Your Next-Door Neighbor Is a Dragon (15 page)

“That’s the biggest dick I have ever seen!” yelled Zack’s mom with joy, and bent over some carpet samples so Janus could see her butt.

“Damn, look at that filthy butthole, Mrs. Parsons! I am gonna fuck that all up!” Janus hooped.

“Mom, stop!” Zack shouted as Janus’s thick anaconda plowed turds up Mrs. Parsons’s butthole.

“No!” Zack cried, but Janus pushed him down and watched as Trixy put her big juicy pussy on Kelly’s head.

Zack was utterly humiliated. He could do nothing but watch as the cheerleader orgy started with his mom and Janus at the center like the eye of a hurricane of stinky-ass sex.

Zack Parsons Meets Janus at the Home Depot by Zack Parsons

There were a few slight discrepancies between my account of the meeting and the accounting I asked Janus to provide, but the real story was no less shocking. All right, the meeting was slightly less shocking. And at least 25 percent less erotic.

Janus didn’t arrive in a Porsche with Halle Berry. My mother was not waiting in the Home Depot with a host of nubile DIY cheerleaders. The meeting did not devolve into an orgy and I did not cry.

Incredibly, the biggest lie in Janus’s account was the size of his penis. I abridged most of the pornographic detail out of his version of things, but it was described alternately as a “16-inch monster” and a “20-inch horse cock.”

The real Janus’s penis was exactly zero inches in length.

“Eileen,” Janus said, reaching out through the window and shaking my hand.

“He” was a middle-aged “she.” Eileen aka Janus looked to be in her thirties with prematurely graying hair pinned back in a prim bun. She was petite, perhaps just breaking the five foot mark, and modestly dressed (as I later observed) in a calf-length floral dress and white sneakers. A small golden crucifix hung from her neck.

She looked at me uncertainly over a pair of thick, open-framed glasses.

“You’re a woman,” I observed.

“That’s right,” Eileen agreed with my assessment. “I have been most of my life.”

I briefly wondered if she had undergone some sort of sex change, but her snorting snicker suggested she was making a joke.

“Are you a lesbian?” I pondered aloud.

“Come on,” she replied. “If I were a lesbian do you think I would write all those stories about giant penises?”

I wasn’t too sure what sort of stories lesbians preferred to write. Maybe in their erotica women had enormous vaginas capable of holding huge objects and extra articulation in their foot-long fingers and tongues.

“Let me park my car,” Eileen said.

She parked her Honda Pilot SUV next to my car. On the back of it I noticed a bumper sticker that read,
IN CASE OF RAPTURE, THIS CAR WILL BE UNMANNED
. On the opposite side, just above the bumper, was a Christian fish sticker with a little silver cross in the fish.

The bumper stickers struck me as strange in light of her chosen hobby in a way her gold crucifix did not. Wearing the cross on a necklace seemed more like a vague symbol of allegiance and maybe a last-ditch defense against vampirism. The bumper stickers were more aggressive.
I love the Lord
sort of stuff.

I made a note of the bumper stickers and planned to bring them up if the interview went well.

“There we go,” Eileen said, turning off her SUV and climbing out.

A large denim purse hung over her shoulder. Through the opened zipper, I could see napkins, receipts, makeup, and a few tampons. Eileen seemed to have trouble making eye contact, but she was smiling and assured enough to walk alongside me into the Home Depot.

There was definitely an edge to her. She flitted from one side of the aisle to the other, evidently interested in every bit of building material, back splash tile, and light fixture for sale at Home Depot. I kept quiet, giving her time to unpack naturally rather than forcing the issue.

“You won’t use my real name?” she finally asked.

“I won’t even use your real fake name if that is what you want,” I replied.

“Good,” she said. “I have a position to maintain in the community. You understand?”

I nodded.

“I don’t think my husband would like to, I mean to say, he knows what I do, but he isn’t aware of the, ahm, the…”

“The extent?” I offered.

“That,” she said. “And the specifics.”

“He’s never read your work?”

“Some of the early stuff,” she said as she picked up a clay patio tile. “He read a little when I was writing
Sharpe’s Rifles
and
Horatio Hornblower.
”

She looked away and half-mumbled the names she used for the popular British characters, “Sharpe’s Rapers and Whoreatio Jizz-blower.”

