THE BOYS GO OUT TO THE PINK PUSSYCAT
By John Dawson
Photo courtesy Pine Co. Sheriff’s Dept.
Remember Gone with the Wind? The book, I mean, not the movie. Of course you don’t, you’d have to be ninety years old to remember the book and nobody that old reads my stories that I know of. But Margaret Mitchell wrote it back in the nineteen-thirties and it caught on like crazy – bein’ chock full of fightin’ and foolin’ around – so they made the big movie with Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh, who turned out to be crazy as a loon, poor thing. Anyway, people badgered old Margaret for years to write a sequel but she went to her grave sayin’ fiddle-de-dee. Years and years later, Margaret’s estate – probl’y a hard-up fifth cousin or somethin’ – decides to sell the rights to a sequel and sure enough, somebody writes one which everybody who read it said it stunk to high heaven, no offense to whoever it was.
I don’t want that to happen to me – I got a reputation - so I’m writin’ my own sequel here to my last story so somebody don’t come along when I’m rottin’ in the ground - Aunt Mary’d say rotten in life and rottin’ in death – and foist an unauthorized redux on my unsuspecting public, who have come to expect what you might call certain standards from me. That, plus I got some filler material here I need to get rid of.
So if you remember, through no fault of his own – the culprits are Karen Sue, Dick Sears and his mealy-mouthed stooge Alvah Roebuck - Bobby Wayne got a job out at PCP two weeks ago. Trina, the Human Alarm Clock, was makin’ sure she hauled him out of bed, threw him in the shower, pushed some eggs and bacon into his face and shoved him out the door every morning, and – unbelievable as it may be – Bobby Wayne had actually showed up for work every day in spite of his inner slackard who heckled him every step of the way. But by the end of two weeks he’d resigned himself to buckle down and go through the motions, which means of course you work when the boss is in the room and when he ain’t you don’t. At any rate, they haven’t fired him yet so give the boy credit for that.
This morning he’s thinkin’ hard – they can hear the cogs churnin’ in China - because it’s payday and he’s tryin’ to figure out how much his check is gonna be. In a few hours he’s gonna be rich, he knows that. It’s just how rich is what’s perplexin’ him.
Problem is, he’s no good at numbers because he didn’t have focus when old Sister Elizabeth was tryin’ to teach the youth of Pineville what exactly arithmetic is supposed to do for you in life. But you can’t really blame him for that, there were a lot of distractions in school - mine being primarily Eileen Applebottom, who if not for her I probably would’ve been a rocket scientist. In Eileen’s defense, though, she did help me learn my geometric shapes.
Anyway, so as a result he’s hazy on exactly how you figure the hours you work times the amount of money they pay you, and neither does he appreciate the point of decimal points or them weird fraction deals or carryin’ this over to that. The only way he even knows how to get to twelve, in fact, is because there are twelve beers in a twelve-pack. He has to pee after six of ‘em and he can always count on six more bein’ there when he gets back. Six and six would be twelve, he’s got that.
In defense of his deplorable dearth of Einsteinism though, right before he left school – everybody agreed it was for the best - somebody invented the calculator, which made arithmetic obsolete overnight. You’d think Sister would’ve seen that trend comin’ and taught Bobby Wayne how to work one of the dang things but no, she tried to teach him his manual numbers right up to the day she threw her hands up and retired. Ironically, the very next year the Pope bought calculators for St. Gregory’s, so as a result of this tragic gap in his education – Sister bein’ the scapegoat - he can’t count and he’s disadvantaged Casio-wise - one of the lost generation - and anything havin’ to do with numbers numbs his skull plumb up, poor poop.
Anyway, Vern liked him so much he was makin’ him work overtime, showin’ him again and again what a meatpacker of the future is supposed to do, so he not only had his first two weeks pay comin’ but ten hours of overtime too - a problematic part of his present predicament because overtime pays more than ordinary - and tryin’ to fathom all them figures out was turnin’ his basic binary befuddlement – call it base twelve - into full-blown computational chaos if not total Archimedean anarchy.
If he worked two hours, that’d be twice what $9.50 was, right? He lines up twelve Camel Filters, then six more, and had it figured up to eighteen dollars but he doesn’t want to break any Camels in half for the cents, not at the price they get for ‘em. Then the tax the bureaucrats pickpocket out of you, you got to deduct -or subtract or whatever it is - that, but you got to use a percentage deal - % - to figure that, and about all he knows about percentages is that the higher they are in alcohol content the quicker they work. To be brutally frank with you, Sister’d lost him at If-Two-Prophets-In-A-Boat- Travel-Across-the- Red-Sea-at-Five-Miles-An-Hour.
So that’s where we find him, sittin’ in the locker room scratchin’ his head like it might stimulate a brain cell or two, and thus our sequel – my sequel, you ain’t doin’ the work – begins.
By the way, it’s another beautiful day in Pineville. The summer wind’s blowin’ in, the flora are flourishing, the fauna are fawnin’ and the crickets are rubbin’ their lil’ legs together twirpin’ Oh What a Beautiful Morning. It’s the kind of day that make me want to grab a beer and sit down and write about people who have jobs.
Anyway, here Vern comes struttin’ in managerially graspin’ some envelopes, and all the boys sidle up to him, pattin’ him on the back and asking how’s Sondra and the family and inquirin’ if his sore toe is any better. Vern knows the reason they’re bein’ solicitous is not because they’re interested in Sondra, the family or the toe – he’s right, they don’t give a rat’s patootie about ‘em - but because they want him to hand out paychecks before lunch.
The rule, though, is no checks til’ quittin’ time because when you pay these boys early they go out and get drunk and start callin’ in sick from the Pink Pussycat and the next thing you know pork production’s plungin’ .42% and the boys upstairs are pickin’ a bone with you. But Vern was feelin’ felicitous today because not only were his Quarterly Porcine Indicia (QPIs) in good shape, but he’d just set an all-time record for CPH – Cows per Hour - and the boys upstairs were so tickled they gave him a Framed Certificate with a gold cow sticker
on it this morning.
on it this morning. “Now look here. You been doin’ a good job lately so I’m gonna give y’all a treat today. I’m not only givin’ out paychecks early…”
“Woo-hoo!”
