Too Much of a Goodyear Thing ~ Part 3

THE EXCITING CONCLUSION!!

A beleaguered sexual minority leads a high tech revolt against the evil Bruno's dictatorship. Will Tommy ever find his way back to reality? Or is THIS reality? Is FRFS (False Running Fantasy Syndrome) a legitimate diagnosis or merely a pop-psych fad? Is our dear Rosalie a true revolutionist or a double agent? Wow, is that a jetpack?! And what's John Williams doing with his Willie Johnson hanging out? It's all just...

 
TOO MUCH OF A GOODYEAR THING
 
by Laika Pupkino
 
  PART 3:  BLOWS AGAINST THE EMPIRE
.
 
IT'S NOW LESS THAN 10 MINUTES UNTIL I HAVE TO LEAVE...
 
But I can do this. And can even still make it in time if I skip the shower, drive like hell! 
 
Of course the smart thing to do would be to forget all this idiot pud pounding, get to work...
But I was counting on this to get me through the day, that line of people snaking endlessly around inside that chalet roofed maze of turnstiles. Lines. I am in absolutely the worst job for an agoraphobe. When the stress mounts it gets so like I can't breathe, and then I start to...
 
I guess the only word for it is hallucinate. The faces of all these wholesome American
kicks-seekers start to change before my eyes .............. taking on the twisted subhuman leers of the mob in that painting of the crucifixion by Bosch, total moral corruption evident on every line of their countenance as they thrust their "E" tickets at me:
"Y-YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRR!! "
 
A sensible person would say that there are plenty of other jobs out there if I’m so miserable. Quit whining and go get one!! But after work it is all I can do to grab some drive-thru, get home + collapse in front of the TV set. Or go jerk off over the toilet...
 
On my days off I might say I’m going job hunting...
Yessir, today’s the day, bull-by-the-horns + all that, just gimme another hour here...       Then end up not leaving my place at all; Another volume of HOOTERMANIA on the DVD player or maybe a Starfighter Squadron Delta marathon; Season Four, my favorite ........ these familiar characters with all their hackneyed banter, their signature traits + unlikely dilemnas (Will Azraela X’aan ever be able to rejoin her people and get her wings back after the tragic mistake that led to her disgrace and exile, or is she doomed to "Fly no more, save in my dreams "...) more or less sufficing as my friends, horrible as this is to admit.
 
And while I KNOW I should go find other employment, there’s no saying that the next one won’t be even worse! Just as Disneyland was supposed to be the solution to the brain-wasting (though initially attractive...) tedium of the freeway-dot factory.
 
God damn it, I was on top of her! My cock grazing her crinkly pubic hairs, mere millimeters from-
 
GOD DAMN IT!! Now I’m all the way back to square one! Just like that time last week, when it took me 3 whole tries, after that one with those awful stinger slugs  
getting into the habitat level; and then Rosalie herself getting turned- all swollen and crusted, cracked + oozing and insisting it would be dreamy to just go ahead and let them!
 
But this is worse! I’m even later, and I am up to my fourth attempt already!
Four? No, that last one was #4. This one is...
 
 
 
========# .5
 
 
 
Fuck it. Just FUCK IT!!
 
Always wondered how fast this truck could go, and now I know. Doesn’t corner too good though...
 
Up until now I’ve been a real sap! Imposing rules of conduct on my own goddamn fantasy life- how stupid can you get?!
 
I flip off the geezer in the booth, smashing through the striped wooden arm of the gate. Maybe I’ll leap out at the last second and let the van sail off the bluff, just for laughs! I mean it, no more fucking bullshit! I know where that gun is, will just shoot that bastard Bruno if he-
 
Or gee, maybe I don’t know where the gun is. It's all so different here. The house is humungous up there on the hill, big as a castle, a tapering glass helix dominating the bluff. Not a neighborhood this time but one vast estate claiming the entire promontory ........... like Ludwig II might’ve built if he’d liked palm trees. Endless lawns crisscrossed by azure reflecting ponds. Bright beds of flowers. Chinese moon gates. A huge crystal greenhouse like a Victorian railroad station. The drive curlicues through all of this like the printed path on a child’s board game...
 
She is down at the base of the same slope as before, but is apparently leaving the gardening to her small army of groundkeepers. Like last time, she is in her early 40’s. Lounging in a cumbersome wooden lawn chair as if sunbathing, but it’s even more overcast, and again there is not much of her that the sun’s rays could get at. She is back in the form-hugging one piece suit- a wanton variation that I’ve never seen before, her large tits welling from a pair of snug round holes and a folded aperture that lets everything hang out between her legs, front + back...
 
There are no neighbors to see, only her employees- minescule forms milling about in the far distance. And from her stern expression (dabbing goo from a pink plastic bottle onto a disc of sponge and smearing it across her knee-) I get a sudden image of her ruling this domain as an irrational tyrant ............. That she dresses like this to drive her workers nuts; and will demand that they all pose as hoops for some surreal croquet match she is going to challenge me to, shrieking "OFF WITH THEIR LITTTLE PEE-PEES!" the first time something doesn’t go her way!
 
"Ah, you’re here!" she beams, a smile that shatters any impression of cruelty. She had simply been intent on shining her suit, just another of these eccentric rich ladies who like to run around with their boobs and pussies hanging out...
 
She apologizes vaguely for her exotic garb but does nothing to cover it up. I tell her I don’t mind, that it looks fantastic. Sort of like Inga Babinga’s outfits in those X-rated comic books...
 
She laughs, "I guess it does. Though I’ve had adventures that would put that girl’s to shame. All in my past, sadly! And you really don’t mind, do you? God, I love it out here in California, the people here are so laid back and mellow! I guess you don’t believe that---I saw you wince---but I’ve lived in lots of places and it’s true, even under the new regime ........... But hey, there is something you just have to see! A new polish I found today. I was sure this old suit was completely done for, until I found this brand that- this shit is incredible! Watch this!"
 
The patch that she had just applied, covering her right hip, has dried into a pink crust. She grabs a piece of towel laying across her radio and rubs vigorously. The stuff comes off, leaving a dazzling sheen, "Now compare this to someplace I haven’t done yet, like ............ Well foo, I’m all done! But it really is a fantastic product."
 
When she goes to turn up the little stereo I see that the center of her back is cloudy, scuffed and discolored. I tell her. She says, "That’s right, I couldn’t reach that part. Would you mind terribly doing my back? I know you probably have other deliveries to make today, so I promise I won’t detain you too long..."
 
She rachets the lawn chair so that it drops flat and then lies down with her hands up beside her face as if for a massage. The shit stinks like it’s toxic as hell, I must remember to only kiss and lick her where her flesh is exposed. I slather some onto her back and start smearing it around, "No, this is my last run for today. I can always say traffic was messed up again. That bottleneck up through Laguna."
 
"Mmmmmm ........... harder! You really have to rub it in!"
 
I rub in silence, looking around for whatever is going to interrupt this. Earthquake. Killer bees. Godzilla rising wet and irritable from the sea. This might have seemed like good kinky foreplay an hour ago, but now it just seems like work.
 
Shit! WORK! Probably no more than a minute or two left now- I’m screwed! I am staring at a nearby fountain, trying to come up with some plausible excuse for being late again when Rosalie impatiently clears her throat. I resume my rubbing.
 
From the radio comes the indignant tones of a right wing radio host. Harsher than old Limbaugh, more strident, with a tinge of the hayseed about him: "...all of these are examples of what I call liberal folk wisdom. Though that’s a bit of a misnamer ........        ‘Cause it sure ain't wisdom" {audience applause} "And it sure doesn’t come from the kinda folk who built this country!"
 
I go to change the channel, "Why are you listening to this shit?"
 
"No, leave it on! Personal reasons."
 
"And another gem of liberal folk wisdom ....... is this trite little truism that ‘it takes all kinds’." {the audience howls, he must have made some face at them. He sputters comically:} "Buhbuhbuhbuh-WHY?!! You and I both know there is some kinds it will never take! Do they really mean that in order for society to work there has to be a certain number of pregnant teenage glue sniffers? Or, say ........... rubber fetishists?"
 
She tenses under my hands, hissing, "He’s always going on about that! Ever since we broke up."
 
"You used to go out with this joker?"
 
"Used to be married to him. Where have you been that you’ve never heard of us?"
 
"Yes," oozes the voice, "I said rubber fetishists! These people, back in the bad old days, when things were at their craziest, they had their own social clubs, their own bars, even dirty magazines. Although the magazines, it’s like they couldn’t even do pornography right! I mean, you open a Playboy. Or a Playgirl, if that’s your thing-" {laughter} "And it’s like: Hey, there’s naked people in here!" {more laughter} "Oh God, what’re they doing? Well, we better not let the kids see this! Put it down there under the underwear drawer, ya know? But these particular deviants, in their ‘erotic' publications, they don’t even have the courage, the uh, misguided courage...     like those picture stories in Penthouse, where they’re up on a ferris wheel, with their clothes comin'off, picture by picture, and they’re both showin'off their teeth like thish: Huhn? Huhhnnn?? Kinda like thurr shmiles are shtuck. But nothing like this for these jerks! Nossir! No fuckin' way!"
 
The audience isn’t laughing but seems confused and embarrassed.
 
"You got nobody feeling anyone up. No nudity, No penetration..."
 
"Hey," I cry, suddenly recognizing the voice, "It’s Bruno! He had a gun! We had to dive off a cliff!"
 
"So now he’s personally shooting civilians, is he? I can believe that!"
 
"NO FULL PAGE CLOSE-UPS OF HUGE THROBBING HAIRY GONADS ALL A-SLATHERED IN GOO!!!"
 
