Life of a Lady: Part III

The third and final part in Life of a Lady: An Autobiography of Sorts.

A work in progress.


For Life of a Lady Part II, go to Chapters 20-30.

PART III

Chapter 31. A Real Lady

My fist was full of chocolate frosting, so I smeared it on my lips and pushed it into my mouth. I grabbed another handful and scooped it onto my tongue,  let my tongue dangle from my mouth, covered in frosting, then pulled it in slowly. I tilted my head back, poured cinnamon and sugar into my mouth and swallowed. Chocolate covered my body. A wet, fried chicken breast sat on a cardboard box before me in a pool of grease stains and crumbs. I bent down to pick it up with my teeth, and pulled the greasy meat from the bone while I squeezed mashed potatoes into a ball with my hands. I forced them into my mouth with the bits of chicken, chewed with my mouth open, and smiled. Quickly I noticed the chicken needed more flavor. I poured chocolate syrup on it, and pulled open a folded paper towel to a large spread of bacon. I wrapped the chicken in five pieces of bacon and ate it as fast as I could.

I was sitting in a chair specially rigged to hold my 600 pound frame. I was naked. I grabbed a fistful of bacon, and leaned back  in the chair as far as I could, its special springs and supports creaking under my mass. With my legs spread wide, I shoved the bacon, piece by piece, into my vagina. It took only a couple fingers to push it far enough inside to disappear from view. Minutes later, I’d fit 34 pieces of bacon inside me. One for every year I’d been alive.

 “Happy birthday!” appeared on my computer screen. Then again. Then twice more. Then about fifty more times. I was in a chat room. My webcam was aimed at me. The lonely boys in the chat with me stopped sending me food suggestions and ideas for a second, and took a moment to celebrate my special day. It was January 1^st, 2003. My 34^th birthday.

For the last two months I’d been the star of my very own webcam show on Mr. Money Shot’s website. My show was called A Real Lady, and I ate food and used the bathroom on my webcam to groups of men who enjoyed that kind of thing. I was building a pretty sizeable fan base. After our movie had blown up back in September, porn fans from around the world knew the name Lady Molasses and wanted more of me. Mr. Money Shot quickly got to work with me on developing my webcam show, and so far it’d been a pretty big hit.

I pulled the webcam closer to my hair-covered vagina and pulled apart my labia so I could reach inside. I stuffed the opening of the chocolate syrup bottle inside me and squeezed as hard as I could, sending a fountain of chocolate into my body. I giggled at each squirt, and felt its cold goo coat the sides of my vaginal walls. When I felt there was enough chocolate inside me, I whistled loudly. A young man in a black leather mask and no clothes came out of the closet in the room and crawled over to me. The messages in the chat room were exploding with excitement.

Mr. Money Shot set up the show so fans could suggest the food I’d eat each week. On weekends, they’d post suggestions on Mr. Money Shot’s message board and vote on the meals I’d eat for the next few days on screen. Monday through Friday I’d do three public shows a day for subscribers, each two hours long. In addition, I’d do twenty minute long private shows once a day, for whoever reserved one. Doing them only once a day meant I had plenty of anxious men lined up, weeks in advance. Private shows at the time ran customers $300. A subscription for my daily shows was $30 a month, or $10 week by week. When I started out in late 2002, right after the release of JO for JO, I had a couple thousand subscribers. By my birthday I had over 80,000 subscribers. My show was pulling in about 2.5 million dollars a month.

The leather-masked man unzipped the zipper over his mouth and put his lips up to my vagina. I spread my labia apart again and began pulling bacon out of my hole, slow and gentle. The masked man took it in his mouth and ate it. Then another piece. He ate every piece of chocolate-covered bacon from my hairy vagina until all 34 pieces were gone. Chocolate ran down the young man’s leather mask and white chest. The guys in the chatroom typed their approval of our deeds. Then I got out of the chair, slowly as to not topple over and crush my masked guest, and I laid myself flat on the ground, or as flat as a 600 pound body could be. The masked man adjusted the webcam to put me in the shot. He then bent over my face and vomited into my open mouth. All 34 pieces of bacon came out, into my mouth, chocolate and all. They still tasted fresh.

The men in the chatroom thanked us for the show, and each logged off as we played the theme song. I turned off the webcam and put a bathrobe on. The masked man pulled off his mask. It was Strygler, my son.

Our test results had come back and he was definitely my son. We agreed to never have sex again. But due to his contract with Mr. Money Shot he still had to perform. He agreed to be in my videos as long as we didn’t have any kind of real sex. It was a wonderful way for a mother to bond with her son. We grew so close through our performances in A Real Lady.

 “What are you doing for dinner, ma?” Strygler asked, pulling a wife-beater over his shoulders and slipping into his silk boxers.

 “Lamp and the girls have a little party planned for me,” I said. “You should come.”

 “Think I will. Don’t think Lamp’ll mind?”

Strygler and Lamp had been on bad terms, each being employees of competing pornographic empires. Lamp, of course, was the king of his growing pornographic kingdom, and Strygler was merely a pawn in Mr. Money Shot’s already established empire, but the two butted heads when I’d introduced them. Strygler claimed I was mostly responsible for Lamp’s success, given my childhood pictures and the building I bought him. Lamp disagreed and told him he was responsible for my success as well as his own. I didn’t disagree. Without Lamp’s internet skills I’d have been nothing. My pockets would have stayed empty. Strygler then insulted Post-Sexual-Industries, Lamp’s porn company, calling it a one-trick corporation, a failure of film and fuck, something that would never amount to anything. Lamp punched Strygler in the face. It was nice of my son to stick up for his mom.

 “No,” I said. “He’d love to see you. Go home and get cleaned up. Meet me at my condo around six. We’ll go over together!”

Strygler and I walked into Lamp’s large living quarters, past his naked lady who answered the door, and right into the kitchen.

 “Hey, buddy,” I said, going in to give Lamp a hug.

 “Whoa,” he pushed me aside, a considerable feat considering my size, and stepped toward Strygler. “What’s up, little shit? Come looking for another crushed jaw?”

Strygler got wide-eyed and backed away. He shook his head.

 “Now Lamp,” I said. “You treat my son right, OK? He’s not looking for trouble. You two need to get past this stuff. You’re both successful pornographers, just leave it at that.”

 “Excuse me,” said one of Lamp’s ladies. She walked around me to get to the stove. She pulled a delicious looking ham out of it. My taste buds were erect.

 “You ever built anything from scratch, Strygler?” Lamp asked. He sounded mad. “You ever built a farm? You ever conquered love to transcend thought and become one with a higher power?”

 “No, Lamp,” Strygler said. He sounded offended.

The woman with the ham set it on the counter and brushed a honey glaze on it. I thought I was going to cum.

 “You ever worked for years on that farm just to see it obliterated behind you? Ever built a pornographic empire from nothing?”

 “I have not.”

 “Didn’t think so, you fuck. So, welcome back to the Empire. Now have a nice time.” Lamp turned to me and gave me a hug. I smiled and winked at Strygler.

 “Dinner’s almost ready,” Lamp said, removing the oven mitts he had on his hands. “Get ready for a feast!”

Two hours and 3,000 calories later, we sat around Lamp’s pad, watching a leggy blond on Fox News, and talking about pornography. The girls were smoking blunts, as they always did, and Lamp was reclined in his walrus-leather recliner. Strygler and I sat on opposite ends of the room,  on white couches that matched the whiteness of the walls and floor. I figured it was all white to hide Lamp’s stains of shame, a touchy subject he still cried about in the privacy of my embrace from time to time.

 “Finished the first draft of our screenplay for Muffled Cunts & Cuntled Muffs,” Lamp said. “The girls and I start editing tomorrow and hopefully start shooting by next week.”

 “How’s this movie gonna be different than the rest of your filmography?” Strygler asked. “I don’t wanna fight you, or nothin’, but you got to admit, all your movies are kind of the same.”

Lamp sat forward in his chair. “How so? The only similarity is the cast. I use my girls in everything I do, but the stories and settings and characters are all so vastly different.”

 “Mr. Money Shot changes up everything, every time,” Strygler replied. “New actors, new settings, new music. New everything. You use the same ten 80’s sounding keyboard riffs and guitar solos in almost every movie.”

 “Kid, I don’t have two decades experience forming the basis for my pornographic business like your boss. I come from farming and computer science, and a hell of a lot of real life experience. Though lower in production quality,  my ideas are far superior to Money Shot’s ideas. Lady’s movie was the only masterpiece that guy ever made. And, with all due respect to the two of you, Money Shot Studios doesn’t have anything else under its belt. That’s it. Lady’s webcam show is the only quality production they’re putting out now, and that’s lower quality than anything I’ve done in years.” Lamp’s face was an angry red.

 “Mr. Money Shot hires the best writers in the adult industry. His ideas might be stale at times, but the special effects and the quality of his girls is unmatched.”

Lamp’s girls didn’t seem phased by this comment. They remained fixated on their preoccupations and, like always, didn’t offer any opinions or insight into anything at all.

 “I’m all about substance,” Lamp said. “Not fucking flashy bullshit. I’m answering to a higher calling. No semen is wasted in my films, for I will not allow it. I don’t permit the murder of billions of God’s spermatozoan creatures. Each of them are given the chance to find a place in these girls to call home. Nature’s way is to guide them to the light of the body. It’s by God’s blessings no pregnancies occur. God understands art and lets us do it as we see fit.”

 “Fuck all of that,” Strygler said. “Your preoccupation with art is why Post-Sexual-Industries will never reach the level of acclaim and respect Mr. Money Shot’s films have.”

 “Lady,” Lamp said, looking into my shy eyes. “Want to weigh in, here?”

I pulled my shirt down over my stomach because it was starting to crumple up under my breasts, something that always happened when I was wet with the sweat of anxiety. “I just wanna say, Lamp, without you I’d be dead right now. And I’d never have accomplished my dream of sexual exposure. That exposure was freeing, but it was anonymous. Mr. Money Shot gave me exposure, and put my modern face on it. Now people know me. But you’re both heroes to me.”

 “I noticed there was nothing in your movie about the pictures I made you millions with,” Lamp said. “None of my work was mentioned at all in the film. The years I spent slaving away in front of a computer to bring your pictures to the world. What do you say to that?”

 “I put that in the script! I told Mr. Money Shot all about it, but he said it wasn’t important. He wanted action, and that stuff wasn’t action, he said. He said it was filler. Garbage.”

Lamp shook his head. He picked up the remote and turned up the volume on the TV. “Everyone shut the fuck up for a second.”

 “Reports are still coming in all along the west coast,” said the leggy blond on Fox News, “of two massive beasts terrorizing citizens and causing unmentionable amounts of chaos.”

Lamp smiled at me. “Your boys.”

 “Eyewitnesses report two creatures standing over eight feet tall, weighing likely over four-hundred pounds, each. Many deaths have been linked to these two creatures. Police say it’s likely they’re two men in costumes, disguising themselves for the crimes they commit. No photographic or video evidence has been produced, but citizens remain terrified of the suspects. Police are saying if you spot these men, or these creatures, to leave the area immediately and to call local law enforcement. They should not be dealt with in any capacity.”

 “Good to hear they’re doing well!” I said. This good news cut through the tension in the room and made me feel alright. It was nice news to have on a birthday. “Stryg, those are your step brothers!”

 “Half brothers, I thought,” he said. “You didn’t marry that rat. Or did you?”

 “Hah! No, son. I just lied in his cum. Half brothers, you’re right. I can’t wait for you to meet them!”

 “In other news,” the seductive reporter reported, “police in Las Vegas, Nevada report of increased gang activity by a relatively new gang known only as the Tommy Hilfiger gang.” A picture of Tommy Hilfiger popped on the screen. He looked so old. Old but handsome in a gray-haired sort of  way. “It’s unclear if the fashion designer Tommy Hilfiger has anything to do with the gang’s activities at the time. All that is known is all members of the gang showed up in Las Vegas six and a half years ago, all wearing Tommy Hilfiger clothing. Given the popularity of the brand, police say it is not uncommon for six kids to be wearing the brand. But police say the founders of the gang, the six original members, all younger than fifteen at the time, all come from different locales around the country. None are natives of Nevada. In fact, none have family in or around the area. According to a suspect of a casino robbery almost a year ago, arrested two weeks ago, and claiming to be a member of the gang, the group were brought together by an adult woman.”

 “How ‘bout that,” Lamp said.

 “The suspect claims a woman known only as “Lady”, along with a bus of rats and naked but mostly mute women armed with automatic weapons, kidnapped each of the original six members on a trek across the United States, forcing them onto the bus, then dropping them off in Las Vegas, in 1996. The suspect, 17 year old Jose Mendez, claims to be an original founder of the gang.”

A poorly drawn sketch of an ugly looking woman appeared on the screen.

 “Jose Mendez claims this is the woman responsible for unwittingly creating the Tommy Hilfiger gang,” the reporter said.

 “Haha, disgusting,” I said, pulling my shirt back over my stomach. “Ugly bitch.”

 “Mom,” Strygler said. “Looks kinda like you. A younger you!”

 “It is her,” Lamp said. He took a puff of the blunt one of the girls passed to him. “Those are the kids we took to Vegas while on an exceptional journey.”

The screen went back to the reporter. “As dangerous as they are inventive, the Tommy Hilfiger gang is becoming a considerable problem for Las Vegas police. Rumors are the gang runs a sex trafficking operation, moves drugs, and is responsible for a string of casino robberies over the past few years. They’re elusive and seem to pose a threat to the community at large.”

A fat Mexican man’s face came on the screen. The name printed under him read Jose Mendez. “We do little things here and there,” the kid said. “Our main thing, the main thing we wanna do, we wanna find the woman who made us like this. The kidnapper who got us here. We ain’t gonna thank her for bringin’ us together. We got somethin’ else in mind.”

The reporter came back on, but Lamp muted the TV.

 “How about that?” he said. “Lady, looks like you got some friends out there.”

 “It wouldn’t be a birthday without some bad news, too,” I said. My shirt was crumpled under my breasts again, but I didn’t bother to fix it.

The Tommy Hilfiger gang was on my mind for weeks. Every day I stressed about this group of shitty kids who didn’t even end up being mine trying to find me and do something to me. What were they planning? Kill me? Rob me? Rape me? Torture me? I could handle a rape or torture. Even robbery wasn’t so bad. Really, murder was all I worried about. But fuck. The stress led me to eat more, which did wonders for my web show. My fan base was growing as the film of my life story started to reach a wider audience online. Every adult video store in the country carried the movie, but it soon became available online and even in the classier video rental stores. If Mr. Money Shot hadn’t already been rich, our film would have made him so. It propelled Money Shot Studios to first place among all porno studios in the world. Mr. Money Shot could do whatever he wanted. He treated me like a queen and gave me all the resources I would need for my show. That just meant pounds and pounds of food, over 5,000 calories a day. As repetitive as the show was, I never got tired of doing it. Strygler still made regular appearances on it, when he wasn’t needed for other projects by Mr. Money Shot. Most of the food the fans suggested  was boring but delicious, but there were rare times when something dangerous or disgusting was put on the menu. Those were my favorite things to eat. The fans knew I’d do anything.

One day in March, I sat down with Mr. Money Shot for lunch at the 69er Diner, a place Mr. Money Shot owned, not far from the studio.

 “I’ll have a black coffee,” I said to the waitress. “Emphasis on the black. Like a man.”

 “It’s hard to keep your fans at bay,” Mr. Money Shot said. “You got some ferocious ones, you know that?”

I blushed.

He sipped on his tea. “You’re really making a name for yourself, Lady. Lady Molasses is big shit these days. I mean that literally and as a figure of speech. That is to say, you’re hot stuff right now. I get calls about you from other studios wanting you to work for them. But tell me, are you happy here? Doing what you’re doing? I don’t wanna limit your artistic freedoms.”

“I’m so happy,” I said. “Every day I do what I love, I eat what I love. And I get paid for it. I’m living on easy street. I work with my son, who I love like a friend. I have no worries.”

 “That’s good to hear, Lady. I think you’ll go far in this industry.”

An image of a cock longer than my body going down my throat and into my organs filled my mind’s eye. I’d go far. There was no length I wasn’t willing to go. It was as though Mr. Money Shot was speaking to  the core of my being with his insights and powerful syllables.

 “What about my son?” I asked. “What do you think of Strygler?”

 “The boy’s a goldmine of untapped potential. He’s a beautiful performer, like you. Before you came along he’d only done fake snuff films and bondage clips. But I see so much in his eyes and in his heart. He knows what he wants and he goes for it. Like his mother. Eventually, I’d like to have him in a starring role. What he does on your show is good. Maybe great. But I know he’s built for something better. The boy’s got a cock like dynamite and a pelvis like a Great White Shark. If I didn’t have all my time tied up in that Noah’s Ark erotic short, The Archetype of Ark Types, Fuck Like a Ninja 3: The Swallow Flies High, and rewriting the script for Desert Vagina, Dessert Vagina, I’d be producing a film with Strygler as the central figure. I want that boy doing bigger things.”

 “I love that you love him,” I said. “I think you’re a good boss for us. Stryg needs a father figure.”

 “I don’t know if I’m equipped to be a father figure to the boy. Just a role model. Do you know how I got my start?”

I’d read interviews with Mr. Money Shot, but never heard it in his own words. “Nope. No idea.”

The waitress returned with my coffee. It was as black as the largest penis I’d ever seen. It tasted almost as good.

 “Answered an ad in the newspaper,” Mr. Money Shot said. “The fucking newspaper. Turned out to be an ad for a bag boy at a grocery store I mistook for a fuck-job. A porn job. I showed up naked and showed them sex moves anyway. The manager liked me so much he gave me the number of a friend of his who worked in the business. I got an audition and got the part in a small film by a small company. I blew them away in that movie and was in high demand. They called me “On Demand” at first, as a nickname. I could cum on command. But after wowing the industry giants with my ability to perform money shot after money shot, once doing 189 money shots in one 17 hour period, I got the nickname Money Shot. It’s stuck ever since.”

I stared into his filthy rich eyes and listened to his filthy rich tongue relay history to me, bathing in his inspirational glory. I slurped my coffee.

 “By the early 90’s I’d accomplished everything I had dreamed of as a pornographic actor. Bought my first studio with the millions I’d earned, and called it On Demand Studios. You’ve seen some of our old films. It’s in the credits. The production company, though, I called Money Shot Films. Eventually, just combined the two into Money Shot Studios. I hired all the actors I’d worked with over the years, all of them eager to work with me as a director after I’d proven my chops as an actor. When we filmed New Orleans House of Jizz, my first film as director, we didn’t use any computer special effects. There really were 18,966 people in that orgy. The most massive orgy ever conducted in recorded human history. My guitar chops were nothing to laugh at, which is why I started composing the music for my films, as well. All the guitar solos you hear in our films are me. Did you know that?”

 “My God,” I said. “I had no idea. You’re a fucking renaissance man.”

 “You know it. When we got into making gay cinema, something that really proved a challenge for me at first, being a heterosexual hunk with no taste for men, I found composing music to be the biggest challenge of the whole filmmaking process. Writing a gay scene is no problem. Piece of gayke. But the music just wasn’t right with an electric guitar. That’s why I got my old pal Ron Jeremy to come in and do guest saxophone riffs over the soundtrack. You didn’t know Ron played the saxophone, did you?” He poured hot water into his tea cup and stuck another tea bag in it.

 “Had no idea,” I said, shaking my head.

 “He’s a master of the instrument. He did the soundtrack for your film, did you know that? Most  of the scenes of you doing coprophagia has Ron’s saxophone playing over the shot. It’s really something beautiful. And speaking of the film. I think you were the one who helped me come up with the idea, but the male actors from the film, they’ve been on a nation-wide tour since its release six months ago, performing orgies around the nation. We call this “JO with a Bro”, and it’s our promotional tour for the film. It’s conducted in most major cities, accompanying a showing of the film. It’s been a huge success.”

 “I wondered if we were gonna go through with that idea. I guess we did!”

 “We sure did. But the one thing the tour’s been missing is the star of the film. It’s missing Lady Molasses. Now, I don’t want to take you away from your web show. We’ve got a good thing with it. You know the show is making $3 million a month, right? It’s the biggest fucking thing on the internet. But we’re getting a lot of requests for you out there. The perverts are coming out in huge numbers, paying lots of cash to experience JO with a Bro. They’re asking for you.”

I could feel myself blush again. I drank more coffee. It was so black.

