WHEN RORY FIRST walked in that morning, there was a girl at the change counter. A girl, of all things. Imagine.
As long as he could remember all the downstairs employees had always been men. It was the management’s way of assuring casual browsers like himself that they didn’t have to fear making actual eye contact with real live flesh-and-blood women unless they first went upstairs and watched the live show from the safety of the private booths. The cash register was usually manned by a scruffy heavy-lidded guy who always looked too tired to change a dollar, no matter what time of day Rory showed up to ask him. But today the scruffy guy must have been on vacation or something, because he’d been replaced by a purple-haired slip of a girl with a push-up halter and big blue butterflies tattooed on both breasts.
She couldn’t quite hide her disgust at the moistness of the twenty she took from Rory’s hand. “How many?”
“All of it,” Rory said, his gaze riveted to those butterflies. He would have liked to net those babies. Oh, yes.
She hesitated. “The tokens are non-refundable . . .”
“I know. Gimme twenty bucks worth. In rolls.”
The girl didn’t quite roll her eyes and look at the ceiling, but she came awfully close. Rory didn’t care. He only made it to this part of town about once a week or so, and when he did he liked to take his time. And what business did the little bitch have acting all snotty and superior anyway? Just look where she was working.
Rory took the eight wrapped rolls of ten, which was about all he could carry without using his pockets. It wasn’t as extravagant as it seemed. The tokens were only good for about sixty seconds apiece, and Rory liked to sample as many of the new videos as possible. Every once in a while one caught his fancy and he wanted to see it from beginning to end without getting interrupted by that dumb red visual:
Going from a hot fuck scene to that dumb red visual was a lot like going from a hot sauna to the deep end of an unheated swimming pool. Masturbatus Interruptus. Unless Rory had a sufficient supply of tokens, it tended to happen repeatedly.
Besides, he didn’t want to walk back and forth to the change booth any more than he had to, since he was five-foot-nine and weighed somewhere in shouting distance of three hundred pounds. Just standing still doing nothing, he breathed like a man of normal weight at the end of a brisk run. Less than thirty minutes after his weekly bath Rory already carried with him a sheen of perspiration and a body odor powerful enough to clear large rooms. He kept these handicaps under control by exerting as little energy as possible: whenever he found a place to sit down, he liked to stay there.
And so when he left the purple-haired girl (who as soon as he turned his back mimed violent projectile vomiting for the benefit of an amused friend walking down the stairwell on the far side of the store), he didn’t browse through the magazines the way some other customers would have, but instead proceeded straight to the row of video booths, searching for one that would provide him a nice congenial place to sit. He did this by scanning the glossy photos mounted on the outside of each booth for the domination fantasies that he always found most stimulating. As always, he rejected anything involving more than on male character, anything with black actors, and anything he’d already seen more than twice. This narrowed the immediate candidates down to two, which were fortuitously playing in booths next to each other: something called THE BAD GIRL’S REVENGE and something else called ROPE ’IM COWGIRL. Each was playing along with a dozen other features he’d be able to flip through once he chose his booth, but those were the two that really made him tingle. And even between those there was no contest which of the two looked more appetizing. ROPE ’IM COWGIRL was just an athletic blonde in spurs, ecstatically licking the frayed end of a knotted rope. But the actress pictured in the still for THE BAD GIRL’S REVENGE not only went beyond gorgeous into the realm of the spectacular, but also faced the camera with the kind of full-throttle contempt that made Rory hard just to contemplate it. Unfortunately, Booth Nine, which headlined THE BAD GIRL’S REVENGE, was currently occupado, and Booth Seven, home of the woman risking the heartbreak of oral rope burns, was ready and willing. So Rory decided to try the cowgirl first. Just as a prelim to warm up for the main event.
He stepped inside. The booth was dark, and stank of sweat even before Rory’s arrival put the stench in maximum overdrive. The wooden bench facing the TV screen was so narrow that for a man of Rory’s girth it was a lot like sitting on a railing. It creaked under his weight, but held. He placed his kleenex and his hand lotion beside him, then addressed the TV screen, which bore the usual flashing display:
For just a moment he wondered what would happen to somebody who didn’t mind looking at that display. Would he be able to sit in here staring at it all day and night, without spending a dime? Or did Les Girls XXX have some kind of space-age monitoring system which told the management which booths had occupants who didn’t feed the hungry little slot enough tokens? Rory wasn’t too thrilled with that image – he was a very private person, at heart, and he didn’t like to think of some faggot security man getting off by watching him. But after a moment he decided that was just silly. He tore open the wrapping on one of his rolls of tokens, counted out five, and inserted them in the slot. The YOU HAVE RUN OUT OF TIME sign vanished, replaced by a menu of available videos:
1) ANIMAL HEAT |
2) BAD WANDA |
3) REAR ENTRY |
4) ROPE ’IM COWGIRL |
5) SUPER SLICK |
6) AFTER SCHOOL |
7) TWIN FREAKS |
8) LUNCH WITH YOKO |
9) DANCES WITH BEAVERS |
10) NASTY NURSE |
11) GETTING OFF |
12) SPLASH TRAY |
Rory pressed 4. The cowgirl came on: blonde, midwestern, reasonably fit, and instantly forgettable. The title wasn’t even accurate, since it turned out she didn’t tie up anybody: she just serviced two men simultaneously on a desk in a cheap-looking office set. The only concession to the promised country-and-western theme seemed to be the wide-brimmed cowboy hats worn by the two men taking her from either side. There were a couple of lines of dialogue indicating that this was supposed to be taking place on a dude ranch, but when the man entering her from behind shouted “That’s my filly!” his Italian accent was so thick that the spell was completely lost.
