Monday, October 1, 2007

Linguini Man

By hughgee

A sequestered booth in a posh restaurant, some time in the future. The kind of private booth you’d expect French guys in our day to entertain their mistresses.

“Am I doing it right?” she asked, sheepishly.

He sat looking at the girl and the girl was cute, really cute; leaning forward, fumblingly but daintily, she slurped a piece of linguini off her plate and leaned back and smiled a glowing, pearly-white smile which would have made her an instant candidate for a toothpaste ad campaign. A blonde—he liked his blondes—was tied back in dual, abbreviated, braided ponytails like some Indian squaw; and she was perky and wholesome, also the way he liked them, and she had a perfectly sculptured, albeit somewhat flattened nose, as though the artist who’d molded her had pressed down a little harder than normal in blending the nose into the cheekbones.

“Don’t laugh,” she chided, playfully, when he snickered a bit at her mild difficulty at eating the precarious food—precarious after the cabernet sauvignon he’d ordered for her. He noted how the tip of the nose dipped and rose with each lovely syllable that passed those long, protruding lips. The arm holding the fork was thin and delicate and beautiful.

This wasn’t about scoring tonight. He’d decided that with her last messy mouthful, and the way she genuinely apologized and sought his counsel on how to proceed and he’d helped her, reached across and, taking the arm, guided the next mouthful in safely, drip-free. Here was a girl who would listen to him, take his advice; a girl who’d listen to you on small matters would likely listen to you, respect you, in the larger ones. His last girlfriend was corrupted by the new feminism sweeping the land. All girls had it, so it seemed. They all tried to pass themselves off as rivals somehow, challenging a man, disrespecting him, doing their own thing. Call him old-fashioned, he wanted a woman who would complement him, cheer him on, and here at last was the gal who could do it. Docile, pliant, loving and nurturing; hell, she’d been five minutes late for their date and had met him in the front of the restaurant in real tears, apologizing profusely, explaining how she’d had a sick cat, she got caught nursing back, she was sorry, she was sorry, she was oh so sorry. That kind of nurturing instinct, that kind of sincere apology, was, well, really and truly deserving of the old cliché “a breath of fresh air.” After years of dumping away, pitching off, and flat out running away from pseudo-militant “feminist” love interests, he was ready for a breath of fresh, traditional, TRULY feminine air.

“I have a confession to make,” she started, then paused a moment to swallow, laughed an embarrassed laugh at her cute little breech of etiquette. “I haven’t been on a date with a guy in a long time.”

He wanted to kiss her. He wanted to drop his own fork, jump across the table, and kiss her. Something this beautiful, this chaste as well—wow! Was it true? Had he really found one at last? A demure, womanly, WOMAN? Too good to be true. It was all too much. Somehow she’d avoided the feminist brain-washing, the party line, the orthodox commie plot that taught every woman to sleep around, take charge of her sex life, use a man because and before he’s just going to use you.

Her eyes lowered submissively as she lifted the triangular salmon-colored napkin off her lap. “I shouldn’t have said that,” she sighed. Big, lovely, blue eyes—to see eyes like that lower themselves in front of him, as if waiting, hanging on desperately for some kind of approval. He gave it.

“I’m glad you told me,” he said, and then cinched some kind of mental knot with the next rhetorical words he offered. “Has anyone ever told you you’re beautiful?”

She dropped the napkin even as the bottom lip dropped down, then rose and formed into a divinely dimpled gigantic smile. She set her fork down. Magic in the air. She let both shoulders sink, totally relaxed, and the dainty elbows went back and rested on the red leather skin of the booth in which they were oh so comfortably ensconced, and accidentally knocked some of the contents out of her pink pleather purse.

“Oop!” she squealed then added, “Oh, drat,” and darted underneath table to retrieve the contents which had fallen to the floor.

Suddenly a moderately searing pain drilled its way up his entrails. Our man at the table spluttered; fork flew out of his hand, clanged down onto the plate of linguini, then dropped as well to the floor. Our man’s other hand just as quickly—and he didn’t yet know why—surreptitiously clutched at his crotch underneath the table. A moment of desperation— ‘don’t let her see me holding my ‘nads!’ he thought.

She giggled behind her napkin as she sat back up. She’d seen it. Underneath the table, she’d seen him grabbing at his balls, seen his body hunch over; she’d seen the slight tremor in the torso as well. Cute as the dickens, this girl!—he wanted to respond, keep up the repartee, the gay banter—hot damn was she cute!—but strangely, he could find no words. All he could find was a vice being screwed “righty-tighty” inside his abdominal cavity. He spluttered some more, turned red, fell forward. Glasses clinked and red wine sloshed and spilled as the dining table supported his full weight. Both hands down under the table now, both hands clutching, rubbing, trying to protect. Decorum went out the window. Okay, it was no longer moderate now. Let ‘em see me, he thought, still spluttering. Let ‘em see me. Let HER see me. Let them ALL see me. Still holding my ‘nads, I can’t let go. Oh man, oh man, oh man does this HURT! His eyes wouldn’t focus but he knew what she was holding.

“Oh! Oh!” she frantically, apologetically said. “I’m sorry! I’m so sorry!” She was banging the thing, slapping the thing, still the pain continued. Pain like he had to take a trip to the men’s room, a long one—but he’d just done that right before leaving his place. Pain like the time that dike bully up the street when she’d kicked him in the balls at the bus stop as kids. Pain like when he’d landed Evel-Knievel-style on the middle bar of his bike after the two-foot berm he’d assembled from two-by-fours in his Dad’s garage.

“Oh!—Oh!” she continued on in higher, more worried octaves, still vainly slapping at the thing.

A lady friend, a “ball-boinker” in street vernacular: she’d had one in her purse. Rectangular, ergonomically friendly for hand-held, personal protection use, the size of small disposable flashlight, and just look at all the froo-froo colors they come in. Oh, they advertised with the women in mind, all right. Women didn’t have balls and those god-awful nerves connecting them. Perfect. Curse the company that’d invented those things. Disgronificator Technologies. Bastards. Blood-suckers. He knew them well. They’d cost him his last job. Sound waves. Who’d’ve thought sound waves’d be so gender-biased?

Anyway you can’t be a beat cop—you couldn’t even be a lousy security guard, he remembered, swallowing a dry swallow of desperation—with a friggin’ pair of balls swinging between your legs when bad guys out there got those. Or bad girls, as the case may be (and increasingly often was). The only known protection was a lead cup the size of pharmacist’s mortar and pestle and five times as heavy, and no guy on the planet was going to go around in his daily comings and goings with a thing like that strapped on board. So the women were the cops and the women were the bad guys, and guys like this—getting back to the guy at the restaurant holding his sack—“and guys like me,” he thought, “can never find a girl no more.”

He slid helplessly off the dining table, onto the bench, just as she got up and came around to try and help him. She struggled to lift but he was too heavy and, despite her genuine best efforts, he slid all the way to the floor beneath the table, emitting a groan as the floor pushed at his cringing lungs and cowering diaphragm. She had a world of sympathy for him but that’s it.

“Oh! Oh!” she sobbed over him. “I don’t know how to work this thing! I’m so sorry!” She was an airhead, he’d just decided, looking up at her with bulging eyes. His real self, the one hiding behind those eyes, the one that wanted to speak but couldn’t, the one waving all those frantically-assembled, mental white flags, took note of the fact that she was still, in her hour of succoring him, still had the thing idiotically pointed at his groin.

“Oh! Oh! Somebody help! Help us!”

He remembered why he didn’t like girly-girls after all and he wanted the hell as far away from her as he could be: they’re all friggin’ mechanically-challenged. Not that he could get up and go anywhere, not that he could do that anytime soon. Still pointing, that thing was still pointing in the worst possible of all directions, even as she tried to help, kneeling over, absurdly patting him on the back, like here he was, some kid choking on a cherry pit.

Idiot girl. Idiot girl, he thought in the center of a maelstrom of abdominal nausea. Still, he wished he was in her shoes right now. Those black pumps of hers, he’d trade places in a second. He’d give up gladly any acumen over gadgets just to be free of his balls. She stroked his hair and squealed "Oh, Oh" quite helplessly down at him once more. Besides, he thought on—and here he moaned and little trickle of saliva ran stupidly out—he could stay indoors and play with his own tits then.

Let the Lady Do Her Job (revised)

By hughgee

The boss told him to follow the broad. That's all he knew. He was just doing a job. As one of Louis Rocco's many notorious "thumb men," Ray Baby Ray did his job consistently better than all the rest of the two-bit thugs, and this was widely acknowledged--he was better at beating people up, tailing people, extracting information, extortion, you name it. This was why Louis put Ray on this job of tailing the broad, that pesky dame private detective who was getting a little too close to Louis' illicit "operations." Louis' instructions to Ray: find out who she is, find out where she lives, find out what she knows, and, above all, find out who hired her.

Walking some distance back from her on a crowded city sidewalk now, tailing her down the sidewalk, Ray's three day surveillance stake-out had paid off. Actually, it had paid off twofold: not only did he locate the ballsy gal and pinpoint her daily comings and goings, he also, in tailing her now, had a front row seat for the side-to-side motions of one of the finest female tails he had ever actually seen in his life. Oh my, holy smokes, thought Ray, puffing on a cigarette, weaving in and out of pedestrians; Oh my, what an ass! True, in pictures, the gal's face was nothing special to look at, covered in red freckles as it was--even in the black and white photo which Louis gave to Ray, Ray could tell the gal was a redhead because of those freckles. Nobody had freckles like that who wasn't also a redhead. She also had the pink complexion Ray was expecting--also typical of a redhead. Ray never liked redheads, really, and up till now, the only attractive thing about her had been her from the photo had been the flowing carpet of hair, wavy undulations sprawling all about her shoulders and down beyond. But still, Ray thought, how many redheads were actually truly worthy of being called "beautiful"? Not many, he'd concluded, and when he first found her on the street after those three sleep-starved days, he'd initially figured that he was right: she was, in fact, not all that special to look at. Just another brassy broad parading around bare-legged in a manly business suit, the type of business suit made for women who think they can cut it in the dog-eat-dog business world of men.

Still, Ray had to admit, watching the undulations of her ass right now while she pounded the pavement in her black pumps, briefcase by her side, the gal had one helluva seat on her. She was in all a strongly built gal, with powerful feminine shoulders, but wow, her hips really, really stuck out from her somewhat slim waist. She had a swimmer's body--a very stout female swimmer. Ray puffed the last puff on his cigarette, his eyes transfixed on the wobbling ass 30 feet in front of him, and he even surprised himself when he whispered aloud, "Damn bucket ass." Her thighs were stocky, her bare calves muscular. But her face told more about her: she wore a grim, confident, in-your-face stoicism. Like she would always know exactly where she was going at any given time, and you'd better not get in her way or else. Louis had warned him that the gal was brassy all right. Boy, she looked it too. Ray was going to enjoy this. He was getting paid to knock some sense into this gal and, he thought, he'd probably get in a few cheap feels while he was at it.

