Shelby, the Pussy Man

What the fuck is it with guys today? I mean, honest to God, men are all turning into pussies. First, we had "metrosexuals", guys who always dressed in the clothes all the magazines showed the male models wearing. I thought they were just gay guys who hadn't admitted it yet, but all the magazines said, no, they were just straight guys who liked looking like magazine models all the time. One even said they dressed like that so people would look at them, because people looking at them was the only way they knew they really existed. All I ever needed to know I existed was some really good scotch to go with my cigarettes, well, that and a half-way decent fuck once in a while.

The next thing that happened was all of a sudden, men weren't suppose to get gray hair like about all men do at some point. Women used to think gray hair on a man was sexy. They'd cream their panties over some movie star with gray hair. Now apparently they don't, because there are hair dyes for men to "target those embarrassing gray areas in the privacy of your bathroom". At one time there was spray paint you could use to make your bald spot kind of the same color as your hair there used to be. You can even dye your fucking moustache and beard now.

It got worse when guys started to let their beards grow out. He has to use a special beard comb, special beard soap, special beard shampoo, and special beard conditioner. The shaving department at Walmart is starting to look like the women's hair care department.

Speaking about hair, now guys think they have to shave their chests and some even shave their pubes. Like with beards, there's a shitload of special crap you need if you're gonna shave your balls. Me - anything with sharp edges close to my balls makes me cringe. Real men have hairy balls and chests anyway.

We also have men's makeup now, and that's going too goddamned far. They advertise you can cover embarrassing blemishes and color in your eyebrows. I mean, I know John Wayne wore makeup for his movies, but it didn't make him look like a goddamned woman like some guys do anymore. It made him look like a man you didn't fuck with.

Don't talk to me about guys who are twenty-five and getting braces so all their teeth line up perfectly. If they'd quit taking fucking selfies to post on the web, nobody would give a shit what their teeth look like.

It takes me all of thirty minutes to roll my ass out of bed, piss, shave, shower, and get dressed. It must take these guys at least two hours like it always did my ex.

Men have also changed for the worst in other ways too. When I was in my twenties, what men worried about were two things - did we have beer in the fridge and if Mary or Ellen or Judy or whoever was going to put out on at least the third or fourth date. Now, these young guys want to understand and sympathize with a woman instead of fucking her. They call it "rejecting their toxic masculinity", like being a real man means you should have to wear some OSHA label on your forehead, like, "WARNING, KNOWN TO CAUSE EXTREME STRESS TO WOMEN".

I have to deal with men trying to act more like women, but there's no goddamned way in hell I can respect somebody like Shelby Anderson.

They say first impressions are usually right, and Shelby wasn't giving me one I thought much of. His T-shirt said "Boys Cry Too" on the front, his shorts looked more like boxers than pants, and he was wearing those goddamned fucking plastic shoes they call "Crocs" with no socks, and the goddamned things were pink.

My first impression was Shelby was gay, but that would have been all right with me. Gay guys don't bother me at all - to each his own and all that happy horse shit. I've had a couple as clients and except for liking other guys, they were OK. I don't pretend to understand why one guy wants to fuck another guy, but if that's what they want to do, far be it from me to judge them. I have my own problems to worry about.

No, what turned me off about Shelby was the story he told me.

"Mr. Meers, I want you to find my wife."

"I can do that if you give me some information. What's her name?"

"Her name is Angela, Angela Marie Salvador-Anderson...with a hyphen."

He smiled then like he'd done something wonderful.

"The hyphen was my idea. I didn't want Angela to lose her personal identity."

I wrote that down on the notepad in front of me.

"OK, I need a description too -- age, height, weight, hair and eye color, and anything else that will help me identify her when I find her. If you have a picture of her, that would be great."

Shelby frowned.

"I don't have any pictures of her. I want her to always be happy with how she looks at the time. Pictures would just be reminders when she gets older of how she used to look, and if she'd changed then, she'd be sad.

