Chapter 16: Sticky Situations

While Lucy and Gloria are consummating their sapphic lust on stage, Livia, Mimi and I are hurriedly preparing the second Decan. “Larry arrived with the NCSS girls half an hour ago,” Mimi tells us; Larry’s our driver in Lauderdale. “We’ve got them backstage. It’s probably good if they don’t see any hijinks before they’re on stage.”

I nod. “Yeah.”

“Marc, Livia, listen. I’m still digging into Jeri. We just got her name an hour before the first Decan. I need more time. I’ll handle controls for the NCSS climax and do the cabinet assistant bit, but I’m going to vanish for the banana-eating until the end. Okay? I really need time on my computer and the phone. Only about an hour. I can’t get into this now, but I think that Jeri is not so much an ideal girl for the third Decan as she is a lightning-strikingly-improbable perfect illustration of everything it’s about. I can give you a lot of cues for the routine, but I need that time.”

“Gotcha. I’ll manage the music, and I think we can get Vendetta to add an extra set between the second and third Decans. Also, Jeri should really be kept backstage during the NCSS bit as well. It’s going to be raunchy, and I don’t want it to give her cold feet. The NCSS girls are ready for it — they can blame us, and use the scandal to advance their careers — but I think it might creep Jeri out.”

“Right,” Mimi says. “I’ll have Tilly keep her backstage and talk with her.”

Tilly’s the Gold Coast ringer from the Tequila Pops Tops routine. She’s a pretty fun girl, chill and interesting to talk to.

“Uh, ladies?” I ask. “Gloria and Lucy are, uh, making use of the roller couch we wanted to put Jeri on for the induction. It was by the side of the stage. We may need to sterilize it and clean it before the third Decan.”

“I’ll drop Larry two twenties and have him do that,” Mimi says.

“How’s the cabinet?”

Livia looks up. “Passed all diagnostic lists on-site,” she replies. “And I talked to Terri this morning. It’ll go great. Everything will.”

I flash a naughty smile. “I’m looking forward to the big climax.”

Everyone giggles. The feeling is mutual. We can be such utter, juvenile little perverts at times. We have schemes — zany schemes. Feeling like you’re fourteen again (and doing it right this time) is fun.

The three of us stride out on stage. “Ladies and gentlemen, the second Decan starts now! I hope you’re all primed to go, since I’m getting the distinct feeling that Lady Kensington and her mousy little assistant gave you guys an intermission show that really cranked up some heart rates — among other things!”

The tone of the crowd’s cheer indicates that, yes, something rad went down. I glance at Livia. We’re both looking forward to reviewing that footage. “Well, that first Decan sure was ... what is the word I’m looking for here, Marc?”

I flash the crowd a shameless grin and make a ‘big bouncy ones’ hand gesture in front of my chest. “Breasty.”

“Yeah,” Livia laughs. “It sure was breasty. Maybe our most breasty ever. Well, we’re going to tone things down from here on out, just a little bit, although I do think there’s a bit the dudes in the audience are going to really like later in the show. But first, you know, we’re magicians. It’s time for some classic stage magic!”

The crowd cheers. It’s tepid, but that’s to be expected — they want tits and porn, not parlor tricks. But the symbolism in the next bit is important, and we’re going to give them a rather different kind of thrill to keep their interest. Here’s a real magician’s secret for you: shocking people, thrilling them, makes them suggestible. Their emotions are brought to the forefront; their defenses go down. We did it with Shanice, River and Norma Jean, getting them into the adrenaline-soaked mindspace where they’d cut loose and have a wild pie fight on stage. People in that mindspace hypnotize more easily, they sympathize more deeply and messages get through. And, being a variety show, we have a license to thrill. It doesn’t have to be straight eros, 100% of the time. We can mix it up, and we’re doing that in a very significant way here.

“Now, as I’ve said before,” Livia says, “I love the classic tricks, but I also love to put my own spin on them. This is the most complex and impressive variant I’ve tried yet, but I’m certain everything will go off perfectly! Well, mostly certain. You’ve all seen the Zig Zag Girl and the Mismade Girl, right?”

