Chapter 6: For Whom the Belles Troll

5 April 2014

When I left Fort Myers Beach, I camped in the Everglades for two weeks. The place was almost deserted since the season was technically over. It was more than thirty miles from the park entrance to the campground. Electric service was still functional as were the restrooms and showers. I had to fill my water tank, though, in order to have water in the trailer.

That was when I discovered I had another problem. Somewhere along the line, my water pump had developed a crack and as soon as I turned it on, it started spewing water into my storage area under the bed. I didn’t realize it until I saw water running out of the bottom of the trailer.

Fuck!

I’d paid for two weeks in this campsite, and even though that was only $150, breaking camp and towing the trailer to Homestead carried no assurance that I could find a replacement pump once I got there. And it wasn’t a complicated operation to replace it, so when I went in for weekly supplies, I could shop around and then do the install myself, I figured.

It was a big campground and there were only about six other RVs scattered around it. We waved and acknowledged each other’s presence, but really didn’t have much interaction. So it was moderately irritating to get back from my unsuccessful trip to Homestead and discover a pop-up camper in the space next to mine.

Unlike Fort Myers, the campsites in the Everglades are a good fifty feet wide with grass and picnic tables and room to play. So it wasn’t really an imposition to have someone camped next to me. Looking around the campground, I realized that the occupied sites, including mine, were the ones that had some shade. I could understand why the newcomers would want the site they chose.

I sat under my awning and had a beer and a cigar as the campers set up their pop-up. It was two women and a man. Looked like a fun party to have in that little camper. Then I realized the man was another woman, though a somewhat burly one. I figured that out while she was shooing the smallest of the three away from the camper and said, “We’ll do it. Just relax.” The banished woman sighed, looked over my direction and waved.

I waved back and motioned her to come on over. My first guess was that she was close to forty, but she could have been thirty and had a hard life. She pulled a cigarette out of the pack she carried and asked for a light.

“They won’t let me do anything!” she said. “They treat me like an old lady.”

“Your kids?” I ventured.

“God, no! My girlfriends. Teach me to pick them so young. I’m Val,” she said, sticking out her hand.

“I’m Aroslav,” I responded. Ah. Lesbians. “Would you like a beer?”

“Thanks. You here all alone?”

“Yes. Just off seeing the world. In this instance Florida.” We chit-chatted while her girlfriends finished setting up the tent and got their refrigerator and lights plugged in. I had a little opportunity to assess my new companion.

She said she was thirty-seven years old and had a daughter who would be twenty in June. I was correct in assuming she’d had a pretty hard life. Her hard accent was consistent with her home in Knoxville, Tennessee. Her ex-husband had gone to jail five years ago for robbing a gas station.

“At least he was around long enough to teach the worst of the boys not to touch our daughter,” Val said. “She’s got even bigger tits than me, but she learned about condoms before I did.” I just sort of stared at her. That wasn’t the kind of information you normally share with a stranger. But I soon discovered that Val had no filters.

“We’re all set up and Janna is doing the cooking,” the big girl in the group said. She’d come across the space between our trailers to tell Val when supper would be ready. I offered her a beer and she accepted, tilting her head back and draining the bottle in one long gulp. This was a very big girl. She was easily two inches taller than me and outweighed me by at least fifty pounds. And solid. I won’t say she didn’t have any fat on her, but if we went head to head in a wrestling match I didn’t think I’d stand a chance. Back in my less socially conscious days, I would have called her a railroad dyke.

A Long Time Ago: Honorary Lesbian

Back when I was working on my PhD in playwriting—officially, dramatic theory—while trying to hammer out my first novel, I still had to earn a living. Paula’s assessment was proving to be correct. I stood a chance of making money by designing and building sets. I’d taken my latest script to a startup theater on the east edge of St. Paul to meet with their artistic director. He’d nodded over the script and said it was interesting and funny, but he wasn’t sure his group would be the right venue for a farce about an Indiana preacher. On the other hand, would I be interested in designing the theater’s upcoming production of The Crucible?

I took the job after he promised that they had a crew that the stage manager had been cultivating. They liked to work together, but needed a pro to design and tech direct. An experienced crew? What a luxury!

