The Harrad Experiment

by Robert H. Rimmer

  “This will make the wire servies, Eb,” one of them said, gleefully. “You’ll be famous. You can run for selectman this fall.”

  The other character tried to persuade us to grasp the bars of our cell and shout angrily while he aimed his Granex at us. Flailing to get our cooperation he edged his way to the cell, in the rear, where Beth, Shelia and Valerie were imprisoned. He was back in a second blushing. “Jumping Jesus,” he yelled. “Those dames are standing there stark naked!” Is that the way you found them, Eb?”

  Ebeneezer, snorting, ran to see. “Put on your clothes,” we heard him shout angrily.

  “You didn’t give us time to bring our nightgowns.” Valerie, answered indignantly. Beth and Shelia were choking with laughter. “It’s your fault you dirty old man. Do you expect us to sleep in our clothes?” The least thing you could do is turn on the air conditioning.”

  On reflection, the reporter with the Graftex stared back to the girl’s cell, but Eb held him back. “Who are they Eb? Where did you arrest them? Let me snap a couple of pictures.”

  “Nope. No dirty pictures in my jail! I don’t know who they are. Can’t get a damned thing out of them. A bunch of wild college kids is my guess. They moved into Bill Sykes’s place up at Nob Point. Been up there nearly a week ... running all over the place bare-ass ... taking movies of each other, singing, dancing and drinking all night long. Don’t know what in hell this generation is coming to. Couple of them live in New York, I think. Probably beatniks or bums from Greenwich Village. A damned shame. Stuff like this gives the Cape a bad name.”

  “If it’s bad for business,” Stanley asked “why do you want to put it in the newspapers, Eb old boy? I’d hush the whole matter up if I were you.”

  “Keep your fresh mouth shut!” Ebeneezer snarled.

  “Where do you kids go to school?” the reporter asked.

  “On a little known planet in outer space.” Jack said,, a very serious tone in his voice. “We are emissaries from the planet Sub Rosa. We arrived two days ago in our space ship which is carefully concealed in one of the lonely sand dunes nearby. These are not our normal bodies. In actual fact on Sub Rosa we had no bodies but are simply emanations of spirit. To bring our message to your leaders we have temporarily assumed the terrestrial bodies of six nice earth children.”

  “See what television has done.” Eb looked at us sadly.

  “It’s true,” Jack said solemnly. “Within the next few hours you will discover that certain earthlings have disappeared. Contact the parents ... send them to view us. They will recognize the bodies of their loved ones .. but will tremble at the dark spirits inhabiting them.”

  I suppose from the viewpoint of more practical and moral earth creatures our Cape vacation and final incarceration does have an other-wordly quality about it. It really all started last March. InSix wasn’t planned. It just grew spontaneously as a result of our nightly get-to-gethers at Harrad. Looking back, I would guess that Jack Dawes was really the germinating factor. The night that he accompanied himself on his guitar and sang us a screwball, satirical rhyming version of the news of the day, we kept testing him to see if he could do it extemporaneously. Jack, never at a loss for words, was able to sing off-the-cuff, jazzed-up calypso interpretations that had us all gasping with laughter. A few nights later, Valerie, who can mimic almost any gesture or voice, joined Jack with a skit satirizing the first flight of a man with a woman (she had a slight case of nymphomania) as they orbited out of earth into space together. For the fun of it we worked out several other skits. Sheila, who had mastered the accordion, joined with Jack on the guitar. Stanley provided a beat by banging on any available pan or bottle. He finally got so enthusiastic, he bought a set of bongo drums. Jack taught Beth how to play chords on the guitar, and before long I had mastered it well enough to punk along with them.

  By April we had a repertoire of eight musical sketches. Shelia refused to do any acting. She couldn’t let herself go like Beth and Valerie. Somehow, Beth always seemed to get cast as the dumb blonde sex-pot, and Valerie as the sophisticated hep-cat. Stanley’s enthusiasm held us together with his pipe dream that we were good enough to “go professional.” The money we could make would help put us through graduate school. None of us took Stanley seriously until the night he and Jack told us we were “booked” the following Saturday at Joe Gonzi’s coffee house in Cambridge. Even then we didn’t believe him.

