Sweet Pauly Purebred

Author's Note: This is an entry in the Summer Lovin' contest so votes are definitely appreciated. I wrote this in long-delayed response to a challenge from another author to write a contest entry with "keywords bisexual, gay male, lesbian, transvestite, straight sex, voyeur, romance, and interracial."

I'm not actually using all of those as keywords, but I think they all fit, and several of them are firsts for me in my fiction. As such, I do also welcome constructive criticisms.

And, as always, all characters are both fictional and over the legal age of 18. Copyright 2021 Kethandra Wilde

Enjoy.

*

Though it was long ago now, I still think of it as the Year Of Change. This was back in ancient times, pre-cellphone and -email. The most polite words for people like me were 'transvestite' and 'drag queen.' 'Bisexual' was not a term I had ever heard, let alone 'Pan'-anything.

The only 'Pan' I knew of outside the kitchen was Peter Pan. And the part of Peter, that twinkle-toed, tights-wearing boi, was always played by a boyish woman, like Sandy Duncan or Mary Martin. Hmm. Maybe I was receiving a coded message back then, even without knowing the words to decipher it.

About the only thing that didn't change, from the first summer of that year to the next, was the Midwestern weather. It was still sticky, sweaty, humid, and hot.

Hi, I'm Paul, though I'm better known as Pauly these days. Sweet Pauly Purebred, to be precise.

About me: I'm little. Over five feet, but not by much, and slender. I probably would have made a good jockey. Now, I may like the idea of the occasional ride on a big hairy beast, but horses scare me. Too big, too dumb, and way too far off the ground.

I'm Asian in my genetic origin. Why do I say it that way? Because life isn't simple. Here's the short version.

A Marine, the American-born son of Japanese immigrants, returns from Vietnam severely wounded. Likely dying, the immigrant father's only son tells him a Vietnamese girl is pregnant with his grandchild. At great expense, my teenaged mother (swollen with the future Pauly) received an expedited entry into the US. I don't know exactly how they managed it but I can't tell you how many times Grandma used those exact words: 'at great expense.' Used them like a guilt-soaked bludgeon.

My controlling Japanese grandparents assumed that their great expenditure equaled a great say in my childhood. They had no idea what kind of Vietnamese mama bear they'd unleashed. My mother applied herself to learning the language of her new home, and its laws. Soon enough, she was woman enough to stand up to my grandparents, sure in her new rights as a mother.

So war began, as war has always begun: territory and property (me), coveted by more than one party. In this case, two parties, both willing to do things that would make Sun Tzu cry. Yours truly, the property in question, tried to vanish, horrified and disgusted by the war being waged for me.

I took to the streets. Cold, hot dirty Midwestern streets. Dirty because the air stank. Bitter cold in winter, with snow white and fluffy clean one day for every three weeks it was a sooty, crusted nuisance. The summer was a different dirty, the humid air rank with the acrid stinks of industry, none worse than the paper mills.

When it comes to people though, there are dirty ones everywhere. And they like those who look weak and vulnerable on the streets. Those that don't fit in. They liked me.

It's funny. Now that I've learned to stand up for myself and found the joy in doing so if needed - even though I look a lot more weak and potentially vulnerable in 5" heels and a skirt up to here - the dirty shits steer clear of me. They can sense a victim and I ain't a victim anymore.

Let's talk about not fitting in. Anyone Japanese knew I wasn't one of them. Same with the Vietnamese, even if I understood almost every word they said, thanks to my mom. The Anglo-Asian kids probably resented my 'purity,' being all-Asian. I don't know. Maybe it was me, knowing I wasn't like them. I wasn't like anybody. Which is largely why I later adopted the stage name 'Purebred.' You know: irony, embracing my very non-pure, mixed-blood origins.

"What a pretty little boy! Such gorgeous, exotic features."

"What a beautiful girl!"

I don't know which pissed me off more. Being so much smaller, more feminine than my peers was one more difference, one more separation. But not the biggest one.

I didn't want to, god how I wished it weren't so the time, but guys turned me on. Not only guys - some sexy is just plain sexy, no matter what parts they have - but definitely mostly guys. If you go back a couple decades, it wasn't odd that I'd never even heard the term 'out.' Still, I knew knew the concept, knew from a young age that I should not mention any inclinations that way to either my mom or grandparents. Or my classmates. Or basically anyone.

