The cold rain recalls those dismal days when I worked as a
messenger in NYC, a vagabond kept warm by the overcoat the Army let me keep
when I got discharged, those chill days seemingly so sour then, but in
retrospect now seem sweet, as now, this time, after a cold, cold winter, life
is sweet again, and sour, having missed something I ought not have and regret
my inability to get it back, like the bus trip I took as a kid, having missed a
stop with no way to reverse, having only a one-way ticket, rain dotting the bus
windows, with me hoping the deluge will stop by the time I get to my
destination, where life might feel sweet again, this chill day seeping into my
bones, raising all those moments when I should have done things differently,
now can’t turn back, I’m soaked to the bones, looking from where I’ve been
rather than where I’m going, missing people I know do not miss me.
Darlene was the manager to the cosmetics outlet attached to
the warehouse where I worked.
She was in her late 30s, maybe even early 40s, but was drop
dead glorious.
Jack was a scrawny kid just out of his teens, who drove part
time for the company making deliveries.
He had the hots for Darlene just as we all did.
I never hit on Darlene but a number of the other warehouse
employees did, and got rejected.
Jack was the only one she paid any attention to, inviting
him into the outlet during breaks or after the warehouse closed its doors for
the day.
She showed him around the outlet, let him sample perfumes
and other things, and he followed behind her like an adopted kitten.
To say the least we were insanely jealous, and teased him
merciless as to whether he got to first base, or maybe beyond.
He never answered the question, simply saying she was like a
sister to him, with the rest of us thinking if we had a sister like her, we’d
still want to fuck her.
The more it went on, the worse we got, so jealous of Jack a
number of us stopped even talking to him.
None of us at the time took note of the small changes he was
undergoing; maybe we didn’t want to; he dressed better if a bit oddly, wearing
female slacks, jeans and flat shoes, rather than his previously grimy t-shirt,
jeans and sneakers. He had even let his hair grow.
I began to suspect something when I saw subtle touches of
makeup, eyeliner, shadow, and just a little pink on his lips. I also noticed
that Darlene started to refer to Jack as Jackie.`
At one point, as he waited for us to finish packing an order
he needed to deliver, Jack and I bumped into each other between some of the racks,
where I asked him what the hell was going on.
“What do you mean?” he asked, seemingly legitimately
baffled.
“I mean the girly clothes, the eye liner and god – the lipstick.”
“You don’t like it?” Jack asked. “Darlene told me you would.”
“What the fuck does this have to do with me?” I asked,
perhaps a bit too harshly.
Jack’s mouth snapped shut; he walked away.
I went to talk to Darlene, who remained very aloof.
‘It’s not something I’m at liberty to talk to you about,”
she said.
“But from what I’ve heard, you talk to him about me all the
time.”
“I don’t talk to him about you, he talks to me,” she said.
“What about?”
“As I said, I’m not at liberty to day,” she said. “Maybe you
should talk to Jackie yourself.”
“I did talk to him,” I said. “I get the impression that he’s
dollying himself up to make himself more attractive to me.”
“Does it? Darlene asked.
‘Does it what?”
“Make you more attracted to Jackie.”
“I’m not gay.”
“Which is why Jackie came to me, asking me to turn her into
a girl.”
“You can’t turn a guy into a girl,” I said.
“I can. Or at least someone as close as possible,” she said
matter of factly, as if she had done something like this before, and from the smug
look and that slight darkness in her eyes, I believed she had.
“What happens if you succeed and he finds out I don’t want
him in that way?” I asked.
“How do you know you won’t,” Darlene asked, looking me
straight in the eyes. “You haven’t see the finished product yet.”
I told her she was crazy and went back to work, doing my
best to avoid Jack, though with business picking up, he got assigned to help us
pick and pack orders, putting him within earshot all day, and leaving the scent
of his perfume wherever he went.
Darlene apparently decided to up the anti. All subtly
vanished. Jack came in dressed in a short skirt, stockings, and bright red lipstick,
creating a huge amount of havoc among the other workers, who were either
disgusted or more often, attracted, men who then found every excuse to get
close to Jack whenever they could, while I did the exact opposite.
It got worse. Jack suddenly developed tits, and spoke in a voice
so feminine I even sometimes mistook him for a girl.