Six women.

Donna, the stage manager, introduced me to my crew and I got a warm welcome when I showed them the designs. It turned out that the seven women, and a couple others I hadn’t met, had formed their own little club to do theater tech. None of them other than Donna had any formal education in theater, but they had all met as volunteers for a show produced by the city’s feminist theater group. Some women come together over coffee, books, social issues, or just for drinks. This crew had discovered they liked working backstage and it gave them plenty of opportunity to talk and have fun.

Two of the women were married. The youngest on the crew was nearly thirty and worked as an admin in a law firm. Ranging upward to about fifty years old, the women proved to be hard workers and one of the best tech crews I’d ever had.

“Theresa is mine,” Donna whispered to me after the intros. “Don’t touch. Take your pick of any of the others.” Well, excluding the married ladies, that narrowed the field to three and none of them were flirty. We worked.

We got the show up and it was successful. It was one of the least stressful shows I’d ever designed and by the time we closed it, I’d been accepted as one of the girls. Mostly, unless I needed to give instructions to someone, I kept my mouth shut. You have no idea what women will say to each other when they forget a man is around.

There was the usual talk about offices, families, theater gossip, and television shows. But once we’d been working together for a while, conversations began to loosen up. The legal admin got some very detailed instructions on how to seduce the lawyer she’d become interested in. I mean, the ladies set up every detail for her, including telling her how she should dress and the best blowjob techniques when she got him alone. Some of those techniques were things I’d never experienced!

One day the conversation got around to lesbian sex and what each of the women liked when having her pussy eaten. One of the married women simply couldn’t understand how a woman could put her face in another woman’s pussy. It was gross. It happened, though, that she had been the one offering the most creative suggestions about blowjobs a few days earlier. Donna’s girlfriend, Theresa, suddenly turned and looked at me.

“Are pussies gross, Ari?” she demanded. “Do you ever go down on a woman?”

“No, they aren’t gross, Theresa,” I said. “And yes, I go down. I’d have to say that I pretty much feel the same about eating pussy as you do.”

“But what about queefs? Gross!” June said.

“I figure if I put the air in there, I can stand the vart. It’s just an embarrassing noise, not a smell or taste.” I said.

“Too bad you’ve got a dick. You could be a lesbian.”

The night the show closed, of course, we had to strike the set and get it to storage. It was after midnight when Donna joined us and said she’d buy us a round at Screamers. I was all for a drink, and Mary—the one who had been disgusted by lesbian sex—had been casually bumping against me all evening.

“What about Ari?” Theresa asked.

“Oh,” Donna said. Like the others, I think she’d forgotten I was male. She considered a minute.

“He’s one of us,” Mary said. Donna nodded.

“Ari, we want you to come with us. Screamers is a lesbian bar on 7th. There won’t be any other men there at midnight on a Saturday. If you want to come with us, you have to promise not to speak to anyone but us. You want a beer, ask one of us. Not all the women in the bar are lesbians, like Mary and Elizabeth and June, but they are all women. Just do like you usually do and make us all forget you’re a man.”

“I’ll take care of him,” Mary said. “Ari, ride with me. I don’t want to stay out for more than one drink. Is that okay?”

“Fine,” I said. I wasn’t sure what I was getting into, but this was an adventure I wasn’t going to miss.

Mostly, Screamers was just a neighborhood bar where a bunch of people went to hang out. Like Cheers, only for dykes. There was even the requisite number of Harleys in the parking lot. It was dimly lit and music was playing on a jukebox. It smelled a little like stale beer. The leather jacket crew were mostly sitting at the bar. There were a few women who were dressed to the nines and were obviously being hit on at every opportunity. They’d go dance with the woman who asked them, sometimes get into a little clinch, and then return to their table where they’d all make a big show out of kissing each other and then redoing their makeup.

“Lipstick dykes,” Theresa muttered when we’d all packed into a tiny booth. I was smashed between her and Mary and was almost invisible. I hoped. “Order for us, Donna.” Over the six weeks we’d been working together, it had become obvious to me that even though Donna was the stage manager and in charge on stage, in their personal relationship Theresa was the top. A waitress came to the table and Donna ordered eight Dos Equis. The waitress scanned the table quickly and paused when she saw me. I saw her eyebrow twitch, but she didn’t say anything.

