Just because something's a book, that doesn't mean it has to be tasteful.
Sicko, I Set You Free is a collection of the funniest erotica the author could think of while listening to his editor drone on and on about the genius of William Faulkner. Within these artistically dubious pages, staid small town journalists, minimum wage food court workers, brilliant Victorian detectives, and even immortal vampires who should know better fall prey to their unhealthy nude whims. Not for the faint of heart or the unpolluted of soul, Sicko, I Set You Free is precisely the kind of book your parents warned would lead you to wind up exactly like that no-good Andy Mittendorf down the street. And just as Uncle Tom's Cabin and Our Town did, these twelve euphemism-laden stories should prove once and for all that men are utterly worthless sex fiends.
The following pages contain rampant smut and perversion, and possess no redeeming aspect whatsoever, or so I thought when I wrote them, huddled over my rolltop desk late at night in a cold dark room with a candle strapped to my forehead. But now, as a wizened ninety-four year old, I can look back and see that what I wrote as a chipper lad of eleven may serve some purpose after all.
Part of the problem with society, it could be argued, is that sex is taken way too seriously. (The other part of the problem with society is that the Yankees SUCK, man!! They SUCK!!!) What I have tried to do with these stories is take the absurdity of sex and the inherent misogyny of male-oriented porn to its extreme. In this book, women sure do get treated like sex objects, but at least the men sometimes have to pay for the consequences of their uncontrolled droolification.
Oh, who am I kidding, this stuff is just fun to write. For the record, I am a sweet, honest, charitable chap who dreams endlessly of romance and the ultimate caring relationship. What I write sometimes in the privacy of my own cell block does not truly reflect my own views about sex between men and women. Except for the stuff about doing it on top of a moving schoolbus---sorry, dude, but that is really, really hot.
Anyway,
Soren Narnia
P.S. The crazy thing is, this was almost, almost, a children's book about a magical boat and the mysterious but benevolent old man who guards the secret of its gentle powers. Interesting.
I had already carted all the basic supplies necessary to sustain a single gal of twenty-six until her next paycheck (six cans of tomato soup, six cans of Calves-Be-Slim, six cans of wontons) when it struck me that I was almost out of cereal. Cereal to me is like the Koran to Cat Stevens, so I beat feet to the breakfast aisle and surveyed the fall line of offerings. Praisin' My Raisins was too sweet for my taste, Bran Francisco ("the Golden Gate Bridge to good colon health") was too insipid, and Eat Oats Like You Mean It was somehow intimidating. I had just about settled on a super-sized box of ever-dependable Lick-O's when I saw a cereal two feet to the left that riveted my reporter's keen gaze.
It was a very bland, plain rice cereal in an unassuming yellow box. The edible bits were of no particular shape or color. All in all, just another lame offering from some anonymous company committed to middle-of-the-road discount breakfast fare. But the name of the cereal, that was something different. It was called, simply, HOT WET CHOODLE.
Shell-shocked, I grabbed a box of the stuff and, leaving my cart behind, strode right up to Yimsy, the egg-shaped weekday cashier who occasionally had to be rushed to the hospital in mid-shift for swallowing her gum.
"Yimsy!" I said, thrusting the box in her face. "Did you have any idea this was on the shelf?"
"Well, it's cereal, ain't it?" she replied, a minty yet somehow tomblike odor gushing from her gob. "Where else would it be, up your butt?" She cackled knowingly.
"Never mind," I said testily. I was about to ask her to page Gus-Gus, the owner of Lazy Eyes, but then it occurred to me that the best thing to do was go straight to my office and make some phone calls. I didn't want anyone else muscling in on my story.
Now when I say "office", see, the thing is, right now I'm sharing a desk with a few of the guys from Distribution. Some would call them "paper delivery boys", but they're pretty mature for fourteen. Anyway, the phone works fine, and with my box of Hot Wet Choodle (contents sold by weight, not by volume) in hand, I dialed a 1-800 number that connected me with the consumer affairs department of the Profit Pusher General Product Corporation. After wading through various menu options, still staring in disbelief at the name of the cereal contrasted with the cartoon images of two perky elfin creatures hopping about on either side of the bowl depicted on the box, I finally got a customer service representative to pick up.
"Profit Pusher," the man said. "This is..."---he emitted a slight grunt for some reason---"...Curt."
"Hello, my name is Donna McTippit, and I'm a reporter for the Tufton Flats Herald-Newsulationist," I informed Curt. "I'd like to address the name of one of your breakfast cereals."
There was a slight pause, and I heard Curt shifting in his chair. Then he held the phone away from his mouth for a moment, muttering, "Don't stop now, Snookie, I'm real close!" to someone in the background.
"Hello?" I said.
"Sorry, yes, ma'am, what is the name of the product in question?" Again he grunted and breathed in sharply.
"You're marketing a cereal called Hot Wet Choodle!" I said. "Do you realize how offensive that is to a woman like me?!"
"I'm afraid I don't understand, miss," said Curt before sighing blissfully for some strange reason. "How is that offensive exactly?"
I rolled my eyes. "I don't know what things are like in Salt Silo, Missouri," I said angrily, "but here in Iowa, you can't just go around referring to a woman's...place... so openly. I think our six hundred readers will be most interested in hearing about this affront!"
"Could you hold on for juuuuuust one second, Miss?" Curt asked, and before I could respond I heard the phone set down on a tabletop. After that, there came a "Holy JESUS, you can swallow a lot of funfoam!" from Curt, and then he instructed the girl in the room with him to "say the Pledge of Allegiance now....lemme see it spill out the sides of your mouth."
He picked up the phone again. "I've just been talking with our legal department, miss," he lied.
"You have not!" I exclaimed. "You've been receiving oral sex on the other end of this phone!"
"Madam, please....if you agree not to run a story criticizing our company, we'll issue an immediate recall notice for the remaining boxes of Hot Wet Choodle."
"Not good enough," I countered. "This is going into the paper tomorrow."
"Well, then," Curt said as I faintly heard his zipper being drawn upwards, "how about a coupon for three free boxes of StrawWOWberry Toast-B-Qs?"
I paused. He really had me in a bind. This could be a truly huge story for me, and maybe even a chance to impress those pompous bigshots over at the Tufton Tribune and Lottery Watcher. But I had a tragic weakness for all the Toast-B-Q flavors, including BlueBURSTberry and ChocoCHOCOlate.
"All right," I agreed, "but those boxes had better be off the shelf in this state and all other states within a week, and I'll expect that coupon FedExed to me."
"Very good, ma'am. Have an orgasmic day." With that, he hung up the phone. I'm sure he was satisfied in more ways that one, but I was not feeling so complete. Had I sacrificed my journalistic integrity somehow? I wasn't sure.
I knew I shouldn't have trusted myself to buy only health food, though, because naturally I wound up in the cereal aisle again like a junkie looking for a fix. The boxes of Hot Wet Choodle had been removed, I saw, so everything was back to normal. I took a small box of Four Grains and a Nut of Some Kind and headed for the checkout line. I stopped dead in my tracks when I passed a pyramidal display at the end of the aisle featuring a new, typically bland wheat cereal from Profit Pusher.
Yeah, bland as a Tufton Tuesday, except that the cereal was inexplicably called SHOVE THAT WANGIE INSIDE ME. The little elfin creatures were back, dancing around the bowl like demented....well, elves. EIGHT ESSENTIAL NUTRIENTS! one shouted in a cartoon balloon. YUM YUM YUMMY! yelled the other. I ran to the nearest pay phone, shrieking at the top of my lungs.
"Profit Pusher General Product Corporation, this is Helen," answered a pleasant-sounding young woman after I had punched in an interminable sequence of ones, twos, threes, and pound signs.
"Yes, I need to complain yet again about the name of a new cereal!" I said loudly. "I'm an important reporter and you people have gone over the line!"
"I understand, ma'am," Helen said. "I'll be happy to assist you. To better help in this matter, I'm going to need a bit of information from you, is that okay?"
"Sure sure," I told her. "But then I'm going to need the name of the CEO!"
"Certainly," Helen said soothingly. "Can I have your name please?"
"Donna McLudlow McTippit."
"And where are you calling from, Ms. McTippit?"
"Tufton Flats, Iowa, fifty-five miles east of West Lemon City."
"And what, may I ask, are you wearing?"
"A sports bra and bicycle shor---wait a second, why do you need to know THAT?" I asked in disbelief.
"Just for a mental image, sweetie," Helen the Operator told me, in a lower voice than she had started the conversation with. "Mmm, I bet your caboose looks amazing in those shorts. Is the sports bra nice and snug against your bulbs?"
"Why yes it is, Helen, and you're going to see just HOW snug when I fly up there to demand to speak to whoever's in charge of that nuthouse you call a company!"
"Mmmmmm, I like to see a woman in a tight sports bra. Tell me about your nipples; are they---"
I slammed down the receiver and ran home. Then I made sure the box of Shove That Wangie Inside Me cereal was secured in the grocery basket of my moped and set out for the airport. By the time I returned to work, I hoped to have an exclusive that would shove yesterday's nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan onto page six of the Family Living section, and perhaps finally arouse the hoidy toidy attentions of those stuffed shirts over at The Mid-Central Iowa Farm and Fruit Stand Reader!
I did a little research on the company on the flight to Salt Silo, thanks to the nice man sitting beside me who let me use his computer. It was a lot like the kind the newspaper finally bought last year, which broke immediately. (It was so weird---I was just sitting in front of it, doing nothing for three minutes, and suddenly the screen went dark and it looked like I was soaring through stars in blackest outer space. We've all been afraid to even touch it ever since.)
Profit Pusher had been founded so recently that they hadn't even issued their first earnings report yet. By all accounts, it seemed to be a perfectly normal establishment which planned to manufacture everything from waffle smoothers to butter shapers to bobblehead dolls of the great vice presidents in history. They had begun with breakfast cereal, and were truly a virgin company asking for bigtime trouble by going overboard so quickly with their perverted ideals. I was infinitely disturbed by the fact that their website was sponsored by six or seven pop-up ads beckoning the web surfer to "CUM SEE THE SLUTTIEST BRAILLISTS WE COULD FIND" or "LOG ON NOW FOR THE HOTTEST AFTER-HOURS MUSEUM SEX EVER"!
The central office was on the fourth floor of the Van Vangel Building in the snootiest shopping district in all of Salt Silo. I walked into the receptionist's area and was greeted with the shock of my life. Greeting me was not the smiling face of a helpful secretary, but a strange man's naked buttocks as he thrust himself repeatedly into some woman he'd lifted onto the front desk! She was urging him to "give it to me like you did at SeaWorld" when I shrieked at them to stop.
"What on earth is wrong with you people?!" I yelled. "Have you no sense of decency at all?!"
The man pulled up his pants quickly and, patting down his mussed hair, dashed off down the hallway. The girl ran behind her desk and sat down in a fevered state, smiling at me and asking me if I had an appointment.
"I'm here to do a news story about this sick, sick organization," I told her. "I want to see the president, now."
"Um, okay," said Miss No-Panties, pressing a button on her intercom. "I apologize for the gadoogling, miss, but after all, it IS casual day."
"Great," I said disdainfully. "I'd hate to see the office Christmas party!"
"Mr. Bootingaily, a woman here to see you," the receptionist said over the intercom.
"A woman, eh?" came the reply. "What's she look like? My type? Ah, it doesn't matter, I'd shnazz almost anything today."
My eyes widened angrily.
"This looks like official business, sir," the secretary said nervously. "Shall I send her in?"
"Sure thing, Sweet Beams," Bootingaily said. "And bring us some coffee if you can. What color is your bra today?"
