Authors: Zack Love
Immediately upon his arrival at her place, Trevor began imbibing far more wine than he normally consumed in a single night in order to calm his anxious nerves. By 1 a.m., he felt unusually light-headed and giddy. In fact, he was so inebriated and lost in the pleasure of Charlene’s passionate kissing and highly skilled fellatio, that he almost forgot his original purpose for that night. But at one point, after Charlene had swallowed his man-juice and was proudly lying atop him, he let his hands run over her blouse, which she still hadn’t removed for him. He was too drunk and happy to notice her breasts, but Charlene – in a moment of self-conscious insecurity – thought that Trevor had felt their true shape and blurted out a self-deprecating admission: “I know, Baby…They’re really flat…The fillers are just temporary, I promise… I’m getting implants in two weeks…And the rest of the operation a month later…It’ll look so much better, Baby.”
Trevor tried to shake his intoxicated lightness enough to inquire further, but Charlene saw his questions coming and effectively stopped them by starting to kiss and arouse him again. During the renewed fondling, Trevor did manage to get his hand down towards Charlene’s groin, and she finally let him explore the area. There was no hiding that Charlene was aroused.
Because there was no hiding that Charlene was, in fact, a man.
“No…Please, Baby,” Charlene protested feebly, “just give me a few more months…”
But Trevor now felt inevitably propelled down a course from which there was no returning, and he needed to confront the full reality of the situation, no matter how shocking it turned out to be. Charlene soon recognized a somewhat familiar look of anxious curiosity and discovery in Trevor’s eyes, and let him finish coming to terms with the situation.
Trevor’s hands continued exploring every inch of Charlene’s body, and the two eventually resumed their kissing.
One hour later, they were asleep in Charlene’s bed.
*****
The next morning, Charlene messengered to Trevor’s office a black envelope wrapped in a pink ribbon. Afraid that his officemate might catch some glimpse of the contents or his reaction to them, Trevor took the sealed envelope with him to the bathroom. He locked himself behind a stall, sat down on the toilet seat with his pants on, and nervously opened the envelope, realizing that this might be the single most memorable and momentous package that he had ever opened.
In the envelope there were playbills featuring Charlene, old photographs, a photocopy from a high school yearbook, and other assorted memorabilia, along with a handwritten note. For a moment, it was all a blurry set of disjointed pieces, until Trevor finally focused on a few key details that he had initially glossed over in denial. Charlene’s original legal name, as it was listed below the Texas high school yearbook picture, was “Charles Smith.”
He then read the handwritten note that Charlene had included: “Trevor, dear, you were delicious last night…I hope this isn’t too strange for you…I’ve never felt so attracted or so close to someone before…So I wanted to share some of my past with you, in the hope that you might understand where I’ve been and where I’m going…And embrace my future with me…As you can see from the photos, I look so much better as a woman…And I’ve never really felt right as a man…I’d really love to see you again and I just hope that – ”
Trevor stopped reading, as a feeling of nausea suddenly overcame him. The envelope, note, and photos fell to the bathroom floor as Trevor’s hands went limp from shocked disgust. With only a slight hangover pounding away at his otherwise sober head, Trevor now had to acknowledge unequivocally that he had engaged in sexual relations with a man – and enjoyed it.
The queasiness in Trevor’s gut became overwhelming. He dropped to his knees, turned around to face the toilet, and vomited.
Chapter 13
Narc and Evan Fall Out
Trevor quit his job that day. He knew that it would be weeks, maybe months, before he would be able to concentrate again on any kind of work, much less painfully tedious legal work. He felt unshakable embarrassment and lingering disgust.
Trevor’s conservative upbringing involved virtually no reference to the existence of homosexuals and made it far too difficult for Trevor to recognize his own attraction to men. Thus, he had always pursued androgynous women as the next best alternative. Being away from home, of course, made it easier for Trevor to entertain homosexual ideas, but because he had no gay friends and had never quite felt free enough to “come out,” the Charlene incident surprised and unsettled him profoundly. An overpowering need to cleanse his body and his mind settled into his conscience. He had become increasingly interested in yoga during the last few years and now felt the impulse to explore Eastern religion more seriously.
