboard stuffed with papers in his other hand, he turns to a pair of neatly dressed young men, "Well Tom, Bill. It looks like everything is in order for the adoption. I just need the two of you to sign here. And here ........... and oh, down here.

Both men sign the document.

"Just out of curiousity," asks Yakko, "Have you thought of a name?"

Tom puts a loving hand on his lifemate's shoulder, and says, "We kind of like Ellen."

"That's a lovely name," says Yakko, and shakes their hands vigorously.

Dot kisses each of them on the cheek and holds the baby out.

Bill takes her, rocking her in his arms before lowering her into into an elegant art deco baby carraige with lines like a Deusenberg. His mouth bunches up and he is blinking, fighting futilely to hold back his happy tears.

"I know, Honey. I know," says Tom tenderly, as he wipes a single tear from his own cheek. Then he says to the Warners, "Well, we'd best be getting home..."

Wakko has been too fascinated by the infant to notice much of what anyone else is doing. He has been making puffy-cheeked "googie" faces at the baby, which the baby has been gleefully returning. But now the stroller is moving, and he is sad to see his little pal go.

We pan back away from the three Animaniacs, who now stand alone on the little hill.

"Bye bye..."

"So long...."

"Fabooooooo!"

The happy parents throw their arms around each other, relishing this magical moment in their relationship as they push the stroller off across the park toward the big orange setting sun...
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[It was a real challenge to write anything even remotely funny involving such an unfunny man.
Hope I didn't botch it too abyssmally ........................ Hugs, Laika]
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America's new adolescent singing sensation was not exactly what she seemed. She was...

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The world hadn't seen anything like this since .......... Well, since the last teen girl singer to go soaring up the charts. From Lil' Boo Teena's first appearance on American Idolator the votes poured in as for no other contestant in the history of the show. Some might deem it a sad commentary on the state of U.S. politics that she received more votes than all the presidential candidates for that year's election combined. But others would say she deserved them. After the performance of Proud Mary that gained her the show's top honor a teary eyed Tina Tooner---one of the judges that season---declared her a worthy namesake. And Simon Scowl---the show's ordinarily caustic host---was so moved by it he proposed marriage to her right on the spot. After he was reminded that he was already married, and that the girl was only fifteen he claimed he had only been kidding; but few believed him.

When her first album BOO-TEENA CALL went platinum in six and a half minutes, it seemed that here at last was an "American Idol" who truly lived up to the title. In fact you would have to call her an International Idol, as young girls from Chicago to Madrid to Osaka ran out and bought her albums, posters, t-shirts with her likeness on them, and then her line of chic apparel that she offered in collaboration with the UberMart department store chain.

There were of course cynics, and scoffers, and those who just can't stand the sight of someone else's success. They claim that her debut album was shallow, derivative and overproduced. That her lyrics were indecipherable, and even her voice was largely the product of technical wizardly. The Littermans and the Leenos made all the expected jokes about her, but this didn't prevent them from fawning over her in an almost comically starstruck manner when they had her on their late night talk shows.

Her fan based crossed all demographic boundries. White suburban kids loved her, as did inner city blacks, and her cd of soulful Spanish language ballads CANCIONES EL POLLO LOCO---which had been heralded as a marketing disaster---was not only a surprise hit in the U.S., but secured her fame from Juarez to Tierra del Fuego. And boys, while most of them would adamantly deny listening to her music, were often noticed doing moves that looked suspiciously like the Chicken Dance as they listened to her tunes on their I-Pods and such...

Parents adored her, and found in her a role model they hoped their children would emulate. This wasn't some brazen little slut like Madonna or Britney, but a shy unassuming girl who seldom said anything, and for the most part seemed confused by all the hype and celebrity that now surrounded her. Her only vice seemed to be an almost addictive fondness for sunflower seeds and unpopped popcorn kernels. So the adults were for the most part indulgent when their daughters began wearing red rubber wattles under their chins and beaklike fake noses in imitation of their skinny-legged young idol.

The rumors that started to surface about her were so preposterous that at first not even the Sludge Report would touch them. They began with one elderly man, Orlo Milo Rollo, who had a history of mental illness; and could be seen every place she appeared, beating her fans and sometimes even the paparazzi to the scene, to shout out a voice approaching panic, the imprecation: "She's a chicken, I tell ya! A giant chicken!!"

When a restraining order did not dissuade him from harrassing the famous singer, the old codger was tried and shipped off to California's Vacaville State Prison. But subsequent events would lead to a commutation of his sentance...