"But what I can’t believe is how after listening to him yammer like this for almost a decade, the fools went and put him in office! It’s damned discouraging .......... After beating my head against the wall for so long, all the letters-to-the-editor and taking petitions around to the neighbors, trying to elicit some outcry over the crap he’s pulling; I saw that all they can talk about isn’t the purges, the New Territories, or even this awful ‘Constitution E-Z’, but what a riot he was on t.v. the other night! Shmoozing it up on all the late night talk shows, or doing his racist impressions of foreign leaders during the big half-time show. The shameless fucking ham! Like how he had the White House cut up and shipped to Malibu," She sighs wearily. "And so just about the time I’m thinking, ‘Well, at least we don’t have to hear him spouting his bullshit on the radio anymore...' He decides he can afford to devote three hours a day to radio. Going back to his first love, he calls it."
 
Dark days for America, it seems, but at least the asshole is keeping busy elsewhere and isn’t too likely to come barging in here with a gun again...
 
I ask, "But if you’re his ex, why do you mess around with dumb junk like petitions
when you could be going on talk shows yourself and telling everyone about him?"
 
The sun seems to be winning its battle with the cloud cover. The polish on her back is dry, coming up like fine powder where I buff it. It leaves her whole surface almost blindingly shiny.
 
When I’ve finished she rolls over to face me and says glumly, "I can’t. It’s a term of the divorce. I agreed to it, because I had this secret dream of using the three million a year I get to help bring him down! But that pack of leftist burn-outs I hooked up with were more likely to kill each other than mount any sort of serious insurrection! Talking and arguing, arguing, talking ........... Eventually I quit the Havelock Ellis Brigade in disgust, and then I got so depressed I started spending the money on Armani fetishwear and thick-cocked studs from the outcall service..."
 
"Forget all those sleazy whore-boys," I mutter lasciviously, "I’ll fuck you for nothing!"
 
A fetching smile breaks through her sadness. She extends her arms toward me in a randy and playful fashion. "I was hoping you’d say that..." 
 
The big anaroidnack chair is just wide enough for two. I climb into it, into her embrace, and purr, "But please baby, please baby, please .............. Turn off the fucking radio!"
 
"I will, I swear, it’s almost over! Play with my tits! Mmmmm, like that! We’ll go inside. You’ll love my playroom, it has everything! For as tender or as hard as you want to- Ooooooh yes, do that! Just like that!"
 
The sun is all the way out now and it’s getting hot. Large drops of sweat well up and glide down the tops of her tits. I smear them around, my kneading palms making faint squitching noises.
 
On the radio Bruno is still going on about the stupid rubber cultists: "-so it ain’t actually obscene, just stupid looking! Lotta times they can’t even prosecute it as porno, because all there is is these suits, with these heads like rubber bulbs! Hell, there might not even be any people inside them things, for all you can see!"
 
"Methinks Bruno protests too much! He was the one who liked  the head sacks. Yee Gods, the bizarre shit he was into! I should have kept some of our home videos! That would sure fix the bastard! He wouldn’t be able to get elected as County Butt-Wiper..."
 
My hands have paused in their teasing circular massage and just sit there, luxuriating in the texture, the softness and heft of these wonders of nature- "But why do you even torture yourself by listening to him?"
 
"We used to catch his show each day in my ‘geurilla cell’, because he’s such a braggart he always lets something drop. Hints, like before a domestic air strike .......... Then one day we were listening and he started saying stuff about me. By name, or almost! Roseena- the kookie neurotic misguided modern American woman, brain-dead dupe of the crypto-lesbo feminist castration conspiracy! He did these skits about her, like- OH SHIT!!!"
 
Oily old time radio-soap-opera organ music has started to drone. Bruno is crooning smugly, "Yes children, once again we conclude our show with The Perils of Roseena!" {pauses for applause} "Chapter 96: The Rubber Trap. I bet you were wondering where I was goin'with- with all that talk, ah-hahaha! Well this is where. And it’s a doozy! For in today’s episode Roseena is lured back to that world of perverted sleazery. But first some background material..."
 
Rosalie curls forward and moans like she’s in severe pain. Right here in my arms, yet she’s miles away.
 
"Having flunked out of her pottery class at Playtime Jr. College, and losing her sexual harrassment suit against her teacher, Monsieur Poopadoo, Roseena finds herself knocking around all alone in that big house once again ......... This is the house---you might recall---that she was awarded by Judge Manhate after her divorce from her husband Frank. You remember Frank. How he lost his job at the state penetantiary after he was no longer allowed to carry his gun .......... And after his suicide, when she showed up at the funeral stoned on quaaludes, danced on his grave, then seduced the Unitarian minister Jonny Dewyerthing-"
 
"They haven’t made quaaludes in 40 years, you jerk!" thunders Rosalie, making a gaggle of peacocks that had been been slinking toward us in hopes of a handout skitter away nervously. "Christ, it’s not even good satire! I can’t stand this! I CANNOT STAND THIS!!"
 
"So what’s the poor girl to do? After flunking every liberal arts class on the curriculum (the ones where you don’t actually have to learn anything) ............ And none of her old causes are gonna take her back, after that fiascus at the Save the Stinkweeds Society; so she decides she’ll try selling stuff door to door. It doesn’t matter what, as long as it lets her feel like she’s not completely useless!"
 
Suddenly she springs to her feet, "That’s it! I’ve had it! Let’s go!"
 
"Now she thinks RUBBERBAG is a company that makes ice cube trays, and them little plastic tubs with the lids you snap on to put leftovers in the fridge. Stuff like that..."
 
"Go where?"
 
"But a week later, she gets this package in the mail. And when she sees what’s inside there, something powerful stirs. Way way down inside her, like superhot high-pressurized magma burblin' deep inside the Earth-
 
"Go! Down to the Aroura! Into the blue! I can’t stand this! Shit fuck the devil! Time to give that fuck what he is so clearly begging for! Pitched with powder and shot! I’ll give that sick freak useless! Make him give pony rides in the Caves of Steel forever-" She kicks the radio, hard! It dies in mid snicker as batteries fly all over...
 
Maybe this time around she is just plain crazy.
 
I follow her up the trail. She is taking the concrete disks three at a time, in great angry strides, this version of the outfit doing nothing to restrict her steps. And as I watch her bare buttocks wig + wag I get the sickly feeling that yet another of these adventures is leading me pointlessly away from that one thing I am here for. 
 
Or maybe...
 
Maybe her endless chatter, these weird plot digressions that pop up again and again, the cartoon sheets on my bed, that cretin on the freeway yesterday who threw a rubber in through my open car window; everything...
 
Are somehow all components of some grand strategy of hers. That she means for me to get good and fed up, so that I will finally just yank her legs apart and TAKE it from her! Thus satisfying her fantasy, of brutal uncaring ravishment...
 
But it seems to me that once you start by letting one forbidden thought in, what’s the next one going to be? And the one after that? My last attempt’s sudden detour into bondage themes was bad enough. Isn’t getting chummy with such stuff, under the aegis of some liberating catharsis, the venting of all your darker emotions (approved by whorehouse madams and best-selling sex therapists alike these days) only going to desensitize you to the real thing? After all, nobody is encouraged to create elaborate fantasies and role-play games about arson or homicide or driving real crazy down the wrong side of the freeway. And these other sorts of daydreams are not (I sincerely hope) accompanied by the built-in Pavlovian reward of orgasm!
 
She has a tiny phone, is punching buttons as we climb. Then speaks: "M? This is Mrs. Peel, and- Huh? Sure, it’s: These Vials of Bubbles are Inviolable. No? Well I figured that one was old by now, but it is me! Remember when you showed me how you could make the commedia mask tattoos on your .............. On my cellular. Yeah? So what if they’re listening? If we jump on it right now they won’t have time- You’re shitting me! You are? Today? That’s fantastic!! Yes I heard him, and maybe that is what prompted me but do you want dialectically pure motives out of everyone or do you want to use the boat? HUH?! Of course we need it! For ‘Plan V' we- Plan R?! Are you fucking nuts?!! I don’t care if you do have the launch codes, do you want to be responsible for a thing like that? Didn’t think so ............ You’re darn tootin'I want to get my hands on the rat, but- No, I swear! Not one greasy hair on his head until the trial! But remember, it’s Plan V ......... Right, as in‘V for Vendetta’  Yes. Perfect. Fantastic! N’byenow-"
 
She snaps the phone shut, flops a hand onto the plump arroyo of her cleavage and gasps loudly. Not from having just climbed this hill, but from relief. That she is finally taking action- striking back at her hated nemesis.
 
As she opens the low gate I see a wild light in her eyes, "Incredible! A hundred cells in twenty different states are mobilizing for the attack, and mine is gonna be the one that actually gets to take out Bruno! We have the Aurora ...... You wanna come along? Make history, get killed, something?"
 
"I guess I can be late again. To hell with ‘em!" I laugh, this cheesy "rebel forces" fantasy somehow carrying over into my dealings with my non-fantasy employer. Probably not a smart thing to let happen, but right now I just don’t give a shit!
 
I stumble past shadowy furniture, the living room an inky cave after the brightness of the day outside and the glare from her mirrorlike carapace. A wall of shelves in the pantry, loaded with cans and boxes of well-known brands, opens on hidden hinges to reveal a whole room stocked rubber suits.
 
She lays one across this padded examination table- "Let’s get you suited up! What are you, about a 38 waist? Just toss your clothes in the hamper there."
 
I strip down, but then balk at the next step. The only way into this suffocating thing is through a tiny slit /// WARNING: NOT TO PLACE THIS DRY CLEANING BAG OVER YOUR HEAD OR THE HEAD OF OTHERS OR CHILDREN ///in the crotch. Also, the idea of being encased in rubber myself seems contrary to my whole fixation.
 
"In ya go! Back to th'primordial womb," she jokes, stretching the cavity open.
 
Then she notices the way I am hanging back, and for a second I see that same terrible look I’d observed on her face when I first spotted her in her lawn chair- cold and stern and judgemental beyond measure ......... But it turns out to be as illusory as that first time, a trick of the light. Hers is a far more amused and forgiving sort of chiding: "Oh for crying out loud! You movement males, I swear! It’s perfectly okay for me to be objectified, that really turns you on! But when it’s your turn its a different story ................ Don’t be such a squeeker!"
 