 “Now,  last week we had some fan in some shit town in Maine asking about all the death in the movie. Wanted to know if it was all true. Apparently someone was asking about the scene in your apartment with the dead bodies. Our representatives of course told the fans  most of the story was true, but some parts, such as that, were fabricated to enhance the erotic atmosphere of the film. But I wanted to ask you, just between you and me, was it real?”

 “The death?” I asked.

 “Yes. All the death. Did that really happen?”

 “More or less. There were some deaths.”

Mr. Money Shot nodded and drank his tea. “I see.” He was silent for a moment. “Like I said, we have to keep your fans at bay. We get a lot of requests for your home address. Lots of crazy fuckers out there wanting to get in bed with you, get sat on by you, watch you eat in person, or just get the chance to touch you. Lot of devotees you seem to have.”

 “I’d love to meet all of them,” I said. “I bet they’ve all got something sweet inside them. Like a soft side, but also a hard side.”

Mr. Money Shot nodded. We drank our drinks and smiled.

I was shitting into a microwave and setting the timer to cook for 5 minutes during a private web show one evening when the customer started typing a long message into the chat. Longer than the usual profanity-laced rants and sob stories shared by most of my private-show clients.

 “Lady,” the message read. “Finally, I’m able to get through to you. I’ve been on the que for weeks. Your contact information isn’t available anywhere! I saw your movie and was very impressed! I’ve been watching your daily shows every week, at least a couple times a week, but you never see my messages in the chat room. I really hope you read this. I’m so proud of you. You’ve grown up so much. Look at the lovely woman you’ve become. When you’re done shitting into the microwave, take a break and send me an email or give me a call. I’d love to catch up with you, honey. Love, Uncle Flambert. F.molasses5hit@yahoo.com / 949-669-0201”

If I hadn’t just shit into a microwave I’d have shit myself right then. Uncle Flambert! I hadn’t seen him since 1976.  My only memories of him were in front of pornos at my parents’ house.

The client disconnected from the private show. It was my last show of the day.  I stopped the microwave before the smell of my shit grew too powerful, and hurried to get dressed. I looked through my pockets on my sweat pants and found my cell phone. I called the phone number.

 “Lady?” the voice on the other end answered.

 “Flambert!” I shouted.

 “Fuck, Lady! So good to hear your voice! Your adult voice!”

 “It’s so good to hear your adult voice, Uncle Flambert!”

 “I don’t have a lot of free minutes on my plan,” Flambert explained, “but I’d love to catch up with you! Where are you living these days? I’m in Irvine, California.”

 “No shit! I’m in San Francisco! Let’s get together!”

 “That would be lovely! Want me to come there, or you come here?”

 “That’s a long bus ride. I’ve got the money to make it, I can come there! Does that work? How about this weekend?”

 “That works lovely, Lady. And I have someone who is very interested in seeing you.”

 “Oh yeah? Who’s that?”

 “Your brother. You may have met him once. Donderick.”

 “Oh my God, yes. How old is he?”

 “The boy’s turning sixteen, soon. He lives with me. Don’t know if you know this or not, but your parents disappeared back in ’93. Headed out to New York to find you. Said something about you living out there. Well, they never came home. Disappeared, it seems. Donderick came to live with me, and I been raisin’ him ever since. We can’t wait to see you.”

 “Oh my,” I said. I said nothing for a second. “Ah, Flambert… I can’t wait.”

             

 “You think he watches all your shows?” Strygler asked, Friday after we finished our last show of the week. “Like, him and Donderick? Together?”

 “No,” I said, excited. “I think if he does, he just does it to remember family. Family’s important, Stryg. You of all people oughta know that.”

 “I know. You think I can meet them? I mean hell, they’re my family, too.”

 “Of course you can! You’re the only real family I’ve had in a long time. You want to come with me?”

 “I don’t think I can,” he said. “Kinda have a date tomorrow with a girl. A pretty one.”

 “Ooh, Stryg! My son! My big boy! Falling in love!”

 “Might be too soon to call it love, ma, but it sure is something. She’s a nice girl.”

 “I bet she is. Your uncle’s a nice man. And my brother… well, hell. He’s your uncle. It’d be a nice meeting of uncles and nephews and a niece on the side!”

 “Sounds like a movie your friend Lamp made a few years back. I watched it before I ever knew you guys. Knuckle Nieces and Nookie Nephews.”

 “You’re right. It does sound like that. Maybe I can get Flambert and Donderick to come up here, soon. We’ll all go out for a nice dinner and be the family we’ve always wanted. Heck, if Dick and Harry come back, it’ll be six’s company! We could make two sitcoms outta that.”

 “Ma, that sounds real nice. I hope you have a nice time down there. You gonna be back in time for our show on Monday? We got a big paying client for a private show who moved ahead two weeks in the que after sending a check directly to Mr. Money Shot. Ten thousand bucks! He really wants a piece of the Lady action.”

 “I’ll be back by Sunday, in time to see the food picks for the week. I can’t wait to do a show for Mister Special Client! Big spender!”

 “Big spender!” Strygler yelled. We laughed together for what seemed like hours, but in reality were seconds, because I had to get home and he had to go shave his chest and armpits for his girlfriend.

Irvine was warm. I arrived sometime in the afternoon by bus, and met Flambert and Donderick outside the station. Flambert was gray and haggardly, bearded, and walked with a limp. But he smiled the same as he always had. We hugged. His 56 year old body wasn’t as strong as I remembered, and his voice was robotic. He spoke through a small box stuffed into a hole in his neck.

 “Little Lady,” he said, holding down a button on the box, “sure did miss you!”

 “It’s been so long, now you’re part robot!” I said. “Where’d your cool voice come from? You sounded fine on the phone a few days ago.”

He let out a robotic laugh. “Had a laryngectomy just last night. Smoked too much. If you’re nice, maybe I’ll let you play with the hole. It’s still fresh.”

I laughed and he laughed, and the pimple-faced little fat kid with him laughed.

 “Donderick, is that you?” I said. “You’ve grown so much!”

 “Both ways,” Flambert said. “Sideways and up.” Another robotic laugh. I would never get tired of that sound.

 “Hi,” Donderick said. “Flambert says you’re my sister.”

 “I sure am,” I said. “We’ve met before. In your bedroom one night. It was ten years ago. Do you remember? I was in a hurry so I had to run.”

 “No.”

 “Donderick told your parents about it,” Flambert said. “He doesn’t remember it these days, but he wouldn’t stop talking about you. That’s why they decided to pay you a visit. Looks more like they just used that as an excuse to run away and abandon your brother with me. Poor kid.” Flambert’s face showed the first emotion I’d ever seen besides lust, which looked  something like sympathy. “We tried to find you for a few years after that, but no luck.”

 “I’m glad you found me the way you did.”

 “We’re so proud of you,” Flambert said, and pulled Donderick and me in for a three way hug.

It felt good to be with family again.

           

We spent the day driving around Irvine in Flambert’s pickup truck. Palm trees lined some of the roads and Mexican boys with sandy glands were on every block. The sun washed me while I lied in the bed of the pickup, the wind blowing through my wavy hair. I whistled to men and women on the street and flashed anyone who wanted a glimpse of my supernatural features. We ate at a hotel bar and Flambert told me about the book he was reading, the novelization of the upcoming summer movie, Bad Boys 2. It sounded like a thrill to read, and his description of the black men in the story made me want to see the movie without pants or a shirt. Donderick told me about the book he had just finished reading, the novelization of another upcoming summer movie, Charlie’s Angels 2: Full Throttle, starring Drew Barrymore and Cameron Diaz. I felt uncultured sharing a table with these bookworms, but I had more than enough stories about myself to fill many dinner plates worth of time.

After dinner, we went bowling at Flambert’s favorite shithole bowling alley. They served light beer and nachos, which was enough to get me drunk enough to throw the bowling ball at the pins like I was supposed to. We had a lot of laughs that night. I lost track of how many games we played, but beer and nacho cheese was spilled all over our bowling lane by the end of the night. And Flambert used one of my beer bottles to fuck his throat in front of a family using the bowling  lane next to us, something we all got a kick out of. Flambert was just as funny as I remembered him. I let him know it was he who inspired me to make the jump into the adult industry. He cried salty pride tears when I said it, and he kissed me on the mouth. Donderick threw up his dinner after the fourth beer we gave him, so I bought him an ice cream sundae and lemonade. He was having a ball, I could tell.

I stayed the night at Flambert’s apartment. The pullout couch was covered in body hair and crusted, canned meats. But it made a fine bed. In the morning I told Flambert and Donderick all about my rat family, and my two rat children, as well as my only living human child. I decided to let them know the true fate of Gene and Jean Molasses. They took it hard, both crying and refusing to eat their sausage links, then taking angry slaps and kicks at my body and my face. I ate while they hit me. I understood their anger. When they both gave up and apologized for attacking me, I apologized for my rat sons whose appetites for carnage and death were unfeedable. There were things in this world that happened and no one would know the reasons why. We all agreed on that. Fate and destiny and things like that were too complicated for us simple folk.

We’d had a great time together, but I had to leave. I promised Flambert and Donderick I’d come back, and they promised they’d come up to San Francisco sometime to meet Strygler and, if their hearts allowed them forgiveness, Dick and Harry.

Strygler didn’t show up to Money Shot Studios that night when Mr. Money Shot and I met to see what food the fans had voted on. He sent his assistant out to buy all the food, and we both called Strygler’s cell phone. He didn’t answer. His girlfriend must have worn him out.

The next morning Strygler didn’t show up to the studio, so I did my shows on my own. My private show for the big spending special client was coming up, and I waxed my eyebrows in preparation. Bad eyebrows make big women look gross. I noticed this during the filming for JO for JO. The phone in my room rang.

 “Yeah?” I answered.

 “Hey, Lady.” It was Mr. Money Shot. “Turn your cell phone on. No, don’t bother. Doesn’t matter now. Anyway, you need to come to Telegraph Hill as soon as you can.”

That was Strygler’s neighborhood.

 “Why?” I said. “What’s happening?”

 “Nothing’s happening. It’s what’s already happened. Your son’s been hurt. Rather, he’s been killed. Police say it looks like stab wounds. I have to agree. Strygler’s dead.”

I dropped the phone. After that it was a blur.

Chapter 32. Sexual Anger

Two bodies, one covered in hair, the other hairless as a waxed anus, both muscular and unmistakably male, gyrated with sexual rhythm to the bass beats echoing through the church. Flashing lights ignited their flesh in different colors. The hairless man, tan and glistening like a California sunset, licked the hairy chest of his pale companion. When his mouth met the nipples there were calls for drinks to be made of the man’s breast milk, from the audience sitting in the pews. These words were ignored, and the tanned man forced his hands around the pale man’s buttocks and pulled them apart so the crowd could gaze into the deep void within. Loud applause filled the church.

This was Strygler’s funeral. Mr. Money Shot arranged and paid for the whole thing. It was the third and final hour of Performance Celebration of the Life of Strygler. Lamp Post sat to one side of me and Mr. Money Shot was on the other. The death of Barbalay, my childhood best friend, had phased me for a couple days. The death of my parents who I almost hated had about the same effect. Each caused me to reflect briefly on my own mortality, but at the time, I had more important things on my mind. I was preoccupied with sexual liberation and the desire to see my naked child body shown to the world. There was no time for mourning, no time to think about life or death or health or pain. This shit could bring you down, and I didn’t let it do that. Oscar’s death was the first one that hit me with a shit-truck in the chest. And though I figured it was the end of the world at the time, when I heard about Claudia’s death I was even more torn open, like a festering sewer rat in the middle of the road, guts spilled for the vultures to pick at. Bludd and his girlfriend dying didn’t mean much to me since everyone knew they were heading that way at full speed. Abusing pussyfist will kill a motherfucker fast.

Strygler’s death hit me different than all the others. My son was dead. My own blood and guts and DNA and piss and puke and shit and memories. My son. I built him inside of me from a mucusy 13 year old goo for almost a year. How it worked I had no idea, but it happened. That little cunt flew out of me and into the arms of other parents who probably loved him more than I could, but I was sure they never cut themselves open and poured their blood into Strygler’s wounds to form a deeper bond like I did.

I threw a snot-soaked tissue on the ground to join the pile of 200 others, and continued blowing my nose and wiping my eyes. Even the positive beats from the score to the Performance Celebration couldn’t take the vice off my heart. The luxury Chinese pussy in the priest’s chambers getting high on heroin for the next sequence of the Performance Celebration wouldn’t tame the sobbing remnants of my heart, either. I was doomed to grief.

“Strygler’s diamond eyes are staring down at you from God’s bathhouse,” Lamp whispered, while the men on stage danced in remembrance. I knew he meant well, but the horrifying idea of my dead son staring at me from a cloudy realm of angels and gold made my stomach turn. “Each day the Lord gives his children time, be it hours or minutes, whatever they wish, to watch their loved ones below. And I have no doubt you were Strygler’s most loved one.”

“You’re drunk,” I said. His breath smelled of diet Sprite and rum—a scent Lamp wore like a scarf. “But thank you.”

“It don’t mean I’m wrong.” Lamp took a sip from the flask in his pocket, and breathed a heavy kiss into his girl closest to him. She didn’t seem phased by his kiss, or by death’s cold dick waving its swollen flesh through the church.

An arm wrapped around my shoulder and pulled me away from Lamp. Mr. Money Shot whispered into my other ear. “Because you canceled your show on Monday, your very important client has issued a lofty complaint against Money Shot Studios. You remember you had an important show?”

I nodded.

“Says the show wasn’t so much for the pleasure of his sexual self—you know what I’m talking about, the deep, true desirous, pink abyss of rumbling sex volcanoes and lion-like tempests of bloodied perversion—but for a message he had to deliver. Since we keep your contact info on lockdown, he figured this was the only way to get a hold of you. And spending the kind of coin he did, he got MVP seats.”

“I’ve been meaning to talk to you about the show,” I said, wiping a tear or two from my salty cheeks. “After all this, I don’t know if I can go back to performing every day.”

“We’ll cut it to once or twice a week, Lady.”

“I don’t think I wanna perform at all, anymore. It doesn’t feel right without Strygler.”

“Strygler ain’t the star. He never was. It was all you, Lady. You’re the star.”

“Yes, but Strygler was the life force keeping me wet and juvenile through the whole process. It doesn’t feel right.”

“I understand, and I sympathize.” His voice was one of understanding and sympathy, so I had no trouble believing him. “But this customer paid a sum greater than ten times the going rate. He’s earned his one on one time with you, and he feels awful cheated out of it. At least one more show.”

In a drastic effort to take my eyes from the unclothed dancers on the church’s stage, I turned to Money Shot and quietly screamed into him: “What do you want me to do? Shall I piss and shit into a mountain’s unholy mouth while this watcher sucks a molten lava penis over video? I have nothing left! I have no dreams, I have no ideas, I have no motivation to continue making affordable but quality filth. I have empty holes in my soul that I never wish to fill with anything, much less a perverted spectator’s eyes, like I used to.”

“This isn’t about filling holes. This is about something more. This watcher had something important to convey to you.”

I thought back to Uncle Flambert’s private session. In the wake of JO for JO, Blow for Blow, my show became a way for friends and family of the past to contact me. It was the only form of contact available to those who didn’t have my personal information. Who could be trying to reach me now? I had the life of a lady with no worries, no troubles, no problems. Everything was fine, and my existence was milk white purity in a bath of salt and cocoa.

“He’s faxed me several times in the past two days. He wants to get in touch with you, even if it’s outside the typical food play and bestial, animal perversions you tie into your show. I’m afraid this can’t wait. He’s paid far too much for me to ignore him or dismiss his inquiries. You need to speak with him. The good name of Money Shot Studios relies on this. Your contract requires it.”

As I watched the boyish dandies dance the final steps of the Performance Celebration, I sat quietly in the pew and tried to appear deep in thought. Mr. Money Shot’s eyes penetrated me like a mushroom-tipped college boy’s penis penetrates the walrus-skinned vagina of a saturated sorority babe, and I finally caved to his ocular needs. “I have nothing to say to him.”

“I’m not so sure of that.” Mr. Money Shot stood and exited the church. The show continued, and I would be selling it short if I said the rest of the funeral guests didn’t find the light and dance combination absolutely breathtaking. If I hadn’t been mourning the death of my offspring I was certain I’d have been rendered wet and  hard, like the others.

“Glad you got rid of that cunt,” said Lamp. “It’s time we mourn with the real presence of the Holy Spirit. I can’t help but tell that when that man is around the Holy Spirit ain’t able to make a real appearance.”

His words were vagrant cockroaches with sterile wombs to my ears. “Please…” But I couldn’t finish. I stood and retreated to the priests’ quarters where Chinese women vibrated their vaginas with silver dildos and golden wands of 6-cornered pleasures. They were preparing for the final act of the day’s performance in remembrance of my son. At first I only watched, soaked in tears from grief. The wetness then found itself rampaging across the frozen tundra of my southern states and delivering its Gettysburg address to my gutty organs and fleshy surfaces. I was hopeless in the cunt of Chinese sluts pushing their pussies into my nostrils and my throat, and the priest’s gums upon my labia was like a gushing river of flesh ooze splashing against a black man’s scrotum. Without reason I sailed like winds against the fire of China’s hot bed of chemical enchantment. Pubic hair unshaven for days grinded against my face as I inhaled the fragrant fumes of the Eastern world. Miniature tree stumps of sharp affliction tried their best to rip rivers of blood from the tundra of my poultry white face. I was cumming within minutes.

Only sexual anger wrapped around me, and I let it fulfill its most horrific ideas while I escaped the tragedy of my son’s death. Murder, they said. By a sadist with a knife, they said. But why? They could never answer why. My boy was cut from head to toe with intentional swipes of a blade. Money Shot fronted a few hundred thousand dollars to convince them to investigate, and all they came back with was a suspect who was likely homosexual and male. When I told the police Strygler was planning to go on a date with a girl they changed the profile to a heterosexual female. That made a little more sense. But the question and  answer session put me in a humid cube of shit and pain.

“Tell us about his friends,” said a cop with thick eyebrows and a dense patch of hair around his lips. “We need to know everything you know.”

“He had hardly any friends,” I said, drinking lemonade in the police station, the day after Strygler’s death. “All day, every day, it was me or Money Shot he saw. All he had going on was a girlfriend. I mean, a girl he was gonna go see. He wouldn’t come meet his great uncle or his nephew because there was a girl waiting for him. Didn’t tell me much about her.”

“You don’t know her name?”

“I know she was slender and hot and hairless.”

“Any clue as to where she came from, or how they met?”

“I didn’t kill my son.”

Some confusion seemed to sweep through the interrogating officers, which made me feel like an expert who knew what she was doing. I didn’t let up. “Strygler was a smart boy and wouldn’t have touched a girl if she didn’t meet some kinda criteria me or Mr. Money Shot set down for him to follow. He was an obedient boy, officers.”

Their heads shook, and one finally spoke. “I have no doubt about that, Ms. Molasses. What I’m concerned about is the possibility of Strygler meeting someone on the internet who intended to do him harm. What do you know about his internet activities?”

There was nothing I could do. The questions overwhelmed me and kicked me in the ribs. “I don’t know anything about her,” I said. “Internet is a magic place, I’ll give you that much. But how my boy used it to his own sexual devices I’ll never understand. To be honest, I don’t try to understand. It doesn’t seem like it’s my place.”

“Can’t you see what we’re trying to do for you!?” shouted one of the officers into my face, treating me like a punching bag who had turned into a pillow for a tired boxer’s neck. “We want to find your son’s killer, Ms. Molasses. You need to help us if we’re to be of any service.”

“What service are you talking about?”

“Our service is justice. But justice isn’t only our service, or our expertise—it’s our passion. You cooperate with us, and we have a better chance of finding who killed your son.”

Lamp and his girls were questioned, Mr. Money Shot was questioned, fellow actors and actresses working for Money Shot Studios were examined. Days went by and we heard nothing. Those days I spent in my condo, eating caramel pies and fried foods. I could only eat for pleasure now, not for money or entertainment. Never again would food be a means to amuse faceless spectators. It would be a way to build the bulge in my body, so as to fill the gut of remorse with carbohydrates.

On the eighth day of closing up in my condo and not answering my phone, Mr. Money Shot paid me a surprise visit.

“As you no doubt recall,” he said, sitting on my couch, “your contract with Money Shot Studios dictates that you must perform. You have time to grieve. I’ll give you all the time you need, but you mustn’t quit. You can’t. This very important customer won’t leave me alone.”

