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updated July 28, 2005
A few onlookers started pumping their fists and chanting "Take�it�off! Take�it�off!" Soon most of the onlookers were pumping their fists and chanting "Take�it�off!", with a few onlookers occasionally shouting "Woooo!"
Mr. Culver stood still for a few moments. "Oh all right!" Mr. Culver shouted over the noise. The crowd turned silent. "Oh all right! If you insist!" The crowd applauded and cheered. Mr. Kay started playing the track he always played at this time, a 1980s synthesized version of the instrumental piece "The Stripper." Mr. Culver slipped out of his suit jacket and let it drop behind him onto the floor. He took off his tie with a few brief tugs and tossed it at Nexworth's first assistant technology officer, 33-year-old Kari Hanna, who raised her arms to catch it after it had sailed past her head and hit the wall; she was drunk too. He slowly unbuttoned his shirt, pulled his left arm out of its sleeve, almost toppled over pulling his right arm out of its sleeve, yanked the shirt out of his trousers, swung the shirt above his head, and hurled it in front of him at Mr. Prine's feet.
"That's what we want!" Mr. Prine said.
Mr. Culver licked his right index finger and touched it to his right nipple.
"Yeaah, hot stuff!" Mr. Prine shouted.
Mr. Culver licked his left index finger, smiled for a moment, and undid his belt. He unsnapped his trousers. He moved the zipper up and down while saying "Beep!..Boop!...Beep!" He finally unzipped them. He stepped out of his right trouser leg, almost toppling over again. He stepped out of his left trouser leg. He dropped his trousers onto the floor and leaped away from them. He wore just black socks, brown shoes, and white briefs. "Ta-da!" he said with pride. He bowed again and again to tumultuous applause.
Suddenly he stood up straight. "Hark!" he said. "The King has a very important proclamation he wants to deliver!" More cheers and applause erupted as Mr. Culver grabbed his left buttock with his left hand, then his right buttock with his right hand. Mr. Kay abruptly cut off the synthesized version of "The Stripper" and started playing the synthesized 1980s rap melody he always played at this time. Mr. Culver thrust his buttocks towards the crowd and started rapping, his hands squeezing them together and pulling them apart, vaguely in sync with his words: "My name is King Keister / And I'm here to say / I'm the finest damn booty / In the U-Ass-A! / I'm smooth and I'm firm / I can win any race / I look good in tight pants / Or on Paris Hilton's face!"
Mr. Culver walked toward Nexworth's customer care supervisor, 36-year-old Kimberley Crandall. He turned around and thrust his rear toward her, his hands still on it. "Hey, Kimmy Kimmy / I know I'm a freak / But could you still rub / My left butt cheek?" Ms. Crandall giggled and rubbed his left buttock up and down with her right index finger. His briefs showed no visible stains, back or front.
After a few moments he moved away and walked toward Ms. Hanna. "How's it hanging, your highness?" she asked.
"It's not hanging at all / If you know what I mean / If you rub my right cheek / I'll make you my queen." She reached under his briefs and rubbed the bottom of his right buttock with her right hand, to loud applause.
He walked toward the newest member of Ms. Browning's flunky brigade, 22-year-old Hallie Phelps, who had started working for Nexworth a week ago. She held a cup that contained one-fourth Perrier, one-fourth crushed ice, one-fourth melted ice, and a chunk of lemon that was three-fifths rind. He thrust his rear toward her. "I just gotta say / You're a cute little lass / You look ready to rub / Both cheeks of my ass!"
"Nah, they look too sweaty from all your dancing," Ms. Phelps said. "Allow me to cool them off." She stretched open the elastic waistband of his briefs and quickly poured everything in the cup between his buttocks. She snapped the waistband shut, and he jumped forward.
"Jesus fucking Christ!" he shouted.
"I can do another take if you want," she said to Mr. Prine. The onlookers applauded sporadically.
"You ruined my performance, lady!" Mr. Culver said.
"So toss me in the dungeon." She walked out of the room. Ten seconds later Ms. Lake followed suit. She caught with her outside the building entrance.
"Hey, I loved what you did in there," Ms. Lake told her. "Too bad it wasn't in the front of his shorts."
"Yeah, that would've been the first bulge there in years," Ms. Phelps said, flicking on a disposable lighter.
"Heh, right. But aren't you worried he'll have you canned?"