You probably have seen these tricks, albeit not by name. They are both tricks where a girl gets inside a vertical cabinet made of three boxes. In the Zig Zag Girl, the middle box slides to the side in a way that looks like it should crush the girl. In the Mismade Girl, the boxes get unstacked and restacked, and it looks like the girl is cut apart but alive, with her legs above her head and torso at the very bottom. They’re both impressive tricks, but we’re not really doing either, or a variant. This is all misdirection for the audience. While there’s a little bit of stage magic at work here, what we’re doing is less an illusion and more a wicked prank.

As Livia does patter and builds up the audience, Mimi and I roll three boxes out onto the stage. They are bigger than the normal boxes for the Mismade or Zig Zag Girl routines, a little over a yard on each side. Each side is covered with an opaque, two-color old-timey stage design in navy and orange. It looks kitschy, but that’s true to our brand. The boxes are heavy, so we actually have a little mechanical crane system to stack them. We circle them, subtly making sure all the mechanical parts interlink correctly. I do most of the heavy lifting, while Mimi is the misdirection — using her ridiculous, neon pink latex bimbo costume to flaunt her copious chest at the audience with lots of downblouse angles and labor-induced jiggling.

Once the three boxes are in position, we roll out the fourth item — which looks like a classic guillotine with a razor-sharp blade and a wooden frame. Our crane lifts it up and sets it atop the three boxes, and Mimi and I climb little staircases to slide the guillotine into a special ridge on the top surface of the top box. If a girl was standing dead-center inside the three boxes and the guillotine blade fell, it would cut her neatly in half from crown to sternum, separating the left side of the body — and the left hemisphere of the brain — from the right. That’s very much the intended symbolism.

“So,” Livia continues, “we’re going to need some volunteers from the audience for our trick. I need to warn you, this trick can get a bit scary, so we need a lady well-conversant with all things scary! How about ... yeah, you! Get on up here, Terri!”

A petite, short-haired blonde makes her way out of the crowd. She’s dressed in a black frilly blouse and a red skirt, and even the loose clothing doesn’t conceal how busty she is.

She’s an oil wrestler using the alias Terri Lariat, from the “Broad Squad” — the same troupe Molly works for. She’s also known as Lisette Crauer, however, and is what is known in horror fandom as a Scream Queen. She has the distinguished honor of having played a horny, dumb teenager killed by both Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees, though it didn’t bring her much mainstream name recognition. She’s not afraid to get racier, either, as her risqué graveyard striptease routine in one of Dario Argento’s zombie films showed.

More recently, she’s made Z-grade, nudity-driven pseudo-horror like Slave Girls of the Outer Rim, The Spa That Dripped Blood and Sorority Babes and the Murder Makeover. I understand she has a real passion for low-budget film, and sometimes directs as well as starring and flashing. And she’s in the messy wrestling circuit, here and at the Tropicana, mostly to raise money for her indie films. Livia knows her in depth and has told me a fair bit about her — the two of them go way back, and she put us in contact with Molly. We’d have used her for Molly’s role, but she just got into Lauderdale today.

“Wow, folks, wow! Anyone recognize this girl?”

When Livia asks that question, Mimi and I scan the crowd in a rapid but detailed manner. We’re looking for hot girls that clearly do recognize Terri, not just as a Summers wrestler but as Lisette Crauer. We look for a bit punkier girls — leather, piercings, darker clothing, tattoos, black eyeliner. We want horror fandom, because they’ll be less likely to be offended at what we’re about to do to them and more likely to take it as a cool story to tell.

One stands out immediately. Hi, Roach, welcome back! I see how enthusiastic you are. I don’t care if you’re going to take this in good spirits or not, you owe me one for what I let you walk out of here with on Monday! So I signal Roach and bring her up while still scanning the crowd. The next pick is a brunette in a strapless white one-piece and a hula skirt. She’s got black lipstick, and body language suggests she’s a huge fan of Lisette Crauer. The pick is a bit libido-driven, though — she’s cute and buxom, and Mimi has told me ... things ... about strapless tops in relation to the content of this routine. Our fourth girl is a cute but heavily tattooed Asian who I pluck because of her cocky stance and torn-up denim jacket with the anarchist symbol on the back.

Once all the girls are on stage, Livia walks them through the standard Trips oath. The brunette looks a bit nervous, but all the girls ultimately agree. After that, Livia turns back to the audience. “Now, this next trick is pretty thrilling and maybe even a little bit scary. If you have a weak heart or a weak stomach, leave now! This is going to be a serious, classy magic routine — I promise not to mess it up and turn it into a series of tawdry, contrived excuses for these lovely ladies to please remove more and more clothing!”

