Of Vampires & Gentlemen. A.R. Morlan

night.

      Just remembered something. I haven’t had to trim my hair since my last cut. In February. It hasn’t even begun to curl down below my ears.

      May 24. My contributor’s copies arrived; the ed. put a little note in with them, letting me know that in this year’s Bloodbath Reader Survey I was the fifth most requested author, etc. There was more, but I wasn’t in a mood to keep reading. I mean, he doesn’t know. The guy’s had more practice shaving than I have. The little scrap of toilet paper I put on my cut keeps falling off. Didn’t Dad use something called a styptic pencil?

      The dogs can’t seem to quit smelling me; they seem puzzled. Last time they acted this way was when my old neighbor Fred Ferger came to visit, back in Wisconsin. They were all over old Fred. God, I hope I’m not smelling like an old man!

      May 30. I think that my voice is changing. When I answered the phone this morning, the B.Q. editor asked if I was home. I don’t know if he bought my line about a bad connection, but I kept crinkling a piece of paper next to the receiver, so I think maybe it worked. The call was about that novella I sent in—did I mind if he split it into three sections? I almost suggested that he print it a sentence at a time until kingdom come, but why should I take this mess out on him like that?

      Could this be hormones acting up? I’m tempted to write in to one of those newspaper docs, and hope that he prints my letter, but I can just see the reply: “Get thee to a doctory, young...woman(?).” Damn, now I’m fracturing Shakespeare. As if it were his fault, too.

      Wolfie and Duke are looking at me funny. They growl when I scratch their ears.

      June 4. It is more than hormones.

      Oh yes. Much more than that.

      A long time ago, Grampa Winston told me about this girl who lived in the eighteenth or nineteenth century, who was riding a horse, or maybe running or some strenuous thing, and she leaped across a fence or something or other, and even though she was a girl going up and over, she came down a boy...as in she was really male all along, only she hadn’t descended. Down there. (Grampa said “The fruit was hidden in the tree.”) It must have been a bitch for the girl, in those sexually dark times, but maybe she hadn’t begun to sprout hair, or didn’t have a pair of boobs to lose....I suppose I was lucky to have some warning, before....

      For what that’s worth. But DAMMIT, I wasn’t leaping over a fence, I was only bending over to put the dog’s dishes on the floor. For a moment I thought that it was my period, but something didn’t feel right....It was like I’d done a number in my pants, but in the front. Oh, I don’t know how to describe it...a fullness? A presence?

      I refuse to go to the bathroom standing up. No way!

      Before...this...I had considered going to a doctor, thought about leaving the apartment, going down to the subway, enduring the stares from supposedly jaded NYC dwellers who stare anyhow, going to a strange doctor (how ironic, I’m usually so healthy that I hadn’t needed to get a doctor since moving here), then...showing, and explaining...and, the hell with that, now. If I went out today, and wore my jogging pants, running shoes and loose top, no one would take a second look at me...and no one would believe that I’m a woman, either. I don’t want to be helped into one of those one-size-fits-all jackets and carted off to Bellevue.

      I snuck down the hall to the bathroom, locked the door. I was naked; I looked in the mirror.

      I wasn’t me anymore. Not on the outside, and hell, what else do people see first but the outside of a person?

      When I came back to the apartment, the dogs snarled at me.

      June 9. I went out, late last night. The dogs weren’t as hard to handle as they used to be; my muscle tone must be better, or the muscles themselves are bigger. My jeans fit, but funny—the rear end is baggy, and they don’t hang right. Maybe I could order some men’s jeans from a catalog, but that would be giving in to...this. Something I hate to do. Came home, started a story. No one’s seen me, I hope. Have to keep making money. Can’t risk being thrown out now. Maybe I’ll submit the story to one of the flesh zines; they pay pretty damn good. I’ve got a couple of stories out in men’s magazines, both under a pseudonym. Clarke Dennis. It would have been my name, if...I had been born the way I am now.

      I think that I can get this finished by tomorrow, and send it off...at night.

      June 13. Over a month now, since this started. Soaping my body in the shower (at midnight, when no one wants in there), I noticed that the skin tone is different; thicker, and even tougher in places. And more hairy, of course. Even my bones seem heavier, behind my ears the cartilage is bigger, and my ears stick out. My nails—all short, for a change—are broader, and slightly ridged. Unfortunately, I’m not taller. My weight has gone up, from 135 (ok—nearly 140) to 155, most of it muscle. Luckily, I have a good supply of elastic waist shorts and men’s tees, bought during a white sale back home in Ewerton. I rinse out my things and hang them in my room; I can’t face the laundry room downstairs.

      Good Lord. I hope my folks don’t ever call me.

      June 22. I think I know what has happened, what is happening to me. On the 10th I sent in “The Metamanphosis” to Skin Magazine, and the assistant editor there recognized my name, and forward my story pronto to the fiction editor, who had previously bought a story from me. Only instead of writing to let me know he was buying my story (as he had done previously) the man called. And asked for D. B. Winston, the name written in the upper right-hand corner of my ms., only when I answered, he didn’t seem surprised that I was a woman, or man, or whatever I happened to sound like. He and I chatted for a few minutes; he let me know how much I’d be getting for the story (more than enough), then, before he hung up, he commented, “You had me going there for a while, D.B.; the parts of the story where the protagonist is still a woman are fantastic—I almost believed that you are a woman! God, man, that is no mean feat...one more thing, do you still want this under the ‘Clarke Dennis’ name or would you like to have it run under...ok...I’ll keep the Dennis byline on it. Well, D. B., thanks for submitting...” etc., and when he finally hung up I began to paw through my files (in the old cardboard box I keep under my bed), looking for all my correspondence, rejection slips, contracts, and the like.

      After I found what I wanted, I spread the mass of papers out on the floor (the dogs lay off to the side, heads on paws, rumbling at me), and began scanning them carefully.

      It was all there, in unwavering black on white. My name, “D. B. Winston,” on my contracts, no “Debbie,” no “Ms.,” or “Miss,” or any indication that “D. B. Winston” was a woman. Likewise, those zines who either sent handwritten rejection slips, or personalized the form ones were all similar—either “Dear D. B.,” “Dear D. B. W.,” or “Dear D. B. Winston,” or, worse, “Dear Mr. Winston”...something which hadn’t bothered me before. When I was still outwardly a woman. Then, the loss of my feminine identity wasn’t a pressing concern...why should it have been? I knew who I was, what I was...what did it matter that other people weren’t in the clear about it?

      At the time, it didn’t seem important, it actually didn’t matter.

      I picked up one of the rejection slips, from a small press zine, with my now blunt and stubby-fingered hand. The editor had typed, “All this time, my husband and I thought D. B. Winston was a man! What a surprise to see you sign your name ‘Ms.’” That letter, the cover letter to a story I sent to her, was a rarity on my part, and I never signed another one that way....A few years ago, I once sent a fan letter to Robert Bloch, and even he addressed his postcard reply to “Mr. D. B. Winston”...and to think that it seemed humorous at the time. With a growing certainty, I scanned the contributor’s copies of the many zines which ran my material, and was confronted with page after page of fiction credited only to “D. B. Winston” (and noticed all that junk mail in my wastebasket addressed to “Mr. D. B. Winston”; why even the computer mailing lists had an erroneous view of my gender!), and on top of it, zines like Bloodbath Quarterly and Skin didn’t run author’s pages (even if they did, people seldom read them)...and many of the stories I’d written were told from a man’s point of view. Right from the start, most of the writers