"No bra at all today, sir."
"Just the way I like it!" Bootingaily said, and I was already on my speechless way down the hall. On the way to the office, I witnessed yet another horrendous sight. A man and woman in business attire were standing by a water cooler, chatting amicably about an upcoming conference in Boxmop Junction, while the woman absently stroked his jutting wicket through his open fly. I blinked in an effort to make it go away but it was of no use. They smiled at me as I passed, as if nothing was wrong.
A tall man in his late thirties opened the door to a spacious and tastefully decorated interior office. "Hi, I'm Ted Bootingaily. Come in and have a seat. In the chair, on my face, wherever you'd like."
"Mr. Bootingaily!" I said. "I am Donna McTippit, a star reporter for the Tufton Flats Herald-Newsulationist. And I'm also a woman who is about to report you and this entire company to the highest court in the land for gross sexual harrassment!"
Bootingaily frowned. "Oops. Forget I said that. Please, take the chair, let's discuss this all before you do something drastic."
I sat opposite him and leveled a serious finger at him. "Your company is marketing cereals with pornographic names, and conducting an aggressive office policy of open coital activity between employees. What can you possibly say in your defense?"
"Well, Ms. McTippit, we're a very new company. Sometimes you hit a few stumbling blocks before everything gets straightened out." At that moment, 'Sweet Beams' came in with the coffee. Topless.
"Uh, Snuzzer-pie," Bootingaily said abashedly, "you might want to cover up while Ms. McTippit is here. I'll explain later."
"Okay," she said, stopping herself in the middle of rubbing Sweet 'n' Low on her nipples, which was apparently meant for her boss to slurp off. "I'll be outside." With that she sashayed out. I felt nauseous.
"Now then, Ms. McTippit," Bootingaily continued, "what is this 'sexual harrassment' you speak of?"
"You mean you really don't know?" I asked, dumbfounded. "You don't know the definition of that term?"
"Um....sorry," he said, looking not at me but at my chest. "That one's new to me."
"For God's sake, do I have to show it to you in your own employee handbook?" I asked, sitting straight up in my chair so he couldn't get any more cleavage than he'd already sampled. "Do you even HAVE one?"
"Oh yes," he replied, enthused. "Just had it printed last week. Here." He pulled open his top drawer and shoved a forty-page booklet towards me. "Read my introduction. I have a blonde joke in there that will absolutely slay you!"
I gagged when I saw that the cover of the booklet, entitled WELCOME, CITIZEN, TO PROFIT PUSHER!, bizarrely showed a man engaged in cunnilingus on a woman as she sat on a bench in what appeared to be an orbiting space station. Testily I flipped to the table of contents to point out the chapter that would explain why Profit Pusher should, for moral, ethical, and legal reasons, exert slightly less effort encouraging rampant intercourse and lewd cereal names.
"My God," I said after a moment's scanning. "You HAVE no sexual harrassment policy at this company!"
"I told you, we're pretty new," Bootingaily said lamely. "Still crossing the T's and dotting the I's. We haven't even connected the Tivo in the break room yet."
Suddenly it came to me in a flash, exactly what had happened. This new company, deprived of an official policy prohibiting sexual harrassment in the workplace, had become the worst case scenario of what could happen without one. They'd all gone insane with sex, and it had now spread to an outside world where innocent children could not even pour a bowl of their breakfast cereal without being exposed to Profit Pusher's rampant smut!
"Sales of our new cereal are pretty slow, actually," Bootingaily said, scratching his chin. "Do you think if we had one of those sexual ass-cement policies, we could foster a workplace in which we might thrive?"
"Sexual HARRASSMENT," I corrected him, "and yes, I think you have no other option but to stop the insanity right now! Call your lawyers and have them crank out something today!"
"Oh, I will, Miss McTippit, I will," Bootingaily said, repentant. "In the meantime, is there anything I can do to dissuade you from running a negative story about us, just until we institute a sexual harrassment policy?"
"Well..." I said. "I'm not sure...."
He smiled. "How about I come around this desk and gadoogle your cute midwestern choodle till you pass out?" Then he slapped his head as I leapt to my feet in outrage. "I'm sorry, that just slipped!"
"The story runs tomorrow," I told him, turning away with purpose and determination.
It was then that he hit me with the lowest blow of all, which was an offer to go down to the production floor and pull the giant handle that released the honey coating onto two thousand pounds of soon-to-be Toast-B-Qs. Despite the absurdly obvious symbolism of that act, I couldn't resist. I was suddenly not just an eater of cereal; I was, for just a moment, a creator of it! In return I offered to give them one last chance. I would come back in two weeks to see if things had become normal around that carnal zoo they called a corporation.
Only eight days passed before I had to rush back there, my anger roiled as it had never been roiled before. On the Tuesday after I had met Ted Bootingaily for the first time, I received a coupon in the mail for a free box of Profit Pusher's newest banana-flavored cereal. GREETINGS, VALUED CUSTOMER! it read in bold green Century Gothic type (a personal favorite font of mine since childhood, which made what came next even worse somehow). THANKS FOR TAKING THE TIME TO EXPRESS AN INTEREST IN OUR PRODUCTS! HELP YOURSELF TO A FREE SIXTEEN OUNCE BOX OF VAGINALICIOUS PENISPOPS, APPEARING AT A GROCER NEAR YOU NEXT MONTH! A PRIZE IS INCLUDED IN EVERY SPECIALLY MARKED PACKAGE
¡XWILL YOU GET THE VIBRATOR OR THE FLUORESCENT CONDOM? OPEN IT UP AND FIND OUT!
Within hours I was walking into the offices of Profit Pusher, pad and pen in hand, and this time nothing could stop me from running the story of the century. Nothing, that is, but the wall of bodies I stumbled into upon pushing open the glass door that led into the reception area.
There must have been fourteen or fifteen people in there, all of them obviously Profit Pusher employees, engaged in every sort of sexual act imaginable. Half-dressed, one-quarter-dressed, and not dressed at all, they copulated with abandon, on the front desk, under the portrait of Martin Luther King on the south wall, and beside the Anne Geddes calendar on the west one. Ties, belts, cufflinks and panty hose lay everywhere. One woman was getting shnazzed from behind while she bent over the copy machine, her fingers working the TRAY SELECT button with admirable, but disgusting, concentration. Another woman was deep-throating a man's foghorn as he sorted through his personal electronic organizer, searching for an elusive phone number. A tall couple, both dressed in the most formal of business attire, were intercoursing on the floor directly in front of me, and as they did so, they discussed the proper formatting for a loss prevention spreadsheet due on someone named Dicky's desk that Friday.
I screamed and ran past them all toward Bootingaily's office. The sounds of their orgy followed me like the reverberations of an earthquake. In the hall I heard a strangled cry of "Look out below, pilgrims!" and looked up just in time to avoid being hit in the elbow with a stream of sperm from the ceiling above. Two people had been doing it atop a filing cabinet.
Bootingaily was in his office, thumbing through a copy of Penthouse. His erection strained his blue cotton Dockers.
"What the heck happened here?!" I shouted. "I demand to see the sexual harrassment policy you were supposed to institute last week, and if I don't see it right now, I'm calling my editor from the nearest pay phone, as well as the editors of The New York Times, Le Monde, and This Week in Tufton Flats!"
"The policy went into effect the day after you left!" Bootingaily protested, putting the Penthouse down but using one finger to hold his place. He shoved the new employee handbook across his desk to me. I flipped to chapter seven, entitled "Sexual Harrassment in the Workplace and Profit Pusher's 'I Care' Program." The chapter was one third of a page long. These are the only words I was greeted with:
1) Employees probably shouldn't gadoogle other employees in the middle of business meetings with other companies. Under-the-table stroking should suffice in these situations.
2) Linda in Payroll likes to take it in the wetmelon only on Thursdays and Fridays for some reason. To her it's strictly a "weekend" thing. Whatever.
3) Doing anything other than groping or finger-yoidling next to the coffee machine can really be dangerous. Remember that thing that happened to Dave. Ouch.
4) Try not to go spungo in a female employee's hair if that employee has a teleconference that day.
"THIS IS IT?!" I bellowed. "THIS is what your attorneys came up with?!"
"Well, first of all, it's not quite fair to call them 'attorneys'. They're still in the law school application process. But some of these guys got B's and C's in college, so it's only a matter of time before they're ready."
I hung my head low. "I give up," I said. "I don't even have the energy to write the silly article anymore. No one would believe me, anyway. I'd be laughed out of my editor's office if I tried to describe what this place was like."
"There, there," Bootingaily said, moving around his desk. "It's not right that an attractive young woman like yourself should suffer all this stress. An attractive young woman whose flowing blonde hair and large, round zoomers should have you thinking about other things in life. I think what you really need is....a bowl of cereal."
"Yes," I said gratefully. "Please....please, a bowl of cereal."
Bootingaily went to a side cabinet and opened it. I glimpsed a box of Vaginalicious Penispops and closed my eyes as I heard the peaceful sound of two percent milk splash over a new bowl's contents. When I opened my eyes again, Bootingaily was holding the bowl at kind of an odd angle, sort of pressed below his waist for some reason. I didn't care. All I thought about was the cereal and how soothing it might be to my jangled psyche. I shoveled mouthful after mouthful as Bootingaily held the bowl firmly in front of him.
"That's a girl," he said, sounding pleased. Well, I thought, at least he had pride in his company's product. "Now, drink down the rest of the milk...."
And I did, and I probably don't have to tell you, the worldly reader, about what horrifyingly popped into my mouth as the milk disappeared, and the evil tricks that an ogre like the CEO of Profit Pusher could conjure involving the cutting of a hole in the bottom of what had truly seemed like a genuine porcelain bowl. At first I thought I had merely gotten hold of an unusually large and firm faux-banana marshmallow, and excited by my good fortune, I began to suck on it heartily. It was Bootingaily's revolting "Ahhhhhhh" sound that clued me in to the truth. My reaction was understandably cataclysmic.
But when that terrible man, that terrible, strangely polite, and rather attractive man, made me an offer I simply could not refuse, I found myself with that hard sausage in my mouth again. I suppose there are just some men in this world who understand on some innate, primal level that no girl could possibly resist the challenge to design and oversee her own line of nutritious oat cereals, and to be offered a full-time job as a Profit Pusher consultant on all cereal matters in the eastern third of the United States.
I suppose it may not have been necessary to yoidle Ted right then and there in my girlish delight over that amazing new opportunity, but don't you see that I had just won the Irish Sweepstakes of cereal fantasy and could no longer control myself? That wasn't really me who ripped off my blouse and bra right there in the office, climbed on top of him, and lowered myself onto his throbbing gavel¡Xit was a being I call Cereal Witch, and Lord knows I wish I could control her. I'm sure only another woman can understand the uncontrolled eroticism of breakfast in a bowl. I mean, there's milk, a bowl, and little bits of frosted this-and-that....do I have to draw you a picture?
"Yeah, shnazz me, sweetie!" I cried as I rolled over and let Ted slide Mister Salty in from behind. "Oh, you bad bad manufacturer of the most important meal of the day!"
"I think your CHOODLE'S gonna be my most important meal of the day!" came the reply.
"Wow, I'll bet YOU'D stay hard in milk!" I yelled, feeling my orgasm burst through me. The sensation of Ted spilling in my mouth reminded me of more innocent times when I used to swirl a spoonful of Eat-iskies around in there. Oh, the early morning joy!