The conversation was lively around me, and filled with commentary on other bar patrons. I don’t think men look at other men in a bar and talk about what they are wearing. I don’t think they even talk about women in a bar like that. My experience was that most male conversation in a bar revolved around sports and, at most, which apparently single woman they’d fuck if given a chance. Most went home alone.

Not so in a lesbian bar. My companions had an opinion or information about everyone in the bar.

“She shaves her puss bare. But she never gets all the stubble. You can get serious rug burn on your face.”

“She was in a really abusive relationship. Lila won’t allow her ex in the bar anymore.”

“I bet she squirts. You can tell by the way she’s sitting. Look at her legs.” Really? You can tell if a woman is a squirter by looking at the way she sits? I needed some more instruction. But I wasn’t going to get it.

Four angry-looking women were headed toward our table.

“What’s he doing in here?” the lead asked. I was toast.

There was suddenly a wall between me and the approaching women. A wall of six women who all slid out of the booth and stood between it and the rest of the bar. And it was obvious that these women were not taking shit from anyone. Only Mary stayed in the booth, gripping my arm so I wouldn’t be tempted to interfere. As if.

“He’s an honorary lesbian and he’s ours,” Theresa declared. “He’s a better rug muncher than you, Karla.”

“You’re such a bitch, Theresa. You never complained when my tongue was in your crotch.”

“Drop it or you’re all out of here,” a voice came from behind them. I had no idea who it was, but I had to assume it was the bar owner, Lila. I could not see past the line of backsides that blocked my view.

“You shouldn’t allow his kind in here,” Karla said, but it was obvious she was backing off.

“It’s a free country,” Lila said. My protectors slid back into the booth around me and our waitress set a tray of beers on the table and beat a hasty retreat. A petite woman in high heels and a nice professional slacks suit stayed by the table. One glance at the baseball bat in her hand, however, told me that she was not a person I wanted to cross. “Drink up,” she said. “Closing time is in an hour. You might not want to stay for last call.” She looked meaningfully at me and I just nodded once. She returned to the bar.

“Well, that was exciting,” Mary squeaked.

“You guys took a big risk protecting me,” I said. “I should probably go.”

“Not really,” Theresa said. “Karla acts tough, but both her nipples are pierced and if you can grab hold of one and twist, she’s on the floor begging to eat you. And you can’t leave yet. You haven’t had your beer. If you leave now, it will look like you’re running away.”

Yeah. Well. That would be true. Nonetheless, I drank my beer and everything seemed to return to normal. When we were finished, Donna paid the tab and we left as a group. No one in the bar followed us and no one was waiting outside. I got into Mary’s car and we left before the other women had gotten into their cars. I’d survived my first—and only—lesbian bar experience.

But my night wasn’t over.

“Show me your apartment, Ari,” Mary said when she pulled up to my door. It was nearly two a.m. and I was a little surprised, but invited her in.

“Would you like a sparkling water?” I asked. I didn’t want to put her back on the road with another drink, but wanted to be hospitable. She accepted as she looked around.

“It’s a little Spartan, isn’t it?”

“I call this style ‘early divorce’. It’s something I just learned about and thought I’d try.”

“Oh. I’m sorry, Ari.” I turned toward her voice and she was in my arms with her lips on my lips and our tongues tangling. I was responding rapidly. “I’m ready,” she whispered. “I’ve been ready ever since those bull dykes showed up at our table. Show me your pussy-licking skills, Ari.”

“Mary,” I gasped. “What about your husband? You aren’t divorced, are you?”

“No. But whenever I go out with the girls, he expects that some lesbian will be licking me before the night is over.”

“But I’m...”

“An honorary lesbian. Theresa said so. Do me, Ari. I’m dripping. Donna says my pussy is one of the sweetest she’s ever tasted.”

Well, I did have a bed. Or at least I had a large mattress on the floor. I led her in and started undressing her.

“I want to see more of this beautiful body than just your pussy,” I said. “I want all of you.”