"I think she's pretty though. She's nineteen, and she has long brown hair and brown eyes because she's Latinx on her father's side. She's quite a bit taller than I am, so she'd be maybe five feet eight inches. I don't know how much she weighs because a man should never ask a woman that question, but she's really slender except for her top. She's pretty big there."

"Any birthmarks, tattoos, anything like that?"

"Well, she has a birthmark that looks like a dove on her left hip, and she has a tattoo on her right ankle of one of those Celtic rope things. Angela said the tattoo made her feel free. I don't particularly like it, but it's her body and if she chooses to decorate it, she should have the right to make that choice."

I wrote all that down and then asked Shelby when he'd last seen her. He sort of wrung his hands together before he answered.

"Two weeks, three days, six hours, and...", he looked at his watch, "about twenty three minutes ago".

Now, I've heard some crazy shit before from people trying to find somebody. Sometimes they do wait a while before they start looking for that lost person. They'll usually screw up their face and then say something like, "I think it's been about a week", or, "Gosh, it was back in high school so it must be, let's see, about twenty years now". Not once has anybody ever given me a time down to the minute. I almost changed my mind about Shelby. If he had it down to the minute, he must really love her.

"What was she doing that time, anything odd or something she'd not usually do?"

Shelby smiled.

"No, we'd gone to march in a Pride march and after it ended, she said she'd met some new friends and wanted to spend some time with them. She said she'd catch a cab home because she didn't know how long it would take and she didn't want me to have to wait. She's always thinking about me that way, only this time, she just never came home.

"I wasn't too worried about her at first because when we got married, I told her that she was her own person and I was my own person, and that we wouldn't let our marriage get in the way of our own personal goals and needs. She's done this before, stayed over a few nights with friends in the feminist movement, but she always calls to tell me where she is. She didn't do that this time."

Well, that was odd too. Most cases where a spouse leaves they don't just leave. There's usually a fight about something and one spouse decides enough is enough. More often than not, they'll leave a note saying they're not coming back and why. I even investigated one case where the wife wrote "I'm fucking leaving you because I fucking hate your pathetic fucking ass" in big letters on the side of the guy's new yellow Corvette, and she used a purple permanent marker to do it.

The other thing was, if she did just disappear, most guys would have called the police at least the day after if not sooner.

"Did you talk to the police about this?'

Shelby shook his head.

"No. I know Angela needs her space and I respect that. If I'd called the police and they found her, she'd think I was intruding on her private life."

Almost nothing Shelby had told me made any sense if he was really married to Angela.

"How long have you two been married?"

"Three months, one day, and...", he looked at his watch again, "four hours and about eleven minutes."

I changed my mind back. A shrink would call that being anal retentive. I'd call it being fucking bat-shit crazy.

"I need your name, address and phone number so I can get in touch when I find her."

The guy pulled a red wallet out of what looked like a tan, woman's purse he had on a strap over his shoulder, reached into the second pocket from the front, and handed me his driver's license.

"It's usually easier if I do it this way. The spelling of my first name is a little different."

His name was Gale Shelby Anderson. I figured his mother must have been expecting a girl and couldn't think of any boy's names after he was born. It was either that, or she was a real bitch with a really sick sense of humor.

When I handed him his license he said, "I go by Shelby. Gale sounds a little feminine to me."

I didn't say what I was thinking. I could understand him not using "Gale" because it did sound feminine though it's usually spelled "Gail". I also knew a woman named "Shelby", so that sounded even more feminine to me.

If you ever saw Shelby Miller, you'd understand. I'd helped Shelby find out who was stalking her and got his ass arrested. I could see why the guy had been watching her though. Shelby was about five feet nine inches of long slender legs, hot round ass, and tits that made me wonder if I'd need both hands to hold just one of them. She had long blonde hair halfway down to that hot ass, and her face looked like the face in a cosmetics commercial.

I watched Shelby's house for a week to take pictures and video of anybody who seemed to be hanging around. The same guy kept showing up about half an hour before she came home from work. After that week, I had video of him sitting on her porch waiting for her to come home and video of him walking away after she drove by like I told her to. A couple days he was late getting there in the afternoon, but I got video of him walking around her house and looking in the windows to see if she was home.