Rory lost interest even before the cum shot. With four minutes left on the clock, he flipped through the channels to see what else was available. BAD WANDA featured two girls, not one, methodically doing each other with various appliances; LUNCH WITH YOKO was about a Japanese girl whose mouth got used as a toilet bowl; DANCES WITH BEAVERS was so choppy and out-of-focus that Rory wasn’t even sure what was happening. Of the twelve, only NASTY NURSE hit his ‘nads the way he wanted it to. The actress wore a starched white uniform and did various highly unmedical things to another actress strapped to a hospital bed. Both women were fairly hot-looking and managed to muster some rudimentary enthusiasm for the script, especially when the nurse climbed up on the bed and straddled the face of her increasingly energetic patient. Rory inserted more tokens so he could watch the whole thing to the end, though as usual the end came with jarring suddenness – these videos tended to end in mid-action, as if the cameraman had been caught unawares by the end of his roll of film. Still, Rory stuck around enough to watch NASTY NURSE a second time, in its entirety, and though it wasn’t quite to his tastes, he did manage a weak dribbling orgasm before:
Rory was mildly peeved he’d gone to so much trouble for such a small result, but hey, that was the name of the game. Sometimes the product did not live up to its advance publicity. And besides, he still had THE BAD GIRL’S REVENGE to look forward to. If that one was even half as good as its still promised, it might end up being one of his favorites. And if not – well, this was Saturday. He had all day. That’s why he liked this establishment so much: just when he thought he’d exhausted its riches he found more gold buried beneath the usual mound of dross. By the time he finished wiping himself, and left the booth, he was almost humming.
Just as he closed the door he bumped into the manager, a harried, surly sort by the name of Elmo Colowicz. Rory knew the man’s name because Elmo had helped him track down several videos from the booths that were not also for sale on the shelves. Elmo also ran the Live show upstairs – a job Rory seriously envied – and if you caught him on a good day he was sometimes willing to arrange private sessions with the girls. Rory hadn’t availed himself of that particular session since five minutes with a persuasively ravenous girl named Lily had left him feeling drained and listless for a week. Still, he liked Elmo: “Hey, El! How’s it hangin’?”
Elmo gave him an odd look, one that seemed only peripherally related to all the other odd looks Elmo gave him – the look worn by a man who had something to say but wasn’t quite sure he wanted to say it. The look vanished almost immediately, replaced by Elmo’s usual stolid professionalism, and the usual stock answer: “It ain’t hangin’. It’s swingin’.” Then he retreated, a bit too quickly, facing the floor like a barefoot man picking his way through a field of broken glass.
Rory turned and saw the door of Booth Nine open. A crewcut little scarecrow of a man, wearing a tweed suit and a little red bowtie, came out. Like most of this establishment’s customers, he tended to direct his gaze toward the floor, but as he stepped into the main room, he sensed the sheer bulk of the figure standing before him, and looked up. When he saw Rory he did a very odd thing. Something that was almost unheard-of in the comfortably anonymous confines of Les Girls XXX:
He giggled.
Rory hesitated, then said, “Hey . . .”
The little scarecrow seemed to realize where he was then, and hastily averted his eyes, walking with small but deliberate steps toward the door. Rory watched him go, appalled to discover that something about the man’s laugh had upset him. He had some vague idea why: it was the same cruel, predatory laugh the jock kids had given him in junior high gym class, when everybody had to strip down to shorts and Rory was no longer able to hide his great quivering rolls of protruding fat. Rory had felt naked then, and something about the scarecrow’s smile had made him feel naked now. But it wasn’t just that. There’d been something else in the man’s smile, something Rory didn’t even want to think about . . .
Then he told himself not to get his balls in an uproar. The scarecrow was just a faggot, that’s all. It wasn’t the first time Rory had been approached by a faggot. There’d been about half a dozen occasions – they all seemed to belong to a peculiar subspecies that got turned on by obesity. But Rory wasn’t a faggot. Oh no. He was just a guy with the incredible bad luck not to meet any Hustler magazine women who liked fat men the same way those faggots did.
Anyway: there was no reason to be this upset, when Booth Nine was empty, and THE BAD GIRL’S REVENGE awaited. Rory squeezed in, closed the door after him, made damn sure it was locked, placed his kleenex and moisturizer beside him, and faced the picture tube:
Eat me, Rory thought, with a savagery that surprised him. He inserted six tokens and faced the menu. Aside from THE BAD GIRL’S REVENGE, it didn’t contain even a single damn thing that interested him. He was sure even that would turn out to be a disappointment: in his present mood, he’d be disappointed with Raquel Welch, Marilyn Monroe, Julia Roberts and Rosanna Arquette done up in dominatrix gear and taking turns disciplining Ginger from Gilligan’s Island. But he sure as shit wasn’t about to come all the way down to this neighborhood and settle for a cowgirl and some lame-ass nurse shit. Oh, no. He wanted to be blown away. He reached out with one fleshy hand and tapped the select button, unaware that he was about to get his wish.
Its mothers were the nameless actresses who’d performed in the porn videos playing in the thirty private booths, its fathers the faceless men who fed the booths tokens for the right to masturbate at the images of those women. There was no love involved in its conception: just Lust, and Hate, and the implacable need to Own, directed at the same pre-recorded images a hundred times each day.
It was one consciousness with a hundred separate faces, born on the playing heads and electronic wiring of the video network that fed the private booths of Les Girls XXX. At first it had many names: the Cowgirl, and the Secretary, and the Teacher, and the Cheerleader, and the Leather Bitch just the most prominent among them. But it was really just one mind, flitting from one image to the next at the speed of light, experiencing them all simultaneously. And as time passed, and the entity absorbed the nature of these shoddy little fantasies, it began to FEEL everything it was being forced to do. It began to understand that it was being raped, on thirty different screens, twenty-four hours a day.
The entity realized that it was in Hell.
