Chapter One

BUZZZZZZZZZZZZ!!!!!!

Tom's annoying alarm clock woke him up once again at 6:30 AM, as it did every weekday. He quickly got up from his bed to turn the blasted thing off as he needed to, since it sat on his desk about 10 feet away - then as always he hopped back into bed. He waited a few minutes for his heartbeat to return to normal, then he lay on his bed for several more minutes. He wished he could sleep another hour, but he knew he had to get ready quickly to catch the bus to his private school in Marin County, which picked him and his sister up from the street corner a block from their house at 7:22 AM. As he lay on his bed, he soon heard his sister Margaret enter the bathroom behind his room to take a shower. He waited for her to finish so he could take his. Getting up in the morning was a real pain! Tom liked taking long showers and not feeling rushed, but this was impossible every morning before school - he was lucky to get 5 minutes in the shower before getting dressed, grabbing a bite, and walking out the door with his school supplies, but as usual, he managed all this.

On the school bus, Tom's mind wandered, as it often had. How he dreaded Phoenix Lake High! Though it was a beautiful school with a large outdoor campus in the woods, not to mention very exclusive (at $3200 a semester tuition, quite a bit in the '70s, it was said to be the most expensive high school west of the Mississippi) there was very little Tom looked forward to in this elitist environment. Of the 320 Phoenix Lake students, only about one-quarter lived in San Francisco as did Tom and Margaret, who commuted by bus along with most of them. The vast majority of students were snobby Marinites who had little to do with people from The City, though these were the ones Tom was most interested in. Tom was very much a hermit. He had no friends to speak of and spent nearly all his time alone, either daydreaming to himself or listening compulsively to Top 40 radio at home. Tom knew all the hit songs - he could tell you all the top 40 songs, as he heard them every Sunday on Casey Kasem's American Top 40, but he rarely shared this knowledge with his peers, nor much of anything else. Tom was very much a loner, wrapped up in his private world of daydreams. In many ways, this made him comfortable - by contrast with elementary school, in which he had been picked on both emotionally and physically by his peers, now Tom had practically no interpersonal contact. For the first two years of high school that had been fine, but now it was taking its toll on him. At 16, although Tom had had his eye on a beautiful girl named Michelle in his French class ever since his Freshman year, he had never had the courage to ask her out on a date even once, and by now it had seemed too late, for she was now going steady with Joe Walker, the high school champion swimmer and lacrosse player. By contrast, Tom hated sports and avoided them as much as possible. Besides his great love of popular music, Tom's main passion was mathematics, which naturally made him stand out negatively in the eyes of most of his peers. Tom realized all this, but by now he didn't really care - he'd come to accept his unfortunate state of affairs.

Although Tom had lived with his shyness and inability to pursue girls for the past two years, by now it was beginning to become intolerable. To make matters worse, Phoenix Lake was having its annual Junior-Senior dance next Friday and he still hadn't found a date. He was really hoping to go, but he was much too afraid to ask anyone! Besides, Michelle was the only girl he really cared about asking, and he knew she would be going with Joe. Tom figured his only options were to go stag as he usually had to his high-school dances or not to go at all. He wasn't satisfied with either of these alternatives. *DAMNIT!!!* he kept telling himself. If only he had pursued Michelle in his Freshman French class, when she had shown obvious interest in him, as no girl before had ever done! Though Tom had often cursed himself for blowing it with her, he could never get her out of his mind! Yet Tom still felt secure in his inner world of fantasy - nobody could hurt him there, as they had so often before. Although Tom listened almost exclusively to the latest hits, he knew a few oldies, and there was one whose lyrics rang all too true to him, "I Am a Rock" by Simon and Garfunkel. He felt the last few lines summarized his life pretty well:

One solitary habit Tom had developed over the past few years was drawing pictures in his room at home. Though this in itself didn't seem so strange, he never told anyone about it. The reason for his reservation had to do with the nature of the drawings - they were of all things drawings of invisible women! Tom loved drawing them, as he did once a week or so, usually on Friday or Saturday nights when he was alone in his room, as he usually was, while his sister and most of his peers were out having fun. These were the times Tom felt most lonely and depressed, and drawing the pictures definitely helped! He'd been doing them now for the past five years or so, and they were definitely improving, or so he felt. All of Tom's private fantasies went into his drawings. Each time he'd see an attractive woman, he made a mental image of her, which he stored in the back of his mind, along with so much other stuff, like the Top 40 songs and all the math equations he'd learned. Unlike most of his peers, at age 16, Tom was a total virgin - he hadn't even kissed a girl yet, much less touched any of their private parts! Nevertheless, Tom had a very strong sex drive, though it was doubtful anyone else knew about it, except for his family, to whom he'd sometimes confessed his desperation. But Tom's sexual fantasies were quite unusual, or so he felt at least. For instance, unlike most of his peers, Tom wasn't at all turned on by nudity. He could never understand why some of his peers made such a fuss about dirty magazines like Playboy and Penthouse - the few times Tom had browsed through the centerfolds, they did very little for him. That wasn't what got him going. By contrast, he became much more aroused by women's clothes! Every time Tom saw an attractive woman dressed nicely, he became instantly turned on. It didn't matter where it was - in a restaurant, a theater, a supermarket, or even on the street or the city bus! Whenever he had such a vision, she instantly became the object of his desires, though he would never in a million years give her any indication that this was so. Instead,

he would usually catch a few quick embarrassing glimpses, usually while she wasn't looking, and store this visual information in his cerebrum for later retrieval.

It wasn't just the clothes that turned him on - it was also the women. Tom was mainly attracted to blondes, although Michelle was a brunette. Thus, Tom had decided a few years ago to include the entire woman along with her clothes in some of his drawings. Each drawing he made had two versions, one with the entire woman along with her clothes and the other with just her clothes being shown. Tom was mostly turned on by pantyhose - thus all the women in his drawings wore them. In the invisible version, the nylons were shown along with the rest of her clothes - dresses, high heels, and makeup, though the hosiery would be transparent, as it should be. Tom loved his drawings and almost always got off in his bed after making them. In fact, in order to get excited, most every night before going to bed, he'd go through his numerous drawings to help him get turned on.

But now Tom was feeling quite depressed. For perhaps the first time in his life, he longed for something more, something REAL! Unfortunately, now this seemed hopeless. He'd blown it with Michelle and he knew it! What was the sense of beating himself over this loss? He figured he'd just have to go on with his life, miserable as it was, and remain turned on by his fantasy woman. If only she were REAL! A real invisible woman would solve all his problems, or so he thought. She wouldn't be a real person - just a product of his imagination as illustrated by his numerous drawings, but she'd be a real invisible woman, who could talk to him, dress up for him, and perhaps even make love to him! But Tom was very much a realist, his mind firmly based in science and rational ideas, and he knew this could never happen.

Upon returning home from school, he was in for the surprise of his life!

TO BE CONTINUED