It Started as a Joke (All the Presidents' Beds, #1)

by Kit Helix

  It Started as a Joke

  By Kit Helix

  Text Copyright © 2014 Kit Helix

  All Rights Reserved

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  It Started as a Joke (All the Presidents' Beds, #1)

  To find out what happens to Alice on her adventure, click the photo below to get the next three volumes of the series! | All The Presidents’ Beds BUNDLE!

  About the Author | Kit Helix is a former museum docent who decided she enjoyed history’s dirty, sexy secrets more than history’s boring, obvious secrets. You can reach her at kithelix@gmail.com.

  It started as a joke.

  We were eating lunch at a posh spot with white cloth napkins folded into swans. Fifteen dollars a glass for house Cabernet, fifty dollar prix fixe lunch menu, you get the gist. I hadn’t seen my bestie Sandra in a long time, and she was dead set on me getting a taste of the finer things in life.

  “Hey Al, what would you do if you could go back in time?” she asked. It was an innocuous question, plucked from the ether and just as quick to return to it.

  “I’d probably go back and fuck every president, though not in succession,” I deadpanned.

  “Even Taft?”

  “Especially that fat bastard. And don’t ask me if Grover Cleveland would get it twice, because you know he would.”

  Sandra was having a tough time keeping her foie gras in her mouth. Each laugh was punctuated by a quick gesture to her lips to make sure she hadn’t spit her food all over her face.

  “William Henry Harrison would be tough,” I said, “as he was only president for a few days before dying. I don’t know how I’d worm my way in there.”

  “But JFK. Damn. I guess I could see it,” Sandra said.

  “You take JFK; I’ll go for the grizzled face of Andrew Jackson. You don’t get the name ‘Old Hickory’ if you don’t know how to wield that stick.”

  Our waiter came over with a glass of water for each of us. It seemed that our gales of laughter had convinced him we’d been oversold (seriously? At 1 in the afternoon on a weekday?), and he deftly absconded with our wine glasses.

  Sandra, of course, took this as an affront. When he came back moments later to bring us our dessert, she glared at him.

  “You think I’m some lightweight, Pepe? You think Asian girls can’t hold their booze? What do you have to say for yourself, Pepe?”

  Since it was inevitable that she would involve me anyway, I added my two cents.

  “Or Anglo-Americans?” I nearly punctuated the statement with a bitchy “Pepe,” but I didn’t want to seem racist. Though when I looked at his vest, I noticed his name was, in fact, Pepe.

  “No, I just...” his feeble attempt at a response was instantly overwhelmed by Sandra.

  “You just nothing. You’re taking those last glasses of wine off my bill; there was still at least enough to wet my lips when you took them, and that’s as good as a whole glass.”

  “Ma’am,” he began.

  “You just got ‘Ma’am-ed,’” I laughed.

  “Do I look like Mrs. Papadopoulos to you? Are you Webster, a tiny black boy adopted by his white godfather? Did you just ‘Ma’am’ me?” she raged. It was all an act, of course. Sandra wasn’t mad; she just got off on this sort of thing. She loved seeing other people sweat.

  “No, ma’am. I mean, no miss,” he stammered.

  “Did he just call me ‘miss?’ Does he not see this massive rock on my finger? Does he not know that my husband owns half this block and this sorry-ass restaurant is merely a tenant in his real estate portfolio,” she said.

  “He does not, as far as I can tell, see that massive rock on your finger,” I deadpanned (which is my favorite kind of panning, so get used to it).

  “I...uh...,” Pepe was flummoxed. Words didn’t even begin to form on his lips; he was a chorus of vowels.

  At that moment, a rogue manager appeared. He wore the standard restaurant manager outfit of slightly-nicer-clothes-than-the-staff and crushed dreams.

  “Is there a problem, ladies?” he smarmed. They always smarm when they see Sandra. Even if they don’t know who she is, managers can smell the money emanating from her pores.

  “No, and you need to go. Pepe here was doing an excellent job,” Sandra replied.

  “Top notch,” I agreed.

  “Well,” the manager began.

