This story is not intended for commercial use and is not to be posted at any other site without the author’s permission. This is not suitable reading for children.

 

Anything for a Fast Wheelchair?                    by: Dawn DeWinter

 

I don’t know whether I should publish this. As a story, it doesn’t stand on its own. Indeed, it will make no sense and bring no pleasure to anyone who hasn’t read my biography (the word has a nice ring to it, right?) of Kyle James, the incredibly average Iowa boy who became a buxom schoolgirl named Demi. I entitled it "Anything for a Moped?"

The title was the easiest part of the biography to write because this kid would do almost anything – even dress in girl’s clothes for a month – in order to get a moped from his mother.

"What in the world is a moped?" you ask. I’m not surprised you asked. A lot of people don’t know what a moped is. Most of the guys who do know about it probably wouldn’t change from boxers to briefs in order to win one, never mind put on a bra and panties. After all, a moped is just a motor scooter. Most guys would wait until they’re sixteen – or whatever age the law decrees where they live – and then buy themselves a real machine. You know – a Harley or a Kawasaki. But not Kyle. At fourteen, he just had to have a moped. He’d do almost anything to get one.

I’ve mulled over Kyle’s original motivation for years – ever since I first heard about Kyle and Demi from their big-time lawyer (I don’t want to say how I came to know an Iowa lawyer; a lady has her secrets. All I’ll say is I’ll never hitchhike again without my wig.) What made Kyle so damn anxious to get a moped? Was it a con from the start? Was he just looking for an excuse, no matter how ridiculous, for getting back into girl’s underwear? (You’ll recall that he liked to dress up as Joan of Ark and Pocahontas when he was small boy.) Was the moped never more than the vehicle he needed to get from A (normal boy) to B (abnormal girl)?

I mean if I had actually made up the story of Demi James, the critics (my word, there are a lot of them!) would have said that the moped was a "plot vehicle." But I didn’t make the story up. It’s not fiction, as is readily apparent to anyone who has read "Anything for a Moped?" After all, it has total verisimilitude, right? Those who’ve read my biography of ‘Kyle who became Demi’ know that everything must have happened exactly as I said it did.

I think the only reason there’s any doubt about the veracity of my work is my decision, taken in the interests of conserving valuable web space, not to include the several thousand footnotes I’d composed. I wish I had appended them to the biography (gosh, I love that "b" word!), because they would have astounded my readers. The notes would have shown that I trudged across the continent in search of the truth – to sheep pastures in New Mexico, leather bars in Manhattan, two high schools in Iowa, and a moped rally in Wisconsin. (I wish I hadn’t gone to the rally. I had no idea that riding a moped was so sexually stimulating. Until then, I didn’t know that a guy, even a cross-dressing guy, could get a yeast infection.)

That biography cost me a lot of money in Greyhound tickets, YM-YWCA billets, and food stamps. It also cost me some pride. I constantly had to lie. I guess biographers, like investigative reporters, have to stretch the truth at times. But I had to do it a lot. For example, I had to tell a shoe salesman that I was a lesbian in order to gain his trust. Imagine that! A lesbian! And you know, even after lying about something as fundamental as my sexuality I still had to buy a pair of shoes – in Des Moines, of all places. The store had absolutely nothing that a New York teenager would wear, and while I’m a mature lady, I do like to keep up to date. I swing like a pendulum.

I’m not ready yet to tell anyone, never mind my vast readership, about the outcome of my attempt to interview the leaders of the two gangs then active at Demi’s school. I shouldn’t have worn a mini skirt. My therapist – who’s pretty good considering she’s still working on her B.A. degree – is convinced I’ll get over the trauma after I’ve worked things through. Don’t worry: they didn’t rape me; and I didn’t do anything illegal. But there are some places in the heart where one shouldn’t go.

I’ve definitely paid my dues as a writer. I did a lot more research than most biographers do. Hell, I even consulted a crystal ball about Demi’s future. At the time of consultation, all I knew for sure was the story of Kyle and Demi to age fourteen. That’s not a lot of years as biographies go; and so I asked Madam Zeta – she runs the Brazilian Tea Room in Manhattan and has mastered futurology – to turn on her crystal ball.

Actually, I paid Madam Zeta to inquire into Demi’s future. There were two things in particular I needed to know: first, whether or not Demi eventually married her girlfriend Jo. It seemed unlikely – after all, how many people marry the girl they loved at fourteen? Yet I figured my readers would want to know. I was also anxious to find out whether Demi completed her sex change and spent the rest of her life as a woman. Kyle kept saying he’d re-emerge, that his Demi persona was, despite appearances to the contrary (including his ample cleavage), a temporary thing.

The last time I had contact with Demi she was planning to leave The Amazonian School – that’s the all-girl school in which Kyle enrolled himself – after a single term, because if she stayed any longer, she’d have to have the operation. You know which one – it’s the one that turns a boy upside down to create a vagina. I’m sure that Demi wanted that operation, but Kyle didn’t. Yet he didn’t seem to be able to find a way to convince people that he’d rather remain a boy. Every time anyone important asked, he affirmed he was a transsexual. But he really wasn’t, or so he said to himself and to his friends.