“But I’m givin’ you the rest of the day off!”
“I’ll be dog!”
“Vern, you the man!”
Everybody’s yee-hawin’ and high-fivin’ and slappin’ Vern on the back while he’s hollerin’ out names and dolin’ out checks and the boys’re quick changin’ out of their blood-splattered clothes like the Catfish River Killer – see the prequel - in a hurry to get to his alibi. Plus, askin’ one another if they want to peel out to the Pink Pussycat for a cold one or two.
Bobby Wayne gapes at his check and it says Five-six-two-period-three-freakin’ eight!
The only time he’s ever had that much money in one place was when he was scrapin’ up the deposit on the Fleetwood abettin’ Junior fence lumber – fir I think it was – that he’d filched from the Taco Bell they were buildin’ downtown. Bobby Wayne’s down payment kept gettin’ bigger and bigger and Taco Bell got smaller and smaller, and I don’t even think they serve Grande burritos in there.
His eyes got big as flyin’ saucers and his mouth agogged. Five hundred and sixty two dollars! Dang! Double Dang!
Well, I know my readers – you’re a sentimental bunch - are looking forward to hearing about how Bobby Wayne, imbued with the glow of a good man who’s worked hard to provide for his woman, how he took his first paycheck straight home to Trina and the two lovebirds had a delightful evening fillin’ out the order form from Sears. Bobby Wayne’d be providin’ indulgent, bemused counsel as Trina selected hankies, curtains, duvets, trivets, skillets, lamps, hampers, and whatever else her sweet lil’ heart desired for their happy, happy love nest. Perhaps the reader can imagine ‘em cuddlin’ up on the couch with the calculator and some snacks, a lil’ kissy-kissy goin’ on as they excitedly selected knick-knacks and spice racks and gimcracks. Maybe a bluebird would fly in the window and Norman Rockwell’d stop by to paint ‘em.
.
Well, you can think that all day if you want, but it ain’t what happened – pardon me burstin’ your bubble like that – because when Vern handed Bobby Wayne his check it set in motion the explosive - Euripidean, some would say - events to come and so if you’re lookin’ for blissful domestic tranquility in your choice of reading material today you’ll have to go, and I’m sorry about that, somewhere else.
The plant emptied out quicker than the time the cows got ticked off at the new taser policy and stampeded Packaging and the boys vroomed out of the lot and veered up Highway 57 to the Pussycat, ya-hooin’ and whoop-de-doin’ and rough-sketchin’ their alibis out.
Pink Pussycat-wise, Bobby Wayne hasn’t been out there since he married Trina except once – a promise is a promise – but he has to cash his check somewhere, right? It certainly ain’t his fault if the place where everybody gets his check cashed happens to be full of naked girls. It ain’t like he wants to go to the Pink Pussycat. Besides, Trina don’t have to know everything that don’t concern her. He can tell her Saul of Tarsus cashed his check for all it should matter to her.
Speakin’ of that pretty blue-eyed doll and her ilk, women - as I believe I mentioned in the prequel - possess a gene that sends a shot of serotonic pleasure through their brains when they’re fixin’ to spend a man’s money. Hence every day for the past two weeks Trina’d been totin’ up Bobby Wayne’s hours and waltzin’ Sears all around the place, internally debatin’ appliance placement – she’s got her eye on a purple popcorn popper – and imaginin’ the new spotted cow spoon caddy sittin’ on the stove. She’s lemon-waxin’ every shelf, table and flat surface in the Fleetwood to make room for all the new foofaraw, gewgaws and doo-dads and plannin’ what’s gonna go where and innervisualizin’ what its gonna look like when it gets there. The spiders, agitated at all the freakin’ rehabitation, are swearin’ up a storm.
She has her Master List, her Room List, her Think-About List and her List of Various Things that aren’t elsewhere enlisted. Plus a couple of spontaneous sticky notes stickin’ up somewhere else. Like I say it’s a gene and she can’t help it. When Queen Elizabeth, for instance, tells Prince Philip honey, we need a new ruby scepter, it’s the same deal. She just wants to gratify her gene and go out and pick one up and come back to the Palace and fool around with it and command the Royal Butler to cross it off her listus regencius. Itch scratched.
She– Trina, not Queen Elizabeth
At the same time, all throughout the kingdom – ha ha, I’ve always wanted to say that - all throughout Pineville sat a group of lovely – we’ve got the best lookin’ women in the state, you know – women. Meat-packin’ mamas, you might call ‘em – and they’re all inured to the vicissitudes of vivisectional life, adept at launderin’ cow blood off pants, dedicated to partnering with their much-loved men to make a happy, happy home, of which one of the crucial elements is that they – the boys - show up every other Friday afternoon with a paycheck in their hand and a smile on their blood-splattered face.
What these queens of their species have in common – besides a shared vision of the shoe sale this weekend at the Mall - is this same gene I’ve been trying to tell you about, and the party was gonna start as soon as their checks – I mean their much-loved men - got home.
Well, at that moment – I hate to keep ping-pongin’ you back and forth like this but I’m tryin’ to bolster my irony skills - the boys wheeled into the Pussycat parkin’ lot throwin’ up gravel and yee-hawin’ and back-slappin’ and lookin’ forward to a brief respite – we all need one from time to time - from the weary woes of the weekly workaday world. You can’t fool with cow mortality all week and not need a little down-time and a beer and it won’t hurt - if you absolutely have to while you’re cashin’ your check - to look at some naked girls, either. In any event, tain’t nobody’s business if you do like Bessie Smith said.
At the risk of givin’ my whole plot away – don’t worry, it’s thin anyway – it’s said that a fool and his money are soon parted, which must be true otherwise it wouldn’t be in Bartlett
Anyway, The Pussycat’s out on Highway 57, couple miles up from the Dairyette out there past the city limits. When it ain’t shut down for lewd and lascivious – Sheriff Badger keeps a constabularic eye peeled on the place every Wednesday afternoon - it’s a snazzy joint too.
But what you don’t do is mention in mixed company, or to your wife, or to your girlfriend, or your sister, or any member of the female species anywhere on the planet that you’ve ever been out to the Pink Pussycat or even thought about goin’ out there. They don’t like the place much – another gene, I’m guessin’ - and they ain’t shy about lettin’ you know it either.