  “Shoo. We are not flowers, and you are not a bee,” Sandra said. “Disappear.”

  The manager scuttled off to the back, presumably overflowing with outrage and regaling the back of the house with tales of the “rudest cunt he’d ever met” and “what she needs is a good hard fuck.”

  Sandra was not in need of a good hard anything.

  “I was just fucking with you, Pepe. You did a good job, and you’ll get a good tip. But you’re going to need to drag your sorry ass back to the register and comp those two wines. You get me?”

  “Yes ma’a...,” and he ran off in terror.

  Sandra sat across from me, pleased as a caterpillar on a leaf. She brushed a lock of her perfectly thick, perfectly black hair away from her eyes and smiled. She tugged her purse from under her seat and pulled out a credit card.

  “Eleanor practically ran the country after FDR got sick. Would you give her a go, just for being adjacent to that much power?”

  “I’d give her a go because she was a stone cold fucking fox,” I said, then muttered, “ That was a lot of adjectives.”

  “Yes, too many,” she said.

  ****

  After we left, that conversation, as all hypothetical conversations do, vanished back in to the ether from whence it came. It was a mere nothing floating in the universe of nothing with nothing to suggest its importance in the least. Six months went by, a year. I didn’t even remember Pepe’s name until moments ago. And yet.

  You see, I work in a lab unlike anything else on the face of planet earth. It is government funded, but it is not owned by the government: it is much too big, too important to be owned by anything as limited and ephemeral as a government. No, I work outside of governmental boundaries, attempting to answer questions and create solutions to problems that haven’t even been imagined.

  So, when I first saw the prototype for the WOGENTIM, I thought, “That’s just another one of our magical gadgets.” And then.

  Sometimes people with allergies will get itches in places that can’t be scratched. The back of the eyeball, inside the ear, on the liver. And it’s agony, those irritations, because no matter how you position yourself or rub your body, there’s just no way to calm that itch. Short of taking a needle and stabbing it into your eye, you aren’t going to be able to scratch that itch. The WOGENTIM made me itch like crazy. I had an itch in my brain, somewhere deep, somewhere that couldn’t be scratched. And so.

  The WOGENTIM was a time travel device. WOrmhole GENerating TIme Machine. The itch that I felt was coming from the ether, from that conversation.

  Our lab had tested the WOGENTIM, using robots and drones as test subjects. We’d send them back in time, have them find a spot that wouldn’t be disturbed, and then just record data for years until we’d come and dig them up.

  At first, we’d send the bots back 24 hours. We’d send them back then find them right where they were supposed to be. Then we tried a week. A month. A year. A decade. A century. A millennium.
Every time, they were fine. Though fine, of course, is in relative terms when you’re asking something to sit in one place for a few thousand years. They were rusty, yes. Their batteries were dead, sure. But perfectly intact. And the logs indicated that the stress on the robot bodies was negligible. In fact, time travel seemed to have no ill effects whatsoever. And now.

  My first experience with time travel, I went back 30 minutes. At the stroke of noon, I hit the button and thought that it didn’t work. When you go, you feel nothing. It’s not like in the movies or TV. No flames on the ground behind a kickass DeLorean. No police box shrieking loudly and spinning through a pink tunnel of time (that’s a little suggestive, no?); no naked Arnold Schwarzenegger bathed in white light and electricity. Nope, it was just button-pressed = new time.

  When I arrived at 30 minutes previous, I checked my watch. It, of course, told me that I hadn’t traveled in time, because watches are not very clever. Humans, on the other hand...well, I wasn’t that clever either. See, in order to make sure I wouldn’t be discovered, I had found a space in one of our underground labs to do my testing. It was dank and grubby, and it had no clocks or windows or anything else that would give a person even the slightest inkling of the passage of time.

  But I am a clever person by birth, a clever person by trade, and a clever person by upbringing. So I hid behind a box. I knew that previous I (let’s call her Old-Alice) would arrive in exactly the same manner as the current I (let’s just call me I, because I am the only I who matters) had. So, if Old-Alice arrived after about 30 minutes, I had just time-traveled. If Old-Alice didn’t arrive in 30 minutes, then I was just sitting in a basement, hiding behind a box, looking like an idiot to absolutely no one but herself.