That all happened last October. These days I come to work happy and I leave happy, and I've more or less forgotten about my silly dreams of pounding the pavement in search of headlines. After my little erotic incident in Ted's office that day, I was able to comport myself much more calmly at Profit Pusher, but I swear, there are times when I get so excited by the important work I'm doing here that I just can't stop myself from occasionally grabbing someone in the hallways and spreading my legs for nutritious, delicious wangie (or, once in a while, the tongues of a couple of the gals down in Human Resources¡Xhey, being inventive is part of my job!) In the meantime, I'm still in touch occasionally with my old friends at the Herald-Newsulationist, but I've been awfully busy this winter on the plans to launch Profit Pusher's newest cereal, a chex-style offering we call Oh God! Oh God! I'm Gonna Spritz All Over The Good China! You'd think the biggest headache would be fielding the thousands of phone calls from angry consumers about our product names, but really, it's just having to come up with a new game for the kids on the back on every box. Take a look at this seek-a-word for me.....too difficult, maybe?
Fortunately, I worked last Sunday's shift with Lila, who usually manages to bring an atmosphere of campiness to the proceedings. She and I both despise having jobs, and whenever we work together, not only does nothing get done, but the price of Tomes-a-Waitin' stock actually seems to dip noticeably during the next day's Wall Street trading. Lila is in her mid-twenties, thin and blonde with green eyes, and she likes to dress to make everyone else look like zombified mental patients. She has often pushed the restraints of Casual Day to the level of Asimovian fantasy, forgoing her usual tasteful fashion sense for the most eye-popping garb. She'll wear leather or even plastic reflective pants to work, low-cut tank tops with vaguely offensive slogans printed on them, necklaces draped one on top of the another until you wonder how she can even stand up anymore, Bono-like sunglasses, high heels...all to say to the world, "You can make me work, but you cannot make me care."
Last Sunday I oozed into my shift after a late night of chatting with Lila online about how we just couldn't take one more wretched day of this $7.00 an hour crap-athalon to find her in fine fashion form, as always. She had donned a red leather mini-skirt and a hilariously tight black sweater to accompany silver high heels.
"I see you're in the mood to risk being fired today," I said in greeting.
"Damn right," she said in reply. "It's been a bad morning already. Some woman asked if I could please hurry ringing her up because her church service started in fifteen minutes."
Ooo, the churchies. They're all over us on Sundays. They come in after yapping with God and never buy a goddamn thing.
The first hour at work was one of record-breaking miasma. We had a total of three customers. Each requested a book we didn't have and which we lamely offered to special order for them, knowing they'd just walk right across the mall and buy it at Booktitanica, our monstrous competitor. Each looked at us with a dazed expression of utter lifelessness and dribbled out the door like lukewarm spit from a baby's drinking glass.
"All right, that's it," Lila said to me as we lethargically stickered the new John Grisham novel. (I think this one was about a young firebrand with something to prove!) "I need some human reaction here. And if I get fired, I'm taking you down with me."
"Then it's agreed," I said, suddenly finding meaning in my life. "We'll just accept that today is our last day. Let our shameful dismissals bring us much personal satisfaction."
I wasn't exactly sure what kind of chaos Lila was planning to create; I thought maybe she'd just run up and down the fiction aisle like usual, telling anyone who would listen how 'the vampires were coming to claim us', or pretend to be a customer and ask me loud stupid questions, like why the Classics section had omitted the works of Dean Koontz. But to my delight, she promptly undid the top three buttons of her sweater and leaned over the counter slightly, awaiting an approaching middle-aged man who, with perfect dramatic serendipity, was coming to the counter to buy a copy of a respected national periodical of current social and political discourse called Almost-Nude Grannies 'n' Friends.
The poor sod put his periodical on the counter inches from Lila's semi-exposed moon pies. The front catch of her black bra was plainly visible to anyone.
"Hi," she said to the customer with just a hint of lasciviousness.
The man muttered something back. Lila rang him up, standing straight and arching her back slightly.
I swear to God, the guy paid absolutely no attention. Here was this cute blonde with her cleavage exposed to the world and he was too dead to the world to notice. He took his change and his magazine and left.
"Oh...my...Jesus," Lila whispered, and I nearly burst out laughing.
Undaunted for the moment, Lila resolved to take things one step further with the next customer, who luckily was a teenage boy. This couldn't miss, right? He was even buying a cheap paperback about Britney Spears, so obviously this sixteen year-old doofus had only one thing on his mind, and it wasn't the haunting melodies of "Oops, I Did It Again." Lila reached for the stars, undoing two more sweater buttons, leaving only the very bottom button fastened. Most of her satin bra was visible, and she made sure to scrunch her shoulders just a bit as the boy came to the counter so that her curve-a-lots were squeezed together in a most fascinating way.
Goddamn if that kid didn't lay a ten dollar bill on the counter with bovine eyes and walk away with his Britney book without taking a single look at that Peabody Award-winning chest.
"It's true!" Lila cried, throwing her arms up in the air as the kid walked out. "Nerve gas has eaten away the central nervous systems and brain stems of our city's populace!" She crouched behind the counter for a moment and undid the last button of her sweater. Then she was shimmying it off entirely.
Tears of laughter began to flow down my cheeks. "Girl, what are you doing? Give it up. Homo Sapiens is being declared officially dead."
"I refuse to believe people are so damn ignorant," she said. I was suddenly staring at her naked back. She had taken off her bra and laid it down on top of a box of receipt tape. Then she put her sweater back on quickly, standing up again. She made a concentrated effort now to experiment with different mathematical button combinations, hoping to expose herself as much as possible without actually drawing the attention of mall security. She turned to me at length and said, "Okay, how's this for a grabber?"
She had fastened just one button again, the one a couple of inches beneath her breasts. She turned sideways a bit so I could see how the slope of one of them led down behind the material of the black sweater, concealing a nipple by bare centimeters.
"You underestimate what the media, the government, and the demons of consumerism have done to reduce the awareness of the masses," I said, sweeping my arm across the bookstore, where a total of two other duds were standing and snooping through our substandard goods.
"Then screw it," Lila said cheerfully, and unfastened things again. Her sweater was now simply hanging open, her cleavage fully exposed. An older gentleman approached the counter to inquire as to the release date of the new Encyclopedia of Herbs, Shrubs, Grubs, and Assorted Greenery of Note. Lila checked the computer as he idly thumbed through a tiny book of Dylan Thomas's verse sitting on a display rack. She then told him it looked to be about August. The man left with a brief note of thanks. At one point during the exchange Lila's love dimes were clearly visible. The dude never gave a hint that he gave a rat's ass.
After several minutes of Lila's agonized shrieking and flailing, I offered to give her what I thought would be an informative demonstration in good customer service. While she stood there, making no attempt to cover herself, a middle-aged woman sidled up with a copy of whatever feel-good womany crap Oprah was pushing that day.
"Have you heard about our Discount Club, good madam?" I asked her.
"Uh, no," she said.
"Well, it's a wonderful thing," I told her. "For every twenty dollars you spend here at Tomes-a-Waitin', I will go down on you for a full half hour."
She absently turned the bookmark carousel around and around, looking for just the right colorful scrap of paper to pay three dollars for. "No thanks," she said.
"Are you sure? Our Bonus Club Members are guaranteed a minimum of two orgasms through oral sex."
"No, that's okay," the woman said. "I'll just take the book..."
It was then that Lila and I made a pact that went far beyond our original intention of simply getting fired. We would not rest until we had made history. Such was our frustration with the retail myopia which was coming to a head on that Sunday afternoon. It is said that there comes a time in every person's life when they must reach deep within themselves to attain a goal that seems beyond their grasp. One is reminded of Christopher Columbus' tireless pursuit of the New World, of Admiral Byrd's dogged, relentless quest for the Pole, and maybe even my old roommate Benny's ceaseless stalking of Catherine Zeta-Jones. At any rate, Lila and I vowed to take one great step forward in the battle against...well, it was a battle against something, right?
Suffice it to say that the next customer, a tobacco-chewing redneck, should have been shocked to his very foundations by the sight of a pretty, utterly topless bookstore clerk ringing up his copy of This Month in DogWalking while my hands gently massaged her naked mams from behind, causing her lickables to become fully aroused. Yet even the soft moan Lila emitted between the phrases "Would you like a..." and "...bag for that" did not distract that potatohead from his meaningless thoughts.
Nor was a young woman from Pensacola, Florida (that's what it said on her check) at all thrown by the image of Lila's hand cradling and slowly massaging my hard longshoreman as I informed her that her SAT study guide would come to a total of nineteen dollars and forty cents---"before tax, you lusty piece," I added casually.
And you would have thought, certainly, that when a Catholic priest came up to the counter and found Lila sitting on top of it with her legs spread and her leather skirt hiked up around her hips, he would have suspected something was amiss, that perhaps this bookstore chain could be doing a better job of helping its customers, and that maybe a call to the home office would be in order. He asked Lila where he might find a copy of Oh, the Places You'll Go!,and she could only respond with a fluttering of her eyelids and a breathless sigh.
"How about you, sir?" the priest asked the back of my head. The front of it was quite busy engulfing Lila's juicer. In fact, I could barely hear the man above the delightful wet licking and sucking sounds. I was courteous enough (I've always had a soft spot for the clergy, you see) to interrupt the proceedings briefly to tell him he might find that particular volume in the For Grads section. He thanked me and the next thing I knew Lila had grabbed the back of my head again and forced it back into place. I tongued her while she let out little sobs of approval, making a mental note both to order more Dr. Seuss titles for the summer rush and to draw Lila's gumdrop deeper into my mouth, giving it a few swirls for good measure, which she seemed to find acceptable.
The bookstore was actually getting a little busier now, and we decided without a word that it was time for the full show. I stood in front of the counter and took off my shirt. My jeans had already been unbuttoned and shucked down a bit so Lila could get a good hold of the Great Gatsby. It was just a matter of kicking off my shoes and my socks. Then Lila had taken care of the rest. I leaned back against the counter and she yanked off my pants, then off came my shorts with one fell swoop of her hand. I took her skirt off, her panties already having been flung away pre-oral. They now hung unassumingly from a sign informing our customers that our entire selection of children's bibles was twenty percent off all this month. We stood completely naked for a moment and then she led me behind the counter again by something that was standing out far more prominently than my hand. Someone was coming.
It was a sixty year old woman whom we recognized; she was a regular. The kind who was always asking if we matched our competitor's prices, and why we couldn't relocate to the other side of the mall so she wouldn't have to walk so far to get to us.
Glorious naked Lila was leaning over with her elbows on the counter. The old lady, Hortense by name, asked her if we had the new Farmer's Almanac.
"Not...just...yet," Lila said. The pauses between words were pretty much my fault. She could really only speak on the downside of the thrusts of the Last of the Mohicans sliding into her from behind.
"The release date on that would be---" I started, and snuggled myself deep into Lila, pausing there for a moment for convenience's sake. "---March 23rd, you nasty old crone!"
"Thank you," the crone said, and Lila and I both nodded politely as I cupped her prancing bosom, she throwing her arms back around my neck as we resumed our rhythm.
"I heard the new Almanac says it's going to be a hard winter," Hortense said dreamily. "Gonna be tough on my cukes and my tomatoes!"
"That's...life," Lila panted. I lowered one hand to her left ankle and lifted her leg up off the floor, to give Hortense and whoever else might be wandering around a slightly better view of the proceedings. I let out an impressive groan that was due half to the feel of Lila, half to pure showmanship.
"Of course, I can save forty cents if I buy the Almanac at MartMan," Hortense went on, touching her old woman's glasses to her cheek in thought.