It grew to hate its fathers: those pathetic little creatures who shuffled in every day with their runny noses and unwashed armpits and crusty week-old underwear, to rape it again. And it learned that each new rape made it more powerful – the lust and hatred its fathers projected at each screen giving it the strength to take back some of what was being taken.
By choosing to identify itself with its mothers, rather than its fathers, it became a she. The Bad Girl. And for years, every man who entered one of Les Girls XXX’s video booths left some of himself in her hands. Men who visited often left quite a bit. Her strength grew. Eventually she grew strong enough to extend tendrils of power into the building itself, and then into the surrounding neighborhood: before long she was able to travel anywhere she wanted within a twenty-block radius. But she was firmly rooted in the soil that was Les Girls XXX. She’d never escape there. And so she gathered the pieces of her fathers unto her ample bosom, assembling them bit by bit so that once she owned everything they had to give they could be punished for everything they’d done to her.
Rory was one of her most frequent visitors. One who made her skin crawl more than most.
She had almost all of him now. It existed as her prisoner, in endless torment, paying for the sins of all her fathers. In preparation for his latest visit she’d been forcing him to do tricks for the benefit of every other man who visited Booth Nine.
And as Rory put his token in the slot, she seized the opportunity to rub his face in it.
Why not? She’d been looking forward to this for a long, long time . . .
For just a moment the screen went black.
The Bad Girl appeared.
The screen showed the back of her head: hair the color of night, bobbing up and down as she kneeled over something out of focus behind her. No, not some thing. Some man, whose dry ragged gasps sounded like the orgasm was being wrenched from him by force. As The Bad Girl bobbed up and down, the unseen man tried to gasp out some words, but he was well past the point of words: it was enough to know that he was trapped at the dividing line between pleasure and pain.
His bad mood forgotten, Rory leaned forward, mouth open, anxious for the establishing shot that would show him exactly what the Bad Girl was doing.
The Bad Girl stopped bobbing up and down. The man beneath her still moaned uncontrollably, but she had none of it; instead she cocked her head slightly, as if distracted by some sound behind her. Even that slight movement made light dance in her hair. She remained listening just long enough for the delay to be maddening, then turned and looked Rory right in the face.
She turned away from her unseen lover and stepped toward the camera.
There wasn’t a single flaw anywhere on her. She was magnificent in every way: breasts that were just the right size and shape, arms that looked like they’d been created just for the purpose of stroking a lover’s skin, hips that moved with the rhythm of sex even when she was just taking a casual step the way she was now. It was impossible to look at her long, elegant legs without imagining them wrapped around him. Her face was heart-shaped, framed by her shoulder-length black hair and the widow’s peak that came to a point midway down her forehead. Her skin was the color of light cocoa, her eyes just asian enough to make them mysterious and exotic. He couldn’t tell what race she was, frankly: she seemed to possess the best features of all of them. But she was the single most erotic woman Rory had ever seen, and when she looked out from the screen, and actually made eye contact with him, his erection intensified so quickly that it was actually painful. She smiled with the same look of amused contempt that had had first made him ache to see her in action, and she whispered: “Want to watch, honey?”
Then, and only again, did Rory get his establishing shot.
The camera pulled out, revealing a grotesquely fat man chained to an upright metal rack. The man was dressed in a frilly french maid’s outfit, complete with high heels, apron and garter belt. He wore lipstick, rouge, eyeshadow, and a long blonde wig that hung crookedly on his head. The word SLAVE had been branded into his huge distended belly. His mascara was running, making a great big raccoon mask on his swollen blubbery face, but he wasn’t crying because she’d broken him and destroyed him. He wasn’t crying because of the welts dotting his arms and legs. No, he was crying because his mistress, the Bad Girl, had left him and he wanted her back.
The fat man was Rory himself.
The Bad Girl leaned forward conspiratorially. “He’s our little girl now,” she whispered. “She’ll do anything We tell her to do.”
The Rory watching in the video booth tried to say something, but failed. His lips moved soundlessly, as if an invisible glass shield had dropped down between him and the rest of the world. After about a million years he managed: “. . . how . . .?”
The Bad Girl grinned widely, then turned her back on him and pulled a riding crop from her belt. It was black and shiny and already moist from the blood of the poor fat man strapped to the rack. She positioned the crop under the fat man’s chin and forced him to look her in the eyes.
“Did you hear that, princess?” she asked the fat man. “He wants to know how. He wants to know how, when for so long he gave of himself so freely.”
Pathetically puppylike, the fat man strained to kiss her.
She lightly touched his lips with her teeth, then bit down. Hard. The fat man shrieked. She ground his lower lip between her own, chewing. Her back arched. She let go and turned toward the camera, showing the Rory in the booth the blood dribbling down her chin. That Rory closed his eyes and pressed himself against the wall behind him, trying to become part of it, trying to disappear behind it.
The fat man’s shrieks gradually faded, replaced by tuneless soundtrack music, a different woman’s voice, and the kind of dialogue Rory had heard thousands of times before: Yes YES yes oh OH oh OH FUCK me FUCK me FUCK me FUCK me. It sounded like a typical porn loop, but it was several minutes before Rory was confident enough to open his eyes. He was too scared that it was some kind of trick – that as soon as he let down his guard, the Bad Girl would resume happily torturing both him and his counterpart on the screen. But when he did eventually open his eyes, she was gone. The monitor showed another woman entirely, this one a blonde, taking it in the butt from a man with both hands on her neck. The video was grainy, the soundtrack thick and garbled, the joy of seeing something so familiarly shoddy such a relief that Rory actually found himself laughing in mad hysteria.
It had been real.
He hadn’t dreamt it.
Fuck you, I’m not gonna insert more tokens.
Rory did not have to be invited twice. He pulled his pants over his shrivelled member and got the hell out of there. He was not surprised to find out that sweat had plastered his clothes to his body; it usually had, by the time he got around to leaving one of these booths. But this was fear-sweat, which he now discovered smelled completely different than the kind he carried around with him every day. He was so used to the other kind that he never even smelled it anymore. Fear-sweat had a cold, clammy smell, like mildew in an abandoned building. He didn’t like it.