“God! You are just like a lesbian,” she said. We kept kissing and undressed each other. I’d always thought Mary was the cutest of the girls for all that she was at least ten years older than me. I knew she had two kids at home, too, but she’d taken extraordinary care of that body. We got onto the bed and kept kissing. She stroked my cock a few times and I could feel her slick things up with my precome. I worked my way down her body and she spread her legs.

It wasn’t as common back then for women to shave their pussies, but from the conversations I’d been privy to over the past few weeks, I discovered that it was a lot more common among women who planned to be eaten. A lot. Mary had a pretty full bush down to where her slit began. Everything from that point down was smooth and bare. I parted those lips with my tongue and set about proving what a good lesbian I was.

“Turn around,” she gasped after her first come. She was just as sweet as Donna had supposedly said. In fact, I wasn’t sure but what she used some kind of flavoring down there. “I’m not going to leave you hanging, Ari. Let me do you while you give me another of those incredible comes.”

In a few seconds we were arranged in a sixty-nine and she was riding my face while she inhaled my cock. I tried to focus on her pussy, licking all the way up to her asshole and back to her clit. She shuddered through another orgasm before she really went to work on my cock.

“Oh, god,” she murmured around the head of my cock as she kissed it and licked the shaft. “Eating pussy isn’t so gross after all. It tastes just like my husband’s cock.” If that was what she needed to think, I was okay with it. She was the woman who had described blowjob techniques I had never experienced. Until tonight. She used her hands in concert with her mouth to both stroke and twist around my shaft. And when I was sure I wouldn’t last any longer, she shoved a finger up my ass and I started spraying her tonsils. Rather than pulling back, she pushed her mouth down farther on my cock and I could feel her swallowing as I continued to pulse.

When my eyes uncrossed, she still held me in her mouth. I attacked her slit again and lashed her clit. It appeared she was just about ready for another good one, so I borrowed a page from her book and took my finger out of her pussy and shoved it in her ass. She screamed and squealed and bucked against my face until she’d finally had enough and rolled off of me. My finger came out with a pop and she gasped again.

“Theresa is not going to believe this when I tell her,” Mary said.

I guess that cemented my reputation as an honorary lesbian.

Back to The Everglades

“Ari, this is Dolly. Dolly, this is Mr. Aroslav whose beer you just guzzled,” Val said.

“I was hot,” Dolly responded. She turned to me and offered a fist to bump. “Thanks for the beer. We just got ours on ice and it’s not cold yet.”

“My pleasure, Dolly. Be sure to take one to Janna, too. Cook deserves to be treated nice,” I said. Dolly grinned at me.

It’s kind of a cliché to have a really big woman in front of you and say ‘she has a really pretty face.’ As if the rest of her was an ugly mess. Well, Dolly did have a really pretty face and there was really nothing wrong with the rest of her. I know that the tall women I usually write about are thin as a rail because ... well, Carly. But even though Dolly was big around as well as tall, she wasn’t an ugly woman at all. I supposed most men didn’t give her a second look, but that was their loss.

“You should see the slut,” Dolly said, rolling her eyes. “As soon as I had the grill set up, she stripped down to her bikini and started dancing while she got the food ready. I think it’s her bikini. Might just be her underwear. She has the sluttiest of both.”

“Be nice, Dolly. You know she does it just for you,” Val said. “Take off your shirt and show us your bikini.”

“Aw, Val,” Dolly said. She was blushing, but she pulled the sports jersey she was wearing over her head and off. It’s a misconception to assume that a big woman—and I was face to face with a seriously big woman—necessarily has big breasts. I guessed that Dolly’s bikini had less to cover than Val had. Val proved it by pulling off her shirt to show a bright yellow bikini as well. She stood on tiptoes and gave Dolly a kiss, tweaking a nipple as she did so. Dolly picked the smaller woman up and smashed her lips against hers. She set her down.

“Isn’t she something?” Val said, turning back to me. She didn’t seem to notice the tent in my pants, but I wasn’t about to hide it. “I been trying to get her knocked up, but I can’t find a guy who’ll do her.” Dolly turned crimson. You just don’t think about a large lesbian being embarrassed. And the truth was, I liked her. She was big and apparently too much information was the standard for Val, but Dolly was a sweet girl. I estimated she was in her mid-twenties, though it was hard to tell. Her face looked so young.