"Hell no, I'm a cute little lass. Everyone loves eye candy." Ms. Phelps stared at the flame for a few seconds, then flicked off the lighter and showed it to Ms. Lake. It had a photorealist painting of a brachycephalic clown in whiteface and red painted frown, a single tear rolling down his cheek. "Great lighter, huh?"
"Great? It's a modern art masterpiece! Where'd you get it?"
"Some gas station, and I don't even smoke. Well, not tobacco, anyway." Ms. Phelps dropped the lighter into her purse, zipped up her purse, and belched slightly. "Excuseh moi. Shouldn't've eaten the stuffed peppers. You'd think a company like ours could afford better food."
"Well, our company needs the money for more important things, like anti-union goon squads in Burma."
"Yeah, gotta spread the glories of capitalism, ha ha."
"Ha ha. Hey, you wanna get out of here? If we leave now, we can just catch the world premiere of this play some friends of mine are putting on, Christmas at Abu Ghraib."
"Christmas at Abu Ghraib?"
"Yeah. My friends run this theatrical troupe you might have heard of, the Fighting Fightmasters?...They like to produce plays that examine the important issues of the day in an irreverent manner. Tonight they're reenacting the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, but in funny animal costumes, with lots of nudity and sadomasochistic hijinks. I hear Santa even shows up and gets a baton shoved up his ass."
"Can't get enough of sodomized Santas."
"Yeah, that filthy ho ho ho�.Anyway, it's ten bucks at the door, but a portion of the money's going toward local anti-war groups. You wanna go?"
"Nah. I watched Jon Stewart last night, so I've had my political fix for the month. Why don't we go to my place instead? We could watch a movie or something."
37 minutes later, the two women entered Ms. Phelps's apartment in the gentrifying barrio outside the development zone. (Four art galleries, a tattoo-and-piercing parlor, and a national maid-service franchise had opened in the barrio within the past year.) "My humble home, decorated in early Salvation Army," Ms. Phelps said.
The women walked into the living room. Ms. Phelps pointed to a stack of four shrink-wrapped DVDs lying atop her DVD player. "My extensive movie library. Bought 'em all yesterday. See anything you like?"
Ms. Lake inspected the titles with increasing pleasure�the first four installments of the Nukey High series of low-budget postapocalyptic softcore teenage sex comedies from the 1980s. "Oh, man, these are great! I used to watch these as a kid on cable TV!"
"Me too!" Ms. Phelps said.
Ms. Lake picked up the first volume, Nukey High: Morton Loses It. "Could we start at the beginning of the saga?"
The two women sat on the couch and started watching the movie, which opens with Morton, a fat teenage boy with thick glasses and a receding hairline, prowling about outside a suburban house late one night (an inept day-for-night effect). He hears giggling emerge from inside, so he peeps through a window and sees five silicone-enhanced teenage girls (in their late twenties and early thirties) having a pillow fight in camisoles and negligees, inside a bedroom festooned with posters of male rock stars with jumpsuits and caked-on makeup. Slow-motion shots of bobbing breasts and swaying buttocks alternate with close-ups of Morton's sweaty face as seen from inside the window. Suddenly a radiation-spawned mutant biker the color and texture of clam chowder lifts up Morton's somewhat thinner and less-balding stunt double by the neck and tosses the double off-screen. Shot of the real Morton's head hitting the ground, knocking him unconscious. The biker bursts through the window. Close-up of each girl as she screams. He grabs the last girl to scream, the bustiest girl in the smallest negligee, as her companions manage to escape. He tosses her over his shoulder. Shot of the girl facing away from him. "God, like how can this night get any worse?" she asks herself in a Valley Girl accent. Close-up of the biker's rear as he lets loose a long, loud, damp fart. Shot of the girl saying "Pee-you!" as she grimaces and waves her hand before her face. The biker runs off with her into the distance. Cut to Morton, regaining consciousness on the sidewalk. A panicked look spreads across his face. He looks down and sees a large dark spot on the crotch of his beige trousers. "Aw�I wet myself again!" he says. He starts to cry. Cue opening credits, set to "The Pinnacle (Theme from Nukey High: Morton Loses It)", a rap song from Power Play (his only foray into movie soundtrack recording, released before the incident the American music press would dub Gaygate) in which he contends "you can get loot and love / and rise above / and reach the pinnacull."
"Ah, memories," Ms. Lake said.
Half an hour later, during a lull between sex scenes, Ms. Lake asked "So what do you think of your job so far?"