Years ago it was Pete’s Pizza Emporium and had big long wood tables and blacklights and pinball games and silent movies and a honky-tonk piano player and funny signs on the walls. Family jollity, you know. But Pete got sick of screamin’ kids and cheese salesmen and decided that naked girls’d lure more lucre in than pizza does. I know, it’s a sad commentary on the decline in American Values, but what can you do.
The ovens are still there too, back in the girls dressing room where they use ‘em to dry their sweaty entertainer costumes – that’s why some of the girls smell like garlic salt - and warm up their lunches
Notwithstanding the aforesaid American Values, it’s the busiest place in Pine County
Junior says the Pussycat, in fact, has everything a man needs except tools, fishin’ poles, football and auto parts and that ought to be a lesson to the Home Depot boys. Shoot, he goes, if they’d put in a bar and a deejay then fire all them fat paint salesmen and replace em’ with naked girls in see-through football jerseys climbin’ up the ladder to get your water heater they’d make more do-re-mi than Donald Trump.
But I hasten to tell you that The Pussycat ain’t a place I normally frequent, except when I’m doin’ research for an article – I tried to interest Playboy in a The Girls of Pine County feature once but they never answered my letter - or Junior asks me to meet him out there every once in a while. Shoot, I don’t think I’ve been out there hardly more than a dozen times. So don’t go gettin’ the wrong idea. And don’t go tell Aunt Rhody.
But I expect my Baptist readers – a wonderful group of people, by the way – are sniffin’ down at the page right now and thinkin’ about puttin’ this story down and maybe goin’ in the kitchen to make a casserole or somethin’. I understand that, and I’d be the last person on earth to expose an innocent lamb to graphic descriptive images of mostly good-lookin’ naked Jezebels who ain’t your wife or take you on a journey rife with finely-drawn, nuanced depictions – if I can pull ‘em off - of bacchanalian temptations and unrestrained wickedness runnin’ amok. I know you aren’t supposed to so indulge.
But I got a responsibility to all my readers, not just the ones with an ecdysiast bias, and one can hardly write – about orgiastic Sex Palaces I mean - without describing the rampant Magdelenian aura of the place. So if my atmosphere ain’t your cup of iced tea I’m sorry and I promise I’ll write up a good Baptist story sometime and won’t glorify any harlots who might pop up in it.
When you slink in the Pink Pussycat first thing you see is a booth deal with a semi-good-lookin’ blonde in her early downhill years wearin’ a lot of mascara and chewing gum. That’s Candy Drobkiewicz – an Elm City Eaglette in her nascent tramp days - and her job is to look world-weary (Junior calls her the Ex-Stripper Pole) and cash paychecks and collect $10 cover charge in between doin’ her nails and readin’ People. So what happens is you cash your check, pay your cover charge and put a dollar in Candy’s tip jar, whereupon she yawns and tells you to have fun, smacks her Juicy Fruit – I myself eschew gum - and opens her nail polish remover and you stumble in stickin’ your money in your pants.
You go through a black curtain – well, past a black curtain, you can’t hardly go through one - and you’ve never seen such a dark place, at least until your eyes get used to it. You walk in blinkin’ and squintin’ like somebody out of a Robert Heinlein book and then you take to trippin’ over tables and chairs like Saul of Tarsus lookin’ for a black sock in a tar pit, if two convoluted similes in the same sentence ain’t too onerous for you. The Pussycat employees get a kick out of that and always stop to watch incomin’ customers bruise their shins and cuss while they’re gawkin’ up at the stage like – per Pussycat patois – Sea World seals at suppertime.
But that’s just the floor. Everywhere else there’s a fancy light show hittin’ you in the ocular nerves. You got bright colors bouncin’ off the walls and one of them revolvin’ mirrored ball deals splayin’ speckles of glitz off everything. They got these lil’ laser light deals mounted on oscillatin’ gyroscope deals, so all the time frenetic colorful beams are willy-nilly streakin’ up this way and down that way and across the wall and ceilings and the upshot is you feel like you’re inside Timothy Leary’s head
The next thing assaultin’ your senses is the highest decibel level OSHA allows in the workplace. Pete’s brother-in-law Slick spins the CDs, and he’s got his music all genre-organized too, so when he sees hippies truckin’ in he puts on Led Zeppelin. When the country boys come boot-scootin’ in he puts on – depending how old they are – anybody from Carrie Underwood to Conway Twitty to Grandpa Jones. And every other Friday afternoon when PCP gets paid he pulls out his Meatloaf.
The Pussycat smells like stale beer and smoke and pizza and urinal deodorizers and cheap perfume and Lysol, so for the married boys it’s evocative of an earlier time and a simpler life. Junior, who’s never been married, says it makes him feel right at home. And Junior – not me – also says you’ve never seen so much you-know-what in one place since the cat show at Mapleville mall.
Well, as soon as the meatpackers manage to mangle their way to a table, a Pussycat waitperson – Penelope Peterson, to be precise - pounces on ‘em. She’s sportin’ a pink Pink Pussycat t-shirt cut down to here and tied up to there and totin’ what Longfellow might have called a bounteous harvest o’ nature underneath it. Penelope – Penny to her friends - has a kind of around-the-block face, you know, like somebody who ain’t particularly glad to be here but since she has to be somewhere she might as well be somewhere where there’s lots of men and gin.
“Hey boys, whats y’all’s names and ain’t y’all handsome! Woo hoo!”
She sticks her fingers in her mouth and whistles.
“Hey girls! Get over here and check out these movie stars what just come in. You boys are cute and I mean cute!” She leans over and empties the ashtray, revealin’ a harvest that Longfellow only in his wilder moments might imagine the bounteousness of.
“What’ll it be, boys?”
“Beer. Beer. Beer. Beer.”
“Well ain’t you the lucky ones, we got a special on today – a bucket of beer, that’s six beers for the price of five! And shots are half-price for the next five minutes!”
“Shot. Shot. Shot. Shot.”