  Minutes passed. According to my watch (which is, I remind you, not clever) it was now 12:28 PM, and I was getting ready to leave, as I am not a patient person. I was feeling embarrassed and discouraged about my formerly latent, now apparently overt desire to fuck the presidents. As I stood up to leave, the door to the room opened, and I jumped back into my box as Old-Alice came bumbling in.

  Old-Alice’s ass was bigger than mine, but not in a good “look at that ass” way but in a “oh shit, that’s a dumpy ass” way. She was wearing the same labcoat as I was. Her hair was totally fucked in the back in a way that I hadn’t noticed in the mirror before I left. Old-Alice also had left her blouse slightly untucked in the back in that way that tiny children and mental patients do, and I couldn’t help but feel sorry for her. Mind as big as the universe and totally unable to handle herself in the real world. I could see how Old-Alice might be beautiful, though. Where her hair wasn’t a wreck it was a gorgeous chestnut. She had beautiful, round black eyes like an anime character or cartoon bunny you’re supposed to feel sympathy for. Even under her labcoat, her boobs looked rockin’; her ass, on second look, was almost “day-um” but more “um, okay, I guess.” And those lips. Whenever she’d walk through the senior hall as a freshman in high school she couldn’t help but hear the comments about where those lips would look good.

  Old-Alice hit a button on the WOGENTIM and she disappeared. And my stomach lurched a bit, because I didn’t hang out with Sandra enough now that she was the kept woman of a real estate mogul; and I had thought for a moment that Old-Alice and I had a lot in common, and now she was gone forever. Or—shit—she had just become me, judging her. I wasn’t good enough for Old-Alice. Old-Alice was something amazing.

  The next two months was hammers, torches, lasers and syntax. WOGENTIM worked for humans, but I needed a way to take it with me. I didn’t want to go back and fuck only George Washington: I wanted to run the gauntlet from 1-38 & 40 (I decided against attempting it with our still-living presidents for fear of larger implications in the timeline—though that Bill Clinton, he must have had something going on. And we all saw W.’s codpiece.). To make sure I didn’t fall behind on projects, I used the WOGENTIM to hit every day twice. When I finished at work for the day, I immediately went back to the previous night, slept, and then worked the next morning in a location as far away from Old-Alice as possible. Perfecting the apparatus took 2 months of calendar time, but 4 months of my life. I wasn’t sure about the relativity implications of time travel, but I sure as shit looked older than I should have after I finished my portable WOGENTIM. I would catch glimpses of Old-Alice when I hadn’t slept enough and forgotten what day it was. I even, at one point, caught a glimpse of I when the I that I am was Old-Alice. I was lucky nobody was around, because I scared the shit out of Old-Alice. (Time travel pronouns are fucking ridiculous.)

  Sandra asked me out for a birthday drink the day I finished my project. My mind was so fried that I wasn’t sure if it was her birthday or mine, but I accepted just the same. She picked the most expensive place she knew, as it was, and I quote, “licit to spend copious amounts of Mogul cash for such an auspicious day.” My Swiss-cheesed brain associated this with my perfecting the WOGENTIM for portable time travel. But, no.

  “Happy birthday!” the crowd yelled. I wasn’t sure who most of them were, though I did know their faces. Apparently it was my birthday. In fact, it was my 29th birthday. Sandra, ever the bestie, had organized a surprise party by hacking into my email and going through my contacts list.

  I recognized a handsome, swarthy gentleman as Alessandro, a legitimate online dating hookup. Oh, and there was blond Kyle, a regrettable craigslist hookup I had during a stressful time at work when I just needed some release—he must have been excited to come, since I had never contacted him again despite repeated texts and emails. Ah, and that wonderful old man over there in coveralls and a trucker hat once trapped a family of squirrels who had taken refuge in the crawlspace above my apartment. A lesbian fling from my time of experimentation, gone full-dyke in a Miami Heat hat and baggy jeans (Oh honey: boys quit wearing baggy jeans before Britney quit acting sane) chatted up my other lesbian fling, who had gone full-glamorous and—holy shit—sexy. Thus, this motley crew and dozens of other randoms RSVP’d because Sandra probably promised an open bar.

