by Jerry Stahl
“More of a palm taster. You can find out a lot about a person with your mouth. Ask any hooker. You must know a few, in your line of work. Screwing is one thing. Even giving head—but that doesn’t count. That’s the job. But kissing, going mouth-to-mouth—no way. That’s way too intimate.”
As if to emphasize her point, she gave his palm a teasing lick.
Manny shivered. The sensation was so dizzying, he had to speak to keep from driving into a tree. “Tell you the truth, I never had anybody lick my hand. Is that a Guru Marv thing?”
She dropped his hand and glared. “Fuck you!”
“Sorry! I was just trying to make conversation.”
“Forget it.”
Manny stared at the road, sensing the creature beside him moving away as surely as if she’d boarded a train going the opposite direction. Suddenly he understood. This is as hard for her as it is for me….
Maybe that’s what love was: damage loving damage, and in the process turning itself into something else, something—he heard the word in his mind and fought to keep from choking—something beautiful. Something—again his mind recoiled—something pure. Which felt like dying.
That was the truth. Despite the teasing, despite the sharp mouth and the swagger and the attitude for days, Tina was struggling the same way he was, trying to violate the bone-deep rule she’d made for herself to survive what she’d had to survive: Don’t let anybody in.
She had opened the door, against all that life had taught her, and he had stood in the doorway, babbling.
In that instant, Manny knew, he had to make a move or lose her. And he made it, without knowing he was going to, just as the light changed to green. He reached for her, loving the feel of his hand on the back of her neck as he pulled her toward him. Finally. Her skin was so soft it startled him. A hard-ass with soft skin….
The first car started honking as soon as his lips found hers. He kept one foot on the brake. The harder he pressed down, the deeper he kissed her. It was rougher than he intended. He had meant to seduce, and instead he pounced. Tina didn’t resist, but she didn’t burst into passion, either. It was as if, he somehow understood, she was waiting to see if she felt anything—or maybe to see what the fuck he’d do next.
Shouting began to accompany the horns, but the noise sounded far away. The part of his mind that considered odds and consequence had shut down entirely, snuffed by the sheer adrenal rush of holding her, falling together onto the Impala’s sunken upholstery. He took her face in his hands as he kissed her, wanting to just get it right, to stamp the moment, to blunt the thunder of fear pounding in his skull as the rest of him succumbed to a sensation beyond pleasure, a kind of twisted relief that he’d macheted all his moorings, that whatever happened now would happen because he’d said “Fuck it” to everything that had rendered him, for more years than he could count, a soul-dead, heart-numbed misfit staggering from pill to pill just to get through the dull risk of his own existence.
Tina tasted like honey and cigarettes. The flavor lingered as he slid south over her throat. She undid her blouse and he kissed her nipples, accidentally biting the left, feeling it harden between his lips as she cried out. He raised his face, just to see her. Then he plunged under her skirt, up along her damp thighs where her panties had soaked through to the wet heart of her sex, like some small, throbbing animal waiting to be born on his tongue.
Tina began to murmur and Manny recognized a language he thought he’d lost forever. “Anything,” she whispered, as he breathed her in. “Anything….” He knew her words had nothing to do with him, which made him want her more. In some strange way, they sounded like prayer.
Tina was almost there. Almost. Until, in a lightning flash of unwelcome awareness, Manny pushed off her, bolted upright, and blinked until he knew where he was. He looked down and saw Tina’s eyes shining with the same wild excitement he felt himself. She met his gaze, then let loose the most crazed laugh he had ever heard.
Manny watched her, stunned—he realized he’d never heard her laugh—and when he saw that she was looking past him he raised his gaze to the faces looming outside all four of the Impala’s windows. A pair of grinning old geezers, an outraged African-American lady in a flowered hat, some giggling punkettes wielding Cherry Big Gulps, and a pack of squealing, freckled boys mashing their faces against the glass on the driver’s side. It was like Night of the Living Dead, with live people from Upper Marilyn, all watching him emerge, dazed and sticky-lipped, from beneath Tina’s rumpled skirt.