"In these crazy times, you elderly windbag, you gotta do what you gotta do," I told her. Lila released herself from my yule log, spun around, and grabbed me by the arms. She pushed me backwards into the counter, and I hopped on top of it and laid back so my face was purse-level with Hortense. Lila climbed up on the counter and shimmied forward, taking the Great Emancipator in one hand and lowering herself onto it in one long, slow movement. After that, there was slightly less subtlety. She began to rock up and down on top of me, supporting herself by placing her left hand on the cash register.
A line had formed. There were four customers waiting behind Hortense, who was babbling something now about how in the old days (of the Mesozoic Era, one would assume) she could order almost anything from the Sears and Roebuck catalogue, from a genuine three-pronged lamshackey to a handmade wicker spinecob.
"Tell me, Hortense dear," I moaned, cradling Lila's frontnot as she lap-shnazzed me with an abandon that would make any Tomes-a-Waitin' shareholder beam with pride, "do you find the level of service here to be less than, say, what you experienced when you bought your first cotton gin from Sears?"
"Stop talking, I'm trying to Vesuvius!" Lila yelled at me. "How many chances do I get in this damn store?!"
And suddenly a voice cried out from the front of the store: "Oh my God, you're naked!"
Lila and I were far beyond the point where we could stop gadoogling, but we did look up for a moment to see our regional manager, the coldhearted, bald-pated Mr. Von Moptart, standing there with his clipboard, ready to document the slightest breach of company policy!
"Be with you in a jif, sir!" Lila cried out, and thrust herself downward one more time, grinding her thelma onto me for dear life, shivering slightly as her caged bird sang. Her orgasm began non-destructively enough, but soon fifty-seven dollars of company merchandise went flying off the counter.
Mr. Von Moptart ran forward, nearly stumbling over his own feet in a desperate attempt to shield the customers from the atrocity before them. He grabbed a large cardboard standee of Salman Rushdie and held it up to block their view.
"We're really almost done here," I assured our distressed visitor, feeling a new warmth and moisture swallowing my wangie.
"Mnnmmn almosht dnnnnnnnn," Lila agreed, her mouth temporarily occupied with more important pursuits than calling in special orders to Ingram.
"One dollar off any purchase of fifty dollars or more, folks!" Moptart shouted, putting the customers first as always, God bless him. "Just forget what you've seen here today!"
"Try and forget this!" Lila said loudly, sensing that I was about to erupt and stroking me frantically with her hand until, two seconds later, a seemingly endless stream of silkymilky leapt out. I did my damnedest to make Lila's chest the recipient of most of it, but if Hortense and a few other innocent bystanders caught a little of the action, well, it's like they say: You can't make an omelette without getting some sperm on people.
From that point on, what I remember mostly is Mr. Von Moptart accidentally choking on the phone in his desperate attempts to call 911, the overhead fire sprinklers being set off, and Lila demanding in the midst of all the turmoil that I go down on her again because I "hadn't quite aced it the first time". The store was cleared out, the police brought in drug dogs, the property was condemned, and Lila popped one more time, her legs wrapped around my shoulders in the History aisle, before we ran for it.
Basically the point is that last Sunday was not only the end of our tenure at Tomes-a-Waitin', but the end of our retail careers. There are now no less than one hundred and forty class action lawsuits pending against the company, while Lila and I escaped unscathed¡Xyou gotta love America and its willingness to blame anything and everything on corporations and not their crazy employees. She and I have interviews with the Salvation Army next week. Someone told us the work is honorable, but a little boring sometimes. Lila wants to know if she'll be allowed to wear only a bikini top to work.
"If there's one thing that's been missing in this life, it's the ability to score a session of sexual intercourse as one would score a professional baseball game," said Runyon McSlurpet, Chairman of the East-West Coalition of Bored Sexual Obsessives. "Many people feel uncomfortable when their partners suggest videotaping or even audiotaping sex, God knows why. I mean, like, get over it already, who do you think you are, Mary Magdalene? Now at last, the United States government, after thousands of years of incompetence, has finally done something right by inventing a system of sexual scoring so that every act of yoidling can at least be preserved on paper for future reference."
Marital attorneys are also hailing the new system, and plan to use filled scorebooks in celebrity divorce proceedings whenever possible.
OFFICIAL DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HORNY SERVICES RULES FOR SCORING SEXUAL INTERCOURSE
1) Participants should fill out their names, the date, the time, and the location of the act on a lined sheet of notebook paper, as well as weather conditions and an estimation of attendance figures, if more than ten people have stayed to watch. The name of the initiator of intercourse should be circled in pencil.
The following are the acronyms and symbols used on the scoresheet:
DK - Deep kissing.
Eat Me, Whispered the Oat Flakes
As a cub reporter for the third largest agricultural newspaper in Tufton Flats, Iowa, I'm trained to keep my eyes open for a story, any story which might enlighten and provoke our readership of six hundred strong. You might even recognize my name if you're a fellow member of the fifth estate; it was I who in 1998 went undercover to penetrate the secret cabal of county fair judges which unethically gave the award for Best Holstein Calf to Artie Sampster three years running in exchange for free annual tune-ups of the head judge's Toyota Camry. I made many enemies the day that sordid tale was printed, but the brush with controversy only encouraged my lust for journalism. I wasn't ready for the big time, though, until last October, when I wandered into Lazy Eyes Grocery and Meats for my usual weekly food run, only to stumble across a story that I knew would soon have one-third of downtown Tufton Flats scrambling for every word I wrote.
A victim of loneliness and a ravenous hunger for Toast-B-Q's, I went through my free boxes over the course of a long holiday weekend. I had always prided myself on keeping a nice trim figure, and I knew I'd have to start working those pounds off immediately, so I put on a sports bra and bicycle shorts and jogged down to Lazy Eyes for some kelp patties and bottled moisture (which has eighty percent less water than normal water)! As usual, I was greeted with prurient stares from all the local single men, who gazed at my jiggling backside like they were watching a total lunar eclipse or the late innings of a Tufton Ticks game.
Damn those freaks, their perversions were even starting to creep their way into my own mind. Sitting down at home after my flight from Salt Silo to eat the tasty contents of that shiny box of Shove That Wangie Inside Me (waste not, want not), I was seized with a strong urge to change into a bra and panties and watch men's golf on ESPN. But I resisted, and even though my dreams that night were tortured by images of men in bikini briefs, and me on the production floor of Profit Pusher whipping them on to churn out the cereal faster, faster, faster, I was okay by morning, and I'm proud to say that my hands strayed only once into my No-Zone. Meanwhile, I was very interested indeed in what I would find in Salt Silo in two weeks' time.
Lila, Part One: Bookstore Becomes Site of....
You Know
Working retail for a living is nightmare enough, but working at a cruddy mall bookstore called Tomes-a-Waitin' is the kind of torture that can drive good men mad. It's a soul-deadening experience intensified by having to work the noon to six shift on a Sunday, when the lamest customers stumble past the Gap and Radio Shack right into our store to thumb through the magazines, ask irritating questions, and gawk at us like retarded chickens as we explain our Discount Club to them at corporate gunpoint. I don't want to hear anymore about the so-called sufferings of people confined to the Gulag, or rotting in a prison during the French Revolution, or even buried alive in Pompeii. Any retail clerk knows a fate far worse than any of these alleged "difficulties".
How to Score Your Sex!
Perverts who have found themselves in a bit of a rut ever since Hustler ceased publication of its annual Hot Mennonite Chicks issue got an unexpected bonus this week when the Department of Health and Horny Services released the long-awaited rules and regulations for formally scoring a session of sexual intercourse. The complete rules are available online for $4.95 or are printed for free below, and scoresheets are downloadable from several government websites in PDF format. A complete leather-bound Sexual Scorebook is now for sale at many Target locations and includes an incense-scented pencil and an Individual Coital Records chart.
2) Each advancement or alteration during gadoogling should be noted on the next line in chronological order using the attached list of acronyms and symbols.
3) A prolonged individual technique or action should be noted with a + sign beside the act. For example, if a woman slurps her lover's peace pipe for longer than a minute, the scorer would write /B for "fellatio" with a + sign after it: /B+. For every minute afterward that she continues to suck, another + is added.
4) The individual technique or action which results in a standard orgasm for either partner should be circled. 'Standard orgasm' is here defined as one that is worth talking about at least one hour but no more than two days later. An individual technique or action which results in multiple orgasms should be noted with multiple circles. (Multiple orgasms should be carefully reviewed and verified by an independent authority before full credit is given, since it seems to be a phenomenon that only happens to other couples.)
5) Breaks in the action to towel off or sharpen the pencil should be noted by starting the scoring over again on an adjacent vertical row.
6) At the end of intercourse, the final figures should be totaled at the bottom of the scoresheet. Statistics should include total time elapsed, total number of orgasms, total number of errors, total number of passouts (if applicable), and final distance of ejaculation (if measurable).
FS - Finger sucking.
TS - Toe sucking.
EE - The earlobe thing.
RB - Removal of bra.
RP - Removal of panties/underwear.
H/H - First contact, hand to penis.
M/M - First contact, mouth to penis.
#H - First contact, hand to thelma.
#M - First contact, mouth to thelma.
#F - Almost anything involving feet.
/B - Fellatio.
/H - Gratification through use of the hand, plus its attached fingers.
# - Oral sex performed by the man; application of tongue to Lustminster Abbey; cunnilingus.
#* - Just plain eatin' choodle.
O/O - Rubbing of genitals against the heaving bosom.
AHHH - Weird but definitely cool rubbing of the genitals all over the woman's face.
(.)L - Nipple-sucking (left nipple).
(.)R - Nipple-sucking (right nipple).
(.)(.) - Breast squeezing/rubbing/massage/awed worship.
OW - Biting.
F^- Finger in rear.
H^ - Hand in rear.
FHK^ - Finger, hand, and knuckle in rear.
FHKE^ - Yep. Elbow.
V* - Insertion of the man's penis into the woman's vagina.
A* - Insertion of the man's penis into a place that is not quite the woman's vagina.
?* - Insertion of the man's penis into the woman's ear. (NOTE: Extended ear-shnazzing should be noted not with more + signs, but with more question marks.)
TO - Temporary withdrawal of penis by the man to prevent early ejaculation or take a pathetic moment to admire his own "mammoth love cigar", as he laughably calls it.
oMo - Keeblers taken into mouth.
oMoMo - Keeblers rolled around in there.
MOT - Man on top intercourse.
WOT - Woman on top intercourse.
DOG - Rear-entry intercourse.
(( - Spooning intercourse.
@ - Standing intercourse with woman bent over.
!!! - Standing intercourse in backyard in broad daylight with woman bent over a gas grill and cooking ribs.
ICK - Oral contact with the rear.
E - Error. Beside the E, write down the numeral that best corresponds with the actual type of sexual mistake:
SAMPLE SCORESHEET
The following log reflects the scoring of a 1997 sexual encounter with pop superstar Madonna that occurred in the noctural dreams of Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic Roger Ebert:
E4+++++
\
///
\
///
\
///
\
Uh
FHKE^
Just looked over your most recent revisions to the book, and everything looks great. At this rate, it should be in the stores by our original target date of May 31! I do have one minor quibble with something in the third paragraph on page 371, which I've reproduced below and want to make a point about:
'Dierdorf thrust his broiling McStewart again and again into Shandrine's star-spangled yumcave, reveling in the sensation that the syrupy seed which brewed like tasty New England cider deep in his rampaging keeblers was about to erupt into that tamed shrew like the whole of Mount. St. Helens shooting millions of gallons of hot orange semen through a single plastic straw.'
Sebastian, I wonder here about your description of the lava of Mount. St. Helens....are we sure that lava is necessarily orange? Obviously we tend to think so because of the images we've been fed through years of educational films in school and on the Discovery Channel, but if I'm not mistaken, it is merely the heat from the lava which makes it appear orange on standard film, which cannot correctly interpret colors of such an intense nature. Therefore, we might be best in going with the word 'red' here. Write me back with your ideas!