“Donuts?” I said, offering a plate of chocolate and powdered donuts to Mr. Money Shot. He shook his head.

“ For more than a week he’s pestered me to allow him to speak with you. He says it’s a matter of life and death, so I spoke at length with him. He wouldn’t disclose anything to me that was of any worth, except his place of residence.”

“Cigarette?” I held a pack out to him, but he turned those down, too. I lit two and smoked them at the same time.

“I invited this customer to San Francisco, Lady. He came by the studio this morning. He’s here—I’ve brought him with me to personally meet you.”

“You… Oh, I see. What?”

Money Shot stood and walked to my front door. “Here. He says you know him.” He opened the door and a short, familiar man entered my apartment.

“Glibbord Squambles,” he said, extending his hand to me. “I hope you remember me, for I remember you quite more fondly than I could ever remember a face, a bottom, a body, a soul.”

My chest felt heavy, my heart was a bulging balloon. My most valued customer from my time at Appledance, with the fondness for my unwashed ass, and an appreciation for my shit, was now my most valued customer at Money Shot Studios. He was visibly older, fatter, but looked as charming as ever. “What are you doing here!?” I managed to ask.

“You do remember me, then?” Glibbord clapped his hands together like he was delighted to hear it. “I’m here because for fourteen years, not a day has gone by that I haven’t thought about you, dear Lady. For fourteen years you’ve held a place in my heart that no one, no thing, no place, no idea can fill. It’s not love I have for you, but a deep, permeating admiration and adoration that colors my world with hues of purple and blue and green and yellow, even red, the color of passion. I have of course been married a handful of times since then, but none of those marriages filled me with the wet hot passions I felt with you. I’ve longed to once again set my eyes on you, to—no, Lady, you mustn’t do that… No, though suffocating  myself in your ass would be the most perfect  pleasure in my life at the moment, I am here for something else.”

I pulled up and zipped my pants.

“I’ll get right to it. Each day that I visited you at Appledance I grew more fond of you. When I visited one day in 1989 and was told that you had disappeared into the dusty gray horizon, without a trace, I was crushed. It took me weeks to compose myself and to return to work. As you were perhaps aware, I was and still am a court judge. I preside over homicide cases, most of the time. I almost lost my job in the wake of your disappearance. The one constant in my life was your dance, and the activities we performed together. You held me and my life together. With you gone, I was unable to perform. To save my job I presided over more cases than a judge my age was expected to. One such case was a homicide case. The case of a girl charged for the murder of a woman in a club bathroom.”

“I should be hitting the sack about now,” I said, trying to derail or end Glibbord’s squawking as fast as I could.

“It’s 4 in the afternoon,” Money Shot said. “I know for a fact you haven’t been awake more than an hour. Let the man talk. He’s spent thousands of dollars and traveled hundreds of miles for this chance.  Consider this discussion part of your contractual obligation.”

Glibbord went on. “The defense first claimed self defense, then manslaughter, then, to the surprise of the whole court and jury, a statement about the crime, with shocking details that had never before been heard. It seems this girl put the blame for the murder on a close friend of hers. Lady Molasses, she said, was responsible. When I heard your name in the court room I must have shown a glimpse of my true self to those who sat before me. As the defense presented evidence that certainly seemed to implicate you in the crime, I used my judicial powers in extremely illegal ways to guide the case against your friend. Barbalay, I believe was her name. It was evident to most that Barbalay had taken the fall for your crime, and you had escaped into the void. But I used every resource at my disposal to render her case invalid. She was imprisoned for four years because of my actions. Because of your actions.

“The year after she was sentenced, your fingerprints came on file. Seems you were arrested for a public exhibition of bestiality in New York. Your fingerprints were introduced by Barbalay’s lawyer as evidence during her sentence, and matched with fingerprints found at the crime scene in LA. Another slam dunk for the defense. I foresaw them releasing Barbalay and putting you in prison. I wasn’t going to let that happen, so I had the evidence destroyed. Again, I worked against the system for you. No one found me out. When I found that you were sent to prison in New York, I felt a deep sorrow at being unable to help you.”

“Well, glad you could share that with the whole room,” I said. “Did you get all that?” I said, looking at Money Shot.

He  stood without emotion on his face, barely nodding. “I’ve heard worse from my stars.”

“So you came to apologize? Is that it? That’s what you wanted to see me for?”

“Oh dear, no, Lady. That’s not it. I come bearing news that relates to the repercussions of this injustice you and I have conspired against Barbalay. Her family, you see, knew she was innocent. Almost everyone did. So when Barbalay took the fall for your crime, her family had it out for you. I should have foreseen that, but I did not. I assure you if I had, and I had known it would bring you greater trouble than prison, I would not have used my powers of justice to achieve injustice. Barbalay’s parents were powerless to do anything. But as you know, Barbalay had a younger sister. She grew up with animosity in her heart, and over the years developed into a hate machine against all the world. The  world was her enemy, but you, I do believe, were enemy number one.”

“This isn’t true,” I said. “Sagepuss and I met by chance seven years ago, in Chicago. There was no bad blood between us.”

“But what’s happened since then? Something left Sagepuss fuming with a vengeful mind. I don’t know what you did, but now you’re a target. And so am I.”

“A target for what?” When Lamp Post annihilated FIST in front of Sagepuss, and we freed Sage into the world, I guessed she would move on and forget the whole thing ever happened. I hoped her memories of me would be ones of youthful kissing in a farmhouse, educational experiences in the FIST compound, and nothing about betrayal or death. In retrospect, that didn’t seem like a realistic option.

“For a ruined, tortuous life that leads to slow death,” said Squambles.

“How do you know any of this?” interjected  Money Shot. The doubt in his voice put my mind at ease. “Are you in communication with this Sagepuss?”

“No, certainly I am not. But last year, one night as I left work, I was attacked on my way to my car. I thought nothing of it, as I am in an occupation that makes me a lot of enemies. It was a girl, and she wore a mask to hide her face. She stabbed me in the gut, but I managed to fight her off. When I left the hospital two days later, my home had been attacked, and a warning was placed in my home. My dog and cat were both dead, a scribbled note pinned to the dog. It warned that I  had made a powerful enemy  years ago, and as such, my life was to be ended soon. The police department issued a security detail to protect me. I received more threats over the following months, as well as a blown up mailbox, and attempts to smear  my name. False documents were generated and spread to other officials, documents that seemed to show that I am a pedophile. I assure you, I am not. Other documents were forged to paint me a racist, a sexist, and a number of other awful things I most certainly am not. By good fortune, those who know me are fully familiar with my character and knew the documents to be false. But my name was still in danger of being tarnished.

“I couldn’t begin to fathom who was behind any of it. Not until I received mail at the court house from my tormentor. In a letter, it was mentioned these actions were to avenge the wrongful imprisonment of Barbalay. The taunting and tormenting continued, and I was again attacked by the same masked girl, this time before I went to work one morning. My bodyguards were injured by the girl, and my wife was murdered. The girl’s mask was thrown off in the conflict. Her arms were bare, but covered in tattoos.”

“Did these tattoos say--”

“Slut, cunt, dyke, whore, and other slurs.”

“Yes!” I shouted. “Oh my goodness. Sage. She’s covered in those.”

“In her first attack, she briefly mentioned your name, saying she was after you and your offspring for the death of her sister and her friends. Her mention of your name hurt me more than the knife in my bladder. I was reminded of my loss, the loss of my immaculate Lady Molasses. And after the second attack, it became clear I had to warn you. Your movie had just been released.  Let me note as an aside that I saw it eleven times at the Panticon West in downtown LA. I now own it on VHS and DVD. I knew I had to contact you. With your fame, though, it seems you’re an enigma. You don’t exist in the phone book. I went through much trouble trying to contact you via the studio. When you started doing your web show, I knew I had to get in touch with you through it. So here I am to tell you that you are in danger for your life. Sagepuss is after you, she wants to kill you and anyone close to you. She wants to set your life on fire, and slowly, methodically, ruin you until she can watch you die. She wants to do the same to me. You, and everyone you love, are in danger.”

“Strygler,” said Money Shot. “My God.”

“Pardon?” said Glibbord.

“My son. He’s been murdered. He was killed last week. The police have no suspects. I think maybe she misunderstood what I told her back then. I said… I said my sons had something to do with the death of her sister. She was looking at the wrong son. My human son. She’s bent on murder without a reason. This is why I don’t leave home anymore.”

Glibbord sat down on the sofa where Mr. Money Shot had sat earlier. He put his hand to his face and started to sweat. “Oh my. Oh my Lord. I’m sorry, dear Lady. So very sorry.”

“Why haven’t the police arrested Sagepuss?” Money Shot said. “If it’s clear who’s behind this, why isn’t she in prison?”

“Police have been sent to her home,” said Glibbord, fiddling with his sleeves. “Problem is, you see, her address is listed as Kansas City. The house she rented with others has long been abandoned. She’s a soul on the move. She’s an ungrounded Marxist with no singular place to call home. You ought to understand, Money Shot. Her current whereabouts are unknown. She’s most definitely someplace in LA, or San Francisco now. Somewhere in California, hunting Lady Molasses and myself. I still have police protection, and I came to warn Lady that she, too must get some sort of protection.”

“Lamp Post,” I said. “I will live with Lamp Post. My friend has girlfriends armed to the teeth. I’ll be so safe there no one could touch me!”

“This girl,” said Glibbord, “she is highly connected, I believe. She’s heavily involved in a number of radical feminist organizations, and extremist movements that have a history of violence. She’s dangerous, Lady. And she seems to think you’re responsible for the death of her sister, Barbalay. She was released from prison after four years, and I was informed she had headed to New York to speak with you. Maybe to patch things up? Barbalay never returned from New York and hasn’t been heard from, since. Your porno biopic last year brought attention to the fact that your childhood friend died in your apartment. I don’t know if this much was fiction or fact. I’m not here to ask you about your life and crimes, but just know Sagepuss suspects foul play. Surely she has seen your film. You aren’t safe. And if what you say is true, your sons are doomed. Just like you.”

“I’ll be fine, Glibbord.”

 Money Shot put his hand on Glibbord’s shoulder and shook his hand. “Thank you for this warning, Mr. Squambles. Although Lady seems to downplay the importance of what you tell us, I understand the danger. If it means hiring protection for Lady, I’ll do it. Whatever it takes, Lady will be protected.”

“Oh, thank you, Mr. Money Shot,” Glibbord said, frantically shaking Money Shot’s hand. “It means a great deal to know you hold Lady in as high regard as I, and that you can afford to keep her under protection’s brave wing.”

“Thanks, sure,” I said. “I guess you gotta get going, though. It’s awfully late.”

“It’s 4:15 in the afternoon,” said Mr. Money Shot. “We shall not be leaving quite yet. Lady, before I brought Glibbord over here we discussed some business. In light of the information he has just shared with us, information that I believe is of life and death importance, as he correctly described it, I believe I owe him something. We owe him something. In accordance with your contractual obligations, I’d like for you to appear in one more production Money Shot Studios is developing. Glibbord here has actually invested in the project. We discussed it on our way here. What do you say?”

“I’m not doing it. I’m still dead inside because my son is still dead outside.”

“Too bad. Your contract requires this of you. You’ll be performing anyway. You have another week to grieve and pull yourself together. After that, we’ll see you back in the studio.”

“I refuse.”

“If you refuse, your contract allows for a thirty million dollar lawsuit against your estate.”

“I no longer refuse. You said a week? I’ll see you in a week.”

“I’ll send some security over in an hour. Stay safe.”

“No, I’ll stay with Lamp.”

“Get over there, then.”

“Get out of my house, then.”

“It’s a condo.”

“I’ll see myself out,” said Glibbord.

“You should do the same, Mr. Money Shot.”

“Farewell, Lady. We’ll see you in a week.”

I didn’t see either of them for a week.

Chapter 33. West Coast Blues

Other than the clear plastic chaps on my legs, I was naked, standing in a blue plastic kiddie pool, one in a circle of twelve other naked, chaps-wearing girls standing in twelve other kiddie pools. White light poured over us and hundreds of eyes would have undressed us if we weren’t already naked. Glibbord Squambles and Money Shot sat away from the light, talking to the directors and camera men in the middle of the circle. An audience sat beyond us, like a coliseum, all men, all with starving eyes, craving our fleshy thighs.

Money Shot lurched from his chair and came to stand beside me. Before he could speak, the director yelled for the cinematographer to start filming. The director’s hands waved  his secret signals, which directed us like marionettes into squats in our pools. On our knees, we held our sphincters tight.

“Am I in the shot?” Money Shot said.

The director shook his head and stepped behind one of the cameras. “We can edit you out in post.”

Money Shot knelt next to my pool and placed his hands on the side. “Glibbord’s a good man. A smart man. This production has taken a substantial amount of direction from his ideas. The man might be a judge, but he has a talent for pornographic production. Genius level talent.”

“The pools are nice.” I said. “They’re supposed to be empty?”

“Yes. You know how this works.”

“I didn’t know if there should be water in here, or not.”

“That would ruin everything. Now Lady, listen. Glibbord and I’ve been getting friendly this week. Conversation almost always turns to the subject of you.”

A team of body greasers made their rounds and greased up the girls. While the ugly Spaniard boy poured grease into my folds of flesh and rubbed me down with a Mediterranean fury, Money Shot decided not to shut up.

“Your film—rather, our film—we made last year has not only made you a major pornographic superstar, but it’s brought forward some alarming things. I was more than happy to overlook these for the sake of telling a story, and for money. In retrospect, it seems like a sort of confession to horrible acts no decent person would commit. I’m no example of behavioral perfection, Lady. Take my word for it. But you’ve got a troubling history.”

“Greasers out!” shouted the director. “Stay in squats, ladies.”

“Your life is a history of spectacular failures, and unimaginable disasters. People like to blame their failures on environment, on other people, on factors they imagine they can’t control. It’s the song of the parasitic lowlife. And when examining the details of your extraordinary life, it’s obvious you are in no place to blame anything but yourself. Yours is a life of bad decisions and terrible ideas. Constant deficiencies, and episodes of defeat that plague your existence. Do you know what most of my employees can say that you can’t say?”

I didn’t answer, and kept my eyes on the director and the camera.

“’I graduated high school.’ That’s something most of my employees here have done, Lady. That’s something they can say with pride. Of course, every person behind the scenes has at least a high school diploma. Myself, I have a graduate degree. Many of my stars have finished at least some college. You barely made it to high school level coursework, and left before you’d accomplished anything close to mediocre. Your failures by no means started at high school, but that is where they  become most evident, and from which I think many of your later poor choices come. Whenever you awaken with a hangover, not only do you have to suffer the day of nausea and headaches and raging misery that everyone else must, but you sit also with the knowledge that you are in your thirties and don’t even possess a high school education. You didn’t graduate high school, something even the stupidest of human beings do. You sit, hung-over, with the depressing awareness of your own inferiority to the majority of the human race.”

“Cameras take aim,” said the director. “Action!”

On his word, thirteen naked women, myself included, let rip a foul batch of diarrhea into our kiddie pools, ceaseless brown streams of gunk and shit, as fire hoses spraying Snickers soup for children to splash and play in. The sounds of splatter and liquefied feces passing through brown holes drowned out everything, including Money Shot’s voice, and my own imagination. For ten whole minutes we shit, we shat, we sprayed our inner voice upon the blue pools. When it ended, and only a few farts and shits rang out, many which were indistinguishable from each other, Money Shot went on.

“The way an intelligent human mind works, one that has been thoroughly educated, or even, at the very least, received a high school diploma, is that when making decisions, it evaluates various factors that go into decision making. These factors include experiences of the past, all current knowledge available to him at the time, as well as an understanding of the implications and consequences that may play out from these actions in the future.”

The director waved his hands in enigmatic shapes and directions, which initiated Step 2 of the process. The cameras zoomed in while we stuck our hands into the pool to the right of us, our eyes still facing straight forward.

“Grab a good handful,” said the director. “One hand only, please. Feel it thoroughly.”

Glibbord Squambles sat in his chair, smoking a cigar and smiling a smile I hadn’t seen since Appledance. His eyes didn’t only penetrate my exterior, they danced along the circle of women around him, and he lit up like a Nazi’s eyes during the Night of the Long Knives.

“That’s how intelligent minds operate,” said Money Shot. “You can view an intelligence, in this regard, as a sort of bubble that encompasses a range of time. The larger that bubble—meaning, the larger scope of time taken into consideration when one makes a decision—the farther one reaches into his history and experience, and the farther into the future one looks beyond his actions, the more intelligent and appropriate his actions will be. If an average decision bubble is, say, a year in diameter, yours, Lady, would be about a day in diameter. Maybe less. Maybe that bubble doesn’t exist. Because, Lady, there is no evidence that shows you ever take a moment to think about anything when you make a decision. No choice you’ve ever made, so far as I can tell, has been the result of experience, thoughtful reflection, thoughtful projection, or insightful ways of thinking. Your measurable intellect is negligible.”

The shit oozed between my fingers, and I heard it plop into the pool next to me alongside the ear-hair tickling words of Money Shot. Smells of sulfur, eggs, sour death, rotten waste, pure shit filled the air. My mind wandered to images of long-dicked boys posting nudes online, clean shaven teens with skinny arms pulling their scrotums down to elongate the phallic view for lucky ladies like myself. My head wasn’t in the game. Too often I thought about my dead son and the dreams he had for sharing his penis with our planet. His dreams were much like mine, but less realized.

“Start thinking about the content of those feces, girls,” yelled the director. “Each of you’ve had a different diet these last two days, so consider that. No one’s shit’s the same. Remember textures.”

“The concern between Glibbord and myself,” said Money Shot, his cheeks betraying his dick’s free flying patriotisim, “is that your stupid decisions seem to be dangerous. Not only to you, but to those close to you.”

The camera rushed forward, to the girl to my left.. The director signaled for Money Shot to shut his trap, and the girl was prompted to discuss the shit she had held in her hand. My shit.

“Soft and warm,” she said, with school-girl charm. “I thought there were marbles in it, and it was like a thick beef soup, at first. I could actually sort of taste it through my fingers, it was that strong, and picked up on some oriental flavor. I guess she’s lactose intolerant, had a gallon of milk, three trays of sushi, vinegar soaked tomatoes, and hot peppers. Prolly some Mexicano bean dips on her breakfast sausage.”

The director nodded, and motioned with his hands he wanted more.

“No solids besides the marble type things. I could tell she hasn’t eaten healthy for a while. Even without looking at her, it’s obvious.”

The camera swung toward me, stopped in my face, and the director motioned for me to talk.

“Rough sludge,” I said. “Tight and compact Thanksgiving stuffing with gravy poured over it. I’m not sure which smell belongs to it, but if I could taste it I’d expect something sour to go with a hot cake sandwich. I dreamed of swimming in a famous person’s toilet while playing with her stuff. She probably ate greased cabbage, pig snouts with heavy oil, caffeinated artificial fatteners, maybe high fructose corn syrup in a cauliflower salad.”

The director smirked, Glibbord Squambles crossed his legs and nodded, and Money Shot seemed more impatient than ever.

The camera moved on, Money Shot began to speak, but the director once more silenced him with a wave of the hand. Not until the camera had filmed every girl give her description and opinions of the feces she’d held in her hand was Money Shot allowed to talk. The judges evaluated our descriptions in the dark, while men in the audience applauded.

“Strygler would be alive today if your brain weren’t somehow impaired the way it is, is what I’m saying. Glibbord and I suspect the bad things aren’t over. No. Not even close.”

Money Shot spent the next hour lecturing me about how I’d chosen every wrong path in life, and had only come to San Francisco by some magic stroke of luck and randomness. After the shit-pool show ended, and the audience had its final applause, Money Shot took me into the dressing room with Glibbord, introduced me to his low hairline, clean shaven friends from Stanford and Caltech who listened to “Push it to the Limit” more often than I cared for, and had them berate me with ideas about behavior modification, restriction of free speech, and suggestions about how I could become an enlightened liberal who made all the right choices, sparing no expense. I didn’t even know what the word “liberal” meant. The world was a fuzzy, out of focus cunt. I wished to be the tongue that flicked its bean ever so lightly.

Over the following dark weeks of slowly enclosing doom, Lamp Post protected me as only Lamp Post could. His armada of fem fatales was a force to be reckoned with. Below the glowing lights of the San Fran clubs Lamp’s ladies held their arms against all who would oppose me, watched my actions in a way only a jealous boyfriend or a hungry penis would. Although I’d quit my web shows and taken a hiatus from other performance of a pornographic nature, people continued to try to contact me.