Utterly relieved, I laugh a whole lot harder than her comment would seem to warrant. [It’s this penchant I have for grave misinterpretations. Reading "she is furious" or "this dude thinks I'm a fag" into any expression that I can’t immediately identify as friendly. Awkward enough with strangers ....... But with someone who has consistantly proven over the course of 18 months that she loves you madly .......... It eventually caused Daphne to conclude that "all she had" was never going to be enough, and drove her away. But in FANTASY communication has never been a problem. I know what people are thinking because I invented them. Until today...]
 
She dumps talcum powder all over me and helps me into it, tugging at the rubber tubing, guiding me through a series of arcane contortions. It fits fine. You’d never know it had been stretched out so far. My dick and balls hang out unsupported, a strange sensation, though not as unsettling as this feeling of cold air on my bare butt. "I’m supposed to run around like this?"
 
"I like to have something to ogle at too, ya know," she says with a wolfish grin, and walks over to a circle of curved steel vanes like a camera shutter in the wall...
 
It sheeeeooks open and she climbs in with the aid of a hefty steel bar like a towel rack above it. Her ass hangs on the rim for a second then disappears. I follow.
 
It’s a swift descent, made swifter by this tube’s almost frictionless surface! An endless row of green spotlights streams past overhead. As I pick up speed the glowing dots ahead me are seldom in the exact top of the cylinder but drifting part way down one side or the
other, indicating where a steep turn is about to send me gliding up the curved surface. 
 
Now and then the slide straightens out enough that I can spot Rosalie’s truncated silloette up ahead. She calls back, "This doesn’t exactly take the shortest path down to the grotto,
but I figure there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be fun too!"
 
And then the damned thing is corkscrewing, the green lights ahead of me spiralling insanely as I’m sent into a roll, a roll, a roll, a roll-  
 
-and without warning I am plunging straight down thru jumbled brightness, some immense stone cavern, slamming into a nylon net down in a deep rectangular well in the obsidian floor. It stretches and stretches toward a blackness that I can see now is water, then yanks me back upward!
 
Rosalie is up on the edge, laughing. Above her I see our entry point, a cone-shaped copper spout depending from the roof of the cave- a dome of sparkling facets the size of an indoor hockey stadium. She says, "All those loops at the end are going to leave any intruders disoriented as hell! And if we really wanted to get nasty we could always remove the net."
 
Beneath me a dozen grey fins circle restlessly in the dark water. I don’t think they’re dolphins. I hurry up the iron rungs bolted to the rock.
 
A rocky underground lake lies on the other side of the polished stone ledge. An old wooden dock angles down then juts out across the surface. A bizarre pink vessel floats alongside it- like an obese stealth bomber with a huge bubble top.
 
Rosalie walks me down the ramp toward it, "She’s called the AURORA III. This prototype was kind of an embarrassment to Bruno. He’d yelled all through his campaign about what an impractical waste of tax dollars it was .......... and then it turned out to work perfectly! So he had it destroyed. My friend Admiral Hallifax blew up a big paper-mache’d barge instead. Bruno considers him a harmless old doddering nitwit, popular with the old folks and the veteran’s groups but easy to manipulate. It’s all an act, just part of his cover ........... In truth he is fluent in nine languages, plays a wicked barrelhouse piano, and fucks like a stallion! Just an all-around neat old guy!"
 
"Oh, Admiral Hallifax-" I nod, having absolutely no idea who she means (sometimes I get script-downloads for these scenarios. This time nothing...)
 
She leans across the slanted hull and places her hand on a scanner. The hatch gull-wings open and a jointed metal gangway extrudes onto the dock with an arthritic grinding sound. She leads me forward down a narrow corridor, one wall weirdly bowed to conform to the curve of the hull, then up into a domed cockpit that seats five. "I’m sure any day now Bruno will come up with his own proposal for a Silent Running Radar-Deflecting Hypersonic Suborbital Tactical Flying Sub, which will just happen to be a lot like-"
 
"Flying sub?"
 
"Sure, didn’t you ever watch Captain Nemo, U.S.N. when you were a kid?" she chuckles, climbing eagerly into the pilot’s seat. 
 
Hundreds of square plastic buttons light up, all these colors giving the cockpit an oddly festive look. The engines thrum sedately and the water around us starts to gurgle and fizz. She nudges the stick forward slightly and water creeps up the bevelled wings, climbs the plexiglass bubble until it closes in overhead. 
 
She is all business now- steering us between a series of ordinary illuminated EXIT signs which look strange and out of place in this silty tunnel. I had never associated submarines with quick acceleration, so it comes as a jolt when we shoot forward, out of the cave’s mouth and into the open sea.
 
Up on the shimmering surface wet-suited legs dangle from surfboards, unaware that this thing as big as a house is zooming past beneath them. She pulls back hard on the stick, stomps on the gas and we rocket straight up, spinning- breeching the surface in a great loud spiralling explosion of water!
 
"Shakes the water off," Rosalie explains, then levels us off.
 
We cross Pacific Coast Highway about a mile south of her estate. Grids of residential streets. Churches. Parks with baseball diamonds. L-shaped strip malls at main intersections. We circle one neighborhood, descending gradually, the sub flying slower and slower until she says, "This is the place. Come with me."
 
She toots a horn that stutters out a few notes of the Colonel Bogey March. Leaves us hovering, bobbing unsteadily on the vertical-thrust vents as we go back into a round-cornered cargo bay. No wait, a bomb bay. There’s a device like an immense revolving steel wine rack but it’s empty. Portholes dot the bulkheads along each side. She pulls a lever and the concave halves of a long hatch in the floor drop open...
 
With a winch she lowers a railed cage to four people standing in the back yard of a tract home. A neighbor with a garden rake in his hand is yelling at them over the fence, pointing angrily up at us while his dog barks hysterically, running in frantic circles. And he doesn’t seem to care much for their outfits: the same genital-revealing latex uniforms that Rosalie and I are wearing.
 
As they clamber into the basket one of them offers a rebuttal that involves hefting his cock in his palm and rocking his hips forward. Rosalie snickers, "That ain’t exactly gonna win us any new converts!"
 
We haul them up. Rosalie asks worriedly, "Where’s Agent 99?"
 
"She’s coming."
 
"Coming? How the hell is-" 
 
She is drowned out by a shrill roaring sound. A red-suited figure (what a figure!) in a jet-pack and a helmet with heavy bug-eye goggles floats up through the hatch, grinning smugly-
 
     -until the throttle dial on her left shoulder strap refuses to obey the twist she gives it and she continues up past us, shrieking "WHOOOOAAAHH SHIT!" until she is pinned against the ceiling! The engine is on the end of a short boom (rudder + tiny delta wings cleverly incorporated into it) where she can’t get at it!
 
We try to pull her down without falling out through the floor or being scalded by the exhaust gasses! One of the two men runs over and throws the lever that closes the hatch. Finally the jet engine sputters and stalls. She lands on her feet and topples into Rosalie’s arms, who laughs, "Jesus, woman! You’ve got to stop reading those funny books! You okay, honey?"
 
"Am I what?" shouts the rocket girl, "I can’t hear shit! Oh man, that was great! You’ve gotta try this! A few bugs left to work out but I figure I can make these for about three grand a piece!"
 
"99" unhooks the heavy device and drops it, pulls off the helmet and digs earplugs from her ears. Tosses back the glossy black hair that had been pulled across her face by the helmet. Perky features, intense dark eyes.
 
"Lori!" I cry.
 
They all turn and frown. Must be taboo to use real names here...
 
Lori stares at me, shakes her head like she has water in her ears, and stares at me some more. As if she can’t believe I’m real. Perhaps she is trying to decide if I’m a cop or not. Or maybe she’s simply dizzy from flying...
 
Just to break this weird silence I say, "I met you last week, at the .......... You know, at the club."
 
She smiles brightly, "Oh yeah, at the Duck! It’s all right, you can say it. Just look around! Have you ever seen a bigger bunch of eraserheads in your life? We’re all regulars down at the Rubber Ducky..."
 
"All of you? You mean........." I knew that Rosalie was into rubber in this way, but as for these others: "I thought it was just a political thing. A statement, like."
 
They all laugh at my naivity, but there’s an inclusive warmth to it. One of the males asides, "Well it’s that, too..."
 
Rosalie slips behind me and starts dragging her palms hard and slow across my shoulderblades. Says quietly in my ear, "Welcome home, Baby..."
 
I’d known there were others like me. I had read about it  [I’D EVEN OWNED THAT SWEDISH MAGAZINE FOR A WHILE- UNTIL I HAD A RAGING BOUT OF WHAT I WOULD EVENTUALLY REALIZE WAS JUST DUMB HYPOCONDRIA, AND I WAS AFRAID THAT MY PARENTS WOULD FIND IT IN WITH MY THINGS WHEN I DIED AND THEY CAME TO MY APARTMENT TO ALLOCATE OR DISPOSE OF IT ALL...]; But I’d never before met anyone who shared my proclivities, and being here with them fills me with a mood that’s wholly new to me, wonderful but scary, as if some threshhold has been crossed. This admitting right out loud of the thing that until now could have been deemed hypothetical- leaving me with at least the chance that someday I might be able to say: "Well son of a gun! I guess I wasn’t into that weird garbage after all! Stupid me, spending $17 on that icky sex mag..."
 
This daydream has taken on such a convincing solidity ......... Like Rosalie’s fingers squeezing the skin over my clavicles as she says, "Guys, this is Tommy. He just joined us today, but I can already tell he’s a real trooper. So what are we going to call him?"
 
A brainstorming session ensues, with facetious suggestions called out, everyone laughing uproriously over what are in fact some pretty feeble jokes... 
 
But it seems like all the cool fictional spy names have either been taken or were "retired" with the death of the comrade who once bore them. At the mentions of "007" and "Lancelot Link" there is a brief dip in the level of hilarity in here. 
 
Finally someone asks, "Say, who’s flying this tub?"
 