While performing an impressive leap during a dance number at that year's Grammy Awards, Boo-Teena's wig flew off- revealling a gangly, oversized Rooster. The music stopped, and for a moment the entire Dorothy Chandler Pavilion became dead silent. You could have heard a pin drop. Lil' Boo-Teena glanced around at her audience in a stunned and dull witted manner. And when the boos and jeers began, the programs and other missles began pelting her, she flew off----in the struggling ungainly manner of barnyard fowl---never to be seen again!

The world was shocked, that not only was the pop star not female, but she wasn't even human. The outcry was immediate, and it was deafening. When folks realized how totally and how easily they had been taken in, they became furious. This male creature---this animal----had deceived everyone, and obviously for the most perverted and despicable reasons. FBI files soon revealled that the young diva was actually a suspicious character named Chicken Boo, who had committed a number of similar frauds over the years- posing as everything from a famous matador to an astronaut.

Bill O'Really devoted an entire week of shows to the specter of creeping trans-speciesism. Her records were burned in mass rallies. The children of America had been traumatized by this nefarious poltroon (The plaintive cry of one young girl---"Say it ain't so, Boo!"---became the defining sound bite of this scandal); And a historic class action suit, the first that was based entirely on charges of emotional distress, was in the works. But where was Lil' Boo-Teena? That's a question that remains unanswered to this day...

Still, in spite of all the rage and vipuritude, he had his defenders. What had he---or she---done that was so terribly wrong? People For the American Way and PETA championed a chicken's rights to participate in our way of life. And The Three and a Half Tenors recorded a song about this great pretender that went to #2 on the charts for several weeks:

What happens when a transgender boy grows up in a world where there ARE no males?
From girl to boy, from Amazon to American, from Themyscira to Gotham City...
Kip Trevor's life has been one incredible journey!

NOTE: All I know about the DC comics universe comes from a handful of feature films, tv shows like Supergirl and The Flash, and a half dozen cartoon series; so this probably isn't even remotely canon. Let's just say all the discrepancies + inaccuracies you'll find here are because this takes place on Earth #27, where whatever I got right is the same as our world and whatever I didn't isn't...

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My name is Kip Trevor, and at 16 years of age I've had a very unusual life so far. I live in Gotham Heights---the most opulent neighborhood in this grim and dirty city---in a gigantic house, but that's not the unusual part...

I know several of these “superheroes” that you read about and see on the news by their real first names. And this might be a pretty rare thing to be privy to, but knowing this group of people with weird powers is not that strange to me. Not compared to my early life and the changes I've been through since then...

Also, I haven't always been a boy. I was born a girl and spent most of my life trying to live as one. But that too is hardly anything unusual these days; There have been a lot of transgender people telling their stories in the past few years, and my story is the same as most of them in many ways. But there's some huge differences too...

What makes my life until recently so unusual is that on the island where I grew up and had to discover and come to terms with my transgender nature there were no males. None. Since ancient times the whole population of our island has been female, and for centuries the location and even the existence of our all-girl island has been a secret that we jealously guarded from the rest of the world, to the point that we used to simply kill any male who set foot on Themyscira's perfect beaches right there on the spot. We have since found other means---like amnesia drugs---but we still live in fear of outsiders. Of men for the most part; but even Amelia Earhardt had her plane destroyed and was forced to live out her days among us when she set down on our isle, lest she tell anyone about us.

From the day the Amazons of Themyscira are first able to pick up a shield and wield a sword or a spear we are taught every form of combat that doesn't require modern weapons such as guns. Generations of warrior women have trained and prepared for the day when somebody might invade us. Our island is without a doubt the single most closed off, insular society on Earth.

And yet the women there enjoy peace and security and healthy long lives full of culture and learning in a warm loving community where everyone helps everyone and no one is exploited. And with a deep spirituality centered around the worship of Aphrodite and Artemis but most of all the great goddess Hera. Nicknamed “Paradise Island”, it really is the closest thing to paradise us mortals have ever seen!

I was miserable there.

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For as long as I can remember I had deep sense that I was different than other girls, and that I somehow didn't belong in this paradise of women. I felt a terrible wrongness that I couldn't explain or define; but I never once associated it with me being a boy, because all I had been told about boys and men was what brutish, cruel violent creatures they were; and how they loved to rape and enslave women, and to go to war over the most trivial matters, and hurt children and small helpless animals for fun!

And I sure didn't feel brutish or cruel or want to do any of that awful stuff; so I could not give a name to my sense of being different and disconnected, or even describe it clearly. It tormented me day and night, and eventually I decided that I must just be crazy.