“Jesus,” Manny heard himself mutter. He hadn’t noticed that he’d popped out of his pants, which only made Tina howl more insanely.
“Oh God, I’m going to pee,” she stammered, hugging herself, until she saw Manny’s expression and touched his lips. “Relax, Detective, they can’t arrest you. You’re a cop.”
He was still absorbing this when, out of nowhere, he heard a voice he recognized but couldn’t place. That’s when he saw Krantz, mullet tucked safely under his police hat, tapping on the window, mouthing “Open up!”
TWENTY-EIGHT
Dr. Willard Roos poured his protein-and-hormone shake into a sixteen-ounce 7-Eleven Slurpy cup and checked his breasts in the mirror. A stoop-shouldered, mousy fellow who wore his hair in a Giuliani sweep, Roos favored lab coats and short-sleeve white shirts from Penneys.
He didn’t particularly want breasts, but as a money-maker, Tits-in-a-Cup—that was his private name for the powder, which he planned to market as Fem-Fem—could be just the thing to bring in the cash he needed to hire a top lawyer or, if necessary, disappear and start his practice all over again in South Africa or Rio. So far nobody’d connected him to the Carmella Dendez thing, but if they did, he had his bag packed. In the lop-job business, you didn’t rustproof a scalpel until you had an escape plan and an attorney on retainer.
It was Chooch, the day man at Pawnee Lodge, who’d called to inform him that the police had found Carmella’s body. The surgeon had helped him with a stubborn goiter, and Chooch owed him a favor. Roos could guess what happened, but decided not to think about it. He focused instead on measuring the slight increase in nipple girth and fat content around his aureole. At this point he had the budding mammaries of a pubescent thirteen-year-old girl. When they grew in all the way, he planned on reversing the procedure with equivalent doses of testosterone. He knew it was risky—one wrong move and he’d end up with big breasts and extra chest hair—but he was confident he could pull it off. If not, he told himself bitterly, he could join a carnival or try for an Internet start-up: Hairy Men with Tits dot Com…“Products for the Man Who Has Everything.”
Buttoning up, he padded to his desk and leafed through his appointment book. Business, as usual, was slow. A bride-to-be from Pittsburgh in at two for a tattoo removal. (The IBM exec she was marrying might not want to see CRIPS BITCH on her posterior.) Mayor Marge coming in for her monthly Botox. And Mrs. Fayton, the police chief’s wife, who’d decided her ears were saggy and wanted a tuck. There was also a new patient, who gave his name as “Smith”—they all gave their name as “Smith”—stopping in for a transgender consultation. Roos had a dream of some day making Upper Marilyn as tranny-friendly as Trinidad, Colorado, which the legendary Dr. Biber had single-handedly built into the Sex Change Capital of the World. If only this Carmella thing hadn’t happened…. Should word get out, it would put the kibosh on his dreams of Genital Reconstruction Glory.
Right now, Roos still had to develop the film Detective Rubert dropped off the last time he’d popped in for codeine scrips. Which was another thing. The prescription situation was starting to get worrisome. Though he had to admit, Manny had taken his share of risks for him. When he was caught shopping those she-male pix on the Net, it was Manny who convinced the FBI that he’d shut down his operations and disappeared.
Roos was still going by Dr. Mayo in those days. (If a patient asked, he’d say, “Yes, as a matter of fact, my great-grandfather did start the Mayo Clinic!”) By way of saving his baco
n, Manny led the team of feds to an abandoned doctor’s office downtown to show them that the man they were after had vanished. An Air Guatemala schedule “discovered” under a phone book convinced the investigators their quarry would be too expensive to track down. Resources, apparently, were scarce. So Manny assured the agents he’d stay on the case for them: He even confided that he had a personal stake, since the butcher they were after had given a girlfriend a breast enhancement that left her with mismatched Santa hats.
Since quashing the investigation, however, Manny had been demanding favor after favor. There were the painkillers, of course, and the fake affidavit claiming that some flake named Marvin Podolsky had come in for “throat reconstruction”—as if there were such a thing—after swallowing drain cleaner on four separate occasions. Manny never explained why he needed it, and even after Roos read about Marvin’s suicide, he still didn’t know why Manny needed the false report. Not that it mattered. He was in no position to balk at the detective’s requests.