The Asian anarchist looks vaguely annoyed at that. I think she’s hoping for a real thrill. Well, she’s definitely going to get one! The brunette in white, conversely, is busy fangirling at Terri.

The crowd cheers — obviously, that’s exactly what they are hoping for. It’s actually misdirection, however. We may or may not get to see a bit of skin from our volunteers, but it’s not the focus of the number. It’s going to be a bit more extreme than that. I take the four female volunteers aside and we form a kind of football huddle. “Listen, ladies. This routine actually can get quite tense at moments. It’s really not an excuse to get your clothes off. We don’t want to traumatize any of you. We picked you because you look like you’re all the kind of girls who enjoy horror films.”

“Yup,” the brunette in white says.

“Don’t worry,” Roach says to the Asian. “If it gets scary, you can hold my hand.”

She rolls her eyes. “I’m up for this.”

“Okay,” I say. “I want you all to know you’re not in any real danger. The thing with us not doing the trick right is patter for the crowd. Nothing here can really hurt you —”

“Spoilers!” the Asian anarchist complains.

“— but, if you want to sell to the audience the opposite impression, that would be super-peachy.”

“We’re gonna freak the normies?” Roach asks.

“Yup!” I reply.

All four girls seem enthusiastic about that, albeit with very different motives. Terri’s our contact, a rebel and a natural showoff, though even she doesn’t know the routine’s punchline. The brunette’s a fangirl of both her and horror in general. The anarchist wants to freak people out, and be thrilled. Roach wants to be macho, and possibly “comfort” anyone who gets scared. I picked well here.

Mimi and I lead the girls over to the chamber and open the three doors. Roach steps in first. There’s a triangular wedge on the bottom that pretty much forces the girls inside to stand facing directly forward with their legs spread. That’s not for pervy reasons — well, it’s not only for pervy reasons — though they clearly get the pervy bit and play along. Roach actually has to unzip her tight leather skirt to spread her legs, which she has no problem doing. She hands me her leather jacket before getting in, and I set it over a nearby chair. She actually looks really good in her tight, faded Metallica t-shirt without a bra — and, keep in mind, I’ve seen her in a balloon bikini and nothing at all. Some looks just work for some girls.

I stop the anarchist as she’s going in. Her tattered denim jacket is covered with safety pins, weird political emblems, chrome rivets and other hand-crafted stuff. It looks like some effort went into making it. “Miss, your jacket is tattered and has dangly bits. I’m concerned it’s going to catch on the rails at the edge of the boxes.”

She looks down at me. “You just want a better look at my tits,” she says sarcastically.

“Yup,” I agree. “I’d love a get a little peekie at your perkies. I’m sure everyone else here would as well. They seem really nice. But your jacket is also legitimately a safety problem.”

She walks over to the chair and tosses the jacket on it, leaving her in a loose black tank top. Then she throws up her arms and yawns very theatrically, thrusting out her chest and stretching her top. She pauses to consider for a second, then pulls the black tank top over her head and tosses it on the chair atop the jacket. The crowd cheers. Even after the complete nudity-fest of the first Decan, the anarchist still manages to get a decent pop by just having a sense of showmanship.

She puts her hands on her hips and saunters back to me, all while keeping a dry, sarcastic veneer. Her insouciant little C-cups bounce a bit with each step. “Well ... there you go. This what you all wanted to see?”

“You got some damn fine chest cannons, baby. Is there a chill breeze here or are you just unusually horny?”

She gives me the middle finger, but it’s playful. “Get in the box, sweetie.”

I’ve just shown more respect for an anarchist’s personal property than I’m sure any anarchist has ever shown for anyone else’s personal property. One of life’s little ironies, you know?

Next was going to be the brunette, but Terri actually steps in front of her and into the chamber. I let her change up the script, and figure out why shortly after she does. The girl in last is in front, and will be facing the audience. Why not let the horror fangirl “audition”?

So the brunette is the last in. She’s acting more demure and nervous now, but I’m pretty sure that’s because she’s play-acting “girl in a horror movie” rather than horror fangirl.

