SEX ON PISMO BEACH by Tweet

by ATLANTIC LIBRARY PRESENTS Jackie Christian

  It been years since anyone had called him “Pastor,” but as a public relations move, he was re-establishing his Holy Father image of the civil rights days for the African-American community. This, his public relations advisors believed, would quiet the whispers regarding his daughter-in-law’s recent accidental death and strengthen support for the upcoming debut of his two new products—the Crown Tires Winter Slush Proof Tire and his new Diet Pudding Pops for those watching their weight.

  At Otis’s request, he would give his sermon to only one person—his wife Queenie seated in front of a blue screen. From there a special effects team would digitally add two thousand “Amen” nodding church goers to the Cathedral later.

  Like an actor, he went into his routine.

  Shouting with gusto and working up a sweat, his adrenaline almost made it to the mountain, but then the memory of that upstart gold digging cavity wrapping her black legs around his son’s waist caught in his mind like a glitch. Otis bent over, clutching his chest as though he was having a heart attack.

  “I just felt her spirit while I was connecting with the good lord, Queenie. It was like she came right here in this church and got between me and god. She’s out for revenge. I’ve got to stop her.”

  Terrified by the serious look on his face, Queenie reasoned, “Let them have the wedding first. It’s going to be televised in the Atlanta area and you’re officiating—we’ll have lots of nice pictures of you smiling and accepting her as a Crown—things will look cleaner if there’s a nice big wedding first; all in white.”

  ~*~

  San Clemente, California

  February Foster was quite used to having her head shaved bald. Because of her dark skin, the crucifix that old lady Critter had cut into her forehead wasn’t as noticeable as the one in Blanca Castillo’s head. But when it came to having passion for the cause, February couldn’t be beat. She was now quick to say on her own, “Rich people are the devil, they deserve to die.”

  “Good you feel that way,” Critter would cackle as she served up plastic bowls of cat food with warmed tomato sauce poured over top it. It was all they could afford being so committed to their religious plotting all day. She said, “Mardi Gras’s just a little over a week away…and then it’ll be time.”

  Beavis and Butthead always pulled out his map for the girls during supper. “See here—the gas station on Ocean where the fuel truck comes at refill the underground reserves.”

  Fuel truck…refueling underground reserves…gas station…steal the truck…drive it up the coast to Warm Leatherette.

  They had plotted for what seemed an eternity. Blanca Castillo bursting into tears about how she couldn’t wait to save the soul of her bartender brother Julio while Critter and Beavis and Butthead figured up the amount of riches they’d loot while the fire reclaimed those souls who belonged in hell.

  The only foreseeable problem was love.

  Blanca and Cindy with the black nail polish had made the mistake of showing February a newspaper clipping that featured news about her sister January’s upcoming nuptials to race car driver Adam Crown.

  February paused, unable to take her eyes off the newspaper photograph. She was trying to process it. Her eyes squinted and her hands went to head as she struggled to piece together the memory and the clipping. Finally, the memory and the clipping were the same. With tears in her eyes she said, “I recognize them. They’re so in love…I remember…they’re so in love. They belong to each other—for the baby.”

  “The article doesn’t mention a baby.”

  “I like the way my hair is fixed in this picture.”

  “But it’s not you, February—it’s your twin sister.”

  “I go to this world sometimes; that’s how they got the picture.”

  Since Blanca Castillo had worked at Warm Leatherette long before either February or January had been there, she tried probing the girl’s mind; constantly asking questions. But unfortunately, February floated in confusion, unable to grasp the details.

  All she knew was that she had a twin sister—stronger and more beautiful than she was, she claimed—and now instead of seeing them as teenagers on the trolley in West Philly; she began to associate them with the stripper’s pole at Warm Leatherette. She insisted that Adam Crown was dead—that she had watched him crash his car off a cliff. She had no understanding of Blanca saying that January owned and ran the whole resort.