"Probably some pervert." quips Lori, spurring more wild laughter.
 
Rosalie smacks her forehead, "Hey, who is flying it? What am I thinking? We’re sitting ducks up here! Oh shit- the time table! We need to get moving!"
 
A chunky redhead woman---not too terribly fat but with these wide hips and a flat pudgy nose---points angrily and explodes, "You just watch what you’re saying! I do not consider myself a pervert!"
 
99 goggles in disbelief, "What the fuck?! I never said you were, Tanya! Lighten up."
 
"Now is not the time, people," commands Rosalie, "Please take your stations!"
 
"But you did. By implying that only perverts are present so one must be piloting the sub! Before that you called us eraserheads! And down at the house, when you were showing off your insanely dangerous gadget, you called Nikita a-"
 
"Nice of you to keep track for me! Didn’t we already go through this lecture last week?"
 
"I said not now, damn it!" Barks Rosalie, but they ignore her.
 
"Maybe we did, but I notice you’re still using words like that! You think it’s clever and daring to ‘annex the language of oppression' by using it in a joking way. But such terms are damaging however they’re employed. A bunch of ‘bloods' passing a ‘jug' around on some corner might think it’s cute to say the N-word five times in every sentance, but no real African American revolutionary---like my good friend Dr. Aylis Janeed---is going to stand for such nonsense! And if you had spent any time in her consciousness rasing classes-"
 
"Yeah, well there’s no consciousness raiser like genuine class struggle! Not the kind that comes from liberal sentimentality or jerk-off political treatises, but because their fucking hands are around your throat! Like growing up on the streets of San Diego and hooking for the price of a room at fifteen years old! Sneaking past those ‘Take Back Our Streets' checkpoints to get out to the affluent zones where my tricks all lived. Robbed by the cops, blackmailed into the most unbelievably gross sex by a goddamn social worker..."
 
Tanya’s face gets a stunned, guilty look; but she can't let it go. She says, "Then someone like you should understand how important it is to only use those terms that empower us!"
 
"Someone like me? Boy, how’s that for a fucked up little euphemism?" smirks Lori, "Someone like me knows that unless we stand up to them, all this pussy-footing around with jargon doesn’t mean shit! Only a rich cow who spent the first decade of the 21st century in the narcotic embrace of the self-help movement would care whether I call us perverts or Sunbeams for Jesus! When Bruno was having those Ecuadorean peasants gunned down outside that Nike factory, you were on some Arizona fat farm, playing patty-cake with your spoiled brat of an inner child!"
 
Tanya is pissed- "At least I never slept with the bastard, like you and your sell-out girlfriend! And maybe I have had it better than you. But that does not give you the right-"
 
It looks like there’s about to be ///// OH BOY OH BOY! //// a real knock-down fight between these two bare breasted rubber bolsheviks, when a shot rings out- deafening in this stark steel hold! It’s Rosalie with a chrome-plated .45. "Now shut up, all of you!"
 
"Hey," says a slim woman with a long braided ponytail, "Watch the hull!"
 
"Oh pish! One little hole isn’t gonna compromise us! It’s not like we’ll be hitting mach 5 or diving to 10,000 feet anytime soon. Now shut up all of you! Nikita, you’re our navigator. You and Tanya ride up with me. West, Gordon, 99 and Tommy ......... you guys are on Retrieval Team."
 
"Hey wait a minute, I’m your co-pilot!" demands Lori.
 
Rosalie shoots her a long withering look and takes her bridge crew forward, leaving Lori and me here with the two guys. Lori stares down at her knockers, muttering something about "stupid big fat stupid skanky old Cap’n Queeg..."
 
West tells her, "Nobody else can stand that whining poseur either, kid. And I’ll bet anything Peel just took her up there to get her out of our way. Because we all know back here is where all the action is gonna be!"
 
The black guy---Gordon---digs through a steel ice chest at the rear of the hold and pulls out a dripping 6-pack of SUPER JOE iced coffees. "But you know, I really don’t know about Mrs. Peel sometimes. What her real motives in all this are..." 
 
"What the hell do you mean by that?" snaps Lori.
 
He starts to bring them over, "Come on, don’t get mad! All I mean is .............Well I’m not exactly sure. I know we all talk about how loveable Rosalie is ........ it’s like this is such a given that we all say it by rote now, without really thinking. And I know she talks a great line of post-exploitationist bullshit, anybody can! But there’s her whole weird history with Bruno, that game of theirs. And also ............ there’s this look she gets every once in a while, I call it her ‘Death Ray Stare’-"
 
Passing the glass bubble of the aft gun turret, he takes a quick step back and peers
down through it in disbelief: "Fuck, man! There’s a bunch of pigs down there!!"
 
We rush over to see. More police cars than I’d ever seen in one place before are clustered down in the street! A cop is yelling through a bullhorn: "Attention spacecraft! On behalf of Costa Niguel and the State of California, I order you to land and come out with your hands, or your claws, or your uh ......... tentacles-"
 
The whine of the turbines changes in pitch and there’s a gut-wrenching drop of several meters before we shoot forward at tremendous speed! The four of us stand around the gun turret, slurping on our hypercaffeinated coffee and watching the houses and debris-strewn gullies roll past beneath us. West nudges 99 and grins toward me, "Looks like you’re not the F.N.G. around here anymore."
 
She laughs, then explains, "Until you showed up I was the ‘fucking new guy’ of this cell. Not as bad as it might’ve been in some units, but still the subject of all the kidding. The rest of these bozos go back practically forever. I got into it through Peel, who I’d met through Bruno- ironic as hell how it all worked out!"
 
"So Bruno was your..."
 
"My trick, yeah. I worked for this escort service in D.C., where he
kept asking for me. The pay was incredible, and the status- professionally you can’t get any higher than that! But he was such an asshole I was about to start refusing him as a customer. I don’t mean his perversions, as intense as they are .......... Or even his beliefs, because with that it’s like being in the Red Cross; you don’t consider such things before rendering aid. But finally I felt like I just could not take any more ......... Until he set up this three-way with Rosalie! She was fantastic, both in and out of bed; and more than made up for him! And instead of her being all resentful like I’d expected, we got along fantastic! And so I moved in, sort of the Official White House concubine. It lasted six months---six weird, wonderful and yet awful months---that ended with me and her walking out on him together!"
 
I like this Lori a lot. She is funny, honest and strong. And in many ways she is even sexier than Rosalie- whose voluptuous ripeness sometimes seems a little too ripe. Too soft. In certain light her creamy white skin seems like some corrupt french waxwork, ready to /// The TROUBLE with BIMBOS /// crumble and moosh...
 
Lori doesn’t have her pretty fluffy blonde hair, isn’t quite so curvaceously fulsome and fucky. But she is endowed with a lean solid animal grace. Like a pantheress or something.
 
So I’m almost ready to abandon my playmate of the past 1001 days & nights for this brand new character, to make her right on the deck we drift over the back lagoons of Newport Beach. Except there’s the problem of these two guys here...
 
And what the hell are they even doing here? Since when are there any MEN in these scenarios?!?
 
Until one of them says, "Let’s go check out that #1 ballast pump."
 
And the other nods, "Shit, you’re right! We’d better get that fixed..."
 
As they exit through a low hatchway Lori smiles, "That was discreet of them! It must have been for your benefit. They usually play trailer-and-hitch right out in front of God and everybody!"
 
I cough, "Play what?!! NOT IN MY FANTASY THEY DON’T !!!"
 
"Your fantasy?"
 
"Oops! I mean..."
 
"You said fantasy. Aw Lord, not you Tommy! Oh Jesus H. Christ on a Segway ....... You think this is all some daydream that you’re having, don’t you?!"
 
"Of course not, that’s crazy! That would be ........ Well isn’t it?"
 
"To you maybe, if you have False Running Fantasy Syndrome.And it’s pretty clear you do!"
 
On hearing the name of this ‘syndrome' I am inexplicably furious, and also strangely frightened. I snap- "That’s bullshit! You just made that up! There’s no such goddamn thing! I watch The Behavior Sciences Channel all the time, and I never heard of anything called that!"
 
"Of course not! It doesn’t exist where you come from ............ But for a condition that you’ve never heard of, you seem to have some pretty strong opinions about it! Why do you suppose that is?"
 
[Yes, why? Why this terrible fear? Nothing here can hurt me...
Yet suddenly I can’t catch my breath and I’m alarmingly light headed! 
Her gaze is level and wise and understanding and concerned. And intolerable-]
 
And suddenly I am shouting, "Because I just do! Because it’s bullshit! I can tell what’s bullshit, and it’s bullshit!"
 
"FUCK! No wonder you didn’t seem worried about going on this mission! Rosalie was supposed to screen you for it! Furfussers make incredible soldiers, but it isn’t fair to them! It’s one thing for those of us who are recovering from the syndrome. But to sign up some poor deluded asshole who doesn’t even know that he has it ......... You might as well give guns to a bunch of those losers from the Church of Latter Day Vulcans and tell them they’re playing in one of those hologram rooms! Because you think you’re off in some other world, where the streets are all made of gold, and everyone is happy and contented and lives to be 1000 years old!"
 
"The streets in my world---the real world---are asphalt, just like anywhere! Nobody lives a thousand years, and they sure as hell aren’t all happy all the time!"
 
"Maybe not. No two of those ‘real worlds' are the same, and some of them are almost credible. But they all vary so much, how could they all be the real one? Every decade has its own unique escape-hatch fantasies. It used to be space aliens, all that apocalyptic hooey. And when none of that materialized it’s this one of how everything going on around you is this fantasy! I know how persuasive it is- I fought with the shit for years! You’re someplace safe and warm, usually in bed. I was so sure I was dreaming all this up! I just couldn’t accept that I was really stuck in this cruddy world.
 
"Yeah, but I-"
 
"And the ‘parascience' quacks aren’t helping any ........... how they encourage and justify this disease with their half-baked appropriations of quantum physics and Buddhist cosmology! Cal Schlagen wrote a funny and horrifying little book about it, all these new hoaxes and delusions, called Placebos for a Dying World-"
 
"Oh Ghod! Are you talking about that astrophysicist asshole again?"
 
