P.J. Morse - Clancy Parker 02 - Exile on Slain Street

by P. J. Morse

  “This time, I want to get it right. This time, I want the kind of love that is more than a spark — I want a love that burns!”

  I tried not to laugh because I could only imagine what kind of unsavory jokes my bandmates and even Harold might make regarding a “burning love.” After looking at the files of my fellow contestants, I thought that a few of them might indeed give him some burning love, only that love wouldn’t be quite what he had in mind. But, like a good reality-show contestant, I screamed with glee.

  “Now, you don’t just have to impress me. I’m already impressed. But you do have to impress one other important person — my body man — Wolf!”

  Wolf emerged from the stretch Hummer. He hadn’t changed much from last season, except he had picked up a little more weight around the middle, and he had a new, huge tattoo of Bettie Page with “RIP” inked under it on his forearm. He didn’t say much but, when he did, it was memorable. Women often came crying to him last season, and he would reply with inscrutable comments, such as “When the ox is in the ditch, sometimes you have to push it out. And, other times, you must cut it in half.”

  Wolf was in his typical quasi-Zen mode. He turned to us and said, “Let the rooster crow freely when he is in the garden. That’s all I ask.” Then he bowed. Fred raised an eyebrow in response.

  I heard Stacy mutter, “If I can’t get Patrick, maybe I’ll go for Wolf.”

  “If you can speak his language,” I replied. “Are you fluent in fortune cookie?”

  Patrick walked up to us and strolled up and down the rows of women. He caught my eye once, and I didn’t look away. I could see Cookie’s chest moving up and down quickly, and I thought she might hyperventilate after getting so close to her idol.

  “Now,” Patrick said. “Today is get-to-know-you day. We’ll leave your bags on the patio, and you can get inside, get to know each other, and get to know me. Tonight, I will eliminate five of you. So, first impressions are everything — and today has got to count. Wolf and I are going to have a chat, so you ladies head inside and get to know the lay of the land.” He gestured toward the mansion, as if it were his. I wondered if he knew the “lay of the land” any better than we did.

  Chapter Eight:

  Bottoms Up

  As Kevin, Greg and other members of the crew herded us inside, I explored the mansion. The large windows let in plenty of light, and it would have been beautiful if someone hadn’t painted the walls brick red, a color that was always prominent on Nuclear Kings album covers. I walked around the spiral staircase, and then I saw another crime against architecture — the silver stripper pole. It ran floor to ceiling in the back corner of the room that opened onto the patio, and it was right in front of a stunning view of the Bay. Unfortunately, that view was quickly obscured by the silhouette of a woman who had taken to the pole like a seal would take to that water.

  Multiple leopard-print couches lined the walls, with fringed jade green tuffets filling the rest of the space. Of course, the crew thoughtfully set out cheap plastic end tables with ashtrays so the contestants could rest their drinks and their cigarettes. They even had coasters, but I doubted those would ever be used.

  Speaking of drinks, the bar was obscenely long and stretched the entire length of the wall that faced the bay. Nearly every kind of liquor and mixer was available, but I could only recognize them from the shapes of the bottles. All the labels had been covered up with duct tape, probably because they were, as Greg said of my can of soda before he took it, “off-brand.” Large mirrors hung behind the bottles, and some of the women were already checking out their makeup.

  Once I saw the bar, I realized that I really wanted a drink. A refreshing drink. An alcoholic one, in fact. By making us stand outside for so long, the producers were probably trying to get us thirsty so we would get good and drunk for the first night of shooting. Like all the other women, I had filled out a questionnaire about my likes and dislikes, and they included questions about our favorite beverage and our favorite “base liquor.” I put down “beer,” and I was relieved that I hadn’t written down my first choice of tequila. Otherwise, the producers might be tempted to shove that down my throat.

  Andi was already behind the bar, touching the bottles and peeling back the tape to see the labels underneath. “Oooh! Is that Schnapps?”

  I cringed, not just at the thought of drinking Schnapps straight but how close her voice came to the sound of squealing brakes. I would have preferred to take my Pynchon book down by the pool, but I let myself get shoved along in the clusters of women clamoring for liquor.