The lady detective wheeled abruptly to the left, entering into the Covington Inn, a well-known and rather plush hotel. Ray followed. He saw her in the lobby, waiting for the elevator. With his keen eyesight, he took note of the floor button she had pushed, then Ray quickly headed over to the stairs and made the ascent.

As expected, Ray got to the 12th floor ahead of the elevator, and, finding a dark corner to fall back in, he waited. The elevator bell rang, the doors opened, and out stepped the voluptuous private dick, pumps clacking on linoleum tiles. Damn bitch, Ray thought to himself. You give my boss trouble, I give you trouble. The gal veered right and headed down the long hallway. Ray followed her. When she got seven doors down, she stopped and reached into her purse. Apparently this was her room. Ray knew this was his chance, so he pounced.

He grabbed her from behind, his big paws enveloping her. "Sorry lady, it’s just business," he grunted.

Instinctively, in one deft, fluid motion, quick as you please, the redhead thrust her butt back, forcing Ray's lower body back. Her black-pumped heel then shot up like an angry mule, catching Ray's crotch dead on. It was such a quick, powerful motion, and it actually made a resounding thump echo down the hallway. Ray Baby Ray, Louis Rocco's number one thumb man, the guy who was built like a gorilla and carried out his various violent jobs like a gorilla, collapsed in a heap on the floor like a thrown-down burlap sack of potatoes.

The redheaded private dick stood over him blocking out the hallway light, her exaggerated silhouette on the wall opposite like a comic book drawing of the feminine form: shadowy huge hips and shoulders and legs, a tiny, wasp-like shadow of a waist connecting them together. The gal had her hands on her hips looking down at the man. Ray was in a curled up ball, clutching his stricken nuts, deaf and dumb to the world, and most of all mute, except for the strained breathing.

"Who sent you?" she said sternly down at him.

Wasn't that what he was sent to ask her??? Ray couldn't believe the pain he was in. He wanted to throw up. He wanted to take a dump. Most of all, he wanted her to just go away and leave him be, leave him lie there, nursing, cupping his balls, his poor balls, “Oh my,” he thought, “what that girl just do to my balls.”

She prodded his abdomen, poking into the center of his protected abdomen with the sharp toe of her black pump. "I said, ‘Who sent you?’" She sounded even more serious that time. Yet even if Ray had wanted to answer, he couldn't have.

The gal crouched down alongside him. Bending, her freckled face was very close to his ear. She stroked his hair in a gesture almost of pity, of sympathy for him. Her voice even changed to a coo as she knelt there. "Look, I don't care if you can't talk right now. You better start spilling your guts or I'm going after them again. You know you don't want that." Ray felt her fingernails gently scraping the side of his neck, running under his clenched chin, tickling his five-o'clock shadow of a beard. "You know you're not going to be able to stand it if I go after them again. Talk, please. Don't make me have to hurt you anymore." She laughed subtly right next to his cheek and Ray felt the exhale; he could tell what kind of perfume she was wearing. The gal sounded worn out, kind but impatient, like she'd just had a very busy day or something. "Look, you're actually kind of cute. I don't like hurting cute guys. Just tell me who sent you." Ray wanted to answer. She seemed so kind and considerate. Didn't she know he couldn't?

The next thing Ray knew, holy crap, sonuvabitch if the gal's slender, fair fingers weren't probing, forcing, thrusting their way through his own fingers which where still keenly covering his crotch. He felt the sharpness of her nails. She was not going to be denied; Ray was in far too feeble a state to resist her anyway. Oh no, Oh no, thought big Ray, as he felt the gal unbuttoning, then unzipping him. It's done, she did it. He winced as her hand jammed its way down his trousers, underneath his boxer shorts, because he felt the sharpness of her nails as it jabbed into the sensitive flesh of his package.

"Oh, sorry. I didn't mean to do hurt your johnson," she said--and she was sincere about it! She was hurting him, she was freeing his package up for who knows what painful purpose, yet she didn't want to cause him any more duress than was necessary, at least not to his johnson. She just wanted his balls. Something in the tone of her sympathetic voice made that clear. There was something clean and surgical about her method and demeanor.

Ray shuddered helplessly on the floor as the gal's grip gained full grasp and mastery over his ballsack. Her hands were cold.

"Up! C'mon, up!" she demanded, pulling his nuts gently upward. Ray was slow to follow only because he was still trying to recuperate, and didn't she realize that? "Look," she bent down extra close to his ear now and whispered, "your balls are coming with me. I suggest you follow."

And Ray did, to the best of his clumsy, enfeebled ability. Ray followed his balls. The gal led him backwards across the hall, and down a ways. Ray's pants fell down at his ankles and he had to hobble in reverse, somewhat bent over, to keep up with her insistent, unyielding tugging.

"C'mon," the girl in the business suit mildly, almost playfully exhorted, sounding like a mom encouraging a baby to learn how to walk for the first time.

When they got one door down and opposite in the hallway, the gal reached into her purse. Ray felt he could finally talk now, but as he did, the gal's grip tightened a bit, causing his voice to involuntarily come out falsetto. "What are you doing, lady?" he squeaked pathetically.

"I'm teaching you a lesson."

"What lesson?" he squealed in a higher octave than before, as she must have given his nuts a rude twist suddenly.

"Not to follow Daphne Wojciewski. Not to sneak up from behind on Daphne Wojciewski." She was rummaging through her purse as she said this, not looking at him, but her crippling grip on him remained constant. Ray could hear some clinking sounds, perhaps some hardcase cosmetics being jostled in her purse.

What was she rifling around for?

"Look lady, lemme go, please? Hey, I'll never bother you again, okay?" Ray was writhing and sweating, his back to the hotel door. Who's hotel door? The woman remained at his side, clutching him, controlling him easily. At last she appeared to find what she was looking for.

"No can do, big guy. If you're not going to talk to me, fine. But at least I'm gonna teach you a lesson you'll never forget."

"What lesson, lady?" Ray twisted and exclaimed. He'd meant to be loud but he wasn't. He'd meant to cry out loud, to cry out for help even, he didn't care at this point, just so the pressure on his balls would cease and desist. Anything, anything, just so the vice his balls were caught in would turn him loose. It seemed to Ray that his vocal cords were directly, inexorably linked to his balls. When his balls were harassed, his voice fled from him. Fled in panic. He had very little control over anything right now. All the control lay with this freckled faced chick detective, in her balled up punishing, oh so punishing fist.

Ray gasped aloud as he felt the coldness of cold metal around his privates, surrounding them, imprisoning them. He'd heard the clink of metal too. It felt like a hard, unforgiving noose had just been placed around his balls, just above his balls, and clamped down mercilessly. And that's exactly what had happened.

Private detective Daphne Wojciewski let loose the man's balls and tugged back on the handcuffs. Ray shuddered again as a cold metal intruder bumped up against his butt, in between his two cheeks. He let out a shrill sigh like a man diving into a cold bath. Another clink, this time metal on metal. Ray had no idea what was going on, but that sound was unmistakable.

Suddenly, casually striding over, the red-haired broad, the woman detective, was standing in front of him, hands on her hips, even as she had been standing after she had originally incapacitated this big unwanted brute. For a split second, Ray thought she must've turned him loose, and he tried to make a break for it, tried to run to the side, down the hall, to freedom, away from this vicious ball-squeezing bitch--only to feel the hellacious pain of his balls being yanked about a full inch out of his body. Ray fell back; his back against the door, and let out a muffled mewling sound. He realized now--the rudest of all realizations--that this lady dick had just handcuffed his nuts to the door handle--AND FROM BEHIND EVEN. A million thoughts raced in big Ray's head, most notably of which was the awesome thought: What will Louis think when he hears what happened. Ray began to huff and cry openly. Real tears came out of him. With his pants down at his ankles, with his butt up against the door knob, he stood there, stooped over, sobbing convulsively.

"Lady, please..." he tried.

"Call me Wojo."

"Okay, okay, Wojo, please--"

"It's too late for that. Save it for the police," she said tersely. Then, bending in to kiss him on the darkly whiskered cheek--whether it was in mocking coyness or actual, genuine feminine sympathy Ray would never know; indeed, it could only confound him for many years to come, whenever he mulled it over in his head, long after he'd gone on to change his occupation to a safer, more pedestrian one--the lady detective whispered something into his ear. Ray felt the smoothness of her skin on his, the slight hint of womanly peach fuzz on the side of her face, her thick mat of deep red hair piling onto his own shoulders just for a moment. She murmured something--Ray could never be sure--but something that went a little something like this: "I'm sorry I have to do this to you, big guy. I love balls. Has anybody ever told you yours are huge? I'd love to suck on them and hear you squeal. I'm sorry. Brace yourself, 'cause old Ms. Robinson does NOT like being disturbed."

With that, she flung herself at the closed door, pounding like mad with both fists flailing, her arms thick, muscular, but womanly fleshy and soft as they grazed rapidly in succession against Ray's shoulder. "Room service! Hey, asshole, room service! Open up! Open up, you old fart!" Just as suddenly as she'd started the pounding, she fled away down the hall, two doors down to her own apartment. Quickly retrieving her keys from her purse, she opened her door and partially went in, careful to peek her face back at the trembling, beseeching, imploring face of big Ray, who only had the slightest, foggiest notion of what was now happening to him. All Ray did know, in fact, was that it wasn't good.

A yell from behind the door. "Go away! I didn't order anything."

Ray was starting to get the picture finally, standing there against the door, stooped and helpless and in shock as he was. He looked up and over, pleadingly at detective Daphne. His eyes were like bulging golf balls as his finger went to his lips, begging her to keep silent, shushing her.

But the Lady Dick would have none of it. She poked all of her head out, smiled and winked at Ray, then, shouting, "Hey in there! I said room service! Open up, you old bat!"

The jiggling of the cold doorknob was unmistakably felt by his naked butt cheeks. His balls clamped and chained to the door knob, Ray freaked. He began shaking, crying over to lady Daphne, "Please, please…don’t…" he whimpered. He begged frenetically. The detective pushed a finger up to his lips, shushing him, shaking her head.

“It’s just a little tug.” So sincere, so damn sincere in her reassurance, his fleeting thought.

“No!” he protested.

“Oh, hush,” she chided. “It’s just a couple inches.”

‘Easy for you to say!’ his next thought.

She stepped away from him, pumps clacking. Ray Baby Ray struggled away, reaching under his crotch for the doorknob in a desperate attempt to keep it closed.

“You men,” the Lady Dick mused. “Such babies.”

“NOOO—“

This last, most vociferous protest was cut short, and the red-haired brickhouse-built bitch, halfway across the hall, from her open doorway, wheeled and feigned a curtsy, and she actually blew him a kiss. The door thumped, and thumped again, thumped against butt cheeks, thumped against the annoyed slippers of person on the other side. Detective Daphne witnessed Ray’s silenced face go palsied, the person on the other side of the door still struggling to open it.