Other people were coming to think I was too. Not knowing how to help me, my mother took me to a high priestess, who after consulting her portents told her I was a devil child- a maenad whose heart held not the wisdom of Hera but the madness of Dionysus.

And after I cut off my beautiful long golden hair because this just felt right to me, I was taken to a soul healer---what here in your world would be called a counselor or therapist---who was kinder than that crone of a priestess had been, but she couldn't help me either. Although in time I came to pretend she did...

“What's troubling you child?” she asked on my first visit, “Whatever it is you can tell me.”

“I don't know!” I wailed, and began crying.

“Why would a pretty girl like you want to cut off all her pretty, pretty hair?”

“I'm not a pretty girl,” I snuffled.

“But you're beautiful, Phyllissa! How can you say you're not?”

“BECAUSE I'M NOT A GIRL!!” I screamed, which was as shocking and baffling for me to hear coming out of my mouth as it was for her.

“If you're not a girl then what are you?” she asked, with that gentle forbearance that had felt so nice at first but now was making me angry.

“I don't KNOW!! All right?!” I shouted. And suddenly my frustration and confusion boiled over and I started tearing up her office, knocking things off the walls and shrieking, “I'M A DEVIL CHILD! I'M A MAEANAD! A HYDRA! A SATYR! A CENTAUR! I'M A MANTICORE! I'M A DRAGON!!!”

I really and truly didn't know what I was...
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It was about this time that the rumors began to spread that I was possessed and had the “evil eye”. I could wither crops, make goats dry up of milk or even cause someone to drop dead. As the rest of the world rolled into the twenty-first century Themyscira still believed that things like this were real.

But what's weird was that unlike a lot of primitive island communities, this sort of shunning wasn't a common occurrence on Themyscira. People were generally a lot nicer to each other than this. My mother did remember one instance from her childhood where a lady was accused of witchcraft and banished to a shack halfway up Lookout Mountain, but old Nyrrisa actually had been practicing some dark hateful magic, and was also a thief, and just plain nasty. It was as if the women of our island had known before I did that I was this thing they had been taught to hate and mistrust all their lives: a male.

Mothers started forbidding their daughters to play with me, and in response to being shunned and suspected of something so absurd my attitude toward people and life in general went into a serious nosedive.
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The one place where all this misery helped me was in my combat training. My anger drove me to excel in hand to hand combat, and my sense that I had nothing left to lose and couldn't sink any lower made me absolutely fearless. Ironically, the one place I felt at peace was in the middle of a fight. But many times I didn't know when to quit, and had to be pulled off of my instructors (I had long since been deemed an unsuitable sparring partner for the other girls) before I killed them.

I was still seeing my counselor, who to her credit had never abandoned me no matter how hard I'd tried to push her away. I learned what to say in order to sound like I was coming to terms with and embracing my life as a female; and I was happy that this was pleasing my mother and easing her worries for me. But inside I was as tormented as ever.
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Until I was about nine I had known a woman who never failed to brighten my day. She always seemed to know what to say.

Believe in yourself she had told me, And believe that Hera has a special destiny for you. It may not be what you expected, it may not be what other people want for you, but it's yours. And when you find it---or it finds you---you'll know it's right, and that all your trials until then were teaching you how to be strong, and were leading you to become the person you were always meant to be.

Lots of other women were giving me advice, but somehow when Diana told me stuff like this I could believe her. Our friendship might have seemed unlikely, not just because she was so much older than me---an adult of twenty-six---but because she was the princess, the daughter of Queen Hippolyta herself. Yet she always seemed to have time for me and my mom, these two nobodies who lived in a modest house down by the fishing docks- the closest thing our island had to a poor neighborhood. I looked up to and loved the Princess like some wise big sister who seemed to know about things that neither my mom nor my soul healer had much of a handle on...

And then she left.

Nobody left Themyscira, ever! But Diana had left to go live in that wider world where both men and women lived; convinced that this was her own special destiny.

The rumors about her fate out there started circulating immediately, and each was crazier than the last- She'd been enslaved by men, she'd fallen into a volcano and died, she'd left the Earth entirely to go live in space with some man with a magic green ring.

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A few years had gone by when one day out of the blue our peaceful island was rocked by a war. The Queen's sister Upstarsia attempted to take over Themyscira, aided by several divisions of very powerful...

