The Survival of Joe Conover Part 1 3
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The Survival Of Joe Conover, Part 4 free porn video
The Survival of Joseph Conover
By Norman O. Johnson
Part Four: A Rainy Day in January
I awoke to the sound of raindrops pelting the roof. The noise of the roof
was loud, because I was now living in Lillith's attic, which she had turned
into a third bedroom for me. Not feeling like sleeping any more, I threw the
covers off of myself, fumbled for the lamp on the end-table, and switched on
the light. My bed was a futon. When set up as a bed, it covered most of the
floor of my little room. I stood up, stretched my limbs, removed the sheets
and blanket from my futon and folded it up into a seat broad enough for two
people to sit down. What was so special about Monday, the seventh of
January, 2002?
My pajama bottoms dropped to the floor. While unbuttoning my top, I answered
my question. Nothing was special about today, but the tenth of the month,
three days away, was the five month anniversary of my death and rebirth in a
woman's body, the body that now stood naked in the light of a small lamp in
a small attic room, with winter rain pouring outside. Was I starting to like
it, as Natalie predicted I would?
Yes. Starting to, that is. One of the things I liked about it now was that
it was so much healthier. Although I was still thin, my ribs no longer
showed, and I felt stronger and more energetic. The thing that made me
proudest was, I had flushed the smack out of this body. If I died again
today, I could count that as a great achievement.
Then again, the price of coming back from the dead was being a woman. I had
mixed feelings about my new gender, which was an improvement over feeling
stuck in a female body. From dressing and undressing this body, bathing it,
and stroking it with my fingers as I lay in bed at night, I had found in it
things to enjoy. I liked having breasts. I liked the smoothness and
sensitivity of my skin. I liked the sound of my new voice. I liked the look
of my elegant swanlike neck. I liked my fine straight dark-blonde hair,
which I wore ear-length with a natural part just to the right of the center.
I liked my facial features, especially my thick sensuous lips and my large
dark brown expressive brown eyes. Some things I didn't like at first no
longer bothered me. Being five inches shorter was no big deal. I wasn't
petite by female standards, and many men weren't much taller than I was. I
didn't have the muscular strength of a man, but a woman can always get some
man to lift something for her. I had learned that on my job.
Then again, there was that thing between my legs, what D. H. Lawrence called
"the feminine triangle of mystery," the thing which some men casually call
the pussy. I myself had used the word as an insult for a couple of years
during my college days, decades ago. I had made love to three of these
organs. The last one belonged to my departed wife Linda. Two children, Jason
and Nancy, had come out of it. It had never occurred to me, when I was still
a guy named Joe, that I would find one on my own body. Not in Joe Conover's
wildest dreams! Well, maybe, in one of two of Joe's very wildest dreams.
These days, in my dreams, I was still a man named Joe. Often Linda and the
kids were with me. Sometimes, including last night, I dreamt of being
Michelle, but with Joe's equipment between her legs.
I could not feel that this thing between my legs was mine yet. I had tried
to learn to like it. I had fingered it in the nighttime, rubbed it against
the rounded corner of the bathroom sink, and ridden on a broom handle like a
Halloween witch. I had even shaved it last Saturday, hoping to get some
autoerotic charge. Nothing had worked. I still didn't like it. My down-there
seemed more like an absence than an organ, let alone a sex organ. Three days
a month, it was filthy, bloody, and smelly. My first period was seriously
late. By Labor Day weekend, I was in a panic. Was I going to give birth to a
heroin-addicted child? Natalie said the problem might be malnutrition, which
causes the cycle to shut down. Mine started up again in mid-September. Its
coming was a relief, for about two minutes.
I knew from my marriage to Linda that the bleeding is only part of it.
There's also the crabbiness, the cramps and the bloating. Natalie and
Lillith both assured me no woman likes having periods. Natalie, who always
takes a cheerful view of things, said her periods reminded her she could
have children if she chose. She was hoping Dewey would propose to her so
they could start a family. I couldn't even imagine myself marrying a man and
spreading my thighs for him. That was much too weird for me. Natalie assured
it was too weird for her at first, too. Then her brain wiring took care of
it.