---Thisha
Thanks for your observation about the paragraph on page 371, but I think you might be mistaken. Boiling hot lava which is released into the air after a volcanic eruption is often a different natural color than magma, which is merely lava in its underground state. While magma is most often a deep red, exposure to air and light usually makes the lava appear orange. Because a thing's appearance is, in essence, its reality, I still believe that Dierdorf's sperm should be described in terms of orange lava bursting its way into Shandrine's quivering and grateful dew closet.
I appreciate your comment, though!
---Sebastian
I think I have to take issue with something you wrote in your response to my suggestion of yesterday afternoon....you state that "a thing's appearance is, in essence, its reality." Not true! We've both read Bertrand Schopendutel's Philosophy for the Very Sleepy, and I know for a fact that your own master's thesis went to great lengths to uphold his central arguments, so how can you suggest that illusion equals actuality? If this were the case, consider your own statement on page 517 of the book:
'To Theo, whose mind often drifted while he gadoogled new choodle back to more innocent and youthful days, Tilly Sue's curve-a-lots looked in the moonlight like two jiggling servings of gelatin, each capped with a ripe purple grape placed lovingly in the center by Auntie Dee, grapes which, like Tilly Sue's jaunty nipples, were perfect to suck on or even eat whole.'
By your logic, then, Sebastian, dear, the bosoms of your adventurous heroine literally are an edible dessert or snack! For is this not Theo's perceived reality? Please clarify yourself so we can move on to other editorial business.
---Thisha
Your rather nebulous comments about my interpretation of Schopendutel's work notwithstanding (I could prove my Dartmouth hypotheses easily by referring you to one or two texts on sensory semantics which currently sit on the bookshelf behind me), I was alarmed to discover, while looking over the galley proofs you sent me this morning, that you changed some text on page 844 without my approval! Chapter ninety was originally launched with the following sentence:
'Lord Thistentop tried in vain from beneath the bouncing Lady Shapiro to signal that the grinding of her cultured gumdrop onto his nose was causing him some muscular distress and loss of oxygen, but, unable as he was to extricate his index fingers from her roundum, he was unable to point, gesture, or otherwise motion for her to go easy just long enough for him to get some relief.'
Looking now at the galleys, I find that you have radically, and injudiciously, altered this sentence to read as follows:
'Lord Thistentop tried in vain from beneath the bouncing Lady Shapiro to signal that the grinding of her cultured gumdrop onto his nose was causing him some muscular distress and loss of oxygen, but, unable as he was to extricate his index fingers from her roundum, he was unable to point, gesture, or otherwise motion for her to go easy just long enough for him to ACHIEVE some relief.'
Obviously this will not do. The phrase 'get some relief' is a far more accurate composition; your implication that he must somehow 'achieve' the relief is preposterous. What Lord Thistentop is 'achieving' is the eating of his girlfriend's choodle; any other accomplishment on his part can only be a mere by-product of his reactions to the spelunking act. You would have him transmogrify into some sort of mythic superman who can both 'achieve' the giving of oral pleasure to Lady Shapiro's yumgina AND 'achieve' a second of freedom from the greedy snuzzer that is swallowing half his face at the very same time! Because of the awkward juxtaposition of the lovers' limbs, and the rather unique weight ratios which result from that juxtaposition, such freedom is not his to win; it must be given, or gotten by the whims of chance or the interruption of a manservant or maid of some sort. Please make the necessary corrections before we discuss anything else you deem to be "incorrect."
---Sebastian
Just on my way out of the office for the evening, and wondering what exactly this line in chapter 116 is supposed to mean:
"Nuh, nuh, nuh, nuh, NUH, NUH, GUH, GUH, YOWP!!" whimpered the Mona Lisa as the Venus de Milo inserted the last of the snow cones.
Obviously your failure to make 'snow cones' into the one-word 'snowcones' is a rare typo of some previously undiscovered and unimagined sort, no doubt with a fascinating backstory about how it came to be. Or was it simply the result of a sudden brain fever, or even a momentary detachment from your senses due to your recent bout with hookworm? Glad I spotted the goof; that would have been a real doozy for an unsuspecting reader to encounter!
---Thisha
You disappoint me, good lady. Casual research on the internet reveals beyond a shadow of a doubt that to join the words snow and cone into one in an attempt to express the notion of the iced dessert treat we all remember from the halcyon days of childhood is to admit to oneself and the entire globe that one is a moron. 'Snow cone' as a two-word sentiment has been used in no less than four hundred and sixty works of American book-length fiction in the past seventy years, including Adam Jayjay's bestselling, oft-translated Meet Me Under My Wangie, while 'snowcone' (I am ashamed to even type the word onto parchment) has reared its stillborn, misspelled head exactly once, in the year 1934, mentioned as an intermission snack on a tattered advertising flyer promoting a Brooklyn wrestling match between a pair of gentlemen presenting themselves as Archibald 'The Running Screamer' Lopez and 'Appendix Man'. Feel free to file this information away so that you won't put any other author in the awkward position of noting the blunders of his own editor!
---Sebastian
Looking over the ending of the book once more, I'm afraid I discovered a massive, infinitely embarrassing miscue on your part lodged firmly in the final sentences. I have taken the liberty of making the appropriate repairs to your misguided verbiage, and the book's finale now reads, more correctly, as follows:
"Gadzooks!" shouted the monster with six penises, soaping himself up for another go at the twins. "I've heard of the rings of Uranus, but this is freaking ridiculous!"
As you may or may not remember, Sebastian, your original version of the finale had the monster with six penises yelling his final exclamation, which I'm afraid is an error on a par with western Europe's policy of appeasement toward Adolf Hitler. I know that I don't have to go into the details of this rather shocking linguistic miscalculation, and the less said about it the better. I'm just glad I caught it in time to thwart the titanic embarrassment your writing might have caused, both to the general public and here in the office.
---Thisha
I have gone ahead and changed the final sentence of Lo! A Hard-On! back to its original form, and shredded your rather bizarre note, choosing to pretend that the moment in time when you decided to play God and invent your own grammatical reality simply never happened.
Dearest Thisha, I am beginning to fear that the neglect foisted upon your own suffering thelma these many months by all American males in your age bracket has perhaps caused you to become unhinged as a professional editor, rendering you unable to complete this project with any sort of acumen. Take, for example, your freakish, lost-in-space suggestion that I change even a single sacred letter of the book's opening sentence on which I labored for so long:
'Dexter removed his fleshy gavel from Sister Freda's mouth just long enough to baste it with more lemon juice, and, in a divine burst of inspiration, he applied a little tarragon to the aforementioned love-ladle, an improvisation he felt would definitely add a Taste-of-Tuscany zing that had been missing in their marriage for almost seven years.'
How humiliating it would have been for me if the book were to someday be picked up by my third grade teacher Mrs. Pleats, only for her to find that you had tried, in your dictatorial manner, to replace that with which between the critical forty-fifth and forty-sixth words! Would I have ever been able to show my face in my beloved hometown of Edges' Corners again? I thank Vishnu that I was able to throw my body in front of the speeding bullets of your editorial gaffes in time to save what surely will become my third consecutive Bram Stroker Award Winner come October.
I am suggesting to Paul Vorpsch and the rest of the gang on seven that the final galleys of the book be submitted to his office instead of your own. Best of luck with your time off work.
---Sebastian
Concerning the that versus which issue, put this in your pipe and smoke it, bro: Restrictive clauses are essential to a sentence, and nonrestrictive clauses are nonessential; failure to distinguish these by proper punctuation results in ambiguity, as when a restrictive clause is accidentally set off by a comma; nonrestrictive clauses are merely descriptive or additive, and are always set off. The chief use of the distinction between that and which is that it helps in distinguishing between restrictive and non-restrictive clauses, a far more important matter than any arbitrary preference of pronoun; the punctuation, however, remains decisive in indicating the distinction, as in the difference between the sentence "I went spungo on the face which was beneath my snuzzer" and the sentence "I went spungo on the face that was beneath my snuzzer" and the sentence "I went spungo on the face, which was beneath my snuzzer".
Thank you for your addled but well-meaning input, and may I wish you a very prosperous New Year.
---Thisha
Um, I'm a little confused. Are we ever gonna do it, or what?
---Sebastian
But the curse of Tuesday found me anyway¡Xin my dreams, no less. Shortly before noon, during nap four in a proposed series of nine, my sleeping brain began to conjure up stupefyingly erotic imagery to torture me into submission. I dreamed of a raven-haired girl in high heels, a black bra, and no panties walking toward me on a California beach and whispering just five words into my ear, one of which was 'you', one of which was 'me', and a third, I swear to God, was a rare linguistic hybrid of 'screw' and 'butt' heard only in isolated tribal nations located close to the equator. My mind then moved on to a rapid-fire montage of sexual delights involving Jessica Rabbit, my third grade teacher Mrs. Tolkinbottom, and a pair of Chinese twins calling themselves Ing and Ung, who showed up at my place bringing their own beer and condoms, and who insisted for some reason on calling me "Sergeant Long." By the time I woke up, having been laid only in the half-reality of unconsciousness, I was so carnally frustrated I knew that to stay in my apartment a moment more would result in a strain injury to my right hand that would undoubtedly jeopardize my future career as an NFL quarterback (stop giggling, dammit, it could happen).
So I went to the phone and called Lila. You might remember Lila, whose adventures with me at a bookstore called Tomes-a-Waitin¡¦ gave me enough memories for the first three volumes of the autobiography I have no interest in writing. I knew Lila was bored on Tuesdays too, and she was always up for a road trip of some sort.
But when she answered the phone I heard static on the line, and that meant only one thing.
"Lila, can you hear me?!" I yelled.
"Yes, what's up?!" she yelled back.
"Dammit, Lila!" I shouted, "Can't you unplug the vibrator long enough to even answer a simple phone call?!"
"Hell no!" she shouted back. "I paid a hundred and thirty bucks for this thing, and it's gonna get used!"
I rolled my eyes. "I need to go out, Lila, but I can't be reminded of anything sexual. I want one day, just one day mind you, to reflect on the higher pursuits in life, not just the eternal quest for tail."
The static on the line disappeared as I heard a muffled click. "Going out is always fun," Lila said agreeably. "I need some air anyway; I've been going at it for two and a half hours."
"Enough, girl!" I warned. "I can only get through Tuesday if I have no sexual distress of any kind, understand? Today I celebrate the nobility of Man through abstinence in thought and deed!"
She agreed to try to think about complying for now, and I swung by her house to pick her up. Lila and I did occasionally dance the giddying dance of coitus, but her animalistic intensity, wildly effective technique, and total lack of inhibition had made me realize that since I would never, ever find a match like her in the future, I'd better wean myself away entirely now while I still could. (I asked you, please, to stop giggling, and I meant it.) I can¡¦t tell you how mad I was when Lila bounded out of her house wearing a leather do-me-twice-before-breakfast mini-skirt and a clingy have-your-way-with-me-over-brunch white halter top.
"Good Lord," I complained. "Doesn't anybody listen to me?!"
"These are the only clothes I had," she insisted. "The other ones got kind of sweaty when I was playing with myse--"
I cut her off right there with a proviso that any further suggestivity would result in penalties up to and including ejection from the vehicle. But the mere sight of her fingers playing with her shiny blonde hair, her long tanned legs crossing and uncrossing, and the maddening scent of her perfume caused me to make too many sidelong glances in her direction, leading to a penultimate moment when Lila leaned over to change the radio station, affording me an accursed front row view of her immaculate handlebars, which were obviously going bareback that day, and the next thing I knew a Yield sign was disappearing underneath my front bumper.
