Close Encounters With the Vagina-ed Type

**I went through almost half a pack of Marlboro Lights as I was writing this awful episode. It turned out that writing, alone, didn't cut it; I had to do something about the excess mental stress that this incident damned me with. It was almost ten cigarette sticks on one recollection alone; imagine how utterly reduced I got towards the end of this event.

The closest encounter I've had with a vagina, in all my gay thirty years, was with that of a transgendered man. It happened in the early hours of last Sunday, October 17, and it will continue happenng in my head for the rest of my years. I was beyond shocked; I was haunted. And with the aggravation that that grim image gave me as I walked home that morning, I swear I looked like this guy.


Anyway, here's what happened.

It was about two in the morning, and there were three of us homos parked in front of my good friend O's sari sari store. We then heard the subdued roaring of a motorcycle engine going out, and somebody saying "Ano nah!" in that distinct faggy inflection you can only hear in the Philippines. It was O's lovely, lovely friend S, and he had a pambahay shirt on these very short cotton shorts.

I never met him before, but he's beautiful.

His name was S, like the chocolate, and he looked like a beautiful 24 year old call center agent. He was really 36, but his shimmering skin, smiling features, and luscious long locks postponed his aging process by a full decade and then some. He was what is known in the local gay vernacular as a Japanera, or a Timer. A Japanera, or a Timer, is somebody who's made several business trips to Japan, usually for years on end, as an entertainer. And he was a shining success as a Japanera, so it goes well without saying that his youth, and his breasts, and his hips are enormously well-invested. He is almost a complete feminine achievement, and he can deceive to his girly heart's content if only he talked less. But he was a charming conversationalist, polite and acknowledging, and he was the sweetest artificial daisy there was.

It turned out that S had more to him than meets the deceived eye, and it was all revealed in the next hour of lively and loaded gay reminiscing until S had to leave. At that point, my friend O, he owns the sari sari store, called me, and he was like, "Momel halika, tingnan mo ung pechay ni S. (Momel come here, look at S' vagina)." Of course I was curious, so I took a peep at his surgically reassigned vagina.

Madre de dios.

Here's what the gracious S did to accommodate his captive, and increasingly stressed, audience. Remember he was wearing those loose cotton pekpek shorts? The kind that Richard Simmons would wear in his work out videos? And he was sitting on the driver's seat of this motorcycle; imagine the angle. From that position, S spread his legs apart, and then he lifted his left knee. He pulled the inner left hem of his shorts towards his right, and there it was. S' surgically re-assigned vagina.

Hijo de puta.

It was dark. It was the beef tapa that was marinated in soy sauce to make bistek with. Only it was diagonal, and it had, for something so wrong, hair in the right places. Of course, this is assuming that hair grew out of those places; my selective memory of straight porn can only be so faint. S' surgically reassigned vagina was in that same spot where the trunk of his cock used to be. The vulva (slit) started about five inches below his belly button, it was about four inches long, and it terminated somewhere in that area where his testicles used to be. It was lumpy, and it was dark, and he had it done in Thailand where SRS (sexual reassignment surgery) was dirt cheap. That probably explains that small tattoo next to his singit, and it said "Made in Thailand. For Export Only."

I kid. There were no tattoos.

I heard S say "Oo, may mani yan," as he played with his man made labia. I didn't care to investigate if that was meant to be joke. I was getting an operation myself -- I was getting an indelible memory tattooed in my head.



I didn't want to touch it, OH HELL NO, because I wouldn't know what will happen to me the moment I laid a finger on somebody's vagina. Even if that somebody was a man. And even then, if I touched it, I will smell my fingers, by and by. Its dreadful how smells amplify the memory of something already that eerie. So I satisfied myself with flinching in silence and had a cigarette the moment S drove away in his motorcycle.

It was all visual, but for some odd reason, the experience left a bad taste in my mouth.

And in spite of what happened, I am still grounded on this blind faith towards a higher, supreme grace, an absentee divinity, a marvelous force that gives each one of us the most needed saving coincidence. I remember looking at S' reconstruction, and thankfully, my mouth didn't water like it did on the Breastfeeding in Cabs episode. That will be my tragic unmaking, and I will not hear the end of it.