Early on in my womanhood, I did some research about female-to-male sex
changes. I would need male hormone injections, breast removal, and surgical
construction of an artificial penis. But it wasn't covered by anybody's
health insurance. I wouldn't be able to afford it for many years. In the
meantime, I would have to live as a woman and get a decent job, so I could
save money to switch back. Then again, if Natalie's experience was typical,
I'd no longer want it in a few years.
Would my children might lend me some money from their inheritance to pay for
it? Maybe so, if they could be persuaded that their father was still alive
and living as a woman.
Suddenly noticing how chilly I felt, I fumbled for the light switch, turned
on the overhead light, and stepped over to the clothes rack where my meager
wardrobe hung. I wrapped my terry-cloth robe around myself and picked out my
outfit for the day. I selected a pair of blue jeans and a heavy sweatshirt,
appropriate for a cold rank rainy winter day in North Carolina. While I was
selecting my underwear, the alarm clock on the end-table went off. It was
7:15. Lillith would be getting out of the shower about now. I needed to get
downstairs and claim my allotted time in the bathroom. Living with two other
women in a two-bedroom house made a strict bathroom access schedule a
necessity in the morning. I slipped my size seven and a half feet into my
bedroom slippers, opened the door of my tiny attic room, and started down
the stairs. Such tiny feet! I liked having small feet. They made me feel
like a woman.
At the bathroom door I met Lillith, wrapped in a plus size robe, with a
bathing cap still on her hair. "One hundred sixty-two, Michelle. I'm down to
162 pounds." She beamed. "Isn't that wonderful?"
"It is wonderful, Lillith. You look good." I wasn't lying. Lillith's weight
loss campaign was working. Her robe fit her loosely now.
I eagerly took possession of the house's only bathroom, showered, toweled
myself dry, and headed back upstairs to dress and put my face on. Because of
the shower situation, we girls never washed our hair or shaved our legs
during our morning showers. All the same, Lillith's little house was just
too crowded. Something had to give. When I'd finished getting dressed and
made up in my tiny attic room, I joined my housemates for breakfast.
The housing crisis had been on everyone's mind for a while. Natalie had been
talking of getting her own apartment, freeing up her bedroom for me. As we
put jam on our bagels, Lillith and I heard the good news. "I'll be moving
out by February first," Natalie announced.
"Oh? Have you signed a lease already?" Lillith asked.
"No," Natalie replied, taking a sip of coffee, "but I've applied at three
different places. At least one is sure to say yes."
"That's really wonderful, Natalie," I said.
Lillith looked at me. "If you're taking Natalie's room, Michelle, we need to
negotiate a rent increase for you." My heart sank. "After all," she
continued, "you'll be renting more floor space, and I'll have to replace the
cash Natalie's bringing in somehow."
"I understand," I said, feeling disappointed, "but I was hoping to spend
some of my widow's mite of a salary on computer courses, so I can get
certified."
"Don't worry about that," Natalie broke in. "I'm the rich and famous writer.
You can borrow your tuition from me. We'll negotiate a repayment schedule
later."
"Thanks, Natalie. You're a real friend."
"It's only fair for us body-swappers to help each other out."
"Your daughter will call me this week for a reading," said Lillith. I nearly
emptied my coffee mug into my lap. "Come on, Michelle, surely you don't
still doubt my psychic gift now."
"No, no, it's just that my daughter---" I began, and put my mug on the
table. "Well, I'm not ready to see my kids yet. I have no money. I'm still
basically a bum without any marketable skills."
Lillith raised an eyebrow and looked at Natalie. "Michelle's got a psychic
gift too, now," Lillith joked. "She knew Nancy was going to ask about her
father."
"Well, do you channel dead people?" I asked.
Lillith shook her head. "It's not my gift to be a channeler or a medium, but
from time to time I do pick up a reincarnational message from someone."
Natalie cleared her throat loudly. She grinned in the way an old friend
grins when rehashing an old difference of opinion. "That's against the
Bible, which clearly states, 'It is appointed to a man once to die, and
after this the judgment.' Once, Lillith."