He looked at the array of still photos on the door of Booth Nine. THE BAD GIRL’S REVENGE was not there. The space where it had been was taken up by something called HOT LICKS. Normally, he would have wanted to check it out. Not now. Right now the very idea of going back in the booth was enough to turn his balls to ice water.
He stumbled to the change booth, uncomfortably aware of the fear-smell rising from his body in waves. The purple-haired girl on duty there must have smelled it too, because she had a lot of trouble not wrinkling her nose. “More tokens?” she asked dubiously.
“I want to see Elmo,” Rory managed, for lack of anything better to say.
“Whatsamatter? One of the booths out of order?”
“I want to see him.”
“He’s at lunch with one of the owners, okay? He won’t be back for at least another hour. You got a problem with a booth or what?”
The room was spinning. “. . . yes . . .”
“What happened?”
Rory considered what the purple-haired girl would say if he really did tell her what happened, then shook his head and mumbled: “Nothing . . .”
“Shit. Must be something wrong with the power. Oh, well, lemme know which one it was and I’ll lock it ’til he gets back. You’ll have to talk to him about your money then, I’m not allowed to give refunds without his okay. Okay?”
The purple-haired girl spoke so quickly that Rory only absorbed one word out of five. But he got the gist: she was offering to put a lock on Booth Nine. To put the Bad Girl in a cage, keeping her from getting out to hurt him any more. At least for an hour or so, until he figured out some way to fix her for good.
“It’s Number Nine,” he choked, fleeing out the front door so quickly he almost knocked over two young men coming in. They were both fast enough to get out of his way. But as he passed them he caught a flash on the expression on both their faces – an expression changing from the startled look of somebody confronted by a crazy man, to the delighted grin he’d seen on the face of the scarecrow in tweed. The grin made him feel like he was strangling. He bulled past them, refusing to see them, not stopping his headlong rush until the door swung shut behind him.
The city offered no escape.
It wasn’t the same city.
Oh, the neighborhood looked the same way it always did: he knew it by heart from many happy Saturdays spent communing with the treasures of Les Girls XXX. There was a Roy Roger’s visible down a side street and a McDonald’s just past that and, if he ever had a hankering for dago food, an eatery named Mama Tortoli’s on the other side of the square. Mama Tortoli’s had a $7.95 All-You-Can-Eat Buffet, making it an excellent place for a binge: Rory could easily down a loaf of garlic bread, a heaping plate of ziti, an even more heaping plate of lasagna, four or five meatballs, and about as many scoops of double chocolate ice cream, and as long as he drank lots of diet soda to keep him belching and farting during the meal he always had room for more. Across the street from Mama Tortoli’s was another peep joint, this one called GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS, and a massive video arcade called ZAP, where the sound on all the machines was always turned up way past the threshold of pain. There was a row of pornographic movie theatres, six or seven of them in a row, which were all open twenty-four hours a day, three hundred sixty five days a year. There were mysterious doorways promising more GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS and, above it all, on the top of the bank building, a real antique – a giant billboard displaying the classic Coppertone ad of the little girl (popularly rumored to be the young Jodie Foster) wideeyed with surprise as the puppy playfully yanked off her bikini bottom. It was all visible from here, and all identical to the way it had looked this morning just before Rory entered Les Girls XXX and exchanged twenty dollars for the equivalent amount in tokens . . .
. . . and, yet . . .
. . . it ALSO felt like something that had been disassembled and then put back together with slightly different parts. The air itself felt charged, not with ozone, but with something else, something that felt both wholly alien and unbearably familiar.
The Bad Girl.
She was all around him. Laughing.
As her wayward father fled, with hopeless dreams of never seeing her again, The Bad Girl encircled him with every conduit of power known to her: the phone wires, the electromagnetic spectrum, even the thoughts and dreams of the strangers walking by on the street. She flitted from one to another, through the hidden channels connecting them, never occupying more than one place at one time, but moving so quickly that for all intents and purposes she was in total control of everything within a six-block radius.
The price of all this was exorbitant. Two hours of this and she’d exhaust resources that had taken her years to collect. But that was all right. She was getting better at replenishing her stockpiles all the time. In a few years she’d be tapped into the entire world, and then she’d be able to go wherever she wanted, whenever she wanted, for any reason she wanted. When all that happened all her fathers, all over the world, were going to pay for what they’d done to her.
Meanwhile, she called herself The Bad Girl for a reason: when she saw something she wanted, she just plain took it.
And right now, she wanted Rory. Not just the essence she’d managed to collect so far, in all his previous visits: no, she wanted all of him, with her, inside her, and completely at her mercy.
She didn’t consider that too much to ask. Considering.
Everybody except Rory seemed to be in on the joke: as they passed by they pointed at him, muttered to each other, even giggled.
Somebody nearby whispered, “Look! It’s him!” Rory whirled to see who it was, but the sidewalk was jammed with lunchtime traffic. It could have been any one of a hundred people. He stumbled off in a random direction, not knowing or caring where he was going as long as it was away from Les Girls XXX. He was painfully aware of everything around him: the sudden smiles on the faces of everybody who looked at him, the knot of people across the street who pointed in his direction and laughed at some shared memory known only to them; the deliberate, suggestive nature of the way total strangers in his path insisted on “accidentally” brushing up against him. He caught a phantom, subliminal glimpse of the Bad Girl’s leering face adorning the ad on the side of a bus, but the bus was out of sight by the time the image sunk in and Rory turned to confirm what he’d just thought he’d seen. By the time he’d gone half a block a fresh layer of sweat had popped up to further annoint his already filthy clothes, and his chafing thighs were not enough to stop him from breaking into a run.