So even if the streets were dirty, in more ways than one, I still preferred them to the strife at home. And the more I spent time out and about, away from family control, the more time that family spent looking for me, dragging me back in. One of my few real friends, the only one I had told my thoughts and fears that I might be gay, was Roxie. And it was Roxie who showed me a way out of familial bondage. And into a new me.

She had been there the last time my grandparents in their Volvo had pulled up to a group of us standing near a corner. At least it wasn't a group of kids standing at a corner or gathered in an alley, beating on little Pauly. That happened often enough.

My grandpa was old as shit, but he could still toss little Paul through the open back door before driving off.

"What was that all about, dude? That was like a kidnapping." Roxie pulled me aside the next day in school. She already had a solution in mind.

Her house was so different from either my mom's efficient little cottage with the garden out back or my grandparents forced-Zen condo. This was chaos and clutter and noise and life. This was little brothers and sisters and nieces and nephews.

Roxie's sister Mica was about my size. I was a senior boy in high school, 18 years old, and she was only an eighth grader and her clothes, I soon found out, fit me. Sad. But only sad until I found out it was the best thing that ever happened to me.

Roxie's idea, obviously, was to dress me as a girl. She thought it would disguise me from my family. It did do that. In tights, skirt and a girl-cut T, I didn't get a second look from the Volvo either time it drove by that day. She had spiked my hair up and done my eyes and lips up rather dramatically. We didn't have any idea how else it would alter my life.

Just because my grandparents didn't give me a second glance didn't mean others weren't looking. Men. Women too, but men looked at me openly. Grown men, thick hairy forearms in greasy white shirts as well as other men with groomed square jaws in silk power ties.

Where the eyes of men like these had always slipped over me without real pause or notice, now they lingered. Some hungry, some threatening, most with a predatory sizing up that found me to be prime, if doubtless too young, meat. I saw disappointment flash across face after face as eyes found my undersized eighteen year old boy's body, in a girl's borrowed clothes, to be too straight, not curvy enough to possibly be a legitimate target of lust. Those eyes moved on to Roxie.

I had always felt like a thing, a possession, an object to be claimed, purchased, fought over. But not this way. These eyes, even if they left me for Roxie, looked at me and saw something of value in and of myself, kind of, and at least some of them wanted it. Sick, I know, but doesn't every teenager seek some validation in ways they shouldn't?

My family looked at me and saw obligation and responsibility, a reminder of a hero son and nothing else, or so I thought. I had been purchased, before I was even born. My loyalty and success in achieving suitable societal standing were desired, and that made me a thing to be fought over constantly, which is why I was wearing those clothes. To hide.

Hiding from them like this brought my feminine side, my sexy flirty side, out of hiding. And I found out I liked to be desired. A therapist told me later it was fulfilling my desire to be wanted for me rather than for my ancestry and genetics - the only offspring of the dead fucking 'hero.' If my asshole father was such a hero, why did he abandon his only child? So what if he died? I was still abandoned even if others might consider death a decent if convenient excuse for him.

Roxie kept clothes for me in her room. More and more. First, I'd hide as a girl maybe once a week. Then twice. Eventually it was straight to her house after school to change, even if we didn't leave her room, especially after she moved into the studio above the garage. I wasn't sure which she enjoyed more: dressing me to go out incognito or simply being with me, with Pauly, dressed that way.

On the street, after eyes evaluated the pretty, flat-chested little exotic girl with the spiky black hair (me) and left for Roxie, only a few came back. I didn't blame them. If you were into underdeveloped Asians with exotic features, your eyes didn't leave for the curvy strawberry blond in the first place. For anyone else, Roxie was an eye magnet.

As much as I like guys, Roxie was worth watching. She had - and still has - that certain something. When she first sat across from me in at lunch in the school cafeteria and said hi, I couldn't understand it. She had been in our school a few weeks, turning the heads of students and teachers.