Penelope sashays off to the bar calculating – she was Vice-President of the Elm City High Pythagoreans before she got pregnant - what her tip ought to be off that. And before you know it here she comes back with four buckets of beer and four shots – actually 7/8ths of a shot, Pete penny-pinches his Patrón – and slaps ‘em down.
“Twenty a bucket, boys, so that’s eighty for the beer and six each for the shots, that’s another twenty-four so it’s a hundred and four and I got plenty of change and you’re gonna be needin’ some tip money, ain’t you? God, you guys are so cute I’d take my clothes off for you right here except the boss is watchin’.”
Pete was in the back room watchin’ a replay of the Chile-Venezuela World Cup game, so in a sense she was tellin’ the truth.
The boys dig in their pants and pony up. Penny leans over Bobby Wayne – she’d had a baloney sandwich for lunch – and gets up confidential and moist with his ear.
“Hey George Clooney, how about a nice tip baby?”
George Clooney - Bobby Wayne to you and me – gives her a gratuitous George – Washington, not Clooney - whereupon she goes around to all the other boys rubbin’ the back of their fool heads and goin’ hey there Johnny Depp, don’t I get a tip? They all give her dollars, appreciative of the flattery, attentive service and design of her torrid t-shirt, the ripe harvest of which they’re pruriently reapin’. But - and this would be a tip for all you future waitresses out there - takin’ note that gin, cigarettes and baloney don’t mix all that well you know, halitosisticly.
Right then, a lissome young lady entertainer - naked as a jaybird in St. Tropez and a kind of combination Ann-Margret/snake – slithers over and plunks down on Bobby Wayne’s lap like she owns the place. Just does it, you know, doesn’t ask him or anything. One minute, no Naked Redhead Bombshell on his lap; next minute, ka-boom, Naked Redhead Bombshell on his lap. Oh, wait - she wasn’t naked all the way. She had on dangly earrings and a teensy-weensy sparkly lil’ bottom deal that’d make a nice petticoat for an saucy parakeet.
“I’m Tiffany!” she announces with a gush while situatin’ her undulatin’ bosomic region right smack at his nose level. “I was beginnin’ to think there weren’t any like, awesome handsome men in Pineville today, baby,” whereupon she wiggles around on his lap like she’s fixin’ to lay an egg.
“Can you stay for a while? Please please please?” She looks up with a cute lil’ moue – poutful protrudin’ lips you know - and batted her Maybellines so fast it evaporated the honest sweat on his forehead.
There’s somethin’ about the admixture of Tabu and stripper sweat that pheromone-wise, physiologically you know, if some scientist would ever conduct a serious study on it, renders the male brain into a sort of insensate stupefaction that allows him to breathe and pee, but in terms of cognitive brain activity it devolves him to basically a bowl of Jell-o with a wallet in its back pocket.
When our male Pussycatgoer – let’s call him John Dough – experiences strange scented sweated swerving naked bosoms close up like that – and I’m speaking anecdotally of course - it’s like that old movie where Svengali gets the girl up to his parlor. She’s sittin there mindin’ her own business and all of a sudden she’s seein’ these rotating optical illusion deals comin out of his eyes, and they’re goin’ round and round and Svengali’s tellin’ her she’s gettin’ sleepy and before you know it she’s an unwitting pawn in his diabolical game and sittin’ there in her shimmy before the fade-out.
My point is, aforementioned scented, sweated, quiverin’ hooters in their natural states – pardon me vulgarly belaborin’ the issue but I’ll be finished in a minute - have a Svengaliistic effect and there ain’t nothin’ a meatpacker with a serendipitous day off can do but stare at ‘em and follow their instructions.
The male human brain – Kant will back me up on this – is capable of many things such as building bridges and sending a man to the moon. I mean, look around, and whatever you’re lookin’ at chances are some enterprisin’ man – no offense to my feminist readers - invented it.
But as finely engineered as our brains are – Aunt Mary says if I ever stopped this writing foolishness and applied myself I might amount to somethin’ – men undergo a mystic metamorphosis when subjected to a concatenation of certain stimuli – I hope I ain’t gettin’ too scientific on you – such as a laser light show with ear-splittin’ music, beer bucket and shot specials flyin’ at you, ESPN and a iniquitous denful of filles nues aux seins secouant avec Tabu crawlin’ all over you. Possibly, it’s a gene in us, I don’t know.
Bobby Wayne goes “OK!”
His normal brain has just packed up and run off, but his John Dough doppelganger – awoken by the ageless siren Tabu - is climbing out of the primordial ooze and tap-tap-tappin’ on his cerebellum door.
“Wanna buy me a drink, please, please, honey?” Tiffany clutches his arm and looks up at him like she’s little sequined-bottomed Olivia Twist askin’ for some more gruel.
“OK!”
Tiffany whistles for Penny, who promptly promenades on over.
“Hurricane Katrina with double Galliano,” she goes, and leans over and smooches Bobby Wayne a big wet gratitudinal smackeroo on the cheek.
“Thanks, baby. Wanna get to know me better, hmmm?”
Bobby Wayne opens his mouth to reply to the vivacious vermillion vixen, but his gelatinous brain – a victim of its own genetics, to be fair - hasn’t caught up with his mouth yet. Before he can ideate up a reply to what sounds like – if he ain’t mistaken – one of them loaded question deals, right then three other entertainers – similarly dazzling and unclad, just so you get the atmospheric picture - slink on over.
“Hi, I’m Tigress!” and she plops on Homer’s lap.
“I’m Destiny!” and she pirouettes onto Cal
“I’m Passion!” and she stumbles into Kenny Bob’s lap.
“Hi, I’m Kathy!” another naturist goes, but all the laps are taken – voted off the island, the girls say - so she goes back to the dressin’ room ponderin’ whether she needs a new name or not. She’s thinkin’ about Sugar, or maybe Meow. But Kathy ain’t cuttin’ it and she knows it.
Tigress, in case you’re wonderin’, is really Megan McGurk. She dropped out of Pine County Community College
Destiny is actually Amber Dawn Grindinger, and she’s tryin’ to parlay the body of a goddess and the personality of a schizophrenic cat into a Hollywood career if she can get some cute man with a reliable amphetamine connection to tote her out of Pineville and make her California
Passion is Phoebe Nighswanger – I couldn’t make a name like that up - from Mapleville. One day in the throes of burgeonin’ puberty Phoebe took her glasses off, let her blonde hair cascade down, looked in the mirror, saw stardom and sashayed into her daddy’s poker game stark naked. She enjoyed the reaction from Dad’s poker buddies and she’s been doin’ it ever since.
