Janey And The Wildcats - Part One free porn video

Okay, so here's how this story came about. It's loosely autobiographical. Once upon a time, many years ago, I really did play lead guitar in a reasonably successful local rock band. Our repertoire was pretty much standard bar-band covers: Zeppelin, Stones, Black Sabbath, Pink Floyd, with a smattering of CCR, Bob Seger, Eric Clapton, AC/DC and Van Halen. Later on, in an attempt to broaden our appeal we added a few more contemporary bands, like Our Lady Peace, The Tragically Hip, Pearl Jam and Nirvana, and in time we also started to throw in a few original songs. At the time I was still, quite literally, "in the closet" as a transgendered person. I had a decent apartment, run down but large, near the downtown core, and the left half of my walk-in closet was devoted to boy clothes, jeans, work shirts, sneakers, while the right half contained my girl clothes, dresses, tight jeans and skimpy tops, mini- skirts, heels, jewelry boxes, makeup. At the time there was only one person, a close female friend, to whom I had confided my feelings, and one other, a girlfriend, who had found out accidentally. She was curiously unsurprised by the discovery, and fairly sympathetic, but she did dump me soon afterwards. (Needless to say, for the duration of our relationship, I'd hidden my girl-clothes in a less conspicuous location. She eventually found out, not by discovering the clothes, but rather by finding a stash of photographs of me in drag. It was an uncomfortable moment, to say the least.) I also had a second deep, dark secret, one that bamboo stakes under the fingernails wouldn't have induced me to reveal. The first, of course, was that I wished I was a girl. But the second was that I was madly in love -- or at least in lust -- with the rhythm guitarist in the band, a guy named Mick. He was exactly the sort of guy that the 'girl' in me would have loved to have for a boyfriend: tall and well-built, his boyish good looks made slightly sinister by his dark goatee and waist- length black hair. He was also sweet, gentle and intelligent, with a wickedly twisted sense of humor, and had the kind of eyes you could get permanently lost in. More than once, during rehearsals at least, I would completely miss a solo cue, lost as I was in some passionately erotic reverie in which Mick and I were boyfriend and girlfriend. I really haven't done him justice in the following story. It was a crazy time, replete with sleazy bars, booze, groupies, and 'sex, drugs and rock and roll'. I played with the band for a little over two years, after which, weary of the non-stop madness and mayhem of the rock and roll life, I quit, moved to a nearby city, finished school, and found work as a graphic artist. And, with the encouragement and support of the aforementioned close female friend, I began living an openly transgendered lifestyle. Some of my adventures since then have been documented in some other stories posted here. The band hired another guitar player and continued on for another year or so, doing fairly well, only to disband abruptly after the keyboard player was killed in a motorcycling accident. The last I heard of Mick, he'd cut his hair, taken out a massive student loan, got his helicopter pilot's license, and was working for an oil company in the far north. To this day (to the best of my knowledge, at least) he never knew a thing about my feelings for him, and I have no idea how he would have reacted if he did. Call this story a kind of "wish fulfillment" fantasy. Janey and the Wildcats - Part One "Look. We've GOT to come up with some kind of a hook, people," Max was saying. "Something that'll make us stand out from the rest of the bands around here. We need something that's gonna grab people and make 'em NOTICE us..." "We could start with a little more stage presence," Janey responded, "I mean, sure, we get on stage and we rock out, but apart from yours truly," here she gestured at herself with her beer bottle, "I don't think any of you guys even LOOK at the audience. Chris, what's your big rock and roll move on stage? You tap your foot. Wow. That's stellar. That's REALLY gonna get people engaged." "Well, what the fuck you WANT me to do?" I protested. "Knee slides? Windmill power chords? Chuck Berry duck-walk? Climb on my amp and jump off? Do the splits?" "For a start, yeah." "Ahh, gimme a break!" I snorted. "Look, Janey. YOU'RE the focal point, right?" Mick piped up, "You're the one who's all over the stage, kickin' ass and takin' names. You're the singer. You're the one the audience should be focusing on, right? We're just the band. We don't NEED to attract attention, if you ask me. I think that'd just distract people." He took a long pull on his beer. "Well then, how about if you tried to look a little less BORED, huh?" she rejoined, favoring him with a wry look, "And here's another thing. Can we maybe wear some DECENT clothes onstage? I mean, the whole black t-shirt torn-jeans thing is getting a little old, huh? If we look like we give a shit, people will respond, trust me." "Shit, I don't think I HAVE anything else..." mumbled our drummer, Capt'n Dan. "Well, Max is right about one thing, anyway," Janey muttered after a short silence, "We gotta do something." It was one of our many impromptu band meetings in our rehearsal space at the back of Capt'n Dan's ramshackle house, and as usual, it was quickly degenerating into a bitch session about what was "wrong" with the band, and what we could "do about it". I was sitting on the couch, noodling on my Strat, the volume turned off. A beer bottle rested between my knees. As the conversation continued, Mick picked up a chunk of hash from the coffee table and began heating it up with his lighter. He crumbled some up and mixed it with a little tobacco, then arranged it in a line on a rolling paper. I watched him carefully. It's kind of a treat, I reflected, to watch a guitar player roll a joint. The results are always so perfect... must have something to do with manual dexterity. But, I must have been exerting some weird psychic pressure on him, because just as I was thinking that, the paper suddenly slipped from his grasp and the hash-tobacco mixture fell onto the floor. "My hash!" yelled Janey. "You wicked little shit!" Max snarled from his seat behind his keyboard stack, pointing an accusing finger at Mick, "I was onto your act from the start! You're a fucking nark, aren't you? Don't try to deny it! Who else would wear shades INDOORS?" "Actually, I think he's a Jehovah's Witness," Capt'n Dan commented, "I'm sure he was trying to save my soul yesterday. I told him I'd already sold it for a bag of Doritos. THAT'S why he dumped the hash on the floor. He's trying to save ALL our souls..." "Everybody!" Mick said, spreading his arms, "Everybody be calm! Dan, please put up some police tape around the scene... This is a restricted area from now on..." He began waving his hands like a cop directing traffic. "Move along, people! Move a long. Nothing to see here... The situation is completely under control. Alright, lady and gentlemen, if you'll just have a little patience... I will now... LEVITATE the hash." He closed his eyes and began intoning, "Ommmmmmm.... Ommmm..." He started to wave his hands over the tiny pile. The rest of us snickered appreciatively. "You jackasses," Janey muttered, "let the girl do it. Thank god there's SOMEONE in this band who isn't completely mad..." She took one of our crumpled business cards from the table and scraped the mixture off the carpet, dumping it back into the rolling paper. "There," she grunted. "God, you'd think it was some sort of a problem in quantum physics..." "How do you know it ISN'T, huh?" said Mick serenely, "The apparent location of the hash in spacetime is, of course, a direct result of the curvature of space resulting from our proximity to the gravitational field of the Earth... Now if we apply the Einsteinian metric tensors which define