Ok. I'm lying. The contest was real. I made everything else up.
Act I was inspired by a Drudgereport headline about a 65 year old male grade school teacher who got a sex change and tried to go back to work. Parts of Act II are inspired by a girl my little brother was infatuated with in high school. You'll understand when you get to the fire pole. Act III ...well... I'd recently discovered the film Little Big Man and become obsessed with it. I have a tendency to watch movies over and over and over again until I understand what it was about that particular film that caught my attention in the first place. Then I never watch them again. If you've seen the film, you'll understand. If you haven't, go see it.
Act IV is percolating. Involves a road trip to Las Vegas ala Fear & Loathing. I'll get drunk some night and actually write it. Or maybe I won't. I'll certainly get drunk though.
Act I
"Grandpa"
(Read by Gilbert Gottfried)
Grandpa taught me how to whittle and spit and fish and drive a car.
That was before he became a woman.
Turns out he wasn’t all that happy being a he, so one day after his seventy first birthday he plonked his amex gold card on the counter of the local gender reassignment chop shop, and a few hours later he was a she.
Only he didn’t really look like a she. He still had that firm masculine grandpa jaw I used to admire in the wartime photo mom kept on the mantle. And even the nail polish couldn’t disguise his big man hands. The died blonde hair and old lady glasses did help a little. But he still had old man smell. I guess old woman smell wasn’t included in the extra value gender reassignment package he bought.
Grandma went to pieces of course.
I guess that’s what you’re expected to do when the man you’ve been married to for fifty years leaves for a round of golf on a Tuesday and comes home a woman. It’s just not what respectable mid-western senior citizens who’ve spent their entire lives in the suburbs of
You don’t do it.
Don’t do things like that Bill.
Bill! How could you do something like this Bill?!?
So she packed her bags and ran away with a Jewish rodeo clown. Last I heard she was turning tricks in Vegas and running an online porn site catering to folks with old lady fetishes.
Schultz checked it.
Fucking Schultz.
“Dude your grandma can shove a bull whip three feet up her ass and still dance the Macarena.”
Shut up, Schultz.
But it was too late, the other kids sitting at our table in the cafeteria heard him. It was bad enough being the kid who’s grandpa was a woman, but now all of myspace would be alive with stories about the kid who’s grandma did internet porn.
For years people would tell the stories. They’d all start with “I knew this kid back in high school…well I didn’t hang out with him or anything, but his grandma…” And they’d all end with the same “Get out. No fucking way.”
But then they’d google it, and something would turn up in the archives about a seventy one year old man who became a woman, and they’d believe it.
You see, Grandpa wasn’t happy just being a woman. Now that he had all the proper female naughty bits, he had to become a professional woman. He went back to the accounting firm he’d been working at for the last forty five years. He’d only been part time for the last few years. Just went in during tax season, but he hadn’t told them about his change.
Needless to say, when Billy showed up as Lilly, the whole place was thrown into an uproar.
The owner told his slack jawed moron of a son to get rid of grandpa, but he was chicken and instead just walked really quickly past grandpas desk on his way to the bathroom fifteen or twenty times a day. And grandpa wasn’t going down without a fight.
When John finally told his son he’d fire Grandpa himself, Grandpa called CNN, and it was the talk of all the internet forums for twenty four hours and grandpa got to stay in his job and everyone forgot it the next day.
Except Schultz. Fucking Schultz.
Schultz decided to write a short story about it for lit., and the teacher loved it. She thought we could all use a lesson in celebrating diversity. She called grandpa and asked him to talk to the class about his life journey. And of course he agreed.
Act II
"Coconuts"
(Read by Garrison Keillor)
It was one of those frost-laden November mornings upon which normal people breathe in the chilled air and express gratitude to their creator. In their own constitutionally guaranteed, -albeit private-, way, of course. Even the most ardent god hating, baby killing, tax and spend Democrat finds it impossible to keep his inner Republican caged on such mornings, and he too breathes a silent prayer to Baal or Mammon or whoever it was that created him.