Lillith turned to me. "We've been around and around and around on this one."
She turned to Natalie. "Then how do you explain my reincarnational
readings?"
"Retrocognition," said Natalie. She turned to me. "That's a paranormal power
which allows you to pick up thoughts or feelings from someone who has died.
That explains these readings about previous lives without having to accept
reincarnation."
"So tell her I've been reincarnated," I said to Lillith.
"It's not that simple, Michelle. I won't lie to your daughter. As a psychic,
I have my professional ethics to think about."
"Yes," I joked, as Natalie took a long sip on her orange juice. "You don't
charge $4.95 a minute over the phone, and then drag it out to 30 minutes
while getting personal information."
At this, Natalie seemed to go into convulsions. "Are you all right?" said
Lillith.
Natalie put down her orange juice, swallowed, and laughed. "I'm fine. I just
thought what Michelle said was hilarious." This was shortly before the Miss
Cleo psychic scandal erupted, but rumors were already circulating about this
fake-Caribbean con artist.
"So," Lillith interjected, "What do you want me to tell Nancy when she
comes?"
"Well, tell her I've moved on to a better place." I stopped to think. "Yeah,
and tell her not to worry. I'm doing okay, and she may run across me again
some day."
"Okay. She'll probably think I'm saying you've been reincarnated. Are you
okay with that?"
"Sure. If she presses you for details, don't give her any."
"Lillith's a lot closer to being a Christian than she thinks," said Natalie.
"This Goddess she worships is actually the Holy Spirit."
"How do you figure that?" I asked.
"The Holy Spirit is referred to several times in Paul's epistles as 'she.'"
###
Natalie, the self-employed writer, drove me as usual to my job. It was a
cold clear January day. Last week's freakish winter storm which left as much
as 15 inches of snow in some places, but huge white heaps of it were piled
by the side of the road, usually next to commercial driveways. All things
considered, the city had done a good job of plowing the streets. Natalie
dropped me off at the Barnes and Noble on Glenwood Avenue, next to the
Crabtree Village mall on the north side of Raleigh. It was a low-level
retail clerk's job, the sort of thing a young woman does before she's
through acquiring her marketable job skills. It wasn't very interesting
work, but I'd always been bookish and it was good to be around them all day
and be able to buy them at a discount. Since I was working the day shift,
trade was slow, consisting partly of college students, partly of retired
folks, and partly of mothers buying children's books with their tots in tow.
That's not counting the older kids who were mad about Harry Potter. And at
this time of the year, there were people looking to exchange the books and
CD's they got for Christmas and didn't like for something they liked better.
About ten o'clock, after dealing with three book-buying moms in a row, I
looked into a familiar face: a dark-haired girl of undergraduate age with
strong forearms. A drummer with a rock band, I guessed. Had I seen her
before? She recognized me first.
"Michelle? Is that you?"
Once I'd heard the voice, I knew. "Gina! Gina from Crazy Monkey! What the
hell are YOU doing back in North Carolina?" A young mother hustled her
five-year-old boy away, so he wouldn't hear the H-word again.
"It's Silly Monkey." Gina flashed me a sly grin. "I'm working at a Taco Bell
in Apex. I'm hoping to get some high-tech training, Michelle, so I can learn
to use state of the art musical equipment, and then get into the music
business from that. It's the right area of the country for it." She looked
me over. "You look SO healthy, girl-friend. I guess you got over your
problem, huh?"
"Yeah, I did," I said, glancing warily at Dorothy, the petite pinched-face
brunette who was training me, and staffing the other cash register.
"Michelle, get your girlfriend's phone number and y'all can chat later,"
said Dorothy. "We got a business to run here, remember?"
"I don't have a phone, yet," Gina explained. "I just moved into a new
place."
I scribbled Lillith's home number on a scrap of paper and passed it to her.
"Call me when you can. I'm usually home after 7:00 PM."
"Cool! Can you ring up these CD's?" To my surprise, she was buying classical
today: two Mozarts and a Brahms.