the topology of local spacetime..." Mick: the closet intellectual. "Oh my God," Max groaned, "please. No more..." "Yeah," grunted Root, our bass player. At this point, I turned up the volume control of my Strat and played the first few bars of the Twilight Zone theme, ending with a pick scrape down the fifth and sixth strings, causing a noise like a prolonged car crash to hurl from the speakers of my Marshall Valvestate, which happened to be turned up nearly full at that moment. "Jeebus," Mick muttered. "Can we PLEASE get back to the rehearsal?" I begged. "If I have to listen to too much more of this, I might have to electrocute myself. THEN you'd be sorry!" "Yeah," Root grunted again. That was Root for you, a man of few words. Root's real name was Ron. The nickname 'Root' harkened back to the night he showed up to audition for the band in response to an ad we'd placed in the local newspaper. We jammed for a while, Ron laying down some sweet bass parts on his Ibanez five-string, and we were all favorably impressed. After some desultory negotiations about time commitments, money issues and so forth, we officially admitted him to the band and adjourned to Capt'n Dan's back-yard deck to seal the deal with a celebratory joint. As it happened, the joint contained some wicked opium hash and, after taking a single toke, Ron nearly passed out, flipping ass over teakettle off the deck and landing spread-eagled in Dan's peony bed. Thus, Root: "Ripped On One Toke." "This is supposed to be a practice," I reminded everyone, "I'm going out on a limb here, but... don't you suppose we should, just maybe... um, PRACTICE something?" "Yeah, I guess we should," Janey said. She finished rolling the joint and fired it up, taking a long toke and then handing it to Max. "Let's work on 'Alcoholocaust' okay? I still need to get the timing right through the bridge..." We smoked the joint down, then took up our positions in the cramped rehearsal space in Dan's converted garage. Janey needed room, a lot of room, when she sang -- she was all over the place -- so the rest of us were, of necessity, jammed into one end of the space. More than once I've accidentally bashed Mick or Root with the headstock of my guitar as I played. Capt'n Dan counted us in, and off we went. This particular song had lots of room for improvisation, and after Max had ripped through a blazing keyboard solo on his Korg Triton, I stomped my fuzz and wound out for sixteen bars on my Strat. It sounded pretty damn good, if I do say so myself. -- "Are we ALMOST ready for a sound check?" Janey pleaded, her voice booming through the P.A., "You guys are the most anal retentive bunch I've ever worked with, I swear. What other band takes two HOURS to set up? Chris, I bet you love that guitar more than your own mother." "Nah. About the same, I think," I countered, as I stomped my tuner and tweaked the low E, "are we about ready, lads?" "I've been ready for at least half an hour," Mick put in, "it's THESE clowns who have the 'anal retention' problem..." His gesture took in Capt'n Dan, who was still fine-tuning his kit, and Max, who was at that moment groveling behind his keyboard stack, only his ass and legs visible. "Almost done..." he grunted. Max had a thing for vintage keys. Only after a prolonged bout of pleading >from the rest of us (who had to help move the damn thing) did he finally ditch his ancient Hammond B3 and Leslie cabinets, and replace it with a Korg CX3, which sounded the same as far as I could tell and was about one-fiftieth the weight. He also ran an 88-key Korg Triton Extreme, which was a fairly recent synth capable of generating just about every keyboard sound ever conceived of, and lots that hadn't. But he also kept a vintage (and very rare) Arp 2600 which, despite having a sound like the voice of God only bigger, was cantankerous in the extreme, and was apt to go seriously out of tune immediately before a keyboard solo. Finally, his ass backed up out of the mess of wires under his equipment, and the rest of him followed. "Done," he wheezed, sweat trickling down his cheeks, "Fuckin' line mixer is just about toast. There's only about eight inputs that still work." "Boys," Janey said patiently, spreading her hands, "can we? Please? They're opening the doors in about fifteen minutes." "Okay," Dan said, "let's do 'Voodoo Thing'. We can do that one in our sleep." He counted it in. We were playing that night in a downtown bar called Frugal McDougall's. It was a decent venue, the club owners were nice to us, the crowds were friendly and reasonably well-behaved (at least until midnight or so) and the acoustics were great. Although we were not 'officially' the house band, we still played there regularly, probably more often than any other local band. We were well-liked. We always felt good playing there, and this night was no exception. Voodoo Thing is a high-energy twelve-bar by Canadian blues-rocker Colin James, and it was one of the few covers that we just loved so much that we hung onto it despite our commitment to push our own original material. We slammed into the song with gusto; Janey leaped and gyrated as she sang, swinging her microphone on the end of its cord, coolly catching it again just as the next vocal phrase began; Max's CX3 wailed like a mountain lion in heat; bass and drums were solidly in the pocket. When the guitar solo rolled around, I stomped my wah (a real nice vintage Crybaby reissue) and ripped into it, my fingers dancing over the frets, my lovely Strat Plus sounding as sweet as I've ever heard it. At the pause before the bridge, I mashed the whammy bar right down to the pick guard, causing a full-throated roar like a squadron of B-17s to leap from the speakers. Janey was right, I DID love that guitar! When the song was over, Janey turned to me, grinned and said, "Well, at least Chris isn't playing in his sleep tonight. Decent solo, dude. We might just make it through this gig without a major gaff. "Oh, and by the way," she gave us all the once over, smiling sardonically, "I like the new look, guys. Torn jeans and black t-shirts. VERY original." "Oh yeah," Mick countered, looking her up and down, "and we've NEVER seen those spandex pants and tube top and high-heels before, either!" "You go with what works, my friend," she replied calmly, cupping her barely-concealed breasts with her hands, "we give the gents a hard-on, and their girlfriends jealous fits. It's all part of the God's plan..." "Can I get a little more bass in my monitor?" Root said through his mike, squinting toward the back of the bar, where Allan, our sometime sound man, sat in the shadows behind the mixing board. We did some final tweaks on the mix for the next couple of minutes, running each mike and instrument in turn, before finally deciding that everything was set to go. The doors opened, and patrons started to trickle in. We switched all our gear to standby mode and headed upstairs to the so-called 'dressing room' (a closet would have offered as much space) to relax, smoke a joint or two, and wait for set time. When the time came, we guys sauntered back onstage and did a final tuning check, while Janey stayed out of sight in the back. She would make her grand entrance a few minutes into the set. A waiter came up to the stage and wordlessly placed open bottles of beer on each of the amps. The house lights went down slowly. I looked around. There was a good crowd tonight, the noise already intense. I looked at the guys; they looked pumped. This, I told myself, was gonna be good... Then Capt'n Dan hit his sticks together to count in our intro number, a high powered instrumental four-four boogie in E. We blasted into it, riffing hard as the stage lights came up to full. I threw in some bluesy fills at the end of each phrase, just for the hell of it. Max was hammering out some rockin' boogie piano on his Triton. Then Janey appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, and leaped onto the stage. A white