I never learned what they were, but they sure weren't from around here and they could fly, and were absolutely ruthless. They didn't fight fair with swords or longbows but blasted everything and everyone they saw with some kind of lightning shooting guns that looked like evil magic to me!

After laying waste to much of Themyscira they were coming toward our neighborhood---mom was holding me, we were both crying and choking on the smoke from all the fires---when our missing princess showed up and turned the tide of the war.

She called herself Wonder Woman now and was wearing an amazing red, white and blue outfit unlike anything us Amazons wore. And had some very interesting friends with her who looked as strange and exotic as she did now. And somehow she was flying around like a bird, and most of her friends were too. The one who couldn't fly himself piloted a very fast airplane shaped like a bat, and all of them were either incredibly strong or had weapons that were equal to what the invaders had. There was a woman with a big mace who could have been one of our Amazons except she had wings like a hawk. And the one with the green ring was here- you wouldn't believe the things that ring could do!

After a fierce battle the invaders that hadn't been killed all fled, and Uppstartia was imprisoned. We all gathered at the arena to see Hippolyta thank her daughter Diana and Diana's friends for saving us all. My mother was being attended to at the infirmary (but it wasn't life threatening and I knew she'd be all right) so it was just me there watching; sort of sitting way off by myself, which had become my habit.

Everyone was amazed by these strangers who had popped in out of nowhere to help us, just because they were our princess's friends and she had needed their help. She and they together called themselves The Justice League; and one could tell they were all brave, and loyal to each other, and stood for doing good and defeating evil- all those things we Amazons had been taught were the important to do.

But the weirdest thing was... MOST OF THEM WERE MEN!! (Well one of them was green and looked like some kind of Martian, but he was definitely a male...)

All my life I had been taught how horrible men were, and here were these amazing creatures with incredible powers (the one from the airplane only had a belt, but it was a pretty clever belt!), and who were wise enough to use these powers for selfless ends. They didn't seek to hurt or kill or oppress anyone but to make the world a better place for everyone.

And I knew right then that so much of what I had learned about males was untrue. It was quite a stunning revelation...

I think it was the largest member of this group---the man in the red cape who had lifted a whole temple out of the path of destruction, and who seemed to be everything I'd always dreamed of being---who triggered the even more colossal realization I had next:

That's what I was! The name for this difference I had been feeling all my life, and why I'd always had trouble fitting in as a girl. Somehow, despite what everyone had been telling me and despite what would seem like an anatomical fact, I was one of them!

“I'm a man,” I muttered, sitting there at the back of the arena rows away from everyone else. Then I said it louder. It seemed right to say it, and it felt like the truth about the baffling mystery that was my life had come to me at last. Great Hera, I was a man!

Or actually the younger type of male, which I now remembered was called a boy.

That didn't seem wrong for me either, boys became men; And this was essentially the moment my real life started...
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After she graciously thanked them all Hippolyta ordered these males to depart, because grateful as we were to them, they had no place in our world; and then she shocked me by banishing her own daughter from ever coming back. I could see this saddened the Queen but rules were rules, and it wouldn't be fair to make exceptions for her own family.

Diana accepted the judgment against her with dignity and quiet grace, but the red one who could run as fast as Hermes himself---and who I'll admit I'd thought of as just a loudmouth clown until now---spoke out of turn, and gave a pretty fine speech about why his friend Wonder Woman shouldn't be made to suffer just because they rest of them trespassed on our land. Which moved Hippolyta but didn't change her mind, and Diana left with the others.

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As profound as my realization about my true sex was, I didn't share it with anyone, not even my mother. She truly believed all the stories about what monsters males were, and I was afraid of losing her love if she knew what I was.

But she and everyone else said how remarkable my sudden change in attitude was. I was cheerful, I was helpful toward others, and I no longer seemed to be in a perpetual gloom as I secretly made plans to get the hell off this island where my kind wasn't welcome.

One day in the deer park I found a book that clearly wasn't from Themyscaria. To this day I have no idea where it came from. The first page with printing on it said it was made in New York City back in 1922. It was called The Further Adventures of Kip Carpenter and I would figure out later it was written for male children. I was captivated from the very first page, as this boy named Kip careened from one unlikely adventure to the next, fighting pirates and bootleggers, saving nuns from a huge forest fire by quickly building a raft that carried them all to safety, and joining a traveling circus that traveled by airship. I read that book until I nearly wore it out, and of course I was imagining that I was Kip, that “daring and resourceful lad” who was “all boy” and “all-American”...

