I Sold My Body So I Could Become the Man I Am

I got off the bus at the terminal with a frayed backpack and my heart pounding against my ribs like a war drum. The capital was an animal of lights and noise that promised to swallow me and spit me out different. No one here is going to twist my arm. I repeated it to myself as I made my way along avenues that never seemed to end, the stubble prickling my jaw like proof that testosterone was already doing its silent work.

I rented a room in a boarding house in the old neighborhood, where the walls sweated damp and the shared bathroom smelled of rotten plumbing. Every vial cost money. The muscle I had built at the gym, arm by arm, wasn’t going to evaporate for lack of hormones. That was what I promised myself the first night, sprawled on a mattress that sagged in the middle.

The first few days were one wall after another. At a café downtown, they asked for my ID, and the manager twisted her mouth when she read my deadname.

—We’re looking for girls who won’t confuse the customers —she told me, with a cardboard smile.

At a clothing store, the manager looked me up and down: pretty face, deep voice, broad shoulders, but hips that still gave me away.

—You’re too… I don’t know, pretty to sell men’s clothes —he decided, and went back to his phone.

Hunger began to clamp down for real. The muscles I had worked so hard to gain loosened, as if my body were eating itself to survive. I counted coins on the bed and fell asleep furious, that kind of fury that keeps you warmer than any blanket.

One morning before dawn, while I was washing dishes off the books at a club near the southern station, my hands wrinkled and my back broken, I saw him for the first time. Dante came in through the back of the place as if he owned the air. A flat chest beneath a tight T-shirt that showed two barely visible scars, silver chains, sneakers worth what I couldn’t save in a month. He asked for a glass of water and kept looking at me with eyes that seemed to know everything in advance.

—How much do they pay you to break your back here, kid? —he asked.

I shrugged, my hands trembling in the soapy water.

—Almost nothing.

Dante smiled without much enthusiasm, like someone who already knew how the joke ended.

—I started the same way. Look. —He lifted his shirt just enough to show the perfect scars beneath his pecs—. No shitty job behind a bar pays for this. The people who want to touch what they don’t understand pay for it. To them, we’re a fetish with legs. But if you’re smart, you charge them for it, then go home and keep being yourself.

Something broke inside my chest. And at the same time, something lit up.

—And doesn’t it… turn your stomach? —I asked.

He fixed me with his stare.

—At first, yeah. Then you understand they’re paying for a ten-minute fantasy. You’re getting paid for your entire future. Period.

That night I didn’t sleep. I looked at myself in the boarding house’s cracked mirror: angular face but still soft, full lips, big eyes that confused anyone. It’s temporary. Just until surgery. Just until I have my real body. I ran my thumb along my jaw, feeling the rough brush of the new hair, and the decision settled inside me like a stone at the bottom of a river.

***

The first time on the street was a freezing hell. The station district at three in the morning, the wind cutting like a dull blade, slowly and persistently. The other trans guys and travestis sized me up with a mixture of pity and territorial suspicion. I planted myself beneath a streetlamp, hood up and hands buried in the pockets of sweatpants that showed too much of the bulge from my packer. Fear closed my throat and dried out my mouth.

The first car was an imported black sedan. The window rolled down slowly, and a man in his late sixties looked at me like someone finding an oddity in a shop window.

—How much, handsome?

I swallowed. My voice came out raspier than I expected, and for some reason that gave me courage.

—A thousand for oral. Fifteen hundred for everything, with a condom.

The man smiled, white teeth gleaming in the dashboard light.

—Get in.

In the back seat, with the car parked on a deserted street, I lowered my sweatpants with clumsy fingers. He was already undoing his belt, breathing in short gasps, and as soon as he pulled his cock out of his pants, he held it up to my face without asking. It was thick and veiny, the swollen tip shiny with pre-cum, smelling of expensive cologne mixed with office sweat. I took it in my hand and weighed it, spat into my palm, and began jerking him off slowly, looking him in the eyes so he would lose his life before I opened my mouth.