“I had heard you were into some dark stuff,” I said, recalling the rumored archives.

“What have you heard?” she asked. “No, nothing that bad. It wasn’t that bad. I mean, it was really poorly written. Not like my new stuff. Which is much better written.”

“I heard it was S&M stuff. Violence and rape,” I said.

She winced at my words and then glanced around, as if to see if anyone was in earshot.

“Well, yes, I suppose. But it was all moral. The rapists were punished or raped bad people.”

“I’m interested in your morality,” I said. “You have written some pretty graphic stuff. How do you reconcile that with your religion?”

Eileen looked at me and scowled.

“There is nothing there. One doesn’t have a thing to do with the other. Believe it or not, it is perfectly possible to be a good Christian, a faithful Christian, and still write about…”

She lowered her voice.

“…intercourse.”

“I thought it might qualify as impure thoughts,” I said. “Don’t get—”

“Well maybe it does, maybe it does,” she hissed. “What if it does? So if I am a sinner, does that mean I can’t ask for forgiveness?”

“No, I—”

“One thing I have learned, Mr. Parsons, is that we all sin all of the time. All of us. Think about that. You are sinning right now. You are sinning thinking about my naked body and the terrible things you want to do to it. But you are holding in all that anger and that need.”

The idea that I was thinking about raping Eileen was preposterous. I was just as likely going to rape some PVC pipe in the plumbing department. More likely, even.

“That’s uncalled for,” I said.

“It’s the truth,” Eileen replied. “I will pray to the Lord for you every day.”

Her eyes flashed with anger, as if she was on the verge of completely losing her temper. Then that flash was gone. Eileen dipped her head and turned away. I continued to follow her down the aisles but I kept mostly quiet. I asked her a few other, very basic questions. Things I thought would not upset her further.

“What series have you put the most thought into?”

“My
Due South
and
Facts of Life
crossover slash,” she said, examining a caulking gun. “It’s a love triangle between Natalie, Fraser, and Vecchio. Janus appears briefly to…well…you know…”

Eileen made the “finger in the doughnut” hand signal. “He does it with Blair and Tootie.”

“At the same time?”

“No, of course not,” she scoffed. “Blair would never share her man.”

We moved a little more briskly through the power tools. Eileen did not seem interested in lingering by the drills.

“Your stories have won a lot of acclaim within the fanfic community,” I observed.

“Oh, I don’t know, maybe. There are a lot of awards I haven’t won,” Eileen said.

“What’s the one you would most like to win?” I asked.

“Well, one site I’m on a lot gives out an award for best scene in a shower or bathtub. I’ve been working on some
Silkwood
self-insertion. Janus does some really hot decontamination. Good use of hoses and brushes. I think I’ve really got a chance this year.”

“What’s a story you regret writing?” I asked.

“Any of the kids cartoons,” she answered quickly. “Most of all SpongeBob. My sister’s daughters were watching it over at our house and I thought it was a hoot. I wrote some stories about it. Some Patrick and SpongeBob slash stuff.”

“Why do you regret that one in particular?” I asked, drawing up short of a woman with a screaming baby in her cart.

Eileen watched the mother go, waiting until she was completely out of earshot before answering my question.

“I don’t think starfish ‘cum,’” she said.

“What?” I laughed.

“They ejaculate, but they release it as a cloud. I described it all in terms of big messy splatters and wads of splooge.”

“But in the aquatic environment it would have been a cloud drifting around?”

“Right. On Wikipedia it said both species sexually reproduce externally, so at least it is sort of right.”

“I don’t think real sponges or starfish can talk. That seems like a slightly bigger discrepancy.”

Eileen looked at me sternly and said, “How do you know? Can you speak their language? Maybe they talk. Maybe they do.”

Janus and the Killer Angels

My sometimes contentious and always uncomfortable interview with Janus/Eileen concluded with me offering her fifty dollars to write an erotic fanfic version of our meeting. At first she was excited by the idea. She confessed, “I almost never get paid to write things.”

By the time I got back to my motel and fired up the laptop she was wavering. Her e-mails included repeated usage of the phrase “I’m not going to prostitute myself.” I was eventually able to calm her down and coax a contribution from her, but it took a lot more time and finessing than I had in me in that beaten up Missouri motel room.