This next part is a bit embarrassing to admit.... But you have to understand that all the males I had ever seen had various incredible powers. Bat-Ears must have had his gifts taken away somehow; but Kip Carpenter must have had something (perhaps it was his “luck and pluck”) that allowed him to survive his life of constant peril. I became convinced that all males had super powers, and if I was a boy then I must have them too. I only needed to discover what my powers were---and like Diana had told me---to believe in myself!

I caused a lot of excitement and barely escaped serious injury or death when I climbed up onto the peak of the Great Temple and attempted to fly.

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I got into a bit of trouble when I stole a small fishing boat and tried to escape to the mainland in it. I was intercepted far out at sea by our two fastest longboats rowed by big shouldered oarswomen. But I got in less trouble than I would have if I hadn't played dumb and told them I must have got turned around somehow because I thought I was headed home. But the docks were watched closely after that.

Another year passed. My breasts had begun to swell and I knew they were only going to get bigger. And once a month I was starting to find a little blood coming from me below, from that place I didn't like to look at too closely or even think about. I didn't know what could be done about these changes but I knew I didn't like them. I tried to hide them both from Mother because I wouldn't have been able to stand hearing the words: “You're becoming a woman!”, and having her expect me to be happy about it.

But maybe in the world outside of Paradise Island they had cures for these things.

I had drawn plans for a small sailing vessel and was attempting to build it out behind a grove of cypress trees---which was a lot harder than it was for that boy in the book---when an amazing thing happened.

Diana returned. Her mother welcomed her home, but it was only going to be a short stay, since she was still more or less exiled but would be allowed to visit from now on. She had arrived in an amazing airplane that she had flown herself, and that believe it or not was invisible! The only part of it I saw was a bit of interior when she opened a hatch and climbed out.

I abandoned my plans to build a boat, and nearly everything I owned except a knife, some gold coins and my favorite book, then sadly wrote my mother a quick goodbye note and found my way back to Diana's airplane. And after a lot of feeling around on its invisible hull I found my way into it, glad to see that it wasn't invisible at all from the inside.

It had a cockpit where the pilot and somebody else could sit, with a small storage area behind it that luckily had room for me. I waited all day and half the night in that little space until Diana returned. She started the engines and we shot straight up into the air. I was really doing this! I was going to live in that other world, and somehow or other I would do it as a boy, and then as a man!

We were leaving Themysciran airspace---that point where our watchers on Lookout Mountain became alarmed if an airplane flew in past it---when Diana said loudly: “You can come out now.:”

She'd known I was back there the whole time. I climbed out through the little door, feeling like my plans had been defeated once again.

But then again this was Diana. The woman who was almost a sister. The one who listened to me and really seemed to hear me. So when she asked me, “Why are you trying to leave Themyscira?” I told her. I told her everything, from my first feelings that something was wrong, I told her things I had told my counselor and things I had never dared say aloud. I told her things about me and how I felt that even I didn't know until they came rushing out here in this magical airplane.

Somewhere in the middle of this I started crying. I didn't stop until she had put the plane on “autopilot” then came over to me and held me for a long, long time.

Then she whispered something to me that I had never even dreamed I might hear some day, but it was the most precious thing anyone had ever said to me: “It's going to be alright, Little Brother.”

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On our flight to America I learned a lot. She said that there were other boys like me. And there were girls who had been born boys and had been just as unhappy about it as I was about being a girl. This was almost inconceivable to me, that anyone would want to give up being a boy! But she laughed and told me: “They say the same thing about being a girl!”

And I found out these boys and girls in the wrong bodies actually could do something about their unhappy lives, and start living lives that fit the person they were inside. Then I started crying again, but out of happiness this time.

I said, “I guess I'm not a very good boy...”

“Why do you say that?” she asked.

“Because boys are never supposed to cry.”

“Who told you that?” she wanted to know, and so I brought out my book.

The Further Adventures of Kip Carpenter is now somewhere on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.

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She was flying the plane again now, and I was in the seat beside her. We were flying over America. It's a lot bigger than Themyscira!

She asked me how I expected to live in a world that that I knew nothing about, where I would have no money and no friends. I showed her my gold coins, which she said would last about a week. I told her I was going to figure out something. I had to. I couldn't live in a place that hated who I was inside. Or who they thought I was, because their ideas about males didn't describe me at all. But either way I couldn't stay there.

She said, “It's not like Themyscira here. It's a rough world, with a lot of horrible violent people who like to take what isn't theirs.”

“I know how to fight,” I said.