There are a lot of stories in the Naked City
Anyway, the girls usurp the boys laps and commence chatterin’ up a storm, tellin’ ‘em like how good lookin’ and he-manly they are and how they’re lonely today and sure would like to get to know a cute boy like them better. And, by the way, they sure are like, thirsty today.
Penny sloshes Tiffany’s Hurricane Katrina on over.
“Sixteen!”
“What?”
“Yep, and you’re lucky too, we got a Hurricane Katrina special on today!”
Bobby Wayne digs a Hamilton
“Would the good-lookin’ gentlemen like to buy these hot ladies a cocktail?” she goes, quotin’ page one of the Pussycat Training Manual and lickin’ her pencil.
The boys’ prehensile – we might as well be honest - brains, grasping that one must conduct oneself in sympathy with the proprieties of societal behavior – to wit, when a friendly naked harlot with hypnotic hooters lands on your lap and abrades her anatomy all over you and implores you to please, please buy her a lil’ drinky-winky-poo while you get to, hmmm, know each other better, well, the dictates of social intercourse – I mean, mankind is either civilized or it’s not - pretty much require you to do so. Kant wouldn’t have it any other way.
Tigress orders a Blue Bulgarian with a Bailey’s chaser. Destiny orders a Malaysian Cannonball with a shot of Seagrams. Passion orders a double Sex in the Basement with a Bacardi back.
To soften the blow, the boys upended their Falstaffs and reached for another one before they were even finished with the one they were chuggin’ down. It’s man’s way, evidence suggests, of placating that cynical nagging tiny little voice that seems to be wanting to tell us something.
Well, all authors struggle with how much action to throw in – Danielle Steele tears her hair out over it, I understand – and as to what transpired over the next couple hours, I’m of a mixed mind. One the one hand, I can tell you the boys ordered more beer buckets and of course the girls had to have new drinks too, and in between all that was a kaleidoscopic glut of grindin’ and gropin’ and Sodom-and-Gomorrahin’ the likes of which you’ve never seen unless you go to Hugh Hefner’s house. It’s a shocking picture, I know, but one either writes with gritty realism or one doesn’t.
Or maybe if you’re a electrical engineer or something, you’d rather hear about the Pussycat’s laser circuits and gyroscope breaker grids and stuff. I could do that too.
Doesn’t matter, though, because this story’s too long already, but I’ll just tell you that about midway through the third or fourth bucket of beer and the fifth or sixth seven-eighths shot of cinnamon schnapps – on sale today - the boys had begun what a cliché-ridden author might call a spiraling descent into a sort of surrealistic sodden netherworld nestled within a swirling Nudist Disco Beer Garden in a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. An illusory ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, lying between the pit of man's desires and the pinnacle of his drunken imagination. A dimension of sound, a dimension of sight, a dimension of mind… there’s a signpost up ahead that says The Pink Pussycat, and the boys were oblivious to all but beers, bounteous bosoms and bouncing bottoms…the pulsating music…the pulsating lights…the pulsating patooties…the rank pulsatingness of it all - it was a scene of such raw, devolved depravity I pretty much shudder as I type.
Junior says that Feminists – and my feminist readers are dear to me, don’t misunderstand – will tell you that the Pussycats of the world exploit women. But those chicks don’t know the facts, he goes. What they exploit is men, and all you got to do is ask John Dough how much money he had walkin’ into the Pussycat versus how much money he had walkin’ out of the Pussycat and there’s your exploitation, girls, he goes.
Accordingly, Tiffany regards herself as a consommé professional and what she’s particularly professional at is not the terpsichorean arts – no, they can bite her – but rather the art of getting George Clooneys drunk enough to facilitate the crossing of as many George Washingtons across her personal Delaware as is humanly possible. That’s what gets her inner Pussycat purrin’.
“Baby, can I tell you something?”
“Huh?”
“Well, as a single mother, you know, life is like hard for me, right?
“Huh?”
“Well, life is hard for me and lil’ Bobby Wayne and the doctor says unless he has a like kidney operation he ain’t gonna live another year.”
“Dang.”
She looks at him like he’s a world-famous kidney surgeon.
“I can tell you got a good heart, ain’t you, baby?”
“Uh-huh,” he says to her breasts.
“Well, do you think you could let me borrow like twenty dollars until payday so they don’t shut my electric off?” She takes hold of his hand and puts it on a garlic salt-scented lap.
“Uh, OK.”
So out flies another Hamilton
A sage man of the world – a wiser, older Uncle perhaps - would have at this point tapped Bobby Wayne on the shoulder and told him hey boy, don’t be puttin’ that pink piece of paper with some tramp’s phone number on it in your pants, which you’ll forget about and they’ll end up in the dirty clothes and the next thing you know you hear a screechin’ “What in the hell is this?” comin’ from the laundry room. Lucrezia Borgia was just fine, he’d say, until she found a Nero’s Playhouse napkin in Giovanni’s breeches, for instance, and look at her.
But actually what I have to do now – and I hate to tear you away from one of my most daring, atmospheric scenes to date - is to get you to wind your clocks back because frankly, I forgot to tell you about this part earlier so I’m insertin’ one of those flashback deals.
Back at the plant when the boys were changin’ out of their overalls and talkin’ about traipsin’ out to the Pussycat, Burt Zing – in the course of his official duties as Pineville Vending Company coke-machine-filler-upper - wheeled by and overheard ‘em.
Which, if you’re plannin’ any funny business of the-wife-don’t-have-to-know variety, the last person you want to be overheard by is Bert. Bert’s a paragon of righteous rectitude and about as big a blabbermouth that ever come down Pike’s Peak to boot. He loves Jesus and he loves gossip and there ain’t nothin’ he likes better than tellin’ everybody what all he’s observed Satan doin’ today and who all he’s doin’ it with.