  “We’re not that good,” Sheila objected. “It would take too much rehearsing.”

  “I’d be scared silly with an audience,” Beth said.

  “It’s only the ‘Grinning Eye’ Jack said. “Gonzi isn’t going to pay us. It’s just for experience.”

  Three weeks later Gonzi offered us one hundred fifty dollars a week for our Friday and Saturday night appearances. Our skits on the parietal rules at “B” College, with Beth and Val paralyzing the audience as the virgin co-ed on their visit to a senior’s room, and Jack and Stanley playing the role of the Mephistophelean seducers of young womanhood; our outer space skit, and a skit with Beth as the naive blonde who comes to college to be a drum majorette and is either constantly dropping her baton or is nearly exposing her breasts as she whirls it in the air, created standing room only at the Grinning Eye. Gonzi upped his admission price. A local recording company told us that if we could “clean up” all eight skits, they would make a long playing record of us.

  Still none of us took it very seriously. “It’s a lark,” Beth said when we all got back to Harrad after one Saturday show, “But it could take too much time. I think we should play it for what it’s worth within limits. None of this business of racing around the country or signing a contract the way that agent wants, we are a local fad. We’re ‘in’ for the moment. I wouldn’t want to live my life in a sweat of wondering how to stay ‘in.’ The whole racket is too fickle.”

  All of us agreed. But Beth had named us. We were temporarily, at least, InSix. Jack and Stanley decided we should be in corporated with the purpose of our corporation to put all the stockholders through graduate school. We finally made the recording and exhausted our repertoire. Much to the relief of Marget and Phil Tenhausen, by June we had forgotten the whole business.

  But unwanted success is sometimes hard to dispose of. We had a money bull by the horns. As President of InSix, Inc. Jack kept in touch with us through the summer. Our lack of desire for publicity created interest, mystery and intrigue. Our record began selling beyond all expectation. The recording company wanted to make another one. By mail and telephone, Jack badgered us until we finally all agreed to spend the week before Labor Day on the Cape. Object, to write and rehearse a half dozen more skits.

  Shelia and Stanley agreed to meet us in Boston with Shelia’s new station wagon, purchased so that InSix could travel together. To our amazement, Jack and Valerie arrived at the South Sta tion followed by porters carrying enough movie equipment to fill a small truck without any passengers. After much hugging and bussing one another (while the local citizenry watched us with their mouths open) Jack finally explained. “I borrowed the stuff from Bad Max. All summer he has been making experimental movies. Ten or fifteen minute jobs that are supposed to give the cinema a new artistic depth and meaning. One of Bad Max’s friends won a twenty thousand dollar award from the Ford Foundation. Seems the foundation is encouraging new types of cinematic expression. The joke is that some of the awards were given for ‘pornies.’ ”

  “What the devil are pomies?” Beth demanded.

  Jack grinned. “Flickers a little on the pornographic side. The public loves them. Makes them feel they can be esthetically interested and still not bored to death. Kook stuff. Nudes with skulls where their breasts should be; a girl sitting like Whistler’s mother but dressed only in her garter belt; a girl carrying her tits on a tray; naked witches riding broomsticks, etc., all mixed up with political crap and God knows what, supposedly created by artists and poets who have some mystical message to convey. I decided InSix can do better!”


  We finally wrestled all the movie stuff, together with Jack and Valerie’s trunks and bags, into Sheila’s station wagon. With the six of us squeezed between tripods, floodlights, guitars, accordions and what not there was scarcely room to turn and look at each other. Stanley edged the car slowly through the Boston traffic.

  “Get us to the Cape before the transmission is scraping on the highway,” I groaned.

  On the expressway, Shelia managed to pry a few more details out of Jack and Valerie. “Aren’t we going to work on a new record?” she demanded. “Where is making screwball movies going to get us? Where the heck are we going to stay on the Cape with all this junk?”

  “Typical female,” Jack said hugging her. “‘Three questions at once. You bet we are going to make another record. InSix is famous. If we want to go on a national television hook-up it’s all arranged.”

  “Nothing doing,” Beth said. “I promised Mother and Pops and Margaret and Phil that we wouldn’t go any further from Harrad than the Grinning Eye. The last straw would be their nubile daughter barnstorming around the country ... and believe me Harrad College is next to the last straw, as far as they are concerned.”