She nodded, “I was talking to my old swords instructor, asking her if there were any exceptional students. She mentioned you. She said you had a lot of potential but your anger makes you tend to fight blindly sometimes. But anyway, you were seriously expecting to just land someplace and go sleep on the streets?”

I said, “I think I would do all right.”

“You might not have to. I have a friend that you might be able to stay with. I'm sure he would put you up for a short while, but it could turn out to be much longer.”

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This friend of hers lived in a gigantic mansion outside of a large American city called Gotham. It had a place on the roof for Diana to park her invisible jet. An old man led us down some winding steps to meet her friend. It took me a while, but I recognized him as one of the people who came to fight for us during the coup. The one without special powers.

We went inside, and Diana told him all about me. She even told him that I wasn't quite a boy quite yet, which made me feel embarrassed and afraid of what he would think of me, but I guess she had to tell him. If I was really going to stay here he would have found out sooner or later.

“Well I am sort of between sidekicks at the time. Dick's doing quite well as Nightwing, and the new kid, he wasn't really working out, and ran off. Probably back with the League of Assassins by now. Can she- Please excuse me, Son! I mean can HE fight?”

“I think you'll be pleased,” she grinned.

The mansion had several types of gyms and dojos and fencing rooms, and he tested me in each one. And he really was pleased. But so was I. I could tell that this man was exceptional, even without Clark's strength or Barry's speed---and he could teach me a lot. Not just about fighting, but about being a man in the very best sense of the word.

So I became a ward of Mr. Wayne. A student by day, a costumed crime fighter by night, and a boy all the time. We made an appointment with the best gender specialists in Gotham City, but there were other matters to take care of first...

I had no birth certificate, or anything that said who I was, but Mr. Wayne took care of that. I didn't even have a name except Phyllissa. I had never even picked one that I could think of myself by. But now I picked Kip after the Kip Carpenter, whose adventures cheered me up during some of the lowest days of my life, and Trevor after Steve Trevor, a male friend of Diana's that she'd often spoke about.

It's my other name I'm not crazy about. The one I wasn't allowed to pick myself. I really wish he hadn't stuck me with a dumb, girly name like Robin!

;

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The only thing TG about this short story is the part of me who wrote it, back around 1998. My Inner Child is a weird little goober...

MY BOOK REPORT -------- Linda Avery --- ROOM #25
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THE BIG TRIP UP is a book about a strange place called The Domain. And the story is sort of like that WHO KILLED ROGER RABBIT movie, because it is about characters who I don't think could ever be alive in a World that is REAL like this one, except these are puppets and not Toons, and also there aren't any regular human people in this book until the very end and then only one, and he is dead but then he is alive again...

The Domain is the inside of this big old dusty four-story mansion, the rooms and floors are different neigborhoods with houses and apartments made from furniture that got left there, and old boxes and sheets, cabinets too where the puppets live. The puppets know what all this stuff is and how they are inside a house, but they take it for granite and do not think there is anything weird about having houses inside another house, and one of them even says that everything must be made of houses, smaller and smaller like atoms, but they say You are Crazy, Professor Buttons!

She throws the book at Happy and it squashes him!

[To the tune of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f70Z3cvrQd0 ]

He's a loser
He's a loooooser...
It's the thing that he most fears to be

My friend you've lost and you're out on your ass
It's time you acted with a bit of class
Screaming “they cheated” and playing pretend
Can only take you so far in the end...
He's a loser, not a victim of duplicity
He's a loooooser, and I won't let him get near to me

His father taught him that to be a man
You must fuck over everyone you can
And it's a weakness to be fair or kind
Old Daddy Fred really poisoned his mind...
He's a loser, though he tweets all night so boastfully
He's a loooooser, just a mass of insecurities

He'll take credit for your accomplishments
But shifts the blame soon as things turn to shit
Hurling cruel insults is his favorite game
He falls apart, though, if you do the same
He's a loser, with his every whim you must agree
He's a loooooser, or else you are his enemy

His motivation's transparently thin
For claiming victory was stolen from him
Better false claims of fraud and dirty tricks
Than to admit he stepped on his own dick...
He's a loser, and bereft of all self-honesty
He's a loooooser, and it's time he faced reality

Of all the schemes he has tried and has failed
This is the one that should land him in jail
He was our brave new messiah, he claimed
Too bad the guy's just not right in the brain...
He's a Loser, though he postures patriotically
He's a loooooser, his real song's “My Country 'Tis of Me!”

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqwEwpEgwB8&feature=related
http://herocomplex.latimes.com/2010/01/25/philip-k-dick/