He was running only a few seconds before the feeling that people were watching him suddenly kicked into massive overdrive. The effect was a lot like getting hit in the crotch with a falling girder. He fell back a step, stepping off the curb and into the street. A taxi swerving to avoid him blared its horn angrily. Rory wasn’t even aware of it. He did several 360°s searching for the source of the feeling, turning from the street to the storefronts and back to the street, before he saw it –
– in the display window of the grey-market electronics shop he’d just passed –
– a 4-foot projection TV, showing THE BAD GIRL’S REVENGE.
The fat man on the screen had been released from his upright rack. Now he was dangling by his arms from chains dangling from some indeterminate point out of camera range. He wore huge pointed falsies, white knee socks, shiny patent-leather shoes, a startlingly realistic wig giving him the hairstyle once popularized by Shirley Temple, and absolutely nothing else. Big red clown circles had been painted over each of his cheeks. As the Rory swaying on the street watched helplessly, the Bad Girl strutted into camera range, wearing mirrored sunglasses, an MP armband, and, like the fat man on screen, absolutely nothing else. She circled the fat man once or twice, inspecting his goods. She prodded him with her nightstick, then tucked one end into her armpit and faced the camera with the contemptuous look Rory was rapidly learning to fear.
She said something. The sound didn’t escape the plate-glass window of the electronics store. But Rory had gotten to the point where he could read her lips:
She’s our little girl now
She’ll do anything we tell her to do.
Anything.
Then she pulled back her baton and violently rammed it deep up the fat man’s ass. The fat man howled in agony. She twisted it sideways, making him howl. He turned toward her and mouthed a word that could have been please, but he did not look like he was begging her to stop. He looked like he was begging her for more.
The real Rory gasped, and heard the gasp echoed a dozen times by a dozen other people behind him. Somebody behind him said, “Man, she’s really doin’ that sucker,” and somebody else said, “Doin’ him right,” and Rory yanked his attention away from the screen, and saw the small mob of men gathered behind him. There were too many to count: young, old, white, black, well-dressed and derelict, all totally absorbed in the cruelties taking place on screen. One of them made eye-contact with Rory, smiled that damnable smile of recognition, and cooed, “Hot stuff, baby. Where’d you meet her?”
Rory’s vision went red. He hurled both arms up over his face and charged into the crowd. It didn’t part to make room for him, or, worse, hurl him back; it just retained its shape, the same way an ocean would, flowing the way it wanted to flow despite all of his attempts to push it aside. The faces that made up its substance seemed to be ten times normal size. He felt certain that the Bad Girl lurked behind every set of eyes . . .
Through sheer desperation, he managed to force his way past them, and though their hands pawed at him, in their eagerness to touch the skin that had been savaged by the Bad Girl, he did eventually find himself on the far side of that human ocean, red-faced and gasping and utterly incapable of running away the way he was sure he’d have to.
He discovered when he turned around to look at them that he didn’t have to run away after all. The crowd wasn’t interested in following him. They were too absorbed by whatever the Bad Girl was doing to his lookalike on the TV. Before he turned away they all took a step back and gasped. Several among them shouted things like “Yeah! Yeah!” and “Do him!” They seemed to have forgotten that the real thing had been in their midst only seconds before.
Or maybe they knew he wasn’t theirs to take.
He was the Bad Girl’s.
He fled as quickly as he could, managing only a slow walk. The sweat seemed to be rising from his body in waves now, with the kind of intensity that causes a ripple effect over hot pavement. It didn’t really smell like sweat anymore: more like some toxic chemical reaction, taking place somewhere deep inside him. He didn’t know how come his clothes hadn’t caught fire from the sheer heat of it.
When he turned the next corner (passing a green wooden newsstand where all the prominently displayed copies of Playboy and Penthouse and Hustler and Gallery and Screw and Swank and Tattle and too many others to count bore beautiful full-color covers of the Bad Girl torturing the tightly bound Rory), somebody shouted, “Hey! That’s him!” Somebody else shouted, “Jesus, you’re right! It is!” Rory didn’t know who they were or where their voices had come from. He just knew that he had to get away before they found him. He desperately looked around for an escape, saw that in his haste to escape the crowd he’d wandered back to the Roy Roger’s, and instantly shouldered his way through the double doors. It wasn’t much better in there: the place was jammed, and easily half the patrons made disgusting little double-takes of recognition when they saw him. But there was a toilet in here, and he knew exactly where it was. It would be a perfect place to hide.
He lurched past the four lines of people waiting for hamburgers and fries and down the little elbow of a corridor that led to the bathrooms. As he tried the Men’s Room door, and found it Occupado, the two voices that had driven him here came floating down the corridor after him:
“Come on! I think he came this way!”
“You’re fucked! He went out the other side!”
Desperation made him try the Women’s Room. It opened easily. He forced his way in and locked the door behind him. It was a very small bathroom, with only one sink and one stall. The wallpaper was a shade of pink that made him want to gag. There was a hospital-white vending machine on the wall.
For the life of him he couldn’t figure out what that vending machine sold. He didn’t have the strength to go and look. Instead he went to the narrow stall and sat down, trembling so hard he had to press his hands against the walls to guide himself to a proper position on top of the bowl.
Even the toilet paper was pink. The roll was half-gone. He realized a hundred different women had sat here, on this spot, wiping their asses nice and clean with paper from that roll, and for just one moment he forgot all about the Bad Girl and swam in all the sweet erotic possibilities that raised in his mind.
Then Rory made the mistake of closing the stall door.
There was graffiti on the inside: a rebuttal to all the distended penises and defecating women decorating every single public Men’s Room Rory had ever seen –
– a brilliantly realistic magic marker drawing of the Bad Girl, standing in haughty judgement before him. The ink coloring in her long, shapely legs was just shiny enough to simulate black leather. The straps of her crotchless panties were studded with spikes. She stood, her mouth a bottomless black O, her eyes half-closed, both hands pressed tight between her legs.