Mimi shuts the cabinet doors once all four girls are inside. She cues up the music. We’ve set up special speakers to give a very deep, low, reverberant bass — both for the ominous music in this bit, and for the hypnotism that will come afterward. It’s hard to set up sinister and foreboding ambiance in the noonday sun during Spring Break ... but we get at least a bit, and that’s important here.

Livia walks over. “Now, as I’ve said, I know you’ve all seen the Zig Zag Girl and the Mismade Girl, but we’ve got a very special twist to the routine, one that we think pushes it beyond the impossible...”

As Livia continues her patter, I can hear noises from the cabinet.

“Yikes!”

“Well, someone’s got some adventurous hands.”

Don’t worry, ladies, we won’t leave you alone with Roach much longer.

Livia’s carrying a showman’s cane. She walks over to the cabinet and raps it once, decisively, with the cane — and all the sides of the boxes fall away, clattering to the ground like a house of cards knocked over. It really is a spectacular cinematic flourish. We’re left with the four girls, crammed together in a row, in a tall rectangular plastic case with transparent Plexiglas walls. For bonus points, when the opaque squares fall away we catch Roach in mid-grope, with her hands firmly grasping those cute Asian ta-tas.

Livia delivers the bombshell. “Have you ever seen this kind of trick with a clear box?!”

Now, that kind of trick with a clear box is ... just impossible, and anyone stopping to think about it will realize that. And we aren’t planning to try it — this is just setup for the punchline. But we’ve earned a fair bit of buy-in from the audience, and they seem genuinely awed at the possibility we’re going to try this for real.

Livia reaches into a square case on the stage and pulls out what appear to be two huge, square steel blades with wooden grips on one end, being a yard on each size. They would fit perfectly into the edges between the boxes, appearing to cut the girls horizontally just like the guillotine blade would bisect them vertically.

“Now,” Livia tells the audience, “these blades are really, really sharp. I’d pass them around so you lot can inspect them, but let’s be honest — it’s Spring Break and I know many of you are smashed out of your gourds right now, and I don’t want the Summers staff to have to mop blood off the stage.”

That gets laughter, but the blades gleam in the sun and actually look quite menacing, so it’s nervous laughter. “Those look ... really sharp,” the horror fangirl whispers nervously. Good acting — I think, at least — and our mikes in the chamber convey it to the audience.

“So, without passing this around, how can I ... ah, perfect.”

Livia sets one of the blades down beside the case it came out of — the second blade will never get used — and hefts the first one up in the air with both hands, using body language to “sell” it a weight it doesn’t really have. She “spontaneously notices” a folding chair off to the side of the stage, and kicks it out into the center of the stage, then walks over to the chair. “How’s this for a demo?”

Livia brings the blade down on the chair — obviously a pre-prepared prop — and it’s neatly bisected, falling to the ground in perfectly-cut halves. Livia sells it with charisma, body language and propwork, though the sinister music from the unnaturally-deep bass speakers we’ve scattered around Summers really does help. The audience gasps rather than laughing. Awe, and a real threat to the girls in the box, has been established. It’s not going to last too long, though, as we pace this faster than any Vegas routine. Now that the setup is done, we’re going to cut right to the meat of the matter before the audience has time to get skeptical — pun intended.

Livia walks up and hands the blade to Mimi. Of course, as our bimbo, it’s her responsibility to screw up the act with flair equal to Livia’s in setting it up. As Mimi takes center stage, I walk over to the control panel.

Mimi walks up to the chamber and edges the blade to get it into the lowest slot, around the girls’ thighs. She fumbles (and jiggles) a lot, looking incompetent, and making the girls nervous. Hilariously, Roach actually looks scared and the topless Asian cutie seems to be holding her hand to comfort her. Sometimes, life just gives you great, subtle comedy material without you having to do anything to earn it.

“Don’t worry,” Mimi assures our captive girls, “this turned out all right in at least some of our rehearsals!”

Mimi finally gets Tab A in Slot B. “Okay,” she says, “here we —”

She seems to stumble and push the blade forward unexpectedly. It’s well-acted. The blade only goes a few inches into the three foot wide chamber before hitting the girls’ thighs. Mimi presses a concealed button in the blade, and a spray of stage blood squirts out of its fake edge, running down the volunteers’ legs. Also, the blade’s surface has inked fibers like the tip of a marker, and it leaves visible red lines on our captives’ legs where it struck them.