  Kevin barreled his way through the crowd of contestants, shouting, “Don’t forget the Major Rager! Don’t forget the Major Rager!”

  Interspersed among the actual alcohol bottles were tall cans of a beverage called “Major Rager.” It was one of the few visible logos on the bar. Andi picked up the can and twisted it in her hands, trying to read the small print and failing. Exasperated, she slammed the can on the counter.

  Kevin stood on a stool and tried to explain Major Rager’s supporting role in the show. “Ladies! Hear ye! Hear ye! Major Rager is our sponsor. Major Rager is the reason we are here. Major Rager tastes great — ”

  “Is it less filling?” Lorelai joked.

  Kevin missed the gag and replied, “Well, the diet cans are on the second level if that’s what you want. Anyway, Major Rager tastes great, and we need you to drink it when you are not drinking alcohol. In fact, I think it goes pretty well with tequila.”

  “What’s it taste like?” I asked, taking down a can and popping it open.

  “Like candy!” Kevin said, getting off his stool.

  He was right. I took a gulp, and it tasted like carbonated Sweet Tarts. Half the can should have been poured out and then refilled with grain alcohol, or maybe lighter fluid, to make it palatable. Then I spun the can around and looked at the nutrition data. The main ingredient was a disturbingly high amount of caffeine.

  Then Patrick waltzed in. He was casually toting a can of Major Rager, as if he happened to enjoy drinking it in his spare time. He stationed himself behind the bar. “Ladies! My second love is mixology, and I’d like to make a special drink for each of you. Just introduce yourself to me, and tell you what you want!”

  We all cheered, of course. He could have said, “I am ready for a rousing discussion of health care reform,” and we would have cheered.

  “Psychology?” Andi asked. “Is he gonna ask about our dreams and stuff? Oh goody!”

  “No, dummy!” Tina said. “Mixology.”

  “Oh! Right! Mixology… yeah…” Andi’s eyes remained blank.

  Lorelai leaned in to help. “He likes making cocktails, sweetie.”

  “Why didn’t he say so?” Andi asked.

  I tried not to laugh.

  Kevin yelled, “We gotta do that again. Ladies, you’re deflating! At least try to look excited!”

  The crew caught several reaction shots of us cheering and clapping. One of the cameras got right up in my face, and I realized my cheeks were hurting from fake-smiling so much.

  A camera guy moved toward Patrick as he described the scene. “I’m going to pick one of you to be my assistant. This lovely lady will get to stay tonight. The rest of you, alas, might be one of the five to go home.”

  “Awwww…” we all groaned.

  “Now, who will be staying?” Patrick walked up and down the length of the bar as each of us fought for his attention.

  At that moment, I discovered Andi’s special gift. She may have had issues with the English language and her vocal cords, but she had a superhuman control of her breasts. She could twitch them, much like a bodybuilder could twitch his pecs. As soon as Patrick scanned past her, she whipped out that trick, heaving up one bosom and then the other. He screeched to a stop.

  “You!” Patrick pointed at her. “What’s your name?”

  “Andi. With an ‘i.’”

  “Of course,” Patrick said, keeping a remarkably straight face. “Wo
uld you like to be my assistant, Andi with an ‘i’?”

  “Yes!” she squealed, jumping up and down.

  “And what would you like to drink?”

  She clapped her hands like a child. “Peppermint Schnapps!”

  Judging from how enthusiastic she was, I began to wonder if maybe Andi hadn’t already appeared on Girls Gone Wild.

  As Andi took her place of honor by Patrick, Lorelai laughed. “Now the competition is serious!”

  “How do you do that?” I asked. I found myself testing my pecs, but my chest stayed put. I realized I was out of my league. On other jobs when I had to pretend to be someone else, I was able to keep up an act for an hour, tops, until I got the information I needed, but this?

  “Taking orders, here!” Patrick spread his arms out. You would have needed two of him for his wingspan to cover the whole bar, but the crew had somehow engineered it so that the contestants were jam-packed together.

  Topaz managed to shove Cookie aside to be first. I saw Cookie clench her fist and shove another woman aside to make sure she was second, but she looked back at me and gestured that I should get myself up there, too. I stepped on some feet as I pushed my way ahead. It wasn’t too hard, as I was more physically fit than the other women, but I got called “bitch” more than once. One woman added, “redneck bitch,” and I had a feeling that my cowboy boots were going to become an issue.

