He said, “First off, I’m gonna buy myself tits.”
Then he swore me to secrecy and showed me his online ad.
I told him, “You’re crazy! Who’s this guy ‘Dominus?’ What do you know about him? You’re taking your life in your hands.”
“Tell me about it!” he said.
Kenneth Kingsley, Attorney and Councilor at Law, to Katherine G. Jackson, Curator of 21st Century Manual Arts at the American Museum Without Walls, March 3, 2067:
It has come to my attention that in your upcoming biography of the late arsomorphic [sic] Manual artist John Firth Baker you plan to reveal the identity of my client and portray him as a sadistic pederast. In this regard, it is incumbent upon me to warn you that any such action would severely prejudice the rights of my client to anonymity and freedom from baseless slander.
Accordingly, should you undertake such a course of action I would feel compelled on behalf of my client to make use of all available legal remedies. These would include, but not be limited to, injunctive relief and damages, both punitive and compensatory, insofar as your action would be undertaken with full notice and awareness of the consequences.
It is no mean matter to defame an individual and thereby severely hamper his ability to function in a normal way in the community of his choice. The damage this type of slander incurs is likely to last for a lifetime and encompasses both emotional trauma and the very tangible loss of income and financial assets.
Conchita Perez to John Firth Baker, May 27, 2054:
Dear John Firth Baker,
On behalf of Ms. Celia Campbell-Kibble, President of the Campbell-Kibble Foundation, I’m delighted to inform you that you are the recipient of the first annual Joseph L. Campbell Summer Scholarship for Young Manual Artists which Ms. Campbell-Kibble recently established in her late father’s name. The manual drawings you submitted were deemed by our three independent judges to be the best they received.
The scholarship amounts to $8500, plus free board at Ms. Campbell-Kibble’s Manhattan apartment and free transportation to and from New York. You will be required to live at Ms. Campbell-Kibble’s from July 1 through Labor Day, during which time you must attend a daily four-hour actual class that meets five times a week at the New York Manual Art Students League.
Please notify me by Saturday, May 30, if you agree to accept the Joseph L. Campbell Summer Scholarship for Young Manual Artists.
Sincerely,
Conchita Perez
From Jeanette Baker’s journal, May 27, 2054:
Johnny has won the first annual Joseph L. Campbell Summer Scholarship for Young Manual Artists ($8500!), which will necessitate his living in New York and taking classes at the New York Manual Art Students League. In other words, he’ll begin his formal training as a manual artist. It’s of course my dream come true. Yet I worry about him being loose at his age in New York. NYC is the S&M capital of the world.
Alex Thomas jr. to Johnny Baker, June 3, 2054:
Your mom told my mom you’ll be in New York this summer. Me, too. But we won’t be able to get together. I’m taking an NYU saturation course in Ebonics. I’ve long had a thing for African-American speech. Like Waleed Parmalee says, “It be spoken music to my ears.”
And like Parmalee, I wanna write orchestral music that incorporates the Ebonic melody and its complex rhythms. But because it was never spoken at home, I gotta learn it from scratch. The NYU saturation course stipulates that I live with an Ebonics-speaking family and speak only Ebonics with them and my friends.
You and me got so much to say to each other that I would be sorely tempted to break the rules. Therefore we can’t meet. Music comes first. I know you understand and will forgive me.
My advice about New York: Everybody will tell you what you must see in this town. I say, listen up, as well. Bouncing off the water or the sides of the canals, every single sound here is muted, fluid and resonant. Waves slap, gondolas bump, voices echo. Man, you ain’t never heard nothin like New York.
Jeanette Baker’s journal, July 3, 2054:
Today I’m 45—the same age as Momma when she died.
Johnny Baker to Jeanette Baker, July 3, 2054:
Happy Birthday, Mother. Many happy returns of the day.
I’m writing you from Ms. Campbell-Kibble’s jasmine and lavender garden. It hangs twenty-four floors above the 79th Street intersection of the West End Canal and the Hudson River. The one-way canal goes north. It’s now jammed with noonday traffic. I count one blue and white police boat, two yellow water taxis, two gondolas, a white ice cream barge. A red fireboat, siren screaming, is speeding uptown. Its wake rocks the orange crosstown waterbus picking up passengers at the corner. There’s lots of turquoise mixed in the depths of the greenish-gray canal water.