From deep within the mantle of his manhood, a cry of "Oooooooaaaaaaaa!" finally exploded from Ray’s gaping mouth.

"What the hell? Damn door—oh my—oh my…”

Detective Daphne's door slammed shut. She headed for the phone to check her messages. Men. Couldn’t handle a little tug on their privates. Thank goodness she was a woman. Maybe now guys like Rocco would get the hell off her case.

Homeless Bust (aka: Bad Day on the Street for Wolfie)

By hughgee

"And stay out, y'dirty bum!"

"Wolfie" Bob Smith left the homeless shelter early that day, punted out the door on his arse by the normally good-natured proprietor for last night's endless streams of profanity and exposing himself.

"You're not coming back tonight. No more soup for you, jerk off."

Wolfie was sprawling face down in the gutter. Moments later, when he could recover enough to shakily stand upright again, Wolfie beat his arms and his chest to try and stay warm. He didn't have much on under this trenchcoat.

Wolfie looked up, cursed the sky, cursed that airplane over there, cursed the morning moon, the remaining few stars; he looked at the old flapping wrinkled newspaper at his feet. Yesterday's. He cursed the mayor, the president, congress--everyone and every thing whose fault it was that he was homeless. Someday, he always told himself, someday he's gonna write a book about his life, his setbacks, his misadventures and peccadilloes. He'd call it "Wolfie's Memoirs" and it would be great and sell a million copies and he'd be rich. After all, Wolfie knew what a talent he was at writing. He knew it like he knew the back of his...something. He forgot. At any rate, he couldn't start writing just yet--Olde English 800 had just started coming out with tallboys in bottles.

Still looking down at the decrepit, tattered newspaper, Wolfie whipped out his johnson and began urinating on it.

"You call THAT writing?" he bellowed, histrionically. "You guys think you're journalists, do ya? Well, ol' 'Wolfie' here could do ya one better. 'Cause I'm-a, I'm-a, I'm-a, why, I'm-a helluva writer. Just axe anybody. Anybody 'round here." Wolfie pronounced "here" like "heeyah." It was coming out in stop-and-go dying stream now, the final disgusting drops of morning homeless free-spirited yellow relief.

"I coulda been a contender," Wolfie bawled, becoming sincerely, tearfully maudlin for a just a moment, as only hard-core alcoholics do. "I coulda got me one of them Poolitzer Prize thingamajigs. If'n I'd ever want to, I reckon I still could," he concluded, feeling much better about himself now that he got that out of him finally and the yellow jaundiced words too.

Finished relieving himself on the sidewalk, Wolfie Bob Smith took a couple of staggered steps forward, stepping through the puddle he'd just made, his wholey-soled Vans soaking some of it right through. Wolfie kept on, this was his normal rolling gait; for every few steps forward, tricks of gravity and a permanently soused sense of equilibrium caused him to sway, then shuffle sideways, then shuffle and sway and stagger sideways to the other, like a drunken sailor in a storm.

At one point, when he'd finally crossed the street, Wolfie fell down on both knees, then to all fours, and began to wretch, then began emitting Technicolor tawdry chunks of homeless vomit, much of it splashing back up, bouncing off his own red hanging face, a few flecks taking up a more permanent lodging in his even redder, scraggly beard.

"HOOOOOO-AWWW!!!" he wretched. "HOOOOOO-AWWW!!!" Gasping for breaths in between each ghastly convulsive upchuck thrust. His drug and alcohol ravaged mind reminded him even here of what a great writer he could be, whenever he wanted to, any second now, he just had to decide, that's all. Looking down, his head swaying freely between his shoulders like a Mexican dashboard ornament, his eyes bloodshot and wide and yellow, he thought how gloriously, how movingly he could describe this growing, steaming rainbow heap of his own vomit in front of him. If only he had a pencil and paper and was ready to go.

Damn you, Olde English. Rusty Nails. Damn you. This is all your fault, Wolfie thought. G. Heilemann Brewing Co., you did this to me. You've so far made me delay my successful launching of my literary career. Hell, I could be a famous novelist by now. I could be up there with Richard Frost; F. Scott Fitzsimmons; Kirk Vonninguts. I could be there. I deserve to be. I gots the talent. Now if I could just only lay off the sauce.

Hey. Wait. Check out that ant I just puked on, thought Wolfie. Cool.

He dragged himself upright again and, sauntering, staggering off, Wolfie began doing what he normally does to pass the time: Grabbing the lapels of his decrepit but warm trenchcoat, opening and closing, a rapid flapping action, exposing himself to anything that walked or didn't walk. Wolfie Bob Smith was an incorrigible flasher. Most amusing of all, perhaps, was his strange sense of humility and decorum he nevertheless kept to: He always made sure to wear at least a homeless dirty T-shirt and his boxer underwear, stained brown from over use and excrement, boxer shorts that once were shiny silvery-white with bright yellow happy faces galore, but now the happy faces were upside-down, inside-out fading beige sad faces with a few holes in them, a few strangely bent black hairs pointing out.

Wolfie turned a corner onto Brewer St., mumbling to himself about what a great writer he is, staggering onwards until coming upon a fire hydrant. Wolfie flashed the fire hydrant. A bench. Wolfie flashed the bench. Some small sleeping somebody, covered in a cardboard blanket on the bench. Wolfie flashed this too.

Yikes. The somebody moved. Wolfie recognized it.

Oh sh*t, it's her, thought Wolfie. Toothless Carol. Wolfie blinked, trying to wake himself from this half-awake-life, the other half a chronic somnambulant hop-and-barley-fest.

The gal didn't have a tooth in her head, save for one vaguely brownish stump of one in the front. Good ol' Toothless Carol. A real local around these parts. A legend, really. One of the truly few homeless women in this town, the homeless men outnumbering them about 10-to-1, typically. She sat up on the bench, rubbing her tongue over her gums, rubbing her eyes with her fingerless blue and black bum gloves. She cackled like a caricature of a witch. A cartoon witch. The one that gave Bugs Bunny all that trouble every Halloween, thought Wolfie, only smaller. A lot smaller.

"Yeh-hee-hee." She cackled. "Cars. Cars when they drive, they, you know, who makes them? Not man, I'll tell you. It's not in the Cosmos. Not man. It's a mystery. A gol-durned mystery. So be it!"

Wolfie recognized her mindless, mind-shot, homeless woman banter. She was nuts. Been out in the elements too long. Too far gone by a long shot. But Wolfie knew something else about her: Toothless Carol was a terror. A notorious bum-roller when she got upset. This knowledge, combined with the earlier upchucking his guts out, made Wolfie's unkempt complexion white as dried bird poo. He shook a bit more than usual, knowing what he was up against, what and whom he was standing in front of.

Wolfie'd seen her do it before, this Carol. She'd rolled his homeless male buddies, his friends--well, a couple of them, at any rate. He was there, he saw it; he knew her technique. For years in this town, he'd always managed to stay clear, to lay low around her. Until this morning, until he'd flashed before looking.

Wolfie stood frozen and looked into that toothless formerly feminine falling apart maw, and he realized something. He knew suddenly that, if he wanted to, he could write a description of this ugly face, Carol's hideous toothless, caving-in grin. He could write it out in spades and similes, enclose it cleverly as a character in a story, and then he'd make the big bucks and be famous. If he ever wanted to. He certainly had the talent, after all.

"C'mere, jet planes. Exxon's calling you out from the dark," she mindless rambled, rubbing her exposed fingers together like she was greedily counting invisible dollar bills. "Planes. You fly because I say you can. I have the power to do all that. You obey because you're part of my endowment of essence. Sooooo...never forget it."

Wolfie knew her heightened ramblings meant only one thing: She was feeling feisty. He'd pissed her off by foolishly flashing her. When Carol was feisty, you ran. You'd better. That was the rule. So he did. Others have tried, others have paid the price. Just go. Move. Get out of here. Standing your ground was futile. Other homeless guys tried, other homeless guys just got rolled. Without exception, as far as Wolfie could recall.

Wolfie told his body to run but it wouldn't. It was too far shot. But it could stumble and stagger, so that's what he did. Wolfie made off, he hustled as best as his wobbly legs would carry him. He had to escape--and fast!

Carol got up from the street bench, adjusted her shawl, grabbed hold of a shopping cart nearby which held all her belongings, and gave chase, cackling all the way.

It was a pitiful chase, something almost geriatric to it, though neither Wolfie nor Carol were all that old. They just looked old. Carol followed along, pushing her shopping cart with both skinny fists, appearing stern and shaky, like an old woman pushing an aluminum walker.

"Yeh-hee-hee, yeh-hee-hee," Carol cackled. It didn't take too long before she'd cornered Wolfie in a box alley, her cackling, him huffing and puffing, wheezing and retching. He'd trapped himself.

Well, at least someday he could write about it, maybe. He'd have to fight his way out, he knew. No escaping it now.

Wolfie was still a pretty big guy, after all. In only his muscles weren't shot from malnourishment and booze and drugs. Then again, he just remembered, she eats the same homeless fare I do, the same homeless shelter soup and crap that they serve. And what's more--she's a chick, after all. Or at least she used to be. She never had the muscles to begin with, so there.

Wolfie was considering this, and pondering the timeless, undeclared, but always ongoing battle between the sexes, in every facet of life. He was waxing philosophical. A residual flashback pang of LSD he'd taken as a teenager shook loose from some fatty deposit in his spine. He touched his chin, stared off into space. He loved moments like this. Moments of reverie and flashback druggy happy paradiso. He could be a great philosopher someday, he knew. If he ever just wanted to. If his brain just said the word. Someday. Someday it would happen. He could be a more famouser philosopher than Dana Plato even.

While Wolfie was tuning out, Carol was closing in. Little more than half his size, she shuffled up, cackled on, then kicked. Her dirt and mud encrusted tennis shoe parted in between the open buttoned middle of Wolfie's trenchcoat like curtains.

Wolfie's big druggy-dazed smile disintegrated, his big upper body instantly arched, and then the whole shambling hulk raced downward in an apparent attempt to beat Carol's dirty kicking foot back to the ground. See which one touches first. It's Wolfie. The only thing he would ever beat her at.

Wolfie Bob Smith lay in a homeless fetal ball, clutching his broken homeless crotch and gasping, suffering from a bad case of ballbusting-induced emphysema.

"Yeh-hee-hee," she tormented and cackled down at him, jumping up and down incessantly, peevishly. She stopped, cackled some more, then began stripping him of his trenchcoat. The only real thing he'd ever had between his fatbody and the real miserable elements of the coming night, and the next night, and the next one. Carol rolled Wolfie one way with her dirt-encrusted shoe, then kicked and rolled this large helpless lump on his other side, as she pulled her prize off him. Wolfie continued holding his stricken privates, staring up at her wide-eyed and paralyzed like a rigid but alive wasp-stung bug of some kind.