As for Dorothy, she was accustomed to working with teenagers with short
attention spans who can't hold a job for long, but she was (and, I hope,
still is) a much nicer person when she went off-duty.
###
About 7:30 that same night, I was in my room trying to decide whether to
shave my legs now or wait three or four more days, when Natalie called up
the stairs. "Michelle, you're wanted on the phone."
"Thanks, I'll be right down." I bounded down the stairs two at a time.
It was a different experience for me to have women as friends. A man typically
doesn't make friends with a woman unless she's a co-worker or an in-law, or
he wants to date her or do her or marry her. Often one of those five
possibilities leads to some of the others. But as a woman with Lillith and
Natalie and Gina the Silly Monkey drummer as friends, I felt a complete
absence of the sexual tension that marks a man's relationships with women.
In fact, even though I still thought of sex, I didn't think of it nearly as
often as I did when I was a man, not even as much as when I was a
middle-aged man. When I did think of sex, I was thinking mostly of stroking
myself. I was still discovering my new self as a sexual being.
I took the phone extension in the living room, dropped myself lazily on the
sofa, and answered. "This is Michelle."
"Hey, dude, it's Gina."
We chatted and chatted and chatted. I told her all about my ordeal of
jonesing and finally getting off of it. "I'm so proud of you, Michelle. I
knew you could do it."
"Thanks. I don't think I was on heroin for very long. Otherwise, it would've
taken much longer than a week. But it was a rough week." Almost as rough, I
added to myself, as my last week with terminal cancer.
Gina was puzzled. "You mean you don't remember how long you were on heroin?"
"No, I really don't. I have amnesia. I don't remember anything that happened
to me before, like, a few months ago, and I was already an addict then.
Maybe one of my tricks hit me over the head or something."
"Well, that period of your life's over now," Gina said. "It's probably best
you don't remember."
I told her about my job, and how I was living with the owner of the
Metaphysical Store now. I mentioned Natalie too, and the titles of some of
her books. "Oh, yeah, I read the first one in the series. That was SO weird.
This dude gets murdered, but he's immediately reincarnated as this black
chick, who goes out and solves her own murder, and becomes a detective. It
was a totally original concept, and I thought the story was very well done."
"It's not really reincarnation. Instead of dying, he swaps bodies with this
woman. She dies in his body, and he lives on as her."
"Oh, right. But I think that's a kind of reincarnation, but she wasn't ever
a baby or a little kid. I sometimes wonder what's going to happen when
Melanie Grove's parents or brother or whatever shows up and wonders why she
doesn't remember them."
"Natalie actually goes into that in one of the sequels," I said. "You should
read them all."
"I just might do that some day."
"So, Gina, what brings you to North Carolina?"
"It's like I told you. I want to learn about computers and synthesized
music."
"You can get that lots of places."
"Okay, Michelle, I'll be honest with you. The real reason I'm in Jesse Helms
Land is 'cause my boyfriend Dave is going to Chapel Hill now."
"Okay, but I guess this means Silly Monkey isn't together any more. Am I
right?"
"You're right, if you mean the same four girls. The last time I talked to
Sarah, she said they might keep it going if they can get a new drummer.
Sarah and Amy are busy with their courses at State now." I can never keep
straight in my head, for some reason, the name of the place where Sarah and
Amy went to college. Somewhere in the Midwest. That's all I can remember.
"Lena still wants to do it," Gina continued, "but there's some other bands
that want her to play with them. She might actually have a career as a rock
star. That would be weird! We were just four crazy girls doing menstrual
rock in a garage, and one of us might be a real rock star."
"Well, you know, Gina, life happens while we make other plans." I let out an
ironic chuckle. I'd gone from being a 52-year-old male computer executive
dying of cancer to a 24-year-old female store clerk, faced with the prospect
of starting her life over again in an unfamiliar role. Like any other
24-year-old, I faced a life full of uncertainties, but also one full of
possibilities, and I appreciated it as only a middle-aged person can.
"I remember you and Amy and Sarah, but which one was Lena?"