spot came on and followed her. I always admired the way she acted as if she owned the stage. She had this wonderfully arrogant swagger that somehow, magically, she made sweet with her blazing, radiant smile, as well as irresistibly sexy with her spike heels and skin-tight outfit. She was giving it to them in spades tonight. She grabbed the mike. "Good evening, ladies and gentlemen!" Janey yelled, as we brought it down a little. "Welcome to Frugal McDougall's! We are Janey and the Wildcats, and this... is 'Badass Boogie'! One two three four!" We plowed into it, everyone locking together as a single organism, relentless, unstoppable. Mick and I swapped solos through the bridge, trading fours over Max's grinding CX3 and Ron's thundering five-string bass. The energy climbed even higher. It felt as if the lights on stage had somehow become even brighter, the amps even louder. By the end of the song, the dance floor was packed, almost unheard-of this early in the evening. It was fucking awesome. The next four tunes went equally well. The place was hopping, the crowd enthusiastic, the beer flowing, the energy unbelievably high. Fuck, this is great! I thought exultantly, this is what it's all about. This makes it all worthwhile... Janey flashed me a look, flushed and excited, and I knew she was thinking the same thing. We plowed straight into our next song without an intro, one of our new tunes, 'Switchblade', which featured Max wailing out a totally retro Keith Emmerson-ish synth solo on his Arp, while Mick and I pounded out a gritty, funk progression in fifths. Then, first intimations of disaster: the Arp made no sound. I glanced toward the back of the bar, where Allan sat, invisibly, behind the board, and screwed up my face as if to say, "What gives?" When four bars had come and gone with no solo forthcoming, I shrugged, gave my guitar's volume knob a twist, and began improvising something over the riff. I threw in a few bluesy bends and hammer-ons, and was just getting into it when a sudden deafening shriek announced that the Arp was abruptly live. Max, looking flustered, yanked the cord out of the output jack and the noise ceased. Great, I thought, that'll go over big-time. Janey glanced over at me and rolled her eyes. We brought the song to an end, to be greeted with noticeably less enthusiastic applause. Shit, I thought, we need to do something to get our mojo back, pronto. I went up to Janey. "Hey," I whispered in her ear, "how about we do 'Midnight Stomp'? That's always a crowd-pleaser." "Okay. Good plan." She turned to the band and held up her hand, "Midnight Stomp, people... in F sharp..." We tore into it with a will, everyone hoping to rebuild the momentum. In the middle of this tune there's a long percussion break where we all pick up various shakers, cowbells, claves, guiros and so forth and lay down a kick-ass Latin funk rhythm. Janey plays the congas, Dan gets to work his roto-toms and timbales, and on a good night we even get the audience to participate, handing out cheap percussion instruments (ones we don't care about if they go missing) to the folks near the stage, and encouraging everyone else to bang out a rhythm on beer bottles, chairs, tables, anything that comes to hand. Janey began clapping her hands over her head to get the crowd fired up, and we all started laying down the beat. The riff intensified, and with a grin I tossed a couple of egg shakers to the folks at a table in front, who happened to be people we knew. This is more like it, I thought. Then, the power went out. Some nights, you just can't win. -- I got home around three, after unloading my gear at Capt'n Dan's place. I took off my sweaty t-shirt and opened the fridge, gloomily staring at the nearly empty shelves. I took out a beer and cracked it open, then went and sat on the couch, put my feet up, picked up the remote and began flicking aimlessly through the channels, unwilling to think too heavily about the night's fiasco. The power had come back on a minute or so later, and we'd finished the set, but the energy was gone, not to be recaptured. When it comes, it's almost magical. You can almost lose all sense of yourself as an individual, and feel instead like you've somehow become enveloped in a kind of massive wash of cosmic energy, linking you and the other band members together into a single, integrated entity, pulsating with blazing light and power and sound. And when it goes away, it can seem like magic too, but not in a good way. Then, it seems almost like BLACK magic, like some evil sorcerer has cast a spell over you that robs you of your life-essence, and strips away every thin, vestigial echo of any connection you might ever have had to your instrument, to the music, to the crowd, to the other members of the band, leaving you naked, isolated and alone. We made it through the rest of the evening without any more major fuck- ups. We re-worked the set list on the fly, abandoning some of our newer, more ambitious material in favor of some older tunes that we knew well, mixed in with a few covers. Still, it wasn't anything I'd describe as triumphant. There was nothing on. I snapped off the TV, then went into my bedroom. I scooped a few discarded items of clothing off the floor and opened my walk-in closet and tossed them in. Two of the nice things about my apartment were: A) it was cheap, and B) it was a good size. A little run-down, but large. And, it had a walk-in closet... a bathroom the size of a phone booth, and a walk-in closet. Go figure. I lingered there in the door of the closet, and for a few moments I surveyed the damning evidence before my eyes of my very own deep, dark secret: On the right-hand side of the closet was a rack of dresses, skirts, blouses, skimpy tops, baby tees. On the floor were pairs of high-heels of the sort that Janey would have drooled over. On the shelf above the rack, a makeup case, and a couple of jewelry boxes. In the tiny chest of drawers stuffed at the back of the closet were more tops and skirts and, filling one drawer almost to bursting, lingerie. NICE lingerie, too. Why was all this stuff there? Well, it was mine. Yes, I said to myself for the millionth time, yes Chris, you're a cross-dresser. But no, you're MORE than that, aren't you? You're not just a cross-dresser, you actually WANT to be a GIRL, don't you? That's the truth of it. You wish you had boobs... you wish you had a pussy instead of a cock... you wish you could wear all this stuff openly, and be called "Christine" instead of "Chris", and... And... have a boyfriend, too, isn't that right? You want a boyfriend. And not just ANY boyfriend either, right? Mick. You want Mick... Face it, Chris. You're in love with Mick. Or in lust, anyway. God, it's agony, sometimes. He'd be up there on stage, on the other side of Janey from you, pounding out some power chords, or you'd be standing facing one another, trading licks, or you'd be right beside to him in the rehearsal room, so close you could feel the heat from his body in that cramped, sweaty space, and your heart would pound, and your face would feel hot, and you'd dream about being a real girl, and having him slide those taut, muscled arms around you, and kissing you, and... Fuck. Fuck it all. Never going to happen, Chris. Live with it. I sighed. I wanted to try something on. A dress, maybe. Some jewelry, perhaps. Maybe polish my nails. But no. Way too late to do anything tonight, I reflected. Got work tomorrow, anyway. But, after stripping off my clothes, I slipped into a silky negligee before crawling into bed. -- My day job was at Sherwood Music. I worked the counter, sold guitars and amps, repaired and set up just about anything with strings that came through the door, handled the ordering and, due to a completely inexplicable facility with computers, kept the point-of-sale and inventory systems running. John Sherwood, the owner, thought I was a godsend. The money I earned there covered my rent, bought groceries, and