It’s our two comrades, back from their adventure in the nether realm.
 
"Please West," barks Lori, "This is serious. Tommy has FRFS!"
 
I try to get a glimpse of my bedroom, usually at least somewhat accessible (-the dull frosted glow of that creepy, inexplicably ancient ceiling lamp cover, white glass cast with brooding flowers, 30 years out of place in my building ....... Distant feel of hand on prick or Digbert Digbert Digbert-), but to no avail.
 
 I’m sweating like a pig in this suit, I smell it. Can smell the various faint scents of this craft, and the sugary pink gum that Lori is nervously smacking on \\\ UNIVERSES BLEEDING INTO EACH OTHER BY COSMOSIS /// I see the steel mills and refineries of industrial Hawthorn down there in impossibly minute detail /// NOT IMPOSSIBLE IF IT’S THERE \\\ below the watertight gun turret, as my mind reels \ roils / BALKS \ japes / flails spastically around for any small proof that the life I knew as real-
 
"Oh yeah? So how come I knew your name?! I called you Lori, remember?"
 
"We met at the Ducky, just like you said. You were in straightclothes, like you’d just got off work. Sears or somewhere, and you were totally blotzed. You kept going, ‘I wanna fuck a-a-aaaaall you rubber bitches!'"
 
"HA!! I don’t work at Sears, I work at Disneyland! So you couldn’t have seen me wearing-"
 
"I didn’t say it was definitely Sears, I said someplace! And how the hell can you work or do anything else at Disneyland when it burned down back in 1999?!"
 
"It did what? That’s the stupidest thing I- No wait, no! Oh wow..."
 
Cascading harp music. A montage projected across rippling gauze ........ The first image is of the great cloud of smoke pluming into the sky over Anaheim. Then of how ticked off I became as news flash after news flash interrupted all my favorite adolescent afternoon shows ......... The record-setting lawsuits ......... Those heartless jokes about it that were circulating at my school before the fire was even out .......And the vast 11-story mall that went up so quickly in its place. Just a half mile from the U.C. Irvine Medical Center nuthouse where years later I would-
 
Nuthouse. False Running Fantasy Syndrome. Was diagnosis. Tests. Frowns. Back in February. Let’s start you out on 15 milligrams. Leave of absense from Sears. Fat Ass Ed the manager was in full Torquemada mode (he’d always said there was somethin' creepy + twitchy + wrong about me!) but he couldn’t fire me. Old patients-rights laws still on the books, even after all these years of Bruno. Who I am also beginning to recall some things about.
 
This whole flood of old-but-new memories affects my senses like some strange and unpleasant drug. An echoing cubist maelstrom of realities. At this dizzy juncture I am split, bicameral ......... I can see both of my lifetimes, like paper tubes held to each eye and angled away from each other. My life there. A far patchier one over here. And what’s truly horrible is that it hardly matters which of them is true. In neither one did I ever amount to much...
 
We turn right at some crowded Los Angeles beach, following a long string of shabby tar roofed t-shirt shops and cappachino joints. Helmeted roller skaters point up at us, their mouths agape.
 
Jim West is arguing, "How do you know he isn’t right? Maybe there’s no such
thing as FRFS. You said it yourself 99: Psychology is a tool of those in power!"
 
"I was talking about Tanya and all her lotus eater pals. That whole bogus quest to find some magic place where they will never hurt or have doubts again. About therapy as an evil borgeouis hobby! Not about treating real cognitive problems---genuine basket case stuff---with scientific-"
 
"Ooooooooh, sciiiiiiiiii-i-i-i-ence!" mocks West. His tone is cattier, far less the gruff revolutionist and more like the stereotype of faggotry. But at least he is taking my side.
"A hundred years ago a woman like you, who wanted to be more than just some subservient hausfrau, would have been branded a ‘female hysteric' by these great minds and carted off to a sanitarium. Because you’re unsanitary! You have that hustera, a womb---this is where the whole idea of ‘hysteria' comes from---so of course you’re gonna lose it! Maybe a hysterectomy will unscramble your head. They did that! That was your ‘real science'not too long ago..."
 
"I know they’re a lot slicker about it today, not so blatant in their biases, but they are still primarily there to uphold the status quo. I’ve read about how people with this so-called false fantasy disease can actually predict stuff, are the only group that constistently scores higher on psychic abilities tests than simply guessing at random can account for! Like they get some inside tip on causality!"
 
"I don’t believe that for a second," huffs Lori, "but let’s say they can ........... So that makes your whole world a hallucination? If someone tells you you’re just a figment of some wet dream of his, you believe it?"
 
"I’ll be in his wet dream any day!" whoops West, then he winces in my direction, "Sorry brother, force of habit. The whole queer raunchy humor thing..."
 
Agent Gordon groans, "I can’t believe I heard that! You’d go for him?" 
 
"Sure," shrugs West, "What’s wrong with him?"
 
"What’s wrong? What’s wrong?!" Gordon pulls out a small black plastic comb and shoves it against my upper lip, "Look at him! He looks just like Bruno! I mean look at that! It would be like balling Satan himself! No offense, 99..."
 
West stares at me, "Holy shit! He does! What a fantastic opportunity!"
 
"I don’t think so." frowns Lori, "He might look like the digitized Bruno you see on the tube, but in person he’s a lot younger. And it’s too late to try sneaking him in there, with Pussy Galore and her girls already taking out the guards..."
 
The shoreline beneath us is becoming less and less urban. Houses sit perched on cliffs dotted with grassy bushes over crescent coves...
 
Suddenly Rosalie’s voice cries out over the intercom, "Oh my! Interceptors."
 
And then, before we can even properly panic they have streaked past us! Three on each side, coming so close that the sub shimmies + bobs. They’re those weird new F-38’s-   twin cockpits connected by a chunk of wing, their undersides bristling with deadly finned javelins. Gordon sighs with relief, "They didn’t fire!"
 
"They will, now that they can say they’ve given us a warning," frowns 99 as they circle back around us, "Let’s hope the toy homing-missles I knocked together can really take out those big air-to-airs! Damn, where did I put those? Did I leave them at home?"
 
But then thin green rods appear from nowhere, angling down across miles of sky so that it looks for an instant as if the fighter jets are suspended from them. When the beams disappear there are holes in their engines. The smoke that churns from them is far blacker than their contrails had been. They begin to lose altitude. The perspex lozenges peel from their tops and tiny seated figures cannonball out, trailing fat nylon worms that blossom into parachutes.
 
"Who said the DEFENSAT system wouldn’t work?" chuckles Rosalie’s voice from the overhead speaker, "We can thank my friend at the Pentagon for that! We’d better win this, or his dick will be in the deep fryer!"
 
But the right-hand cockpit of one jet doesn’t eject. It’s so close that I can see tiny hands pounding futilely on the glass before it slams into the top of the cliffside and explodes with a sharp whummp!A messy orange fireball rolls down amid tons of dirt and dust and rocks. It leaves the rounded cement corner of someone’s swimming pool hanging in the air ........... Death before my eyes.
 
My guts spasm and twist, some obscure set of muscles I never knew I had! And I know this marks me as a snivelling neophyte in combat, but I can’t help it, my mouth starts going like some disconnected jabberbox: "Oh fuck! That guy is cooked! Smashed! Cooked! All I wanted was- goddamn it I just wanted the sex! Some kissing. Squeezin' some nice titties. Her pretty legs ......... that rubber on her. That guy is dead! And I’m flying to Malibu with a bunch of old t.v. characters ........... And I’m late for work. Or no, what do I mean?! Getting back to work, to that warehouse. Sears, where they humor me like I’m a mental case, and I guess I am .......... Misplaced my whole universe, what a screw up! He flew right into the hill there. And it’s really, really real! Why couldn’t  I just fuck her there in the laundry room that first time? Shoulda been so simple. Any idiot can beat his meat, can’t he?"
 
Lori cooes, "None of that ever happened, sweetie! Somewhere inside of you, you know that! I know how strange all this seems but you’re getting better now. Finding your way free of the illusion, of that sense of being a spectator in some false-front world that keeps you from ever really living. I know, God do I ever! And we all want Rosalie in the laundry room, but she’s spoken for..."
 
"By her twerpy old Admiral!" snorts Gordon, "And that’s another thing about her-"
 
"Don't start on that now, damn it!" groans Lori, who doesn’t want to get sidetracked from my emotional state, my ‘reality problem’. But Gordon doesn’t take the hint-
 
"Yes, I know you’re really protective of her---and that’s a commendable thing in a dyke---but what is it with Peel and these fascist pigs?! First Bruno, and now this one! Power tricking is one thing, but she actually likes the senile old fartbag!"
 
Lori glowers at him, "That ‘old fartbag' just saved your ass, bucko! And she fell for him because he was one of us! Or he is now, anyway ........ You should see the spiffy rubber uniform he had made for himself!"
 
"OKAY GANG, WE’RE INTO THE HOME STRETCH..." announces our captain, "I CAN SEE HIS PLACE. SURE LOOKS FUNNY SITTING OUT ON THAT BEACH! I’M SLOWING US DOWN TO TRAWLING SPEED..."
 
My horror over the pilot’s death is already fading. As if watching some movie I am swept along to the next scene, caught up in the bustle of preparations: Gordon peering into the eyepiece of a length of pvc pipe jutting up from the deck, fingering a calibrated plastic dial set in its side. West jacking clips into side arms at a fold-down workbench. Lori testing the winch’s rachet, dousing it with WD-40. They unhook the lift cage and slide it into a corner, replacing it with what appears to be a pink booger the size of a bean bag chair impaled on a lug wrench...
 
Lori takes in a deep breath and slowly exhales, "Beautiful, isn’t it? Unprocessed Malasian rubber. Like raw opium must look to any devoted junkie. The primal substance of all our dreams! No wonder they run amok down there..."
 