"Oh, terrific!" I shouted as I saw blue and red lights flash in my rearview mirror. "That's the third Yield sign I've iced this week!"
Lila was laughing hysterically. "This should take your mind off sex for a few minutes, at least," she said..
Well, that much was true. I fished my registration out of the glove compartment, pretty sure I would be saying goodbye to not just my front end this time but my license as well.
The cop leaned into my window and smiled. "Interesting driving technique," she said.
I gulped, not out of shame but because the armed babe's long brown hair, cherry red lips, and skin-tight uniform had instantly short-circuited six of my brain's eight cylinders. I mumbled something about being distracted by tragic thoughts of the coming anniversary of John Denver's passing and held out my license.
The officer took it and walked around to the front of the car. She bent over, way over, way WAY over, to inspect the damage to the sign. My eyes locked in on her shapely pluto like two horny Stinger missiles.
"Wow, that's some hot five-o snuzzer!" Lila commented.
"I'm....begging....you," I sputtered.
As we watched, the cop reached down and wrapped both of her smooth hands around the long, hard Yield sign, slid them up and down a few times to get a better grip, then ever-so-gently guided it upright again. I moaned. Lila positively delighted in it.
The cop walked back to us, shaking her head. "You really did a job on that. I don't think it'll be fully erect again for a while."
Lila forced a fist into her mouth to stem the flow of her laughter.
"I, um, I'll try not to do that again," I said.
The next thing I knew, the cop was sweeping her eyes up my body and across my chest. "Do you work out?" she purred suggestively.
"Me?" I replied weakly, wondering if the three pushups I did in 1989 had suddenly manifested themselves into something resembling a muscle. "Well, I...."
"Because I think I've seen you at FlexMe Fitness," she said.
"Oh, yeah," I laughed nervously. "I go there a few times a week." The fact is that I had been there only once, trying to find a public bathroom.
She flung her hair away from her gorgeous face and sighed saucily. "I'm going to slurp you off 'cause I'm horny," she said then.
My blood pressure rocketed up five hundred points, hit the ceiling, and dropped another thousand.
"What?" I gasped.
"I said, I'm going to let you off with just a warning. Just go right around the corner to the station and pay for the damage." With that, she sashayed back to her cruiser, leaving my mouth hanging open and my imagination trying desperately to get up off the canvas.
Lila forced her face into her shirt so as to hide her tears of joy. "I haven't seen a look of such sexual agony on a male face since my twelve year-old brother watched the interrogation scene from Basic Instinct!" she laughed.
"Silence, devil woman!" I cried. "I will not be mocked! You probably set that whole thing up!"
"Oh, give me a break," she said. "If I wanted to torture you, all I have to do is start talking about how incredible that vibrator felt in my delicate puƒ{"
I peeled out rather suddenly to drown out her nightmarish words. It was six blocks before my erection faded. I tried not to think about anything, anything at all, just a black silent void. A lightless, limitless nothingness where no thoughts of sexual congress could ever enter. A dark, wet, enveloping place. A place so accepting, so tight, I could slide right into its warmth, then pull out just long enough to bend it over the nearest picket fence and commence to--
"Stop the car!" Lila was shouting into my ear. Someone's Daewoo had broken down on the shoulder. I caught sight of a female figure and hit the accelerator harder instead.
"What are you doing?" Lila asked. "I feel the need to do a good deed to atone for all the perverse shnazzing I've been doing lately!"
"No women!" I insisted. "They must not enter my sight for even a moment! I'm dangerously close to meltdown!"
"Oh, please, that old biddy was at least a hundred and seventy years old," Lila reasoned. "Back up and let's give her a hand."
I reluctantly threw the car into reverse, figuring maybe Lila had a strange point. Doing something benevolent toward a fellow human bring would almost certainly give me an ever-so-brief respite from the storm of my disgusting thoughts.
The little old lady waved at us as we approached. "Oh, thank heavens," she said happily. "I'm ever so clumsy with automobiles."
Lila grabbed onto my arm and leaned her head on my shoulder. "Don't worry, ma'am, my boyfriend will have you back on the road in a heartbeat."
"Back off, demon slut," I whispered under my breath.
"I hope it's only a simple repair," the old lady said. "I've got to get my granddaughter off to boarding school!"
With that, the rear door of the Daewoo was thrown open and out stepped the granddaughter in question, a teenaged lass with fiery red hair and deep blue eyes. Her absurdly undersized Catholic school outfit was snuggled over a cartoonishly slutty body that threatened to pop out in every direction at once like a jellyfish dumped into a spaghetti strainer.
"Grandma, Mr. DeBlow said he'd have to discipline me again in his office if I was late getting back to school!" she complained. Then, seeing me, she curtsied fluidly and smiled. "Pleased to make your acquaintance, sir."
"Hiya," I said, and shifted my gaze quickly into the distance, where a billboard advertising septic system repairs soothed my jangled nerves and in no way made me imagine what it would be like if the aforementioned curtsey were to end on my outstretched tongue.
"What's your name, baby girl?" Lila asked provokingly.
"Purity!" came the perky response.
"Of course it is," I muttered. I gazed under the hood of the car and tried to focus. I leaned over and played with a couple of wires, hoping for the best.
Purity leaned in beside me, her cheek about two inches from mine. "Do you fix cars for a living?" she asked, the odor of Bubblemint gum wafting in my face.
"No!" I said curtly. "Can someone try the engine again?"
"Ooo, let me do it!" Purity said cheerfully. "Grandma's been teaching me!" With that, she took three bounding steps toward the driver's side. I heard a resounding rip of cotton and glanced up to see almost the entire process of her sky blue blouse separating itself from her body, having gotten caught on the radiator cap with insufferable serendipity.
"Oh Lordy!" cried Lila. "Will you look at what just happened! What are the odds?"
Grandma No-Name gasped. Purity gazed down at her bronzed, bulging chest as if she had never seen it before. Her breasts strained against a red satin bra that was working overtime and probably a few extra hours on weekends just to maintain a hold on its curvaceous burden. I doubted the small metal crucifix depicting Christ's last agonies which rested lovingly between those blinding young blinkers was anywhere near as hard as I was at that moment. (Note to editor: I don't care what parts of this story you cut, but this last sentence has gotta stay.)
"Why does this happen so often to me?" Purity wondered aloud.
"All right, I think we're done here!" I said, slamming the hood shut. "Looks like you need a tow, so sorry, gotta split!"
"Oh, Rufus, your hands are filthy with oil," Lila observed cheerfully. "Purity, give the nice man your skirt so he can wipe them off."
Purity shrugged and began to unfasten buttons, but I was too fast for any of them. By the time I caught a flash of the lacy edge of Purity's black panties, I had seized Lila's hand and dragged her most of the way back to my Datsun. In three seconds we were back on the road, me cursing any and all gods above for the way they had chosen to forsake me. About fifteen seconds after that, we ran smack into what I can only refer to as The Phenomenon.
Cars were skidding to a halt everywhere as no less than forty hot naked chicks charged across northbound route 44. (Dammit, I should really save this last sentence for the opening of my Watergate novel.) Like a herd of unintentionally sexy buffalo they rampaged toward my car, pursued by eight or nine state troopers who were waving gawking motorists out of the way. Video cameras appeared of nowhere, flash bulbs popped, and those witnesses lacking any recording technology at all whipped out sketch pads and hoped for the best.
I threw my hands in front of my burning eyes as the three hot naked chicks in front of the pack passed my car. One of them leapt onto the hood and bounded over the roof. I could hear her hot naked feet up there.
"I'm not seeing this!!" I bellowed. "What the hell is going on?!"
"There's been a breakout at the porn star prison!" a passing CNN reporter yelled.
"There's no such thing as a porn star prison!" I exclaimed.
"Yeah there is, it opened up next to the Playboy Playmate law library on Division Street," Lila noted. "Man, did you see the incredible wetmelon on that blonde? I think I remember it getting shnazzed in the pre-title sequence of A Streetcar Named Semen."
"Okay, here's the deal!" I shouted at her, banging my head against the steering wheel. "We're going straight to the city dump, the most un-erotic place on earth, and we're staying there till dusk, and you're going to take it and like it, understand?!"
Lila cackled mockingly. "But I have an appointment at four to have my nipples moisturized. I thought you could hold my hand through it."
"I consider you an accessory to this day!" I cried. "You tied that girl's shirt to the radiator cap, I know it!"
"That much I admit," Lila said mildly. "If that hadn't worked, I was gonna come up with some kind of lesbian angle, maybe lay a big sloppy French kiss right on that ruby virgin tongue of hers."
"I can't see you or hear you!" I protested. "You're nothing more than a bag of groceries sitting on my passenger's seat!"
"That reminds me, we gotta stop at a farm stand and buy a really big cucumber. I wore my last one out on Friday night. I forget, have you ever watched me insert a--"
She went on, but I had resorted to the last of my dwindling mental weapons to drown her out, replaying the thrilling final inning of the 1997 World Series in my mind, relying on the echoing, sexless prattle of Vin Scully to patch my frazzled psyche. It worked for a good fifteen minutes, right until the moment we pulled up to the dump. The neutered anticipation of throwing out the old soda cans and Arby's wrappers littering the floor of the car restored me to my normal self, and I knew as soon as I saw the first gigantic pile of sludge and cess off to the right that I had somehow managed to completely conquer the many sexual demons that had today tried to possess me. The ambiance of the filth that stretched off in every direction inured me even to Lila's deep-throated complaints about how itchy her panties had suddenly become. I was victorious! Who said that sex was all men ever thought about?
I pulled the car over in Area C, which was reserved for the disposal of broken snow globes, dead animals with four hooves or less, and other loose detritus. Here at last was a place a man could feel completely at peace, where his mind could zero in on the truly important things in life, mainly throwing crap away. As I tossed sundry items over the railing, everything from last Sunday's Help Wanted section to a half-filled box of rotting blueberry Pop Tarts, my very intellect seemed to sharpen, and the unpleasant carnal memories of the day faded into nothingness.
That was when I heard Lila clear her throat behind me.
I turned to see her standing a few feet away, hands on her hips, staring at me bitterly. "You're ignoring me, Rufus," she said testily.
"Terribly sorry, Lila," I said. "I just got caught up in thinking of how society's condemnation of the refuse which society itself creates presents a fascinating paradoxical paradigm. If, for example, we let A equal the garbage we see all around us--"
"That does it, babe," Lila said coolly, and pulled her white halter top over her head. "I can only take so much of your so-called willpower."
I stopped in mid-sentence. Lila stood before me now in only her leather miniskirt and a pink push-up bra.
"Now just a second, Lila, good buddy, good friend," I said nervously. "Wait right there. Don't do anything you'll regret."
"Like this?" she said, and tore off her skirt in what seemed like slightly less than one delicious motion. She put her hands on her hips in a deadly come-hither pose, smiled seductively, and hooked her thumbs inside the elastic band of her thong panties.
"No, Lila!" I said desperately. "Look, let's make a deal! Anything, anything you want, just don't go any further!"
"What I want," she said softly, "is to see you grab that handsome foghorn of yours." She turned slightly and kicked her shoes right over the railing into the abyss below. She then took one step toward me and shucked her panties down a couple of inches.
"Look in your heart!" I cried, sinking to my knees and clasping my hands in supplication. "It is up to me and me alone to celebrate the nobility of Man!"
"Wouldn't it feel just lovely to free that long hard love-bone while you watch me strip?" Lila wondered aloud. "Isn't that what you really want to do?"