even allowed me to keep my aging Toyota Tercel on the road. I also got excellent deals on musical equipment, which enabled me to put together a decent instrument collection, including, besides my lovely Fender Stratocaster Plus (maple neck, vintage white body, lace sensor pickups, and Sperzel locking tuners), a tasty cherry-red Gibson SG, a vintage reissue Telecaster, a very nice Simon & Patrick six-string acoustic, a Yamaha 12-string and, purchased in a moment of folk-festival induced madness, a Degas 5-string banjo, which I'd never really learned to play. Not to mention my Marshall Valvestate amp and speaker stack, Roland GP- 100 guitar processor, and enough effects pedals to choke a hippo. Oh, and some miscellaneous harmonicas, penny whistles, recorders and a D concertina. I arrived at the store just before ten, in time to open up. As I was switching on the lights and starting up the computers, Benny and Erin walked in. Erin worked in the keyboard department and taught piano. Benny was a young guy who'd come to the store on a high school co-op training program two years earlier and never left. He was a talented drummer and jack-of-all trades, and was also one of the sweetest people I'd ever met. Several times a day it would be all I could do not to just throw my arms around him and give him a hug. He just had that effect on people. Erin was in her sophisticated-rocker-chick mode that morning, wearing a revealing crop-top, flowy skirt and flat-heeled sandals, with her hair swept back, long dangly earrings and several silver bracelets. I thought she looked wonderful, and I stared at her with my usual uneasy mixture of attraction and envy. "Wow, Erin," I commented, "you look pretty hot today." "Thanks," she replied, "And YOU, my friend, look like you could use this... A grande latte; one sugar, right?" she handed me a large Starbucks take-out cup. "Oh, bless your heart," I said gratefully, "I do need this." I popped the lid. "Ahhhh..." I sighed, taking a sip. "Yes... Nectar of the gods..." The day was busy, and time passed quickly. We did a brisk business selling small items, strings, cords, stomp boxes, mike stands and so forth. Erin sold a Yamaha digital piano, Benny sold a bunch of percussion instruments, we rented out several P.A.s and I sold a Fender bass amp and a couple of acoustic guitars. Not a bad day's work. That evening there was no practice. I went home and ate some leftover Chinese food, and then with an empty evening ahead of me, decided that I should maybe "practice" my girl-look. This was, of course, really just an excuse to get dressed up. Until fairly recently, all of my dressing had been at home, but about six months ago I'd finally gotten up the nerve to drive to a nearby city and check out a night-club that was apparently trans friendly. Once my initial nervousness was dealt with, I'd wound up having a great time, met a lot of really nice people, received some glowing compliments, and even flirted with a few tranny- chaser type guys. I'd been back at least half a dozen times since; it was generally a reliably good evening's fun. I was pretty lucky, really. I'd always been slim to the point of being skinny (or "willowy" as I preferred to think of it) with a very slight build, medium height and baby-faced, and I currently had long straight brown hair down to my mid-back. My wispy beard barely needed scraping once a week. Even now, well into my twenties as I was, I was still regularly asked for ID in bars. In my teens I'd been frequently mistaken for a girl, something that even now still happened occasionally. Just the previous week, as I'd been pushing my cart around the grocery store, a woman with two young children in tow had seen me coming and told them, "Watch out, you two! Let the lady by... Man!" she amended, as I shot her a look. All of this made it ridiculously easy for me to pass, when I dressed as a girl. I probably didn't even really need to wear makeup, although I always did. A couple of the friends I'd made at the tranny bar had asked, since I passed so easily, why wasn't I more 'out'? The answer was simple. I was scared shitless of being discovered. There's a theory that people with the most developed imaginations make the worst soldiers. This is simply because they are able to imagine, with great vividness, every possible terrible thing that can happen to them in a battle, and this can induce in them such a level of fear that they are essentially useless in combat. A different person, with no imagination, doesn't even think about such things, unless and until they actually happen. He can therefore plunge confidently into battle without the same debilitating fear, simply because he can't picture in advance what it would be like to get shot, or have a leg blown off by a mine, or be burned alive by napalm. It was the same with me and dressing. I knew, intellectually at least, that I looked like a girl when I dressed. Indeed, I think I usually looked quite pretty, even sexy. But that really didn't matter. On a more visceral level, I could imagine in excruciating detail exactly what it would be like to be 'read' by a gang of street toughs, or pulled over by the cops and forced to flash my male driver's license, or unexpectedly coming face to face with a close friend who would instantly recognize me... No, it was just too scary. Even the fairly short drive to the tranny bar was fraught with apprehension. I knew that somehow, before I could make any real headway in my long-deferred quest to be female, or even be more open about it, I would first have to deal with my fear. So, until then, well, I was stuck doing things like I was doing tonight: dressing in the privacy of my own apartment, the shades drawn and the front door closed and locked -- which it never was at any other time. My goal was to perfect a completely natural look, appropriate to a girl my age, seasoned with just a dash of the 'rocker-chick' look I so admired in Janey and Erin. Casual but sexy makeup; funky, laid-back clothes and jewelry; flats sometimes, heels other times. I selected a pale blue print sundress with spaghetti straps, and white high heeled sandals. I stripped off my clothes, took a quick shower and washed my hair, then, with my hair wrapped in a towel turban, I slipped on a padded bra and panties then began on my makeup. I sponged on a very light, transparent foundation, then added a little blush, contoured my eyes with some grey-brown eye shadow and black mascara, finishing with a strawberry lip gloss. I examined my nails. Probably not time to polish them, I thought ruefully. I took out the tiny silver hoops I habitually wore in my ears, and replaced them with large hoops, then slipped a couple of bracelets on my wrist. I put a couple of rings on my hands, and a silver toe ring onto my left foot. Then I removed the towel and brushed my still-slightly damp hair. There. Not bad, I thought, as I gazed at myself in the mirror. Just the look I was going for tonight. I looked at my nails again. Ah, fuck it. Why not? I examined my nail polish collection, and selected a dark, blood red shade that I knew Janey would have liked. She almost always wore nail polish, and almost always in rocker shades, like blood red, blue, green, violet, silver, sometimes black. Of course, her nails, like mine, were of necessity very short, because she sometimes filled in on acoustic guitar. I sat down and applied a couple of coats, then after the polish dried I wandered into the living room and switched on the TV. I was probably more tired than I thought, because I fell asleep on the couch, waking several hours later at about 2 AM. Foggy from sleep, I wandered back into my bedroom and stripped off, leaving everything where it fell, dress, bra, panties, shoes. Fuck it, I'll pick it all up in the morning, I thought groggily. I collapsed into bed and fell instantly asleep. -- The following morning I woke late. Damnit! I had just enough time to dress, strip off my