"Mike O'Driscoll - The Future Of Birds" - читать интересную книгу автора (O'driscoll Mike)

on the streets of Rochina, the stinking favela that sprawled up over the
lure of the wealthy suburb of Saї Conrado. And a sister, a year older, a
pretty girl who sold her body so that they might eat. But already the
teeth-marks of the disease were on her flesh; there were nights when the
boy awoke in the corrugated iron shack that was home, to her cries of pain
as blood poured from between her legs. There were no parents.
Gangsters ruled Rochina with machine guns and calculated terror;
occasionally some City politician wanting to make a name for himself would
send the police into the favelas to wipe out a few marginals - low life
petty thieves; the politician's face would make the tv news and things
would go on as before. Business-financed death squads would execute
children; a cleansing process, ridding the city of future criminals,
making Rio safe for gringo tourists. Their bullets spared the girl the
worst ravages of the disease. The boy left Rochina and graduated to
picking tourists pockets on Copacabana, and from there to the docks at
Maua, where he learned to give head for ten dollars a trick. Soon, he was
working the streets off Rua Princesa Isabel, discovering that he could
double his take if he dressed as a girl. Evenings, he'd work the cars
parked along the seafront, blowing the men on their way home from work; in
one car, suck suck, open the door, spit it out and move on to the next
vehicle; for an hour or two each evening, a prolonged chorus of slamming
cardoors.
And all the while, the boy worked on his appearance, improving his make-up
and clothes, avoiding the older hookers and pimps till one day he gave lip
to a marginal who wanted his money. The man was going to cut him bad and
would have too, if it hadn't been for the tall, raven haired figure who
buried a knife in the man's ribs. That was his first meeting with Cledilce
Macedo. He was sixteen, streetsmart, and was making more money than the
boy had thought possible from giving head. Cledilce's johns - American and
European tourists - were a long way up from the factory workers and
dockers among whom the boy plied his trade. They had to be, because
Cledilce was a Bird, a transsexual on a female hormone programme, and like
any other route out of the gutter, hormones cost big money. He took the
boy home to a shabby apartment on the sixth floor of a block on Rua
Toneleiros. He got him on to hormones too and told him he needed a new
name.
For three years he ... I learned, developing and refining my body, making
contacts, saving money and loving Cledilce. At first, I worried that I
would no longer be able to perform sexually, that it would feel like
nothing at all, but the strength of Cledilce's erection soon put my mind
at rest. There would be no loss of libido he, or rather she, explained,
not until after the operation. And even then, we wouldn't have to
ejaculate to experience orgasm; sex, she said, was mainly in the head. As
my breasts grew and I lost my facial hair, I began to worry about the
operation itself. I had heard tales of the awful consequences of the
gender reassignments carried out in the Centro clinics, even saw the
evidence of their botched surgery with my own eyes. Till Cledilce had
finally shared the dream with me, the dream of escaping to 'sanctuary,'
where Parisian surgeons - not Centro butchers - would sculpt us anew,
transforming us so that we would feel what women were meant to feel.