West pulls the big lever that opens the bomb hatch and we’re struck by a briny wind. The big slot gives us a much better view than we’d had through that cramped bubble with the 50mm gun and the steel tractor seat down inside. Scrub brush blurs past under us, then immaculate green lawn. 
 
West yips, "Whoooeee! Look at all the fucking fucking down there!"
 
Couples flicker past on the grass below, locked in lustful embrace. One partner---usually female---in bright rubber, the other---usually male---naked or nearly so, the ground around them littered with army fatigues, kevlar vests and secret servicemen’s garb.
 
The mass of bodies grows denser. Duos, then triads, then vast indecipherable cluster fucks! The Aroura III creeps along at about 75 feet, flying slower + slower.
 
Anti-aircraft guns, unattended, droop from their mounts like spent weenies. A rubber-clad Chinese girl, on her back beneath a great thrusting walrus of a man, her luxurious black hair fanned out around her head like a halo, gives us a cheery "thumbs up" before her eyes slam shut and she loses herself in her duty to the cause, her red heels digging ruts in the lawn.
 
Then they have scrolled past. We’re hovering now, the deck under our feet lolling around goofily. Someone whispers, "Perfect, just like the computer sit-sims predicted. Right down to the color of his bathrobe bathrobe!"
 
A lone figure has appeared on the lawn in a shiny salmon diamond-quilt robe, pointing a shotgun up at us and jabbering in a faint squeaky voice: "COME DOWN HERE AND FIGHT LIKE A MAN! "
 
"No. How about you come up here and fight like a woman?" asks Rosalie casually as she saunters in through the hatchway. "Don’t worry, kiddies! La Femme Nikita’s got the stick. I wouldn’t miss this for the world!"
 
A thick yellow extension cord droops from the winch motor to a galvanized junction box with a large button on it resting on Gordon’s knee. He stares intently into the bomb sight- "I got him!"
 
"Then get him," says Rosalie tightly.
 
With a deep sinister rolling villian’s laugh he jabs the button and the 150 pound mass of rubber drops straight down- the reel of cable whirring brassily as it unwinds...
 
Bruno stares up idiotically, seemingly more intent on identifying
this strange amoeba hurtling toward him than on avoiding it...   
 
At the last instant he swings the gun up to shoot it, but not before the pink blob hits him square in the face, enveloping him down to his elbows! He tries to run but he is dangling, yanked right out of his slippers, his legs jigging frantically as he is reeled in!
 
Once he’s inside the ship lurches forward. It banks nimbly then goes into a steep climb. Bruno swings on his tether, kicking his feet and yelling, "M’fffa-mpffflt-mullp-plupp-mlp!"
 
Rosalie regards the suffocating man with icy contempt. She relieves him of his weapon, prying it from the rubber with a loud, rude viscid sound. Then she and Lori each grab a leg and pull. Bruno pops out with an even louder, ruder sound and crashes down onto the hatch, wheezing horribly.
 
He is naked, strangely pale, the bathrobe having stayed in the mass of rubber. It yawns over him like a weird rayon labia. His hand goes immediately to the top of his head, which he gingerly explores "My hair! You pulled out half my implants out with that crap, you cunt!"
 
"The prisoner will remain silent!" barks Rosalie. In her rage her whole jaw is stretched, lined with deep parallel creases- making her suddenly seem much older.
 
Bruno laughs contemptuously, "Listen to you! Still playing your idiotic People’s Army games .......... My my, what a jolly bunch of freaks you’ve assembled here! My writers are sure gonna have fun with this episo-"
 
With a sickening crack the butt of the shotgun slams into his cheek, "THE PRISONER WILL REMAIN SILENT!!"
 
"AAAAAAAAAAWWWGG!!!" groans Bruno. He rolls onto his side, twisting in agony!
 
But still he snorts, "You gaw no idea how mush twubble yer in, Girlie! I mighta been inclined to be a lil' leenyint wiff ya, on account of you ain’t‘zackly right inna head! Ya let theesh com’yanish bastids talk ya inta some ...... Oh Chrisht, thash gonna need sti’shes! Dat’s da f'anks I get fer makin’ you a shelebrity! Thanks to me, ev’ry day millionsha people get a good laugh over yer pat’eddic exshploits-"
 
She clubs his naked flesh- battering his ribs, his kidneys! I have to turn away. Walk over to a porthole and try to tune out the awful sounds. Cumulus clouds jumble past, soggy and dark, then incandescently white,  then dark again; making the rounded room brighten and dim strangely.
 
I hear 99 cry out, "For God’s sake, don’t kill him!"
 
A raspy voice, hardly sounding like Rosalie, grunts, "Are you suggesting that I’m not in control of myself?! Believe me, I wouldn’t let him die this quick!He might piss blood for a while, but he’ll be around to spend years and years ina prison cell the size of a phone booth. So get your bloody hand off my arm!And what the hell are you looking at, faggot?!"
 
Lori/99 and the two gay guys come over to see how I’m doing (and I think they might be trying to stay clear of their crazed captain as well...).
 
"You know, it’s not like he’s some foot soldier, deserving the decency you should show to captured enemy troops," says Lori wearily, sounding as if she is trying to convince herself in the face of such brutality, "His role in this doesn’t need to be investigated. He boasted about his crimes, and built monuments to a hundred massacres! So if she is getting carried away ......... I know it’s not pretty, but you haven’t lived through the shit we did. ‘Least not that you remember..."
 
Behind us Bruno screams and screams. I’m afraid I might start crying, or puke or something if we stay on this subject, so I say, "I thought you’d want to escape detection, dive right back into the ocean. Why are we still climbing?"
 
West says, "To dock with our starship, The Priapic. We’re going to the moon. To Tycho Caverns, where the Rubber People live. They didn’t care much for those Apollo assholes, but they sure like us! I hope you’re fertile, because most of  their men were killed in the Great Depressurization of ‘07, and they need able bodied studs-"
 
"Knock it off, you jerk!" snaps Lori, "If you had even an inkling of what FRFS is like---never knowing what’s real or not---you wouldn’t tease him!"
 
Bruno has stopped his inhuman howling. I turn, fearing the worst- but he is up on his elbows, scowling, a gory mess. Rosalie draws the shotgun’s bloodied stock back, ready to wallop him again, "Had enough?!?"
 
He roars: "No! I LIKE it!"
 
I cringe, assuming that he is egging her on out of some insane stubbornness! That he would rather die than show any compliance or remorse...
 
Then it dawns on me that he had meant just what he said. There had been a squirmy, excited quality to all his agonized flailing around!
 
Rosalie lowers her cudgel, "This isn’t a game, Bruno! You’ve got some real Crimes Against Humanity to answer for! One half-assed little beating won’t even come close to atoning for it- especially if you’re enjoying it. You are one evil son of a bitch!
 
He blubbers coquettishly, "I am! I am! I’m ba-a-a-a-a-d! I been a naughty, naughty despot! PUNISH ME!"
 
"Whatever you say," shrugs Rosalie. She reaches over and pulls the big lever.
 
The hatch flops open, dumping him into the thin air of 22,000 feet. Ten randomly-spaced oxygen masks fall from the ceiling & dangle there like hospital-theme party decorations. Bruno drops away, a pinkish white cupie doll tumbling crazily. He calls plaintively, "I love yooooooooooooooooouuuu-"
 
"Shit," croaks Rosalie, with a weary remorse that seems to have taken her totally by surprise.
 
She stares at the receding form, muttering shit!' over and over with increasing intensity, then whirls toward Lori- "Quick! Loan me your jet pack!"
 
"There’s not much fuel left! And I’ve never even flown it at this high an altitude," cautions Lori, but Rosalie already has the thing strapped on and has swan-dived into the rectangle of blue sky! Soon she is just a teeny red oblong down there. The silver droplet tracking alongside her flares brilliantly to life!
 
Lori screams into the com-set on her wrist, "After them!"
 
The ship noses down and we all tumble up the deck (luckily around the big hatch-   those thick doors flapping + banging like storm shutters) until we’re wedged up against the aft bulkhead. Thirty seconds later we all go sliding again---with a flattening pressure---back onto the floor. My eardrums are aching like hell. We stagger woozily to our feet and peer down through the opening...
 
Rosalie is flying along, hands hooked through Bruno’s armpits, her neck straining like she is trying to gain altitude by sheer force of will! But their combined weight is too much for the puny engine. Mountains gyre below us- all drab chaparral and dry jagged ravines.
 
The sub eases gently down until it’s right over them. Rosalie sees us and unclutches one arm from Bruno long enough to make a grabbing motion in the air.
 
99 asks her wrist-com, "You guys see that?"  
 
To me the answer sounds like a chicken gabbling in a tin shed during a hailstorm, but it seems to satisfy Lori, "Alright Nikita- use your magic touch!"
 
A mechanical arm---jointed in at least places---appears from under the sub and grabs the silver pack with a big tong-like hand, just as the jet engine farts out a plume of black smoke and dies. The arm lifts them into the hold and sets them gently on the deck, then withdraws...
 
Bruno’s face is frozen in a somehow comical expression of terror. When Rosalie hugs him possessively and asks again if he has had enough, he gargles,"Yes. Alright. Anything..."
 
"Mmmmmm," she purrs, "I’d say your rehabilitation is well under way!"
 
 
"THAT WHICH DOES NOT KILL ME MAKES ME HORNY"
                                ...........................    -Leopold von Sacher Masoch
 
.
She dresses him up like The Gimp from Pulp Fiction. I won’t go into all the sordid details, except to say that henceforth he won’t exist as a nefarious Force of History, but as some lowly slathering thing encased in head-to-foot ("RUBBER’S TOO GOOD FOR YOU...") black leather.
 
As she rides him around the hold, West muses, "Weird, isn’t it? Rosalie and him back together, with Bruno down on all fours in his beastie-suit! It’s like we’re all right back where we started from. Well, except for Jim and Ella being gone, God rest ‘em. But now there’s Lori and Tommy, so it all evens out!"
 