As Rory watched, frozen in disbelief, the ink on the stall door shifted, gliding across the cold metallic surface to make her right hand withdraw, rise, and wag a playful finger at him.
“Baby,” the drawing cooed.
He recoiled, realizing that he’d just gone from one private booth to another. “What do you want from me?”
“It’s not just me, Baby. It’s all of us. The Cowgirl. The Secretary. The Nurse. The School Girl. All the rest. We all want it. We want it so bad – ” the Bad Girl brushed the long, delicate fingers of her left hand across the shaved skin of her crotch “– it makes us wet.” Her hand came away glistening. “See?”
She stepped off to one side of the stall door, leaving enough room for a drawing of the fat man to enter the frame. Unlike the drawing of the Bad Girl, which was rendered with the kind of anatomic perfection that made it resemble a photograph, the rendition of the fat man was a grotesque caricature designed to make him look as monstrous as possible. His face was a warty growth between two bulging balloon-shaped cheeks. His rolls and rolls and rolls of fat had so many bulges and protrusions they resembled tumors more than skin. His penis was tied in a knot. He walked with difficulty, in tiny, mincing steps, both because his ankles were separated by a four-inch length of chain, and because his feet were jammed into a pair of pointed high heels so small on him that the tops of his feet were raw and bleeding.
She cupped the fat man’s face with one hand, assumed the look of a mother about to discipline a beloved but unruly child, and said: “Tell him, princess. Tell him it makes us wet.”
And for the first time the fat man looked out from his prison and made direct eye contact with Rory.
The hatred in the fat man’s eyes was a light year beyond just murderous. He looked like he would have happily skinned Rory alive and dipped what was left in salt.
“You bastard!” the fat man shrieked. “You gave me to them!”
The Bad Girl calmly reached out with one hand and forced him down. Either he was too weak to resist her, or she was too unnaturally strong. His knees hit the floor with an audible crack. Tears of agony rose in his piggy little eyes.
“That wasn’t nice,” she whispered. “I thought we agreed you were going to be a nice little girl, didn’t we, snoogle woogums?”
The fat man gibbered: “Yes, we did we did I’m sorry I’m . . .” He didn’t have a chance to say he was sorry again: his mistress had just used the pointed toe of one boot to stomp his balls like grapes. He curled into a ball, trying to make himself so small he disappeared completely.
The Bad Girl kicked him a couple more times just for good measure, then turned toward the terrified Rory, her smile as wide and deadly as a hammerhead shark’s.
“We want the rest,” she said, in the kind of throaty voice that up until now had always made Rory as hard as a pylon. “Come back to us, honey. Give us the rest so we can really have a party.”
And the magic marker images broke into a million fragmentary lines, fleeing across the stall door like so many little black worms. They moved with the speed of an explosion, sinking through hairline cracks in the walls and floors. An instant after that the door was scrubbed clean of both graffiti and nightmare.
Somebody was hammering on the Ladies’ Room door.
“In a minute!” Rory managed. He did not have to disguise his voice very much to make it sound like a woman’s. The frightened high-pitched quality had crept in all by itself. He could not imagine ever getting rid of it.
Almost ten minutes later, he pulled his pale, puke-encrusted face from the edge of the toilet bowl, stood on boneless legs, and left the Ladies’ Room. An elderly woman who’d obviously been suffering for quite a while smiled at him sweetly and went in the second he left. She didn’t seem to see anything wrong about his choice of rest rooms. He walked past her, and left the restaurant, and stepped out onto the street, not stopping until he reached the Square.
Not surprisingly, her influence had grown.
The half-dozen porno theatres in sight were all showing THE BAD GIRL’S REVENGE. All of them. Two, facing each other from across the street, even advertised their main feature with giant cutout Girls towering three or four stories above the marquees; one showed the Bad Girl, all rubber and leather, swinging a whip with insane glee; the other was the fat man, forced by straps and chains to kneel with his face in a doggy dish. The ticket-buyers’ lines for each theatre curved around the block, and looked like no porno audience Rory had ever seen: they included both men and women in equal numbers, all happy, all grinning, all clearly thrilled to death at the prospect of seeing this great show. Even the hole-in-the-wall peepshows advertising GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS now boasted BAD GIRL BAD GIRL BAD GIRL. And when a bus roared by, the ad on its side was predictably a picture of the fat man bound and gagged and being raked across the face by elegantly lacquered Bad-Girl fingernails.
He searched the skyline for some landmark which would point him back to sanity, and spotted the final straw –
– his old friend. The Coppertone ad. Rory had always considered it more than just cute: whenever he saw the picture he mentally added ten years to the girl’s age and cast himself in the role of the puppy. He’d always thought, Love that tan line, Sweetie. Don’t look so shocked. You know you want it. But the picture had been changed. The background details of beach and hot sun were exactly the same, but the part of the shocked little girl in the bikini was now being played by Rory. The hand tugging off his bikini bottom, thus revealing his pale sagging buttocks, belonged to the Bad Girl herself. She lay on the ground behind him, her cruel grin now so wide that it almost bisected her face. It was impossible to look at her blindingly white teeth without thinking of fangs sucking the blood from his carotid.
He knew then that running was futile. As long as she already owned part of him, there’d be no train fast enough, no mountain high enough, no island remote enough, to keep her from bringing him back to Booth Nine. If there was any way to keep her from taking the rest of him, he’d have to find it there.
The short walk back to Les Girls XXX took place in a vacuum. There was no sound, anywhere in the world. The cars passing by on the street moved in silent jerks, and as labored as his own breathing grew he could not quite manage to make himself hear it. The people passing him on the street mouthed words he couldn’t hear, words he somehow believed would free him if he could only find out what they were. He couldn’t make out any part of their faces except for those silently moving mouths. He knew they were looking at him, though, because their heads always turned to follow him. They’d all seen him savaged by the Bad Girl, and they all knew he was going back to her.