"I'm gonna need this coat. Yeh-hee-hee. Yeh-hee-hee. It gets mighty gol-durned cold at night, dontcha know. Yeh-hee-hee. Yeh-hee-hee. Hey, let go o' yer nuts so's I can git it off around yer wrists. Leggo. Leggo or you'll be a mite sorry, I reckon. A-yeh-hee-hee."

Wolfie was just in the middle of thinking how, if he ever wanted to, he could write about this. Change the characters around; it'd make a great scene in some cops and robbers story or something. He definitely had the talent to write it and make it a classic. He knew that much.

Just at that moment, Toothless Carol stomped on his hands, which offered no protection to the balls they cupped; the force of the blow just went right through, driving the little malnourished hapless victims into his pelvis.

Wolfie let go. Carol got herself a new jacket.

Well, not new, exactly. I mean, they were homeless, after all.

Wolfie's pain was abominable, primordial. He lay there for a long time, a filthy homeless guy in nothing but an awful smelly T-shirt and disgusting, abhorrent boxer shorts, holey socks and decaying shoes. Eventually, when he could almost think again, when is about as good as it ever got for him anymore,

Wolfie thought about the pain, just how shockingly bad it was. And he knew he could write about it, if he ever felt like it.

Wait. Forget that sh*t. Mayes Liquor Mart. Tallboy bottles. He'd have to beg and loiter all day, but if he did, by the end of the day, he might have enough for a sixer. Maybe. It was a definite maybe, if he could just get up.

Hitting His Eject Button (revised)

By hughgee

Captain Parker had worked all summer for this. All officer candidate school, really. For years he’d crammed the books, he’d got himself in shape, focusing on his lower body, mainly. Doing squat after squat in the officer’s rec hall and gymnasium. This was it finally. Pilot school. Passed all written exams with flying colors, eased through simulators, now this, the last and most crucial part of his final exam. Fighter pilot. The centrifuge. All those squats would surely pay off now.

You had to flex your lower body muscles, your thighs in particular. Quads are the biggest muscle on your body. He knew all that. He also knew that by doing all that, by flexing your lower body muscles, tightening up your lower half, you squeezed the blood back upward, back into your head where you needed it. You needed it desperately during tight maneuvers, dogfighting, double barrel rolls. Without enough oxygen to the brain, you’d pass out, lose control. If you were lucky, hopefully, if that ever happened, if you did pass out, Auto-eject would kick in, kick you out of the plane. Get a free ride down on a parachute. You’d have to explain how you lost a 3 million dollar hunk of valuable machinery though. Captain Parker hoped it would never come down to that. That’s why his legs were like iron bands now. He could take the Gs. He would take the Gs. He must succeed. Failure is not an option.

So successful was he that this morning, prepping and going over and getting stuffed into the bulky flight suit, he was not at all surprised that he, alone, had made it this far. He had watched as, one by one, all his fellow aspiring fighter pilots had dropped out or failed a written segment and had to go back. Capt. Parker was surprised to learn that one other candidate had come over from the East coast, a candidate highly recommended. This being the only centrifuge in operation, what with all the defense cutbacks, it was not, however, surprising that another would be sent out this way. Col. Rampart had informed him of this this morning. “So where is he?” Capt. Parker had asked.

“Isn’t he suiting up?”

“Oh, you’ll see,” was all the response of the Col., who had a smirk on his face.

“Dude’s gonna be late. Afraid I’m gonna smoke him?” said Capt. Parker, adjusting his last of many zippers over bulky cloth, reaching for his helmet.

When he got there, out in the hallway, he could see in the window the giant cylinder, the cockpit suspended at the end of a huge titanium arm. The colossal turning screw at the center. Soon, he would be riding in that. At the entrance now, Parker saw the back of him, also in a bulky, ponderous beige flight suit. Must be the other pilot, he thought. Damn, he’s short. What is he, a midget? He approached, tapped the guy on the shoulder and had meant to wish him luck, but held his tongue when…she….when SHE turned around. ‘A GIRL?’ he thought.

“Hi” she said, and broad beamed a smile upward at him. She was cute, if you were gonna be generous about it. Kind of a big ass. Even in that suit you tell, now that he knew it was a girl. He should’ve seen that before. Her blond hair was shoulder length and she saw him looking at it.

“Oh,” she said, fiddling with it with the hand not holding her helmet at her side. “I’m gonna get it cut. Don’t worry. They’ve been all over my ass about it. I told myself I’d cut it right after flight school. Only if passed, though.”

“Oh,” he said back to her. It was all he could think of, taken aback as he was. He wasn’t really looking at her hair, per say. Not really it wasn’t the kind of hair that warranted that much attention. It was blond, sure. It was wavy, sure. But it was coarse and thick. It looked like it might have the texture of horse hair if you grabbed it.

“So, you must be Parker. Heard you’re pretty good.” She snapped out her words quickly, coyly. She had this funny upturned pug nose. Nothing to write home about, but maybe worth a bang or two.

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah. I’m Parker.” He was feeling more composed, more adjusted to this new development. And he didn’t like it, now that he thought about it.

“So, you ready to ride the snake?” She was cocky. She was sure of herself, this stubby little gal. He had to give her that much. Especially since she had just reaching out and flicked his crotch when she said the word “snake.” This brazen gesture served to irritate him a little.

“Look, are you sure you belong here?”

“What?”

“You know what you’re getting into?”

“What—because I’m a chick?”

“Yeah, if you want to put it that way.” Parker rapped on the clear acrylic window into the centrifuge twice. “See that in there? That ain’t no written exam. That ain’t no video game. This is the real deal.”

She scoffed, snorted, shook her head and her hair caught the wind and lifted up for a second. “No shit, Sherlock. Geez, you guys. I swear. Think you own the world.” He saw that she had yellow teeth now, in that otherwise cherubic permanently puckered up mouth.

“Look, don’t gimme that women’s lib crap. You could get hurt. I MEAN it. Look at you. Doesn’t look like you’ve worked out much. Doesn’t look like it all. You’ve still got babyfat.” Parker slapped the back of her flight suit over her rump. Yes, what he felt confirmed it. He’d felt the jiggle in there. This girl hadn’t worked out at all. She was soft, squishy. Good for a girlfriend, all that cushion, but NOT a pilot. “Shouldn’t you be back home, or most back at some office somewhere?”

He knew it instantly. He shouldn’t have slapped her. She slapped back and Parker felt a sharp lightning rod of pain run up his spine and push out his eyeballs. He was on his knees before her, grabbing his crotch with both hands. His helmet was rolling on the floor. He looked at her legs in the paunchy suit, saw her boots, he couldn’t talk, he couldn’t believe it.

“Oops,” he heard her say. “Forgot how sensitive you guys are. Here, come on, let me help you up.”

Parker was mortified but he took her arm willingly, he needed the help to stand and he was hearing footsteps approaching. She wasn’t much help, slight as she was, and he couldn’t believe it as she continued talking, in the voice of a babysitter reading a nursery rhyme. “Poor little underballies. How’s my friends? How’s my friends?”

“Look, shut up, already. Okay?” He was standing now, though a little shakily.

“Sorry. I had a lot of brothers. They never messed with me once I learned their…secret.”

Parker couldn’t believe it. When she’d said the word “secret” she’d just tapped him quickly again down there, lightly but well placed, up and behind, right where they dangle, right where he lives. He felt his knees nearly buckle out from under him again. He’d been kicked there once as a kid—well, almost. Anyway, it didn’t feel like THAT. Not THIS. This was ridiculous.

She must’ve seen this in his face. “Oops,” she said then giggled. “You are sensitive. Okay, I’ll go easy on you.”

“So you picked on your little brothers, huh?”

“No, they were all older than me.”

“TEN-SHUN!”

The two stiffened like ramrods. It was Col. Rampart and a female assistant, heels clacking, looking leggy in the standard issue air force skirt ending at the knees.

“Captain Parker, Captain Whitmarsh, this is Lt. Danley. She is the operative centrifuge engineer on duty.

They all exchanged greetings. Lt. Danley and Col. Rampart stepped into the control room. “Captain Parker, you’re up first.”

Parker whispered one last unpleasantry to the girl, the word “bitch” was in it, and the phrase “watch a real man” something something, put his helmet on, entered the vast centrifuge room, stepped over, climbed into the cockpit.

Click. Pop. Whir. A metal moan sounding ominous. He began spinning. Slowly, perceptibly, he was spinning faster, faster. He was enjoying this. He could see the little pug nose creature out his window. Holy shit—what was she doing? Dammit, she was grabbing her crotch and making face grimaces. That’s it. He’d bitch slap the little harlot when he got out of there. He swore it. Faster now, spinning. He felt the change, the dizziness. Flexing, breathing methodically, flexing, his face contorting, straining, tighten those quads, tighten them, dammit, get the blood back…..

When they pulled him from the cockpit, he was still out. When he finally did awake he was on a gurney somewhere—where was he? In another room somewhere. Hospital material everywhere. Oh no, how long had he been out???

Col. Rampart. There was Col. Rampart entering the room.

“Good morning, Sunshine.”

“How long was I out?”

“Oh, just a couple minutes.”

“Where am I?”

“Next door down. Infirmary.”

“So I didn’t do so hot.”

“I wouldn’t say that. 8.2 before you blacked out. It’s about average. You’re welcome to get up if you can. This was only precautionary.”

Captain Parker shot up from the gurney. He was on his feet. “The other one—how’d she do?”

“Come see for yourself.”

Parker didn’t wait to follow Rampart. He hustled out, down the hallway, to the big window peering into the centrifuge. It was spinning like a horizontal ferris wheel on amphetamines. He heard the voice of Lt. Danley counting out numbers in a calm but strangely feminine, almost lilting voice, the kind you seldom hear in the military.

“14.8. 14.9. 15. 15.1. 15--”

Parker could see her in the cockpit. She was smiling. She gave him a thumbs-up sign with a small, fat, gloved hand.

“15.4, 15.5, 15.6--” Lt. Danley called out to Col. Rampart who was now alongside Parker. Danley said, “That’s it, sir, that’s all this machine is rated for. Gonna have to stop this.”

“Shut her down,” Parker bellowed.

In the cockpit, the girl pilot slapped her arms around, waved at everybody. She had all the enthusiasm of a teenage girl at a slumber party. Off came the oxygen mask, and check it out: that yellow-toothed puckish grin again.

He slapped Parker on the back, squeezed his shoulder like a father might. “Looks like we’re becoming obsolete,” he said, with a sigh. Parker knew what he meant. He felt a strange bonding with Rampart which he had never felt before.

“Get your stuff, you guys. See you both back at IOC.” With that, Col. Rampart slapped his felt hat on his thigh as he made his way down the hallway and out the exit.