I am shocked- "Where you started from?! You mean with him? This dickwad is a friend of yours?!"
 
"I wouldn’t call him," West squeezes the word out with difficulty, "a friend ........... It’s hard to explain. Off and on, between his ventures into politics, they’d get backtogether---to everyone’s horror---after she went on and on about how awful it wasand how she was never, ever going back! Pretty much like what just happened. Pushing someone out of a plane sends a fairly unambiguous message, and yet here they are."
 
Gordon frowns, "You see? That’s the sort of thing I’m talking about .........This shit goes way beyond some normal dominance/submission game! Did you see the way she was wailing on him with that shotgun?!!"
 
"I’m not saying he’s good for her," shrugs West, "But for whatever reason ..... When they started the relationship none of us could imagine what she saw in him. We all knew who he was from the radio- there’s no mistaking that voice of his! But we figured that what Rosalie did was her business. Even after people started leaving our club in droves to get away from him! But as their game progressed, in his outfit with that chomp in his mouth, he sort of faded into the background...
 
West grabs the last iced coffee, shakes and opens it and guzzles half, "After a while they just started holing up together, never answering our calls. You expect a couple to do this when they’re newly in love, but the changes in Rosalie didn’t look like any kind of love we’d ever seen her in. She was always so happy and bubbly, even with that abusive shit Frank Baldini! This looked ....... grey. But they were adults, even back then, so---like I say---what they did in there, with all that medieval hardware they had laying around, was ultimately between them...
 
"But then he escaped! I’m not sure how, Houdini himself couldn’t have gotten out of the way she had him. We helped her look all over town, putting flyers up on telephone poles: LOST GIMP. $50 REWARD...
 
"And we had all but given up on finding him, when he turns up on t.v., running for city council on a moral-decency kind of platform. Saying how he’d shut down the Rubber Ducky, Wild Oscar’s and Phyllis’s Phetish Phair. He might have won too, but we nabbed him right in the middle a speech he was giving ....... Got him back to their condo and into his nasty black suit- him yelling the whole time how he was finally free of Rosalie’s spell, free of the ‘demonic false-ecstasy of perversion’! He sure sounded like he meant it! If it was up to me I would've let him loose ........ But Rosalie saw through his protests and ignored his codeword for ‘No really- let me go!' .......... and soon had him re-gimperized and whimpering happily!"
 
"I never heard any of this. This is all from before my time with them. Rosalie never really went into it." says Lori with a nervous false blitheness, as if dreading what might be revealed...
 
"The second time he escaped he ran for Governor of California. He was a lot harder to catch by now! We didn’t manage to nab him ‘til he was Governor Elect- after he won on a platform of seceding from the Union and putting a thousand foot high wall around the whole state! We made it look like an assassination---used a shitload of incindiary bombs!---so they wouldn’t come looking for him!"
 
I sort of remember this now. The bellowing from the editorial pages over ‘this craven terrorist attack’. And it still seems underhanded of them to me: "But if he won that election fair and square, what right did you have-"
 
Rosalie canters up on her animal. Hard to tell what he is thinking under all that upholstry, but he’s docile enough. Rosalie’s voice takes on a lecturnly tone, "I’d hardly call it fair! That ‘flag-burning workshop' they raided at his opponent’s headquarters was a total frame-up. And anyway, he was only using the electoral system so he could destroy it! Pretending to play by the rules until he could get into the big chair, and declare himself Emperor of All Known Space For Eternity...
 
"But the truth, and I think it’s about time you chumps got a good dose of the truth-   Especially you 99, get back here this instant!"
 
"I just needed to use-"
 
"I don’t care! The truth is Bruno never really wanted to rule the world. It was never about conquest and glory. But for him to become so powerful for a spell that it would make his subsequent capture and debasement all the sweeter!"
 
"My God!" I shout, "Are you saying that all this, overthrowing democracy, these wars and everything, were all just part of some sex game between you?!"
 
Lori says hurriedly, "No, not between them- I get what she’s saying! What she’s talking about is what Bruno was thinking, the apocalyptic mindset ....... The unconscious motives behind so many of these would-be conquerors. Secretly hating the very people they’re leading ......... and wanting to take ....... take the whole place ........ down with them. What
this sociologist Deforest Kai called .......... Rosalie?"
 
She is looking at Rosalie, who stares back at her with no warmth or fondness whatsoever. I’d seen "multiples" emerging before, on talk shows and such, and it had always seemed kind of a put on. But this is totally unnerving ........ It shines from her eyes, like when the vicious movie alien decides to shuck off its disguise to let you see its true form, and the depths of its contempt for such a weak and gullible species!"
 
"Told’ja so..." intones Gordon in a faint, childish sing-song.
 
But the rest of them are goggling like dimwitted fishes as Rosalie sneers,
"I never gave a shit about your insipid little cause, or liberating the stupid masses! Why do you think I was doing so little to help?! Ennui? Revolutionary burnout?" she mimmicks some compassionate loser, "‘Pooooor Rosalie, hiding out in her mansion all day, she seems so suh-sad, and l-lost!' HA! I was biding my time is all; Letting him enjoy his brief moment of glory. Because the harder they fall, the louder they squeal! Ain’t that right my precious gelding?"
 
When he doesn’t instantly respond she whacks him across his only exposed feature---his eyeball---with her riding crop, "Answer me, you snivelling shit!"
 
West stammers, "What about all the people who had to live under his vicious regime- just so you two sickos could get your rocks off?! Like the ones hauled on barges out to that fictitious ‘rehabilitation colony' and just dumped out there!"
 
"The people? The people fucking loved it! Didn’t they all rally behind him? ‘Give us order! Tell us what to do, what to believe!!' This freedom we will be restoring to them will make it all the more glorious when I let him loose again! And next time we’ll really give ‘em what they want- BOOOOOOOOMMM!!! " cries Rosalie, making a furious salad-tossing gesture with her hands. She drives her pointy heels into Bruno’s haunches, making him rear up on his hind legs like a performing stallion as she throws back her head and bursts into a chilling laugh that soars into a long ragged hysterical shriek!
 
I turn to Lori, "I suppose you’re in on this too!"
 
She gulps pitifully, "I swear Tommy, this is the first I heard of this!"
 
"Oh ............. Come off it!" cackles Rosalie, "Like we’re the monsters and the bunch of you are so fucking innocent! You were all thrilled to be hanging around on the edge of the most magnificent sex-game of all time! The whole hemisphere was our bedroom- a coast-to-coast dungeon! And oh- his Great March South! He wasn’t conquering all those
crummy jerkwater states because they had anything to offer us!"
 
Lori groans in pure agony, "Aw shit. You don’t mean any of this, girlfriend!"
 
I mean it more than anything I ever said about our ‘friendship’, you pitiful twit! You and the rest of these pawns ....... But Bruno! Our exquisite dance together across the pages of history..."
 
"No, this isn’t you! I know you Rosalie!"
 
"Believe what you want, you always did! That ridiculous alternate world you imagined coming from, with those cars you drive around standing up and whatever all goofy shit it had- and everything there had the stupidest names! The dreams of a born loser! But when those of us with greatness in them dream ......... Any pissant can promise his gal the world, but only my man ever came so close to actually doing it! A world in flames, every napalmed village getting me hotter! And next time- oh, next time! As that great social visionary Shoko Asahara said: there’s only one way to maintain control of the entire world forever! That limited atomic strike that damned fool M. was plotting might have led to some effective disarmament, which would have jeopardized the final phase of our game- AN ENTIRE PLANET SACRIFICED TO OUR PASSION!
 
"None of you has ever seen even a fraction of my underground fortress. We will be down in those impenetrable caverns, the last remaining humans ............... Not ‘Adam and Eve’, because we certainly won’t be spawning anything---tedious life- pointlessly multiplying and eating and sleeping and shitting all over the place!---but will simply be savoring the extinction! Playing rubbergames, endgames, each one darker than the last!! Down in our house of ............ Uh, what would be the word for the opposite of miracles?"
.
It’s a simple precaution. You’d think they would have figured it out by now.
Conveniently, Gimp and rider are poised right on the crack of the bomb hatch.
 
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.
It’s the triumphant over-the-top awards ceremony from the end of  the original STAR WARS film. Air base inside a cave. Harriers, the hoversub, and ungainly Star Fleet shuttlecraft like big toasters on pontoons parked behind us. Everyone standing in rank and file as Admiral Halifax strolls down the line (in his rubber uniform with shoulder thingies like fat-bristled brushes and rubber medals that look like some kid made them...), dispensing Citations of Valor and long-winded avuncular homilies.
 
He’s a gabby old fuck, shouting over the blare of this peppy march music that John Williams has composed (John Williams likes rubber too!) for the occasion. Lori and I are talking discretely behind our big aching smiles, like ventriloquists:
 
"For me? What do you mean you did it for me?"
 
"Somebody had to make sure that their madness wouldn’t continue! But I did it right then because I couldn’t stand for you to have even a hint of suspicion that I might have been in on their-"
 
"You’re taking my opinion way too seriously, if you did that for me!"
 
"You bet I take it seriously! I love you! From the instant I spotted you here, it was like I was right back in one of those sexual fantasies, that I used to call: BEAUTIFUL BIG-DICKED TOMMY IN THE RED RUBBER JUMPSUIT-"
 
"You actually did this? Or is this an FRFS memory?"
 
"Who the hell knows? Maybe I have had a relapse, and all these detailed memories of how I used to dream about you don’t go back any further than when I flew into the sub and saw you there! But they feel so old and familiar to me- God, this disease is a head fucker! If Rosalie was here I could ask her, ‘Did I ever tell you about having had such and such a fantasy?’. But now... But if it was you, you’d remember, right?"
 
"I do recall meeting you just a while ago, but I don’t think it’s from any reality that you would recognize. I don’t suppose you were ever a superhero..."
 