“Oopsie!” Mimi squawks.

“My thigh is bleeding!”

“Mimi!” Livia hisses. Her lips are white, and she’s selling genuine fear fairly well. “What did you do! Didn’t you put the safety buffer pieces in when you were putting the cubes together?!”

“Um ... I might have ... um ... forgotten?”

Livia’s gaze travels up the cabinet to the guillotine atop it nervously. When she speaks, it’s with a tightly controlled tone. “Mimi. Get those women out of the cabinet. Now.”

“Right, boss,” Mimi says, her voice trembling. “I remember this. The door catch should be right ... here!”

Mimi reaches up and taps the case, but it’s actually me quietly pressing a button on the control panel that makes the guillotine start rattling back and forth ominously.

There’s a moment of dead silence. I’m surprised, honestly. Livia did it — she took a crowd of Spring Breakers wanting bare titties, lewd dancing and sapphic overtones and managed to totally transfix them with the tension of a stage magic act. Now that’s talent!

“Mimi,” Livia says in a dull monotone voice filled with dread, “that was not the door catch.”

I press the second button. The guillotine blade lances downward and vanishes from the audience’s line of sight. Horrifying — and horrifyingly loud — feminine shrieks pierce the air. The walls of the transparent chamber are plastered with a slick, visceral redness. Something that might be human intestines can be seen dangling, vaguely. Feminine handprints press against clear glass and slide down, leaving a trail in the redness.

The majority of the crowd screams, clutching the person next to them. I count out seven seconds of utter terror for the audience. We can’t go longer than that, as we don’t want the packed standing crowd to stampede and trample each other.

I press the third button. The ominous music cuts out, replaced by a comedy “wah-wah” sad trombone sound effect. Our projector casts out the word “Gotcha!” in red block letters.

“Calm down, folks,” I say into the mike in my most confident and masculine leader-voice. “It’s just a little prank, to give you all a thrill. The ladies in the chamber aren’t hurt.”

Livia grins. “They probably want to give us a right solid switch across the ears as soon as they get free, though. Don’t be cross, birdies — you took the oath...”

So, now let me explain the trick and what actually happened here.

The guillotine blade is actually paper-thin. It’s literally a banner. We’ve got a mesh grid of that invisible thread I told you about in the Tequila Pops Tops bit to form the parts of the guillotine where the blade isn’t there, and the blade itself is ... well, it’s not tinfoil, because that crumples in a very obvious way, but it is a shiny metal foil that’s not sharp and can be rolled up into a roll like paper. When the guillotine blade “drops”, what actually happens is the bottom spool is motorized, and it’s like transferring paper from a roll at the top to a roll at the bottom — but some of the “paper”, where the blade isn’t, is instead a mesh of invisible thread. Make sense?

And the chamber ... ah, that’s the fun part. I’ve already explained that Mimi is into WAM. Actually, Livia is too, and honestly it’s starting to grow on me as well. So, the idea seed that led to this routine was wondering what kind of weird pretext we could use to get unsuspecting, cute women into a gunge tank without them realizing it was a gunge tank. The symbolism for this specific show, with cutting women in half, was paired with the idea later. Inside the chamber there are a number of tiny, servo-directed ball nozzles. The mechanics that guide them come from a specific brand of spy camera, and we usually pair them with an actual spy camera.

I actually have little targeting reticles on the control panel for each jet, that I guide with a joystick. It’s a neat, if expensive and complex, setup. Livia’s got an heavy-duty industrial pump that can generate quite a lot of pressure. She originally got it for the syrup bit in her halftime debut show, to pump it in and out, though it’s actually designed for heavier sewage in a wastewater processing plant. Today it pumped nine gallons of ketchup out of five high-pressure nozzles in just under ten seconds.

The apparent intestines are just strings of raw breakfast sausages, dropped on the ladies from above.

The screaming in the live show is a horror-movie soundbite, but for the N-VHS release we dubbed in the four girls’ real screams. We weren’t sure how the real thing would turn out beforehand, but after the fact I can say the answer is: very nice, very loud and very naughty.