—Put it in, kid, come on, don’t make me beg —he panted, digging his fingers into the back of my neck.

I opened my mouth and began taking him in little by little. My tongue circled his glans, right where he was most sensitive, and then I sank him deeper until the tip touched the back of my throat and I felt my gag reflex rise. I pulled back, breathed through my nose, and went down again, slower this time, sucking his cock with my whole mouth, saliva running down to his balls, which I squeezed with my other hand. He panted in that mixture of moan and broken word men make when they lose control, and I sucked at a steady rhythm, jaw tight, lips sealed around the hot flesh.

I closed my eyes and thought about the scars I would soon have, about the flat chest I would be able to look at without hating myself. I thought about the operating room the way other people think about heaven. Meanwhile, the old man’s cock grew harder between my lips, throbbing, and he began pushing my head up and down with both hands, fucking my mouth as if it were a pussy.

—Suck it, suck it all, for fuck’s sake —he muttered—. That’s it, that’s it, don’t stop, like that, boy, swallow the whole thing.

I let him do it, my throat open, saliva streaming in thick threads onto the leather seat. I felt his balls tighten against my chin, heavier and tenser by the second, and I knew he was about to come. I gave the base one last squeeze with my hand, my tongue working beneath the glans, and he let out a low roar and shot his load into my mouth in hot jets, thick and sticky, with that metallic, salty taste that would stay on my tongue for hours. I kept sucking him until the last drop while he trembled and tugged at my hair.

When he was done, with a muffled groan and his fingers clutching my hair, I felt nausea and power at the same time, both things mixed into a single gag. I spat the semen into a crumpled tissue and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. He looked at me with his still-wet cock resting against my thigh, unable to move. I grabbed the crumpled bills he had left on the seat.

—Come back whenever you want, sweetheart… sorry, kid —he said, laughing nervously, as if correcting himself cost him more than the money.

I got out of the car and vomited against the wall, doubled over. But I tucked the money into my pocket like someone putting away a promise signed in blood.

***

A week later, I wasn’t vomiting anymore. I learned to negotiate, to hold the clients’ gaze, to use my androgyny as a sharpened tool. Men paid more for the confusion. They wanted what they didn’t dare name in daylight: the deep voice whispering filthy things in their ear, strong hands pushing them against the backrest, and at the same time the body that still carried what I wanted to erase.

I bought a harness with a thick, realistic dildo, black as the night I worked in. I used it on the ones who asked me to fuck them, and there were many. Office men, wedding bands on their fingers, who signed papers during the day and begged me against a car’s upholstery in the early hours. I put them on all fours in the back seat, spat on their assholes, sank two fingers inside them until I opened them up, and then drove the rubber cock into them in a single thrust until the whole harness was pressed against their buttocks. They howled, bit their forearms so they wouldn’t scream, and I fucked them with hatred and method, changing my rhythm, grabbing their hair, making them say please. I made them come twice: once touching their cocks with their hands while I fucked them, and again with their mouths against the leather seat, without touching themselves, just from the way I rammed them. I pounded them thinking about my future, not about them, and somehow that twisted fact made me feel whole.

One night, a regular took me to a hotel in the expensive district. He was younger than the others, an executive, even handsome. He paid everything in advance and asked me to stay until morning.

—I want to see you with nothing on —he said, his voice trembling with desire.

I took my clothes off slowly, one piece at a time, while he watched me sitting on the edge of the bed. My body was in full transition: broad shoulders, a waist still defined, a small chest I hated but that he kissed as if it were an altar. He sucked my nipples one after the other, lingering, licking them with his flat tongue and then biting them gently, and despite myself they hardened like little stones. He traveled over me with his mouth, lost in the contrast between the soft skin of my belly and the hardness of my arms, between what he saw and what he heard when I spoke.