But the heat! A West Side neighborhood is called “Hell’s Kitchen.” To tell the truth, all of NY in the summer is hell’s kitchen—the temperature right now is 104.1 degrees.
You need big bucks to live well in this town. I know for a fact Ms. Campbell-Kibble rents her three-bedroom apartment for $61,600 a month. She’s a very private person, like her father, who was a little-known but big-time collector of early 21st-century manual art.
Next Monday I start a class in drawing from life at the Manual Art Students League. Don’t worry. I won’t let on what I am.
Happy Birthday, Mother! I miss you. The hairdressers here, though very expensive, are too Chinese-y for my taste. The Mandarin cut doesn’t become me at all, so I’m letting my hair grow out.
Have a good Fourth.
Ms. Campbell is having a cookout on her hanging garden. Politicians and rich business-class types expected. Maybe even some Beautiful People!
Your loving son, Johnny
Johnny Baker to Teddy Petrakis, July 4, 2054:
To tell the truth, I adore being a slave. It’s restful, not thinking for myself. This afternoon, butt-naked, I served drinks and hot dogs to my Master’s guests at his July 4 barbecue. My Master is very “God bless America!” As the sun went down, he read the whole Declaration of Independence aloud. Then he gave me as a gift for the night to a friend whose name you’d instantly recognize if I was free to divulge it.
Jeanette Baker to Johnny Baker, July 11, 2054:
I’m so proud of you! I hope your first life class went well. Please thank Ms. Campbell-Kibble on my behalf for her kindness to you.
I hope her party was fun. Any Beautiful People show?
Enjoyed your description of your neighborhood. You have a wonderful eye for color. What a painter you’ll be, once you set your mind to it! Reading remains the only way I can leave the keep. A proposal to extend the Guild insurance plan to cover treatment for us keepie shut-ins was recently turned down by the benefits committee as too expensive. (Bashy Weinberg, by the way, is running for Treasurer of Local 103 in the Fall. Think I’ll back her. She’s got a Jewish head for money.)
Emma, who’s twenty-seven next month, is trying to decide whether to have a baby. We’re no longer lovers—just good friends.
Emma Torchlight
I was thinking about having a daughter. Jeanette told me that all her life she’d feared that if she’d had a daughter, she (Jeanette) would’ve wound up like her mother—a suicide.
Johnny Baker to Teddy Petrakis, July 21, 2054:
My Master let me play tourist for three hours this afternoon.
I saw a funeral—a very fancy funeral—making its way SE along the Canal Street Canal towards some cemetery in Brooklyn. Picture seven black Kanoye cabin cruisers purring along all in a row. I’m talking seven twenty-two-foot-long pitch-black boats, each powered by a GE 186 KW “Cat.” The sun shone on the silver cross on the prow of the lead ship, a floating hearse. Riding high in the stern, a gleaming black impermium coffin; silver handles and the biggest wreath you ever saw, roses and white hydrangeas.
Teddy Petrakis to Johnny Baker, July 21, 2054:
“O Death, where is thy sting?” (1 Cor. 15:55)
Johnny Baker to Te
ddy Petrakis, July 21, 2054:
In the same old place.
Jeanette Baker to Johnny Baker, August 1, 2054:
This is the longest we’ve ever been apart. The house is empty without you. I miss your deep voice, which sounds so much like my poor Daddy’s. I miss your musky smell, the beard sprouting all over your face—your physical maleness, which also reminds me of Daddy, whom you’ve more than replaced in my life. Gynarchist or not, I love having a son. You’re part of me. I can’t imagine the world without you. Hell, I even miss your unmade bed and the dirty underpants you leave on your bedroom floor.
I miss your moods. Why are adolescents so angry all the time? I was always depressed. But mostly, I miss the way you think; I miss sharing, via your drawings, the unexpected things you see with your mind’s eye.
Counting the days till we’re together again,
Love, Mother
Johnny Baker to Jeanette Baker, August 6, 2054:
I miss you, too.
Jeanette Baker to Johnny Baker, August 20, 2054:
I know you’re busy working and I don’t wanna bother you, but drop me a line when you get the chance, let me know how you are. If you don’t, I understand. I can wait. Only twelve more days till we’re together again.