nail polish and grab a coffee on the way to the store. I got there just in time to open, and John, Erin and Benny arrived a few minutes later. It was another busy day. Sales were good, I set up a couple of acoustic guitars in the workshop, and took in some P.A. returns. After closing up, I headed back home and changed in preparation for heading over to Dan's for a rehearsal, and ate a couple of slices of cold pizza. I should put my clothes away properly, I thought. I went into the bedroom and gathered the stuff up from the floor, hanging it up carefully and putting away my lingerie, makeup and jewelry. As I was doing so, I noticed my black leather jacket hanging on a hook at the back of the closet. I took it out and tried it on, examining myself in the mirror. It was actually a girl's jacket, bought during one of the rare moments when I actually had some extra cash, and it was a nice one. Maybe, I thought, maybe this would work to change my stage look a little. It was not an obviously feminine garment. It was somewhat shorter in the waist than a guy's jacket would have been, and cut differently, with a little extra allowance over the bust, but there was nothing really noticeably feminine about it. Yeah, I thought, this might work. I stripped off my habitual black t- shirt, and put on a burgundy tank top with the Frugal McDougall's logo on the front. Like the jacket, it was a girl's garment, but not obviously so. I put the jacket back on over top. There. Not too bad. Maybe Janey'll be suitably impressed. She was. I walked in just as the rest were tuning up. "Hey!" she said on seeing me, "Now that's a good look! See?" she looked around at the others- "See? Chris is making an effort, at least." "Kiss-ass..." Max growled, looking me up and down. "Did you bring an apple for the teacher, too?" "Why don't you run outside and play hide-and-go-fuck-yourself?" I replied laconically. Despite the acidity of our typical exchanges, Max and I actually got on well. He was always crusty in the extreme, but we all knew it was a bluff, intended to hide the fact that deep down he was really just a big pussycat. He rode a Harley, did Max, and looked every inch the biker; he even tended to park his bike IN the living room of his tiny house down by the lake, which meant that his living room carpet had a large permanent grease stain in the middle. But, one blustery spring afternoon Dan and I drove down to his place to find him outside his front door, wielding a handful of tools, cursing steadily, and wrestling with a large sheet of plywood in the stiff wind that was blowing in off the water. "What the hell are you doing?" we asked. "Ahhhh," he sighed, screwing up his face and looking slightly embarrassed, "see, there's these birds building a nest in this bush here by the front door, and in this wind I'm afraid the nest'll get blown down, so I'm making a wind-break... that is, if I can get this fuckin' plywood to stay put... Here, grab one end, will ya?" That was Max for you. Gruff and cranky, with a heart as big as all outdoors. He was also a brilliant keyboard player. Janey was looking foxy as usual, in a ribbed halter top, skintight black capris and heels. She retrieved a beer from Dan's fridge, threw her purse into a corner and said, "Well boys, let's get started!" "I was thinking," began Max, "for the second set, how about we start off with 'Traffic Jam'? That'll give us guys a chance to wind out a bit, trade some solos, and you can get a couple of extra minutes to relax." "Okay," she said, as she pulled her hair back into a ponytail, "then what?" "Well, then you could take the stage, and we could go straight into Jackhammer Blues... they're in the same key, and then maybe Cajun Woman or Midnight Stomp. Then we could slow it down with Only Time Will Tell, then finish up the set with a cover or two. I was thinking maybe Back in Black? That's a pretty reliable crowd pleaser." Janey could, when necessary, come up with a fairly credible female equivalent of Brian Johnson's trademark screech and, although I'm no Angus Young, I can hold my on most of his guitar solos. Back in Black was once one of our signature tunes, before we began pushing our own original material. And of course, it gave me a chance to play my SG. Janey considered this. "We ought to leave Midnight Stomp to the third set. It always goes over better when the crowd is good and 'likkered up'. But the rest is good. Can we squeeze another slow tune in there somewhere? Check this out, guys: Mick and I have something for you to listen to..." Mick put down his Les Paul, opened up a small case and took out a mandolin, equipped with a piezo pickup. He plugged it into a vacant channel on the PA and Janey picked up my acoustic, which she also plugged in. She looked at him expectantly, and he began to play, quietly at first, but building, and I recognized the opening mandolin lick from Led Zeppelin's 'Battle of Evermore'. Janey began to strum the acoustic, filling out the bottom of the song underneath the high stridency of the mandolin. It sounded lovely. Mick began to sing: "The queen of light took her bow, and then she turned to go..." Wow, I thought, he sounds amazing! I had no idea... He actually sounds a lot like Robert Plant... But the surprises were not over. "Ohhh... Dance in the dark of night," Janey sang the counterpoint part, her eyes closed, "Sing to the morning light..." Holy shit! She sounds like Sandy Denny... This is fucking amazing. I had no idea she could sing like that! The hairs on my arms began to stand up. They went deeper into the song, the energy building higher and higher, their voices trading and blending, bouncing off one another, fighting, reconciling, making love, only to fight again. It was an incredible performance, and it was almost unbelievable that this density of sound was coming only from two voices and two acoustic instruments. "...At last, the sun is shining, the clouds of blue roll by, With flames from the dragon of darkness, sunlight blinds his eyes..." Their voices rose in that final, agonized discord, soaring higher, only to come to rest magically on the perfect fifth, then plunging down to an octave split. The song faded away. There was stunned silence in the room. "Um," I said, trying to keep my voice steady, "Uh, sure, yeah. We can do that one..." -- A few hours later, we were sitting in Capt'n Dan's den, listening to an old Allman Brothers CD and drinking beer. Mick was rolling a joint, and Janey and I were sitting on the couch. She had her feet up on my legs, and had just finished doing her nails, the air still pungent with the aroma of the nail polish. I was half asleep. "Hey babe," she began, sitting up, and poking me in the arm, "Can you give me a lift over to... OH SHIT!" "Wha...? What happened?" "Oh shit, Chris! I'm so sorry!" She looked horrified. "What? What are you talking about?" She pointed to the sleeve of my leather jacket, which was now sporting a vivid purple stain. "Oh shit, man, I'm sorry! Really! I thought my nails were dry, honest! It's supposed to be quick-drying." "Um... It's okay, I guess." I had no idea how to clean something like that off leather. "No, man," she said adamantly, "I'll take care of it. It was my fault. It was fucking stupid. I'll get it cleaned, promise. It'll be good as new, or I'll buy you another jacket. Damn it! What a dumb thing to do... Now, take it off, and I'll take it to the cleaners first thing tomorrow." "It's okay, really," I said, uncertainly, "not a big deal..." "No way, dude. Come on, take it off. I fucked it up, I'll fix it. Please! Let me do this." I shrugged and slipped off my jacket, handing it to her. She took it. "Wow, this IS a nice jacket," she commented, holding it up and examining it, "Where's it from? 