Doctor Diarrhea Jackson contacted me one evening in the Fall of 2003. Money Shot Studios had set up an email address through which I was to keep in touch with fans, something Mr. Money Shot said was good for publicity. Dr. Jackson wasted no time in asking me to meet face to face. He was in town for his granddaughter’s Bat Mitzvah.  Lamp Post decided against it, and I, an adult, a person convinced of my whims and ideals, forced Mr. Post to let me speak to Dr. Jackson in person, which took place one wet afternoon in San Francisco.

Four of Lamp’s women guarded over me from a nearby table in Scooper’s Deli, while Dr. Jackson and I sat with our potatoes. As we talked I notice a warm, ancient, learned, historical quality in his voice. He was the sort of man who spoke ancestral words on top of historic aphorisms, who reminded me that evil resided in the crevices of the devil’s finger-fucks, not in the bourbon-laced mountains of one’s thoughts. His good will and his mirror neurons imposed upon me the concept of retribution.

“You have family, and this family is in danger. Not only do ill-will-wishing scoundrels wish the worst upon you, but your actions will stream a river of cunt blood toward us. Toward you, I mean. Dr. Johnson, my long-time best friend, has plotted heavily against you, see. He and his niece seem to be in cahoots, again. How’s your body, by the way? You’re looking larger than I remember.”

“Fine, thank you.”

“No rabies flashbacks?”

“Not even one. Clean for years.”

“Everyone deserves to live without rabies, I say.”

“I say the same thing, Doc. I’ve been sayin’ it for years.”

“Good. Good. So I see you’re protected.” Dr. Jackson looked at my nearly naked bodyguards a few tables away. The older customers of the deli had by now cleared out in a panic, and only perverted young men with eyes for fresh female flesh remained. One of these perverts had a pregnant wife who seemed to be competing with me for fatness. She was losing.

“Sage and Johnson won’t stand a chance with these gals around,” I said. My smothered potato was already gone, and Dr. Jackson had only eaten two bites. I knew he was more concerned with talking than eating, an idea that was alien to me.

“Lady, you’ve gained some weight. How much are you weighing these days?”

“Six hundred pounds, give or take.”

“My God.” He hardly touched his food, so I eyeballed it to let him know it wasn’t going to eat itself. “I see you’re not walking.”

He was right. The power wheelchair I was sitting in must have given it away. Walking was too much a strain on my legs. I was taking the wheelchair everywhere, those days. My incapacitating illness known as obesity had control over my life.

“Too much work to walk,” I said. “Why walk when you can roll?” I showed off the forward and backward movement of the wheelchair, something I think caught Dr. Jackson by surprise. He seemed impressed. The mechanical hum of the machine tickled my nerves and put a smile on the Doctor’s face.

“Health, for one. Too much reliance on technology is going to make you weak and vulnerable. When confronted with people like Sage and Dr. Johnson, it’s best to reduce vulnerability.”

“Fucking done,” I said, pointing a finger to the bodyguards at the table. “How much safer can I get?”

 “Women with assault rifles aren’t enough to protect you from all the evil some can bring your way.”

“That’s the most sexist thing I’ve ever heard.”

“Do you know what sexism is?”

“Saying something about women and their abilities.”

“That’s… no. It isn’t sexist to say these girls, as beautiful as they are, and as highly trained in combat as they might be, are not enough to fully protect you.”

“Yes, it’s sexist. I know sexism, Diarrhea. I learned straight from the experts.”

“Sage was among those experts.”

“Your point?”

“Forget it. Lady, I’ve got to get going. My niece’s Bat Mitzvah starts in an hour.” Diarrhea’s potato still sat wide open in front of him, and he was going to leave it to see a shit parade for a young girl.

I pulled his potato onto my plate and ate it with my fingers. “Can I come?”

“Absolutely not. Your naked women can’t come to the temple. It’s a house of God.”

“They’ll stay outside.” My mouth was already full of starch.

“That’s not wise, considering your predicament.”

As I stuffed smothered potato bits into my mouth, I mocked Diarrhea’s voice, “considering your predicament.” I choked the potato down with a glass of milk as Diarrhea stood and began to make his exit.

“Oh God!” shouted one of the perverted boys who’d stayed in the  deli after we entered. It was the one with the pregnant girl. “Mary!”

The girl with him was curled up on the floor, began screaming like she was having a baby. Diarrhead Jackson looked at me, then at the woman. He pulled a pair of latex gloves out of his pocket, put them on, and went to kneel beside the girl. I wasn’t done with his potato so I stayed at the table.

A door flew open from the deli’s kitchen, and an important looking boy no older than 25 years old stumbled out and ran to the screaming pregnant lady. To make a long and boring story less boring, the bitch gave birth, Diarrhea Johnson delivered the baby with the help of a napkin, and the important young buck from the deli was the manager, informing the lady and her husband that Scooper’s Deli had a policy requiring all babies born on site to be named Scooper. The lady and her husband didn’t put up a fight, happily agreed to name their baby Scooper, and laughed with joy at the baby’s stupid noises and pathetic farts. I spent most of the time driving my wheelchair in circles around them while Dr. Jackson delivered the baby.

Wiping sweat and afterbirth off his forehead, Dr. Jackson’s final words to me that night were, “Lady, you’re in real danger. If there’s ever anything I can do to help, I’m all ears.”

When Lamp Post heard of Diarrhea Jackson’s warnings about Sage and her uncle’s plot against my friends and family, he assured me everything was under control.

“I can’t extend protection to everyone you know.”

“Can Flambert and Donderick live here, with us? Just them. I have no other family. Besides Dick and Harry, anyway. But they’re fine.”

“Also, they’re unable to be reached.”

“Right. So what do you say?”

“I’ve never met these fellas. Your uncle and son, right?”

“Uncle and brother. Strygler was my son, Lamp.”

“Right, oh, of course. And he’s dead. How’s Money Shot’s films been doing since the boy’s passing? I can’t imagine it’s good to have one of the studio’s greatest performers gone.”

“Fine, I guess. We shot something new a few weeks ago. The judge Glibbord Squambles came up with it, and his new friendship with Money Shot meant Money Shot had to shoot it. He said it’s the best thing we’ve done since JO for JO.”

“Hmm. You think Flambert and Donderick wanna be in some films? They could be stars. How do they look? They handsome? I’m thinking the reason my films empire ain’t expanding so fast is we only have girls in the films. Seein’ as I don’t care to put out a casting call for men, it’d be nice if Flambert and Donderick could perform in these films. They’d get all the gash they could want. Fucking these girls hundreds of times a day! Who wouldn’t want that? You think they want that kind of deal? If I’m to let them stay here, it could be their little way of paying rent.”

“What rent? I bought you this building. There’s no rent.”

“Then it’s their way to say ‘thanks.’”

“I thought you letting them come here would be a nice way of you saying ‘thanks’ to me for buying you a building.”

“I think me lending my ladies as your bodyguards is a good way of saying ‘thanks for the building.’”

“I thought you were doing that ‘cause we’re friends.”

“We are. OK, that’s what I’m doing it for. Because we’re friends.”

“Then how about letting them come live  here?”

“You know, you buying me this building was, I thought, a way of saying ‘thanks’ for me making you millions of dollars with your pictures on the internet. Illegal pictures, I reckon.”

“I thought you giving me millions of dollars was your way of saying ‘thanks’ to me for giving you those pictures so you could make millions for  yourself.”

“Lady, I had to do all the work.”

“Lamp, I had the good idea thirty years ago to photograph myself naked.”

“Christ in Hell.”

“OK, I’ll talk to Flambert and Donderick. Flambert might say yes. Donderick’s sixteen years old.”

“And?”

“And it might be harder to convince him.”

We ate dinner that night at a marvelous hotel bar in Mission Bay that had harsh restrictions on nudity, so the girls had to wear dresses. The weapon policy was even harsher, so they holstered their guns in packages that looked like candle sticks. Lamp cracked jokes about people’s clothes, and how the transition from the 90’s to the 00’s was a difficult one for fashion. The girls, who seldom talked, whispered riddles to each other and shared a few with Lamp and me. I called Flambert while we waited for our food, told him of the predicament that had bled down all over me and my loved ones. Before I even finished explaining Lamp’s offer, Flambert’s mechanical voice did jumping jacks, squat thrusts, and dynamo pelvic lifts into Heaven’s shit factory. He tried to yell at Donderick the good news, but his voice rumbled and crawled along with a messy, distorted lack of enthusiasm, on account of it not being a real voice. But as soon as Donderick understood the proposition, I heard him hooting and shouting and whipping himself in the background. Their happiness was, I guess, understandable. We made plans for them to move to San Francisco within the week.

“Lamp,” I said, after hanging up on Flambert, “there’s something else I wanted to talk to you about. I want to go back to high school. I want to get my diploma.”

He laughed and made another joke about 90’s fashion, and how dated it seemed, then he looked at me. “Why? You’re already rich. You’re already a star. You’re already stalked by psychopaths. What more could you want from life? That’s the only reason people get an education, to make money.”

“I have all good things, but something Money Shot said to me a little while ago got me thinking.”

“Of course. Money Shot. Big shot Money Shot. All the wisdom and experience and advice a person could ever hope to have, right? What’d that cunt say?”

“He talked about my life decisions, and how everything I’ve ever done has been the wrong thing to do. He talked about how all his employees have graduated from high school—some even went to college—and they’re all smarter than me. Maybe not successful like me, but smart. Like, they do things that aren’t as dumb.”

“You’re not dumb, Ms. Molasses,” said one of the girls. “We all think you’re pretty neat and that you have good ideas a lot of the time.”

“Aww.” I brushed her on the shoulder with a flick of the wrist, and touched her face.

“Since you weren’t specifically bred and raised for sex, combat, and tactical planning,” said Lamp, “you do have some intellect all your own. But it’s best not to overdo it.”

“Graduating from high school isn’t overdoing it. I just want my GED. If I can get that, I can become smarter. I can think better, talk better, do things better.”

“Is that what you really want? To think and do better?”

“Yes. I want intelligence. I’m thirty-four years old. I’m ready to be smart.”

“Sorry to break it to you, but that’s not how you get smart. Lady, there are two kinds of brains in this world. You got your analytical, logical, complex-thinking brains that are good for science, math, engineering, technological stuff. And you got your creative, emotional, impulsive brains that are good for art, music, acting, literature, anything creative. The two kinds of brain can never overlap. Never. You get one or the other, maybe sometimes neither. That’s why all your scientists and engineers and professors over-think everything, they are too careful to enjoy life, but they don’t make mistakes. No, they’re perfect at the things they do, so long as they stick to science or computers. They can’t sing, dance, write, or make music worth a shit, though. Completely untalented at any of this. Can’t make art, can’t understand it. Artistically retarded. And then you got your artists and musicians and dramatic cunts who  are impulsive and emotional and can’t go a day without crying or screaming or being angry at something, get in all kinds of car accidents, can’t make up their minds about anything, or stick to anything, and fail at everything but making nice artistic stuff. When you really think about it, though, both kinds of brains are worthless.”

“That can’t be true. Once, I knew a boy who was good at math and good at painting. What kind of brain do you have?”

“Who’s to say? Maybe neither one. Maybe I’ve got another kind of brain altogether. And maybe you do too, since I don’t see you making music or pictures or books. But I sure as fuck can’t picture you doing math or using a computer without catching a real life virus. Maybe that boy you knew had a different brain entirely.”

“But if there are only two kinds of brains…”

“That’s an exaggeration, Lady. But those are the main kinds. Maybe you got yourself a military brain. You like violence and bloodshed, you ain’t got empathy for anyone or anything but your flag, and you like to fight, and probably hunt. Or maybe you got yourself the druggie’s brain. Maybe your drug habits come from that, and you can’t function without toxins and juices and stimulation from chemicals. Maybe you got a carpenter’s brain, and you’re supposed to build things. Hell, there are so many possibilities. But some brains ain’t designed for school or books. Yours is that kind of brain. School never did you any good, and never will.”

“Money Shot says it does everyone good.”

“Money Shot doesn’t know what he’s talkin’ about. He’s intelligent, maybe. But he’s all single-focus kind of intelligent. He’s got book smarts, nothing else. Sure, he can run a pornographic empire. Sure he can go to school forever. But you think he can build a farm into a tactical powerhouse of defense, with massive weapons and amazing machinery? You think he can raise and train women into obedient, lifelong companions who can build weapons out of trash and spices? Of course not. His intellect ain’t the kind from experience.”

“I don’t know. Really, I got no idea.”

“If you came to work for me instead of Money Shot, I think I could help you get your GED, Lady. Maybe that could be your favor to me for letting Flambert and—” 

“Fuck! Thought we already decided on favors. They’re gonna work for you. Why you always want favors?”

“Sorry. Sure. I forgot. But listen, you really think trying to get an education right now is the best thing? With Sage and her uncle after you? You ought to be paying attention to other things. Maybe getting out of town altogether, changing your name, going into hiding. Witness protection program! No, sorry. That’ll mean you gotta talk to the Feds. Don’t do that.”

“Maybe that’s the only thing I can do. I’ve seen X-Files. The Feds are good at their job. Maybe Fox from X-Files will take  me under his wing, like a wife, or a friend.”

“Fox isn’t real.”

“David Duchovny, then. He works at the FBI on weekends.”

“I don’t know about that. Maybe he does, maybe he doesn’t. But if you go to the Feds, you and I won’t speak again. You go into hiding, no one you’ve ever known can contact you. Not your uncle, not your brother, not me, not even that fast talking cunt, Money Shot. You really want that?”

“What am I supposed to do? What if I could live under a fake name with David Duchovny? David Duchovny Molasses? Lady Duchovny, maybe.”

“It won’t even work, anyway. Your face is recognizable to everyone who’s seen your movies or watched your web show. That’s over a million people in this country alone who recognize you. Most of them men, most of them at least as perverted as me, but without the class.”

“You ain’t got class, Lamp. You got sass.”

He high-fived me and poured salt on the meat on my plate. It improved the taste, and I thanked him for it. He was right about hiding my identity. It was impossible. We talked longer about getting a GED, and argued over whether or not it would solve all my problems. As the night dragged on, and the servings continued to fill our table, I out-ate Lamp and all his girls, and made sounds that none could match. Our drinks drifted us into comas that lasted for hours, and the night disappeared below us.

No one was more excited about Flambert and Donderick’s debut in the pornographic industry than Flambert and Donderick. They moved into Lamp’s large building later in the week, and after I showed them around town for a day, Lamp got down to business. Within a few days they started shooting. They got along well with the girls, and the girls loved putting things into Flambert’s cancer-induced neck-hole, giving underage Donderick his underage blowjobs, and I loved watching as they filmed. It was the first of Lamp’s productions I had watched in the process of filming, and it seemed very professional, even considering his limitations. It wasn’t as high budget as Money Shot’s productions, but it was charming. It was holy, like a church.

Through the weeks, they shot each day, most nights, and created lively, exciting films. Some short, some long, some dark, some funny. It seemed Lamp Post was in better spirits than ever. I spent the days eating, shopping online, watching TV, and watching DVDs of Care Bears and Fat Albert, a man who I found more attractive with each pound I gained. Equal proportions creates great lust, I started to think. On the weekends, I studied an hour a day for the GED. The first time I took it I failed. I studied harder, still failed. Lamp was too busy with my uncle and my brother to tutor  me, so I talked to Money Shot, who was more than happy to tutor me on the weekends, when he usually went for rides in Glibbord Squambles’ submarine along the coast of California. Since Lamp wouldn’t let Money Shot in or near his building, I had to go on the submarine. Lamp’s lady’s couldn’t join me, because they were needed in his films.

Falling in love on a submarine voyage was always something I wanted to have happen to me, but I didn't see how it was going to happen if my life kept me locked away from adventure. When Money Shot told me he would tutor me on his submarine, I pissed myself, short-circuited my power wheelchair, and had to order a new one.

The only people on the submarine were Glibbord, Money, and myself. I wasn’t going to fall in love with either of these men. I knew I was here to learn, not to fuck. The tutoring sessions went slowly at first, because the fish and the sea animals that swam by the windows caught my attention in their attention-grabbing net, and never let go. My attention was like a blue whale stuck in a whaler’s net, a whaler with the mind of a military man who can’t grasp empathy or what it means to be cruel. But when Money Shot threatened to pull the blinds over the windows, and showed me he meant it by doing that very thing to one of my favorite windows to peer out, I obeyed.

The weeks fluttered by like the wings of a butterfly. I learned facts and ideas on the submarine, and while on land, watched the news and heard terrible stories of ferocious beasts continuing to terrorize the West Coast. Lamp had to constantly remind me who these beasts were so I could sleep at night. Other horror stories filled the news, with tales of the Tommy Hilfiger gang spreading their violence to cities in California, including Los Angeles and San Francisco. When this news broke, Lamp Post refused to let me out of the building, for fear of my safety. My GED study sessions with Money Shot and Glibbord ended, and so did my visits to the animals of the sea.

It was the very next day, the day after I became a prisoner in Lamp’s empire, that Money Shot brought sad news. Glibbord Squambles’ submarine had exploded underwater. Glibbord had exploded along with it. Lamp Post, who didn’t know Glibbord, didn’t care. But I cried, and Money Shot, who adored Glibbord as no one else did, cried even harder. But as more sad news, Lamp and Money Shot both told me I was not to attend Glibbord’s funeral. I’d be in great danger, they said. And they were right, because the Tommy Hilfiger gang showed up at the Squambles funeral and murdered half the people there. Money Shot was not among them, having decided at the last minute not to attend.

“Why that bunch of ruffians?” remarked Money Shot, while on the phone with me. “Those hood rats and shit-eaters from the sandy states have come all the way to California to ruin funerals? Who the fuck do they think they are?”

“They have a vendetta against me,” I said.

“Lady, great vocabulary. I see our lessons paid off. Vendetta is a beautiful word.” His voice turned to cries, as he recalled Glibbord’s squealing laughter on the submarine.

“They’ve been hunting me for a long time. It’s a long story.”

“Tell it to me,” he said between sniffs and tears and coughs. “I need a story right now.”

I told him the story of the accidental origins of the Tommy Hilfiger Gang in Las Vegas. Afterward, he was silent.

“You know what this means,” he asked. “Don’t you?” There were no more tears in his mouth.

“It means I should stay inside some more, right?”

“The Tommy Hilfiger Gang striking Glibbord Squambles is a pretty big coincidence, don’t you agree?”

I agreed.

“I think you will find your friend Lamp Post agreeing, as well. It seems to me that the Tommy Hilfiger gang has joined forces with Sage and her uncle, Dr. Johnson. Lady, you’re now in greater danger than you ever were before.”

“So I need to finish my GED as soon as possible,  right?”

Chapter 34. Risen from the Wasteland

Government and economics; geography and world history; civics and American history. These subjects took up days of my time. I’d gone from studying an hour a day to two hours a day. Physical science, earth science, numbers, counting, algebra and geometry, statistics, sentence structure, grammar, writing. These things took up even more days. Two hours became four hours a day. A private tutor, named Egbond Tartaratov, spent the days with me, teaching me knowledge like a spaceman, or a sea captain. I paid him five hundred bucks daily, and his interactions with Lamp’s fine woman specimens he saw as a bonus for a job well done. He was old, big, bearded, bald, and black. Tattoos covered his knuckles, and from what I could tell, he read a lot of books.

“Ya don’t get out much, eh?” he asked, one afternoon after he realized I didn’t know the difference between hills and mountains. I’d said San Francisco was full of mountains, so he spent the day reviewing geography with me.

“I can’t go anywhere. I’m locked up here so I don’t get murdered.”

“Makes sense. Ya don’t look much like ya could get around too easily, know what I’m sayin’? You’d be a sittin’ duck’s my guess.”

“I get around just fine.” I drove my power wheelchair backward into a table, knocked a lamp to the floor, and spun it around for Egbond’s pleasure. “I know what I’m doing.”

“You’s certainly a BBW, I oughtta say.”

“I ain’t black, but I do love chocolate men.”

“Big beautiful woman’s what I mean. When you getcher GED yer gonna be a prize for any man who respects quantity like he respects quality.”

“I don’t need a man. I do fine by myself.”

“So you say, livin’ here in a man’s skyscraper. A man who runs his own goddamn industry of puh-nagraphy.”