Captain Whitmarsh, this little sawed-off waif with wide hips, hopped out of the cockpit before it had even come to a complete stop. She was still hopping once she was again on linoleum.

“Woohoo! That was fun! Can I go again?”

Danley was more subdued. “Very funny, Captain. Get your things. Col.

Col. Rampart wants to see both of you in the IOC.”

“Oh, maaaan,” she complained, sounding like an adolescent girl protesting her mother’s curfew.

Whitmarsh bounded into the control room, hair bouncing, boots sliding, hopping. Everything around her was electric. Upon entering the hallway, confronting Parker, she remained giddy.

“Man, that was FUN!”

“Shut up,” Parker said, dryly.

“Oh, come on. You passed….probably.”

“Yeah, but…but…how’d you do that anyway?”

“Do what?”

“What’d you mean, what?! 15-something? You broke the damn machine.”

She stopped. “Oh, shit. Don’t feel bad. It’s girls, silly. We’re stronger.”

“What?!”

“We can handle more Gs.”

“That’s bullshit.”

“It’s a scientific fact.”

“Bullshit.”

“Sorry, dude. Scientific Frontiers Magazine. Guess you don’t read much.”

“Come on.”

“Well, you could try watching the Discovery Channel sometime. Where’ve you been, soldier?”

“Yeah. Right.”

“Lemme guess--spend all your time in the weight room, huh?” She approached him stood on her tippy-toes, reached and rapped on the side of his head one and a half times before he violently pulled back. “You gotta work out this out, too,” she goofed.

“Don’t touch me!” he snapped and jerked his head away. He had lost his last strand of patience with this tiny, space-invading virago. He should have jerked the rest of himself away.

“Too bad you can’t work this out,” she playfully chirped, swiftly palming his crotch again and connecting.

Parker stooped instantaneously, felt his knees nearly go out once more, protesting in husky-throated anger, “Look, you’re a freak of nature. That’s all.”

“No I’m not. Just a girl,” she giggled, and then, as if to emphasize this point, she skipped a couple times on the linoleum as if playing hopscotch around him. It looked ridiculous in the huge flight suit. Parker gathered himself, took a deep breath, stood up, let go of his crotch, and promptly pushed her against the wall. She collided against it with a thud.

Her turn now. Collecting herself, Captain Whitmarsh’s voice turned into an adolescent, a sarcastic adolescent: “Um, okay, like, don’t ever do that again—or else.”

“Or else what?”

“Or else--whatchowww!” She had leapt and crouched at the precise moment she made the cartoon karate sound; she had made the cartoon karate sound at the precise moment her hand struck his groin, a balled-up feminine fist, her teasing cruelty magnified. It was like popping the valve on a standard-issue auto-inflating raft but in reverse. Captain Parker deflated all at once, dropping to the floor that fast in a coiled up a fetal position. It was in the same place, up and in behind the penis, where nothing was there to cushion the impact of the strike but the thin, hanging bag of his scrotum. He didn’t know it, senseless as he was, but she did.

The bottom of the Easter basket. Her brothers knew the spot and it was many time they cursed their own anatomy at her feet, sometimes bare feet, sometimes those Mary Janes she wore to school, but always so little. That was the thing that stuck with you; that something so little could’ve just beaten you up. Could’ve made it look so easy, too. And she did it in front of friends, their friends, her friends. No sense of decorum, decency; no sense of respect. But it was exciting to have a man down. To do it so easily. Kneeling on one knee over Parker made her remember. The silence mood this put them in, the forced shutting up. So sudden. She never cared if her brothers got teased mercilessly afterward by their schoolmates. That was their problem. They were assholes. Well, till they’d learned. They were nice after awhile. Of course they were. Wouldn’t you be if you were carrying around such liabilities? The funniest was when her oldest brother swore up and down that he had only been kicked in the stomach. Like anybody believed him. Like that was any better. Like any school girl armed with a mother’s advice knew that the pain, yes the pain, did indeed go up into their stomach. So maybe her brother wasn’t lying. Well, technically…

A rap on the window. Lt. Danley. She’d seen it, she’d been watching. Whitmarsh had known this. Just like school, it only made it funnier. Danley guffawed and covered her mouth not to laugh when she’d seen Capt. Whitmarsh drop Captain Parker. She was merely smiling know. Smiling as the two women exchanged knowing glances. She gave Whitmarsh the thumbs up sign.

“Well, he had it coming, don’t you think?”

Lt. Danley laughed. “I believe so.”

Danley made a motion like she was going to resume her work at shutting down the control panel, but she raised her eyes again, setting them on the stricken Parker. She looked mystified. Captain Whitmarsh merely looked pleased with herself, standing up, gathering her things, her helmet, standing looking down at her helpless victim.

"Like I said, girls're stronger."

No answer but a muffled grunt.

“If you’re late, should I tell Col. Rampart what’s keeping you?”

"Tell 'im he's busy holding his manhood," joked Danley, and the two service women walked down the corridor together.

Captain Parker’s fetal position, like a half-open armadillo, was by chance facing them as they exited, otherwise he wouldn’t have been able to see it, Captain Whitmarsh's butt, the way it jiggled. It was like blubber. Even in the big fat flight suit, you could still tell.

Futuristic Beach Bust

By hughgee

Venice Beach looked like a Hindu Hari Krishna festival, jammed with people, jammed with foreigners, shops, stands, exotic foods, jugglers and magic trick hoaxers all out to pimp a buck.

“Ah-bah-diddy! Ah-biddy-biddy!”

“Ohhhh yes, my friend. Watches! I have watches! I have plenty watches for sale.” Che Guevara T-shirts waving, hung up next to tie-dyes, across from multi-colored flip-flop sandals. Everything for sale. Freak show central. The strip of asphalt running along the beach was full of walkers, strollers, bikers, roller skaters and roller bladders. The usual for Saturday morning. A young bikinied woman zoomed along on cherry red rollerblades with snow white laces, long sandy straight hair streaming in her tail wind, listening to earbud headphones, thin yellow cord descending down to her wrist upon which was Velcro-strapped a small yellow-silver mp3 player.

Here she comes and the kind of lips she smiles with, pink and puffy, makes more than one of the guys she zooms past think of blow jobs. Blow jobs and she knows it. She has that knowing look. She knows her bare midriff is a good bare midriff, sleek and supple; knows the legs she pushes off on look damn good in a skirt. They look damn good now, and she knows it. She knows what she has and she flaunts it, smiling and cavorting in circles around the cute ones, then moving on down the strip to the next. Everything matches, and she has a new yellow fanny pack strapped around her waist where the sweat of bare skin rubs against it. And she’s unzipping the thing as we speak, reaching in, grabbing something. She’s got it, and she draws it up to her lips. Something silver, pencil-like but shorter. She skates on, skating past men, couples, freaks and foreigners. She takes a deep breath, she blows as she skates.

“Ooooo.”

“Aaaaa.”

“Ohhh.”

She can’t hear it. There she goes.

Three men she just went by grabbed their Bermuda shorts and bent over at the waist. Skating and blowing. Look at her. Zoom.

“Oh, shit.”

“What’s wrong, honey?” the dumpy woman in the black bikini asks.

“My balls.”

“Your balls?”

“Yeah.”

Skating, blowing, zooming on by some more.

“Ohhhh.”

“Damn! Ow!”

“Oh! Oh!”

Three more, bent over in her wake, all male.

Two women talking who were walking with the stricken males: “She’s got one of those things,” says the one.

“That bitch.”

Another woman knows what’s up. She looks at the girl’s teardrop, partially-clad-in-pink rear end as she skates away and she hears the girl laughing.

“What a bitch.”

The guys sit down in the sand one by one. The ones who were walking alongside women get help from their mates. The women help their men off the strip and gently ease them down as they moan, one and all, moaning and cupping their ballsacks through their swimwear.

“Here she comes—she’s coming back!” one of the women announces.

And she was. She made a loop and was headed back this way again, leaving a trail of stooping, anguished men in her wake.

“Dammit, what’s she doing? That bitch.”

“Get her. Grab her!” one of the ladies says.

And when she’s close enough again, they do. The young woman on the rollerblades, accosted by three angry women whose men are hurting.

“Dammit, girl, what the hell you doin’?”

“She can’t hear you. Take that thing out.”

One of the ladies yanks the earphones out of the girl as she looks surprised and half certain of what to do, whether to flee or blow some more on her whistle. She blows. Big this time, a big, big breath then blows, and three of the guys in the background already butt-planted in the sand turn over to one side and let out feeble hollers like somebody’s jabbing at their insides. Which is what it feels like when somebody comes at you, comes at your testicles with low-frequency soundwaves in the decibel of -.0359? Thank you, Disgronificator Technologies. Men of the world rejoice.

“Ha, ha!” the girl chortles, pointing over at the men, sides on the sand, feet curled up underneath the seat of their Bermuda shorts. “Your guys are done.”

“Girl, what’s with you? You know you can hurt somebody with those things.” The woman who said this yanked the whistle out of the girl’s mouth.

“Can’t help it if your men are such sissies,” says the girl, impishly.

“Aw, girl, don’t you rile me now. Don’t you—don’t even do it, y’hear.”

“Get the hell out of here.”

“Make me,” says the imp. She distracts the lady holding the whistle, points at a turbaned Hindu freak walking by, long enough to snatch back the whistle. Blow, baby, blow. Long and hard, all her might. Just blowing.

“Ohhh—oooohhh—ohhh!!” says a rolling-around man.

“Oooooo—shit!—shit!—Ooooo,” says another, equally rolling around on the sand.

“Honey—please—make her stop!” wails another to his wife, one of the three angry accosting women. They try to snatch back the whistle. Cat fight. Bikinis fly. The girl’s tits are small; the middle aged woman who also had her top yanked, her tits are large, long, hanging down nearly to her belly button. The middle aged tits flap and undulate as the women struggle. Handfuls of hair.

The young woman breaks free, skates off, scratched and bleeding on the arms and one shoulder.

“Bitch!” they call after her. “Don’t you dare come back here!”

“Tend to your men!” the girl yells back. “Pussies!”

The women walk back to their men, old long-tits stopping to retrieve her bikini top off the asphalt.

“Oh, Howard, are you okay?”

“Don? Don? Can you talk?”

No answer. There’s your answer.

People go by. The freak show continues.

“I don’t understand it,” says one woman, standing over her fallen man. “Why can’t they handle it?”

The long-titted woman, leaning over her man: “Because they’ve got balls.”

“Yeah, but so what?”

“So what?—LOOK at them! They’re in pain.”

“Yeah, I know. But those damn whistles do nothin’ to us.”

“Low-frequency sound waves,” says the other woman, sitting down beside her man who was still fetal-positioned up in the sand.

“I know. I know. But what do they do? What the hell do they do to them?”

