Like Warm Sun on Nekkid Bottoms (23 page)

“A dancer? You’re asking me if I dance?”

“Isn’t that what I said?”

“I have been known to dance.”

“Me too. Movies?”

“Do I see movies?”

“No. Do you
make
movies? Are you
in
them?”

Mindie was stunned and suddenly softened. She smiled, apparently flattered.

“No. I’m not
in
movies,” Mindie said girlishly. “Though many people have said I should be.” She adjusted her hair coyly, and laughed a bit. “In fourth grade, I…”

“You wanna get in? I can get you in, easy,” Waboombas told her.

“What?”

“You wanna get into
movies
? I make ‘em, and I know some people who’d love to use you.”

“Use me?”

“Well, not
use
you. That’s just an expression. You’d get paid to be in ‘em. They’d kill for someone like you.”

“Someone like me?”

“With a body like yours.”

Mindie giggled, girlishly again. “I do take care of it.”

And keep it well protected
, I thought.

“It’ll look great on camera,” Ms. Waboombas said.

“In front of the camera?” Mindie couldn’t believe it.

“Where else?”

“Acting?”

“Some people call it that. I think of it as an overall
performance
, but sure. ‘Acting’ works.”

Suddenly Mindie was Wendy’s best friend.

“You can get me into movies?” Mindie asked.

“Is there a language barrier, here? Yes.
In
to movies. They’re always asking me if I know any other hot girls. If you’re reliable, they’d give me a finder’s fee.”

Mindie blushed and chuckled.

“Especially with gazongas like yours.”

“And they really are my own,” Mindie said, laughing. At no other time in her life would Mindie be pleased to have someone refer to her ‘mammarial vesicles’ as anything other than ‘ta-tas’, or ‘boobies’, yet, for some reason,
now
—

“So they’ll move good on camera,” Waboombas complemented.

Mindie blushed, and smiled shyly, again. “If that’s what they’re
looking
for. Good movement.”

“Are you kidding? Why do you think so many girls get the Pflemmels? They’re bank. They cost more, but he’s a genius. Still, the natural ones are—well, there’s no substitute for the real moosh factor. And they’re great PR. They can really bring in the customers when you dance.”

Mindie hesitated, not understanding. “When I dance where?”

“Wherever.”

“Like…at
clubs
?”

“Yeah. Any club. As long as they promote it well, you can make as much as five thousand a night.”

“Dollars?”

“I know a girl who made
ten
once.”

“In one night?”

“Four hours worth of work.”

“In one night?”

“For that much, you gotta do a little lap snorkeling, though. Maybe let the swimmer take a dive.”

“
Lap
snorkeling…” Mindie said, apparently somewhat confused, then a light seemed to dawn, and she took a deep breath. “I don’t think I could do that.”

“So you make a little less,” Waboombas shrugged. “It’s all good. Whatever gets your motor runnin’.”

Mindie studied her intently for a moment and then smiled. “Do you have a card?”

“I’ll write my number down,” Ms. Waboombas said, winking. “We can talk more about it on the ride down.”

Ms. Waboombas turned and headed toward the car, as Mindie hesitated, visibly torn. Her smile fell. I prepared to dive for cover.

“You’re going?”

Waboombas turned back to her and hesitated. “Aren’t you?”

I could see the wheels spinning in Mindie’s head, and the friction was heating them to a melting point. Finally, the combined oils of selfinterest and potential fame lubricated the grinding into submission, and her smile popped back onto her face. She held out a flattened palm indicating ‘wait’.

“Of course I’m going,” Mindie said. “Just give me a sec. I have to go potty.”

The word ‘potty’ obviously set Waboombas radar spinning. “Sure,” she said, smiling darkly. “Take all the time you need to ‘peepee and poo-poo’.” Then Waboombas laughed heartily.

Mindie hesitated a moment, looking at Ms. Waboombas, and grinning as if she’d just found a long-lost sister. Then, haltingly, my adoring fiancée turned away and raced for the bathroom, running through the door and into the foyer, where her shoe got stuck on something, and she fell face down onto the tile. Instantly—holding her nose, but acting as if nothing had happened—she leaped up happily and turned back to us through the doorway.

“I’m all right!” she said. Then looked down at her chest and back to us. “We’re all fine! We’ll still look good on camera!”

Chuckling, she bent down to retrieve the shoe. After a few moments of struggling, she gave up with a laugh and then ran off to the restroom, leaving the thing stuck where it was. Probably on some of Morgan’s Lollipop drool.

Wendy watched her go, then—shaking her head—she turned to me.

“Well,” the stately stripper said after studying me a moment. “I guess I can understand why you weren’t swayed by these.” A slight hand-wave indicated her surgically altered Waboombas.

“Of course,” she continued, walking toward the car. “In ten years, hers’ll be floppin’ down around her knees, and mine’ll still be right up here where they are.” As she opened the door, she turned and fixed me with an intensely sexual stare. “So you’d still be able to reach mine while I’m suckin’ your dick.”

GLOOP! Big time.

