Kicker Street

Chapter 1
Kicker Street

Chapter Description: "You'd better believe it / It's written all over your face" -Bad Religion

It’s a bitch when nobody believes you.

For over a decade now I’ve told this story—written it out, uploaded it to the internet, recited it to anyone who would listen. Results ranged from the condescending (a tousle of the hair, a chuckle and a pat on the back, a “Like” on Facebook) to the severe (being taken to scads of therapists, psychologists, and psychiatrists just to find the screw in my head that was loose enough to allow these flights of fabrication to bleed out).

So I’m not even sure why I’m bothering to clean up the grammar and mechanics and send it, again, out into the wilds of the internet. This is sort of a “director’s cut,” you might say, as more and more memories have come back to me, and as previous memories I’ve already publicized have become increasingly vivid in retrospect.

Without further ado, I send you off to read with a plea: You’ve got believe me.

Not for my sake, but for those of everybody who looks into the mirror in the morning and wants to take off a few years.

-=-=-

The address was 4321 Kicker Street and the place was called Rejuvenations. They marketed themselves as a youth and health spa, but the business itself didn’t seem to be doing too well. There was no advertising, no signage, and you essentially had to rely on urban legend to find the place. They must have been caught in an endless cycle of not bringing in enough clients to afford to get the word out.

Anyway, don’t go looking for it now. It’s gone. Or, at least, it’s moved to God-knows-where. That’s the idea that panics me the most.

Fourteen years ago, I had my 48th birthday and nobody with whom to celebrate it. The divorce had been finalized a couple years past and I was only just then getting back into the dating game (inasmuch as a man my age could call it a game and not a travail).

I’m a hell of a nice guy, I mean, and I wouldn’t have called myself over-the-hill… my hair may be have been graying, but it was still thick and dark and I didn’t obscure my face with a beard or even stubble. I was modestly paunchy. I was 48, what can I tell you?

Anyway, I thought at least I could get a leg up if I visited this Rejuvenations, which guaranteed a more youthful appearance (or my money back… which turned out to be more than enough to force me to cancel an anthropological sojourn to Micronesia). The nonexistent advertising and the vague promises left me a little skittish, but the operation as a whole didn’t seem all that shady. A receptionist greeted me in the foyer and led me to a small office wherein somebody with a number of framed certificates on his walls asked me a few questions about my life and desires.

Ultimately, he wanted to know my ideal age of physical appearance. He reiterated ad nauseam that they had the tools required to bring me to look like any age I desired. Not expecting this level of specificity, I dashed off a number – 24, half my age, why the hell not – and paid the tens of thousands of dollars upfront to be made to look like I did when I was studying anthropology in graduate school. Though I couldn’t have afforded the Rejuvenations program on a college professor’s income, I was comfortable enough with dipping into the kitty.

Thereafter, the doctor – or, at least, I think he was a doctor, as he certainly made himself out to be – introduced me to Cade, the young man who would be conducting my therapy. He was a solid-looking guy, in his early 20s, and didn’t appear as though he’d had the experience and education necessarily to get involved in an operation such as this. Perhaps he had gone through the program himself.

And then it hit me—I had seen him before. I knew him. I knew that face, and the name, but I couldn’t get the neurons in my brain to put them into a past context. That left me feeling a little uneasy, as such experiences have always tended to do.

Cade led me into a sealed chamber with a long conveyor belt and all manner of equipment reaching up from consoles to hang like spider legs over the belt itself and down from the ceiling, positioned like audio-visual equipment.

The young man was amiable and professional as he brought me into the chamber. He asked me to leave my clothes on; the machine would “work with me,” he said. In fact, he flat-out told me to leave my fate in the hands of the equipment, because my program fee had been paid to help subsidize the maintenance of some of the most advanced scientific infrastructure in the world.

As I walked into the chamber, I took note of a digital numeric keypad positioned just outside the door. I could see through the porthole behind me that Cade was punching the buttons, carefully referencing the clipboard he held, to which was clipped my admission form with the desired age of destination: 24.

Cade locked in his input and I laid upon the conveyor belt. Down past my shoes was a tunnel as long as a football field, divided into sections by a colored paint strip along the right-hand wall, which was solid.

The opposing wall was a viewing window. The whole way through. I could see Cade outside it.

The conveyor belt hummed to life.

Where had I seen his face before?

-=-=-

I was brought into the first section of the tunnel and the process begun immediately. Thin, robotic arms, each with a number of digits of remarkable dexterity, rose up from beneath the conveyor belt and quickly began unbuttoning my shirt. When that task was finished, an arm reached up and slid the opened shirt out from under me, revealing my hairy chest and abdomen.

Six feet down the belt, a tough-looking pair of clamp-like arms removed my shoes, then extruded a number of probes that simply removed my socks with their prehensility.

At this, I started to wonder: How much of my clothing did they suppose to deny me? With the window lining the left side of the tunnel, and with Cade looking on, I was already feeling more exposed and self-conscious than I had intended that day. The way I saw it, I was paying for vigor and self-confidence, not humiliation.

