Tats (11 page)

Holy shit. This must be the works Paula was talking about.

Sonja takes my right hand and sticks my index finger in her mouth. She takes her time licking and sucking and cleaning each and every finger. When she’s done, she guides my hand to exactly where she wants it the most. I realize she was planning this before she walked in the door because Sonja the Cowgirl has been ready for a while.

She grabs my tits like they’re a saddlehorn and rides me like a broncobuster in a rodeo. It doesn’t take her long before she’s ready to come. I know this to be true because she tells me so. The whole thing has blindsided me in such a rush that I’m half surprised to find myself coming right along with her.

I shatter into about a thousand little pieces and barely have time to put the pieces back together before Sonja gets out of the saddle, inches her skirt back down and wrangles Donny and Marie back into her shirt. She leaves as quickly as she came. Pun intended.

Did that really just happen? Are all spas like this? Is Vivian doing the same thing right now?

I take my time pulling my pants up over my wobbly knees and washing my hands. I look in the mirror and think the same thing I always think when I first see my reflection:
Help! I’m trapped in a body that doesn’t look anything like me.
I reverse directions and try on a smile for size. A smile looks fake as all get-out. What’s wrong with me? I just got laid and most people would be happy, but all I feel is guilty. I wipe the smile off, sniff my hands and promise not to look in a mirror again that day.

I open the door and reenter the bright world of reality. As luck would have it, the first person I run into is Vivian. I feel like apologizing to her and I want to tell her it’s not really cheating on someone if you were actually thinking about them the whole time. I clench my teeth so that what I’m thinking stays inside my head where it belongs.

Vivian takes one look at me and staggers backward half a step. “You look great!” she exclaims. “Your skin...you’re absolutely glowing.”

“Thanks...” I say, reining in my thoughts with a forced smile.

“Where’s your girl?” Vivian asks. “I want her to do to me exactly what she did to you.”

“No, you don’t.” I grab Vivian by the elbow and lead her down the hallway as far away as quickly as I can.

I’ve given in to the swift current of Vivian’s glamor treatment and I float lazily down the river in my innertube trailing my fingers along in the water.

I jerk my fingers out of the cup of goo, Vivian’s laugh jerking me out of my reverie. Vivian and I sit side by side in front of twin Vietnamese manicurists. The only way you can tell these little women apart is that one talks constantly and the other never opens her mouth.

I have the one who talks constantly. And right now she’s examining my hands and nails and chirping in her strange little accent, “Big hand. Strong hand. Big like man.”

“Thanks,” I respond.

“Nail, bad. You no take care. Nail too short. Why short nail?”

I shrug. I don’t really care to get into all that with a perfect stranger.

“This is the life, huh?” Vivian says dreamily. “This is the fuckin’ life.”

“Personally, I enjoyed the facial more,” I reply dryly.

My manicurist attacks my nails with a file and a vengeance and I jerk my hand away out of sheer terror. “No, no,” she scolds, “Nail ugly. Give hand. Me make pretty.”

I give her my left hand, saving my best hand in case she damages the other, praying she doesn’t have a chainsaw under her table.

Vivian continues in a lazy voice, “You know if they make a movie of our lives, I want Drew Barrymore to play me.”

“I want Queen Latifah to play me.”

Vivian gives me a strange look. “Queen Latifah? She’s black.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize we were dealing with reality here. Then I choose Hillary Swank.”

“Okay...” she relents. “I guess she’d look okay in dreads.”

Vivian’s tits buzz. She digs her cell phone out of its hiding place with her free hand, glances at the caller ID, and bites her lower lip.

“What’s wrong?” I ask. “Is it him? The Prince Charles guy?”

A lightbulb pops on over Vivian’s head. She looks at her Vietnamese girl and asks, “Wanna make a quick two hundred bucks?”

The manicurist’s eyes open wide at the prospect. Both sisters talk excitedly back and forth in Vietnamese, then Viv’s girl asks, “Do what?”

“Answer this phone and talk dirty to him.”

“Talk dirty?” the girl asks. Her twin talks to her in Vietnamese and they both giggle with their hands over their mouths.

“Real dirty,” Vivian says. “Nasty. Sexy. Dirty,” she emphasizes.

The girl smiles big and grabs the phone, answering, “Hello, big sexy man. Me talk dirty. Sexy nasty dirty.”