Roos flipped on the lights in his outer office and sighed. He slept on a gurney in his examining room, just off the tiny reception area, and lately he’d been waking up every hour on the hour to take a stress pee. No doubt the estrogen had something to do with it. And Manny’s mounting demands weren’t helping, either. But what could he do? As long as his friend the detective was sitting on evidence that could put him away, he had to go along.
To his credit, Manny never asked for a penny. Sometimes Roos almost wished he would. Straight extortion might be easier. The doctor blushed to recall the time he protested having to write so many prescriptions. When he complained that he could lose his license, Manny had smiled and reminded him that he didn’t have a license, so why worry about it? Until then, Roos hadn’t realized Manny knew he’d been asked to leave med school in Granada after the unpleasant indigent incident. (Roos had tried some practice sex-change surgery on a comatose homeless man. How was he supposed to know the fellow would wake up, three days later, and have a coronary when he saw a vagina between his legs?)
That was the thing about Detective Rubert: He never let you know how much he knew, so you were always anxious that he knew more than he let on.
Dragging himself into the darkroom, Roos massaged his tiny breasts and checked on the photos soaking in the tray. He’d just set the timer for five minutes and slipped back to the examining room to stash his pajamas when he heard the office door open, and the unmistakable voice of the savior who was making his life hell.
“Willard, where are you?” Manny called. “We have business.”
“Coming,” Roos called back, shutting the darkroom door behind him. That was another thing about Detective Rubert. He didn’t like to knock, and he seemed to have a key to everything.
“Dr. Roos, this is Tina. She’s working with me,” Manny announced, introducing a striking creature with the best cheekbones Roos had ever seen.
“Amazing bone structure,” he said. “I’d love to make a mold of your face.”
“I’ve had stranger propositions,” Tina replied, taking in the dismal reception area and the nerdy little man in the lab coat who stood rubbing his rib cage before them. Some kind of very old vegetable soup stained the carpet—at least she hoped it was vegetable soup—and what had to be a pound of moth carcasses were visible in the light fixtures overhead. The only magazines on the filthy glass table were Modern Brides. By way of decoration, the doctor had taped up calendar pictures of frolicking kittens. But somehow, in this context, even kittens looked sleazy.
“I guess you know why I’m here,” said Manny, noting the doctor’s exceptional squirreliness. Roos was always the jumpy type, but now he looked like he’d shot up strychnine.
“I…I didn’t know this would happen,” Roos blurted. “After the first operation, I realized I used too much erectile tissue to construct the outer lips. That was a mistake, I admit. Whenever Carmella got aroused, her labia got hard. It was…embarrassing. She came in for her appointment very upset, and I don’t blame her.”
Roos wiped his forehead with the tail of his lab coat.
“Go on,” Manny said.
“Well, naturally, I told her I’d do the reconstructive surgery for free. I removed the tissue and performed an ileum loop. I’ve done them before. You take a piece of intestine, leaving it attached to the blood supply, and divert it to make a vagina. It’s fairly routine. But something went wrong. The patch of intestine continued to digest food, which meant that it secreted enzymes. At first it was just a matter of smell.”
“Oh my God,” said Tina, covering her mouth while Manny remained silent. Expressionless. Roos was confessing to something. Stomach-churning as it was, whatever he let slip could be used to squeeze him later.
“The odds of something like this happening are one in a million,” Roos blabbed on, wiping his face with his coat again. “But it happened. She began to experience some leakage.”
Tina groaned. “Leakage?” It was like listening to Don Knotts channel Joseph Mengele. But Manny held up his hand to quiet her, to let Roos talk.
“Feces,” the doctor explained shakily. “Not a lot. But, of course, she was very concerned.”
“Concerned?” Tina rolled her eyes. “I’m surprised she didn’t come back and cut yours off!” Manny had to signal her a second time to stop interrupting.