"She was the one that was crashed out in the back, snoozing, when we gave
you a lift. Remember the sleepy girl who couldn't get your name right? Kept
calling you Shelly?"
"Yeah."
"That's her."
"Well, Gina, I want you to say hello to all of them for me, even to Lena,
and be sure to tell them the good news that I'm off the junk."
"I'm always glad to be the bearer of good news, Michelle. Amy will be the
most glad to hear it. She had a thing for you."
"You're kidding."
"No, really. She kept saying, 'That Michelle's gonna be an ass-kicking girl
if she gets off the heroin.' If Amy calls somebody an ass-kicking girl, she
really really likes her."
"Are you telling me Amy's a Lesbian?"
Gina laughed. "Duh, Michelle! She only came out to us a few months before
graduation, but we're cool about it. I mean, this is the music business. If
somebody's gay, it's not a big deal unless you're into, like, gospel or
something."
"I'm that way myself," I said, telling the truth. "Tell you what, if Amy
comes to the Triangle on a visit, maybe you and Dave and she and I can
double-date." Even though I was now a woman myself, I was still attracted to
women, just like when I was a guy named Joe. I liked having some continuity
with the old me.
"Do you mean that?"
"Yeah, I do."
"Cool, 'cause we could do that. Amy's talked about coming over during Spring
Break or summer vacation."
"Let's do it then. You know my number. Be sure to let me know when you get
your phone put in."
"I'll do that, just as soon as I can scrape together the money. You'll be
one of the first to know."
Now that I had a possible Lesbian date set up for the springtime, I
confidently moved on to the next subject. "So, how'd you get interested in
electronica?" I something about electronica because my daughter Nancy spent
her college years going to raves. I feared she would get into drugs, because
so many kids in the rave scene are into ecstasy, but I needn't have worried.
I had raised her better than I knew.
"I'm not into straight-up 100 per cent electronica. I just want to mix
synthesized music together with some other styles, like for instance, the
Gorillaz do." I made a mental note to check out their music, if I ever had
any CD-buying money. Now that I was a young person again, I saw no reason
not to take an interest in what the kids were grooving to. Only I mustn't
call it grooving.
We went on and on and on. After about a half hour, Lillith walked into the
living room, sat in one of the easy chairs, and watched. When Gina and I
finally exchanged good-byes, she grinned like the proverbial cat that had
just eaten the canary. "Fifty-two going on sixteen," she said.
I hung up the phone. "I do enjoy chatting on the phone more than I used to.
I don't know whether it's the hormones, or the fact that my formerly male
mind is using female brain wiring, or both."
"I prefer to think that the Goddess has granted you and Natalie the
privilege of being both male and female in the same lifetime. Frankly, I'm a
little bit envious."
"Yes, you have to settle for being merely psychic."
"Your daughter phoned to set up an appointment today."
"Oh, good," I said fondly. "Can I lurk behind a screen, or something, and
watch as she talks to you?"
"No, that would violate confidentiality. If you want to see her, why don't
you just introduce yourself to her?"
"Lillith, I'm a retail clerk living on a paycheck barely bigger than minimum
wage."
"There's no disgrace in being a retail clerk, Michelle."
"I know, but if I introduce myself to her, I want to tell her I'm my father,
and I can't do that now."
"Why not?"
"I'm just not ready."
"You don't want your daughter to know that her father, a successful
businessman, is now a female retail clerk." Lillith regarded me intently.
"Michelle, what is it you're ashamed of? Being a woman or being a mere
clerk?"
"Being a mere clerk."
She grinned knowingly, and raised an eyebrow. "You're a proud man, Michelle
Toomey." Appreciating the joke, I threw a sofa cushion at her.
TO BE CONTINUED
Copyright (c) 2002, by Norman O. Johnson ([email protected]). With the
author's written permission, the above copyrighted material may be archived,
copied, transmitted, and redistributed, provided that it remains in its
original form with all warnings, copyright, author credit, and other
information intact. It may NOT be distributed for profit or sold for profit,
except by the author, Norman O. Johnson.
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