  And open it was. The restaurant—another one of The Mogul’s tenants—had closed down for the night to celebrate me. And I looked like shit. When Sandra got a good look at me, she immediately pulled me into the bathroom.

  “Girl, you look as bad as Norm,” she said. (Norm! That was the exterminator-guy’s name.)

  “I know. Things have been busy at work. I didn’t even remember it was my birthday. I was going to suggest a cheap bar, but you seemed so gung ho,” I said. “I didn’t realize how highfalutin this place was, or I probably would have changed before I came.” My voice sounded desperate.

  “Oh honey, I’m so sorry. It didn’t even cross my mind—this is usually the easy time of year for you—I should have been more considerate.” And that was why she was my bestie. She spends a ridiculous amount of money, organizes a massive party, and apologizes for it. She doesn’t spend all her time screaming at the Pepes of the world.

  “It’s ok. I should have been more assertive,” I collapsed onto her ample bosom. "Thank you for this, whatever this is.”

  “It’s your last year of life. Once you hit 30, it’s all downhill,” she said.

  “You’re 32,” I said.

  “Not for me; I have a rich husband who adores me and a fucking hot ass after two kids,” she said. “For you.”

  “Happy birthday to me,” I said.

  “I’m just messing with you. You are perfect, and I know you enjoy being alone,” she said. “But that Alessandro drove up in a Jag and I think he smells of money.”

  “Total closet case. He was the perfect boyfriend until it came time to cum,” I said. “It was doggy or nothing for him to finish. And I’ll do anything to please my man, but when you put the cellphone with gay porn on the headboard while ostensibly ramming it in me, that’s a flag on the play.”

  “Basketball?”

  “Football,” I said. “I’m nobody’s beard. Except, perhaps, James Buchanan.”

  “James
Buchanan?” she replied. Then, light bulb. Her face split into an outrageously large smile. “President James Buchanan!

  “Was it at this restaurant?” she asked. “Is that what made you remember that? That was over a year ago. The Mogul wasn’t even a mogul then, just The Little Bump.”

  “Ha, Little Bump, tiny mogul,” I said. “Let’s go back out there; The Mogul’s money won’t spend itself. Come by my place tomorrow after you drop the kids off at daycare; I’ll talk to you then.”

  Sandra spent the next hour practically smothering The Mogul in their booth. He had a permagrin painted on his handsome face, probably due to the fact that Sandra was giving him a handy through his pants pocket. He liked that kind of thing: gracefully toeing the line of decency and depravity, forever maintaining the façade of The Mogul while keeping his trench coat on over his suit so Sandra’s magic hands wouldn’t become a piece of communal knowledge. Sandra knew where her bread was buttered, and she’s at least as clever as I am: when I met her as an undergrad, she was regarded as the rockstar PhD candidate in particle physics that was going to push the university to the top of the bullshit college rankings.

  She gave up the glamorous life of a researcher for the well-appointed mansion and perfectly-coiffed hair of The Mogul. Since she left school, I’ve never seen a tear in her eye that I’m not responsible for (either inadvertently or not); in fact, her formerly prominent scowl lines have completely disappeared, and she does have a rocking ass, as she previously mentioned. Maybe if I’d taken her advice, my surprise party would have been less full of online hookups and more full of, well, real friends.

  And maybe that’s what is driving this mission: I have frown lines, scowl lines, and Sandra’s seen me cry more often than a handful of times. Whenever I catch a glimpse of Old-Alice, she looks like an older version of the I that inhabits my imagination. And that sucks. If I’m not going to settle down and have a family, I sure as shit better do something awesome.

  While Sandra had her illicit manual sex in the booth, I traversed the minefield of former flings. Smiles and nods, mispronounced names, and drunken attempts to kiss the birthday girl kept me moving.