I had two weeks of downtime to look forward to between my interview with Eileen and my next interviews, so I loaded up my car and prepared for the long drive back to home base in Chicago. I had picked up the audio book download of Michael Shaara’s civil war epic
The Killer Angels
for the drive home.

I pulled onto the interstate, enthralled by
The Killer Angels,
wondering what Eileen might do with General Longstreet and whether Janus would fight for the Union or for the Confederacy. I was picturing Janus, now a creature entirely of my mind’s eye, defiling a southern belle. The image distracted me from the audio book and the traffic and I snapped back to reality just in time to realize a large, black SUV was bearing down on me.

I swerved over a lane to avoid it, but the passing SUV kept on me, chasing me toward the shoulder. I realized in a terrified instant that I would either have to allow it to hit the side of my car or drive off the road. I had no idea how much of a drop there was off the shoulder of the interstate. I could see there was a drop, but not how much of one.

I laid on the horn as I swerved off the road. The instant the wheel left pavement and plowed into the grass the car seemed to be sliding on ice. I slammed on the brakes as my car dipped and began to spin in the grass.

As I lost all control I caught a fleeting glimpse of the SUV as it passed me. Two faces in ski masks peered out at me from the back windows, like
Jacob’s Ladder
had just robbed a liquor store. One of them made a throat-slitting motion. I tried to read the license plate, but I was already spinning away.

My car came to rest a scant few feet from the tree line of a thickly wooded marsh area. My heart was pounding like a bongo at a Ron Paul blimp launch. It was a miracle neither me nor my car seemed to have suffered much damage. When I climbed out and surveyed the side of my car, I saw a few scratches, and there were a few burst blood vessels in my head but I would live.

While I waited for the tow truck to arrive I went over and over what had happened in my head. After a few minutes and many replays I came to the only logical conclusion. Someone was trying to kill me.

Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it is too dark to read.

 

—Groucho Marx

 

I
was standing at the baggage claim in Pittsburgh International Airport wondering why my pair of small black Samsonites had yet to appear on the conveyor. Most of the other passengers on my flight had already picked up their bags and departed. No doubt headed for their hotels to prepare for the coming days of Anthrocon 2008.

It was down to me and a guy bulging out of a Simpsons T-shirt one size too small. He was also wearing red suspenders, cargo shorts, socks with sandals, and a pair of prescription glasses with flip-up sun shades. This was a man who desperately wanted to never have sex. Or so the uninformed might have thought.

The baseball cap with pointed ears glued on and the fluffy ringed tail emerging from the back of his shorts were two dead give-aways that he very much wanted to have sex. Just maybe not in the way you or I think of sex.

“These things take forever,” he complained.

A battered red clamshell suitcase emerged and he began to prance up and down with excitement. He edged around the side to where his luggage was slowly trundling down the conveyor. His tail swished from side to side thanks to his practiced hip swaying.

“Good luck with yours,” he said as he hefted his bag up. “Are you going to the con?”

“No,” I lied, slightly hurt that he would assume I was.

“Oh, okay,” he said. “Well, have fun anyway.”

He waggled his fingers at me and departed. An approaching baggage handler in a reflective vest cast a sidelong glance at him before addressing me.

“Two black Samsonites?” the man asked.

“Yeah,” I replied, fearing the worst.

It was worse than I feared.

“You’re going to have to come with me,” the baggage handler said. “TSA wants to talk to you.”

As it turns out, carrying an entire suitcase full of weird spy equipment raises some red flags with baggage screeners. In Chicago they had looked at me like I was insane as they pulled a wireless recording device and a concealable camera out of a padded case. Having two dozen bullet-shaped batteries in with them didn’t help.

Miraculously, the screeners at O’Hare had let me on the plane as long as I checked both bags. I jumped through their hoops and got my spy gear to Pittsburgh, only to be detained by less trusting screeners at my destination.

The baggage handler showed me to a small windowless room with a folding table and three chairs. My cop show instincts told me to sit down on the far side of the table facing the door. The side with only one chair.

A TSA official arrived shortly along with the same baggage handler and my two black Samsonites. Exhibits A and B. The baggage handler set them down on the table and left the room.