“You wanna know who bought him this skyscraper? I did. With my own millions! Mr. Tartaratov, I’m a porn star.”

He laughed and rolled over on his belly (he was lying on a couch). “Then what’re you tryin’ to get educated for? If you can buy buildings and own property, whatchu want a GED for?”

I didn’t answer. I had to think about it for a minute. For a few minutes. For about the second or third time in my life I was forced to reflect on something of massive importance to my existence. The strain to my brain created by this reflection felt like it popped blood vessels in my head and was going to require every piece of energy I could muster. Egbond had taught me energy didn’t come in pieces, so I could tell already my brain was forgetting things.

“Money ruined my life.” The words sounded stupid when I said them, and I didn’t know if they were true. “Fame ruined my life.” I thought that sounded better. Egbond stared at me with big white eyes, and I went on. “No, maybe it was something else. My life’s been turned upside down, like the Fresh Prince without a kingdom. But it might be my own fault.” The feeling that boiled in my chest when I said this wasn’t as harsh as I’d expected. I almost felt weightless, like suddenly all the truth of life that others knew and tried to force on me had come out in full force, from my own mouth. “The reason I need education is because I make too many mistakes. My whole life has been nothing but mistakes.” Again, a sensation inside me that I had never known before twirled and whirled and spun like a Ferris wheel, as though I’d come clean with the dirtiest secret I’d ever known, and had been holding onto for almost thirty five years. Turns out the dirtiest secret I knew was common knowledge to those who knew me best: in life I could only fail.

“You an ambitious girl,” said Egbond, with a black licorice smile. He rolled off the couch, and sat up. “Long as the green keep goin’ in my wallet, I’ma keep teachin’ you some education.”

The door to the room opened, and one of Lamp’s girls brought us tea, a crushed up spoonful of painkillers on Egbond’s request, and a syringe of pussyfist, on my request. We partook of our poisons, and got back to lessons.

Each day passed like a tow truck on the sidewalk. Some days Lamp, Flambert, and Donderick took breaks from shooting to come by what was now a tutoring studio on the fifth floor, and drank with us, smoked with us, ate lunch with us, and quizzed me on basic knowledge. Donderick was a sophomore in high school, and it was Lamp and Flambert’s opinion that we both shared about the same level of life knowledge. Donderick’s level of intelligence and education was greater, though. So they said. Some nights he would teach me math alone in the basement while he played arcade games. Other nights, Flambert told me of his love for life and the pornographic industry. His dreams were coming true. Every day exhausted his old bones, but he loved it because he loved pussy.

Egbond didn’t watch pornography, and as a result, didn’t know of my celebrity status. Church of Christ to the end, he always described himself, he was a genuine guy with genuine words about genuine things, and had a way of making learning fun. How he knew so much about stuff was none of my business, but Lamp compared him to Bill Cosby, something Egbond appreciated. The internet was the tool my fans usually used to contact me, but for the first time since I warned Lamp about FIST’s cross-country assault, I used the internet to find someone for myself. That’s how I found Egbond. “Girl in Tower Seeks Tutor for Getting a GED.” Internet was also how I bought clothes big enough for my BBW body.

Winter came, and it made no difference to me, because I never went outside. My 35^th birthday came and passed, my first spent with my uncle and my brother. For a woman stuck in a skyscraper who had everything money could buy, everyone found it hard to shop for me. I made lists every day to hand out to loved ones, hoping to be surprised by their measure of love for me in gift form. When these gifts failed to impress, I remarked how they could improve next time, if I made it to my next birthday. Everyone seemed amused, and that made it worse.

While taking a break from my study sessions, I’d usually watch TV and smoke cigarettes as Egbond swallowed or snorted painkillers. He loved to chat with the girls in the skyscraper, but never touched them. He was a married man who just loved company, and his wife wouldn’t have liked it if he touched other girls, he said. One day, during the study break, I caught a special on the Biography channel. They’d put together a program on the Tommy Hilfiger gang. High on painkiller dust, Egbond watched the program with me.

Forgotten youth, risen from the wasteland of Las Vegas, they were called. Cast aside by the upper class, the middle class, even the lower class. They were the zero class, the classless scum of a dark society, raised in America’s Vice City, corrupted by the trauma of kidnapping that grew into sociopathic intentions. The show documented the gang’s spread from Vegas to California, flashed news reports in chronological order, some of which I’d caught on the original broadcast, and they showed graphs and pictures that explained the gang’s growth over the years. While my life went effortlessly forward in the safety of San Francisco, the gang strengthened itself with the recruitment of other rejected youths from the streets of Las Vegas. The six kids who formed the core of the gang remained the leaders, and their blood pumped with a mysterious urge for vengeance. Never did the show elaborate on their target, but I recalled the news from a year earlier. They wanted me. Another bad life choice coming back to haunt me, this one growing and mutating into more dangerous forms.

An unfortunate side effect of the gang’s activity, according to the show’s narrator, was that Tommy Hilfiger’s clothing line’s popularity was waning across the country, as it now came to be associated, by some, with horrific and violent crime. Kids seen wearing Timmy Hilfiger shirts and shorts, some of my personal favorites in the world of fashion, were being targeted by police. Even adults shied away from wearing the stylish brand for fear of imprisonment and unwanted police attention. The world was changing beneath us, and it was a scary realization. It was 2004 and I thought clothes went out of style for regular reasons, like fickle teenage girls’ fickle minds, or MTV. Never would I have guessed slumlord crime could cause clothes to lose their cool.

Egbond laughed at the show, and called the gang a bunch of pissbags who lacked a good education. Since education was my big thing now, I agreed.  

The show portrayed the gang as teens who had been dealt a bad hand, saying it wasn’t their fault they turned out so bad. By this point Lamp was in the room, smoking a cigar, watching the show with us. He called this idea liberal nonsense, and Egbond got into an argument with him about politics. Knowing nothing about politics or the hands that were always associated with it, I stayed out of it and listened to the narrator go on about this bunch of miserable criminal children who had it out for the world.

By some strange pathways of thought, their political argument brought them to the topic of my so-called imprisonment in Lamp’s skyscraper. Egbond said it wasn’t right for Lamp to keep me holed up in this luxurious palace, especially if he was so much about freedom and rights. Lamp said it was none of his business why I was holed up in his tower, and that I could leave whenever I wanted to, but that by doing so, I’d be exposed to dangers from beyond which he or anyone else was equipped to protect me. Egbond said that was a typical worldview of a person like Lamp, who assumed danger and conspiracy at every turn, mistrusted everyone, and who chose to hide from the world in fear, instead of going out freely and openly into it to experience and embrace the beauty of humanity and life. He called me Rapunzel, and said Lamp was a cruel miser who wanted to keep me for himself, to hide away my beauty from a world who would treat me right. He said Lamp’s thought was poisoning my mind, convincing me of danger, and conditioning me to be afraid. “I see how you value women,” said Egbond, at  one point. “Keepin’ those dames naked all the time, sluttin’ around, fuckin’ in your films. They just objects to you, man, not even people.”

It was at this point Lamp silenced Egbond, and told him everything. He told him of the ominous threat of Sagepuss, and that the Tommy Hilfiger gang sought me out to rid the earth of me after I kidnapped them years earlier. He explained that through some awful twist of fate, the gang had teamed up with Sagepuss, a raving, radical, feminist lunatic, and sought out the targets closest to me, and continued to seek me out for ultimate destruction. He showed newspaper clippings to Egbond, about Strygler’s death, and of eminent Judge Glibbord Squambles’ unfortunate final submarine voyage. Egbond had a lot of questions, and finally, I decided to speak. Together, Lamp and I had a lot of answers.

When Egbond learned the whole truth, and his painkiller high started to fade, he became animated like a cartoon dog, or a cartoon bear, or a cartoon corndog, or something cartoonish, and was full of ideas. First, he suggested a plea to the police for constant protection. When Lamp advised him that the protection he provided, of the tower and the ladies, was superior to anything the government would or could provide, Egbond recommended I change my name, move far away, and never let my true self be known. Lamp shot this idea down with some bad words and bad looks.

Flambert and Donderick, each fully nude and covered in sexual juices, joined us as we discussed the situation, each interjecting their own opinions. Flambert said that although the bad fortune of having these psychopaths after me was wretched, he sure appreciated the chance it gave him in life to fuck to his heart’s content. Donderick, failing his classes in school because of his devotion to the pornographic industry, was critical of my ongoing tutoring sessions, and said I was wasting my time. Lamp told them to stop changing the subject, and Egbond asked each if they had suggestions how to keep me safe. Neither did.

“They’re looking for a big, bulging, hulking woman, ain’t they?” commented Egbond, after the idea-well in the room had run dry.

“Yeah, sure,” I said. For someone who was so smart, he liked stating the obvious.

“They ain’t gonna find ya if you ain’t a woman no more. Get my drift?”

“No, I don’t.”

“I think,” came Flambert’s mechanical man voice, “he’s meanin’ for you to get a sex change.”

The room was quiet, except for the TV that kept on about the Tommy Hilfiger gang. A picture of some dead bodies flashed on the screen, and spectacular music played.

“It’s not a bad idea, huh?” Donderick said, after a moment.

“It’s not a great idea, either.” said Lamp.

“Why not? Sounds perty great if you ask me,” Egbond replied. “If you’s a porn star, and got all sorta fame and fortune, of course them pissbags gonna know what you look like. That’s yer problem. Change all of ya appearance, make yuhself a man, why dontcha?”

The idea energized me. It wasn’t the first time the thought of being a man passed through my head.

“I’d have to quit the business forever, I suppose.”

“Only ‘til things blowed over,” said Egbond, his smile cackling and swerving in fleshy shapes at me. “Or you could go back as a man, make a new name for yaself. Find out if it was ya talent all along, or some fluke of fate that made ya whatcha are. Either way, Lady, when you’s a man, you can leave this tower, go ‘round town like a free person, not afraid of no gang or psychopathic avengers. Or hell, when you know you’s safe again, maybe change back to a girl and start back to the pornin’ and grindin’ and fuckin’.”

Being free again sounded good. A skyscraper life was no life for me, I had decided. I’d heard of a thing called cabin fever, but having never been in a cabin I didn’t care to learn what it was. But I guessed I had something like tower fever, and I was done with it.

“There’s always a spot for you in my films, Lady,” said Lamp, like a solemn giant with a heart of gold. “I’ll give you the artistic freedom Money Shot can’t offer.”

Money Shot offered me as much artistic freedom as I had ever hoped for, but Lamp’s ways with the internet, and his artistic eye for incestuous, voyeur, fantasy, bestiality, nature-infused, hardcore porno made his offer hard to ignore.

 “That’d be hella sweet, Lamp.” 2004 was around the time I first started using the word “hella.” I’d heard it first in 2003, before my months in the tower. It was a word that hit me with instant pizzazz. Using it was like a jolt of energy into my soul. It made me seem young, fresh, hip, cutting edge, and desirable. In the face of horror, I needed to stay strong and confident. Words like “hella” made that possible. The word also asserted my glamorous nature over all present company. In a city like San Francisco, where image and style and status were gods, that was everything. It reminded Lamp and Money Shot, I think, why they adored me and wanted me in their films. It reminded everyone who knew me that I had a rock-star heart, and a cool attitude.

 “Where you gonna get a sex change, Lady?” asked Donderick. “I hear they get real crazy when they start just cutting at you, slicing away parts of the sex organs, movin’ your boobs around. You oughtta be careful.”

The TV flashed another gruesome image of death, bodies hacked and sliced by the Tommy Hilfiger gang. Point taken. Sex change surgery would be dangerous.

“I once knew a man,” I said, with a short pause, “…who was once a woman. I should speak to him.”

It took Money Shot’s vast network of connections in the underbelly of all industries in North America to discover if Dank Wanklin was still alive. Truckers are known to have short life spans, on account of their violent nights at bars, their drug habits on the road, and unprotected intercourse at truck stops, sometimes with prostitutes, sometimes with each other. Money Shot’s longtime compatriot, by the name of Glands “Tom” Pulpquid, a man who worked in fashion, finance, and long-haul truck driving for the majority of his life, had heard of a Dank Wanklin based in the Midwest, who’d been blasting through the ranks of the Truck Driver hierarchy. He said that, through the grapevine, folks had been speaking of the masked trucker who drove all day, all night, didn’t bother to respect the hours of service regulations put in place by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, and had gone rogue back in 1997. They said he had his own big rig now, customized with all sorts of recognizable features, and he ran shipments for the highest paying clients in the country. He could get things from Seattle to Maine in only forty hours, said the grapevine voices.

Tracking down Dank Wanklin was going to be a difficult task, Glands “Tom” Pulpquid said, since he’d never actually dabbled in private investigation. Money Shot, insistent that I get to speak with Dank Wanklin about sex changes, transexualism, and alternative lifestyles more alternative than my own, pressed the matter until Glands exhausted his efforts. He came back empty handed, with only tales from guys at truck stops who called Dank Wanklin the Lone Ranger of the Interstate. Some called him the Highway Ghostman, which I thought was a better name. Money Shot pointed out that since Dank Wanklin was known to wear a mask, the Lone Ranger title made more sense. As someone who knew Dank personally, I told Money Shot he didn’t have any right to talk.

Money Shot bypassed Glands and hired a private investigator, an idea he came up with after Glands mentioned he wasn’t one, by the name of Leonardo Lamborghini, based in Chicago. Since Dank was based in the Midwest, this seemed the best place to hire. The investigator and Money Shot never met face to face, but they communicated through emails and text messages while the trail toward Dank was chiseled away at. I was never let in on the details of the guy’s smooth investigation, but he finally traced Dank to a small trailer park outside of Lewistown, Missouri. He emailed photos to Money Shot of Dank Wanklin undressing through the window of his trailer to verify it was a man below that mask. The pictures took me back eight years, to the hotel room with Dank, my bamboo children, and times of simple dreaming.

Leonardo Lamborghini introduced himself to Dank Wanklin at his trailer, after knocking on the door, shouting that he wasn’t a police officer, and promising he had no law enforcement authority. He said Dank made him dinner, fed him cottage cheese for dessert, and introduced him to a wide barge of a woman living with him. When Leonardo mentioned my name, Dank became quiet, told the woman to wait in the bedroom, and he put on his mask. Leonardo tried talking with him, but Dank sat in quiet puddle of himself for an hour before removing his mask, and asking why I wanted to see him. Leonardo didn’t have all the details, and said it was a life or death kind of deal, and Dank would be paid handsomely if he agreed to come to San Francisco.

Time passed after Leonardo left Dank Wanklin’s trailer. He’d given him my contact information, but I didn’t hear from him for some time. Studying for my GED continued to be my routine, Lamp continued filming groundbreaking, low budget, high grossing porno films, and Money Shot called me every day to see how I was doing. It was a hot day in April,  if you can believe it, when I finally heard from Dank. He emailed me, simply to say he’d be in San Francisco in a week. This was on the day that Egbond was teaching me about verbal communication and written communication, and it provided a great practice when I wrote him back to share my excitement.

Sometime during that week before Dank came to San Francisco, Money Shot called me to tell me my condo had been burned down. He came to Lamp Post’s tower, but Lamp refused to let him in. Only after I threatened Lamp with emotionally manipulative displays of power and persuasion did he bend, to, for the first time, grant passage to Mr. Money Shot. My mailbox had been tampered with, he said, and a horse’s tongue had been nailed to the inside, with a napkin taped to it. He showed me the napkin, which contained a drawing of the letters T.H. inscribed inside of a fist. I pretended I understood what it meant right away, but it was only after Lamp Post explained it to Donderick that I got it. The Tommy Hilfiger gang and FIST!? But FIST was gone. Finished. Maybe Sage just fancied herself a specter of FIST, a FIST ghost.

The danger had grown, and another attempt at my psychological ruin had been taken. When fear had finally crushed me into paralysis, Lamp Post said, they would deliver their most punishing blows. Money Shot told me to make a peace offering to Sage and the gang, but Lamp shot down his idea and offered a barrage of his own thoughts. Soon, the two were in a war of words, and forgot what they were discussing. I spent the day trying on the 59 kinds of lip gloss I’d ordered online. I let them fight, because these two important men in my life had wanted at the other’s throat for so long it made me quiver with wet nights  in thought about their bodies entangled as one. Quickly it became a rumble about pornography, and the two insulted each other’s pornographic empires, comparing film quality and film quantity, comparing budgets, talent, integrity, vision, and eventually penis size. They needed this, and I needed them. Once they got it out of themselves, maybe they’d focus a little more on me. It was a day at the zoo, so I practiced being beautiful for Dank, while they monkeyed around.

A magnificent, purple semi-truck parked outside the skyscraper, with chrome wheels, chrome exhaust pipes, and massive headlights on the roof. Rugged looking stickers were stuck all over the doors, with sayings like, “My other truck’s a woman,” and “18 wheels straight from the hounds of hell,” and “A real man don’t shit where he puts his lips,” and all sorts of other stuff. The man who climbed out and came to the skyscraper was the same man I’d left in Chicago eight years earlier. No mask covered his face, his mustache was trimmed and gray, and he was only a few pounds heavier.

For the fifth time that morning I checked my breath—it had only a hint of tuna, corn-dye, syrup, and garlic—and I rushed to the tower’s entrance. Dank’s alpha-male body walked through the rotating doors, and our eyes met.

“Dank?” I spit as I talked. “So good to see you.”

“Been a long time,” he replied, from under his mustache. The gray was nice.

“You look good. Real good. I’m so sorry about… so long ago.”

“You’re bigger. Like a big-rig waitin’ to get hauled off across the tundra.”

My power wheelchair was upstairs, so I waddled with a slowness to Dank, with my arms open and my eyes wide.

His arms didn’t fit around me, but his hug stole me from this world and had me floating in an endless vacuum. Bambarello was there, tossing spider eggs at me, and Dank’s masked face took up the bigger part of my view. As we released from the hug, Dank looked me up and down.

“It’s good to see you too, little Lady.” And he smiled.

Chapter 35. Alpha Males and Sex Changes

Dank’s alpha-male personality caused problems in the tower. Lamp Post and Money Shot, the two prominent alpha males of my life, never willing to compromise, agree, be quiet, or be friendly when aggression and selfishness were available, butted heads not only with each other, but now with the third entity of superior posturing.

“You live here?” Dank asked, while we walked down the lobby on the ground floor of the tower. The lights and marble walls and red carpet probably caught him off guard, because he seemed impressed, maybe even jealous.

“I do. I bought the place for a friend in a time of crisis and need. He helped me, I helped him. But some shit in my life has come at me, so I’m living here until the shit dries up.”

“What friend is this? I must meet him. Why this building? Why San Francisco?”

“I’ll get to all of that.”

“And why did you send for me?”

“That’ll make sense, soon.”

We explored the building together, even going into corridors and rooms I had never seen. I showed and told Dank everything I knew about the building, and told him of the long adventure I’d been on since we parted ways that fateful day in Chicago.

 He said he was unsurprised by my being taken in by FIST, nor at my easy fit with feminist theory. As I told him of their spectacular ways and their controversial worldview, he expressed less skepticism than I expected, and, unlike Lamp, wasn’t opposed to them. He voiced concern at their extremist action, and their ways of going about things, but he said he had, at one point, been aligned with a similar group that had empowered him as a transsexual. It was interesting, then, to him, that after running away from him so quickly, that I would end up among them.

“That night,” Dank was talking about the night I left him, in Chicago, “I smelled the sheets for hours. Got drunk on Lysol and coconut rum, jacked off into the pillows we shared, gnawed on the wooden legs of the furniture, in heartfelt devotion to your wooden teeth, and cried out with a broken heart.”

We were in a corner room of the skyscraper, one with a window that spanned 180 degrees and let us see a wide view of San Francisco in the morning sun. The kind of room a person gets excited about when they stay in a hotel, and they show to all their friends who aren’t even staying in the hotel. Dank looked over the city and exuded a humble and confident essence, like I remembered.

“Didn’t hang around the hotel much longer. My mask became wet with nightly tears, and I gave up my job to return to what I was good at. Drivin’ a truck. Sailed across the nation in my steel thunder-tank, delivering goods for the trucker syndicate I found myself employed by. Didn’t have a home, so I stayed in the truck. But soon as my spirit sewed its wounds back together I sought the path of freedom. No one would make my schedule, any longer, or set up a rulebook that stifled my work. I quit workin’ for Hungry Todd’s Trucking Company and went on alone, like a red wolf in the forest. Made a killing as I climbed the ladder of trucker ranks, soon able to put enough away to build up a hefty retirement.”