When the police got to his house, they found about a hundred pictures of Shelby on his cell phone. In most of the pictures, Shelby was shopping or working in her yard, but a few had to have been taken through her bedroom window. She wasn't in any of those bedroom pictures, so I suppose the guy took them when she wasn't home.

In a way, I felt sorry for him. Homer Boggs was about five two and skinny as a rail, and...well, you know the guys they always have in those movies about Appalachian Mountain rednecks...the ones where the guy's parents are first cousins...

He'd said "Hey" to Shelby one day in the grocery store, and when she smiled at him, he just knew that meant she liked him. He told the police he wasn't stalking Shelby. He was just trying to get up the nerve to ask her out on a date. That was a little weird too, because he was twenty and Shelby was forty-one at the time.

Shelby was just a nice woman who smiled at everybody. She'd smiled at me when she told me what she wanted me to do. She'd smiled at me when she thanked me for finding the guy. She'd smiled when I told her Homer was in jail awaiting a bail hearing and at a minimum would receive a restraining order to stay away from her.

Anyway, I finished writing all that down and then looked over the page to see if I'd missed anything except asking him the obvious question.

"Shelby, I know this is kind of a hard question, but is it possible Angela is seeing someone else? It does happen."

I swear to God, he got tears in his eyes then.

"I thought about that. I thought about that over and over, but I can't bear to let myself think that would ever happen. Besides, I know all her friends and they're all women."

"Well, sometimes that happens too. I don't know why but sometimes a woman will decide she likes other women."

Shelby wiped his eyes.

"No, I'm sure that's not the case. She does know some lesbians because we protest with them too, but she told me she did that because she agreed with me that women should be free to choose the life partner they want, not because she liked women."

"OK, I'll start looking but I do have to be paid for my time. My fee is three hundred a day with two days in advance. If I don't find anything in two days, I'll call you and you can decide if you want me to keep looking or not."

Shelby pulled out his red wallet again, opened the third pocket from the front, counted out six, hundred dollar bills, and handed them to me.

"I want you to look until you find her and money isn't a problem. I'm a senior graphics designer and I'm doing very well. Just find her for me."

I said I'd start that day and I'd call him as soon as I found out anything.

Once he left, I lit a cigarette and went over what he'd told me. I could see why Angela might have left him because I'd talked to him for all of ten minutes and I already wanted to strangle the dipshit. I couldn't imagine living with the asshole if he really thought all the bullshit he'd told me, and apparently he did.

I had a lot of questions I needed to get answered somehow because there were a lot of things he'd said that didn't make sense to me.

I mean, who in their right fucking mind would say something like they wouldn't let their marriage get in the way of what they like to do? I thought people got married because they liked doing things together. That's why I got married. It didn't turn out that way because my ex didn't like anything I did, but that's why I did it, well, that and the fact she had big tits.

They did apparently go to feminist and lesbian and pride protest marches together, but even though my ex thought I was an asshole, she never just left and said she'd be back when she got done doing whatever it was she wanted to do. Usually, she'd drag my ass along with her so she wouldn't have to drive and carry all the crap she bought, well, until she decided she'd rather do it herself and divorced me.

The three months they'd been married was also weird. Most couples are still fucking twice a day at three months, or at least that's what Sarah told me she was doing. If Angela felt the need to leave after only three months, there must not have been much of a marriage to begin with.

When you start looking for someone, you pretty much have to start at the last place somebody saw them unless you have an idea of where they might have gone. Angela could have gone anywhere, so I'd have to track down somebody who knew her from the protest marches and see if they knew where she'd gone. They might not, but they'd know somebody else who might. I might have to talk to a dozen or more people, but eventually, I'd find her.

The only problem with me doing that is I don't get along very well with the goddamned fucking feminists. I have met a few, but they think I'm too long on being a man and too short on understanding women. They always get pissed at me, like this one broad did when I held the door to a building open for her.