I felt anything but normal, and was far from grateful to God. In fact, I wanted to kill Him. Still stewing over Schultz’s upcoming presentation on my hemale shemale grandpa, I stopped outside his door and waited for him to join me.
“Hey Brian.” Schultz mumbled as he staggered out with his books. He grabbed a handful of unkempt hair, yawned, then slowly grinned.
“Only a week to go, man.”
“Shut up.”
I would’ve broken into the supplications and pitiful pleas for mercy that had become our ritual each morning on the walk to school, but today was different. Today I would exact one miniscule sliver of revenge. Today it would be Schultz who would suffer, and I – glorious I – the tormentor for once.
“You see the paper this morning Schultz?”
“No.”
“Girls soccer team won the tournament. Allison Fournier’s on the front page.”
I watched as the grin faded. His face sank beneath a sea of grief like some passenger liner torpedoed by a maniacal mustachioed Sieg Heil screaming Nazi submarine commandant. With an eye patch. All proper villain submarine captains need an eye patch. I’m not sure why. Perhaps from running into a rock or something while looking through the periscope.
“That bitch,” muttered Schultz.
“Bitch? I thought you were infatuated with her?” I could barely contain my sadistic glee.
“She broke my heart man.”
“How’d she break your heart if you’ve never even spoken to her?”
“Dude I’ve told you this a thousand freaking times. We were in the library. She looked up from across the table and our eyes met. Our souls mingled man. We are one now.
“She just doesn’t know it yet.” I laughed.
“Shut up, Brian. What do you know about love anyway?”
“I know enough not to get infatuated with a girl who’s railing Eric Krauss.”
That was it. I’d gone too far. I’d played the Krauss card.
Eric Kraus: that glorious blonde haired captain of the boy’s soccer team. He was so good looking even the most secure, red blooded, apple pie and I love my mama homophobe in school went a little weak in the knees around him wishing he’d been born a woman. The freshie hotties would fall down in front of him in a slippery little puddle,— their legs sticking straight up in the air—, whenever he strode confidently down the high school halls.
I giggled a little as the expression on his face changed from all hands abandon ship to battle stations! The
“I fucking hate that guy.” Schultz growled. “What does she see in him anyway? Ooh I’m a pretty soccer boy. I kick balls. Probably doesn’t even have any.”
“Schultz, I’m in gym with that guy. I have to shower with that guy. You ever seen his dick?”
“I’ve got a policy about seeing as few dicks as possible, you fag.” Schultz growled.
“Dude… It’s like a freaking fire hose. I swear it’s three feet long. Friggin’ guy swings around in the showers slapping people with it just ‘cause he can. Down to his knees man.” I said raising one eyebrow and winking knowingly.
“Shut the fuck up, Brian.”
We stopped at Dunkins and grabbed a coffee. I mused over the warning printed on the Styrofoam of my large, steaming coffee. WARNING:CONTENTS MAY BE EXTREMELY HOT. Some old woman had won millions in a lawsuit years ago because she’d burned her mouth on a cup of hot coffee. Go figure.
Schultz exited with his coffee. He’d gone from rage back to despair, but I just couldn’t let up.
“I was talking to Mike. He told me that Eric told him he always has Allison do him on top. Said he has to pile up pillows on either side of him, and she has to brace her hands on the pillows and slide down him like a fireman sliding down a pole.”
“Shut the fuck up man. I’m fucking serious. Not another word.”
We stood there in silence for a minute, and then it happened.
There before us, just outside of Dunkin Donuts was a newspaper dispenser. Behind the frost covered glass you just make out the jubilant face of Allison Fournier hugging her teammates after the previous nights victory.
Schultz stopped in front of it, set his coffee on the box, and started pulling down his pants.
“What the fuck are you doing man.”
“Man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.”
“Seriously, Schultz what the fuck are you doing?!?”
“I’m tea bagging the bitch. It’s gotta be done if I’m going to make it through this.”
Panic, horror! We’d be arrested. I turned in circles looking over my shoulder, and seriously considered running. Schultz sidled up to the newspaper box, his scrawny white buttocks winking at me in the rosy fingered dawn.
