As a boy, Big Mouth loved dressing up in his sisters’ clothes.
Big Mouth’s childhood and adolescence resembled a Charles Aznavour song.
He lived in a very old house with a crumbling façade and dirty windows. There were no trees in his street, just street lamps that blinked in and out all night and made giant shadows and monsters out of every parked car, stray dog, and lonely drunk trying to find his way home.
Big Mouth lived alone with his mother. Both his sisters were in school in another town. They came home on the weekends, bringing with them piles of dirty socks and underpants.
For company, Big Mouth and his mother had two canaries and a cat. The canaries lived in a dirty cage lined with old newspapers. The cat spent her life sleeping in the corner of a broken-down couch in their tiny living room that was also their kitchen, dining room, and bedroom.
To help his ailing mother, who suffered from varicose veins, Big Mouth did all the shopping, cleaning, washing, and wiping. Occasionally, he also mended his sisters’ socks and mother’s underpants.
Big Mouth had little interest in his school subjects and passed from grade to grade by being a well-behaved and quiet boy. Teachers passed him even when he answered their questions with complete silence because they mistook his disinterest for docility.
Big Mouth knew he would drop out of school as soon as it was legally possible to do so. He had no interest in becoming a car mechanic, welder, cement mixer, or veterinary assistant, which were, apparently, his only options.
What he really wanted to be was an artist. The kind of artist that decorates, designs, or styles something, or someone. But such professions didn’t exists when Big Mouth was a boy–at least not in his town–and his future was therefore uncertain.
At night, while his mother slept in front of the TV, Big Mouth turned into a stage artist for an hour or two. Watched by the cat and the two canaries, he took off his male clothes and put on his sisters’ dresses, blouses, and skirts. He especially liked their high-heeled shoes. They made the back of his legs look exquisitely elegant and feminine. If he’d had the time, he would’ve spent hours every night admiring the back of his legs in the mirror.
But every night time was short and he rushed through a cross-dressing routine that eventually turned into a striptease, performed for the cat and the two canaries.
To make himself softer and more feminine, Big Mouth shaved the hair off his arms, legs, chest, and shoulders. As far as he could reach, he also shaved his back. He let his hair grow long and used his sisters’ shampoos, conditioners, sprays, and mousses to create more volume and shine.
His sisters kept no makeup at home, so Big Mouth stole lipstick and mascara from the girls in his class. Theft was disgusting to him, but he had no other way of obtaining items necessary for his nightly performances. It never occurred to him that one day he might be able to walk into a store and purchase makeup without being ashamed or judged.
At school, Big Mouth’s classmates made fun of people like Big Mouth. There were none they knew in town, but they knew there were such people somewhere in the world, and such people provided an endless source of amusement for them.
Big Mouth didn’t have any real friendships at school, so he didn’t feel obliged to join in his classmates’ mockery. He stayed apart, distrusted, disliked, and detached.
The boy Big Mouth loved turned 18 the year Big Mouth entered his final compulsory year in school. The boy was very tall and very skinny, with unusually fine skin, full lips, and soft eyes. Big Mouth thought him prettier than the perfectly sculpted bodies he once saw at the town’s art museum. The boy was a god without knowing it, and that made him even more appealing.
Big Mouth longed for the boy the same way other boys longed for girls. But the fact that he couldn’t tell anyone about it made his longing almost too painful to bear. To ease the ache, he staged his nightly performances pretending the show was for the boy, not the cat and the two canaries.
To make matters worse, the boy apparently spent most of his time in women’s beds–at least according to his own stories, which he recounted in detail every chance he had. Quickly, the boy’s sexual conquests became legendary. Even grown men working at the town’s biggest factory talked of the boy’s victories with admiration.
Big Mouth’s torture abruptly ended in June that year, when school let out. In a flash, Big Mouth was free of pointless lessons in geography and calculus. As an added bonus, he no longer had to listen to the boy’s fucking stories about fucking.
But he also no longer had any chance of seeing him, unless he pursued the same line of work as the boy and the boy’s father.
To prolong the illusion that he was part of the boy’s life somehow, Big Mouth joined the night crew at the town’s cable factory.
The night suddenly belonged to someone else. No more dressing up in his sisters’ clothes, no more striptease for the canaries and the cat.
The following year when the boy quit the factory and moved to Germany, Big Mouth finally stopped longing for him. All he had left was a tough night job and a tiny salary.
When he married one of his sisters’ girlfriends the year after that, Big Mouth became everything he always hated about every man he’d ever met in his life.
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