Johnny Baker to Jeanette Baker, September 1, 2054:
Dear Mother,
I’m writing you from the Salmacis Gender Reassignment Clinic in Havana, where I’ve had a transgenic mastogenesis costing $7040 which I earned by working as a sex slave last summer in NYC. I’m growing tits like Billy Lee Mookerjee so I can become his sheila and gain Gaian Consciousness.
Good-bye! Forgive me!
Your loving son, Johnny
Polly Baker
Jeanette showed me Johnny’s letter, saying, “This is the thanks I get.”
Then she sobbed and sobbed.
From Jeanette Baker’s journal, September 4, 2054:
Thank God for Endcrave!
My disappointment with Johnny goes way beyond the merely personal. By becoming a she-he, he’s betrayed our political principles. He’s made himself a willing dupe of the American phallocratic establishment. As an educated Gynarchist, Johnny knows phallocracy encourages transgenderism—particularly male-femayle transgenderism—because transgenderism reduces the femayle body to an appropriable object.
Mookerjee’s home page puts him in Washington, D.C., where undoubtedly Johnny has gone.
He’s a minor. I’d be within my rights to have the cops bring him home. But I won’t. For some time now, I’ve had the feeling that Johnny’s living out a truly original destiny, with which I’m powerless to interfere.
Sri Billy Lee Mookerjee
On Sunday, September 6, 2054, I was leading the morning service in the Gaian Wimin’s Cooperative Shelter on Euclid Street and Sherman Avenue in Washington, D.C. It was a tough time in my life. I was going on thirty-six and all alone. My sheila, Alfred Howe, had recently walked out on me because he hadn’t gained Gaian Consciousness. I thought maybe it was my fault. Spreading Gaian Consciousness was my life’s work, and I was no damn good at it!
That was pretty much my state of mind that morning, when into the shelter walks Johnny, who joins me singing “My Motherworld.” I was moved that he knew Srimaati’s words by heart.
Katherine G. Jackson
My Motherworld
A Gaian Vision Song
O, my Motherworld,
I love you
More and more
Each passing day.
Let me share your
Life eternal
While I make my
Mortal way.26
Sri Billy Lee Mookerjee
Johnny threw himself at my feet, saying, “I’m growing tits, Srimaanji! And a beard! I wanna be like you in everything! Make me your sheila, Srimaanji! Help me gain Gaian Consciousness!”
I tested his determination to persevere in his spiritual quest by answering “No.”
Johnny Baker to Teddy Petrakis, October 4, 2054:
For almost a month, I’ve been eking out a living as a manual street artist—a portraitist—around Capitol Keep, in D.C. I charge my two or three daily customers (mostly Chinese tourists) $65 apiece for an idealized black-and-white (charcoal) likeness of themselves. The sugary portraits are crap, and teach me nothing, but to tell the truth, I draw them too slow to make any real money.27 The competition is fierce, particularly from a well-organized gang of young West African immigrants who each churn out six or seven slick portraits a day.
Art supplies—charcoal pencil, vine charcoal, 13" x 19" sheets of Canson ingress paper at $5.50 each, which I cut in half, and fixative—run me about $45 a week.
I eat for free—ripe manna for the picking, right off the trees—in the Franklin Square Public Orchard. The stuff constipates me. What I wouldn’t give for a pepperoni pizza!
I share a room at the Y for $114 a night. Tonight’s roommate, you’ll be glad to hear, is a Methodist minister from Birmingham, Ala. He averted his baby blues when I undressed.
My enlarged nipples are spongy and broken out in tiny bumps, like soft sandpaper. One day I’m sore under both armpits; the next, beneath one tit. Both are already bigger than golf balls and growing fast.
Billy Lee’s visiting London. Every evening, with my heart in my mouth, I check his home page for fear she’s chosen someone else to be his sheila.
From Jeanette Baker’s journal, October 22, 2054:
A sleepless night. This morning at work, Polly outlined my three possibilities:
1. Hire a sect deprogrammer to kidnap Johnny and deprogram him. (Can’t afford it.)
2. Go to D.C. and beg him to come home. (Don’t think I’m able.)
3. Adopt a wait-and-see policy for six months—which is what I’ve decided to do.
Jeanette Baker to Johnny Baker, October 25, 2054:
Happy Birthday!