A few of the crew were so upset about all this, they wanted
to take Jack out into the woods behind the warehouse, and would have beaten him
senseless had I not intervened.
I went back to Darlene.
“You’ve got to stop this,” I told her. “Jack is going to get
hurt.”
“Jackie wants this,” Darlene said. “Besides, it’s too late
to stop.”
“What do you mean?”
“Jackie has been taken hormones and getting other treatments,”
Darlene said. “And she’s scheduled to go into surgery next week.”
“You really are crazy!”
“It’s what Jackie wants.”
“But it’s not something I want, so if he’s doing this for
me, he’s wasting his time.”
“It’s not about you anymore,” Darlene said. “If you don’t
want her, there are plenty of others who will.”
That’s when she told about Jack’s giving blow jobs and doing
anal sex in the men’s room with the boys.
“If he gets caught, he’ll lose his job,” I said.
“It’s a risk we all take,” Darlene said. “I won’t ask her to
stop doing anything that makes her happy.”
Due to the surgery, Jack was out of work for several weeks.
I thought things would get back to normal when he got back, when the opposite
was true. During her absence, many of the guys moped around, it felt like a wake.
When Jack got back, they treated him like a star. At that point
upper management got involved, realizing they had a very pretty girl working
side by side with a pack of overly horny men.
Jack got transferred to the outlet to work with Darlene,
while each day at lunch or breaks the boys went over to outlet, brining Jack
small gifts.
“You can’t tell me Jackie isn’t better off now than she was
before,” Darlene told me sometime later. She’s never had so much attention.”
“I suppose not,” I said, although I still wished for the old
Jack back, something that seemed to transpire when management hired Jack’s
replacement, a kid as scrawny as Jack had been, but to my dismay, the new
driver attracted Dalene’s attention.
Only in retrospect do I realize how she kept me aroused,
sending me pictures each morning to remind me of what she looked like, feeding
me my own hormones like a drug, addicting me, stirring me up, until I couldn’t
think straight, and would do just about anything to please her, a personal
servant, a sissy with my cock locked up in the palms of my hands, and now,
realize how pleased she must have been, knowing she could make me do anything
she wanted, pulling this string or that, causing sensations in deeper part of
me, and I think of that time – after I became irrelevant– when she sent me
texts to meet her, telling me she didn’t mean me when I got there, and my head
so over inflated, my blood already in a boil, I saw in the corner like a
scolded child, waiting for her next command, and even now relishing a bit of
it, thinking how pleasant it would be for her to control me, though I think,
too, she may not have completely know how much power she really had.
I keep thinking I see her reflection in the store windows
when I walk the black from where we worked to the German bar, outside of which
she surrendered her first kiss to me.
She’s not really there; neither is the bar, as if punishment
for all the carnal sins I’ve committed in my imagination since, reshaping that
night long ago into something other than it was, something grander in which I
got to play a starring role, my imaginary fingers slipping through the space
between the buttons of her blouse, my palms encircling the swelling I find
there, fingers pinching the tips until their rigid, this madness of hormones
that keeps me aroused, shaping my world view as I stare through the glass of
the German bar where I see ghosts, the barstool on which she sat, painting into
the vacant space the wine glass with the smudge of her lipstick on it.
I make love to her in my mind over and over, again and
again, reliving and expanding on that scene, remembering the quite real kiss,
and all the paraphernalia I have added to it since, always in need for more.
I still have the pic she sent of her mixing drinks at her
father’s party, when she had to travel north, telling me she would not see me
again for a while, and all I wanted at that time when I saw that picture was to
be there with her, leaning close as she stirred up the ingredients as if a
witch’s brew I did not need to imbibe to fell intoxicated, and how much later I
sent her a text wishing her a happy birthday, as the whole world changed, collapsing
in on itself like a black hole, and how I felt the need to run and hide from
the mob she set loose, their torches and pitchforks full of vengeance, and now,
years later, I think of those two moments as bookends, my brain bouncing back
and forth between the two extremes, the good memory side by side with a bad
one, though after the second she seemed to show mercy on me, aware that I was
up to my neck in quicksand, and how I should not fight the inevitable, the more
I struggled the faster I would sink, when even now I know, I’ll still way over
my head, but wise enough not to send any more birthday wishes.