She must have been hit on by everything with at least one nut in the first week alone. Roxie didn't exude slutty at all, but she was definitely sexy. She seemed almost ignorant of the effects her young body and bright smile had on others. People actually leaned physically in her direction, like they were compelled; they were steel needles quivering on the surface tension of a glass of water tugged by a distant magnetic Roxanne. I'd be lying if I said I didn't have a boner every time I woke up that night, thinking about the beauty who had sat down across from me earlier in the day, those dreamy eyes focused on what little Paul had to say.

Two years ago, she had sat across from me at lunch. Now she was graduated and I was a senior, best friends since that day. I hadn't drooled over her with lust, or sniped with jealous envy, she said. That was unique, apparently, and I didn't mention the first-night boners.

Roxie had picked me because neither one of us fit in, she claimed. Funny, since she was literally everything I would have cobbled together if I was Dr. Frankenstein creating a monstrous agragate of high school popularity. Witty, smart, beautiful, built like a brick shithouse, kind and sweet. The last two probably ruined it for her. In high school, backstabbing and bitchy seemed to be a better ticket to being popular. To her mind, in a new school, she was as outcast as I.

Being such eye candy, sweet Roxie developed a strong defense. I remember her practicing what she called her "what the fuck are you lookin' at, pervert?" look in the mirror. I kept cracking up because the natural actress nailed it, and it was so not sweet, kind Roxie.

I benefited from the look more than once as spring turned to summer. When a grown man is obviously ogling a tiny, completely flat-chested 'girl' in open daylight, a scornful "what the fuck, perv?" look, well delivered with the disgusted sneer only an older and more worldly teen girl can provide, is remarkably devastating.

Shoulders dropped, steps hurried, faces reddened as eyes glanced down and quickly away. I learned to enjoy the scurrying responses, even if I still enjoyed the fact they had looked at me that way at all.

I was taking French and Photography in summer school even though I had already graduated. I know it's a stereotype, but little Asian Paul was really 'encouraged' by his devoted Asian elders to be taking some kind of extra class or lesson 12 months out of the year.

One summer day, with a bluer sky than usual and less humid oppression in the hot air, two people looked at me in very different ways. They weren't interested in Roxie. Their eyes found cute little me and stayed, though their looks shared nothing else.

One I knew. He was in my photography class. Matt. Quiet, observant, smart. By the sudden widening of his eyes after his second, harder look at me, I knew I'd been IDed. His full name came to me at that heart-pounding moment: Mathew Cohen. Then he was gone.

Half an hour later I saw Matt across the street with an ancient school-issued Minolta manual SLR and a long lens. He wasn't looking my way at all, but I felt like he had been just before. A couple minutes later I saw him on our side of the street, round glass pointed our way only for an instant before he disappeared again.

The other pair of eyes that day were old, maybe forty. They looked at me, sizing me up before moving on to Roxie. I saw them travel up and down her body casually, not furtive at all. Taking their time. And then they came back to me. To stay. That wasn't normal.

His eyes met mine. They moved down, following the same leisurely trip down my body and legs, then back up to mine. They stayed locked on me while he smiled with the tiniest of nods, his lips never parting. I noticed his eyebrows. Thick already, they grew thicker as they pulled together, considering. He pulled his gaze away from me finally as he turned the corner, but not before I saw him bite his lower lip with a just hint of a snarl.

He was in the power tie category: red tie and no grease on this white shirt. His new-looking pinstripe suit was single-breasted and a little tight around the heavy shoulders and upper arms. Curly, light brown hair cut short.

I hadn't felt like he had ogled me, or degraded me with his look, like I had with so many others already. But he had definitely sized me up. And I thought I'd passed the test. He liked what he saw.

A drum was pounding in my ears. I felt like I couldn't, shouldn't breath. I could feel a hard-on pushing against my belly. The flared skirt covered the bulge from view better than pants ever could, but I felt so much more vulnerable and exposed. It felt like anyone could see up under it, see my arousal and my lie.

Half way down the block he turned, caught me looking and gave the same tight-lipped grin after the same wondering brows. His wide upper back overfilled the suit coat walking away from me, shaking his head. A chill passed through me, even on the hot summer day. Something about his predator's knowing grin told me: I'd been IDed again, twice in one day.

Matt Cohen had identified me, his classmate, through the make-up and in these clothes. This guy, Mr. Curly Burly, had identified me too and I knew without a doubt that he knew I was not a girl in these girly clothes.