"Well�I like the employee break room," Ms. Phelps answered. "I didn't know they still made Formica countertops with the little boomerangs."
"Cheer up, Hal. Pretty soon you'll be comfortably numb and love your corporate oppressor with all your heart."
"I don't dislike my job. I've always wanted to work in advertising. I just thought I'd be doing something more creative after college than calling T-shirt manufacturers in Beijing [at Ms. Browning's request, to specify the width of the tears in the line of pre-torn, retro-Eighties, new-wave T-shirts promoting the company's Nextunes downloable music service]."
"Well somebody's gotta do it. I started out toiling in the Nexworth salt mines just like you."
"How long have you worked for Nexworth again?"
"Over a year."
"Well�you ever see Bert Gossard even once in all that time?" Mr. Gossard was the 54-year-old president of advertising and promotion at Nexworth, a position he'd held since 1995.
"Maybe once. He, or someone who looked like him, actually ran through the office one day eight months ago, with no warning. I saw whoever it was only for a few seconds. He had Bert's build and ponytail, but he had a paintball helmet on and I couldn't see his face."
"I heard he hasn't come to work in years, yet still gets paid. And he's not even related to anyone higher-up, so we can't blame nepotism. So why does he still have a job?"
"My theory is, either he has videotape of the top execs dancing around to ABBA records in drag�or the top execs are sexist creeps who don't want a woman to join the old-boys' club. If they fired him, they'd have to replace him with the next in line, and that next in line's Everette. If they replaced him with another dick-slinger, she'd probably quit, and our department would tank without her and they know it."
"You have a pretty high opinion of her."
"Of course. I have to admire her skills. She didn't have any training or experience in advertising, yet she managed to bullshit her way into this department straight out of college, then perform well enough to climb the corporate ladder. She knows how to lead. She knows how to spot creative people and win the Run 'em Over betting pool each week."
"Well, yeah, but Al. I think you like more than just her gambling skills....Don't deny it. The other people at work might not notice, but I do. I see the way you look at her. Your tongue all but unfurls down to the floor."
"Heh heh heh�.Can't put anything over on you, huh?"
"I'm just observant. As a kid, I could find Waldo in half a second. And you spent the whole time looking at her legs at the party."
"Who could blame me? Man, those calves. So big and powerful, like something straight of R. Crumb, especially in those stockings." (Ms. Browning wore what she liked to call her "rich slut stockings," the retro-look gray ones with the exaggerated black seams.)
"Mm-hmm. So how serious do you feel about her?"
"Pretty serious�.I was somewhat attracted to her the first time I saw her. Then I started doing well at work, and she promoted me to head flunky and started inviting me to those weekly foosball tournaments, if you could call them that. We didn't compete or keep score, we just twirled the little guys around at random on their poles and had pleasant conversations about work, TV, politics, nothing too personal. Anyway, my feelings for her deepened during these games, as I got to know her. Or rather, as she let me know her. God, this is corny shit."
"Of course it is. Go on."
"She started telling me about her private life, minor stuff. Frozen dinners she's bought, her favorite toys as a kid, political donations she's made, the snot-colored walls of her dorm room at college. I loved these factoids; they made her even more appealing, and made me feel like part of an exclusive club. She never told anyone else at work about herself, at least I like to think so. Anyway, one day three months ago we were having a match, a lighthearted game, just the two of us as usual. Suddenly she stopped playing. She stood still, a little unsteady, and had this stunned looked on her face. 'Anything wrong?' I asked. She looked down at the foosball table, looked up at me, and said�"
"Yes?"
"She said that one day when she was seven and her brother was eight, she was pissed off at him about something. She's forgotten what it was. Anyway, she was so pissed off that she went to his room and stole his favorite toy, a G.I. Joe doll. She went to the garage and...dropped Joe into a can of pink paint, head-first, uniform and all."
"Pink? Heh heh, I can imagine how divine he must have looked."
"Yeah. It was house paint too, the permanent kind. Her father had used it to paint her room. Anyway, she went outside, found her brother, and said 'Come quick, there's been an accident.' She led him to the garage and showed him the scene of the accident. He could see Joe's legs sticking out of the can. 'He fell in,' she told her brother. 'I tried to save him.' He, her brother, stood there for a moment, then started screaming in agony. Their mother heard him and went to see what the problem was. Ev knew she'd get into trouble, but she didn't care. She was that pissed off at her brother.