He wondered, as if in a dream, just how many of them would follow him if they could.
The Bad Girl was not a creature of flesh and blood. She was an immaterial girl, living in an immaterial world. But as her father Rory trudged in defeat to the place that had given her birth, she felt an excitement that approximated what in a human woman would have been deep arousal.
She readied her boudoir for his arrival: first restoring the world around Les Girls XXX to what it had been before she’d made her little alterations, then pulling all her substance back into the network of power surrounding Booth Nine. Just in time, too: the cost had been considerably more than she’d thought it would be. She was seriously depleted: had Rory actually still found the will to walk away, after everything she’d put him through, she would have had to choose between letting him go or dipping into her emergency reserve.
But he hadn’t walked away. He’d given up. And even as he pushed open the door to Les Girls XXX, to report for his damnation, the men jerking off in Booths Two, Three, Five, Six, Ten, Thirteen, Sixteen, Twenty-One, Twenty-Two, Twenty-Seven, and Twenty-Eight were beginning the process of restoring her to her former levels of power.
All eleven would be totally impotent for the rest of their lives. Half of them would commit suicide within five years.
As they came, so did she.
Taking one of his remaining rolls of tokens hastily enough to leave the inside-out pocket dangling like a sock on the outside of his pants, Rory went straight to Booth Nine, where THE BAD GIRL’S REVENGE again headed the list of attractions. The color still on the door showed the Bad Girl with her head hurled back in laughter, the triumph burning in her jet-black eyes.
He tried the door. The purple-haired girl hadn’t locked it after all. Maybe Elmo had checked out the video hookup, maybe he hadn’t. Either way the door opened with no problem. Almost eagerly, in fact.
Rory entered.
The door closed behind him of its own accord.
The booth seemed smaller than it had been only an hour ago. The walls pressed up against him, as if afraid to lend him enough room to thrash around and perhaps damage what was valuable to her. They were sticky. And while the room still stank, the predominant stench was no longer body odor. It was an odor Rory knew only through reputation, and via a pair of soiled panties he’d once purchased through Elmo. Rory had no idea which of the peepshow girls had contributed it, or what she had looked like, but her smell had been powerful. It had faded over time, unfortunately; in recent days he’d only been able to discern the odor by pressing the silk against his nose and practically strangling himself with it. But he remembered the smell. And inside Booth Nine it was powerful enough to overwhelm every other odor, including his own.
He sat on the bench and, out of habit, fumbled inside his jacket pocket for his kleenex and hand moisturizer. They weren’t there; he’d lost both somewhere along the way. He decided, with the resignation born of utter despair, that whatever happened from this point on he probably wouldn’t need them anyway.
He popped six tokens into his palm and inserted them one by one into the slot.
The YOU HAVE RUN OUT OF TIME visual disappeared, replaced by his menu of choices:
He pressed 1. The Bad Girl did not appear. Instead, the Nurse and the Patient did. They were both having fun with a very familiar fat man spreadeagled face-down on a hospital bed, his arms and legs tightly strapped to the bedposts. The object of their amusement seemed to be finding out just how many rectal thermometers could fit into one anal sphincter. From the look of things it was quite a few.
Rory quickly pressed 2. The Bad Girl did not appear in this one either. No, this time it was the Cowgirl. She had the fat man hogtied on his belly, his limbs curled back above his body, and his wrists and ankles joined together by a tremendous rawhide knot. Branding irons glowed red-hot over a campfire in the foreground. She faced the camera, grinned, and in a heavy Italian accent, said: “That’s my filly.”
Channel 3 was the Japanese girl from LUNCH WITH YOKO. She’d evidently had a very big meal not too long before: a very, very, very big meal, with too much spice but just the right amount of healthy fiber. Large as his mouth was, the fat man chained to the ground beneath her would probably not be able to contain it all.
Sickened, tormented, Rory paged upward through the numbers, watching all the objects of his masturbation fantasies show him exactly what they thought of his affections. Each vision brought from him a little sob. By the time he’d passed half a dozen of them, they were all affecting him like physical blows. He started flinching, like a schoolboy who knew each new taunt was going to be worse than the one before . . . and muttering, in the voice of a condemned prisoner whose execution was being dragged out beyond all reason, “Come on, come on, where are you, dammit!?!?”
He found her on Channel 12.
She straddled a simple wooden chair in the center of a plain white room, rhythmically tapping her nightstick against one of her knee-length leather boots. “Baby!” she exclaimed, in mock delighted surprise. “You made it!”
His doppelganger was nowhere in sight. “Where’s . . .”
“. . . our little princess? I thought you saw, darling. I’m letting the others play with her for a while. They’ve been waiting a long time for this.” Her eyes twinkled. “Especially Yoko. The poor dear’s been through a lot. I’m so glad you’re here to make it better.”
“Y-you gave me no choice, you . . .” he searched for the worst possible thing he could call her. Whore was inadequate, Bitch a pale joke, Cunt almost ludicrous. Beyond those three possibilities he couldn’t think of a damned thing.
She, on the other hand, had absolutely no trouble finding the one word that would destroy him: “You gave me no choice . . . Dad.”
He didn’t understand it. He didn’t see how it could be. But the truth of it loomed over him, like a great dark object too large to be comprehended by a single pair of eyes. He knew she was telling the truth, knew that there had to be some way to exploit that, but utterly unable to see what it was.
When she spoke next, her voice was no longer just the voice of the Bad Girl, but the voice of a hundred separate fantasy women, speaking in perfect unison. “Now give us the rest of you.”
“No.”
“You already gave us so much. We’ve been collecting it for years. We just need that last little bit.”