The TSA official was a ruddy-faced guy with the bulbous nose of an alcoholic and the beetle brow of a man used to clubbing things to death. He had a thin ferrous mustache that resembled a crust of hair formed above his thin lip as part of a natural chemical process.

His name tag read
LOU ASTOR.
His accent suggested he was one of the Scranton Astors.

“Mr. Parsons,” he said. “We are not normally in the business of detaining people leaving our fine airport, but for you I have made a special exception. You have some very interesting devices in your baggage.”

“I don’t—”

Lou wasn’t finished. He pressed down with his fingers on the tops of both bags.

“Seven hundred fifty dildos a week come through here. Half of ’em vibrating dildos. Nine hundred knives. Fireworks, dangerous chemicals—people try to bring all sorts of dumb shit into my airport. Mr. Parsons, I have never had someone bring a bomb into my airport. So please, please, tell me that you are not my first bomb in the airport.”

I was scared shitless by the word “bomb,” but just smart enough to realize that if Lou had really thought there was a bomb in my luggage he would not be leaning on my suitcases and conducting the interview without FBI agents present.

“It’s not a bomb,” I said.

“Sure, sure.” Lou waved a hand and sat down. “I’m sure it’s just some sort of fancy dildo. A vibrating dildo. Lots of them this weekend.”

“It’s not a dildo,” I said. “One of them is an audio recorder in a, ah, cigarette box. A wireless transmitter. Ah, there’s a, hidden camera—”

“Hidden camera?”

“Right.”

“Like the nanny cam?” he asked. “Like on Maury when the nanny used to pick up that little baby and just swing it around by its fat little arms and yell ‘shut up!’ I loved that thing.”

“It’s, yeah, it’s a hidden camera,” I said.

“Hidden, huh? So tell me, why do you have all of this hidden camera and sound equipment? What are you, some sort of terror spy or something? An al Qaeda spy?”

Lou was obviously getting a kick out of scaring me.

“Are you part of a plot?” he asked. “Who are your conspirators? What are you hiding your cameras from, Mr. Parsons?”

“The furries,” I replied. “They hate us.”

“The furries,” Lou repeated bitterly. “Those motherfuckers.”

Furries: Those Motherfuckers

The furry subculture is so large and long-lived that it has become an inseparable part of the blighted tapestry of the Internet. Furries are not just popular compared to weird or fetish subcultures, they stand out as popular among all Internet subcultures. A search for “furries” in Google returns almost 1.5 million results, including artwork, videos, and links to real articles in real magazines like
Vanity Fair.

So what are furries? You really don’t know?

Sorry, I don’t mean to be condescending, it’s just that they’re everywhere. If you have used the Internet for more than a few hours you have probably run into someone or something associated with furries.

Furries represent a diverse subculture that includes many offshoots, but at the core all furries have an interest in anthropomorphic animals or animals with human characteristics. Think Disney characters like the bipedal chipmunks from
Chip ’n Dale’s Rescue Rangers
or the ducks of
DuckTales.
Ducks so human-like they built a city and fly in time machines just like humans.

The iconic image of a furry is of a man inside a sports mascot–like suit with big furry paws and a cartoony face. This is actually just one of many types of furry called a fursuiter. Fursuiters dress the part of their furry persona or fursona.

Yes. Fursona. Get used to it; most terminology related to furries is a portmanteau of fur and some other word.

One notable exception to this rule is the term “yiff” or “yiffing.”
Yiff
is supposedly the sound foxes make during mating. It has been around in the furry community since the early 1990s and has become a multipurpose term for furries having sex (yiffing), furries feeling horny (yiffy), or furry erotic art (yiff).

One key objection of furries to their portrayal in the media is that being a furry is treated like having a fetish. Furries view it as a lifestyle, more akin to lifestyles like homosexuality or being transgendered. They live as furries, not as normal people who sometimes put on mascot animal suits for kinky sex.

The upshot of this is that furries have come to demand the same degree of respect and understanding afforded to homosexuals or the transgendered. They view being a furry as a legitimate lifestyle that should be protected from hate crimes. When mocked, furries will often react in the same way as the victims of bigotry and racism.

In other words, it is impossible to convince a furry that their lifestyle is insane. They are nearly immune to mockery.