Dank pulled his hands out of his pockets and let a fat ring on his finger glisten in the sunlight. It was full of colors I’d never seen and if it was an instrument I thought it would make music that no one had ever heard. It was beautiful.

“See this?” he asked, like he didn’t already see my eyes locked on it. “Won this in a fist fight in Dallas. More than this. Won a bucket of jewelry off these two immigrant truckers who were haulin’ oats across the border. Mexican border. Now you don’t know nothin’ about oat-law I guarantee, and these two fellas didn’t neither. Thought I’d school ‘em on oat law, a thing I know about on account of my uncle havin’ been a small town lawyer for wheat farmers back when I was young. Didn’t see him often, but when we did, boy, he’d talk up a thunder storm about wheat law. Anyway, I got to educatin’ these fellas about what they was and wasn’t doin’ right, and all of a sudden—now ok, I was drinkin’ a lot this night, but no more than I’d become accustomed to on the road—they’re throwin’ bottles at my head, throwin’ punches at my gut, kicks at my knees, and all sorts of cussin’ and spittin’ on me. I pull my fist back and clobber one of them mothers right in the head, sendin’ him over the bar. Now a pair of other immigrant truckers come runnin’ in, start yellin’ in what I guess is Russian, and they toss some glass boxes my way, like they gonna cut me up with boxes of glass. The boxes hit the walls, my fists hit their heads, and soon the floor’s covered in nine unconscious Russians.

“The rest of the drinkers just sit around lookin’ at me with smiles and grins and laughter. The bartender jingles a set of keys at me, and I ask him what they’re for. He says these Russians always come in drinkin’, give him their keys so they won’t go drinkin’ and drivin’—real responsible of them, I guess. He tosses me the keys and says I oughtta check out what they got in their trucks. I take a peak and there’s mostly just oats in there. But the truck driven by the two boys I first met, it’s got buckets of jewelry in the front seat. They come on outside rubbin’ their heads, apologizin’ to me, and we get to talkin’ about other stuff besides wheat law. We go back inside, and the Russians say they’re impressed with my tough character, so they say I can have some of them jewels they say they just find in different towns on the side of the road. So bein’ a man about money, I of course take what they offer. A whole bucket of jewels, Lady! Still got ‘em all. But this here ring. This fine piece of richness was the grandest thing my eyes have ever seen.”

“Can I touch it?” I asked.

Dank held his hand out like the King of Wales, and let me rub it with all my fingers and both my palms. It was smooth and hard, a jeweled ring as stiff as a cock.

“Oh, and them boxes they threw at me,” he continued. “Haha, they hit the walls and was full of shit! Shit went all over the place that night. Never did drink at that bar again, though. But Hell. Boxes of shit!”

Memory snapped into my head and I recalled the boxes of my own shit I’d sold as a young girl. Some small shithole town in California had, for a brief time, known the art of Lady Molasses, my business and my creation, sold in mass quantities, and very popular. I wondered where those boxes of shit ended up. There were days where I thought back to those shitboxes and dreamed of the lives affected by each one. My memory was too weak to remember all the people who bought my boxes, but I hoped they’d remember me. Something told me they held onto those boxes their whole lives and thought fondly of me when they looked at them, years later, in a closet or a basement or a patio with friends. A box of dried, molded, bacteria-ridden shit that fogged a glass box with the colors of sin. A product of the now semi-famous Lady Molasses, famed for size and skill, hiding in a skyscraper in fear for her life.

“Gosh, Dank! What a life you’ve led since I last saw you. But I suppose now’s a good time for me to answer some of your questions.”

Dank acted like he wanted to go on with stories about his life, but I didn’t fake enough interest to push him to continue, so he walked with me some more while I talked.

The fate of FIST was revealed to him. With as much detail as I could stomach, I told him how my time with FIST ended, and how I was reunited with Lamp Post, my family of rats who I had long ago told him of, and how I’d come to San Francisco to experience the end of the twentieth century in solitary confinement and filth. I told him of the stardom I’d reached in the years leading up to my reunion with Lamp, and how I acquired two million dollars from my childhood pictures. Dank commented that good fortune just seemed to follow me, and I agreed because I didn’t really think about it when he said it.

He was regaled with my tales of lavish living, growing up, and becoming a true porn star with Money Shot’s guidance. He had never seen my film, so I told him we would watch it together, because the scenes about him would upset him and make us enemies without an explanation of my artistic license. When I told him, then, about Sage hunting me, and the possibility of the Tommy Hilfiger gang pursuing me for similar purposes, he expressed some concern. It looked like the big alpha-male really cared.

“So you hide away, spending each day in a tower, protected from the world. That right?”

“That right.”

“That ain’t right.”

“That all I can do, Dank. Lamp’s girls can kill anything. They’ve kept me safe. I’m part of the family. But I don’t like this lifestyle. I want out, I want to be free again. Freedom is everything.”

“Hell fuckin’ right it is!”

“That’s why you’re here. My tutor, a man named Egbond, came up with a brilliant idea. A sex change. If I can do that, I can be free. No longer will I be Lady Molasses, but Sir Molasses. Can you imagine? A penis to call my own, a body fit for bringing the fuck, not just taking it. And I’ll live the life of plenty and pleasure and privilege. Everything will be handed to me as though I’m royalty. Honor and power and authority and opportunity will be mine!”

“You wanna be a man, do ya?” asked Dank, his eyes flaring with eagle’s passion.

“I do. And you’re here to tell me how to make it happen.”

At that moment, Lamp Post rushed past us, on our stroll down one of the many hallways, and insisted we follow him at once. I tried to introduce him to Dank, but his mind was elsewhere, and  he pulled us with him to the studio where Flambert and Donderick, joined by nine of Lamp’s prestine goddesses, sat nude, on the set of his most recent cinematic creation.

“Behold!” Lamp shouted with his arms in the air, seeming to direct this to Dank and I, since everyone else was already in the room, part of the movie magic, “the final shoot of my magnum opus,  the pinnacle of not only my, but the pornographic industry’s achievement in filmmaking. For months we have worked toward this, and for months we have labored toward purity, perfection, and the highest quality imaginable. I give to thee… Act V, Scene XII in Of Cocks and Cosmicism.”

Dank smirked and glanced at me. Being a fine, upstanding citizen as he was, he didn’t seem to feel at ease on the set of a porno shoot. But being a gentleman, he didn’t raise a fuss.

“Bear witness to history in the making!” shouted Lamp, as he waved his hands in bizarre shapes and patterns, sending out understood directions to his camera men and the rest of the crew. Lights turned on, and the girls moved to take their places in front of the cameras.

“You’re the fuel that ignites the engine, the engine that drives the revolution!” screamed Lamp, his hands on Flambert’s shoulders, his face inching in closer. “Grief is something you’ve learned to ignore because it only hinders progress. No one’s tears are your tears. Their tears are the flint that creates the spark that sets you aflame!”

Flambert nodded with enthusiasm at Lamp’s words and rushed onto the set, his penis erect and glistening with wench’s spit, and his flabby stomach greased with a lubrication I knew all too well from my time in Money Shot’s films—a lube that sent the muscles into overdrive, like an adrenaline boost for the inner animal. Dank and I exchanged glances again and braced ourselves for entertainment.

“Actors take your mark!” Lamp yelled, while violins on set struck chords that sent chills down my spine. Judging by Dank’s face, chills rattled down his spine also. The quintet of violinists wore bowties and black suits, but stood in the shadows by the catering table in the back of the room. Their chords were haunting and heroic, if you can believe it.

The set was made of crystal, glowing from within with all the colors of the rainbow, and the naked actors were like pillars of flesh against immortal backdrops of eternity. That’s how Dank later described it, so I stole his words. But he was right.

Flambert went to his knees, and the women swarmed him as the cameras rolled. The music was like a puppeteer for the scene’s choreography, controlling every movement with each note, and every expression with each harmony. Flambert held the mic up to his throatbox and moaned, in robotic yearning: “Goddesses of galaxies, thou hast shown to me all horrors of the cosmic voids, all meaningless realities of humanity’s future, all paths of mankind! And so I await my time before the Celestial Overmind! I pride myself in my resistance to human nature, and my strength as an evolved entity!”

Tears started to fall down Dank’s cheeks, and he wiped them away thinking I wouldn’t see. I didn’t cry, and I thought about how stupid Lamp’s script was. Violin music couldn’t move me like it moved other people. Money Shot once said this was because I had the brain of a mute cannibal without hemoglobin in the blood. Lamp Post said this was because I lacked mirror neurons and other types of brain cells that let me experience other worlds. But Bambarello often appeared to me in dreams to tell me I saw other worlds just fine, and he showed them to me with great pleasure. There was never violin music in the worlds he weaved.

The womanly swarm around Uncle Flambert pulled strap-on penises from unseen places, attached them to their pelvises, and gang raped my uncle on the colorful crystal floor of the set. It was cinematic rape, so its qualities were artistic and its brutality was forgivable. But its realism cut right to the bone. Nine cameras pulled in close to create a panoramic view of the scene, each focusing on a different girl, a different mode of penetration into Flambert’s cyborg body. His mechanical voicebox uttered pained gasps and tortured buzzes, but the women brandished phallic staffs and tore into him remorselessly with multi-colored penises that spoke of multicultural themes in this masterpiece of pornographic cinema. I gasped more than once at the visions of sexual violence before me. When  my own brother joined in the sexual circus, with a snakeskin toga covering only his barest of parts, and his quivering, young adult voice replaced by a valiant steed of a man’s booming voice, a voice much like Dank Wanklin’s, or Money Shot’s, or Lamp Post’s, or Jeff Goldblum’s, turned up to ten, I just about melted with pride. A Molasses youth saving the day. It was pure romance to entertain such thoughts. I watched him with sisterly pride as he pulled a buffalo-hide vagina shield from his loins, and used ruthless force against each of the nine intergalactic wenches of shit and shame, subduing them with a cosmic, celestial, universal rape of his own, that defeated their horde-like thirst for the vanquishing of a man. I saw, then, a vision of my future. This film, this celestial journey of storytelling that I wouldn’t bother to watch when it was released on DVD or on Lamp Post’s website, was probably much like my own life’s journey. Here, before me, was a scene of a man conquering woman to avenge a fallen male comrade. I would soon be a male comrade, a man, a hero, a celestial figure of the patriarchy. What FIST had taught me over those months in Chicago was that a man’s power was everything, and that men were devils in disguise, they were cruel psychopaths who hungered for a woman’s cries of pain, and marched with erections toward a golden throne of holy dominion over all female and minority kind. Suddenly, horror gripped me, and I feared my transformation and my future. But that fear was a kind of power in itself. And that power made me tremble. I was ready.

Fire blew out from behind the crystal walls, and the girls screamed while my brother set their holes aflame. I couldn’t watch the scene much longer, and Dank’s face was by now scrunched into a terrible shape. I dragged him back into the hallway and explained to him that becoming a man was a dream I had to conquer, and that dream would become a nightmare if it didn’t come true. His nods and gestures said it all: “OK, I understand.” He held me in his arms while I cried some of my final cries as a woman, and blew snot into his cotton shirt. Dank’s embrace was a hold I remembered fondly.

When Lamp’s shoot wrapped up, I introduced him to Dank Wanklin. I watched their hands meet in a shake like the greetings of proud leaders of nations. Earthquakes rumbled beneath my skin,  brought on by emotions of conflict and collided worlds. Heroes of separate eras of my existence meeting in one wet hole of reality. My hopes for their friendship seemed useless. They each put on masks (metaphorical, not real, not yet) of hidden holes of the self. Lamp boasted of his success in pornographic film, a feat he said was impossible without lifelong devotion to artistic vision, uncompromising focus on skill-improving labor, and proper intelligent investments. Dank bragged about his self-made fortune in the trucking world, his strength and agility in bar brawls, and his endurance against sexual judgment over the duration of a life twice as long as the average trucker’s. Right away they stepped into the ring of alpha-male competition. It was a constant series of one-upping and self-adoration. I’d be lying if I said it didn't make me wet.

I explained to Lamp my need for Dank’s guidance, and Lamp explained to me his own knowledge of gender reassignment therapy. He said he held many honorary titles that gave him a sense of expertise on the topic, and he challenged Dank’s experience. When Dank made it clear he was, in fact, a transgendered, transsexed, transformed being of fresh sexual identity, Lamp voiced doubt.

“You enjoy challenging me with a man of similar but lesser qualities,” Lamp said to me at one point. “But I won’t be shamed by some fat man who drives a truck.”

“You keep the company of narcissistic psychopaths,” Dank told me, right in front of Lamp. “I can see why you left me in Chicago. Looky at this tower. You got your cake and you ate it. You got your prince and you folded yerself up real nice and gave in to mediocrity.”

They went on like this not for hours, but for days. Dank remained in San Francisco, lodged up at a hotel in the gayest part of town, and came to the tower each day to speak with me while Lamp edited his film into a master creation. Egbond continued to come by for my lessons, so my days were filled with information overloads. While Dank and I discussed sex change operations, and he advised me on what to look for in doctors, and how to find my special purpose in life, Lamp would occasionally make an appearance to pose a threat to Dank’s superiority, and Dank would counter with his own threat to Lamp’s superiority. Egbond would watch and laugh and drink his soda. The girls kept away from Dank on Lamp’s orders, but it wouldn’t have mattered, since he was devoted to his wife, the rotund rotisserie of a girl back at his trailer. He couldn’t help but tell me about her in between explaining to me the ups and downs and the dos and don’ts of sexual reassignment surgery.

“You a big girl, Lady. You got a ass like a volcano. Don’t think I don’t remember. But you oughtta know there’s a girl out there with a ass so round, so big, so fiery it makes my heart burn and bleed like it ain’t never done before. I met her at the child custody court when I’s fightin’ for my kids. She’s a desk clerk, the kinda girl who sits back in the big ol’ room with too much light and no air conditionin’ and figures out where people s’posed to go in the court house. It’s a real important job she got. Met her on a Thursday when I was fightin’ the ex wife for rights to see my kids. This girl, half my age and half my size, but twice my smartness, come on outta nowhere and start tellin’ me she gonna help me get my kids back. Now, it didn’t work, her plan. But there was fire between us that day, and I took her out to lunch after I said goodbye to my kids for the last time. And it truly was the last time, ‘cause my ex-wife committed a murder-suicide shortly after that day, as a result of her ongoin’ troubles from her own sex change. A dark time in my life for sure.”

My hand found its way to Dank’s elbow, the part of his body with the least sensuality. I rubbed it to let him know I cared. “So sad, so sad,” I whispered. “Did you start wearing your mask again?”

“Never stopped. But anyway… that girl, she took my heart into her heart and we been lovin’ wild ever since. A heart of gold, that one.”

“Really a beautiful story. Tell me more about sex changes.”

The lips on his face turned from sad to glad, and he got back into the swing of talking about things that mattered to me. Egbond, a well-read kind of guy, said even he was learning a thing or two he didn’t already know. If Egbond learned something, that shows just how much of an expert Dank Wanklin was when it came to getting a new sex.

The only thing Money Shot and Lamp Post could agree on was that I shouldn’t be let out of the tower for any reason. When Dank said it was time to interview surgeons, Lamp and Money insisted I couldn’t go. The danger was too great, they said, and the likelihood of me fucking up and getting killed was staggering. Like the old days of Russia and Europe, Money Shot arranged for the top ranked sex-surgery doctors in San Francisco to come by the tower for an interview. Disguised as emergency sex-surgery housecalls, they were tricked into a comfortable interview in the tower’s luxurious lobby. They were paid $50,000 just to show up. That’s the kind of dough Money Shot flung around.

Doctors of all sizes and shapes and colors were granted interviews, over thirty in all. Dank took it seriously and spent days speaking with each about their offers and their practices. I couldn’t make it to every interview because GED studying took up most of my daytime hours, like a real job. Getting smart takes work. During these long days and long nights, Lamp Post put the final touches on his magnum opus. The special effects team wrapped up their work, the sound guys finished, and all the post production that goes into a big time motion picture started to see its end. Lamp’s mood was visibly worse during this process, and his interactions with Dank became fewer, but more angry. When Money Shot made his infrequent appearances, by now coming into the tower freely by my own permission, a ménage a trois of territorial pissing and cock comparisons erupted between the three boys.

The summer of 2004 heated up. Money Shot’s visits became more regular so he could hand each royalty check to me personally. It became a time for us to talk about his current projects, and to reminisce about my time with his company. Lamp restricted Money Shot’s access in the tower to the lobby and the first two floors. His movie studios took up the higher levels, and now that Of Cocks and Cosmicism had finished production, he kept a tight lid on all copies of the film before it was to be officially released. It would be bigger than JO for JO, Blow for Blow, he said. His spirits were higher in the wake of completion, though he became paranoid and suspicious of everyone who entered his building. But despite his newfound paranoia, he was kind and gentle to the girls and even to Dank. But Dank’s stress levels shot through the roof as his interviews wrapped up, and he had to eliminate unsatisfactory surgeons from the list. Dank’s temper got the best of him one morning, and he threw Lamp through a table of china dolls and papier-mache windmills. These being gifts from one of Lamp’s pornographic distributors, he was furious. A minor remark about vaginal inversion to create a fake penis had set Dank off, and Lamp didn’t dare apologize. Though I wanted to get between them as they fought, I didn’t want my head to get hit and all the GED knowledge I’d accumulated over the months to suddenly disappear. I played it safe, and hung out by the studying area with Egbond while Dank and Lamp fisted each other’s cheeks in front of the interviewing sex surgeons.

Life went by in a dirty montage. In desperation, I contacted Dr. Diarrhea Jackson to ask if he meant what he said when he said he would help me. After telling him my plan to get a sex change, he said he knew a great doctor in the San Fran area. This was good, because Dank hated everyone he interviewed. Dank had been in San Francisco for months, had put all trucking on hold, and had his girl come stay with him in his mostly gay hotel, her first visit to the big city. Of Cocks and Cosmicism had been given a  release date, and a massive release party was planned in the tower. Money Shot’s empire bought out two small porno production companies in Los Angeles, and merged them into the LA base of Money Shot Studios.

As for myself, Egbond had scheduled me to take the GED test at the end of the summer. Our studying became more fierce, and I felt smarter every day.

Dank met Dr. Jackson’s colleague, a woman with blond hair and blue eyes and breasts smaller than my own. Her name was Luxana Dumpulcer and she came from Russia. After reviewing what credentials she had, Dank hired her. He scheduled my sexual reassignment, and invited the sex surgeon to meet me in the tower one evening in August.

“Sex change is for end of the year, nice Lady,” she said, with a cold voice and a cold face. “But we must make preparations for this. You take hormones to get you right, for masculinization. Testosterone and others to get your body presented just as it should be for a man. Many drugs are needed, and a series of administrations must be done. I will tell you about the choices you have in administering this testosterone as skin pellets, as pills, as injections, or other options. Then you will learn about Depo-Provera that will be put into you to stabilize things. Other supplements will be used, as well, like gonadotropin-releasing hormone agonist to decrease your pituitary secretion of luteinizing hormones. Do you understand?”

I nodded, and she went into horrifying detail about the operation and the drugs I would take before it to change my body accordingly. But with each terrifying new piece of information she showed me pictures of successful female-to-male surgeries and the smiling faces of these people as their new selves. I would be among them soon.

Hormone therapy ended my period. It made my boobs weird, and I started to lose weight. The strange effects of it on my mood took a turn for the best when I found it easier to study and to learn things for the GED. When August came to an end, I took the test. A furry mustache had started to sprout on my upper lip, and three long hairs curled below my chin. I was on my way to smartness and to manliness.

By a small margin I passed the GED. Egbond, Lamp, Flambert, Donderick, Dank and his girl, and Money Shot celebrated with me in hardcore party action, with Lamp’s ladies serving hot cakes and hot beers throughout the night, and mild drug use that lasted for hours. For the first time in my life, I had accomplished something by hard work. Even Dr. Dumpulcer came by to celebrate with us, and to make sure I was doing well with my hormone treatment.

Egbond didn’t come around anymore. His job was done, and it was sad to see him go. But the smile on his face when I held my GED high in the sky sure was pleasing to the eyes and the other senses, like taste and smell. I paid him his final installment of five hundred dollars and kissed his hands goodbye. He would later use those thousands of dollars to open a bed and breakfast in South Beach, which would go out of business and bankrupt him and his wife, but teach them the true meaning of money, something Egbond would find you can’t learn in books, and set them on the path to ultimate financial success as directors of the San Francisco library. But as far as his story being part of my story, it ended here and we parted ways.