“The sound penetrates their scrotum,” explains old long-tits, peering up into the sun at the one befuddled, still-standing woman. “There’s nerve-endings in there. We got ‘em too, but they’re higher up.” She points at her bare, fat-rolled abdomen. “Men’s hang out and the scrotum’s too thin. It goes right through.”

“Shit,” mutters the standing woman. She goes over to her man. She waits. And waits. It’s hot. “Herbert, when you think you’re gonna be able to get up, huh?”

A groan. Only a groan.

Men, the woman thinks. Such wimps. We really have to look after them.

Thursday, September 20, 2007

Facing his weakness the hard way...

By hughgee

“Come on,” the tall, gawky man said, a bead of sweat running down from his flattop hairdo. “Time’s a wastin’. I paid for thirty minutes here.”

“Awright, awright. Just hold yer horses,” she said, snappishly, chewing on gum, chewing on her tongue as well. She sounded and looked like Fran Drescher, but was more realistically built, having a few actual curves to offer underneath her gray lunchtime female executive suit.

They stood opposite each other in the sweltering apartment.

It was his turn. “Now, I want multiple shots—remember that. Once you start going, don’t stop. I want it all, baby. Gimme all you got.”

She raised her eyebrows in disdain, peering up at him, blew a pink bubble over her red lips. “Are you sure about this?”

“Course I’m sure.”

“You want multiple? I mean, you’re not crazy or nothing, are you? I don’t wanna be goin’ to jail over hurtin’ no crazy man.”

His nostrils flaired, his hair bristled, though it already was bristled. “Look, I’m a real man, okay? I can do this. I’ve got macho all over, now do it.”

She took two steps and was within reach of him. She put her hands up on his shoulders, looking up at him. She looked apprehensive. Like she had experience in this kind of stuff; experience he was apparently lacking.

His jaw muscles clenched tight in his cheeks. His hands hanging at his sides turned into fists. His face peered down at her and something like rage over took it. “Come on!” he urged, “Remember—keep it coming! They call me Numbnuts! I can take it! Keep it kicking or I won’t pay y—“

His words got cut off as her bony knee thrust up into his groin. He had gone completely silent over this single blow. She went to knee him again but halted it halfway up when she saw the strength; the cocksuredness immediately leave his face. She waited two seconds on one foot, in something like a half-flamingo position, watching him nervously. He looked like a man who’s every single possession had just been confiscated by the IRS and this worried the hell out of her. By the time she went to kick again he was bent over so her knee hit him on the top of the head, the next knee on his shoulder.

“Hey,” she complained in that annoying New York accent, “don’t make me kick the top of your head? You want a broken neck or what?”

A second later he was on the floor, writhing around like an accordioned straw wrapper that someone was dripping carbonated soda on.

“Multiple shots, huh? Numbnuts. Don’t look so numb to me, bub.”

She had her hand on one hip, alternately examining the nails on her other hand and peering down at him, as he began to make loud soaring groaning noises, like the sound of distant but emphatic ghosts.

“Wait a minute—you tryin’ to commit suicide or something? Multiple shots. Listen, you’re a MAN, y’silly. You can’t be doin’ stuff like that wit balls. Dem balls is sensitive, y’know? Didn’t y’momma ever teach you nuttin’?” She blew another bubble and it snapped loudly. “Geez, I heard o’ guys committing suicide by cops, but not suicide by me. I could get in some kind o’ trouble for this. One shot is enough. That’s all you get. I ain’t never killed no man before and I ain’t about to yet. I am a lady, no matter whatchoo or anybody tinks.”

She waited, stood over him. “So, you gonna pay me or what?”

He could not answer. His scorched pathetic moans continued. He was in a fetal ball with his hands in his crotch, but it was a flailing fetal ball that she now had to step away from...but not before she reached down, took his wallet, extracted every green bill inside then walked out, high heels clacking.

"Hope I didn't bruise y'manhood too bad, Pete. Nice doin' bidness wit yous. See y'round maybe."

She closed the door behind her. The room went dark for the most part, except for the beam of light shining through the blinds on the suffering, sweating forehead of the guy she'd just left prostrate in one blow.

Det. Wojo Strikes Again (REVISED)

By hughgee

Detective Daphne Wojciewski needed answers. The guy wasn't cooperating. His fault. It was he who'd jumped her from behind just as she was exiting her car. He was much larger, far and away the brawnier, but his narrow male hips were no match for her equestrian thrusters and, while he reached and wrapped a semi-chokehold on her, she'd driven her big bucket posterior backwards, jabbing an elbow into his ribs. The big man fell like a house of cards.

Still, he'd have been up in a second were it not for Wojo's quick turnaround and even quicker toe blast: the black pleather pump split his kneeling legs like goal posts and sent him down to all fours—but she wasn't finished yet. Her big butt shot horizontal outwards like a polyestered horse’s rump as she bent at the waist--her tight gray business skirt preventing her from squatting—and here fought off his feeble manipulations of protest, and she thrust an insistent hand down the front of his button-fly jeans.

Got 'em.

"Your balls're coming with me. I suggest you follow," she said smartly, bringing him to his feet. He complied but stood shakily. Wojo saw he might go down again any second.

"Don't do it," she snarled, squeezing some more. "You're gonna hang yourself if you fall.”

(Business-like. ‘What’s with this bitch?’ his frantic thought. Everything business-like!)

“I ain't lettin' go," she advised with a shake of her head, red hair rising and falling. A lion’s mane and this bitch bites.

"OOO!—OOO!—OOO!" came the involuntary high-pitched ejaculations under the moustache, the lips forming on “O,” protruding and quivering. Quite an octave raise from the deep, imposing baritone he'd originally accosted her with.

"Talk!" she insisted. Twisting and watching and making the “OOOs” go harder, faster, higher. She was face to face and sick of it. Had enough and the day was young. Brown saddle of freckles over her nose wrinkling up as she glared and menaced. It was that time of the month and WHY NOW!?

"Who sent you?! Was it Louie Rocco? Hm?!"

Nothing. Grunts and feeble squeaks and heavy eyelids beating frenetically and eyes rolling up back into the head and down again. The guy wanted to talk. Fact is he couldn't. Wojo was her own worst enemy: She played too rough.

Wojo scanned her surroundings. "Hmph," she said, satisfied at something.

"Come." She lead him over to the right, off the sidewalk, him pelvis first, her walking backward and pulling. When they got to the chain link fence she stopped, and with her free hand struggled at his fly and then, voila, his package was out, exposed to the open air, but still being strangled by her slender, pale, merciless digits. Her free hand now went into her purse, brought out a pair of handcuffs.

CLICK.

The big man's chin was jutting up to the sky, Adam's apple bulging. He did a big in-over-his-head gulp a-la-Vince McMahon as he felt the cold metal go noose-like around his 'nads. Wojo tugged upward on the cuffs, testing it, letting him know what he was in for.

"Aye! Aye! Aye!" the man squealed at each tug, standing on tip toes throughout.

CLINK.

"There," Detective Wojo said, then, laughing, added, "How long can you walk on water?"

Standing on tip toes with his package cuffed to the fence a few critical inches too high for comfort. Trouble. ‘How'd he get into this?’ he thought. What'd the boss send me after THIS bitch for? Shit. Shit. He puffed and huffed and his mind raced as he sought a way out--but no way. There wasn't a way. This was really happening. ‘Shit! Get me out of here!’ he thought. Boss! Help! Anybody! His hands clung to the fence; he looked down and around and dribbled panic-stricken saliva like he was thirty stories up.

"NOW you'll talk," droned the Lady Dick confidently.

"No!" he said, and he gulped and swallowed hard. "No--I can't--he'll kill me."

"Oh, you'll talk," she corrected, surfeited with dramatic irony like somebody who knows exactly what the hell she was talking about. "When you get tired of hanging on, oh you'll talk all right."

He clung and he hung, clung and he hung. Wojo went back to the car, took out a donut and some coffee, skirt spread wide and thick as she sat on the edge of the hood and watched and ate and sipped quite calmly, quite calmly indeed. A couple minutes went by. Poor guy, she thought. Yeah, she had a heart. Someone under that hard cynicism she felt a little bad for every guy she'd ever de-nutted before. Still, there was that other side she had. One that didn't take no shit; one that's cracking a smile as the poor dumb bastard's legs're beginning to shake now. Yep, calves can't take much more. Look at those white knuckles hanging onto that fence. Give 'im another minute.

She went back around to the driver's side, reached in the open window, extracted a romance novel, then it was back to hood, flipping through pages and more coffee sipping. Gotta do something to fight this monotony, she thought. Look over. Poor bastard's leg shaking like convulsions now. Instant smile, suppressed chuckle.

OOO--the leg went—

"AAA-OOOO-AAA!"

Back up on tippy toes now. Oh you poor bastard.

"Okay, I'll talk! I'll talk!"

‘Thank goodness I don't have those,’ she thought. Thank goodness. Doesn't take much to get you f#ckers to talk.

Wojo took her time finishing her donut and coffee, thinking and waiting, reading, sipping, till he was pretty much begging and mewling and would've sold his grandmother out. Serves him right, she thought. Don't jump me. Not if you got balls, you don't.

When she did come to his rescue finally, first she took time to taunt him, rub it in a bit, blow in his ear, brandish and wave that flashy little, precious little, vital little key on the outskirts of his hallucinating peripheral vision. The guy was sobbing into the fence unabashedly. Savoring the moment even longer, she stuck a finger through one of the holes in the fence, wrapped it around and caressed the tight thin bulging skin of his sack with a long red fingernail. Even now, she noted, will a man quiver with enjoyment if you do this. Putz. What a putz. She soundly rapped the end of the finger a few times on the peachy-like bulge--TAP, TAP, TAP--and watched his eyes roll up, roll up, the lids blink, blink, and the dry mouth wheeze and plead. But when she pressed down, when she made like she was trying to leave a fingernail impression on the skin of that peach, then that was all she wrote.

"Okay! Okay! I’ll do anything!—I'll talk! It was Rocco!—he hired me!—it was him!! Lemme go—PLEASE!!"

"Wasn’t so hard now, was it?” she muttered sardonically, then harrumphed satisfactorily to herself: "Men. Easy gettin' you guys to talk. Yeah, too easy."

The fella got his desperate wish. ‘Free at last, free at last, thank goodness they are free at last!’ thought he. He was standing there bent over on top, spacey-eyed and head hanging down at chest level, shoulders in a bunch, and he was hanging on, protecting his liberated sack with all debilitated might.

“Why do you guys try and cover up?” she asked. “You know it doesn’t do any good. A thick pistoned-delivered knee to those same goobers dropped him for good. Detective Wojciewski chuckled and went away, pumps clacking on pavement, went about her daily business and watched her head as she plopped her wide bottom down in the driver’s seat. Damn skirt, she thought. Damn butt, she thought again.