So when he gets home he - like Judas, Junior said – tells his precious Sydney Sue about Vern givin’ the plant the afternoon off and that a bunch of the boys were headin’ out to the devil’s own playground, That Purple Pussycat Place Out There. Sydney Sue frowned, tsk-tsk’d, looked up to heaven, bemoaned that evil sure doth pursueth sinners don’t it, O Lord, and picked up the phone.
Well, when a blue-eyed doll with an itchy gene – let’s call her Trina - is sittin’ at home patiently waitin’ on her paycheck – I mean her husband – and her phone rings, she reaches for it under the Jungian Theory of Intuition. Meaning that if this telephone call has the slightest thing to do with her meatpacker – known as George Clooney in other, secret circles - coming home late or without his full paycheck or any freakin’ poppycock of that ilk – she knows exactly what to do about it and there will be – Do you hear me, Mister? – There will be no monkey business and you just get your butt home right this minute with that paycheck is about the size of it. Not that she expected it – she loves and trusts her Bobby Wayne to a point - but she was prepared.
“Hello?” she goes tentatively, her inner Napoleon cockin’ an ear.
“Hi honey, praise Jesus, it’s Sydney Sue. Say, listen honey…”
The gist of the terrible thing took about twelve seconds and Trina had her boots on and halfway strung up before it was over.
OK, that’s the end of the flashback deal, so you can get your head back in the present now which, as you’ll recall, we’re in the Pussycat witnessing the decline of civilization. Nebuchadnezzar – a gratuitous reference for my biblical scholar readership - never had it so good, or Bacchus or Tiberius either, for that matter, to exhaust some of the more famous Kings of Debauchery I can remember offhand. I expect it’d just another day at the mansion for Hugh Hefner, though.
Every once in a while, one of the girls had to get up and sort of dance – none of ‘em is exactly Margot Fonteyn – and they made sure to tell the boys how it’d sure make em’ feel like a lot better – please please please, they pleaded, like naked sweaty James Browns - if they’d stumble up and slip em’ a George or two while they’re on stage so as not to hurt their feelings.
“Let’s get some champagne and party all night!”
That’s Tiffany, and in the interim since you’ve been away, she’s swiveled around on Bobby Wayne, straddlin’ him face to face and slidin’ up and down on him like she’s Kookaburra shinnyin’ up the old oak tree.
“Awesome! Let’s get some champagne and go back to my place! Yee-haw!” goes Passion, clutchin’ Kenny Bob’s thigh like a nymphomaniac airline passenger over the Bermuda Triangle.
“S’Penny!” sputters the munificent bonhomous bon vivant Mr. Bobby Wayne, and the aforesuggested King of Grapes is summoned. The girls exchange meaningful glances too, because when you – the employee-entertainer - get John Dough to pony up for champagne at the Pussycat, Pete pays you a twenty-buck premium and a Lincoln
“Sixty,” she goes untwistin’ the sparklin’ fruit of Pierre Matisse & Sons’ award-winning New Mexico
“Woo-hoo!”
“Hey baby, I’ve got an idea!”
“Huh?”
“How about a lap dance, darlin’!”
“Uh, OK.”
Now, I myself had never heard of a “lap dance” before I started doing research for this story about thirty years ago, but what happens is the dancer basically acts like an eager Eaglette cheerleader in the rear seat of a Volkswagen – although she’s already got her bra off so you don’t have to mess with that - while the dancee sits in a chair and tries to move his hands where John Law says she don’t want ‘em. This goes on for the length of the four-minute “lap dance” and Pete – although he ain’t doin’ the work – charges thirty smackaroos a pop for ‘em which the girls are supposed to split with him but they sometimes – it takes a lot of devotion to your art to get drunk and party naked - forget.
Tiffany quick pivoted herself upside down – her gymnastics coach at Elm City High had spotted her talent right off when she did it for him - and her legs are up in the air with Bobby Wayne’s head smack between ‘em, thigh-wise. She’s reachin’ up and grabbin’ him by the hair and grindin’ him into – it pales me to have to tell you this - her actual sparklin’ grocery area. Thus situated, he reaches over for the champagne bottle.
“Where in the hell is my husband?”
This would be a good time to tell you about Red Wife Alert program at the Pussycat.
Shortly after Pete forsook pizza for pulchritude, he began to notice that on certain days – paydays, to be precise - the Pussycat attracted certain unwelcome guests – to wit, ticked-off wives of Payin’ Customers – and they were puttin’ a monkey wrench in the business by causin’ a general ado and disturbance and railroadin’ them – his valued Payin’ Customers – out the door by the ear, notwithstanding our Jeffersonian Freedoms to have a naked girl on your lap as long as you don’t yell Fire in a crowded theater. Sayin’ nothin’ about his constitutional right to operate his legal, tax-payin’, properly-councilman-bribin’ business without a bunch of wild-eyed communist Carrie Nations cavortin’ around.
If there’s one thing your Pussycat proprietor positively eschews, it’s the sudden injection of reality into the swirling other-dimensional psychedelic Nude Disco Beer Garden
He flips off the Chile-Venezuela game and presses the Red Wife Alert switch, which, with satellite red bulbs all over the place, notifies the employees that page four of the Pussycat Training Manual - THE RED WIFE ALERT AND YOUR RESPONSIBILITIES - has been activated.
Candy quick pulls out the Red Wife Alert sign:
No unescorted ladies allowed – no exceptions
No weapons
No refunds under Any circumstances
We call the Police
Member Pineville Better Business Bureau
Have a Nice Day
She scoops up the money and paychecks and zips out the back door and zooms off in her rusty red racin’-stripe Camaro, takin’ back roads to the bank and swirlin’ up a cloud of dust like Mrs. Babyface Nelson leavin’ Topeka
The only employees exempt from Red Wife Alert are the entertainers who always enjoy ‘em. You can’t get too much drama in real life is their motto, and a bigger audience – they’re performance artists, after all – inspires ‘em to do their best.
“I said, where in the hell is my husband?”
Bobby Wayne thought he heard something.
Well, Lucky’s seen so many mad wives he might as well be married to Lorena Bobbit and her mother and he goes up to Trina, buttons his bulletproof vest and points to the sign.
