September 24, 2009
Fiction
When Lacy LeTush Went Blue, Blue, Blue! (part 2)
Lacy retrieved her boom box and set it up again; she was about to rewind Cab Calloway when she paused, frowned, and scampered to her bag. She pulled out her MP3 player and plugged the cord in to the AUX outlet on the boom box. She paged through a dozen songs and found the one she wanted. She kicked the baton and the fan and the silver mask and the bowling pins off the stage — on this she was going new-school. She took one last glance to make sure that her girls were safely ensconced, pasty-free, in the bustier; that wouldn’t last, but what the hell. She stretched her foot out toward the MP3 player and pressed the PLAY button with her toe, in a move she’d perfected through months of solo dance practice.
“Playing something special, are we, Lacy?”
“You better believe it,” she said nastily, as the music started with blaring horns and a screaming electric guitar. It was Lacy’s favorite band, the Bindlestiffs, playing “Drink, Rob, and Fuck,” a violent punk homage to corruption in 1920s-era Chicago. She figured it suited the situation.
Lacy started dancing with a savagery that she usually reserved for slow nights at The Mustang. It never failed to liven things up.
This particular MP3 of “Drink, Rob, and Fuck” was a live recording, so she could hear the roaring of the crowd with each crooned boneheaded obscenity: “Big Al C he rules the street/but I just wanna lick your feet/bathtub gin goes down the hatch/you got a license for that snatch?” Lacy pulled a nasty twirl and went shimmying across the stage with her body undulating viciously; at the back edge, she pulled a scissor-move and started climbing up the curtains like they were a stripper-pole, popping out of her bustier, nipples erect and pointing like pistols. Hap would be having a heart-attack about now if he could see her. She did an inverted twirl and came down in a flying pirouette; executing a perfect landing, she brought the filmy peignoir across her chest in a coquettish conceal; she figured fuck the peignoir, fuck the bustier; the skirt was a tearaway, so she cast it at the balcony, though it didn’t make it far. Lacy was down on her hands and knees wearing nothing but fishnet stockings and marabou-fluffed heels. She spun onto her back, scissored up and writhed her way to the chair. Never got used to the smooth look, eh? Here, pal, get a faceful. She started working the chair obscenely, pumping her body in time with the violent music; had she pulled this particular move at the Mustang, she would promptly have been buried under $5 bills and just as promptly been fired for spreading her legs without a G-string. Even with bikini bottoms she would have been pushing the envelope here; obscene pelvic thrusts were as fun to make as they were pleasing to the audience, but too many of them and you sometimes ran afoul of the local cops, so the manager Bobo kept a close eye on things.
But her pelvic thrusts had nothing on what she was about to do; in each dance, she found a moment when she knew Bobo wasn’t watching and dipped her hand down into her bikini bottoms and bring it up with a see-how-wet-I-am? look; that always brought a cascade of bills and a guarantee of a dozen well-paid lap dances when she came off the stage. She figured if the weird old guy wanted blue, that was as blue as it got, so she slid her hand sensuously down her belly and tucked it between her spread legs, staring up at the balcony and screaming along with the lyrics: “Drink and rob and fuck like hell!”
She gave Creepy Old Dude the little tongue-swirl that so completely addled Happy Henderson, then slipped her middle finger into her mouth, and — whoa, she actually was wet, which she hadn’t really been expecting but it was kind of nice. She did it again, slowly, sensuously, down her belly and up over her tits and into her mouth, wetter this time. She could hear a steady wave of howls erupting all around her; funny, she didn’t remember any howling on this particular live recording.
She stood, spun with the chair, leaned over and spanked herself hard in time with the music as she ground her crotch toward the chair, pumping, writhing, undulating. It wasn’t ballet, but — damn! She was enjoying herself. More howling erupted; when she spun around for final round of chair-humping, she got dizzy, smelled liquor, and could have sworn —
Lacy backed off and abandoned the chair, hearing it crash over the edge of the stage. She ran to her MP3 player and hit STOP. She looked around, her eyes dazzled by the lights; for a second, she had this creepy feeling like the theatre was full, like the howls were coming not from the boom box but — then it was all gone. The sounds echoing through the theatre as in a single instant the power went out. It was the goddamn fuse box again — this old theater had wiring from hell. The lights died in a few long seconds with a hot orange fading glow.
Lacy stood there dizzy in the dark, trying to get her bearings.
But it sounded, as the soft echoes pulse, like the cheers and howls from the MP3 player died even more slowly than they should have — while up in the balcony, she could hear the sound of her lone spectator stomping his feet, clapping, howling, wolfwhistling. “Bravo! Bravo! Bravo! Lacy! Lacy! Lacy! Lacy LeTush, Bravo!” The voice faded slowly into the cavernous black of the ancient theater. Then everything went dark and quiet and the black closed in around her. Lacy felt her heart pounding.
“Hello?” she called out. All she could hear was her own nervous panting. “Hello? Creepy old dude?”
She didn’t get an answer.
Lacy groped around for her clothes. She had never before put on a pair of sweat pants and a T-shirt so fast. She hit Main Street running for her car, and didn’t even check to make sure the door of the Chimera was locked.
•
Lacy tried not to freak out; hey, she was sleep-deprived, and sometimes that makes things weird.
She did think hard about her routine, however, and about what a huge pain in the ass Happy Henderson was. In the end, she decided that the screaming control queen could bloody well go fuck himself.
And for all the warnings he’d given Lacy, Hap was distracted enough that night that he didn’t even notice when she slipped Armando the DJ a burned disk of “Drink, Rob and Fuck” to replace “Minnie the Moocher.” She handed it over along with a $20 bill, and told Armando to blame it all on her when Hap hit the roof.
“With pleasure,” said Armando, and put the disc in the stack. “It’s always good for a laugh when Hap freaks out.”
Oh, she’d wear a G-string, all right — no point in completely shocking the straights. But pasties? She’d call it a wardrobe malfunction. If she spun her boobies just right, maybe she could make her pasties hit Happy Henderson in the face when they flew off at the first chorus of “Drink, Rob and Fuck.”
Maybe the old man was right: she’d get her headlines, and Hap Henderson would get to hit the roof, which he seemed to love. He’d fire her, and the incident would enter the long burlesque history of the Chimera in some infinitesimal way . . . while she’d be stuck working the Stang.
She’d worry about that in the morning. Right now, Lacy LeTush had some pasties to loosen.
• • •
is the author of several hundred published short stories in the erotica, crime, horror and fantasy genres, including work in the Best American Erotica series, the Best New Erotica series, and many other anthologies. His own books include four volumes of horror/fantasy, three volumes of erotic crime-noir, and three short story collections. He blogs about sex, drugs and cryptozoology at http://www.thomasroche.com.