New business she had to attend to. Let’s pay a visit to Louie Rocco, she thought, driving off. Yeah, Louie. He’s got balls. Go get the sonuvabitch. Once and for all.

Big Balls and a Big Problem (Turbo Edition)


By hughgee

The young man stood with his karate gi unfastened, loose and open, in the private mini-locker room of his martial arts studio; he could have his own locker room. Given the budding weakness which threatened his prodigious young career, he needed it. He needed the privacy. He’d had the partitions put up just for this purpose—to avoid the mortification of having…of having…of having to put THIS on. Standing bent-backed, head down, examining his lower extremities, he exhaled mightily as he tightened the Velcro straps around both thighs and his waist. It had to be tight, extremely tight or it might not work. And he couldn’t have that. He knew that feeling. He didn’t want to go even go there. Not THERE again. Stunned, stupefied, abdomen full of killing nausea and his rectum all dilated-feeling, pupils most definitely dilated, open mouthed, his opponent standing over him, triumphant. So defined pectoral muscles went to work, flexed and relaxed, flexed and relaxed, under the open top to the gi, the bottom pants hanging down around his knees, knees bent, bowed out to hold them up as he worked away with two strapping and likewise well-defined arms.

KNOCK-KNOCK-KNOCK.

A high-piping female voice on the other side of the locker room door, a tad impatient-sounding: “Are you done in there yet?”

“Almost,” the young man said, a bit annoyed himself. He sported a dark brown flat top, and dark, imposing eyebrows which furrowed themselves together into an easy angry wrinkle across his suntanned forehead, and a dimple in his chin also became accentuated with any display of emotion, or just plain old disdain. He looked a bit like Henry Rollins, he fought a bit like Bruce Lee, so they said.

He’d had the new cup two months now and already this was getting inconvenient. Still, he knew that without it, he might not be doing this at all. He’d been training in the martial arts since he was a boy and had won all kinds of championships before anybody gave him a shot—he was in fact a kind of young phenom on the AKA circuit—karate and aikido trophies festooned all shelves of his bedroom back home—so successful at such a young age was he that now, at the age of 23, he’d been the owner of this successful studio in the posh sector of Ebor City for some two years. Business was booming. He’d gotten married at 21 to a cute, heavily pulchrituded-out student of his from the very first class he taught, and it was she who helped instruct the very many classes of students his studio now hosted. That was her just now on the other side of the door.

Velcro strapped in, strapped down with straps the tensile strength of automobile seat belts, pinching off the circulation to the legs more than a bit—dammit—the young man bent and flexed and exhaled heavily one last time as he lastly slipped the all-too-generous helping of gonads nature went and stuck him with into the markedly distended silver cup. More than distended it was. The oversized hunk of protective convex NON-plastic was different from standard protective cups not just in material make up—it was solid metal and therefore somewhat heavier—it was also shaped strikingly different—this accounting for great distension. It was in fact shaped, anatomically, on special order from the Kelso Industries Orthopedic Co. of Denver, Co., in the exact shape of a man’s descending, not compressed, testes. His testes—which meant the thing was big. Very big.

A suck of air, a prolonged puffing exhale, muscles on one forearm flexed strong with ripping tendrils as it pulled downward on the metal crotch contraption, the man’s fingers on his other hand gently, carefully, exactingly deposited their precious cargo in the yawning, pitcher-like gullet of the cup—and letting go, it snapped disconcertingly snugly onto his pelvis. But he felt fine, felt protected, at least: his legs may have been turning blue but his balls were safe and sound and oh-so-cushioned. (The inner lining of the cup, just for good measure, consisted of 2.5mm of ballistics foam, the stuff they use in football helmets). Pelvis of chrome protuding, pulling up the pants of the gi, tying the sash around his top, one last self-check of the handsome, imposing profile, and,

“Ready!” he yelled assuredly.

“About time,” said the muffled female voice behind the door.

A quick kiss. Time to get down to business. A noontime martial arts class of about 20, mostly housewives. They were a young couple just starting and bills had to get paid.

It had been his sports doctor’s recommendation about the unconventional cup; it had been a joke of his wife’s to get it made out of 100% titanium when stainless steel would have done just fine.

Thanks honey. Real funny.

The problem really started at around the age of 19 or 20, he recalled. Of course as a boy, in PE lockers undressing and dressing at school, he’d always thought he’d noticed he was just a bit bigger “down there”—not where grown up guys said “it counted,” but rather under. Underneath. He was big in the balls. He’d always had big balls. Okay, ever since he could remember, so he’d thought. But it wasn’t until post-adolescence that they became a problem. A very real problem.

That was when his martial arts opponents started catching on to how this was the one way—the one and only way—to beat this guy on the mat. This guy just didn’t seem to recover from the normal “groin shot” like other guys did. Okay so it’s not like the other guys recovered quickly at all, either—let’s get real here—but this guy, opponents soon inadvertently found, this guy took an INORDINATE amount of time to collect his senses back, to get his legs back under him. Hell, even to stand up again. Forget about it: The lightest hit or swiping graze of a foot would send him off, send him down, put him out of commission for huge chunks of an hour. Once opponents found this out, well, it was open season on his nuts, no messing around. Concerned with suffering this string of surprising, unheard-of setbacks in martial arts competitions he’d formerly dominated, our hero at last went to see a doctor about it, and the doctor, there in his office, had been taken aback for a second.

“Yeah,” came the heavy admission of the doc, “those are big, all right.” She was a heavy-set Indian woman with a thick Bengali accent, wire-rimmed spectacles, peppery-black hair tied back in a bun and, of course, the pasted-on round dot on her forehead like a huge third green eye. She filled up the room with her matronly bulk, and the way she kind of stepped back in surprise when he’d dropped his drawers in front of her had been, for a split second, nothing less than alarming. Making a mental note to kick himself in the ass when he got home for not waiting until his regular “man doctor” was available, this was about the precise moment when the young man gulped and asked if there was something wrong with him—something wrong with…them.

“No, no, not that,” the doctor had hastened to reassure. “Nothing wrong. Just… those are big, all right. Yes, I see.”

“Is it normal?” asked the still-scared young karate-master. “Are they—are they okay?!”

He’d wondered why he’d waited so long to see a doctor about it. The woman squinted, thinking it over, then stated, “Well, you’re about at the limit of what might be considered normal, I see. You see, normally a man’s testes would measure, oh,”—she made span of width between pudgy thumb and forefinger—“anywhere from like this—2-and-a-half, 3 inches. That’s all.”

He gulped again.

“You’re just a bit over that, I see…about…about the size of a chicken egg, you see?”

“CHICKEN?!"—big, dry gulp here--"Is that BAD?!”

“No, no,” she calmly reaffirmed. “You are just a bit over, you see.” The woman put a hand on the young man’s shoulder, steadying him, then chuckled. “You are fine. Nothing wrong with you. You are big and strong.”

“Yeah, but…” he cut himself short, not really all that crazy about saying it.

She looked at a clipboard she’d picked up, then up at the patient again with raised eyebrows, waiting. “Mm-hm?” she prodded him.

“It’s just that—it’s like—well, I’m a martial artist. I can’t—I can’t stand to be hit down there.”

She laughed heartily. “What man does?” she asked rhetorically, making a few diagnostic notes on the clipboard.

“No,” he said, gaining the courage that comes out of pure frustration, and seething humiliation. “You don’t understand. I get kicked down there, it’s over. One hit and I’m done. Like, for the whole day. It just kills me.”

“Mmm,” she mumbled, then set her clipboard down on the counter behind her, then turned to face him again. Both fat brown hands were placed on his shoulders as he sat sullenly on the examining bench. Advice time. Time to share some. “I see,” she began, continuing in clinical fashion, “what you are experiencing is most common for men of your age. For you, just a little bit worse, maybe. For you are bigger, that is why.”

She could tell she’d lost him after “I see,” so she continued further. “When a man is sexually peaking, at his peak for sex age, then you see his testes get real hard.” She made another span of measurement between her thumb and forefinger. “Big hard means very, very sensitive. I see you will see many years from now, when at the time of middle age, then your testes will grow softer. For you not too small still, but soft. And soft mean less sensitive, less sensitivity to hits.” She laughed, propping him up at the shoulders as he sagged with the news. “Though it still hurt then too. I suggest you don’t try too much getting hit there. It don’t feel too good. Not ever.”

Tell me something I don’t know, he thought. Then—a panic came on. His “peak sex years”—were they not also his peak athletic years?! Was this true?! Were men at their strongest also at their weakest? Was this true?! He felt vulnerable, humiliated. His voice was high and riddled with anxiety. “You mean I’m ALWAYS gonna be this way—till I get old?!”

She frowned a bit and nodded, reluctantly and to one side. Forgetting his “Are they all right?” fears of a moment ago, this to him now confirmed his worst nightmare.

“But—but—how’m I gonna compete?!” His breathing began to become accelerated. She’d removed her arms and took a step back, standing there. This to him, this perfunctory gesture, in his suddenly heightened state of anxiety felt like she was telling him, It’s your problem now, buddy boy.

“No! This can’t be! I have to compete! It’s what I do for a living!” Odd for him to be reacting in such a melodramatic fashion, she thought. Did not all men have the same problem as he? Why such a fuss.

“Man, this is bullshit!” he protested, shaking his head, his legs dangling off the table and his pants down around his ankles. “Bullshit!” he yelled, more vigorously still. “I’m gonna get a second opinion!”

She raised her eyebrows at him. “You can do that. They tell you the same thing, you know.”

His mood changed again, on a hairpin turn, back to despair. “Why?” he sobbed. “Why me?” He even began to cry a little. And still the breathing which had accelerated was accelerating still. Squinting at him, clinically-diagnostically through the one open and educated eye, she concluded the patient was on the verge of hyperventilating.

Not in her office, she thought. No situations in the office. She worked hard to get where she was at; off the boat from India then school all the time till now. No incidents in this here office that is mine, she told herself. She reached out a chubby brown hand and grabbed hold of his scrotum, so big in front of her. Let’s see, she thought. Let’s see how they hurt you. His reaction, his breathing, his facial expression changed the instant she clamped down the cold hand. A quick, final sucking-in of air as his back went rigid and he fell silent; totally, all-over silent. She knew the way she to do it, the way she had to do it. She knew she had to make it look as though she were examining him, still.

“Now let me see,” she said. “Let me check these things here.” The two were face to face, and his face was all agog at hers as she poked and prodded, pushed and pulled, down there at his privates. When all she was doing was shutting the patient up, averting the possible hyperventilation, avoiding the “scene” which she was sure would send her “back on the boat.” She was always sensitive to that, irrational as it was, educated as she now was, she never forgot those boat days. Those poor days. Nobody could ever send her back. Never give nobody an excuse for that. Make patients safe, you run a good business, they come back. Nothing bad ever happening in the office. So she would make sure this boy with the big balls, he no make no incident for her to have to explain. So she was now squeezing the life out of his balls to shut him up, and pretending it was part of the examination.