“Schultz! Come on man! Let’s get out of here!” I cried.
But there he stayed, straddling the box.
The silence was deafening.
“Shit,” Exclaimed Schultz.
“Shit?”
“SHIT!” He yelled.
“What?!?”
“I’m stuck Brian.”
“Shut the fuck up Schultz. Let’s go.”
“Brian, I am seriously fucking stuck! My nuts are frozen to the glass!” He wailed.
It’s a known scientific fact that when you apply ice to the scrotum it retracts. Now if you’re twins are frozen to a pane of glass, and suddenly retract, it pulls you closer. This makes them colder and you pull away, and yet they retract again pulling you closer to the glass. Schultz was gyrating wildly as he thrashed back and forth, back and forth becoming one with the box. His pathetic yelps sounding more and more like the unbridled cries of passion.
Time stopped. I went into a trance. A blinding light pierced my inner eye, and I saw the future.
Schultz would be apprehended with his little hairy coconuts frozen to a newspaper dispenser. We’d be on Drudge. Within hours there’d be 50,000 posts on bulletin boards where balding, middle aged men allegedly discussed offroading, but really just grew huge epenis by ridiculing the misfortunes of others.
He’d have to register. He’d grow old alone and despised, on the outskirts of some rural town. Until one day in the distant miserable future a flat rater would check the online registry and go to his house and punch him through a screen door and stomp him to death while angry pit bulls slathered in peanut butter ravaged his remains and cops tazed him until his eyes popped out.
Unless, unless…
And then it came to me.
I did the only thing a friend could do. I took out my camera phone and snapped a picture of Schultz fucking a newspaper dispenser. Then I poured my steaming hot coffee directly onto his twins.
They heard the shriek three blocks away.
As we arrived late to school, Schultz wallowing in humiliation and despair, I cleared my throat and said:
“So… um… Schultz… What’s your new creative writing project going to be about?”
“Your grandpa…” He trailed off in mid sentence. He looked down at the brown coffee stain on the front of his pants, then up to the cell phone I was tapping, then back down at his pants.
“Myspace, man. You breathe one more word about my grandpa, and this is going on myspace.”
And though the black eye lasted for more than a week, and Schultz got three days internal suspension for fighting, I was again the happy master of my fate.
Act III
"Moobs"
(Read by Alec Baldwin)
I stopped by my grandfather’s new apartment on the way home from school to inform him of Schultz’s sudden change of plans. I knocked several times, but there was no answer. I tried the knob, found the door to unlocked, and let myself in. The air inside was heavy with a thick, sweet smoke that I instantly recognized and knew was not tobacco.
He was sitting in the middle of the living room floor, clad only in a knock-off Indian head dress and leather loin cloth. His face was smeared in what appeared to be peppermint scented lip balm, and in place of mocasins, he sported red Chuck Taylors.
“Jesus Christ, Grandpa, put a shirt on!”
“ Hello my son. I had a dream you would return.”
I failed to notice the slow sonorous way in which he spoke, so horrified was I by that vision of my bare breasted grandfather. Had there been a toilet brush and a bottle of bleach handy, I’d have given my eyeballs such a scrubbing that the creators of Mr Clean and Tidy Bowl would have fallen to their knees in front of me and begged me to become their new household god.
“Schultz isn’t going to need you for his presentation next week.” I croaked. Averting my eyes, I tried not to gag at the vision of my grandfather's breasts now indelibly burned into my fragile young psyche.
“That is ok. I have grown weary of being a woman.” The slow deliberate words resonated through the room, carrying with them all the windswept wisdom of the open plains. I had visions of buffalo, and a solitary mournful dove calling out about the endless prairie grass.
“ Do you know what it is?” He continued. He’d wrapped himself in one of those abrassively gaudy Elvis Presley blankets that people buy in
I looked him straight in the face and said no, Grandpa.
“ You are to address me as Grandfather now. It is the Indian way.”
“No, Grandfather. Why have you grow weary of being a woman?”
“It’s these god damned tits.”