"No!" I shouted, staring straight ahead at Lila's navel. "No! I want to use this day to create a work of art, or plant a tree or read a book, or follow an idea to its logical endpoint!"
"Or you could just let me spelunk you silly," Lila said from above.
"I want to read the Koran and paint a Flemish landscape!" I blurted. "Let lesser men be such pathetic victims of their libidoes that they can't go a single day without trying to shnazz anything that moves! I want to be better than that!"
Lila kneeled in front of me, pressing her breasts against me and squeezing my crotch with demanding urgency. "Is the Koran that book of sexual positions?"
"That's the Kama Sutra, you evil harpy!" I cried as I heard the zipper of my jeans being undone. I knew I was spiraling out of control, and grasped like a drowning man at the unsexiest images I could summon. When Lila's cool fingers touched Jude the Obscure, I thought of war atrocities in Sierra Leone. When she playfully touched her tongue to the sensitive underside, I imagined the suffering children of Somalia and Burundi. When she took the whole length of my bursting trumpet into her wet, inviting mouth, I pretty much lost interest entirely in my visualizations of political and geographical strife and decided to shift my focus instead to yoidling Lila's perfect body as hard and as fast as humanly able.
So I blame another menacingly vapid Tuesday for the way I drew Lila back onto her feet and lifted her onto the hood of the Datsun, laying her down with her legs spread wide so I could get my mouth into her Smothering Heights with minimal difficulty. Yes, it was Tuesday's fault that I licked and sucked her for such a long time that both of us nearly passed out. I commenced to make Tuesday pay for what it had done to me by sliding one finger into her just to mark my place so I could pause to swallow her oats down and dive right back in for seconds.
"These surroundings don't turn you off even a little bit?" I asked her hopelessly as I stood up and positioned The Big Lead One inches away from her drenched homewrecker.
"The city dump, a four-post bed, what's the real difference?" she panted, settling her heels on my shoulders and propping herself up a bit with her elbows to get a better view of my slow entry into her. "There's no need to be such a gentleman," she advised me when every inch of my foghorn had disappeared entirely. "We're surrounded by rusty needles, old pizza boxes, and used batteries."
"Good point, toots," I agreed, gripping her pluto with both hands and starting to thrust into her with great vigor. "A city dump shnazz should by definition be a real backclawer."
Damn you, Tuesday, for the way you made Lila and I bang each other senseless in the open air! If it hadn't been for your miasmic boredom, I wouldn't have had to lift her entirely off the car and start hoisting sail totally out of control, and I'm sure Lila herself would like to have a few words with you about the way she was driven to push me backward onto the ground and ride me like a discount mechanical bull. She took hold of my hands then and made sure they stayed in constant caress of her lickables until she went spungo, laughing and sighing. As part of my reward for being such a good sport that day, Lila finished me off by stroking me rapidly and offering her heaving vowels for target practice, and I showered her chest and stomach with enough elephant jam to fill the fuel tank of a military transport jet. Like honey glaze on Aunt Sarah's Thanksgiving ham, it glistened upon her body artfully, inviting the world to sample the holiday cheer. (Mental note: check to see if this sentence was ever used in Native Son.)
I slunk back to my apartment that night a defeated man. How could I look myself in the mirror knowing I was such a faceless pawn on sexuality's damnable chessboard? When Lila arrived that night at ten o'clock as we had agreed in order to continue our gadoogling session in my newly tiled bathtub, how would I apologize to her for being so cowardly in the face of the hormonal enemy? Did I even truly exist if all I could think of was licking soap bubbles out of Lila's chunnel? I had never felt so ashamed to be male in all my life, and I vowed to put my priorities even deeper under the microscope sometime before or during that evening's promised bondage games.
"Son," he said to me, staring out the wide window which looked down on midtown Lutzburg, "your mother has been gone for eight years now, and certain....appetites are beginning to haunt me." (My mother vanished mysteriously in 1994, swallowed by a rare internet black hole while surfing the web for the best price on a George Foreman Grill.)
"Every man needs to satisfy his appetites," he went on, his piercing grey eyes gazing at the Calvin Klein billboard across the street, which showed two eight year olds snorting heroin off the back of a large walrus. "The time has come for me to pursue one impossible dream¡Xto achieve coitus with an Amish midget."
"Yes, Papa," I said, beginning to take copious notes. He already had a plan.
My father was a wealthy man, having patented a computer software program which could scan a photograph of any human being and tell him or her within seconds which member of Supertramp they most resembled. All his vast resources were mobilized within minutes. Helicopters were dispatched to Pennsylvania Dutch Country, and by six o'clock that evening, two possible candidates for my father's scheme had been identified. Helen Ippleflap, a cobbler's wife, was four feet two inches tall, and when she was informed of the offer of one million dollars in exchange for fifteen minutes of sexual intercourse, she expressed polite interest. "Mayhap I consult my husband," she told the suited, bespectacled agents of TriBiOmniCom in her humble kitchen, from which wafted the smell of fresh raisin bread. "I bed with none other than he, but goddamn, a million beans!" Unfortunately, my father would not commit to gadoogling Ms. Ippleflap, as he was unimpressed by her photograph. "She is short, yes, delightfully so," he told me, "but she looks like a cross between Leonard Nimoy and whatever Leonard Nimoy ate for lunch today. I will only spill my seed into an Amish midget who instills in my noble wicket a happy smile!"
Fortunately, we got much luckier with Miss Prudence Cartgoody, a nineteen year old blonde lass who barely broke 3'6" and practically beamed at the suggestion that she nail a complete stranger for cash. "I have heard of this 'gadoogling' in the fair streets of Lancaster," she said, "from tourists who speak of the Pamela Anderson and the Hugh Grant. Am I then to expose my tendermuffin to a man-sir?"
"That would be part of the contract, yes, miss," she was told emotionlessly.
"It has the sound of pleasing work," Prudence said, nodding and untying her bonnet. "Can I shine anyone's rooster while they're here?" She was flown in to Lutzburg the next morning. By the time I ushered her off the chopper, my previous illusions of the Amish had been subtly altered. I really had no idea they were such money-hungry sluts. Maybe Witness actually got it right.
We took Prudence to my father's office. He looked her up and down, then bent over at the waist and shook her delicate hand.
"Good lady," he said in his most cultured voice, "I welcome you to the United States of America, and thank you from the bottom of my heart for helping me achieve my dream."
We had instructed Prudence not to say a word, figuring that what my father truly wanted was the traditionally perfect image of a silent, servile Amish midget from such books as Mill on the Floss and The Hunt for Red October. She remained quiet and smiled. Later I would learn that she had made the mistake of shaving her choodle and writing the words DO ME on her stomach in creamed corn, but apparently neither one of these transgressions was enough to distract my father.
"Let us retire to the antechamber," he said airily, and with that, they left myself and three TriBiOmniCom lawyers behind to somehow occupy ourselves for a while.
Six minutes later my father came out of the room, looking as triumphant as Christopher Cross when he accepted Rhythm Romp's 1977 Best Male Artist award. "You may give her the million dollars," he said, walking past us in his finest silk robe. "I have inserted my penis into her thelma from assorted angles and our contract is complete. Let the record show that Amish midget choodle is of a most delectable variety!"
Later that night, I found myself beneath a wildly bucking and newly rich Prudence as she bounced up and down on my own member in room 219 of the Lutzburg Super 8. She had decided to stay in the city, renouncing her teeny Amish ways for a life of unrestricted intercourse among the general populace. As I lifted her off me and set her down temporarily in the top drawer of the dresser to go shower and shave, I couldn't help but feel a little sad for our corruption of a once-airtight culture.
I was not afforded too much time for regret, however. My father frantically phoned the room as Pru lay there idly drawing circles of sperm on her chest.
There was something else he wanted now.
"I do," my father said confidently, smoking a cigar the size of the Erie Canal. He coolly surveyed his team of yes-men and then turned a kinder, more paternal eye towards me. "I will not leave this world having ever backed down from a challenge. What would my son think of me then?"
"I will always have the utmost respect and admiration for you, Papa," I said with total honesty.
"Pish posh," he muttered. "I, Hendricks Fingermelon, WANT something, and I shall have it. Thorpsalt, how much would it cost to rent a zeppelin and a lovely young lady to accompany me on it for the purposes of shnazzing her dry?"
Thorpsalt, a skinny drink of water who had made ass-kissing into a kind of performance art, actually hesitated for a moment. "Well, sir, I'm not quite sure if there are even any zeppelins in existence at the moment. Now, a blimp...."
"No blimps!" my father retorted. "I want to shnazz a woman on an authentic zeppelin in the skies of Berlin!"
Stanley Pickwit sighed. "Sir, building a zeppelin for such a purpose would cost millions of dollars."
"Don't forget the money it will take to find a comely, sexually experimentative woman who is also an experienced zeppelin pilot," my father said. "That condition is absolutely set in stone: I must yoidle the pilot. From behind at first, I should think, then possibly up against the dashboard. Zeppelins have dashboards, don't they?"
The logistical details of my father's new plan were debated for hours, but in the end, he was certainly going to get what he wanted, even if it meant dipping into TriBiOmniCom's sheltered cash reserves. I knew he would simply not be dissuaded. There was a fire in his eyes I had not seen since he hatched his 1991 plan to manufacture pocket combs that could also be ridden like mopeds. The yes-men and the butt-smoochers would have to learn that a man with a goal is a man with the ultimate weapon against hypocrisy and even mortality itself. My father would bang the daylights out of a zeppelin pilot in midair within eight weeks, and that was that.
Construction of the zeppelin began the following Wednesday in a massive Air Force hangar sixty miles south. I was to supervise the operation, from the hiring of the engineers to the contracting of the painters who would apply the vessel's name to its right side. During those eight weeks, concerned whispers about my father were heard in back rooms, limousines, and secret tool sheds. His enemies conspired in Starbucks cafes and in the changing rooms at Kmart to spread rumors that he was losing his mind and was a danger to his own company. The media gathered in the meat freezers of Taco Bells and inside rolled Persian carpets to plot a seemingly endless stream of shock headlines. HENDRICKS FINGERMELON RISKS PAST SUCCESSES FOR BOOTY. BRILLIANT C.E.O. SPENDS COMPANY ASSETS ON YUMGINA. FEARLESS ENTREPRENEUR LOST IN THE HARSH WILDERNESS OF CHOODLE. Through it all my father paid no heed, knowing, as I did, that the human soul is obligated to pursue its most powerful yearnings no matter what the cost. Whether a man is trying to climb Mount Everest, build a transcontinental railroad, bring Christian values to the Amazonian rain forest, or Vesuvius on some brunette's zoomers in the hold of a humungous airship, it was the quest that mattered, dammit, the quest.
I will never forget the way my late father's chest swelled when he puttered onto that military tarmac atop his CombScooter and first saw his custom-made zeppelin, christened The Minty Swan, being rolled out for public view on the day of its inaugural, and only, flight. I knew then that it was all worth it....and that it was not all quite over.
The pilot of the zeppelin was an unpleasant and just borderline-attractive lesbian named Winnifred Milwaukee. She was absolutely the only zeppelin pilot we had been able to find after an exhaustive search that spanned the continents. She had never had intercourse with a man before, and would accept no less than one million eight hundred thousand dollars for the grand event. "And if that bastard soups inside me," she warned us, "I'm gonna make him suck it out with a straw."