The next day, a Friday, I had French class first and it seemed to drag on forever. Then Photography, which went by even slower. Matthew ducked into the darkroom, eyes avoiding me, as everyone else filed out, including the teacher. The few students in the summer class sometimes stayed after to do lab work and developing, but not on Friday.

I was shaking. I didn't know Matt well, but I didn't know very many people well. He was quiet, had a good eye for candid photography, and kind of cute in a brooding sort of way. He had bright, quick eyes when he brushed his bangs back from them. I didn't know if he played an instrument but he looked like he ought to be in a band. Some of the kids I had seen him with wore leather and a lot of black, and Doc Martin's of course.

I wondered what he thought. He hadn't looked at me at all today.

The darkroom had double doors and a baffle of thick curtains, so students could enter or leave one at a time without any light entering the far room where the actual developing and loading of reels went on, the mixing and rinsing of processing chemicals. The click of the inner door sounded loud.

I stood in total darkness, complete silence. Then a faint sound of metal on metal came out of the dark. If I didn't speak, I'd scream.

"If I turned on the light now, would I ruin them?" It sounded like he was loading exposed film, on reels, into lightproof cans. Any light now could render the negatives black, unviewable. Once the can was sealed, for most work a dim red safety work could be on. Until then, any light at all would ruin the exposed but undeveloped and fixed film.

"I thought that would be you." His voice sounded deep, kind of soothing even, coming out of the dark. "No, not those, the ones of y...her. I processed the ones of her at lunch."

He called me 'her.' If I'd stopped to consider it at that moment, I think I liked it.

"What...what are you going to do with them?"

Silent, heavy darkness. Then, "Keep them. Look at them."

I could almost hear his shrug.

"Are you going to tell anyone? Show them the pictures?"

"No!" It wasn't loud, but it was immediate and definitive.

I was quiet but he said nothing more about it. I needed to know how threatened I should feel.

"What do you want from me?" Even asking a question into the total darkness was intimidating.

"She was so beautiful."

"Who..oh. Me?" My voice cracked, squeaking on the last word.

"I'd like to see her again."

Now I was the quiet one. I wondered then if he felt as vulnerable as I had, waiting for a voice out of the void.

"Can she trust you?" It was easier to use his language. It felt right to call that other me 'she.'

"Yes."

"If anyone found out, I'd die."

"I know. So would she. And I can't ever allow that."

That should have been creepy, but I was touched. It seemed sweet; like he cared. He said it as though it was part of a twisted chivalric code. I had no idea how to answer, but I had to say something to still the utter darkness.

"She says thank you." The dark didn't answer. "She'll be around next week again."

I needed to hear an answer of some kind. The silence in the complete darkness rattled me, where sometimes this room had before felt so comforting and safe.

"Sunday." It was almost a croak. A throat cleared, loud in the silence. He was unnerved too. "In the park. She should bring her friend and walk the path through the rose gardens."

My body shivered hard in the dark. "You're...going to take pictures of us? From where?"

"I want to see her. Make sure she doesn't know. Neither of them. She simply wants to walk in the park with her friend, perhaps in her new outfit, that she's never worn before."

I inhaled sharply enough that I wondered if he heard it. I leaned against the counter beside me, any anchor in this void. He wanted me...her to wear a new outfit, and she wouldn't know he was watching. She was me hiding in girl's clothes. Apparently, it was important to him that she be someone different, separate from me, from Paul the little Asian in his summer photography class.

It almost sounded like he had pictured this walk in the park before. Had he photographed others walking there? He used a school camera, which we were allowed to sign out while taking the class, so I assumed he didn't have his own.

He had only seen her for the first time yesterday. Seen me. I had never heard of 'her' until this bizarre conversation in the void, and I was already thinking of the petite, exotic Asian girl with the spiked hair as someone else. All because of this voice in the dark.

I realized my cock was hard in my jeans, angled up toward one hip pocket. I wondered if he was too.

He wasn't the big, thick kind of man that I usually pictured at night. The kind who were close to my mind when my cock was pumping into my lotioned hand, balls sucked in tight, as I squirmed under the sheets in the early morning. But he wanted me, kind of, enough to request a new outfit and suggest a time and place.