'Southbound Leather'" she read off the label. Then she lowered her voice and leaned toward me. "Hey, are you aware this is a women's jacket?" "Um, yeah..." I said weakly. "But, like, I didn't know at the time... and well, it fit good and..." "Hey, these jackets are all pretty much the same... I was just wondering if you'd noticed the label. Anyway, don't worry about a thing, man. I'll have it good as new." She bundled it up and put it with her purse. -- Friday. We had a gig that evening in the university bar, at which we debuted the Battle of Evermore, along with two new tunes written by Janey, "White Lightning" and "Pearls Before Swine." The response was encouraging. Battle of Evermore especially went over big with the college crowd. After the gig, we celebrated with a few beers at the bar, then headed off to our respective residences in an elated mood. -- Saturday. I worked at the store during the day, then in the evening I went home, showered and slipped into bra and panties. I did my makeup and nails, then tried on a few outfits, blue sundress, a denim mini and crop top, black halter-neck minidress, tight black miniskirt and lace- trimmed burgundy cami. I settled on the black minidress, paired with black heels and silver jewelry. Then I stuffed my wallet and a few sundries into my purse and headed out to my car, after first carefully scanning the hallway outside my door to make sure nobody would see me emerge. I arrived at the T-Bar around nine, and the place was hopping. I spotted Alison, another t-girl that I'd met there a few weekends ago and thought of as a friend, and went over to say hi. She was dressed in an impossibly short miniskirt and skyscraper heels, her ample, surgically enhanced breasts spilling out of her halter top. She lived full time as a woman, had undergone electrolysis, had hair extensions down to her ass, and even had a nose and chin job, as well as collagen lip injections. Nevertheless, it was questionable that many people took her for a genetic woman, at least upon close scrutiny. We hollered at each other over the noise for a while, then headed to the bar to order. "So, when are you going to come out, Christine?" she yelled, "You know, so many t-girls around here couldn't pass at midnight in a dark alley in dense fog, and THEY'RE out... Take ME for example..." she grinned, "And look at YOU! My God! If I didn't already know you were a t-girl I would never be able to tell. I'd just naturally assume you were a real girl, I'm not kidding! You look gorgeous!" "Yeah, well..." I began, "To be honest Allie, I'm just scared. I mean, how the hell do other girls handle it when they come out? How do you tell your co-workers, friends, neighbors, family, all that stuff? And you know, rock and roll is a pretty macho world. I don't know how the other guys in the band would deal with it. They might flip out. And what about my job? Could I lose my job over this? And then, there's my voice. My voice still sounds pretty male. Hell... it's just scary, is all." "First of all," Alison replied, "You can't lose your job because you're transgendered. It's against the law. Second, I bet your band would be a lot more tolerant than you think. I mean, the whole entertainment business is full of oddballs and weirdos. In the grand scheme of things, dressing as a girl is pretty minor, especially these days. I read an article that said that in the next couple of years, transgender is going to be the new 'gay'. Lots of people are going to come out, and there's going to be a lot more acceptance. I bet you'd be pleasantly surprised. Finally, there's training you can do to make your voice more feminine. There!" she finished up, "All your fears laid to rest!" She grinned. I took a long pull on my beer. "Well, that may be so, Allie, but it still scares the crap out of me. I just don't think I'm ready." We danced a couple of tunes together, flirted with some tranny chasers, got tipsy, and talked more about coming out. I reiterated that it was still too scary a prospect to be entertained seriously, however much I might want it. But, by the end of the evening, her arguments, perhaps combined with the beer I'd had, had whittled away at my fears and, bolstered as I was with "liquid courage", I found myself starting to wonder if she didn't maybe have a point. I left around 2 AM, having had my last drink around midnight, and drove home, although I knew I probably shouldn't have been driving. Still, I suppose the gods were smiling on me, and I made it back to my apartment without incident. I stripped off, dumping my dress and under-things on the floor next to the outfits I'd discarded earlier, then flopped down on the bed and fell asleep almost immediately. -- Sunday. The day everything fell apart. I woke late, with a faint echo of a hangover lingering at the fringes of my consciousness. There was not much to do; the store was on "summer hours" and was thus closed Sundays, and although there was a band rehearsal later in the day there was not much for me to do until then. I contemplated tidying my bedroom and picking up all the clothes, lingerie, jewelry and makeup that was scattered around, but the prospect sounded too tedious for my pre-breakfast frame of mind. Instead, I stripped the polish from my nails, showered off the hangover (along with the last vestiges of my makeup, which I'd never removed the night before), drank a lot of water and made myself some slippery elm tea, as a kind of pre-emptive strike, in case my hangover should attempt a rearguard action. Then I headed down to Manny's, a greasy spoon just down the street from my apartment. Manny's offered an all-day breakfast, with excellent wild blueberry waffles and cappuccino, and that's what I was in the mood for. I sat at a booth and ate slowly, reading a trashy novel that I'd picked up some months ago and never got around to starting. I thought briefly about the previous evening, and how, after listening all night to Alison's arguments in favor of my 'coming out', I had actually been starting to think it might be possible, after all. In the light of day, those thoughts now seemed pretty foolish. After breakfast I wandered around for a while downtown, checked out Ground Floor Music, an indie record store that stocked a great selection of hard-to-find CDs, and finally headed over to Capt'n Dan's. Mick was there, and Dan, sitting in the back yard and sipping beers, shirts off, shades on. It was a hot day. "Hey," Dan said, "I thought you and Janey would show up together. Didn't you see her?" "Huh?" I said, puzzled. "Why would I see her?" "She was here," Dan replied, "but she headed over to your place to return your jacket. She picked it up from the cleaners this morning." "Oh," I began, "well, I wasn't at home, actually. I had breakfast down at Manny's, and then I headed over to... oh, SHIT!" "What? What's wrong?" "Uhhh. Um, nothing." I stammered (Oh fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck!!!! went my brain), "Nothing. Nothing's wrong. Uh, look, I gotta go. I'll be back..." "Hey, where you going?" Dan called after me. I didn't bother to answer. I sprinted for the street, reaching for my cell phone at the same time. Goddamn... What if she goes inside my apartment? Everyone knows I hardly ever lock my door. Hell, when I'm home, I rarely even bother to close it. And I knew that my good friends, like Janey, usually didn't even bother to knock; they'd just walk right in. And the floor of my bedroom was, of course, littered with incriminating evidence. Shit! I flipped open my phone, mildly surprised to see that it was still working, since it had been a comfortable length of time since I'd bothered to make a bill payment. I speed-dialed her number. "Hello..." her voice came on the line. "Janey! Janey, it's Chris... Listen, don't go upstairs, okay? I'm..." "... If you're after money," Janey's voice continued, "I've moved to Tierra del Fuego, permanently. Otherwise, leave me a message. Rock on!" Beep. Fuck. Voicemail. "Janey!" I yelled into the phone, still running at full speed down the sidewalk, "Janey, if you get this message, just wait outside, okay? I'll be there in a couple of minutes..." I hung