“I’d do her,” I said impulsively. “I couldn’t knock her up because I got those parts disconnected years ago. We could practice, though. All night.”

“Oh, gawd!” Dolly moaned. She turned to Val. “You are gonna get such a licking tonight.” That image just burned itself into my brain.

“Hey you two sluts,” called the bikini clad Janna from the front of their camper. “Dinner’s ready. Get your asses over here.” Janna wasn’t a skinny girl, either, but she did have a skinny girl bikini on. It disappeared in some places. I handed Dolly a beer to take to Janna and she thanked me. Just before she left, Val gave my arm a squeeze, pushing her bosom into it.

“Thank you,” she said. “I’m not really a lez, but those two girls suck clit like you would not believe.”

The week in the Everglades was peaceful. The ladies next door took off each morning to drive to one of the many beaches around Homestead and Miami. I went into town a couple times because I had no Internet service out at the campground and I was trying to find a replacement water pump. It looked like I was going to be without water until I got north of Port St. Lucie. Oh well. There were showers in the restrooms just a couple hundred feet away, even if they were cold. I kept a bucket of water by the toilet for flushing and had bottled water for coffee. Everything else I cooked on the grill and ate off paper plates.

When they got back from their day’s outing, if it wasn’t late enough that I was in bed, Val would often stop over and either bring or accept a beer as she told me about their day.

“You have got to go to that beach, Ari,” she enthused. “The skimpiest bikinis I have ever seen and the roundest butts in the world. Every color you can think of. Careless girls, too. One bitch parked her blanket right straight ahead of us and proceeded to bare her beaver to us while she laid in the sun. It was so hot out there, I felt it was my obligation to offer to rub sunblock on it. It was already red and puffy.”

“Sounds like a lesbian beach,” I laughed.

“Oh there were plenty of guys if you swing that way. They were sure swinging!”

We compared notes on other parts of the park and other parks outside the ‘Glades. I visited some of them. I tended to stay around camp most of the time. I was really getting into Living Next Door to Heaven Part II: The Agreement. I loved setting up some rules and then seeing how far the kids could push them without breaking them.

The morning I got up and started hitching up the trailer to leave, Dolly came to see if she could help. I thanked her, though there wasn’t anything but power to disconnect. I did have leveling blocks to deal with and Dolly did a great job of directing me as I backed the hitch up under the tongue of the trailer. I figured I’d go say goodbye to the other two before I pulled out. Dolly held me back a moment.

“Did you mean it?” she asked.

“What?” I had no idea what she was talking about. We’d been camped next to each other for over a week and I’d even had the three of them over for dinner one night. When I make beans and rice, it always makes up a big batch.

“About ... When you said you’d do me? Did you mean that?” I suddenly got the feeling that maybe Dolly wasn’t a lesbian by choice. At least not first choice.

“Do you want to go inside the trailer and find out?” I said. She stared at the ground. “Dolly, you’re a sweet woman. You are bigger than average, but that doesn’t take away from you being a woman and yes, I find you desirable. Is that what you want?”

“No. Well, not really. I mean, I don’t want to just go into your trailer and jump your bones. But, Ari, no guy has ever said anything like that to me. It’s nice to know you meant it.”

“That wasn’t a particularly romantic way for me to tell you,” I said.

“Wasn’t romance. It was just sex. Still, it was nice to know.”

I walked over to their camper with her and said my goodbyes. They’d decided to stay another week with the park almost empty. I was headed down to Key West just to get to Mile 0 of U.S. Route 1 and head north. Each of the ladies gave me a hug and a sweet little kiss. Dolly blushed fire engine red. Val wiggled her tits up against my chest and drove her tongue into my mouth.

“See you around, cowboy,” she teased.

I got in the truck and pulled out of the campground.

Key West is basically an ugly tourist trap with a monument that says you are 70 miles from Cuba, and a beach that was one of the smallest I’d ever seen. I got my picture of Milepost 0 and a sticker for the back of my trailer, and headed north.