Now, I admit I was watching her because she had really nice tits and I wanted to see if the ass in her little shorts matched, but I thought she'd think I was just being nice when I held open the door for her. She stopped in front of me, frowned, and said she didn't need some fucking misogynistic man to open her door for her.

That pissed me off, and when I get pissed off, sometimes I say things that pop into my head. It's possible I might have said if she'd get one of us fucking misogynistic men to fuck her really good once in a while she might not feel that way about us fucking misogynistic men. I don't really remember. I do remember the way she turned around and stomped off muttering under her breath about asshole men who think a woman is only good for sex. Her ass was pretty hot though, so she probably would have been a great fuck.

Anyway, it wasn't going to do me any good to talk to any feminists, but I did know a few lesbians, so maybe one of them could give me a lead. I thought it was highly probable that Angela had decided she liked girls, and most women in the lesbian community at least know somebody who knows somebody who just got a new girlfriend.

I thought that because if Angela married Shelby, she must have liked men with a soft side. Shelby was anything but a man's man. Shelby was pretty much a girl except he had a cock and balls and no tits. Well, I assumed he had a cock. If he had any balls, he sure wasn't using them. It probably wouldn't be that big a change for her to start fucking a woman if the woman had one of those strap-on rubber cocks.

I looked through my address book for the phone number for Tiffany Rogers. Tiffany and I became good friends while I was tracking down her twin brother for her. Tiffany had shocked her whole family when she came out, and they told her they didn't want anything to do with her anymore. Her dad was one of those Charismatic preachers, so that probably had something to do with it.

Tiffany moved from White House to Nashville and got a job, but a couple years later, she wanted to get back in touch with her twin brother. I gather she and her brother were pretty close, and he didn't really look too happy when her mom and dad told her to get out. She thought if they got together, she could explain things and maybe he'd decide she wasn't the evil sinner the rest of the family thought she was.

I found her brother and got them back together at the Wild Horse one afternoon. It was interesting how much alike they looked. It was also interesting that Jeff brought his boyfriend along. When I left them, Tiffany had called Joyce, her girlfriend, to come and join them. They were going to have something to eat and then do some line dancing.

Tiffany answered the phone on the third ring.

"Hello"

"Hi Tiffany. It's Harry, Harry Meers. Remember me?"

Tiffany chuckled.

"I remember you, Harry. You're not calling me so you can to try to convert me again, are you."

"Now, Tiffany, I never did that."

She chuckled again.

"Yes you did. You got me drunk and then took me to bed."

"No, I didn't. You got yourself drunk. All I did was keep filling your glass when you asked me to. If you remember, I put you in my bed and slept on my couch that night. I never touched you even once."

"Well, you did grab my boobs."

"That was just when I picked you up after you fell down."

"It sure seemed to take you a long time to pick me up, and you kept squeezing my boobs while you did."

"Well, I had to hold on to something. You weren't helping any."

Tiffany giggled

"I'll bet you liked it though, didn't you?"

"No, I didn't...well, I did, but that's not why I did it."

Tiffany chuckled again.

"OK, if you're not going to try to convert me, why did you call?"

I explained about Angela and asked if she could help me.

"I'll buy you dinner and we can talk while we eat."

"Can I bring Sandy?"

"I thought Joyce was your girlfriend."

"Well, she was, but she sort of changed her mind. She's with a guy now. I met Sandy after that and we get along just fine. You'll like Sandy. She won't like you at first, but if you play nice, she'll come around."

I said she could bring Sandy and we set the time for six that night at a Mexican restaurant on Gallatin Road.

Tiffany was right about Sandy. Tiffany is pretty hot, but Sandy was smoking hot from her big smile down to her big tits down to her sexy round hips. It didn't hurt that she was wearing a frilly blouse that barely fit over her big tits and jeans that fit like body paint. I've never understood how women get their asses in jeans like that. It's a bitch to get them off so it must be even harder to get them on.

While we ate, I explained to Tiffany about Angela and asked if she remembered Angela and Shelby from any of the gay protests. Before she could answer, Sandy said, "Shelby? I thought you said Angela was married to a man."