I hear a garbled male voice on the other end.

The little manicurist giggles and continues, “Me suck big dick. Ten dollar, titty only. Twenty dollar, me suck dick all night long. You likey suck? Me number one sucker. Hundred dollar, me suck dick, sister put thumb up ass. You likey big boy?”

Dial tone on the other end.

The manicurist frowns, shuts the phone and hands it back to Vivian. “No likey thumb up ass.”

That sends Vivian and I both into loud guffaws. The manicurists look at each other and chirp again in their own language. Vivian’s girl holds out her palm, saying, “Me two hundred. Sister one hundred.”

Vivian pulls the wad of hundreds out of her tits, peels off three hundred dollar bills and hands them to her, exclaiming, “Worth it. That was so fucking worth it.”

I’m still laughing when my little manicurist exclaims. “Done! Give other hand.”

I look at my done hand and flex it a few times. It doesn’t look any worse than it did before and it appears to be in working order, so I hand over the other.

“Think we can we go get my Harley after this?” I plead.

“Sure,” Vivian promises. “But first...” Then she says the two scariest words I’ve ever heard in my entire life. “...bikini wax.”

If Vivian can do it, so can I, I keep repeating over and over in my head.

It’s not helping at all.

I have allowed Vivian to lead me to a private back room in the spa and now I’m lying on a cold table bare-ass naked from the waist down. I’ve kept on my shirt and my leather jacket and boots in case I decide to flee.

There’s a pink curtain running down the middle of the room, separating me and Vivian. She’s over there just chatting away like she gets a Brazilian wax all the time. Maybe she does for all I know. Personally, I like my woman parts just fine. I don’t see any need to fuss with them. I fig leaf my privates with both hands and pray for this to be over real soon.

“You’ll love the feeling, Lee,” Vivian says from behind the curtain. “Smooth and silky.”

“I don’t want to look like a seven-year-old,” I grouse.

The door opens and Julia Child walks in. Not the real Julia Child, of course, but a big, older lady who’s the spitting image of Julia Child. She has huge hands with hairy knuckles and a faint mustache on her upper lip. Ironic. She waxes people’s junk, why can’t she do her own mustache?

Her name tag reads Marquis de Sade.

Okay, not really, but I wouldn’t be one bit surprised if it did.

“What’re you wanting today, honey?” Julia Child begins. “Heart? Heart’s are all the rage right now. Triangle? Boring. Landing strip?”

That’s why they call it a bush, I guess. Because just like a bush you can trim it into cute little shapes.

“How ’bout a teddy bear?” I ask.

“Give her the full monty!” Vivian yells from the other side of the curtain.

“Full monty it is,” Julia says. “Now move your hands, darlin’, let me get a look at you.”

“I’d rather not,” I say.

Julia grabs my hands and throws them away. I grimace while she gets her face right down next to it. She looks for a long time.

“Gonna need more wax!” she yells over her shoulder.

“Hah!” Vivian barks.

“Is this going to hurt?” I whisper.

“No worse than a good spanking,” she answers with a wink.

Julia grabs a bottle of talcum powder with one hand and with her other hand she grabs my right ankle and yanks my leg up in the air. She shakes baby powder all over me. Then she grabs my other ankle and throws that leg up above my head and shakes some more. When she’s done, she slaps me hard on the ass and grins like she just floured me and next she’s going to throw me in a skillet of hot grease.

She grabs a huge pot of hot wax and spreads it all over with what looks like an ice cream stick. It might be a tongue depressor, but I can’t let my mind go there right now.

Julia lets the wax cool for a moment, then looks at it closely. She gets her nose right down next to it and blows on the wax. I’m about to make a blow job joke until Julia grabs a corner of the wax and rips the funny right out of my head.

Holy shit! I bolt upright into a sitting position. I don’t know if I scream or just gasp, but the pain is fucking intense. Tears spring to my eyes. I look down at myself. My God! I look like a plucked chicken.

I look up at Julia. She’s holding the dried strip of wax up like it’s a scalp and she’s a triumphant Indian war chief.

I collapse back onto the table and take a deep, ragged breath. “Thank God, that’s over with,” I gasp shakily when I can finally talk again.

“Not quite, darlin’,” Julia says. “Turn over.”

“Turn over?”