“I brought the lady in for a third operation. No charge,” Roos wanted them to know. He rubbed himself nervously. “This time I gave her a temporary shunt, to make sure there was no chance of peritonitis, then I went back to my original tissue construction. But one side of her vagina developed swelling. Toughening. So the final result was more…uneven than we would have liked. There were also some hair issues. Though, I assure you, when all was said and done, Carmella Dendez could perform like a woman.”
“You’re sure about that?”
“Absolutely!” Roos directed his appeal to Tina, unable to face Manny’s ungiving stare. “Many females are naturally asymmetric. Among the Maori, it’s actually considered a sign of beauty. And I think, at least I pray, by the end, even Carmella was satisfied.”
“Who told you she died?” Manny asked casually. He’d bullied Fayton into keeping her death out of the paper for a day, so the news had to come from elsewhere. It was important that Roos keep squirming under the belief that he’d botched the surgery. That he’d killed her.
“Who told me? A friend, at the motel. He said you found her body.”
“Right. And do you know how she died?”
The doctor pawed at his chest, his gaze shifting back and forth from Tina to Manny. “Well, aren’t you here to…I mean, I just assumed there were complications. I often send patients to the Pawnee Lodge to recuperate. So when I heard, I naturally thought….” He began kneading his chest more vigorously, with both hands, then caught himself and stopped.
“You have to believe me! She never even called. I swear to you, I would have been there to help out!”
“Sounds like you helped her plenty. I found your phone number in her hand,” Manny lied, “and I don’t think it’s ’cause you were selling her Special K.”
“You know I got out of that,” Roos injected, his skin jellied with perspiration.
“Whatever. You’re just lucky I got to the motel first, so I can cover your ass. You owe me big-time, Willard. Even more than before. More than you even know. Just one more question.”
Roos touched his chest. “What?”
“Are my pictures ready?”
The doctor wilted. “Oh God…. They should be. If you wait here, I’ll check.”
“That’s all right, I’ll come with you. Be right back,” he said to Tina and started off behind the stunned surgeon. Manny knew he had to stay with him, in case he decided to try something drastic. Nobody was more dangerous than a coward in a corner. And Roos had that trapped mouse look in his eyes.
Alone in the waiting room, Tina leafed through a Modern Bride. She was trying to block out the visuals of what happened
to Carmella and let her eyes rest on a splashy ad. Beneath a full-page spread of some Doris Day blond in the arms of a doltish hunk, the caption read “Honeymoon jitters? Don’t let menstrual cramps spoil your stay in paradise!” Could this be what Roos’s customers thought they were getting when they bought vaginas? A life where the biggest romantic worry was whether or not Captain Blood was in town? Then again, ex-men probably didn’t menstruate, so they wouldn’t have to worry about it. Or did they? Maybe for an extra thousand, the twisted little sawbones could make them bleed.
No doubt the doctor had his own reasons for restricting his waiting room reading to bridal magazines. The whole subject made Tina want to spray her brain with Lysol. And yet, on some level, she understood the torment that drove a person to endure what Carmella endured. Her late husband had a theory that capitalism instilled humans with the sense that they weren’t enough, that there was somebody else they were supposed to be. If they didn’t believe this, according to Marvin, they’d never buy anything and the economy would disintegrate. The world would be overrun with happy, liberated idiots and chaos would ensue. The reason for advertising, in Marv’s view, was to keep people feeling so creepy about themselves that they spent all their money on items which, deep down in their psyches, they believed could transform them into divine versions of who they really were. “We don’t need shoes,” he used to say, “we only wear them because we want god-feet.” No doubt, if he were still around, her husband would tell her that a faux vagina was the ultimate consumer good, right up there with Lexus, Rolex, and a top-of-the-line Sony PlayStation.
Tina threw the magazine on the table, convinced all over again that, even if it was half an accident, things had gone the right way with Marv. “Things happen for a reason,” he used to say. Wherever he was, she hoped he still felt that way. In any event, she’d no longer have to listen to his endless theorizing, which was almost as unendurable as his nose hums. Still, in this case, his notion of people wanting to be other people sounded on the money. Carlos needed to be someone else so badly he paid to get gelded and become Carmella. Now that was desperation….