up. Jesus. How could I explain this? The dresses, skirts, tops, heels... Maybe, just MAYBE I could say they belonged to some groupie I'd picked up the night before. The padded bras and breast pads... probably no way to explain those away. I discovered I was even better at running than I thought. Sweat was pouring down my face and into my eyes as I hurled myself through the entrance to my building and up the stairs to the second floor, taking them three at a time. The door to my apartment was wide open. I ran in. "Janey?" "In here," came her voice from the bedroom. She was sitting on the bed, my leather jacket beside her. "Hey!" she said brightly as I entered, panting heavily and still pouring sweat. My t-shirt was glued to my back. "Hey," I wheezed. "Did you RUN here?" she inquired, surprised, "Why? Don't you know there's a heat wave going on, you silly person?" "Well, yeah... I... uh..." I panted, in between rasping breaths, "I thought maybe I'd locked the door, see..." My closet door was wide open. I was pretty sure it had been closed when I left this morning, but I wasn't positive. I tried to scan the room without looking like I was doing so, using my peripheral vision as best I could. There was damning evidence everywhere, it seemed. Bras and panties, dresses, skirts, tops, high heeled shoes, girl's jeans, were scattered all over the floor. Makeup, jewelry and several bottles of nail polish were strewn on the dresser. I was sure my face was turning a darker red than mere running would explain. "Hey, check it out, man!" Janey said, holding up my jacket, "They did an AMAZING job, getting stain out. You can't even tell where it was! Cool, huh?" I took the jacket with trembling fingers and made as if to examine it. "Yeah," I said weakly, "Yeah, it looks real good..." "Were you over at Dan's? I was there earlier and you weren't around, so I thought you might still be here." "I went out for breakfast," I said, trying to keep my voice steady, "I was down at Manny's." "Oh, well. That explains it." There was a moment's silence, then, "So whose clothes are these?" she leaned back on the bed and gestured around the room. I opened my mouth but no sound came out. "She must be really flat, whoever she is," Janey went on, grinning, "to need so much padding for the boobies." "They're..." "Cool shoes, though," she continued, pointing, "She's got great taste, that's for sure!" "They're..." I took a huge breath, then another. The inescapable moment of truth, I realized, had arrived at last. Literally. Destiny can be a bitch sometimes. All this time, I realized, this moment had been out there, hurtling through space toward this very spot, like an asteroid on a collision course with the Earth, heading for an inexorable, cataclysmic impact on my life, like that big meteor in Armageddon. And I never even saw it was coming. A large chasm seemed to open up in my stomach. This sort of thing, I reflected, you just can't plan for, can you? Sometimes, you just have to let the forces of the cosmos do their thing, and go with it... "They're... they're mine." I said in a small voice. "They're yours..." she said. It didn't exactly sound like a question. "Yeah." There was a moment of intense silence, while a bead of sweat dripped from the end of my nose. "You wear them?" "Yeah." She looked around the room, then at me, her eyes wide. The ghost of a half-smile seemed to form at the corners of her mouth. There was another moment's silence, then, "Wow," she said, at last, "Wow. WOW! That's... that's totally amazing, dude!" I absolutely could not meet her eye. "So, do you dress up often?" "Well, not really. I go to this club, sometimes, and I guess I... you know, practice... Practice looking like a girl." I took several deep breaths, trying desperately to dissolve the knot in my guts. "Huh. So tell me... do you want to BE a girl?" "Well... Yeah. I guess I do." She sat up again and looked around at the clothes strewn on the floor. I was able to look at her, briefly. She didn't look freaked out, I thought. If anything, she looked kind of... what? Amused? "Wow," she said again, a slow smile creeping into her features, "You know, it's a surprise... but it kind of isn't, you know? I always thought I got a kind of... feminine vibe from you. Just a bit. You've always had this kind of... soft and gentle side, you know? It... it kind of suits you." "Really? I always pretty much thought I'd kept it under wraps." "And I bet you make an AWESOME chick!" she exclaimed, grinning, "Totally! You're even pretty as a guy! So, Chris, can I see you sometime? Dressed up, I mean. Can I maybe go with you to that club? Would that be okay?" "You don't think this is weird? You're not totally freaked out?" "Well, I AM kind of freaked out," she replied, still grinning, "but in a GOOD way, honest! Actually, I think it's pretty cool! REALLY cool! I think it's great!" "Really?" "Really!" she said, bouncing on the bed, "Hey, we can be girlfriends! It's like there's another girl in the band! I'm not the only one now! Far fucking out!!!" "Wait a minute, Janey," I protested, holding up my hand. "Look, you CAN'T tell anyone about this! Please! Nobody in the band can know, okay? I mean it." "How come?" she asked. "I bet they'd be cool with it." "Are you nuts? I seriously doubt that. Anyway, I don't want to take the chance. So PLEASE! You gotta keep this a secret, okay? Please!" "Well... okay. Sure. It'll be our secret, if that's the way you want it... But..." she finished, pointing a finger at me and smiling, "I STILL wanna see you as a chick!" "Look, this is kind of embarrassing for me, Janey. I'm still a little freaked out, myself. I have to deal with the idea that you know about it, now. I've never told ANYONE before. Nobody knows, except a few people I met at the club, and they're all trans people themselves. It's going to take me a while to get used to this." "Okay," she agreed, "I understand. But seriously, dude. I think it's awesome! I LOVE that you're like this! It... it kind of makes you special, you know? And it makes US special, too, you and me. Like we've got this shared secret, see? And it IS pretty cool that there's another 'girl' in the band, even if I'm the only one who knows about her." I nodded, still trying to will my heart to slow down. We looked at each other in silence for a few moments. "So, tell me, Chris," she said, looking me in the eye, "What are you gonna do about this? I mean, you have to come out sometime, right? You can't say in the closet forever. Are you going to get a sex change?" "Honestly, Janey, I have no idea," I said, sitting down on the bed next to her and heaving a yet another big sigh, "I guess I haven't thought that far ahead." "Uh-huh." She paused, then, "Hey... I'm just curious... You don't have to answer this if you don't want to... But well, I'm wondering, do you like guys, too?" she asked, "I mean, I know you've dated girls and all, and I know you've been with a few groupies, now and then. Is that just a cover?" I sighed again. "I don't know. No. I mean, I like girls... I really liked Amber, remember her? I dated her for about a year... but... hell, I just don't know." "Well, whatever you want, dude," she said, putting her hand on mine, "is cool with me. We're friends, okay? I like you a lot, Chris. I think you're one of the coolest people I know, and if you want me to keep it a secret, I will. But I wanna BE there for you, okay? You can tell me anything you want. If you tell me that you want to be a girl, that's cool. That's totally okay by me. If you tell me that you like boys, that's cool too." She put her arm around me. The way I was feeling at the moment, it was all I could do not to burst into tears. "Well, Janey. Thanks," I said gratefully, "You're right. We are friends. I think you're pretty cool too." "Hell, I've dated a few chicks, too, you know. It's no big deal for me whichever way you swing," she grinned. It was true. Although most of her sexual partners since I'd