Dank and his girl stayed in San Francisco in the months leading up to my surgery, in the Tenderloin, my favorite part of town. He took up truck driving jobs again, as one of his bank accounts was starting to hurt on account of his staying in a San Francisco hotel for so long. That’s why they moved over to the Tenderloin. It was cheaper there. The man had a tendency to let hotel lifestyles tug at his dollar bills, if you know what I mean. And I think you do, because the same thing happened in Chicago, with me. But the Tenderloin, being a seedy, filthy, drug infested, crime-ridden, prostitute-laden, homeless-filled cesspool of good things was a lot nicer on Dank’s wallet.

September of 2004 saw the release of Lamp’s magnum opus, Of Cocks and Cosmicism, which  sold out every adult theater in the nation for three weeks straight, blew up the Adult Industry Dominating Specials List, kind of like the Billboard charts for adult entertainment. It was number one for the rest of the year. Suddenly, Lamp Post’s minor pornographic empire exploded into massive success, his name became a household one, and Flambert and Donderick were propelled to superstardom as the leading men in the film. My heart was overjoyed for them, my blood was drugged and hormone riddled, but still made me glow with glee for my family. Lamp’s release party at the tower was wicked and full of fucking, sucking, fisting, twisting, blowing, bobbing, throbbing, juicing, licking, sprucing, dicking, flogging, feeling, talking, drinking, walking, stinking, laughing, shitting, pissing, snorting, huffing, smoking, puffing, pumping, humping, getting wet and wild, and positive Christian vibes from everyone. Money Shot made an appearance to congratulate Lamp Post, which seemed to show a step toward peace between them. My glad levels were through the roof, along with my testosterone. I had almost a full mustache by this point.

My uncle and brother became instant millionaires, though we all knew danger still lurked in serious corners of the silly city. Their new fame as pornography’s leading men, exactly two years after I had achieved the status as pornography’s leading plus-size star, made it seem as though good fortune poured over the Molasses family.  Our luck was spread eagle on the mantle, showing the world what our genes could do. The two of them didn’t heed the warnings of Lamp or Money Shot, and took chances on the edge of life by running out and about in San Francisco, frolicking with other porn stars, clubbing with babes and boobs and bitches, and spending their  money like wild cats in heat. Could I blame them? Not at all. I envied them. The testosterone that filled my body got me hungry for pussy. Cock still made my lips quiver, but those lips would soon become a scrotum, and I’d have some holes to fill.

My body hair grew at an accelerated rate, and by the time Christmas rolled around my body was ready for a change. A sex change. Dr. Dumpulcer came to the tower the morning after Christmas to start the surgery. At her side were four assistants, all highly trained in sexual reassignment, she assured me. Dank, Lamp, Money, Flambert, and Donderick were present as I was put under. The gas smelled like sweet vanilla, a smell that made me want to use a cock for both good and evil.

In my sleep, Bambarello appeared out of a fire shaped like a tree, spitting whirlwind and hurricanes. The storms he spat were harmless to me, and his voice shook the earth that held everything I ever knew.

“Your sexual self is to be supplanted by another,” he said in cosmic voices. “An existence such as yours, so full of raw indulgence, uncouth revelry, has come into the light of being.”

With this, a yellow light shined down on my head, and I noticed that I was only a head. No body, no hands, no arms or legs. I couldn’t feel anything, but I somehow knew it didn’t matter. My head was turned on its side by Bambarello, and he probed into my ears with his smoky fingers and a tongue like a whale. I felt all of it. My brain tingled and my skull felt fractured. When Bambarello stared into my  eyes my body seemed to turn on and I suddenly felt everything.

“Alright,” he said, setting my head back where it belonged. “Nothing will prepare you for this.” He disappeared and the yellow light shut off, the fire shaped like a tree went out, and I floated in darkness.

I woke up with the smell of vanilla gone from my nose, and Dr. Dumpulcer standing over me with her four assistants.

“Am I…” I found speaking horribly difficult, but had to go on. “Am I a man?”

Dr. Dumpulcer nodded with a cold smile. I smiled, too, and heard Dank speak up.

“Well, there’s more to bein’ a man than just havin’ all the right parts. But we’ll worry ‘bout that later.”

Chapter 36. A Real Guy

What a ride, what a rush, what a thing! To be a man of steel, of iron, of spring! Masculinity lifted me to heights unreal. Made me feel what I could never unfeel. Made me sing the song I sing.

A new man, a new soul, a new dawn. I had a cock like a beached blue whale, bloated with death, loaded with taste. It looked like a missile covered in slivers of beef, because it was made when Dr. Dumpulcer turned my pussy inside out, into a dangling mass of cutlet. She just cut some meat and muscle, yanked, tugged, and unfolded the sweaty, musky rocket from within me, and engineered some special nerve treatment, giving me a perfect penis to pound the most perfect pussies. Oh god, so wet, so fresh, so tight and luscious for the squeeze, for the pounding. The reason my dick was so big, said the doc, was from all my years of shoving big cocks inside me, along with other things too wide for an average vagina. Thousands of hours of brutal fuck turned my pussy meat into stretched steak, which, when pulled out of me to hang free, made a massive dangling dick that could strike fear into God’s pink heart.

I’d become part of a new and mysterious club. The club of men. Dank, Flambert, and Donderick took me out on the town, out in the Tenderloin district, the only part of San Francisco where shit still happened. With a face covered in hair, and a body molded by science and nature into unfathomable shapes, I was disguised to any and all who wished me harm. Safety never felt so grand. Appearing in public never felt like such a privilege. While I regretted not being recognizable to the porn-hounds of the town who would have jumped at a chance for a quickie if they knew who I was, it was good to be able to walk among the regular folk without fear.

We shot pool in mangy bars. I flopped my dick out into every glass on every table I saw, feeling liberated for the first time in my life. Bar patrons frowned and vomited at the sight of my dick, turned into stone by its penetrating glare, its robust and formidable presence. I couldn’t blame them. Had I seen a dick like that in my hungry days of bar-hopping, I’d have jumped on it wide open, or died of thirst.

Speaking of dicks, here’s a little anecdote about them. The Tenderloin’s full of beggars. And they say beggars can’t be choosers, but in the Tenderloin, beggars can’t be chewers either, because they’ve got no teeth. So if you’re looking for a good blower or rimmer and you find yourself in the dark and grimy streets of San Francisco’s filthiest burb, wait ten seconds and you’ll be asked for money. Most people in the area lost the speech centers of their brains years earlier, but still have enough neural activity to manage to say things about money, and to formulate crude fictions of their past to tug on your empathy chains just to get a few nickels from your pocket. When they come at you, tell them your meat’s getting dry, and right away they open their mouths to show you their gummy works, to let you know they possess no means of harming your cock when they go down on it. They know the best spots, so give them your hand and they’ll guide you to an alley where you can watch them work on you, gum and tongue and spit and nothing else. They’ll take anything as payment: French fries, chunks of bread, toilet water, nickels glued to pennies, anything. I don’t know if that’s an anecdote, because I don’t know what an anecdote is.

Dank Wanklin and his wife were living in the Tenderloin at the time, you remember. They had a homeless junkie friend named Billy Burrows who roamed the turf at night, and owned nothing but a sweater vest and a pair of gym shorts. It’s what he wore every day. He was addicted to pussyfist, and was an incoherent mess of a man. But we loved bringing him out with us on our voyages into the underworld.

Flambert and Donderick enjoyed their newfound fame as stars of the world’s biggest hit porno. The junkies and lower class of the district were well up to date on the latest goings on in the ‘nography world, and flocked to my uncle and brother like flies flock to shit, asking to see the burns of excessive fucking that must reside on their dicks. They weren’t shy about showing their cocks to anyone who asked, just like me—though I never waited for anyone to ask. Billy Burrows was Flambert’s and Donderick’s key to the high life. Though he was poor, Flam and Don used their riches to score mountains of pussyfist to use with Billy, and after that, he was up for anything. Dicks were always out and about when Billy was around. ‘Dick on the Bill’ we called it.

I remember a night all of us were at a car park—a place where local scum and dirt people bring their cars to roar engines, drink light beer, and trade women—and Billy tried introducing a group of tough dudes to pussyfist. They stood in a circle, had their pants down, their cocks out, and syringes in their hands, ready to inject their dicks full of pussy cream.

“The fuck? This ain’t heroin?” one of the fellas asked. Billy nodded, and said, “Brotherside, trust in me, so much gooder than heroin, you gonna see.”

But the guy started freaking out, he pulled his pants up and ran out of the circle of friends, sat on the hood of some guy’s car, and watched Billy and his friends shoot pussyfist into their dicks. I was in that circle of friends, and my swollen vaginal-mass-turned-cock was red with hunger as soon as a syringe was close by. Billy taught us to shoot straight, right into the dorsal veins. It was like Heaven came down, the whole cloudy lot of it, and sat on your cock, and the angels and demons alike groped your stretchy skin, poked your arteries and urethra with feathery wings and iron spikes, gargled your blood and cooked with your semen, impregnating all the figures of historical importance you’ve ever heard of.

 We shot our loads in seconds, each of us, into the center of the circle. As my cum came out of me in body-quaking spurts of tense orgasmic power, I pictured myself sitting in the middle of the circle taking in all the seed that came my way. But I was a new person, a man. No longer could I sit on the bukkake throne to absorb the white nectar of man’s loins. I was one of them. A man. A shooter, not a taker. I filled a new role. And many nights did my loins supply some of the nectar for a young girl we got off the street who had the right kind of skin for a glistening white bath. But I put myself in her place every time, at least in my mind. The look on her face pulled me into her head. I saw every dick facing me like the barrel of a gun as I awaited execution with tingling skin, and I could almost feel the sweet thick frosting spray me in warm showers.

My own load was an artificial cum produced of coconut milk and glue from a small apparatus installed in my guts by the good doctor. A woman can’t make male cum, you’ve rightly guessed. So a woman as a man has to fake it. When I shot my artificial load on the girl’s weeping face, I dreamed myself into her body, pretending myself into the throne of seed-soaked tranquility. I don't think the girl ever quite realized what luxury she had going. It took my whole imagination to plant myself inside her when our dicks blasted off at once. I never thought about her thoughts, I never sympathized with her, I never felt it from her perspective, or considered her tears as they mixed with the jelly jam of generous men. I just felt it from my own perspective, put inside of her head. So when she killed herself after the fifteenth bukkake it was hard for me to understand. But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t fantasize most nights after that about murdering myself with slit wrists or a cut throat after being covered in cum, going out in the parking lot’s dark eternal night with a glaze of frost on my skin, seeping into my death wounds to make my dark and endless a little more tranquil.

Dank let Billy stay at his place some nights. He had a whole refrigerator in the basement filled with glass jars of cum. Billy would fill these jars all day after shooting up pussyfist, to stock Dank’s freezer and fridge full of it. Sometimes when we were out and about in the warm summer days in the Tenderloin, and skinny dope fiends pushing baby carriages full of tin cans and glass bottles walked by with the sniffles or the giggles, or old, numb-faced women with saggy sweatpants and wild hair limped along the sidewalk, Billy and I would toss bottled semen at them for a laugh. They’d drink it down every time, and before we knew it we’d be in the alley getting blowers from 60 year old black crack addicts of indiscernible sex, and sagging glands, our fingers up their butts, and their loose teeth (if they had any) twisting with each thrust of the face. I fucking loved this city.

With the liberation that came with being a man, I learned once again that life was worth living. Life involves things outside the confines of a small, filthy building of pornographic empires. Life needs friends to make it fun. Life needs experiences to make it stretch as wide as it can go.

Speaking of friends, there was a small falling out between me and Lamp Post shortly after I became a man. Seems he was up to some secretive stuff during my time living in his building. Every time I took a shit, a hidden camera in the toilets, under the rim, sent a picture of my shit to one of Lamp’s computers. He had a whole harddrive full of my feces, filed by date and time. There was a page on his website called A Shit in the Dark. Every day he’d post two pictures, side by side, to the page. One was a picture of a dump he took the day before, and one was a picture of a dump I took the day before. All the hundreds of thousands of visitors to his website would guess which shit was taken by a man and which was taken by a woman. If you got it right, it recorded your IP address and some other stuff, and gave you a day of access to hidden, extra content on the website. This was either photos of Lamp’s ladies doing sexual shit with each other, doing it with Lamp, or doing it with my uncle and brother. He  had millions of these pictures, so he never ran out of ‘bonus content.’

Everyone knew what was going on except me. It’s not that I got upset when I found out. Privacy never meant anything to me. It’s just that I never found out until I became a man. And although he never voiced his opposition to me getting a sex change, Lamp was a little pissed when I got the change, and he had to bring A Shit in the Dark to an end. The fans wrote horrible emails demanding he bring it back, but he never could explain to them exactly why he had to take it down. No one knew it was my shit. No one knew Lamp and I even knew each other. No one knew Lamp’s skyscraper was where universally acclaimed porn star Lady Molasses was hiding out from a gang of children and a cult of social justice warriors who wanted her gutted and gorged and gangraped and dead. No one knew Lady Molasses got a sex change to protect herself from these creatures.

 His fans were in an uproar. Lamp was always sensitive to the way his fans treated him on the internet. He took his frustrations out on me, causing tension that resulted in me finally moving out of the skyscraper to live with Dank and his lady in the Tenderloin. A man does what he wants, and he’s safe doing it. This is a huge contrast to the always-afraid-of-everything-in-the-world existence of a woman who suspects a rapist and a child molesting killer at every corner and in every hole, who shutters in fear at the sight of a man walking toward her on the sidewalk. It’s amazing what a cock does for you when it’s between your legs, how it assures you that things will be OK, how it puts you at the front of the line, how it takes you to the top, how it gives you a bloated bank account, how it lets you do anything you think you can, because it enables you with elite power, thundering privilege, towers of golden shower potential, shining in the moonlight with the fifty foot flag of the patriarchy waving behind it. I know the ways of the vagina and the ways of the penis, and for all it’s worth, I nominate myself as the authority on comparing the powers of the two.

Consider the cock, the penis, the ankle-spanker, the sword of omens, the spear of mankind, the hose of horrors, the cylindrical sin rod, the trident of superiority, the imperial totem pole of Bacchus, like an artform perfected only after centuries of united struggle toward the alpha point. This staff of the angels’ golden triumph is what has, for all of history, given man his power over the land, over the beasts, over women. I couldn’t help but think back to what I was taught during my time at FIST. The violent, misanthropic, helpless feminist philosophy that perpetuated the idea of victimization and despair was so vivid in my man-eyes, the mind’s eye of my man-brain during this time that I was conflicted. I know what you’re thinking. A regular person might think that a sex change doesn’t modify a person’s brain. But the transcendental person who is learned in new age sorts of deals and advanced humanist concepts will rightly tell you that the brain is shaped by the body, by the soul, by the effervescent aura of the human being’s interaction with the collective race of mankind around him. MANkind. Think about it, reader. Think what those words imply, what debilitating, tear-inducing thoughts that word brings to the forefront of the mind. But that interaction with MANkind changes all brains, you see. That’s what Klunti taught me. That’s what Sage preached in a heavy handed sort of way, with venom and vitriol. She championed the cause for woman superiority with iron-fisted ideation. Her fuel was the world around her, the MANkind that had to be crushed. But now I was part of that MANkind. The phallus dei between my legs propelled me to that status, to that ethereal throne of privilege. God, what a tremendous occasion. If only I could put into words the feeling of immutable strength one feels as a man I would accomplish what thousands of years of philosophers and feminists have not.

But I digress. About that conflict I just mentioned: The penis is the sword that strikes down the world. It cuts the world in two. One half is woman, one half is man. And as FIST knew and preached, and the rest of feminism knew and preached, those halves of the world must constantly be at war. Was my dick a master, and I the slave? If what FIST taught me was true, my own artificial penis was the master of my being and was dragging me helplessly toward life as an enslaver, an abuser, a user, a destroyer of worlds. A man. Maybe I was blinded by its power and its imposing nature. Maybe it tricked me, that penis, with the intoxication of muscle, of courage, of willpower, of free agency. Maybe it was a mind all its own, pulling me willingly toward actions I could never fathom as a helpless virginal woman of purity and innocence and a complete lack of any noticeable agency in the feminist eye. Should I hate myself? I laid awake nights wondering that. I had kissed goodbye my femininity, and shut the lead door that would ever let me back to who I was.

But that’s neither here nor there. Now that you’ve got the basics of my first year and a half of manhood I can go on with the story.

You remember Nicolette? Probably not. She was one of the groupies I met on tour with the Spin Doctors—the young Christian virgin who unknowingly lost her cherry in a night of sticky passion with the band and myself. It seems a life of adulthood and responsibility had brought her to San Francisco in 2006 for her job at Google’s new headquarters. The Googleplex she kept calling it. When me and Dank and Billy Burrows were hanging out in the Bay area  for a day of philosophizing and life-reflection in early 2007, my eyes stumbled upon the familiar figure of Nicolette getting out of a Mazda Miata in front of the very bagel shop we were sitting in with our deep thoughts. She looked the same, just about 13 or 14 years older. Hadn’t gained a pound or lost hair or tooth. I could almost smell her, and I could definitely feel her soaked skin against my soaked skin, still so many years after that tour bus. While she ordered her bagel I approached her, unsure how to introduce myself in my new state. Let me spare you the details and just say that one full can of mace later she started to believe my red and teary-eyed face about the times we had 69’ing, clusterfucking, and ramrodding with the greatest band of the 1990’s.

“The 90’s,” she said more than once, “seems like such an ancient epoch.” But I reminded her that, at the time, it was only about 7 years gone, and our own period of bus-based fucking and friendship was no more than twice that far gone. We laughed together for hours about Bleckie, Frangfoi, and Yarara, not to mention the timeless personas of the Spin Doctors. I told her the abridged version of my story since that time, rats and death and sex change included, and she told me her own, with bright eyes and red lips much like the way she used to talk, with more educated flair.

After the Spin Doctors tour, she finished college with a new vantage point on life. Sex with friends was a thing of regularity. She and Bleckie stayed friends until Bleckie’s high school graduation, when Bleckie went into a coma from alcohol poisoning. Nicolette and her boyfriend of that week visited Bleckie in the hospital and watched her die while they fed her alcohol through her IV, while singing Spin Doctors tunes. Nicolette said the funeral changed her life, when she saw that alcohol and death and sex and music could ruin people when they least expected it. She finished her studies in social work and abstained from sex or drink for years, until she got her Masters in government relations or something like that, and started working for a dot com company. I don’t know what that is and I never bothered to learn. She said her life “took off into the stratosphere,” from there, where she met so many exciting and enriching people who changed her life for the better that she just had to start back up with sex and drink and music again. Nicolette got married to an Arab named Yusef who was the inheritor of millions of dollars from his father who died in a suicide bombing incident just a couple months earlier. Always being called the golddigger and trophy wife that she was, she finally divorced Yusef after 9/11 when she decided all Arabs were concerned with was suicide and death and politics. “Get your virgins while you can,” she told him, “because I’ll never be that for you!” But knowing Nicolette, I imagine she said a lot more than she told me, and sprinkled it with words like “fuck fag,” “cunty,” “twat,” and even “sand nigger,” just to try to sound cool.

Something called Facebook had come along in the years, and Nicolette said she used it to get back in touch with Yarara and Frangfoi, only to find out they had formed their own band called Médecins Français. That means French Doctors. Seems they did Spin Doctors covers, along with a few originals with an anarcho-punk theme. I always thought the Spin Doctors went well with anarchy, so I wasn’t surprised. When Nicolette said Yarara had died in an incident with a pipe bomb and a shampoo testing facility that she wrongly thought was testing its products on animals, I also wasn’t surprised. Frangfoi had gone into politics later, and Nicolette lost touch with her when she abandoned the internet altogether. That surprised me. Frangfoi was a spirit that, from time to time, I thought of in night dreams and day dreams, hoping to one day reunite with.

Nicolette and I kept in touch on the website she showed me. Facebook, it’s called. She had a real job and was, of course, very impressed by my success with pornography, the very thing I’d hinted at almost two decades earlier on the bus as being my dream. Google made her happy. I guess it was all the things they did for her. But when she told me she was tired of working and not living, I said I had her solution. It wasn’t a real solution, as much as it was just drugs and food, with the hope of sex on my end. We spent a few weekends together after she decided it was best to get out and live a life that wouldn’t last forever.