Trevor felt deeply embarrassed about misidentifying Charlene’s gender and about the resulting confusion surrounding his sexual identity. He was too mortified to say anything to Narc, Evan, or any of his other male friends, all of whom were unquestionably heterosexual. Instead, he abruptly and quietly left the city for an ascetic ashram in upstate New York. Trevor took a vow of celibacy, ate only two vegetarian meals per day, and practiced meditation every day.
A week later, Narc tried to call Trevor at his office but was informed that Mr. Bediako no longer worked at Bartles, Arp & Polka and that he had left no forwarding information. Narc tried calling Trevor’s home and cell phone numbers but they were all disconnected. The next day, he got out of work early at 10 p.m. and took a cab to Trevor’s one-bedroom apartment in Gramercy, where he learned from the new tenant that Trevor had sublet his place for six months. To Narc’s relief, the new tenant had a phone number for Trevor.
Trevor’s ashram had one public phone for three hundred disciples. After twenty-three rings, someone finally picked up. Yes, he would look for Trevor and tell him that Narc was on the phone, but it could take a few minutes to find him. About ten minutes later, the same voice came back to the receiver and informed Narc that Trevor didn’t want to receive any phone calls or visitors for at least a few months and asked that his friends respect his wishes. The man apologized and Narc thanked him for his help.
The following Sunday, Narc had lunch with Evan in Chinatown. They talked for a while about Trevor and whether they should visit him or try to bring him back. Narc was concerned that Trevor might be getting involved in some strange cult, but Evan finally persuaded him that they should respect Trevor’s personal decision – at least for the time being – and check up on him in a few months. They discussed competing theories about what might have prompted him to make so many radical changes in his life, and Narc concluded the cause was probably discovering that Charlene was a man or an ex-man.
“But you don’t know that for a fact,” Evan replied. “We never found out what he learned about Charlene…I really think he was just fed up with the corporate life that you complain about all of the time.” And with that remark, the focus of the conversation changed, both because they had exhausted the Trevor topic for the moment, and because Evan had touched upon a raw nerve.
“I don’t complain about it all of the time,” Narc objected, reflexively.
Narc’s favorite gripe about life was his job. He hated his job with a boiling passion. He hated it more frequently and more vocally than he hated anything else. Every morning – without fail – he woke up at 7:30 a.m. almost cheerful to be alive another day, and by around 11 p.m. that night, when he typically left his office, his throat was stiff with frustrated fury at the world and his particular place in it.
The waiter took away their empty dishes and left them the check.
“All right, I do complain,” he conceded. “Because I fuckin’ hate every minute of it.”
“Sounds like you need to vent again, Narc.”
“Yeah. Just last night my parents asked me, for the 429
th
time, what’s so bad about being a corporate lawyer. They’re calling me at 11 p.m. at the office on a Saturday night, as if that fact alone wasn’t enough to answer their question. But then again, they’re workaholic immigrants who don’t know anything but working hard seven days a week, so what can I tell them? So for the 429
th
time I lied to them and just said that sometimes the high-pressured responsibility gets stressful and that that’s the only thing that I’m really complaining about. But the fuckin’ truth of the matter is that everything’s wrong with being a lawyer!”
“Everything?” Evan repeated.
“Yes, everything. The question is, what’s good about being a corporate lawyer? Besides the pay, of course. The work itself sucks ass, because – like city sanitation – it’s the shit work that no one else wants to do, so the poor bastards doing it need to be paid well enough to ensure that they keep doing it.”
“But lawyers make four times as much as garbage men,” Evan replied.
“That’s because lawyers work four times as many hours. Why the fuck do you think that for the last four years I’ve barely had the time to have a meal with you, much less play basketball, or go out and meet women? If you had those sanitation guys taking away the trash three thousand hours a year, you better believe you’d have to pay them a six figure salary.”
“Yeah. And imagine how clean the city would be.”
“Seriously.”