I can’t believe you’re seventeen! It seems like yesterday that I gave a final push and there you were. I remember your first cry and the mid-wife holding you up between my legs, still attached to me by your umbilical cord. You looked like you were covered with runny white cheese. Your head was a little squished. I held you in my arms and kissed the tiny purple soles of your unused feet.
Enough! I won’t bore you with a mother’s memories.
Polly and I have added $500 to your cash card. Use it any way you see fit.
So your guru’s in Rio with his (her?) guru, “Ma” Andrews. Emma: “The word is, they’re lovers.”
I’m now exclusively immerse-sexual. I’m more comfortable with a virtual lover than an actual one. In case you haven’t noticed, I have trouble expressing love.
Be that as it may, I love you. Please come home!
Johnny Baker to Jeanette Baker, October 25, 2054:
I love you, too, but can’t come home. I’m out to gain Gaian Consciousness.
Thanks for the money. Thank Polly, too. I used $155 of it to buy myself a much-needed 40-B bra. I love how my tits have a life of their own. They swing to the right when I take a step with that foot, jiggle a bit up and down, then when I step down on the left foot, do the same on that side. My nipples are still slightly sore.
Having tits makes me feel closer to you than ever before.
From John Firth Baker’s interview in The International Review of Manual Art:
The chill in the air and rainy weather ended my career as a street artist. I made a scratchboard drawing of my rapidly developing breasts and used it to go into a better-paying line of work.
John Firth Baker’s online advertisement at transgender.238, October 25, 2054:
Hi! I’m Johnny, a 17-year-old she-he. My boobs look like this: They are available for tit play. I’m also growing my first beard. I’m yours by the hour in greater D.C. Cash only, please. Special travel rates. You supply the place, I supply the unique me. Uncut, all inoculations attested. Contact [email protected]
Online ad, 2054, scratchboard drawing
From Jo
hn Firth Baker’s interview in The International Review of Manual Arts:
The first day, thanks to my ad, I turned two tricks at $850 apiece. That evening I bought myself a steak dinner and a good bottle of California red, which set me back two hundred and ninety bucks, then took a room for the night at the Truman.
Nearly a quarter of all hits on my ad were from business-class types desperate to rent me for an hour—but only on the sly. So I rented a furnished one-bedroom apartment, with all utilities, and night air-conditioning for $2420 a month in a straight—mostly white—skilled working-class neighborhood near Washington Circle, a block or so northeast of the Flooded Zone.
I averaged two tricks a day, seven days a week. My tits were squeezed, cupped, kneaded, rubbed, kissed, bit, and stroked; my nipples, licked, sucked, kissed, tweaked, nibbled, plucked, pulled, and twirled.
I was in seventh heaven.
From Sri Billy Lee Mookerjee’s Home Page, Wednesday, October 28, 2054:
Washington, D.C. Saturday is one of my favorite Gaian holidays. Halloween for us Gaians marks the Earth’s New Year, the midpoint between the Autumn Equinox and Winter Solstice.
The First Church of Gaia in D.C. will celebrate the Gaian New Year by throwing a traditional Halloween apple-bobbing party for neighborhood children at the Gaian Wimin’s Cooperative Center on Euclid Street and Sherman Avenue. Join me there Saturday, 5 P.M. Give the kids a good time—and have fun! Welcome our Motherworld’s New Year!
Sri Billy Lee Mookerjee
Johnny came up to me at the beginning of the party and said, “Make me your sheila, Srimaanji,” and again I told him, “No.”
A neighborhood girl of about seven eyed us and asked, “Is you guys Mommies or Daddies?”
I said, “Both,” and Johnny went, “Yeah, we’re both.”
The girl took Johnny by the hand. I watched him teach her to catch an apple between her teeth. Both got soaked, and laughed and laughed.
I overheard Johnny asking her, “Do you like to draw?”
“Oh, yeah,” she said. “Lots.”
Then I had a brainstorm and said to Johnny, “Draw me as if you were a little kid again.”
From John Firth Baker’s interview in The International Review of Manual Art:
The Song of the Earth Page 13