He jiggled one of them beneath the blanket, and I screwed up my face in disgust again.
“They keep getting in the god damned way. Bump into things. I’ve spent my entire life thinking about squeezing boobies, and then I finally got some. And you know what? It hurts. Not really pleasant at all.
“You know those white women in the movies? The ones with the enormous boobs who show pleasant enthusiasm while the white man with the cock of a raging stallion fills them full of man meat and kneeds their enormous boobs as if he would soon bake bread? Those women are faking. The do not enjoy having their boobs groped like that.
“You watch porn Grandpa?! I mean Grandfather?!?”
There was a long pause.
“No. But if I did, then I would know such things. And another thing. I found myself becoming offended by the word ‘boob.’ It really is not something that we who have them like to hear. It is strange, my son, and I cannot fully explain it. And I found myself remembering. I remembered everything. Every unkind word ever spoken to me. And every little thing anyone ever did that was not done the way I wished it to be done. Even if I had not told them how to do it in the first place. And all I wanted to do was cry. And eat ice cream.
I stared in disbelief and absolute befuddlement.
“You see, my son, it was then that it came to me. I had indeed become a true woman. And now that I understand them, I wish to be a man again. Simple. Free. Reasonable. And able to go without showering for three or four days and leave my dirty socks on the kitchen table during meal times.”
“But...but Grandfather, “ I stammered, “um... what about the...um... rest of your...um...?”
He reached beneath the couch and retrieved the most elaborate and ornate pipe I had ever seen. And stuffed it full of weed.
“My heart soars at your return my son, and now we must smoke.”
He struck a match, held it to the pipe, inhaled deeply, and held it in for what seemed ages. Then coughed. He passed the pipe to me.
“This is some preeemo shit, my son.”
He was right. It was some primo shit. I burned my fingers as the match burned down between them after the third or fourth pass of the pipe, and we both giggled as I continued to hold it, and the match continued to burn. I leaned back against the couch and stared at the little flashing luminescent clock on his antiquated VCR.
Hours passed. The wisdom of the Indians was being imparted to me in deep, melodious tones. I became one with the people of the plains. I lived in a teepee with three buffalo hunting women, and we made glorious whoopee each and every night.
I looked back to the clock.
“Nooooooooo!” I cried. Time had stopped. I was truly, properly, unexplainably, and forever fucked. Trapped for eternity as a pimply 17 year old kid. In an apartment. With my be-breasted, pot smoking, freak of a grandfather. My legs thrashed, and I banged my head against the couch. I flailed my arms about, and accidently smacked one of Grandfather’s withered shemale dugs, which I admit, undulated gloriously beneath the King’s neon visage. The King’s mouth expanded and contracted and you ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog echoed through my empty head.
“Ouch, ... my son.”
“Grandfather?”
“It’s pot panic. It will pass in a moment.”
He was right. It did. And then I was sitting across from him. My legs crossed, my shirt off, with war stripes of Burt’s Bees peppermint scented lip balm streaked across my face.
“Grandfather?”
“Yes, my son?”
“Grandfather... if you are tired of being a woman, and um, are going to be a man again, um... what about...well...your other naughty bits?” I giggled.
“Do you think I would cut my junk off just because I wanted to be a heemenah, for which their ain’t no English word?
“Heemenah, my son, like Little Horse.” He replied.
“Little horse, Grandfather?”
“Yes, my son. Little Horse - the extraordinarily well adjusted homosexual Indian brave in the movie Little Big Man. He was a good one, too. We Human Beings thought a lot of him.”
“Human Beings, Grandfather?”
“Yes, my son. We
“Grandfather... we’re Jewish.”
“And so is Dustin Hoffman,” he replied.
His logic was irrefutable, and I sat there stuffing fistfuls of Cheetos from the bag he’d retrieved from the kitchen into my mouth, turning the entire lower half of my face orange in the process.
“And now, my son,” he said, rising with infinite Indian chief wisdom and dignity, “ I must go and get rid of these tits. Then find your grandmother and bring her home. So that I can squeeze hers.”
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