As I was writing Demi’s biography, I expected Demi to have the operation and to become a real girl – or as real a girl as a boy can be. If I had had any money, I would have bet on an imminent sex change. I would have given odds that Demi would have girl’s genitals by the end of her first summer as an Amazonian.

My willingness to bet on Demi’s sex change might impress some readers – those who don’t know me – but two of my friends bought a brownstone in Chelsea by systematically betting against my picks for Miss America, for the Super Bowl, for the Oscars, for the Grammies, the Indianapolis 500, whatever. You name the competition, and I can predict its winner zero percent of the time. Whoever I think will come last is a good bet to finish first. So don’t believe me when I tell you that Demi will soon have the sex change and settle down to a life of joyful lesbianism.

Since I couldn’t trust my gut instinct, I went to Madam Zeta’s tearoom and queried the crystal ball. I hoped it could tell me something about Demi’s future to cap off my biography of her. Well, as readers of "Anything for a Moped" realize, that piece of reject plastic (I bet it’s too low-grade to recycle!) jerked me around. It told the future of everyone I’d met in Iowa, save for Demi and her girlfriend Jo. Boy, was I ever furious! I was so mad I wouldn’t drink tea for a month! I’m still boycotting everything Brazilian. (Although I do think I’d make an exception for a Brazilian footballer.)

One day last week I suddenly realized: It’s the crystal ball that won’t cough up the future. But that’s not the only thing that Madam Zeta can read. She also reads coffee grounds! They’re not quite as informative as a crystal ball (when it’s willing to cooperate), and they tend to speed through what little information they do give, but they allow you to see the future. I don’t know why I didn’t think of grinding out the conclusion of "Anything for a Moped?" I tried to take the easy way out, and that was wrong.

Coffee grounds don’t spill the beans for free. I needed some hard cash, but I now had it, as a result of my day job, writing essays for High School students. (I’m much in demand because "there’s no risk," the kids say, "of Dawn DeWinter’s writing an essay that’s too good to have been written by a grade nine student.")

Madam Zeta at first wouldn’t cooperate, but became friendlier when I shared the pint of sherry that I’d stuffed into my purse. She brewed coffee in her 24-cup percolator. It was from a country I’d never heard of – Sri Lanka, I think. The first reading was useless. But then she ground the beans, and after we’d finished off the pot she’d made, she gave me the fastest reading of the future anyone has ever had.

So I’m not sure I got everything right. In fact, I’m sure I didn’t, for I wasn’t able to focus on what Madam Zeta was reporting until she was almost done. She’s such a cheapskate she used the grounds to brew another pot of coffee before I had a chance to have her go over the facts a second time. Now that I think about it, I’m not even sure she didn’t switch beans on me.

So it’s possible that I didn’t get my money’s worth. (And I could have used the money after what happened to me at the Port Authority Bus Terminal after I made an emergency stop to pee. I can’t seem to avoid the police, even in the ladies’ washroom.) However, I leave it up to you, the reader, to judge whether Sri Lankan coffee can be trusted. What follows is the story they told. Or I think they told – Madam Zeta talked so fast you’d think she was taking uppers.

As I’ve already said, I really wasn’t able to make out much of what the coffee grounds said. Maybe it was the Asian accent. I’m more used to a Colombian accent – you know, like Juan Valdez’s or Zorro’s. In any case, I missed a bit of Demi’s story. Or at least I didn’t catch the details. How much did I miss? I’m afraid it was seventy years. I’m very hazy on what will happen to her from the age of 14 to the age of 84.

But I’ve got a lot of detail on what she’ll be like at eighty-four. You’ll never believe what Demi will one day be willing to do to get a high-speed, motorized wheelchair!

 

Note from the editor: Dawn DeWinter’s manuscript ends at this point. It’s as far as she got before she went into de-tox. We’re all pulling for her full recovery. Everyone who knows Ms. DeWinter is hopeful that she’ll be able to lick her addiction to caffeine. Our lawyers have advised us to attach to this story a brief disclaimer:

When Dawn DeWinter states that her story about Demi

James is a biography, the account of the life of an actual

person, Ms. DeWinter is showing the unfortunate effects

of advanced sleep deprivation. "Anything for a Moped" is

not the biography of an actual person or persons, and we

wish to apologize on behalf of Ms. DeWinter to Demi S.

James and Joanne Smith, students at The Amazonian

School of Ottumwa, Iowa, for any embarrassment they

may have suffered as a result of the publication of

"Anything for a Moped."

 

 

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© 2001 by Dawn DeWinter. All Rights Reserved. These documents (including, without limitation, all articles, text, images, logos, compilation design) may printed for personal use only. No portion of these documents may be stored electronically, distributed electronically, or otherwise made available without express written consent of the copyright holder.