Now there is one additional salacious detail here that’s actually pretty raunchy. These servo-nozzles can get us substantial pressure — not enough to really harm anyone, but a mildly forceful spray-jet that could knock over a beer bottle from a few yards away. And ... all three of us are perverts. One of the nozzles is on the bottom, on the edge of that triangular ridge the girls had to spread their legs over.

We said we wouldn’t do it, unless it was the right girl, one we thought would be game for something that rude. Well, folks ... I am a bad man. I gave in to temptation. I shot a hammering stream of pressurized ketchup directly up Roach’s skirt, and pounded her between the legs with it for a good three seconds. Most of the streams aren’t that hard, being more wide-angle, but that one was. And, while we aren’t distributing any upskirt footage, you can see the expression on her face in slow motion as it happens on the tapes, and it’s ... let’s just say it’s memorably entertaining.

Folks, don’t feel too bad for Roach. She is pretty shocked and a bit humiliated, but I wouldn’t say traumatized — and I’m pretty sure she will be able to work out any angst she might be feeling about the incident later tonight during a rather pleasant sushi dinner. Pun intended.

Anyway, Mimi unlocks the chamber for real this time, opens all three doors and helps the stunned women out. We really went to extremes with this one — they’re just plastered with ketchup from head to foot. Well, Mimi says that WAM is supposed to be like that — the more mess, the better. I’m not sure — these girls are kind of sexy, messed up, but they don’t hold a candle in my memory to the erotic intensity of Livia’s olive flesh lightly splattered with suggestive whipped cream from the Risqué Rope Routine.

The brunette is first. She takes Mimi’s hand and steps down out of the tank. She laughs. “Holy shit,” she says. “My heart is pounding. That was insane!”

Now, Mimi had shared with me and Livia one rather naughty bit of trivia that apparently WAM aficionados are familiar with. Gunge is not water. It is heavy, and being viscous it sticks to clothes in a larger volume than clothing absorbs water. When the clothing is strapless, well...

The brunette raises her hands to wring ketchup out of her long hair. She stretches a bit. Her formerly white, strapless one-piece has taken on a large amount of ketchup, and thus a fair bit of new mass. (Her straw hula skirt was already on the floor of the chamber when she stepped out.) It begins to slide downward. I see the left nipple pop out. Oh, yeah, it’s gonna happen...

She starts to look down, noticing too late. Her mouth opens. The garment, well-lubricated with ketchup, slides off her pert young boobies and gathers momentum as it falls. Her legs are neither spread nor tightly clamped together — the perfect position. The swimsuit passes her waist and just keeps going, turning inside out. It lands at her feet with a loud, wet plopping sound. For a brief magnificent second, we get some full frontal — lovely natural torpedo tits, with pink nipples made erect from fear and cold ketchup, perfectly trimmed black bush, odd crucifix tattoo above a shapely navel, shocked and mortified expression.

It’s all the more picaresque because we can still see the line of the swimsuit — her whole body is plastered with ketchup, except for the areas the swimsuit formerly covered which are perfectly clean. That doesn’t last, however — her arms snap up to cover her breasts and pussy, which mostly has the effect of smearing sticky ketchup all over the last clean parts of her anatomy. I’m sure there are portions of my readership that will find that very titillating. I’m not yet sure at this point in my life that I fit in with them, though.

Slowly, she stops being horrified at her extreme wardrobe malfunction and begins to chuckle ruefully, unable to deny the humor in her strange situation. She’s still covering, though, and definitely does not seem ready to start flaunting it. “Could you, a, could you help me with my swimsuit?”

“Sure, possum,” Livia says. “I’m going to need to wring it out, though.”

The brunette steps out of the fallen swimwear. Livia picks it up and wrings it out. Ketchup drops to the ground in large globs. I see mischief flash in Livia’s eyes and she fights with temptation. I can totally imagine her swinging the soiled garment over her head like an exultant stripper and tossing it out into the audience, sending the bashful brunette scurrying into the crowd naked after it — but she doesn’t. She holds out the suit at ankle level. “You’ll need to raise your hands,” she says, “so you might want to turn around.”

The brunette does, giving us a nice ass shot to go with the split second of tits and pussy. She wipes excess ketchup off her body first, facing away from the audience — but I can tell Livia is enjoying the jiggle show a foot from her face. The brunette does manage to get dressed again. It’s now a pink swimsuit, though, and just damp enough to show off hard nipples clearly and pubic hair faintly. Nice!