  Topaz leaned in, giving Patrick an eyeful of her ample cleavage. “Gimme a martini.” She paused for a moment. “And make it real dirty,” she purred.

  Patrick winked. “You know what you want, eh?” He bowed toward Andi. “Milady, can you pass me the gin and vermouth?”

  “Yes, sir!” Andi giggled, shoving random bottles that may or may not have been gin and vermouth toward Patrick. “I love astrology!” As all this was going on, she was halfway through her Schnapps.

  Once Topaz had her martini, she pulled out the toothpick and ate each olive off it, looking Patrick in the eye as she did so. Cookie was positively stewing. Unlike Topaz, who let her dirty martini do the talking, Cookie leaned in with her shoulder to show off a tattoo on her bicep. The tattoo was simple — a flame above a power plant.

  “A fan!” Patrick yelled. “That’s our logo!”

  “Hell, yeah,” Cookie said. “I want a Long Island Iced Tea.”

  “You don’t mess around,” Patrick said.

  “Oh, no, I don’t. I love your work.”

  Right as Cookie was going to say something else, Tina jostled her aside and planted a kiss on Patrick, complete with tongue. She received a Red Bull-and-Vodka in return. Cookie got pushed back into the second group of women, all those who were still begging for drinks.

  By the time I got up there, I didn’t know what I had left to offer. It seemed as if every woman spent the night in her hotel room thinking of her signature pickup line. I spent most of the night watching the news and reruns of Charlie’s Angels until I fell asleep. My last thought before I dozed off was how someone who was really like Kate Jackson had to pretend to be Farrah Fawcett.

  “I would like a tall boy.” All the women had tried sexy. I tried a shy smile. “Like you.”

  “Making it easy on me!” he said. “A sweetheart!” He grabbed a can of beer from the cooler and slid it my way down the top of the bar. It landed in my palm, and I popped it open. “Cheers!”

  He smiled back at me and moved on to the next contestant. I wasn’t sure why I was trying so hard to make an impression because I knew I wouldn’t be eliminated, but it was better to blend in convincingly. Plus, with an opaque can of beer, I could drink slowly. I saw that both Cookie and Tina were already halfway through their cocktails. Topaz was taking her time with the martini, for which I was grateful. She’d admitted on her video that she could be a mean drunk, and she and Tina had already aligned themselves against me and Cookie.

  By the time all the women had drinks, Patrick had been whisked away by Wolf and the producers, but no one was sober enough to mind. Some of the women gravitated toward the stripper pole and were taking turns on it, much to the delight of the camera crew.

  I wandered out to the pool area to look at the water. My beer tasted good. I could see Angel Island, but I wondered what was happening in South Park. I almost forgot about the camera guy and the sound guy standing right next to me.

  Cookie walked out with her second cocktail, a margarita. “Damn. I was hoping Patrick was out here.”

  “No such luck,” I replied. She may have been the only one who cared.

  “Wolf’s kinda cute, too. I like that protective vibe, and what he said was pretty deep.”

  I sipped my beer. “About the rooster in the garden?”

  “Yeah — Patrick’s the rooster, and we gotta respect that. Deep.” She nodded solemnly.

  I wasn’t ready to call Wolf the next Dalai Lama, so I just let that one go. I thought the camera guy snickered.

  Kevin walked up behind us, as we were the only ones who had gone outside. “Hey, why don’t you guys have a seat?” he suggested, guiding us over to a cluster of seats by the pool. Soon, he had Lorelai join us. They moved Topaz, Tina, and Andi over to a patio table. Stacy and her rhyming posse were at their own table.

  I overheard Kevin say to Greg, “These are our constellations. Let the other women fall where they choose.”

  Greg asked, “Do you think Stacy’s going to make out with Tracy?”

  Kevin leaned back to check out the scene, “God, I hope so. Keep a camera on them.”

  I tried not to laugh. I was tempted to catch Kevin’s eye, but he was the ultimate professional. Just once, he looked at me and nodded, like he approved of my decision to align myself with Cookie.