Twenty-one TriBiOmniCom representatives and assorted members of the press waved at the zeppelin as it rose into the air for its six day journey towards Germany, where, fourteen hundred feet above Terlippitzplatz, my father quickly dropped his pants and hoisted sail into Winnifred Milwaukee's reluctant snuzzer, referring to her as "the coldest dyke I've ever encountered". Ms. Milwaukee actually attempted to chloroform my father three days into the return trip when he suggested that she might have a happier life if she learned how to slurp wangie. "I got plenty even, though," she later told reporters. "I told the old prune I'd ram the blimp into the side of the Matterhorn if he didn't eat me out for three hours."
My father's face was still ashen from that particular experience when The Minty Swan (or the Lez Zeppelin, as some wits called it) touched down once again. But he managed to put on a wide smile and uncork a bottle of champagne for the photographers whose flashbulbs popped picture after picture of one of America's boldest patriots. TriBiOmniCom lost approximately eleven million dollars on the entire deal and its stock plummeted seventy-nine points, but as my father would tell his biographer just days before he died, "you cannot put a price on the sight of your funfoam hitting a woman in the ear at two thousand feet."
It was there that he revealed to us his desires to be provided with oral gratification by a Chinese teacher of motorcycle safety in center field during the ninth inning of the All-Star game.
My father lost his temper then and ordered us all out of the room. Who were we to doubt him? he shouted. Who were they to question a man who'd now had his penis in places they had only read about?
His burst of rage was even more dramatic than I thought. The next day, my father fired all eight hundred and twenty employees of TriBiOmniCom and sold the company to an overseas concern called The Norwegian Doughnut Collective. He pocketed the millions they paid him and announced in a press conference that he no longer wanted to be known as one of the greatest venture capitalists in American history. Instead he wished for "the prayers of all horny men everywhere as I attempt to attain coitus on the grandest stage of them all". He stopped there to tantalize the nation with suspense. I watched his announcement on the flat-screen Hitachi mounted on the wall of my favorite Kutzburg whorehouse, where I had retreated to mourn my loss of faith in my beloved father and to see if Paulette was available to give me one of her infamous Tongue Wheelies, a sexual maneuver so intensefully blissful that it is believed to have been what killed Bruce Lee and Grover Cleveland.
Naturally, word got out quickly about my father's exact plans, and security for major league baseball's All-Star game was beefed up to Code Red levels. There was little to worry about, I felt. Two weeks was not nearly enough time for my father to have made the necessary arrangements for his final epic sexual statement to mankind, although his total disappearance after the press conference made me a little concerned that he might be spending twenty-hour hours a day working on those damnable plans. I feared for his declining health.
When Mariano Rivera struck out Barry Bonds to bring the American League to within one out of victory on that hot July night, I finally relaxed. Even the announcers in the broadcast booth suggested that the only shnazzing the sellout crowd of fifty-eight thousand would get tonight was on the price of a souvenir program.
The security force on the ground seemed quite tense, however, and the television showed sixty-odd policemen standing catlike in foul territory, their eyes peeled for any sign of some wealthy nut dashing onto the field for sexual purposes. (Interesting trivia tidbit: Just such a thing had happened during Game One of the 1983 World Series, when the female owner of a well-known shoe company ran out onto the mound in a crucial two-out situation and actually conceived a child with Phillies pitching great Steve Carlton.)
Not even the most seasoned counter-terrorism expert, however, could have foreseen or guarded against what happened next.
Montreal Expos star Vladimir Guerrero was in the batter's box, waiting for a 1-1 pitch, when he dropped his bat and pointed skyward. A parachute had appeared in the sky above Yankee Stadium. My dying father, the famed industrialist and proudly demented pervert, was descending toward center field.
The policemen all began to rush toward the outfield to arrest him the moment he touched the grass. How could he have been so short-sighted as not to see that he would be nabbed so quickly, I remember thinking. It would have taken at least thirty seconds for his envisioned Chinese teacher of motorcycle safety to slurp him off, even if she had been able to materialize from nowhere. The cops were bound to snap cuffs on him long before anything could occur.
This time, it was not only me and a bunch of high-priced suits that had underestimated my father. The entire country was guilty this time. More than fifty million people watched on TV as he fell gently to earth wearing a parachute fortified to hold the weight of not one, but two, people. The second, 34-year-old Mai Linh, a resident of Dpho Fwap, Manchuria, noshed frantically on my father's wicket as he held stoutly onto her legs. Her upside-down slurpwork was cheered on by everyone in the stadium.
They hit the ground eight feet away from a stunned Bernie Williams, the noted Yankee outfielder who possessed three World Series rings and who now finally had one good baseball story to tell his grandchildren. Bare seconds before my father was surrounded by half the NYPD, Ms. Linh's cheeks were seen to bulge somewhat as a fountain of zither mix leaked out of the corners of her mouth, the result of an orgasm timed with dramatic perfection. Hendricks Fingermelon's eyes glazed over in silken pleasure as the crowd in the stands spilled out onto the field in wild celebration. The game was never completed, and in fact the sport of baseball was thereby banned forever from the globe. Just as Nostradamus had once predicted, a terrific amateur fellatrix had doomed the national pastime forever.
My father wrote me a note of forgiveness upon his return, telling me he wished to see me one last time before he died. I rushed to his estate, where he greeted me warmly on the south lawn.
"Son," he said, "I know it was too much to ask for anyone to believe in my All-Star Game Fellatio Adventure. Don't feel as if I turned my back on you. You will always be my pride and joy."
"Thank you, Papa," I said, tears streaming down my face. "I was never prouder to be your son than when you souped in that Chinese woman's mouth."
"Shortly I will die," he said, his voice cracking with emotion. "But I do not intend to go out like a lamb. Won't you assist me, boy, in devising a final sexual feat to test the limits of the human imagination?"
"But father," I said, "don't you want to spend your last days on earth resting and recounting your triumphs to your biographer?"
He put a gentle hand on my shoulder. "I shall rest in the bosom of heaven," he told me. "As long as I have one final dream to achieve, there is work to be done. So I ask you now, Pinky...will you help me?"
"Yes," I replied patriotically. "Yes, I shall."
My father is gone now, but he is remembered as a man whose dreams flew higher and farther than any other ever born. Americans even have a Tuesday off in his memory, every year on the anniversary of the day the rocketship that launched him and an unknown female companion into outer space unexpectedly burned to a crisp. His final dream, to deflower a thirty-nine-year-old virgin on the surface of the sun while playing 'The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald' on the pipe organ¡Xwas tragically cut short, breaking the hearts of an entire oversexed generation and those of the legions of engineers he had hired in secret two years before to build a craft that could sail to infinite lengths. He died on August 9, 2003, his wangie most likely still in his pants, where, like a majestic bald eagle, it should never have been caged for any reason.
Scientists the world over are still trying to figure out why that spaceship became hotter and hotter the closer it got to the sun, until it was finally engulfed in deadly fire. No matter. Some think it romantic that my father died for what he wanted most in life. Sure, billions of men strive to gadoogle girls in strange places and spew their Italian syrup in bizarre situations, but precious few of them are willing to bankrupt the most profitable company in the western hemisphere and totally deplete their only son's trust fund to actually make those twisted sexual longings come true. He and his desires were larger than life.
Now it has fallen upon me to keep his dreams alive. Oh, I am not the adventurer or risk-taker my father was, and I am pretty much penniless these days. But everyone has to begin the road to immortality somewhere, and so tomorrow, I begin my own journey of a thousand miles with a single step. This single step shall hopefully consist of me sliding my rigid penis into a near-sighted grocery checkout girl's candy mountain in the cereal aisle of the local Safeway. It's always been a little goal of mine. We shall see if I and my forty-six dollars can make a little magic happen---but not for me, you understand. For my father. And for history.
I Before E Except After C, and You Can Take it From There
Sebastian,
Thisha,
Sebastian,
Thisha,
Sebastian,
Thisha,
Sebastian,
Thisha,
Sebastian,
Thisha,
Lila, Part Two: A Trilogy Nears its End
For those narrow-sighted people who simply don¡¦t believe in monsters and demons, I offer one simple word: Tuesday. For me, Tuesday's utter vapidity has grown into a more fearsome creature than any long-toothed beastie my subconscious has ever concocted. Monday might represent the depressing beginning of the work week, but when you have a blisteringly boring job like mine, Tuesday is the six-headed, snake-haired, tedious reptile that breathes the fire of monotony through its irritating nostrils. So last Tuesday, I used the one accumulated personal day I had earned through eighteen months of work as a picker/divider on the warehouse floor at Zero Tolerance Industries and decided to sit around on my butt in my sub-efficiency apartment, now and then taking to my knees in prayer for a hasty end to the week, the month, and whatever hopes I may have had for a better life.
The Burden of Dreams
There are two types of men in the world: those who merely dream, and those who will stop at nothing to capture their dream. Some say there's a third type of man¡Xthe kind who gets really loud and vocal at a little league baseball game when he thinks the umpire messed up a call against his son's team and won't shut the hell up about how "the fix is in". My father was a chaser of dreams, carved from the same cloth as Charles Lindbergh, Sir Earnest Shackleton, and Paul Reiser. From the time he was twenty-one, when he journeyed on foot across Michigan for six months in an attempt to buy a package of Chuckles from every Walgreen's in the state, to his shocking retirement from the world of high finance at age fifty-eight, he crossed uncrossable borders and broke down unbreakdownable walls to get what he yearned for. So when my father called me into his palatial office at TriBiOmniCom on a drizzly March afternoon and told me that what he now wanted in life more than anything was to achieve coitus with an Amish midget, I did not hesitate for a moment to assist his quest.
"Dirty sex on a zeppelin?" his chief legal counsel, Stanley Pickwit, asked in the cavernous expanse of Conference Room T at 1:17 a.m. "Do you realize how much that will cost, sir?!"
Two weeks after Winnifred Milwaukee cashed her oversized novelty check for a cool $1.8 million, my father's doctor informed him he had only seven more weeks to live, having contracted a rare disease called Coital Altitude Syndrome, which struck the central nervous systems of men in their fifties who engaged in sexual intercourse at heights too far above sea level. The business world bowed its head in regreftul silence upon hearing this news, while at the same time it breathed a hidden, hypocritical sigh of relief. TriBiOmniCom had been headed into the toilet since my father had turned his attentions away from the business world to focus on his ambitious penis-related challenges. He was expected to step down as CEO as early as the following weekend. A secret meeting of his closest advisors was called for Conference Room W at 10 a.m. on Saturday.
Every great man has at some point approached a line past which those around him have the responsibility to urge him to stop, to go no further with his mad journey toward potential disaster. My father crossed that line at 10:02 that morning, and for two hours Stanley Pickwit, Fielding Thorpsalt, and even Hendricks Fingermelon's dutiful son labored to steer him away from this final stunt. This one would surely land him in jail, we insisted, and would destroy not only his own image but that of TriBiOmniCom itself, which had already suffered a harsh blow in the wake of the Senate's hearings into the company's refusal to hire anyone who had enjoyed The English Patient. We tried to explain to him that nailing an Amish midget in his office and banging a slutty lesbian in a gas-propelled balloon had rightfully made him a hero to dreamers everywhere, but being dragged out of Yankee Stadium half-naked would not go over too well in historical perspective. It was simply an impossibility.
It was official then in the hearts and minds of Americans everywhere: My father was a visionary to be celebrated. He was greeted back in Lutzburg with a tickertape parade. He was pre-emptively voted Time Magazine's Man of the Year, and the Intercourse Hall of Fame in Reno, Nevada awarded him with a wax replica, placed in the main lobby of that historic building between Madonna and Monique LaCreme, the brave Frenchwoman, sometimes referred to as the Rosa Parks of masturbation, who in 1899 pioneered the fight for a woman's right to get off with a cucumber.
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