all over, ending up in San Francisco. He came back home when his Great-Aunt Wet Yah was dying. His Great-Aunt Wet Yah was the only one who let him wear her silky undergarments and read to him from a forbidden book on the great geishas she had happened to possess. Wet Yah died and now Pie was working for Glad, saving up to move back to San Francisco and open his own geisha training school for men.
‘You have to listen very carefully when you are with a man that wants to dress.’ Pie uses his hands while he talks, gracefully waving them back and forth as if he were icing a cake in the air. ‘He might only want to show you how nice he looks in his pink panties and discuss how much he enjoys the feel of the smooth material against his privates. Or he might want to be a lesbian and make love to you as a woman making love to another woman.’ Pie moves his body in a flowing S, making the silk of his kimono ripple so sinuously as to suggest two women making love. ‘Or the gentleman might wish to be called a little sissy pantywaist, teased and otherwise humiliated.’ Pie shakes his hips and mimics a femmie boy. ‘You can often make extra by making the gentleman pay to bring in other bacula to laugh at him.’ I nod and scribble notes in a notebook Glad has given me.
‘The gentlemen often do not tell you what kind of cross-dressers they are. You have to listen and take their clues.’ Pie sits down on a beanbag and looks at me studiously, the slight slant of his eyes accentuated by broad strokes of black liquid liner. ‘It is your job to figure out: do they want to pretend you are a woman completely, do they want you to be sweet and gentle, do they want you to be forceful and fill their hungry mouth, do they want abuse or gentle guidance? The faster you can figure this out, the more famous you will become.’
And Pie is famous. Cross-dressers come from as far away as Antigua to see him. But I don’t need to be told which boys are the best. All I have to do is look at the raccoon bones around their necks. The better the whore, the bigger his bone. I heard it said that the bigger bones aren’t real, that Glad just melts waxed dental tape onto a small bone until it is bigger. I look at Pie’s and it looks authentic. Big and genuine.
‘You’re ready for your first date,’ Glad says to me two months after I’ve started my training. I haven’t lived at the motel room in a month. I stay at the caravans. Sarah took off with a rich crooked cargo inspector, and I check the room every day to see if she is back. The plastic attaché case is gone, but her bubbles are still there in the bathroom so I know she’ll come back eventually. I plan to have my own bubbles on the shelf next to hers by the time she gets back.
‘You think you’re ready? You feel okay?’ Glad asks as he helps me get dressed in a muted pink leather miniskirt I couldn’t wait to show Sarah when she came home.
‘Ready as snippers at bull-ball cuttin’ time,’ I say, borrowing Sarah’s line. I put finishing touches on my makeup the way Sarah taught me. Glad makes me go light on the makeup, though. I want to take an iron and straighten out my hair so it flows like floss, but Glad won’t hear of it.
‘You really oughten not to be wearing any makeup. The natural look will make ya more lettuce than a face palette. Men pay for freckles and curls,’ Glad says and wipes up my face with his hankie.
‘Glad, you are a sight worse than a mother dressing her daughter for prom night,’ Sundae laughs.
Sundae is a Texas honey-blonde with a bone bigger than Pie’s. Sundae’s specialty is cheerleaders. ‘You’d be surprised by how many football players want a cheerleader with cock,’ she says adjusting the miniature pompoms in her hair.
Glad picked out a truck driver everyone knew.
‘He’s a nice man that only wants to diddle you,’ Sundae says.
‘Remember to watch the clock on the dash,’ Pie says and gracefully kisses the air next to