  I sipped my beer while Lorelai talked about her experience on Bikini Girls Ahoy. She didn’t quite realize that Cookie and I were zoning out as she discussed the importance of product placement in reality television and encouraged us to drink Major Rager as much as possible to stay on the show. Luckily, she took a breath when she finished her drink, and she offered to get me and Cookie something from the bar. I declined, telling her I didn’t want to peak too soon.

  “Looks like somebody’s going to peak too soon over there.” Lorelai pointed and giggled. Stacy, plus Tracy and Casey, had decided to sit with Tina and Topaz’s crew, and they were rooting Stacy on as she took shot after shot. I noticed Greg discreetly placing buckets around the back yard, just in case someone needed to boot and rally. He was chuckling to himself.

  “What’s so funny?” I asked.

  “Those three… Jesus. They’re like the Inebriated, Triple-Headed Hydra,” he giggled.

  “That’s pretty good,” I agreed.

  “Eliminate one, and surely another drunken ditz will spring up in her place,” Greg said. “I think I’m going to need more buckets.”

  The three began swarming from corner to corner, smooching each other, trying to rub noses with strangers, picking fights and drinking from cups that weren’t theirs. They stopped only after one of them tripped over a paving stone in the garden, sending all three of them tumbling, but it wasn’t long before they got up again.

  When the camera crew became bored with their drunken display and went elsewhere for more footage, Stacy stood, walked right up to me, took my beer out of my hand, and drank from it.

  I reminded Stacy that the beer did not belong to her. She slurred, “Oh… yeah. And what the hell? Booze is booze!”

  I had to resist the temptation to shove Stacy away. I was hired to prevent fights, not start them. At that moment, my primary concern was to make sure no one spilled beer on me or threw up on my nice boots. As I looked over the scene, with the women playing on the stripper pole, mixing drinks or collapsing into piles of flesh, booze and silicone, I realized that what transpired on reality television was actually boring. All the decadence got old after a while.

  Patrick emerged from his lair with Wolf in tow. He must have had to brace himself somehow before re-entering the fray.

 
“Where’ve you been hiding?” Tina shouted out. She dragged him into a corner of the yard, shoved him down onto a wicker bench, and gave him a lengthy lap dance.

  Patrick responded with a stifled yawn. Luckily, Tina was so absorbed in her own performance that she didn’t notice.

  Lorelai had wandered off somewhere, possibly in search of more camera time. Without even making a formal pact, Cookie and I decided to stick together. I noticed her drinking steadily, building up her courage to talk to Patrick. “You’re as good as Tina is,” I told her. “You’re a professional.”

  “I am. I was a gymnast, too. Anything she’s doing now, I can do with my legs behind my head.”

  “You oughta show him!” I said. Encouraging Cookie had several pluses. First, it kept me blending in with the other women. Second, if Cookie did something outrageous, it would take heat off me. Third, it would annoy Tina and many of the other women I didn’t like.

  The only issue with that game plan was that Cookie could be a chatterbox. Even though we’d only met that day, I already knew about her five-year-old son, how he wanted to dress as Charlie Brown for Halloween and how he was getting As in spelling. I also knew that she had an occasional twinge in her back from a stripper pole move gone wrong. Her favorite color was fuchsia: not pink, not purple, but fuchsia. And her boss gave her hell for leaving her gig at one of Houston’s finer gentlemen’s clubs to be on the show, but the boss gave in because he liked the Nuclear Kings almost as much as she did and wanted her to bring back some autographs from Patrick. Only after all that did she take a breath.

  Cookie grabbed my hand. Somehow, she had managed to keep an eye on Tina while delivering another soliloquy. “I think she’s done! It’s time! You ready?”

  I nodded. “Let’s do it.”

  She led me over to the back of the house, far away from Patrick and Tina. I wondered why we went there, but then she dropped my hand, hiked up her denim dress, and launched into a series of cartwheels and backflips across the grass. I gasped. She tumbled all the way to Patrick, and I was worried that she would slam her foot in his face, but she landed perfectly in front of him, right between his legs and just inches from his crotch. “Hello,” she said, her voice breathy.