Chapter 1

My name is Janno.

I've decided to tell my story, and it's a strange and wicked one indeed. I don't know where this story will lead me, and I don't know if you'll stick with me to the end, dear readers, but I do feel the need to tell it. I'm not sure why, at this point, I need to talk of these things, but somehow I am compelled to do so.

Who am I? It's a question I ask myself time and time again, and yet I never get an answer that stops the questions. I am sometimes man but sometimes woman, young but sometimes old, and I have been every race, every shape and size that a person on this Earth can be. And sometimes, I am like something not of this Earth at all, some entity that has come here from far, far away. Truly, there are times when I look around and feel I could not possibly have been born here, among all these humans. I am so different, as if my very atoms are arranged differently than everyone I see around me.

But, enough of this mystical talk. You don't want to hear me prattle on about how I feel, or who I think I am. You want to hear a story, don't you? Of course you do. You want something with emotion, drama, and some sex to spice it up, don't you? I don't blame you. I like stories myself. I tell myself stories all the time, to make sense of my world. Maybe some of them are even true.

Anyway, here are the basic facts. At least, I think they are facts. They might be just a figment of my imagination, or a fragment of a dream, or a thought that comes to me in meditation. Tomorrow I might remember a different set of facts, and tell myself they are true.

These, though, are the facts I know today.

I was born a male in the 1950s, and if you know anything about that era, you know that your life was fixed with a rigid certainty back then. If you were born in my town, which was in New Jersey, and you were a boy, by the time you got to high school your life revolved around cars, baseball, beer, and girls, in that order. You went to work in one of the local factories after high school, or you joined the Army, but by the time you were 21 you were married to a girl you'd known since first grade and she was pregnant with your first child. Your life was as fixed as the main street in town, the one that led to the church, the factory, and the cemetery.

But I was somehow different, in the midst of all this sameness. For one thing, I was an only child. For another, my mother was not like the other mothers in town. She had been many things in her life, and not all of them fit into the idea of what a woman in the 1950s should be. She had grown up in the 1920s in Detroit, and her father had owned a speakeasy during Prohibition, so she got a taste of the wilder side of life early on. She sat on Al Capone's lap as a little girl, and she sang popular songs for the gangsters at her father's speakeasy, standing on a bar stool and belting out standards like a pint-sized Sophie Tucker. She had no illusions about human nature: she'd seen pillars of the community -- politicians, churchmen, priests and every kind of do-gooder throwing off their morality like a woman wriggling out of a corset as soon as they walked through the door of her Pop's saloon, and she giggled in church the next morning to see how they threw themselves into the hymn singing with gusto, as if it would erase what they'd done the night before.

She learned about sex early, too, in the back seat of a Packard that belonged to a slick-haired gangster named Giancarlo, when she was still wearing bobby socks. It was the same Packard that her father's body was found in a few months later, sliced up and stuffed in the trunk. He had been stubborn about letting a partner join the business, and he had said a few things that were regrettable. Some men took him out for a ride one night and he never came back.

My mother survived, somehow. Her mother was a weak, mousy little woman who quickly lost interest in living, and took some pills a few months later and died. My mother was taken in by a gangster's girlfriend, who got her a job in burlesque. Mom had developed a woman's body overnight, and it wasn't long before she put an act together and was appearing on the burlesque circuit. After all, as she used to say, "A girl's gotta eat."

Her name was Lucy Adams, but she took the stage name of Delilah St. Pierre. She still had pictures in our house from her days on the circuit, and I have to admit she was a beauty. She had long red hair that cascaded past her shoulders, a set of breasts that were firm and ripe as two honeydew melons, a tiny little waist, and a rear end that you could have used as a shelf. She also had a smile and a mischievous glint in her eye that said she was up for pretty much anything.