“That’s what I said, honey, flip over. You’ve paid for the Hollywood, so you’re getting the Hollywood.”

“What’s a Hollywood?” I ask with the appropriate amount of alarm.

“I’m going to clean your basement,” Julia says.

“Oh no...” I protest not quite fast enough. Julia grabs my hips and flips me over like I’m a crepe in a pan.  And before I can say nether regions, she has my cheeks spread and wax slapped on my nether regions. A few seconds and one mighty tug later, I’ve gone from hair to bare.

There’s a delayed reaction. I’m thinking that didn’t hurt at all but it takes two or three seconds for the pain in my ass to register in my brain. I bite my hand and pound my forehead on the table to keep from screaming. I cannot believe women put themselves through this. I’d rather be waterboarded.

Julia slaps my ass again and says, “Remember no sex for forty-eight hours.”

“No sex? But tomorrow’s homecoming!”

Julia wags her finger in my face. “Licky licky, yes. Sexy sexy, no.”

“Oh. Well. I can live with that,” I say, rolling over onto my back.

But before I can even sit up, the door bangs open and a man is filling the doorway. He’s dressed in a three-piece expensive-looking suit and penny loafers.

“No men allowed in here!” Julia scolds.

I know who he is in one glance. It’s Prince Charles, the guy from IHOP, the woman-beater, the man who no like thumb up ass. He looks at my face. He looks at my now bare crotch. He says in his sissy-girl accent, “Where is she?”

“Run, Vivian!” I yell, jumping off the table and grabbing for my boxers and pants at the same time.

He steps in the door and makes a lunge for me, but Julia blocks him with her big body, shouting again, “You are not allowed in here, sir!”

He throws her against the wall. I make a quick decision that there’ll be plenty of time for pants-putting-on later. I grab the pot of hot wax and toss it at him.

The wax splashes across his crotch, but I don’t stick around for the grand finale. I rip open the curtain to Vivian’s side.

She’s gone.

I jump over the table and bolt out the open door and down the hallway with Prince Charles’s screams chasing me out. I hit the lobby just in time to see Vivian hauling bare ass out the door. Good. I’m not the only one. I try to cover myself with my pants, slamming against the glass doors, spilling onto the sidewalk and exposing my whitest parts to everybody on the street.

I run through the middle of all the double takes and pointing fingers and make it into the passenger seat of the Pinto just as Vivian starts the car. She guns the engine, jerks the wheel to the left, trying to unparallel park, but ends up taking the taillight of the car in front of us halfway down the block.

After a couple of heart-thudding turns I look over at Vivian. She looks back at me.

She grins. “Don’t I always show you a good time?”

“I’ve had better times with my pants off,” I mumble, trying to get my damn boxers on over my boots.

Vivian slams the Pinto to a screeching stop in the middle of the street, damn near causing a four-car collision and throws it in park. She leans over the seat, sticking her bare ass in my face while she fishes a skirt out of the jumble of clothes on the back floorboard.

I want to bite her on the ass so bad. I don’t know if it’s lust, adrenaline or anger or if there’s even a big difference between the three. But before I can act on my impulse, she pops back up, wiggles into a skirt and takes off again just like she does this every day.

Vivian drives, going nowhere as far as I can figure, and I have my feet up on the dashboard and my hand down the front of my jeans. Vivian was right. It is smooth and silky. And calming. I’m just starting to relax a little when Vivian says politely, “Can you please get your hand out of your pants?”

“I don’t want to. It’s soothing.”

She looks at me sternly. “I can’t focus on driving while you’re over there masturbating.”

“I am not masturbating. I’m just...feeling it. I can’t help it. Like how when you were a kid and you lost a tooth. You just keep poking the hole with your tongue.”

“You start poking the hole with your tongue and I’ll wreck for sure.”

I’m the first to laugh. Vivian joins in and just to be nice, I take my hand out of my pants. For now.

“I am BIG. It’s the pictures that got small.”

Norma Desmond’s giant face looms in front of me. I sit up, take my hand out of my pants and click off the TV.

I reorient myself. I was watching TV and fell asleep. Gloria Swanson in
Sunset
Boulevard
woke me up. We’re at the Crowne Plaza hotel in downtown Tulsa. Vivian checked us in to the Presidential Suite (two bedrooms, sigh...), passed out some hundred dollar bills, then shut herself in her room with the bags of money.