But the robots kept working, undoing my pants and sliding them off me with not a whisper of difficulty, leaving me clad in the black boxer-briefs I had put on that morning. Seconds later, those were gone, too.

Already there was this feeling of reticence, of violation; Cade seeing me naked, with consent that could only be described as “implied,” discomfited me. The cool air of the laboratory licked and labored at my flesh, consuming me. Second-thoughts tiptoed into my head, wondering whether what I was doing was worth it, to be bare-assed and subjugated so completely to forces beyond my control. But, as the conveyor belt I laid upon, I sent those thoughts away as best I could.

The next section of the tunnel was when things really got kicking. It was a sci-fi barber shop, more or less. Depilatory foams and creams were applied all over my body, and automated razors came up from beneath the conveyor belt to shave my body hair. They were safety blades, surrendering the space and lifting away from me every time I took a breath or fidgeted. But they knew their business well, and their business started with my chest, and then my arms – all over, even underneath – with the same attention given to my legs and feet.

I had an inkling that something had gone wrong when the flexing and flailing arms of the machinery started taking my pubic hair. Up and down my crotch, all along my testicles, in between my legs, and around in circles along my dick did the blades whirl, clipping and snipping away, shaving and smoothing my groin so it was as it was the day I was born.

My head of hair was next to go. The robots did their jobs and took all of it off. Now, this is not what a typical 24-year-old looks like – barren of hair from stem to sternum – let alone what I looked like when I was 24. Immediately I knew Cade, for whatever reason I had yet to detect, had fouled up the process somehow.

My physical self, my body, was totally in his hands.

In the next section of the tunnel, I was violated beyond reason. First, a transparent suction hose was affixed to my groin, subsuming the entirety of my penis and testicles. Horrified, I watched as the machine sucked years and years of growth and development out of me. I reached down and grabbed the hose, desperately attempting to get it off of me, but it was no use. I had to sit there and watch as my cock, which wasn’t anesthetized and still had all of its feeling and function, got smaller and smaller and smaller. When it hit puberty I could feel my balls retract and my sexual compulsion driven away. Angrily I howled at Cade to abort the procedure – “Stop it! Stop it! It’s sucking my cock… away!” – but he did nothing but smile as I uselessly wriggled and squirmed.

At the end of it, the immediate way I could tell I had the genitals of a newborn baby was by sight. The hose retracted into the machinery, leaving my worthless excuse for a dick, this little pink nubbin, behind.

The conveyor belt hummed anew and I entered the next section of the tunnel, wherein I was braced stomach-side down and had my ass cheeks spread wide by stainless steel fingers. It was the first time during the entire process I was completely immobilized. Uselessly I cast invectives into winnowing air as a lubricated device was pushed into my rectum, slowly, but forcefully, until I felt it reach my prostate, whence it proceeded to drain all my years of physical experience away. I felt completely filled up, like I had to take a shit, but there was that sexual tickle that comes with contact of the prostate gland… no way to relieve any such tension now.

A cold collar clasped around my neck and began regressing my voice as the device in my rectum concomitantly regressed my body. I became smaller and smaller, my bones and muscles retracting into themselves in direct concordance with the concept of wholesale age regression—and it was neither painful nor pleasurable; I had no room for such sensations in my head, bar the enormity of humiliation and loss I was feeling.

My voice started to crack, and then it devolved into childish soprano. My cries and my objections were announced in the timbre of a kid. The size of my body kept pace, ever shrinking, ever contracting, as I begged and pled and cried for this ultimate violation to be over.

But my pleas went unheard or unheeded, and the alien thing in my ass was already retracting, and my collar became unclasped, and the conveyor belt transported me, the aching, tiny, newborn infant me, into the final section of the tunnel.

In there I was laid on my back, and a weighted dome, something like a helmet or colander, descended upon my little crown. Below, the machine began to diaper me. I was entreated to the sensations of cleaning and powdering as the device on my head did its work, draining my accumulation of knowledge and reason I had acquired throughout my life. It felt as though I had been drugged, dosed heavily with a tranquilizer, as the memories and stores of notes fluttered out of my head, erasing my life history bit by bit.

During this dull and idle time, it came to me: Cade was a boy I had failed on a crucial final exam, and he was exacting his recompense in the most sociopathic manner available to him. The “24” he inputted into the system was meant to represent hours, not years. As a child, growing up (the second time), I hated him, hated him with every breath of my being, but as the years plod on I became too exhausted from hate and even he became a faded figment in my life that was shaping anew.

When the soft, fluffy, crinkling diaper was securely affixed to my body, when the little robotic fingers were done taping me up—only then was I brought out of the machine, my body a woefully vulnerable vehicle, my mind erased.

So now I’m fourteen, my second childhood actually having bettered the first, and I’m telling my story now to a new audience whom I hope doesn’t take my precocious vocabulary or insight into the human experience as signs of a hoax.

For there are things out there – people, machines – that will take from you, that will scour each and every vector as you helplessly writhe and wriggle, and all that you love will be carried away.

I beg you to believe me.

Take care.

_____---littletrip at live dot com