  “I agree,” Valerie said. “Let the world come to us.”

  “The world won’t have to come to us,” Jack chuckled. “We are going to the world with a movie. When it is finished it will be the rage of the Village. Bad Max promises to run it twice a week at the Last Gurgle. Behold you knaves! Sitting next to you is Jack Dawes, produœr and director of the new epic, a twenty minute satire on the women’s fashion industry. InSix is going to change women’s fashions and clothing styles singlehanded. We’ll be famous and infamous. Tell’em Val.”

  Val groaned. “Jack has lost his marbles. I refuse to comment. Whatever mad project he has afoot we are going to come to grips with it at Nob Point. Bill Sykes, a kind of uncle-ish friend of my father (unbeknown to that good man) loaned me the key to his cottage, a slight token of his affection and appreciation of behind patting privileges I have rendered him since I was a little tot. It’s a nice lonely spot on a sand dune overlooking the Atlantic, conducive to lovemaking and reverie.”

  A few miles from Eastham we turned off the highway, bumping and careening along a lonely dirt road that led to the ocean, we finally located the Syke’s cottage. It seemed isolated enough. The Atlantic a hundred feet below us was a red glaze in the afternoon sun. A few other cottages were nestled in dunes at a respectable distance. After we had lugged all the stuff inside and surveyed the living room, single bedroom and kitchen, it became apparent that we were going to have to rearrange the sleeping facilities. Hilariously we tossed the mattresses from the two single beds on the floor. Sideways with our feet hanging over the edge all six of us lay down. We were as neatly packed as sardines.

  “Those with sex on their minds will have to find a lonely sand dune,” Beth yelled from the bottom of the pig pile we all made on top of her.

  “Who wants sex and with whom?” Val said hugging Stanley.

  We all looked at each other embarrassed for a moment. Beth broke the tension. “Remember me? I love you all!”

  “So do we,” Shelia and Val chorused. The girls merrily proceeded to kiss Stanley, Jack and me.

  Deciding that food was more important than kissing and hugging, at least for the moment, we drove back to the highway, found a supermarket, and bought enough groceries for a week, and Jack bought two cases of aged-in-the-bottle champagne, telling us we earned it for devotion to InSix, besides we had to celebrate our re-union.

  An hour later, wearing sweat-shirts that the girls had embroidered with the word InSix lettered inside a heart, and shorts and panties, we slid down the sand cliff in front of the cottage to the beach below. Stanley slid a case of champagne down the cliff and popped the corks at us showering us with geysers of foaming wine. We cooked hot dogs over an open fire. Wrapped in blankets as protection against the cold night air (somehow or other I found Valerie, a sinuous caterpillar, curled up beside me) we chattered incessantly about the world, life and us.

  “I guess you’ve got me for the night,” Valerie wiggled closer. “Are you sorry?”

  The conversation had become sporadic. I pulled the army blankets partially over our heads and Val and I burrowed into our shelter. The fire of drift wood had turned into a red glow. The sand beneath us was still warm from the sun. Not far away, Beth and Stanley, Shelia and Jack were huddled mounds on the beach. I watched the shadows the firelight made on the planes of Val’s face. I held her hand. Silently, we watched the stars in the evening sky.

  “Are we bad ... all of us?” Val asked softly.

  “What is bad? That I care for you? That we are just human beings alone ... and yet somehow wonderfully knit together?”

  “Doesn’t it frighten you?”

  “This moment isn’t meaningless. It’s wondrous. You know, my guess is that Stanley and Beth and Shelia and Jack are asking each other the same questions. I like the way the six of us surrender ourselves to each other. We have eliminated dishonesty ... shame ... pretense.”

  Val sighed. “I don’t know why any of you, Jack, Stanley or you would want me. I’m too tall ... too awkward. An ugly duckling compared to Beth and Shelia.”

  I leaned on my elbow and looked into her face. “Val, you have a lovely face; strong, clean cut, big saucer eyes that glisten, a nice body. If you are looking for the ugly duckling in the crowd, you are lying beside him.”

  “Men shouldn’t be pretty. You have character. You look like a genius. But me ... in high heels I’m at least two inches taller than any of you.”