"Anyway, her brother told their mother what had happened, that Ev had ruined his doll. His mother stood there, then slapped him hard across the face. 'Don't scream like a little girl,' she said. 'Next time, hit her.'"
"Yikes."
"That was the first time their mother had ever hit any of them, and it wouldn't be the last. So he started crying and whimpering, and Ev�Ev started snickering. Not laughing, snickering. She couldn't help it, she told me. She thought her mother would slap her harder. But before Mommie Dearest could do anything, her brother was snickering, too�'snickering through his tears,' as she described it to me. Her mother looked at both of them with a blank expression and left the garage.
"Soon as their mother left, Ev asked him why he'd snickered. He wiped his tears and said ''Cause girls don't use house paint, you dummy.' So she punched him in the face. That was the first and last time she ever hit him. She wasn't angry and didn't want to hit him. She just felt she had to, as a formality. She didn't punch him very hard; he didn't go down, or scream or cry. They looked at each other, and she left the room. Neither of them ever mentioned anything about the doll incident ever again, nor did he ever hit her."
"How'd he turn out?"
"She didn't say, and I didn't ask. She wouldn't even tell me his name. After telling me this story, she did say, in all seriousness, 'If you tell anyone this, I'll knock your block off, screw it back on, and knock it off again.' And she jumped back into the foosball game and reverted to her usual cheerful self. But since then she's stopped feeding me bits about her life, no factoids, nothing, just back to harmless conversation about our employees' sex lives and the public meltdowns of shiny celebrities. I've started to think I should euthanize my feelings for her, but�"
"Does she know about them?"
"Well, I've never told her, and she's never said anything about them, but she has to know."
"Have you had a relationship with anyone else since joining the company? A reciprocal relationship?"
"No."
"Would you like to have a reciprocal relationship?"
Ms. Lake stared at her with a slight grin.
Ms. Phelps reached for the remote control and turned off the movie. She laid the remote control in front of them onto the yellow throw-rug shaped like a circular smiley-face; the face had three black vertical ovals for eyes and a white buck tooth. "You know, you can have different types of relationships with people."
"How different?"
Ms. Phelps dove atop her and started kissing her. Ms. Lake started kissing back more forcefully. They kissed and groped each other for a while. They stopped kissing. "Stay right there," Ms. Phelps said. She got up, pulled her dress off over her head, let the dress dangle at arm's length between her thumb and forefinger, and dropped the dress onto the smiley-face rug. She wore no bra but did wear fruit-print panties: apples, oranges, bunches of grapes, unidentifiable berries; the words HEALTHY EATING appeared over the crotch in Times New Roman font. "I had to buy these panties. Their subtlety appealed to me."
"Yeah�at least they don't have an arrow pointing down from HEALTHY EATING," Ms. Lake said.
Ms. Phelps pulled down her panties around her thighs. She got back onto the couch and straddled Ms. Lake's face.
"I better get a bonus for fucking that cow, that's all I have to say," Ms. Phelps told her supervising agent, 49-year-old Paul Shivek, the next morning over soy scrapple at Big Chollie's, one of the gentrifying barrio's newest eating establishments, a gourmet diner that the food critic at the development zone's most popular monthly upscale fashion and lifestyle magazine had awarded three-and-a-half out of four forks. Ms. Phelps was actually a 28-year-old undercover FBI agent named Teresa Williamson. "She can't even eat pussy right. Had to fake my orgasm when her tongue was flopping around in there."
"You're playing a role, remember?" Mr. Shivek asked through a mouthful of Big Chollie's Morning Meatloaf Platter. "What difference does it make if you have to play-act your orgasms, too?"
"Well, I deserved some pleasure after sitting through that goddamn Nukey High movie."
"Poor baby. The sacrifices one makes for the good of one's country."
"The night wasn't a total waste. She did tell me a few interesting facts about Everette Browning. Didja know Browning made a five-hundred-dollar cash donation, anonymously, to the John Kerry campaign?"
"That was money well spent. Why didn't she just give the money to Osama bin Laden and cut out the middleman?"
"Yeah�.Hey, out of curiosity, have you ever heard of R. Crumb?"
"Of course. I read a few issues of Zap Comix in college. I didn't really care for them, but at least I was once hip and cool, Agent Williamson."
I apologize for the dearth of oral sex in this story so far....Fiction, Home.
� 2005 David V. Matthews