“No unescorted women in here. And no weapons!” he goes, can’t helpin’ but to notice Trina’s daddy’s Winchester
But tell you the truth, Lucky was a little leery. There are mad women – look at Chaillot, for instance – but there are also Insane Women With Weapons, the kind you read about in the paper. And in Trina he sees the mad red-hot mama to end all mad red-hot mamas – she’s practically emittin’ chaos and destruction – and he notices the steam curlin’ up out of her ears which is never – ever - a good sign in a woman brandishin’ a shotgun. Even if she does have the prettiest blue eyes you’ve ever seen.
Trina points Daddy’s twelve-gauge smack up against Lucky’s nose which hurt like the dickens because he’s got a little sore tryin’ to come up on it and she pushes her way right past him – imagine Napoleon stridin’ into Austerlitz past the crossing guard - and the gals march through the black curtain into the Pussycat proper.
Barbra, normally a voice of serene reason in trying times, tried to tell Trina that lovers are very special people, but Trina wasn’t havin’ none of it. Charlie Chaplin fell down some steps but she didn’t think it was all that funny. Our entertainers, watchin’ the weapon-wieldin’ wives walkin’ in, wink and smirk at one another and intensify their exotic erotic exercises all over the boys and wait for the metaphoric or figurative – whichever it is – axe or shoe to fall.
Trina and her troops make a bee-line – there’s uxorial radar about this kind of thing - up to the tawdry tableful of sloppy-drunk meatpackers and hard-workin’ wicked wet wenches and slowly digest the entire disgusting scene - which, if you recall, we left at the moment Tiffany’s garlic-salt-scented rhinestoned rear end was, shall we say, tête-à-tête with Bobby Wayne’s sinuses, her thighs bein’ wrapped around his fool head like the vice on grandpa’s workbench. He – Bobby Wayne, not Grandpa - was tippin’ the champagne bottle over and tricklin’ a stream of Pierre & Sons’ into Tiffany’s upside-down gapin’ mouth and yellin’ “Take it, baby, take it.”
“Robert Wayne!”
Bobby Wayne turned his head in curiosity at some noise over to his left, shook his head, and sees Trina – actually, two Trinas – standin’ there with a shotgun - actually three shotguns - and although you may find it hard to believe he managed to gasp out a greeting to ‘em.
“Oh, hi!”
Remember Bobby Wayne’s wise old Uncle? Well, he’s back again and he’s wincin’ and tellin’ Bobby Wayne hey boy, when your woman catches you in the Pussycat in the compromising clutch of a scarlet temptress – which I would say she has just conclusively caught you in the clutch of – what you don’t do is say “Oh, hi!” like you just ran into her on the Boardwalk on a sunny day in June and you like her hat. What you do, the avuncular sage advises, is rub your eyes, shake your head, and say “What? Where am I…All I remember is the train…the screams…”
But no matter, it was done.
Tiffany looked up from upside down and over at Trina.
“Hey sugar, we’ll be done in a minute. Why don’t you be a good girl and go sit up at the bar and have a Shirley Temple while you wait.” She resumes climbin’ up Bobby Wayne like depraved ivy on a Carnegie library.
Seein’ Trina like that reminded me of the time Aunt Mary put a capon – an emasculated chicken like what Bobby Wayne was about to become although it hadn’t quite dawned on him yet - in the pressure cooker (which for my younger readers is a kind of prehistoric microwave) whereupon she drank a pint of Captain Morgan and went to sleep for fourteen hours. Meanwhile it – the pressure cooker - was goin’ chumpa-chumpa- chumpa with increasing ferocity and it eventually erupted and ka-chumped consommé of castrated chicken carcass all over the kitchen and halfway across the street.
Trina, and you can’t narrow your eyes and clench your teeth any tighter and still enunciate your words, levels her shotgun at Tiffany like Annie Oakley catchin’ Belle Starr on Buffalo Bill’s lap in the Gilded Birdcage. Shootin’ from the hip while shootin’ from the hip, you know.
“Is that so?”
Sheriff Badger – always alert to a 911 call from Pete - walks up. Slick changes the CD to I Fought the Law and the Law Won, which the Sheriff always tips him a dollar when he has to come out to the Pussycat to kick somebody out and Slick plays his song when he does.
Tiffany, Tigress, Destiny and Passion, wary of the exact status of certain personal jurisprudential matters, slunk down to the floor and slithered away under the lights - sweaty, sequined serpents of Sin you might say - back to the dressing room to dry their sparkly sweaty seat-covers in the oven, dump the phone numbers the boys’d given ‘em in the trash and count their cash which, I understand, was about two thousand sweaty Georges, give or take. Mission
Universal happiness and good will toward men, though, is a rare thing and as the pistol-packin’ mamas unceremoniously – you can’t ceremoniously yank four stinkin’ drunk meatpackers across a sticky floor and a gravel parking lot – hauled ‘em out of the Pussycat, their thoughts lie – not, as I say, in good will toward men - but in far darker, Sadean regions of their minds.
Plus, leading optometrists will tell you that when you’ve been in a Dungeon of Desire for the past three hours and your drunk eyes are all accustomed to it you shouldn’t all of a sudden get drug by your hair by your wife out into the blazing afternoon Pineville sun because you might risk eye damage – retina or cornea, one of those - like when you gawk at a solar eclipse. But it’s my sad duty to report that the red-hot mamas weren’t in the slightest bit concerned with the ocular well-being of the dragees, and when the glaring Pineville sun hit the boys they were struck blind - in addition to bein’ blind drunk – and they looked like Saul of Tarsus stumblin’ out of Mary Magdalen’s whorehouse on a sunshiny day.
I guess you’re wonderin’ what happened when the boys got home. That’s a whole other story – a trequel, I guess – and I ain’t got time to get into it now, although it’s a doozy and I’ll write it up for you someday if I ain’t doin’ anything else and can wrestle with the sheer pathos of it.
Oh, all right. I’ll give you a peek.
The next morning – and I don’t know if you’ve ever had about twenty-four long-neck Falstaffs and a slew of cinnamon schnapps shots in the space of about three hours and been rudely extrapolated from your Nude Disco Beer Garden, blinded and dumped in your back yard whereupon you pass out and sleep for sixteen hours in the doghouse and are awakened by – no, not the gentle, welcoming twitter of the birds - but the cold, unrelenting stream of the garden hose rainin’ down on you like you’re a smelly trash basket?