I found a nice little place on Long Key to camp and was able to watch sunset and moonrise at the same time on a much nicer beach. I’d been clued in on a tiny restaurant reputed to have the best burgers in Florida out on Deer Key. I found it, as had enough other people to pack the place to overflowing. The local ritual was to write your name on a dollar bill and staple it to a wall. The walls and ceiling were completely papered with one dollar bills.

After a couple days on the Keys, I decided to head north. The Keys were a bust as far as I was concerned and I’d read about a nudist park near the Georgia border that had a music festival coming up. I got a reservation there and was going to work my way slowly up Highway 1.

U.S. Highway 1 was six lanes wide coming out of Homestead, just another big highway lined with malls and auto dealers. I was already planning to get off of it and find a backroad north instead. Somebody laid on their horn nearby and I looked out the side mirror. Down next to me was a gray Toyota wagon pulling a pop-up camper. Dolly was driving and had one arm out the window to wave at me. Val was in the backseat and had her head out the window yelling and waving. They peeled off into a shopping center and I edged over to the next entrance. They’d stopped in front of an auto parts store and I pulled into a space next to them. Dolly and Janna had the back of the wagon open and, after they waved at me, they headed for the store. Val came over to give me a hug.

“We blew a fuse in the car when we tried to plug the refrigerator into it,” she said.

“I thought you were staying down there for another week,” I said. I ruled out the idea that they were stalking me. There was no way they could know I would be heading out of the Keys today.

“They came in and mowed the whole campground this morning. Bugs came out of everywhere. You shoulda seen us swattin’ and whackin’ at each other. We closed up the camper and hitched up to get outa there. That’s how we happened to plug the lights into the car with the refrigerator still connected. Boom!”

“So you’re just headed home?”

“We don’t know where we’re going. We’ll just drive up here a way and find a campground near a beach. Must be one somewhere.” The whole time Val was talking she was edging closer to me. I was up against the truck and she was a couple inches in front of me. “Where you goin’ next?”

“I found a park up near Fort Lauderdale,” I said. “Figure I’ll spend a couple days there. Next weekend I plan to be at a nude park west of Jacksonville.”

“I love nude! I never wear clothes at home. You should come visit me in Knoxville,” she said. Well, she might not be the prettiest woman in the world, but she was certainly being one of the friendliest. I pulled out my cellphone.

“Give me your number and the rest of your name so I can give you a call when I get to the Smokies. I’ll either stay in Gatlinburg or Pigeon Forge. That’s not far.” Under the pretense of looking over my hands as I thumbed in her phone number, Val closed the remaining distance between us and started rubbing her tits against the back of my hands. It was subtle at first, but soon became obvious that her nipples were hardening against the back of my hands while I held the phone.

A Long Time Ago: Personal Space

And that brings me back to Joy.

Remember Joy? The judge’s daughter who was way above my social class.

It was two weeks before graduation and Coach Hancock had come down hard on the seniors for goofing off in his government class. We were all squirrelly as hell and nobody was really concentrating on school. We’d already started partying and nearly every night we were out late playing games that mostly had to do with getting touchy-feely with classmates you figured you might not ever see again. Oh, the games all had ‘science’ behind them. We were going to learn to trust each other by having one person (strangely, always a girl) stand in the middle of a tight circle of guys sitting on the floor. She’d hold herself as stiffly as possible and then tilt until she fell backwards. The boy behind her would catch her falling body and toss it the other direction. Of course, there was a lot of catching her by the boobs and giving a little squeeze as we sent her on to the next guy until she’d start giggling and collapse instead of staying stiff. I’d wanted my hands on Shannon’s boobs for three years and this was the only opportunity I’d gotten so far. But that’s a different story.

The real story here is that we were staying out ridiculously late every night and sleeping through classes. Serious sleep deprivation. Coach Hancock said that since we couldn’t focus on class that he was just going to assign us a paper that had to be turned in before the weekend and that anyone who didn’t have it in would have to come to school during senior week when we all intended to be gone. He was a really good guy, a six-six former marine sergeant who coached basketball, but he could be hard as nails if you disrespected him.