  “I haven’t heard Jack complaining.”

  “Do you think we should be mixed up like this? Won’t someone get hurt? You probably wish you were with Beth.”

  I grinned at her. “I’m not giving it a thought. I think we have all discovered that any two of us could get married and live together so, in effect, we are all married to each other. What’s more I think that the ‘Idea’ of us will last. I used to think we might fight and get jealous of each other. In the first year at Harrad most of us did. And then we simply eliminated jealousy by discovering that it was a very boring and selfish preoccupation. In its place we have developed a strong sense of unity and a fast instant communication.”

  Val kissed me. “Pull up your sweatshirt, Harry. I want to feel your flesh against me.” Later she wiggled out of her panties, and we fell asleep enmeshed.

  I awoke with the sun a red crescent on the horizon. Night was reluctantly leaving the sky. Val was holding my penis lightly, half asleep herself. Our climax was sleepy-sweet and hungrily joyfuL I was asleep again in her arms when Stanley yelled. “Come on all you young lovers. Last one in the ocean is custard the dragon.”

  A yelling screaming churning mass of gasping naked flesh, we all plunged into the icy morning water. Shivering and half frozen we scrambled out within minutes. Our courtly naked ladies, their nipples erect, hooted and howled at our shrunken, wizened penises and our dismay at discovering they had practically disappeared in pure shock at such an outrage.

  After breakfast, Jack and Valerie opened their Pandora trunk. Jack proudly held up what looked like a roll of cloth, about five yards long. While it looked like ordinary cloth held on the vertical axis it was transparent as dear vinyl plastic.

  “This,” he said mysteriously, “is something new in the world. It is actually plastic but it is perforated with millions of microscopic holes. In the vernacular of Madison Avenue, it breathes, and behaves like any ordinary cloth. It is not on the market yet, and probably won’t be for a few years until the manufacturing costs are reduced. A friend of mine pilfered it from the research laboratory of one of the large chemical companies.”

  “What will anyone use it for?” Beth demanded.

  “Beth!” Jack chided her. “You obviously didn’t get enough sleep last night. Your clear mind isn’t functioning. It will be used for clothes! What else? Show them you handiwork, Val.”

  “This
wasn’t my idea,” Val grinned as she fished in the trunk. “If I hadn’t been working for a very good-natured dress designer this summer, Jack would never have got them made. A fortune of labor went into them.” Val handed Beth a dress which looked quite normal to me until Beth held it up to examine it.

  “Jack Dawes, you are mad!” Beth yelled: “Completely off your rocker! Look everybody . . . the damned thing has a transparent behind!”

  Sure enough, carefully merged into the seat of the dress in the shape of a perfect heart was a piece of Jack’s plastic cloth.

  Val produced a similar dress for Sheila. Altogether Val had three street dresses and three evening gowns. The evening gowns had the additional feature of transparent breast cups as well as transparent behinds.

  While the girls were excitedly putting them on, their behinds undulating and clearly visible as they walked, Stanley and I tried to stop laughing long enough to listen to Jack.

  “How do you like them?” he demanded. “Most entrancing style ever developed for females. Something absolutely unique in female fashions. Original creations by Jacque. That’s me! When Val first modeled them for me I nearly gave up my dream of being a movie mogul and departed for Paris to set up a fashion house. But that will have to wait. First InSix is going to make a movie. It will be a satire on the fashion industry. Since I will, of necessity, have to be cameraman and director, I think that Harry and Stanley should take the parts of famous French fashion designers. Get the picture? As the movie opens the entire fashion industry is clamoring for the first view of the fall fashions.”

  Jack delved into his trunk, and chucked two rubber ape-masks at Harry and Stanley. He then produced two full dress morning suits with striped pants. “I bought you costumes for two dollars each from the Morgan Memorial,” he chuckled. “Probably taken off rich corpses before they interred them” Jack grinned at Stanley and me who were suspiciously sniffing the shabby moth-ball impregnated clothing. “Now my idea is that our famous designers should appear in full dress, wearing ape masks. This will permit Harry and Stanley to take other parts as the movie develops. So, I give you the idea. Take it from there! The basic point is that women will wear anything if the Paris or Italian designers make it suffidently outré. All we have to do now is to put together a zippy script.”