 She and I were riding in a taxi driven by a guy she thought seemed a little creepy. This was sometime in mid 2007. His name was Vincent and his words and face gave us all the signs of someone who was ready to touch you even if you said no. Feeling the gut-filled strength of manhood, I had no fear of rape anymore. But Nicolette was white with horror the whole ride. Before we made it back to the Tenderloin where I planned to fuck her wet with my bleeding mass of cock, she got the idea Vincent was gonna kill me and rape her, and leave us both in a ditch to be picked clean by ‘cisco vultures. So she opened our to-go box from Dubo-Dongo’s Steakhouse and started shoveling meat and cornbread into her goddamn face like we hadn’t just had five pounds of meat apiece. Every block we drove sent another mountain of shit into her gullet. I didn’t even remember getting that much food at the steakhouse. She threw back rib after rib, lump of fat after lump of fat, and her face turned to a sad, toxic, exposed kind of pathetic fearful animal.

“It’s so he won’t rape me,” she cried, spitting cornbread or steak or ribs or some kind of grub as she talked. “I get fat enough and he won’t wanna put it in me! My skin will bloat into full sportsballs shapes and he’ll avoid me like Gengis John fought me off in senior year!” She yelled at me, and I knew he could hear her. I stopped fearing for my life, and started feeling bad for Vincent, the obviously outcast taxi driver from some subhuman shithouse suburb where he developed no skills beyond driving and shifting gears and parking over sewers. When I caught his face in the mirror, I recognized him as one of the guys from Billy Burrows’ circle of friends at the car park. He was the one who refused to try pussyfist. I saw in him the man who seeks pleasure, but not if it’s dangerous. He never joined our bukkake parties. He never gave in to peer pressure to try pussyfist. He was a professional who probably only dabbled in heroin when the world slept. But rape? No way.

“He don’t look like a rapist,” I said, with a kind of I-gotta-be-quiet voice. My judge of character is always astute and right on. Nicolette argued with me, constantly spilling food from her mouth, burping with fear and rage, filling the cab with the odor of desperation. For the first time ever, I lost the fermenting essence of lust, rendered impotent by Nicolette’s ideas of perversion. Maybe it was the man in me, but perversion stopped being so overwhelming. Talking and acting freely with my impulsive feelings over a lifetime somehow seemed like something I could no longer do. I feared it, now. I felt this secretive, hiding sense of judgment always lurking behind bushes of the mind’s firmament. Like I was under watch at all times, unprotected by the feminine innocence assumed by society, instead always implicated by the masculine sense of guilt that came with a cock. So I calmly told Nicolette she had nothing to worry about. And it turned out to be true. Vincent didn’t rape us. He let us go when we got to our stop, without so much as a word of evil or a threat. He just smiled and put out his hand for money.

Without the urge to fuck Nicolette wild like the preserved beast she was, and being stuck with her for the night, I decided to introduce her to some friends. I let her meet Dank again, who kissed her hand, and whose wife smiled a toothy grin between puffs of cigarette smoke. Nic and Dank remembered each other from the bagel shop months earlier. They nodded a short hello. Billy Burrows waved to her, then came to shake her hand while saying, “we meet again, we see eye to eye, and you look at this frail and flittering guy, this thing before you who is but skin and shrinking bone, a sinner getting thinner who in his mind is all alone. Imagine if you can, for a moment or a minute, if you and I had met one time, and our memories were in it, attached to each other like a child to its mother, my fingers in your hair while your eyes began to stare, and the music turned to brass, dropping trumpets in the grass, along trombones, the music of our homes, our ancient and forgotten huts, ancestral cabins fitting arms and legs and butts, French horns and spectral melodies, woodwinds in the back, and forfeited integrities, only the percussion we had lacked.”

Like everything he said, this made no sense. Nicolette acted charmed and aroused, and with the grease still on her lips from her surprise taxi ride feast she kissed Billy’s hands before I threw her into Dank’s truck and demanded we be taken to Lamp’s skyscraper so I could show her where I lived, and where I became a legend.

I hadn’t seen Lamp or Money Shot in two years. But with the pressure of a past acquaintance on my arm, under the nighttime sky of a San Francisco Spring, and the support of my uncle and brother greeting us at the door, we walked into Lamp’s skyscraper like nothing had ever happened.

One who hadn’t known our story or our history, observing us for some reason for the first time this night would have in fact been under the impression nothing had happened. We walked in and Mr. Money Shot and Lamp were arguing in the well lit marble lobby about another thing I never had cared about.

“You honestly believe I sit around masturbating to taxes?” Money Shot asked.

Lamp Post snapped his fingers in the face of one of his women, and said nothing. The babe ran out of the lobby, into a hallway, out of sight. 

“Like I just sit there thinking about taxes, or looking at new taxes, or raised taxes, and I pull my dick out and go, ‘Ooh, yes, that’s a good tax! More of that, please!’ You really think I do that sort of thing? You think that’s what Liberals do?”

The babe returned to the lobby and handed Lamp his laptop.

“Let’s see, huh?” replied Lamp. He clicked on a folder on his desktop labeled MS, and smiled big.

“Big deal,” I said, announcing my entry. “I have plenty of shit on my computer with MS. Ever heard of MS Paint?” I crossed my arms and seemed to be the only one impressed with the good point I had made. Nicolette giggled. It was a giggle of approval.

Lamp and Money Shot got wide in the eye and white in the face when they saw me. Money Shot motioned for me to come closer, like I was still just one of the family. Such were the ways of the San Francisco pornographic community in those days.

Upon moving a few steps closer we could see that in Lamp’s MS folder there were dozens of videos and photos. He played a video for us.

“I present to you,” he said, like he was announcing his victory,  ignoring us for the moment, “the money shot.”

On the screen, our very own Money Shot was sitting in front of his computer with a graph of taxes and tax rates. He clicked a couple times to reduce the image size to only show lines that trended upward, and pulled his dick out and stroked it with the angriest tugboating I’d ever seen. He cycled through pictures with his free hand, finding data on income tax, sales tax, property tax, and pulled up a picture of Ronald Reagan with a statistic about raised taxes, and threw his head back, his eyes closed, and screamed while he came all over his keyboard.

“The money shot,” repeated Lamp. He closed the video and set the computer aside, putting on a screensaver that cycled through the numerous photos of Money Shot masturbating to taxes.

“Where the fuck did that come from?” Money Shot boomed.

“A better question,” said Lamp Post, “is, where the fuck did that come from?” He pointed to me. I was holding Nicolette’s hand, and Dank stood behind us. But none of that mattered. Lamp came at me with his arms open for a hug. He squeezed me tight, squealing in glee, shouting to his girls that ‘the ol girl is back!’ I kissed him on the cheek and said, “But I’m a man now, Lamp.” He seemed to understand.

Money Shot shot a money-winning smile at us, and shook our hands, including Nicolette’s, having no idea who she was, such is the man’s flair and personal charm. It was just then I noticed the music playing in the lobby. It was Bush, one of Money Shot’s favorite bands. The song was “Comedown,” a song Money Shot had used for so long to try to get me into the band. I have to say this has no impact on the narrative, it is no matter in the story, but it is something I remembered at the time. Disregarding the music, I introduced Nicolette to my old friends, introducing her as an even older friend, an ancient compatriot never forgotten. The way Lamp and Money looked at her I could tell they were thirsty for her secretions, each eager to be the first to cast her in a pornographic epic that outdid the other.

“Forget it,” I said, before they asked. “Nikki’s a wet deck only I get to swab.” I winked at her. She was on the verge of vomiting from all the food, so she didn’t return the affection. “She works at the Googleplex with numbers and designs and ideas none of us could fathom in all the fathomless deeps of time.”

Ignoring my commentary like usual, my New York pal went into his own tirade. “I’d like to apologize, dear Lady, for what I-“ started Lamp.

“Fuck it,” I said. “And you know I ain’t no Lady no more.”

“Guy Molasses,” said Money Shot, putting his hand on my shoulder, “I feel like I can treat you like a comrade now. You’re like a true blue fellow of the cock.” And he grabbed his own cock, shook it once to show me we were all alike, all of us with penises. “How’s living been? Dank, pal,” and he looked at Dank. “I hear you’re living together. I do hope the living’s going alright.”

Not willing to let himself be outdone in manly hospitality, Lamp Post grabbed my hand for another shake, and smiled, nodding rapidly, saying, “We’re so happy to see you back. You and Dank both! So sorry about things in the past. I will say no more. Just know the company has taken off so tremendously that me and this pal of yours,” he pointed at Money Shot with a golden wand that must have cost hundreds of thousands, “we are, by all technicalities, professional enemies now.”

“It looks like you’re getting along right as rain right now,” I said. “Only politics getting in the way!”

They looked at each other, then back at me.

“Politics is the language of life, Lady,” said Money Shot. “We vehemently disagree on it, and despite our otherwise satisfactory agreement on most of life’s tricks and shadows, we are therefore opponents in the larger scheme of things.”

Lamp, for once, looked at Money Shot and said something against me. “She wouldn’t understand. But Lady—sorry—Guy,” he looked at me, then at Money Shot with disdain for not acknowledging my rightful new name, “you have never really understood the complicated aspects of politics, nor how they intercede with human affairs. Let us regale you with—”

But I stopped him with my palm to his mouth. “I’m here to show around Nicolette. Listen, Lamp. Listen, Money Shot. Love you both. But I’m a man, now. I got needs and I got things going on in my life. I want this girl to see the empire that made me the hero I am. And don't either of you downplay what a true hero I am.”

“I can show her that empire,” said Lamp, raising his hands as if to indicate the lobby of his skyscraper as being the fortress of my success.

“I can show her that empire over on my side of town,” said Money Shot, waving us toward the door.

I didn’t know who to stare down first. Lamp did give me that early pornographic exposure, and anonymous boost, plus that first couple million that put me on the road to glory and absolute success. Money Shot did give me that ultra successful pornographic biopic years later with my name plastered all over it, and the few million that followed. But when I thought long, deep, dark, and hard about it, I saw it was only me who gave me that success. I made myself the hero. I had the foresight in 1977 to take pictures of my naked self with Polaroids so I could preserve for all of time my endless sexuality that would have gone to waste if it wasn’t shared with the masses. I fantasized about patting myself on the back and granting myself the use of a room full of hookers and dumptruck drivers and mothers waiting for the cold ice-saw of later middle-age to slice them open at the bum for fuck with frosty surprise and hope. In a way, but in more than just one way, I deserved it. I deserved to be loved and looked upon as the eternal idol I was, with a room full of beings to conquer in fuck. I had earned a legion of adorers, yet all I had were two rich men vying for my approval, each claiming to be the creator of my vast fortune.

“Neither of you hold the reigns of my life or my success,” I said. That was, up to that point, the most poetic thing I’d ever said. “I made myself. The two of you just capitalized upon my good ideas and my taking the prerogative.”

I could feel Nicolette looking at me with a hint of sexual dampness. Some sort of dampness, anyway, derived from my use of powerful words only a man could use. The way she pulled on my arm without any sound, with only a glance into my eyes, with a smile that said, ‘show me something,’ let me know I was the alpha male of the room. Even Dank Wanklin was no match for my phallic charisma that night.

“Prerogative,” echoed Money Shot. “Listen to that. Guy, you learned a lot under the tutelage of Egbond. You’re quite the—”

“You’d never have known Egbond or even the heights of higher education if you hadn’t come to San Francisco with me,” interrupted Lamp. “The way your mind was sculpted to know—”

“Excuse me, but let me say that without my prodding you to be a more thoughtful and better human being you’d never have  sought out Egbond’s tutelage, and you’d never have gained his—”

“I’m afraid I have to interject that my forethought to devote entire divisions of my website, funded fully by myself and my farm earnings, was what provided you the chance to—”

“Let me cut in here to say it is the film I funded with millions of my fortune that propelled you to the top of pornographic stardom. That, in effect, put you at the tip top of—”

And he was again cut off by Lamp Post, saying: “It was my computing expertise in the 90’s that brought you to instant fame with the pictures of yourself as a child, which, illegal as they were, I put my life behind, and all the hours of the week behind putting on the net via skills I learned in the dingiest homes and the most coke-stained living rooms a man has ever—”

“You no doubt recall I said to you what a failure you had been for the entirety of your life!” shouted Money Shot over Lamp Post. “This man,” he screamed, pointing down Lamp, “never gave you the punch or the boost or the encouragement to become the better human everyone knew you should be. He saw your weakness as a thing of filth; the degenerate who always had to react to a stimulus that entirely conquered it and made it be something without agency or intellect, who couldn’t go without fully reacting to it like an animal. This sonofabitch enabled you as the immoral subhuman who behaved with nature’s reactionary instinct. The thing separated from humanity by a dividing line of reason and forethought. He allowed your rebellion against life as though it was a—”

“A lease to be who you wanted to be!” Lamp screamed in anger. “I enabled you to be the Lady you always were. Everything I did was in order to make you more the person you knew you were. You were the Übermensch I never knew. You were something that previous empires—”

“Something any past civilization would despise outright with complete prejudice!” yelled Money Shot. His hands were full blown flying in the sky. “I pushed you to become something better. It’s something I’ve pushed all my stars toward. Every porn star who works under me has at least a high school education, if not a full four years of college. I’ve told  you this. I’ve shown you the path to ultimate—”

“To ultimate servitude and self-hating failure,” said Lamp. “He’s feeding you this illusion of control that you have over your life, when in reality you were for so long a slave to his empire. You pledged allegiance to the flag of money shots and money bags, devoted to his perverted dream of—”

“My dream of giving the populace what they wanted,” said Money Shot. “God forbid it be my dream to let the common man find sexual fulfillment in a fantasy that only multimillion dollar productions can give him!”

I was surprised at how cordial Lamp and Money Shot were as they interrupted each other for close to an hour. Although their ideas conflicted like acids and bases (a comparison I could only make on account of Egbond, thank the dark lord for his assistance and existence), they behaved like the professional adult gentlemen they were. I told both of them to fuck themselves with memories of me as a robust female. When Lamp said something about Mark from the Spin Doctors having confided in him his most desirous of dreams toward some kind of sexual comfort in later life that could only be accomplished by the development of my childhood pictures into pornographic legend, I was swayed toward his side. It didn’t hurt that Nicolette’s sympathy was with Mark in her perverted fourteen year old memory of our bus times and her youthful days of love for the music of the 90’s.

As an attempt to build some common ground between Nicolette and my friends, I told Lamp that she knew Mark from way back in the day. I asked what Mark was up to these days, but Lamp didn’t know. He said he never spoke to him again after our little sprint from the police. The same sprint that left me in the woods for years. The same woods that led me to Dank Wanklin’s little shit town in Ohio. The same Dank Wanklin who took me to Chicago in his big truck. The same Chicago where I met FIST and reunited with Sagepuss. The same Sagepuss and FIST who tried to murder Lamp Post on his New York farm after finding child porn on his website. The same child porn that I made of myself with my dad’s Polaroid camera. The same dad who was killed by my sons, Dick and Harry. The same sons who killed Barbalay, Sagepuss’s older sister. What a stream of reality. How peculiar it is that everything looks connected like some fat hand of fate designs it that way.

By the time I’d thought all this through in silent contemplation, Dank and Flambert and my goddamn brother were seated in leather chairs with Lamp’s provocative women giving them lap dances and meaningless sexual advances that would never result in sex. Seems Flambert and Donderick should have known this, as they lived there. But Dank, a man with a wife waiting for him back at the shithouse, there was no excuse. I took a tater tot out of Nicolette’s pocket and threw it at Dank’s head to let him know I was eyeing him in his time of temptation. I didn’t have to put forward much effort before Lamp took it upon himself to kneel beside Dank to preach Biblical passages about faithfulness and endless devotion to one’s wife. Dank was receptive. He suckerpunched one of Lamp’s gals in the jaw and tossed her away. We all thought this was funny, except Nicolette, who for some reason didn’t think a big man punching a girl was anything to laugh about. When I told her Dank used to be a girl in his younger days, she suddenly found it hilarious and said it could be the kind of thing someone threw into a movie. When Lamp’s girl jumped back to her feet and suckerkicked Dank in the neck eight times, almost putting him into a coma, no one was laughing except me, and everyone was running around crying for order and simplicity, begging the world for some kind of sense. Seemed I was the only one with a sense of humor.

That sense of humor carried over pretty good when Money Shot and Lamp Post took me aside after the ruckus to say there were messages sent to their respective residences saying someone knew my secret, and that even as a man, I wasn’t safe from the fate I’d written for myself. I told them I hadn’t written anything, which didn’t seem to convince them I was safe. They said there was definite trouble in my immediate future. For some reason I didn’t buy it till Dank Wanklin got done with the biggest busted babe of Lamp’s party and confirmed to me that he, too, had received a letter at his place that I wasn’t safe.

“What the fuck?” I said, pounding my fist on the closest table, which was cheap wood, and incidentally broke at my strike. “And when were you gonna let me know, Dank? I’m a man now. I’m not supposed to be susceptible to danger or death.”

Money Shot looked at Lamp, and said, “Egbond taught her that. Taught him that. ‘Susceptible.’ Had no idea what it meant before he came along.”

“ This makes no sense!” I said. “Who sent these letters? I’m a man now. I can read. Why didn't I get a letter?”

Dank said, “Sorry, Lady. I mean Guy. Didn’t get it til a couple days ago. Didn’t even open it til today. But you were gone by the time I read it. When you came home with Nicolette here, I was too enamored with her good looks to tell you anything about some goddamn letter.”

“Lamp and I have compared the contents of our letters,” said Money Shot. “ And they appear to be identical. Both are signed D.J.”

“Diarrhea Jackson!” I yelled. I’d worry about how he came to know my whereabouts later.

“Same initials signed at the end of my letter,” said Dank. “Must be this Diarrhea fellow.”

“That’s the bloke you met with in town some years back,” said Lamp. “Is it not? The girls here accompanied you as an escort, if I recall right.”

“You recall right,” I said. “Diarrhea is a great friend. He cured my rabies. There might be something to all this, because he knows a man named Diarrhea Johnson.”

“Yes,” said Money Shot. “The uncle of Sagepuss, the psychopath who has orchestrated this massive operation against you.” He looked to Nicolette, to let us know he wasn’t simply reciting some plot back to everyone who already knew it, but was instead bringing this newcomer up to speed. She didn’t seem to be following, anyway. “It was through your webshow on my website that Dairrhea Jackson, the good one, came to find your current whereabouts. Do you remember?” He winked  at Lamp Post, as if to say, ‘working in my employ, Lady has benefited far more than she ever has under you.’

“Sounds about right,” I said. “Why the fuck doesn’t he email me? Email’s so much faster and easier. I  have his email address. I’ll just find him that way.”

“Maybe he’s got a reason,” said Lamp. “You can’t trust the United States postal service with your secrets, but you can’t trust the internet either. I don’t like this, Guy. Maybe you ought to move back here.”

“It’s wiser that you come with me,” said Money Shot.

“Hell, ya’ll motherfuckers,” said Dank. “He’s doin’ just fine with me. We love having Guy stay with us. Our neighborhood ain’t no place a bunch of rabid feminists are gonna trod through.”

“There’s more than just a social justice entourage,” said Money Shot. “Don’t forget the Hilfiger gang. They’re in cahoots with Sagepuss’s army. At least that’s the news. No place is safe.”

“You cunts forgot one thing,” I said, standing my lardy mass on a table that broke immediately and planted me on the floor, so that I was unwilling to stand up. I unzipped my fly and pulled out my cock. “I’m a man, now. I ain’t afraid of anything. I got the patriarchy on my side. No fucking feminists or gangsters are gonna send me back into hiding.”

That’s when Dank, Lamp, and Money sat down around me to tell me all about the inconvenient truths of being a man. There is very little difference between man and woman, Money Shot explained. There is no such thing as a patriarchy, said Lamp Post. And that from a man who believed heavily in conspiracy theories. There is no special power or privilege that comes with being a man in America, said Dank. They went on like this for some time, while I laid on the floor with splinters from the broken table. I could do nothing but listen as they lectured me about manhood. But I knew manhood. I was a man. I didn’t need this. But I was too fat and helpless to move. After an hour or so, Nicolette went off with Flambert, Donderick, and Lamp’s women to explore the skyscraper without me. Maybe it was best that way. I didn’t want her to be cheated with a false man who couldn’t even stand up to the hardships of manhood.

Chapter 37 coming soon....