"I’m afraid not. Well, when I was a kid I used to pretend I was this one cartoon character---BOUNCING BETTY!---from a bad t.v. show we used to have. She had a costume a lot like these. It was supposed to be some miracle stuff that the Space Pixies had given her, but now that I think about it, it was really rubber. But half the girls I knew used to pretend they were her, and I always knew I was only playing. No, my life was pretty normal and uneventful until I got here four years ago." says Lori. She looks miserable. I want to hold her but we are standing at attention.
 
She sighs, "Though I’m sure you wouldn’t think it was normal. Even other furfussers have a hard time with my Home Reality, it’s so different than any of the worlds people described in my group! Their idea of a major discrepancy was that they used to get their hamburgers at McDougal’s instead of McDaniel’s like they do here. And then I would share about missing the taste of Snarfelpuppies from Wingwackamazoo’s. See what I mean?"
 
The Admiral, his entourage, the camera crews with their fierce lights are pretty far across the cavern from us now. With all the attention on them we take off, leaving a pair of gaps in the formation. We're heroes today, we won't get in too much trouble. I hope...
 
Where to? Lori points, I nod and smile. We make for the Aurora, its hull hanging above us, held aloft by its three retractable landing legs.
 
A series of bars welded to one of them forms a ladder up to a circular hatch. Lori pauses with her foot on the bottom rung, "But the fact that it was such an unlikely place helped me accept that it had all been fantasy. Because it doesn't sound real at all when I talk about it out loud. It's all so crazy, it makes my head hurt trying to figure it all-"
 
I take her by the shoulders and say in my best Harrison Ford, "Shut up and kiss me already!"
 
A long passionate kiss, then we clamber up the ladder and into the sub...
 
Down the accessway, heading I guess for the cargo hold- but that unyeilding steel space doesn't really sound like the best place to ball. I recall seeing a couch in this sub somewhere- but where?
 
But suddenly as we pass an open hatchway Lori gasps, "A laundry room!"
 
She grabs my hand and pulls me into it, clearly terribly excited. Sure enough what I'd glanced at and taken as torpedo tubes or something turn out to be a row of glass-doored stainless steel washing machines down one wall of the narrow room, and a row of very similar dryers down the other. Six of each seems like way more than a ship this size could ever need; the only think I can think of is that the Aurora III's designer shared our proclivity for shiny laundry facilities.
 
In the center is a long formica folding table. I heft Lori up onto it. Volumes are spoken as we look into each other's eyes-
 
Suddenly we hear voices:
 
"So I says to the Captain, I says: How do I get out of this rubber-chicken outfit?"
 
"Ha ha! You mean nobody told you about the explosive bolts?"
 
"No I swear! So he gets this look, and he says to me-"
 
Two guys, and they're clearly headed this way. Maybe we should just tell them to scram. Or maybe let them watch...
 
But when I point to the familiar (to me) narrow little door in the laundry room's rear bulkhead Lori nods emphatically, and we scramble inside and snick the door shut. She is up against the vertical bank of steel pipes, our rubber coatings sliding slickly against each other under the bare red bulb above us in its little metal crash cage.
 
I manage to crouch just enough to place my mouth on her tit, sliding it along the top of the soft dome, but my ass hits the door when I try to get at her nipple. I splay my knees, hunch down, my tongue aching from the straining- Shit, just another inch! Maybe this closet wasn't such a good idea after all. We should really try to get up to the bridge. It's got carpet, the instrument panels going like christmas lights, and the big transparent aluminum canopy with the black rock twinkling above it like stars...
 
But it's too late, they're here. "Ah here it is. Thought it was further down the hallway..."
 
The thud of duffel bags being dropped, "It's not a hallway dummy! The correct nautical term is 'axilinear stomp-o-way'..."
 
Lori startles, this term uncannily close to how they name things in her world of origin. A strange bleedthrough...
 
She shakes her head---nevermind all that---and reaches up and grabs the metal brace across the water pipes. Pulls herself up to where I can reach her rigid little nipple. She shudders as my tongue dances across its tip, side, top, bottom- flicking and feinting...
 
"So excuse me if I don't speak squid. I'm USMC. Family tradition and all that. It was bad there for a while when I came out as a tire biter, but me and my Pop ...... we got over that eventually. But he woulda SHIT if I woulda joined any other branch of the service-"
 
To help her stay up I wrap my arms tightly around her. Our faces close, breathing hotly on each other's. Comfortable enough, and properly aligned, we resume kissing, her bare boobs flattening warmly against me...
 
Finally. Finally here! No psycho Bruno, none of Rosalie's weird games, hard as Gibralter and nothing is gonna stop me!
 
Quite late for work I suppose //// EVIL GLARING YELLOW CLOCKRADIO \\\\ but FUCK THEM it doesn't matter, because I quit that horrible job. That world. I know now it was never real, and I'll never be going back!
 
The Star Wars march thuds faintly through the hull of the ship. Lori hallelujah!
Our tongues slither around each other, wrestle & tug like eels in heat!
Her hands reach around to my ass, to jerk me forward...
 
As my dick
 
slides
 
>snugly<
 
into her
 
*gooshy*
 
**hot**
 
***tight***
 
= = = = >UnghGOD!< = = = =
 
 
 
 
äĢnǺ...
.
 
.
 
 
 
.
 
 
 
NOTE: I wrote this novella during the Clinton years, most of PART FIVE during the Lewinski hearings on CNN. A coarse inarticulate right wing crook of a president hypocritically pandering to scary religious zealots felt like a real stretch of the imagination to me...
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NOTE: While writing this I listened to the following cds and albums:
 
The Beatles: RUBBER SOUL /// Jefferson Starship: RED OCTAPUS /// Billy Holiday: THE VERVE COLLECTION (disc 2) /// the Pixies: BOSSANOVA /// Berlin: PLEASURE VICTIM /// Ike + Tina Turner Review: WHAT U SEE IS WHAT U GET (Live at Carnegie Hall) /// the Scientists: WEIRD LOVE /// Captain Beefheart & his Magic Band: LICK MY DECALS OFF BABY /// the Who: QUADROPHENIA /// Luciano Berio: LABORINTUS II (Berio conducts Musique Vivante) /// Soft Cell: NONSTOP EROTIC CABARET /// Lou Reed: CONEY ISLAND BABY /// Shonen Knife: BIRDS & THE B-SIDES /// Akiru Ifukube: GODZILLA SOUNDTRACK /// Eno: HERE COME THE WARM JETS /// Dolly Parton: BUBBLING OVER /// Ali Akbar Khan: "80 MINUTE RAGA" /// John Cale: FEAR /// GAMELANS OF JAVA (Nonesuch ?)  /// Psychedelic Furs: FOREVER NOW /// Marty Robbins: IT'S A SIN /// Prokofiev: SCYTHIAN SUITE (Boulez/Paris) /// the epidemics: YOU CAN BE ANYTHING /// Roxy Music: FOR YOUR PLEASURE /// CRUMB soundtrack /// Love & Rockets: 7TH DREAM OF TEENAGE HEAVEN /// Pharoah Sanders: MESSAGE FROM HOME /// Syd Barret: BARRET /// Screamin' Jay Hawkins: VOODOO JIVE /// Blondie: PARALLEL LINES /// Ramatam: IN APRIL CAME THE DAWNING OF THE RED SUNS /// Bowie: STATION TO STATION /// Lil Green: WHY DON'T YOU DO RIGHT? (1940-42) /// Henry Kaiser: HEART'S DESIRE /// Hole: PRETTY ON THE INSIDE /// Beethoven's 7TH (Reiner/Chicago) /// Tom Waits: FRANK'S WILD YEARS /// Goo Goo Dolls: SUPERSTAR CARWASH /// Modern Jazz Quartet: PLASTIC DREAMS /// Bonzo Dog Band: URBAN SPACEMAN /// Sly & the Family Stone: STAND /// Jesus & Mary Chain: BARBWIRE KISSES /// Patti Smith: RADIO ETHIOPIA /// X-Ray Spex: GERM FREE ADOLESCENTS /// Thee Midniters: WHITTIER BLVD. /// BRAZIL soundtrack /// the Fugs: IT CRAWLED INTO MY HAND, HONEST /// Boss Hogg: RUBY RUBY /// the Kinks: LOLA VS. POWERMAN & THE MONEY GO ROUND /// Dan Hicks: WHERES THE MONEY? /// Howlin Wolf: CADILLAC DADDY 1952 /// TRAINSPOTTING soundtrack /// STRAWBERRY SWITCHBLADE /// Current 93: IMPERIUM /// LOST HIGHWAY (soundtrack) /// The Cramps: A DATE WITH ELVIS /// CCR: PENDULUM /// Grace Slick: BARON VON TOLLBOOTH VS. THE CHROME NUN /// Hooch: MAXIMUM SHINDIG /// Captain Beefheart: SHINY BEAST (Bat Chain Puller) /// Pain Teens: BEAST OF DREAMS /// John Handy Quintet: LIVE @ MONTEREY 1965 /// Buddy Morrow: NIGHT TRAIN GOES TO HOLLYWOOD /// Iggy Pop: AMERICAN CAESAR /// Miles Davis: BIG FUN /// Hendrix: RAINBOW BRIDGE /// Ravel: DAPHNIS & CHLOE (???) /// Royal Fingerbowl: HAPPY BIRTHDAY SABO /// STUFF SMITH & his Onyx Club Boys: 1936-1939 /// Pere Ubu: DATAPANIC IN THE YEAR ZERO /// Passion Fodder: FAT TUESDAY /// Bowie: LOW /// Louie Armstrong: HOT 5'S & 7'S (vol. 2) /// Bobby Bare: DOWN & DIRTY /// Sonic Youth: WASHING MACHINE /// Camper van Beethoven: OUR BELOVED REVOLUTIONARY SWEETHEART... 
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 CMMENTS  SURE  THE  HECK  WULD  BE  APPRECIATED!!! 
 

 

Something Else

I almost wish I was into rubber! I keep having visions of Monica and it's much better than that blue dress. no mention of cigars though,
Joanne

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