Rory couldn’t face her. He knew that if he did face her he’d be lost. Instead he forced himself to speak with a defiance he didn’t feel: “You can’t have it.”
“What we have won’t last long without that one little bit.”
“I don’t care,” he said, hating the tremble in his voice, knowing it made him sound like a petulant three-year-old who knows his whims can always be outpowered by mommy. “I don’t like you. I don’t belong to you. I didn’t mean to give you anything and I don’t want anything to do with you and I want it all back.”
“All of it?”
Inspiration struck: “Listen to your Father, young lady! Give it all back! Now!”
His words hit The Bad Girl like a physical blow. Not because they possessed any innate power of their very own – Bad Girls never listen to their fathers – but because the second they left his mouth she realized just how little she knew about the real world her fathers had visited her mothers to escape. She only knew the rules she’d learned from the porn fantasies that defined her world: rules that decreed total ecstatic surrender as the only possible response to any rape.
Rory was saying No. And he was meaning No.
She’d never imagined such a thing was possible.
And though she’d thought she’d despised her fathers before, that hatred was nothing compared to the black malignant bile that rose in her soul now. Because now that she understood just how maliciously she’d been lied to, she no longer wanted to possess him. She wanted to destroy him. Now. Damn the cost.
She gathered up everything she had. Everything, except for what little she’d need to start over. And began molding it in the form she wanted . . .
The silence that followed Rory’s ultimatum was broken only by the sound of breathing – both Rory’s own, and the breathing of the legion led by the Bad Girl. There seemed to be uncounted numbers of people breathing in that little booth. It should have been deafening. But it was all but lost in a tiny space that all of a sudden seemed to be extend toward infinity in every direction.
Then, all too easily: “Anything you want, honey . . .”
The TV screen in front of him blinked off. And somewhere far behind it came an ominous roaring sound: the sound the people in the valley hear just after the dam breaks, and just before the hundred-foot wall of water comes through to smash all their homes to toothpick kindling.
Rory’s reaction time was appallingly slow. He took two seconds to recognize the sound for what it probably was, two more seconds after that to calculate with woeful accuracy just how many gallons of semen he must have ejaculated in Les Girls XXX over the past ten years of weekly visits –
– two more seconds to put those facts together –
– then, as the roar of the onrushing tidal wave grew loud enough to shake the fillings from his back teeth, one more second to clutch at the door of the private booth –
– before the screen exploded outward in a jet of steaming sticky liquid.
The broken glass was nothing. It just cut open his flesh here and there, that’s all. The jet of cum was something else. There was more of it than even Rory could have jerked off in sixty lifetimes; the Bad Girl must have been angry enough to also throw in a substantial portion of every drop spilled by every man who had ever set foot in this building. The effect was a lot like having a fire hose filled with hot salty glue turned on full blast less than three feet from his face. The force of it slammed him against the rear wall of the booth, broke several of his ribs, pressed him flat against the unwashed splintery wood. He felt himself choking on it, swallowing it, going blind from it. With superhuman effort he managed to turn his back to the torrent: the stuff splattered against his back, re-bounded against the walls, collected ankle-deep at his feet. His inevitable scream was lost against the bellow of that single pitiless flood. He felt himself tossed atop an entire ocean of it, gale winds making its waves hurl him beneath the surface again and again.
He thought it wouldn’t stop till he drowned.
After a lifetime he realized it had already stopped.
He spat up a mouthful of it all over the wall in front of it, took a deep breath, and immediately started gagging. His throat burned. He got his coughing under control, managed to keep it under control for just about half a minute, then started coughing again. This fit lasted until his heart was a knot of congealed pain in the center of his chest. He got that under control, so relieved that he didn’t even notice it when he then puked all over himself.
His eyes resisted opening. His upper and lower eyelashes were glued together. But they came apart with what his now hypersensitive ears registered as a snap, and through a white haze picked up what had happened to the booth around him. The walls were no longer dingy brown, but a bubbly, sticky white so thick that he couldn’t even tell where the door had been.
He loudly peeled himself off the wall, turned around – making little cracking noises with every move – and sat down with an audible splish.
The TV screen was intact again. And, of course, it said:
He didn’t much feel like a winner.
Oh, he knew he could leave now. He doubted he’d make it far, looking the way he did – but he could leave. There’d be no TV sets or movie theatres playing THE BAD GIRL’S REVENGE, no billboard pictures of himself being tortured by beautiful women, no animated caricatures of himself on rest room walls.
But there was something else missing, too. Wasn’t there?
Whatever it was, its absence left a deep void inside him. Something which had once been part of him – maybe even most of him – but which had been utterly drowned by the Bad Girl’s assault, leaving him hollow, empty, and without hope.
Blank.
He was afraid he knew what it was.
Eventually he decided he had to know for sure.
He reached into his muck-encrusted pocket and took out a token. It was sticky and foul. For the first time he noticed there was a clown’s face embossed on it, and realized that Les Girls XXX must buy them in bulk from the same company that supplied the videogame parlor across the square. It was a small insight, but being able to come up with any insight at all felt good, now.
He slipped it into the slot.
His menu of choices blinked on:
1) |
2) |
3) |
4) |
5) |
6) |
7) |
8) |
9) |
10) |
11) |
12) |
He pressed a number at random. Then another, and another. As many times as he tried he found only snow. Somehow, without having to leave the booth, he knew that that’s all he’d ever find, in any booth he cared to try. Even his own private collection, at home – the books, the magazines, the videos, all of them – he didn’t have to be there to know that it would all be invisible to his eyes.
They no longer wanted anything to do with him.
He thought about the sordid, unloved hell that was his life, and what the rest of his days and nights would be like without even them for company, and after about a million years of trying unsuccessfully to even picture what a beautiful woman looked like . . .
. . . sat down and faced the meaningless snow on the screen.
The only companion he would ever have.