I nearly fainted. It was an ambush, and I wasn’t prepared for it. With Mindie’s arrival, I thought Waboombas had given up. I should have known better. The Nubian stripper was a determined juggernaut of preheated lust. She probably assumed there’d be some sort of orgy in the hotel room with Mindie, Morgan, myself, and whatever other interested comic fans we might find. And what comic fan
wouldn’t
be interested? Images of naked Simpsons’ Comic Book guys and their female counterparts all naked, greased up, and rolling over one another’s writhing flesh while reading out loud from the latest issue of X-Men nearly made me pass out.

And worse, based on what I think she’d just been saying to Mindie—would she be
filming
it all?

“Um…Ms. Waboombas,” I said.

“Wendy.”

“Em…Ms. Waboombas. By ‘movies’ you meant…” I hesitated, feeling as if someone had just pulled my underwear up over my head and lit them on fire, “…you meant ‘
pornography’
didn’t you?”

She looked at me like my face was flat and had shrubbery growing out of it.

“What’d you think—I’m working with
Spielberg
?”

No, but Mindie clearly did.

As we waited for whatever was taking its own sweet time working its way out of Mindie, gravel crunched on the driveway again and I turned to see my Aunt Helena’s Duesenberg racing in through my outer gates, heading like a rocket straight for me.

She was actually driving—Biddleby, the chauffer, was nowhere to be seen. I leaped to one side as the car hurtled toward me and swerved in my direction. I dove again to the other side, and it swerved my way once more. I was trying to figure out what I had done to offend Aunt Helena so much that she felt the urgent need to grease her axles with my blood, when suddenly she braked late and skidded to a stop on the loose rocks, nearly pinning Ms. Waboombas and myself against the Beemer. Wendy seemed to take it all in stride. I felt my legs go weak and collapsed on the hood of Helena’s car.

Aunt Helena jumped out of the driver’s side carrying a hammer and ran at me with a fierce look in her eye. I recoiled, fearing she intended to ventilate my skull. Maybe she’d come to the conclusion I was possessed and felt a ball-pien was the perfect surgical tool required to release whatever demons now controlled me. She had that look.

My mind raced through the last twenty-four hours trying desperately to remember what I’d done wrong. Had she reconsidered her feelings toward me and decided I was a sexist, model-groping pig who needed to be taken out? Had Grandfather convinced her that I really
was
useless? Did she stand to inherit anything from my sudden demise? If it was Woodruff, she’d more likely be trying to elongate my life, not shorten it. Perhaps the answer was as simple as she had just been watching some documentary on Roman surgery techniques and felt an urgent need to try them out. She
was
a fan of the History Channel.

“Corky! I’m so glad I caught you before you left!”

“You are?” I said, my voice high and terrified. “Why?” “Because I want to talk to you.”

“Just talk?”

“Of course. What else?” She noticed Ms. Waboombas and nodded

quickly. “Hello.”

“Hi,” Ms. Waboombas said. “Nice car.”

“Thank you.”

It really was. A Duesenberg model J 1934 convertible club sedan

with the top down. I had admired it often, and had been looking for one myself, but they were exceedingly rare—especially the threeseater. But if I was going to live a sexless existence, I had decided I deserved one, and would really look good while driving off my frustrations. Unfortunately, like the perfect woman, ‘my’ Duesy was nowhere to be found. Instead I had settled for a Beemer. And Mindie.

“I need you to do me a favor,” Helena said, flushed and out of breath—as if she’d had to peddle the Duesenberg over. “Can you take it in and have it repaired for me, please?”

“Fine,” she gasped. “Never better. I was just afraid I’d miss you before you left, so I rushed.”

I stepped closer to the Duesenberg, and Helena moved with me. Ms. Waboombas opened the rear door and climbed in with cooing appreciation.

“What’s wrong with it?” I asked.

“Ooooh,” Helena said dismissively. “I had a little accident— broke the light. See?”

She pointed to a headlamp at the front, and I could see it was pretty badly damaged. Fortunately the surrounding area wasn’t disturbed; only the headlamp itself, and the injury seemed minimal.

I leaned in and inspected it more closely.

“What happened?”

She fidgeted nervously and gestured absently with the hammer. “I’m not entirely sure. I just came out this morning, and noticed it was like that.”

“It looks as if…” I said, speaking earnestly, as though I knew even the slightest thing about cars or how they were supposed to look, “somebody’s been hitting it. With a rock or something.”

“Really?” Helena said, moving the hammer behind her back. “How odd. I wonder who would do something like that?”

“Teenagers,” I said, irritated, and nodded knowingly. I knew how they operated. I had been one once. On some mental levels, I still was.

“Well, just be glad they didn’t do any more
significant
damage,” I said, standing and putting my hands on my hips with confidence while looking sternly proud. I was now about to repeat something which I had heard Uncle Pjuter mumble a few times in that strange, regionless dialect of his that was actually going to prove useful and appropriate in this situation. There was something invigorating about using other people’s knowledge as if it were one’s own. “Parts are going to be difficult to find ahs eet ees. Thees wan may haf to be punded out and re-krahmed,” I said, unaware that I had done more than repeat the information, but had actually slipped into speaking ‘Pjuter-ese’.