“These here, they feel good to me,” she breathed right into his face, drying out the man’s unblinking, unfocusing eyes. “Whatchoo think when I do this?” she said, pressing down on the convex end of one big testicle.

“Ooo-Hoo,” came the involuntary emission, like air being squeezed past his lips. He couldn’t swallow; she took note of it. Focusing on the one for what felt to him like forever, her four fat and brown fingers cradled the underside of the chicken-egg-testicle while her thumb ran roughshod over the top, rubbing and examining, oh-so-rudely examining. She was a doctor; she’d studied anatomy; she knew the names of every nerve-ending she was deliberately bruising.

“Ooo-Hoo.”

“Yes, these feel very, very good to me. Very, very healthy.”

“Ooo--A-Hoo.”

Her thumb kept going, rubbing, hurting, pressing, at the place she knew to be vital. The point where nerves most of them are, most are bundled up together, where they tie to the testicle. No man can stand, no man can stand, can’t stand that, not there, she told herself. No longer dry, water welled up; she saw, in her patients roundly open eyes. The eyes don’t blink still, she noted.

Somewhere inside him where his real self had fled, where it hid crouching, fearful of the pain being inflicted on him, chased there by a fat woman’s brown thumb, his real self asked the rest of his self what the hell was going on. Ain’t I a martial arts master? Ain’t I? Why can’t I DO anything?

“Ooo-Hoo,” was the only outward response the rest of his self—his physical body—overcome with paralysis—could muster. Every tiny massaging motion of The Thumb played hell on him; like a moose let loose on a flower display, each and every movement caused damage, more damage.

”Ooo.”

The spot she had chosen—that bundle of nerves!—how she knew what she was doing!—don’t move again!…don’t move it again!—Don’t!

“Aaa!—Ooo-Hoo,” said his rounded, wide-open mouth like a monkey in heat. “Ooo!”

“You appear fine to me, young man,” she at last announced, and more importantly, at last letting go her examining damaging hand. She’d have him subdued for awhile, she knew. Instructing him to get dressed, she noted with amusement how he left her office bow-legged and hunch-backed but yes, very, very subdued. He no cause incident in this here my office, she thought. No sir. M-hm. My patients, happy patients. No problems. Nutting, nutting, nutting. You go home, put some ice on them. Make you feel better. Maybe you smart you stop fighting. Not good for balls your size. No sir. M-hm.

Our hero was sure, quite sure, he’d gotten a thorough examination. He was even more sure he wanted no part of anymore doctors. Not like this. Not these guys. No more general doctors. So he went to see an orthopedist about his problem—a few days later when he could walk normally again. He told the guy the whole story—thank goodness, a guy this time—how it was getting to the point where he couldn’t fight anymore. A blow to the balls, just a tiny hit, was devastating, threatening to put him out of work. The orthopedist was a kindly, attentive old man with two gray puff balls of senile hair behind each ear and Coke-bottle glasses. Whatever else the guy was, maybe because he also had balls, the guy was a lot more sympathetic to the cause.

It was as a result of that meeting then that a plan was hatched, measurements were made, and corporations were consulted. Weeks and meetings, correspondence and more and more consultations. And more measurements too. Embarrassing measurements—Kelso Industries sending company reps out, spending a lot of time on their knees, and him naked, standing there, like going to a series of tailors all single-mindedly concerned with his inseam. At last the climax of mortification - he stood and let them take a plaster cast of his nuts. But finally the thing was made, at last it has been delivered, this Frankenstein’s monster of a cup. The damn thing, the high-tech super cup, had cost a pretty penny too. But it was worth it. He fought—and beat—his opponents on the mat, and taught in his studio his amateur, flailing-limbed students, with the same old reckless bravado and impunity.

The young couple walked side by side in matching gis down the hall away from the locker rooms. He, straight and strapping, about 6 feet tall, square-shouldered; she, a full foot shorter, voluptuous as all get up on top and bottom, powerfully built in a feminine way, melon-breasted and bucket-assed but athletic-looking for all of that. They were just about to round the corner leading into the gym when the young man’s wife playfully flicked out the back of her hand and rapped it against the cup which was painfully visible under his gi. He jostled her on the shoulder and she laughed, he protested a bit; an ongoing joke they had—or she had, at least—ever since he’d first gotten it. She got a kick out of the look on his face; she knew he was already terribly self-conscious of the big protuberant rounded-off tent in his trousers. But his resilience, his ability to take her jibes—this was important to her, being a bit of a rabble-rousing fun-lover kind of a person, a “life of the party” type of gal. It was key to her maintaining respect for him. And for him, for the young husband, this raucous, fun-loving quality she evinced was the last straw that had attracted him, had really sealed the deal, for his own personality was quite the stern and stoic, strong-but-silent opposite. So yeah, she was always goofing around and lately, just lately, with the advent of “the Cup,” his balls were the butt of many a catty jape.

Class went off as usual. She lead the stretching and taught the absolute beginners while he worked with those with a little experience, practicing kicking and striking techniques, making the most use of momentum during routine flips. Later both classes combined again and finished up with a brief regimen of strength training on free weights. She watched him out the corner of her eye: he was her man, authoritative and handsome and strong was he. She loved him. She’d been a bit worried over the whole “balls” thing, how it cost him his confidence—even left him depressed there for a bit—but here he was, back to his old glaring, graceful, tutoring self. For his part, he always kept one eye on his lovely young wife over there on the other mat during class.

They were a young couple, all right: still seeing hearts, feeling Cupid’s arrow, exchanging furtive and effusive smiles and looks of lust. She had a short, thin, ski-ramp of a nose and thinnish slivered lips, thinned-out eyebrows and wide oval brown eyes. Her husband would wipe perspiration from his forehead, and he’d look, and he liked the way her short, brunette bob-cut bounced, those behemoth breasts of hers bounced, whenever she’d show the class a strike or a hopping movement of any kind. Girls with big tits. They always had bob-cuts. Shows their boobs more, he’d tell himself. That first ever class, she’d caught his eye—right away. He was young but he knew women—and he didn’t think she’d amount to anything in the martial arts; seemed to be the case with voluptuous women, they somehow lacked the grace. It was as though when their body did one thing, moved one way, struck or pivoted, the rest of their body needed a second or two to catch up. To stop jiggling. To get realigned. He was SURE a girl with breasts like that, breasts the size of mid-sized cantaloupes, would have problems moving around, maneuvering. But she proved him wrong, she got better, she didn’t let the jiggling and shifting of her bodily accessories bring her down, though it was, at times, a challenge (“Thank you, sports bra!”); she’d even won a few tournaments after he’d taken it upon himself to “tutor” her privately. Marriage was inevitable.

After class, in the private locker room, the young man grunted and rubbed his tingly legs and it was taking a bit longer—again—than his impatient young wife and business partner would have liked. She’d been finished and was standing outside his private “ball sanctuary,” hearing him groan and moan and sigh as he released himself from his protective crotch-casing. The KNOCK-KNOCK-KNOCK came before he’d even begun to unfasten the Velcro and the titanium (yes, those too) buckles.

“Aren’t you DONE yet?!”

“All right, all right,” he said. He hated being rushed.

The door flew open. She caught him one leg up on the locker bench, one leg down. This was perfect as she was in another frisky, jovial mood of hers. Caught him with his pants down.

“Hey—Sweetie,” he tried to protest. “—you know this is my place.”

“Pshh—YEAH! This is your BALLS’ place,” she jibed. “C’—MON!” she said, deftly sauntering into his partially unclothed, spread-legged stance and bringing her hand up quickly into his groin.

A metallic ringing CLINK—partially muffled from the cotton covering of the gi of his sleeve as he belatedly tried to block the shot—resounded through the tiles and showery acoustics of the locker room. Her husband clutched his chrome crotch and dropped to his knees, his head hanging limp at the end of his swaying, unresponsive neck. She stood over him, looking down, fully dressed in street clothes save for bare feet on bathroom tiles. At her side in one hand hung the two-and-half pound free weight plate she’d gotten and grabbed up from the weight room that she’d hit him with—tapped, she would insist.

“Metal on metal,” she boasted, giggling, “Ha-HA! They’re STILL not safe.” She paused. She waited. She set her other hand anxiously on her hip—she had plenty of hip for it—and she waited some more.

”Oh, come on,” she finally said. “You can’t be hurt THAT bad.” She bent over at the waist, and what would have been a thick waist on most other girls appeared as a thin wasp-like segment on her, given her other proportions, the way both breasts were dangling like hammocked udders in a loose-necked purple Angola sweater, and the black skirt bulged at the sides and the back like something equestrianly powerfully was lurking underneath. She put a finger under his chin, then it took two fingers, then three, and finally, she lifted up his face for her to see. His mouth was dumbly open and his eyes were in La-La land, not even trying to focus.

“Shit,” she muttered, and let her fingers away. She sat on the bench beside him, him still on the floor, hanging over, beaten, defeated, she set the little weight she had down on the bench, and she looked at her watch. She huffed. She began counting the minutes, looked at her watch again at intervals. Her mind drifted off. This was getting ridiculous. At last—somebody home again.

“Thank God!” the wife cried, the young man was moving, making an effort to get up and stand again. She had to help him, and when they both figured out, more or less at the same time, that sitting would be the better option still, she helped him to sit on the bench next to her.

“That was four minutes.”

Her husband gave a dumb look of disbelief.

“FOUR minutes, and I barely TAPPED you.”

“I know, I know,” he motioned, seemed to motion her away with one hand though she still was right beside. His other hand stayed fast to his shining big groin. The cup still wasn’t off.

“What am going to do with you?” she said in exasperation. “I can’t even play around with you, I swear.”

All at once he found words. “That was METAL!” he cried.

“SO?!”

“So you know what that DID?!”

“What?!”

“It made it VIBRATE.”

She chortled out loud then said, in a voice mocking his, a voice like an utter wimp, “OH! It made it VIBRATE!” And she clutched herself at her groin and made like she was going to all curl up, then straightened herself a second later on the bench and sat proudly, sticking the big chest balloons out.

“Gimme a break—I got THESE things to watch out for. You don’t see ME being all wimpy about it.”

“Yeah but you got a sports bra,” her husband said feebly.

She laughed again, in strictest disdain. “SO?! I still get hit there!”

“Yeah, but…”

“Yeah but what?”

“Nothing,” her husband sobbed. “Just leave me alone.”

“Fine. I will,” said the young wife. “I’m gonna go grab dinner. Guess your balls don’t want to eat.” She unceremoniously exited the locker room, slamming the door, leaving her hapless husband alone on the bench with his balls, thinking to herself, The next time I hear some guy say, “He’s got BALLS” or “That dude’s got BIG BALLS for doing that” I’m just gonna laugh my head off. I’m married to big balls. I married big balls. And they don’t mean SHIT.