A Wildly Incomplete List of Furry Offshoots

I mentioned that so-called fursuiters, the classic archetypical furry, represent only one of many subcategories or sub-subcultures inhabited by furries. Just as “gamer” describes a person who plays games, but not the sort of games they play, “furry” is the biggest possible tent for a group of folks with diverse tastes and interests in the lifestyle.

To truly understand furries you have to have an appreciation of, or at least a passing familiarity with, the many furry subcultures.

Confurvatives
Confurvatives take a bizarre psychosexual obsession completely discounted by the majority of the world and combine that with being a furry. Imagine the worst thing ever and then multiply it by the next-worst thing ever. Your end result should be anthropomorphic cartoon foxes that believe it is liberty-ending communism to adjust the tax rate upward by 2 percent on people with enough money to own more than one NFL team.

Zoophiles
Furries and non-furries who “take it to the limit” and yiff the real deal. Sometimes this limit is exceeded, leading to yiff-related tragedies like the colon-shattering Mr. Hands incident in which a full-size stallion dealt mortal harm to a man’s tract during the act of sweet lovemaking. Contrary to popular opinion, most furries are not zoophiles.

 

Plushies
Plushies or plushophiles are furries who take out their sexual frustrations on innocent stuffed animals. This can involve cutting holes in existing stuffed animals, making stuffed animals specifically for intercourse, or simply rubbing up against the stuffed animal. Like zoophiles, there is some animosity toward plushies from “normal” furries. In other words, the dudes who dress up in big wolf suits or think they’re a cartoon fox look down on these guys.

Furry Gamers
Much like marijuana is said to lead to heroin, furries arrive at the conclusion that they are a furry through a combination of anthropomorphic cartoons and video games that are geared toward furries. One of the oldest and most popular of these games is Furcadia. More a graphical chat room than a real game, Furcadia allows players to create and customize a wide variety of furry characters to “role-play” and interact with other furries.

Baby Furs
Furries that pretend to be baby anthropomorphic animals. This involves role-playing them in furry games, furry artwork with a diaper theme, and eventually dressing up as a furry in a diaper. It seems ridiculous to imagine a mascot-like anthropomorphic wolf wearing a diaper, but really, what is one more layer of mind-bending insanity once you’re at that point?

Christian Furs
Self-described “furries for Christ” believe in the primacy of the Lord Our God and his holy yiff. It is only a matter of time before the “born furry” believers collide with the Christian furries and there is a camp where people can pray away the fur.

Macro Furs
Remember
Attack of the 50-Foot Woman?
Think
Attack of the 50-foot Anthropomorphic Horse Woman with Giant Boobs.
Macrofurries are furries interested in giant versions of anthropomorphic animals. In furry artwork these giant versions often exaggerate sexual characteristics to an even greater degree. The rare reverse, Micro Furs, are titillated by tiny furries.

Fan Furs
Not an actual furry term, fan furs is my term for the thousands of furries who involve their pop culture interests in their furry lifestyle.
Star Trek
fan furs are particularly prolific, reimagining
Star Trek
characters as furries in art, fanfic, creating mods for video games, and much more.

Nazi Furs
Similar to confurvatives, but with snazzier uniforms and better branding. According to the Nazi Furs they seek “to further the understanding of Hitler’s Germany through study and discussion.” And also erotic artwork and dressing up in costumes and having sex while pretending to be furry Nazis.

Scalies
Furries who are not furry at all! Anthropomorphic reptiles and amphibians are more popular in furry artwork than with fursuiters, but there are some. Scalies include dragons and dinosaurs, which is totally outrageous and must really make it difficult to suspend your disbelief when you’re trying to immerse yourself in the reality of a furry convention.

Anthroids
Furry robots or androids. As if being an anthropomorphic animal was not enough, anthroids are artificial anthropomorphic animals. Think ShowBiz Pizza’s Rock-afire Explosion band with tits and dicks. Not to be mistaken with mechies, which are anthropomorphic inanimate machines and are for whatever reason not considered a part of the furry fandom.

 

That is just a sample of the ever-evolving furry fandom. In the time it took me to write this section of the chapter, three new niche offshoots of the furry fandom formed.

Metamorphosis