When Bobby Wayne snapped to – it was either that or get waterboarded –he looked up at Trina and opened his mouth to say “Oh hi,” but somehow, seein’ the look on her pretty face – imagine Venus de Milo on a real bad hair day - he found mere words somehow inadequate and he shut it again. It was plain that overnight time had not healed, despite what Chaucer claims.
Which is just fine from a me-havin’-to-write-dialogue standpoint, because Trina pretty much hogged all of that anyway for the next week and there wasn’t a thing Bobby Wayne needed to say except yes ma’am, no ma’am, and I guess I am, ma’am. Any time he attempted to interpolate an explanatory, non-servile or unobsequious comment – and he finally stopped tryin’ after the second day – she told him to shut up and kept tellin’ him to shut up until he finally did.
His mother had warned her, she’d begun, about him and what she believed to be a regressive brain-cell that’s been lurkin’ in his family for years and could quite possibly be traced back to a diseased Congolean ape. Plus, certain of his ancestors – everybody knows it so let’s get it all out on the table - had neglected to undergo certain legal and moral formalities and the horror of drunken inbreeding – she was frankly surprised he didn’t have polydactylism – was the only excuse for his well-known moronic imbecility and that yes, she felt a certain compassion for him as she would a lobotomized slug, but how he was ever to rise above his multiple pathetic failures as a human being – pull himself out of the fetid muck is what she said – was a good question and well, maybe God knows and cares, but she sure don’t and she sniffs like there’s a three-day-old dead skunk in the room and walks away, mutterin’ in one of them sotto voices that at least the Lord in his mercy hasn’t condemned her to bear an idiot child with such a slobbering goon and thank God for that and the door slammed.
Notwithstanding, of course, that Bobby Wayne, slobberer, was possessor of one of the most magnificent hangovers that Bacchus had ever inflicted on a descendant of a Congolean primate and quite possibly had permanent retina – or cornea – damage to boot. One might think, Junior said later, that she’d be bringin’ him an ice bag and a pillow, but no, when she came back out all she brought him was a naked discussion of narcissism and nihilism. One way he might possibly redeem himself, she said in a thoughtful aside as he writhed there in the mud, would be to kill himself and leave his brain to science so they can take it apart and find the loose screw and maybe help some other poor half-wit.
By the way, she interrupted herself, didn’t your mother drink a bottle of Muscatel every day when she was pregnant with you? That might explain part of it because it takes nature and nurture both to turn an innocent – although genetically doomed – infant into a slavering, amoral, lunatic sot, whereupon she limned in uncompromising detail at least sixteen occasions in the past twenty years he had made a drunken ass – her term, not mine - out of himself.
That topic smoothly evolved into a broad philosophical discussion of immorality, degeneration, debasement, depravity, libertinism, profligacy, pecancy – which is the morals of an alcoholic alley cat like you, she explained – and she took pains to document each of these tragic moral failings with exemplars going back through the years of Bobby Wayne’s checkered life – a trip to the principal’s office in fourth grade for trying to look up Sister Elizabeth’s habit was first on the list - and featuring pertinent quotations – in an ironic twist I like to put in my stories - from Saul of Tarsus himself.
Around three o’clock she opened up new topic and waxed eloquently – I’ve always wanted to say that but none of my characters has ever come this close before – on the subject of strumpets, harlots, trollops, loose women, Naked Redhead Bombshells, S-words and other names these are mild compared to, along with an incisive running commentary about the morals, complexions, personal hygienes and fat thighs of those S-words out there and others of their insidious ilk. Upon which she segued seamlessly into a thoughtful history of syphilis and all the other types of parasitical cooties you get by consortin’ with the aforementioned deviltresses of depravity. All that was missin’ from her lecture was a pointer and blown-up pictures of body parts all rotted away from lookin’ for love in the wrong places.
At dinner – tuna noodle casserole for her and a can of cold pork and beans for him in a dog dish - she began an unblushing discourse about the meaning of the word idiot, making her various points with a finely-wrought, colorful recitation of each character flaw and foible, major and minor, that he’d had since childhood up to the present day, some of which, admittedly, was anecdotal such as the time when he was twelve and decided to pee on the fence in the middle of winter, got too close and got his weenie frozen stuck to it and they had to call the volunteer fire department. Should have left well enough alone, she said. And with that reminder of an incident Bobby Wayne had all but blotted out, she strode into the bedroom and the resolute click of the lock echoed like Heidi in his poor ears all night. That was the first day.
In the morning - the floor or the doghouse, take your pick but use Lysol after yourself, she’d said – here she comes, startin’ in anew by recapping her major points of yesterday and embellishing them with some new things she had thought of overnight and some insults she’d remembered from Jerry Springer.
And this went on for four solid days, from the minute he got up to the minute he left for work – he actually looked forward to it and volunteered for overtime, if you can beat that - and from the minute he returned to his once happy, happy home until a merciful, uneasy sleep finally claimed him at night I doubt he uttered, muttered or sputtered more than twenty words the whole time, while a conservative estimate of her vehemence would be in the three-hundred to four-hundred thousand vocabulary range with very little repetition. It was the pent-up rampage of a woman with an ungratified gene and a grudge, so you can imagine.
Things finally seemed to calm down, though, by Wednesday night. Hurricane Trina’s windin’ down or maybe she just run out of the English Language, Bobby Wayne thought amusedly - but guardedly - to himself.
He’s sittin’ on the sofa tryin’ to focus on Criminal Minds when a bloodcurdling shriek - it could have been the Catfish River Killer’s latest poor victim - comes from the laundry room.
“What in the hell is this?”
Bobby Wayne, never a quick thinker, had to digest it for a second or two, but suddenly he heard the voice of his sagacious old uncle.
“You better get the hell out of here right now, boy.”
*
EPILOGUE DEAL: The last time anybody seen Bobby Wayne he was shufflin’ down Highway 57 at sunrise whistlin’ a mournful tune about a lonesome whippoorwill.
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