  “Where is the safe with all the money in it?” Cindy Griffith finally asked February one day.

  “The safe with money—I don’t know.”

  “Come on sugar, you pole sluts ruled the joint!”

  But that was the day that Critter got wind of what was going on and snatched the newspaper away from Cindy and Blanca and burned it up.

  “Do y’all dumb ass bitches realize that if she starts feeling all emotional about somebody at that place—it could ruin our whole program? How is she willingly going to deep fry her own sister? Now stop telling her she’s got a twin sister!”

  Critter worked hard to confuse February’s memory of January. In time though, she succeeded. February began to think that she simply “resembled” the resort’s owner—the same pretty face but with a bald head.

  “And you, Beavis and Butthead—you stay away from that gal. You feeling horny and crusty, you keep doing what you always did. Fuck Cindy. But I don’t want you messing with these new girls, Blanca and February. I need to keep their minds right for what we got to pull off up in Pismo Beach.”

  Beavis and Butthead growled, nodding that he’d be good. But in his bed, he jerked off every night. At first, because he’d never been with a black woman before, he’d visualized and got his mouth watering over February. But one of those nights, as he’d fell asleep naked and spread eagled on the bed, he came to fear February more than lust after her.

  As he breathed in his sleep that night—February’s face suddenly blocked his nostrils.

  He woke up gasping; completely shocked to find that the pretty brown girl had wandered into his room and was pressing down on him with bulging eyes. Up his nostrils and into his blue eyes, she stared as though she were looking down into a well.

  “February—what are you doing?”

  “I’m trying to see your brains.”

  “What? What’s wrong with you?”

  “It’s the voices,” she had told him with a trance-like expression on her face. “The voices are telling me to let your brains free on the pillow. Your knowledge wishes to converse with me.”

  And right then he had looked down and noticed the sledgehammer in her hand, the gavel end of it touching the floor next to his bed as he exclaimed, “Holy shit!”

  He jumped in horror!

  But with tears of love in her eyes, February had cooed, emotionally, “Your eyes are blue like Charles Manson and sweet Jesus’ blue eyes. I love you so much…I honor and adore you! I just want to become one with your mind.”

  Scared out of his tattoo covered wits, Beavis and Butthead had said, “I’m going to call Critter on you!”

  But a whimsical February only replied, “I want to see her brains on the pillow, too. The voices have so much they want to ask her, but she needs to be free first.”

  Out of the blue, February kissed him on the mouth. When he looked conflicted; one part of him realizing she was insane and the other wanting to take advantage of it—she simply said, “We’ll be married soon. It’s in all the papers. We’ll be married and then the baby will come and then the voices will quiet down again. They never spoke to me when I was in your arms at Warm Leatherette, Adam.”

  “I swear I want some of what you’re smoking.”

  “It’s going to be the most beautiful wedding. All the sinners are going to be burning in a lake of fire, but not you and me. My sister will save us. January is like that, Adam—she will always come to our rescue.”

  ~*~

  Anchorage, Alaska

  The news hit Lorna Sinatra like a ton of br
icks.

  “Can you say that again, doctor?”

  “Our lab tests show that this nefarious vaginal odor is being caused by those Vichy Vitamin pills you’ve been taking. They contain a compound ingredient…”

  The voice of the physician trailed off as it finally dawned on Lorna that this whole illness had been a case of human revenge, not a natural medical condition. The name “Debbie Dallas” did cartwheels in the Italian beauty’s mind as she blinked with disbelief. But then after a few moments, she did believe.

  Trembling with rage as she drove back to the dark, chilly Alaskan apartment that she’d been hiding in for the last three months, Lorna realized…that bitch made me quit my job; drove me out of Pismo Beach; turned all my men against me; made me move to a colder climate so that I could try to neutralize the strong odor by freezing it.