known her were guys, she never made any bones about her gameness to bed the occasional willing female fan should the mood strike her. "But we've got to get you OUT somehow, too, dude," she said gently, stroking my hair, "Not till you're ready, of course, but hey. You only get one shot at life, right? You don't want to fuck it up. You don't want to waste time doing nothing until it's too late... Until you're some middle-aged, balding old fart still trying to squeeze your bulging ass into a miniskirt. If you want to be a girl, you should BE a girl." "I know," I said, sadly, "But honestly, it scares me. I just don't know if I have the guts." "You leave it to sister Janey," she said with decision, putting her arm around my shoulders and squeezing, "Sister Janey will make it alright..." -- I hardly slept at all that night. The band practice had gone well that evening. Janey hadn't behaved any differently than usual, apart from casting me the occasional secret smile. But it was a smile full of affection and warmth, and I knew that she was on my side. It felt good, I decided, to have someone in on my little secret, now that I had a chance to get used to the idea. And if it had to be anyone, I realized, I was glad it was her. She might be a wild and crazy rocker chick, but she was also warm, kind, compassionate and smart, and I knew that she had a special place in her heart for me. For some reason, I played really well that evening, and the guys in the band all remarked on it. A tiny piece of a huge weight that I'd never even known existed had been lifted off my shoulders. It wasn't gone, by any means, but now someone else had taken a little bit of the load. I felt a lot lighter. -- Although I couldn't know it yet, Janey was already formulating a plan to coax me out of my deep dark closet, a few inches at a time. A couple of weeks had passed since she'd stumbled upon my secret, and she still hadn't yet seen me dressed as a girl in the flesh, although I'd shown her a few pictures. She'd oohed and aahed over them, commenting that she just KNEW I'd make a hot-looking babe. But, as it happened, the band became suddenly a lot busier, and we'd packed into our van and left town soon after, on a mini-tour of some nearby towns and cities, before anything could happen with Janey. It took a couple of weeks for her plan to see the light of day. One evening, we were sitting in Janey's hotel room in a small northern hick town, having been booked into the hotel bar by our some-time agent as the final stop on our tour. Janey was reclining on her bed, reading a copy of NME, and the rest of us were either dozing or flipping idly through the channels on the TV. "I've got it!" Janey said, sitting up suddenly. She smacked the page of her magazine. "Hey, I've got it!" "Well, don't spread it to us," Dan grunted, "I haven't had my shots." "Janey's got it," Mick commented, "she's got IT. Hey, I've got IT too! See?" He held up his copy of IT magazine. "No, no," she said excitedly, "no, man. I've got the way we're gonna change our image! Our hook! The thing that's gonna make us famous! Or at least 'well-known'." "Uh-huh?" Dan looked less than impressed. "And what's that? This I have to hear." With a flourish, she held up the magazine she was reading, open to an article about the New York Dolls. "Glam!" she said exultantly, tapping the page, "We can be a glam-rock band!" The enthusiasm that greeted this announcement was conspicuous by its utter, complete and total absence. There was a leaden silence, after which Dan muttered, "Super idea, Janey. Let us know when you think of something GOOD." Nobody else even bothered comment. They just went back to watching TV. "I'm serious, guys! This'll work, I bet! We've been talking about how we need a new look or something. Something that'll get people's attention. This is it!" "Come on, Jane," Mick replied. Nobody ever called her 'Jane' unless they were trying to get a rise out of her, "Come on. Glam is SO dead. It was dead in the 90s, for God's sake. We'd look stupid. And how would I look as a glam rocker? Beards don't exactly go with makeup and platform shoes, do they? And -- trust me on this, honey -- the beard is NOT coming off." "Well, I bet HE'D look good in makeup!" she pointed at me, and my heart skipped several beats. What the hell is she up to? I wondered uneasily. "Come on, Janey," I responded weakly, "Mick's right. Glam is dead. We're a hard rock band, anyway." "So were the Dolls," she replied, unperturbed, "Come on, think about it, man. You'd look amazing as a glam-rocker, I bet!" and here she gave me a secret wink, "You've got the right face, the right build, the right hair, everything!" "Yeah, but..." "Come on, dude!" she said. "Let me try, okay? If you don't like it, I'll take it off. Just lemme try it, alright?" "What do you mean? Try what?" I asked, my heart pounding. "Putting makeup on you, of course!" she said. "What do you think? Come on, man! What can it hurt?" I went over and sat down on the bed next to her. "Janey!" I said in an urgent undertone, "What the hell are you doing? What's going on?" "Come on, man," she whispered, "this is perfect. It'll be okay, honest. Nobody'll suspect anything. If it doesn't work, we forget the whole thing. If it does, well, maybe you can at least get the chance to wear a little makeup now and then!" "I'm not ready for this," I whispered back, "I don't know if I can pull it off..." "Come ON, Chris," she hissed, poking me in the arm, hard, "I'm trying to help you. You've got to get your shit together sooner or later. This is your big chance. Be brave! It'll be okay. I PROMISE!" Christ. I was out of arguments. I looked around the room. Nobody else was at all interested. Mick had gone back to his magazine, Max was snoring, and everyone else was watching the tube. "Come on," she repeated, quietly, "don't pussy out now." I sighed. "Okay," I said, holding up a finger, "Fine. ONE time, anyway, and see what happens." "Great!" She began rummaging around in her overnight bag, and extracted her makeup. "Okay, sit here in this chair." She said, indicating an armchair over by the window. She pulled a floor lamp over next to the chair for some improved lighting, and I sat down, my heart still thumping loudly. "Alright honey, now just relax... Let Janey handle ev-ery-thing..." She pulled my hair back with a hair band, then extracted a bunch of items >from her makeup bag and arranged them on the table. She began sponging on some foundation. I closed my eyes in resignation, trying to will my heart to slow down. She worked for a long time. Now and then I would open my eyes to see her, staring intently at my face, tongue between her teeth as she concentrated, wielding a brush or some other implement. She got out some tweezers and plucked a few errant hairs from my brows, then shaped them with a few deft strokes of eyebrow pencil. From my seat I couldn't see into any mirror, so I had no idea what kind of transformation she was creating. She stroked on eye shadow and dark eyeliner, then applied several coats of mascara. As she worked, I became aware that the occasional murmur of conversation in the room had ceased. Dan, Mick and Root had fallen silent, and were watching us intently. Max was still sawing logs. Janey dug around in her makeup bag for a few moments, then extracted several lipsticks and glosses, a couple of liners, and a lip brush. She opened all of them, lining them up on the table, and began outlining my lips with the liner pencil. Then she took the brush and, picking up each lipstick in turn, began brushing various colors onto my lips, blending them together. She looked like a painter trying to execute an extremely tiny, detailed portrait, or something. Finally, she took some gloss on the tip of her little finger and smoothed it onto the center of my lips, top and bottom. She pulled the hairband off my head and began brushing my hair. "Take off your earrings," she instructed. I reached up and slipped