“But how can you compare what you do to what a garbage man does?”
“It’s the intellectual equivalent. It’s shit work for the brain. It’s the most friggin’ tedious, comma-chasing, minutiae-oriented shit work you can possibly imagine. It’s all that damn fine print in our society that nobody wants to read, but some poor soul has to draft or dissect.”
“Give me an example,” Evan said as he started to look at the bill. Narc snatched it from him, put his credit card on top, and called the waiter over in Cantonese. The server, who was taking an order nearby, signaled that he would come over in a bit.
“Thanks, Narc.”
“Don’t mention it. So last night is a perfect example. Last night was even worse than fine print.”
“What happened?”
“Until 2 a.m., I spent six hours circling every number that I found in a two-hundred-page prospectus. Why six hours, you ask? Because the financial numbers in the prospectus were adjusted three times during those six hours, and each time, I needed to circle the numbers so that the accountants could give us comfort on the circled numbers.”
“Circling numbers?”
“It’s called doing a circle up for the accounts.”
“What’s that?”
“The accountants need to provide a comfort letter on the financial numbers in a prospectus. They need to comfortize the numbers, as we idiotically call it. And to know which numbers to comfortize, someone needs to tell them, because for some asinine reason, they can’t make this judgment call themselves even though they’re fucking accountants and any fucking seventh grader could provide the fucking accountants with their fucking circle up because all you have to do is circle every number that you see.”
“Wow. That does sound bad.”
“The hardest part is getting past the fifth hour of circling numbers, when you can’t remember why on earth you paid 120 thousand dollars and three years of your life to go to law school so that you could one day spend your days and nights circling numbers.”
[1]
“I didn’t realize your work was so riveting.”
“Why do you think working at the firm made me vote Republican? If I have to put up with shit work all day in exchange for some bling bling, there’s no way I’m giving up that bling bling for all the lazy fucks out there just waiting for some tax-subsidized government handout.”
“Are you serious?”
“Of course I’m serious. Taxation is passive theft, yo. Don’t get me wrong: I’m down with helpin’ kids in the hood’ but there’s also a lot of government waste. And the more I’m taxed on income from a job I hate, the more I notice the waste.”
“I hear ya’,” Evan said, suppressing his urge to defend the Democrats to allow Narc his much needed ranting.
“Federal, state, and local taxes collectively take forty percent of my paycheck. I might be cool with that if I liked the work. But not if my paycheck represents days and nights of mind-numbing due diligence.”
“What’s due diligence?”
“That’s just going through mounds and mounds of corporate data – memos and contracts and letters and documents and spreadsheets – looking for minutia that doesn’t mean shit to you or anyone else you care about. Minutia that doesn’t really mean shit to even the client, because they’re some Fortune 500 company that can afford to be needlessly thorough and will never question a nine-hundred-thousand-dollar legal bill that was, in fact, a complete waste of everyone’s time and money, because nine hundred thousand dollars is just a rounding error to them.”
The waiter came by to take the check with Narc’s credit card.
“What about the people who work at these Fortune 500 client companies? What about your colleagues? Don’t you at least enjoy your contact with these people?” Evan asked, hoping to find something positive.
“The firm’s clients are a bunch of overly demanding, disorganized, and boneheaded corporate prima donnas. And my colleagues are, for the most part, a bunch of obsessive compulsive, conservative, anal retentive, phony yuppies who lack the courage or the imagination to do anything more interesting with their lives. So tell me what’s good about my job, besides the pay check?”
Narc was really worked up now. Evan wanted to say something, but it was clear that Narc just needed to rage on some more.
“And you know what else I fucking hate?”
“What?”
“I hate the fact that the fucking partners in my firm are so obsessed with billing hours that while I’m standing there taking a piss in the firm bathroom, one of them will come up to me and start talking to me about what we’re working on.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, I’m standing there, dick in my hand, peeing into a urinal, and this partner I’m working with walks in still reading a draft of the document we’re working on. He walks up to the urinal next to me with the document held up right in front of him, and then starts to piss.”