Then he spread my legs and buried his face between my thighs. I closed my eyes, gritting my teeth, and let him do it. He licked my cunt with a devotion none of the others had shown: his tongue working my clitoris in slow circles, then two fingers moving in and out, curled as they searched for the spot that made my back arch without permission. A deep moan escaped me, more male than female, and that made him even more desperate. He sucked me harder, moaning against my flesh, and I came in his mouth with a long spasm, grabbing his head with both hands, squeezing his face between my thighs until the trembling passed. The rage of enjoying it boiled inside me, but so did the pleasure, and the two things blended into a single heartbeat.

—Turn around —I ordered, and he obeyed at once, trembling.

I put on the harness in front of the wardrobe mirror, watching myself tighten the straps around my hips, the black dildo pointing forward like a promise. For a second, I liked what I saw: the silhouette of the person I was going to become, outlined against the city lights coming through the picture window. I led him by the hair to the glass and pressed him against the window with my open palm between his shoulder blades.

—Spread your legs —I said in his ear, my voice deep against his nape—. And take what I’m going to put inside you.

He trembled, his hard cock bouncing against his belly. I spat on his asshole and ran two saliva-slick fingers along his crack, sinking them in to the knuckles to prepare him. He was hot inside, tight, and his ass sucked at my fingers as if it were hungry. I pulled them out and put the tip of the dildo there, barely pressing, teasing him, while he writhed and pushed his butt backward, searching for me.

—Please… please, put it in, don’t make me wait —he whimpered, his cheek flattened against the glass.

I gripped his hip with one hand and guided the rubber cock with the other, slowly sinking it into him inch by inch, watching his face fall apart with pleasure in the reflection. When I had buried it completely and the harness touched his buttocks, I waited a few seconds for him to adjust, then began fucking him in earnest, ramming him against the window, every thrust of my hips making the glass tremble. He whimpered with pleasure, his hands leaving wet, smeared marks on the glass, his cock dripping against the baseboard.

—You’re perfect… you’re the hottest thing I’ve ever seen —he babbled.

—Shut up and take it —I answered, grabbing his hair and pulling his head back.

I fucked him harder, my hips colliding with his, sweat running down my back to the harness, the straps cutting into the skin of my groin. I drove the cock all the way in and pulled it almost completely out, and he begged for more, pushing his ass backward to impale himself on it. I reached around him and grabbed his cock, hard and wet with his own fluids, pumping it at the same rhythm I fucked him from behind. In less than a minute he came in jets against the window, moaning my name, squeezing the harness inside him with spasms that nearly tore it out of me, his cum running down his thighs and over my fingers.

I thought of Dante and his perfect scars. I thought of the operating room I could almost afford. I clenched my teeth and felt that pleasure and rage were, that night, exactly the same thing, one current pushing me forward. I kept fucking him for a while longer, with him trembling and whimpering, until I slowly pulled the rubber cock out and he collapsed against the glass, his legs giving way.

When we were finished, he sprawled across the sheets and fell asleep immediately, with the foolish peace of people who pay to forget. I unfastened the harness, left it beside the dried semen on the floor, and stayed awake, listening to his breathing and the distant murmur of traffic.

***

At dawn, while he slept facedown, I went into the luxurious bathroom and looked at myself in the fake-gold-framed mirror. The money sat on the nightstand, neatly arranged and waiting for me. Enough for the surgery and then some. I touched my chest with my fingertips, that chest that would soon cease to exist, and for the first time I didn’t feel disgust. I felt farewell.

—Almost there —I told my reflection, so softly I could barely hear myself—. Almost myself.

I gathered the bills, dressed without making a sound, and rode down in the elevator of endlessly repeated mirrors. Outside, the city kept roaring, indifferent, chewing up others as it had chewed me up. But I walked toward the boarding house with my backpack over my shoulder and, for the first time since I got off the bus, I felt that I was the one with the teeth.