  Tears filled Lorna’s eyes as she realized that she’d seriously considered suicide all because of a prank. Wiping them away, Lorna recalled the very last thing Deborah Crawford Gower had said to her before she’d fled California in shame and disgrace, “We started out as secret lovers, we squabbled over a man, you destroyed my face—stole my innocence. And now I’m a rising television actress and you, Lorna…you need to go somewhere and wash your ass, bitch. You stank!”

  Indeed, that small, cold apartment in Alaska was putrid with the stench of Lorna Sinatra’s Bacterial Vaginosis. Robotically, she picked up the phone and called Tiger Holden at Warm Leatherette. “Tiger, this is Lorna—look, never mind where I’ve been hiding. I just want you to know that I’m coming back to reclaim my life. I’ll be home for Mardi Gras.”

  ~*~

  Las Vegas, Nevada

  The joyful banging of sex in the afternoon began to rock the head board of the hotel bed like an earthquake.

  “Ooh god, it feels so good…fuck me!” Deborah Crawford Gower shouted as Buck Knuckle-Joy drove it deeper and deeper. Not only were they celebrating Buck’s spirited boxing match from the night before in which he’d reclaimed his title as Heavyweight Champion of the world, but they were excising stress that had built up over the last six months in both their lives.

  For Buck, who had struggled for months with impotency, a bitterly rushed divorce by January and a failed attempt by Mafioso to frame him for putting a hit on January—just being able to get it up was a triumph.

  For Deborah, who had proven she was the soap world’s best actress by winning the Daytime Emmy and was now in a bitter war with the show’s head writer over her desire to star in a new television mini-series he’d written for the network based on the life of Hillary Clinton—the stakes were much higher.

  Though she’d lost her virginity to her show’s executive producer, Kent Gower, and married him all on the same day—Deborah had gone on her honeymoon famished for more sexual experiences only to discover that once Kent possessed his woman on paper, he couldn’t fuck after that.

  The more Deborah had tried to explain to him that by taking her virginity, he’d awakened a volcano inside her, the more she’d been met with either disinterest or premature ejaculation on Kent’s part. Everything was the show, his golf game; the show, his golf game. And that had served as the seed for her becoming sexually addicted to Buck Knuckle-Joy.

  In the last eight weeks alone, she’d ended up pregnant by the sexy black boxer, aborted the baby for fear of Kent Gower joining with the show’s head writer, Peter Dasher, to destroy her career—and yet in the path of all that, she’d found that she couldn’t shake her addiction to Buck’s hypnotic way of poking pussy.

  He wore his Heavyweight Championship Belt and nothing else as they rolled in the sheets in Vegas. And the stature of that belt alone was enough to make any woman feel as though she were riding on the engines of power and masculinity.

  “Ooh, get my pussy!” Deborah demanded rapturously. She watched spellbound as his humongous black dick delved inside her strawberry pink gash; wetting and burning her. But after the fucking was over, Buck demanded more than that.

  “I’m tired of you women using me as a sex stud.” Symbolically, he removed his Heavyweight Champion Belt. He said, “I’m a human being. I can’t live by bread and water alone, I need love.”

  “I can’t leave my husband,” Deborah told him as she brushed out her long blonde hair and fixed her makeup. “Just as you have your boxing career—I have my acting career. There’s a new starring role that I’d kill for. A mini-series my network is producing about the life of Hillary Clinton.”

  Buck frowned in depression.

  “This role spans over forty years of aging! There’s college girl Hillary; newly married to Bill Clinton Hillary; Hillary in Arkansas; Hillary the first lady; Hillary getting humiliated by hubby’s cheating; Hillary running for President with devoted hubby proving his love, standing by her side in a vicious campaign. If I could get this part, Buck—I’d win major acclaim and I wouldn’t ever have to do a soap opera again. The problem is that asshole Peter Dasher.”

  “What about us?”

  Deborah sighed heavily. “Can’t we just enjoy these moments for what they are?”

  “No, Deborah, we can’t. I’m not a human dick machine, OK? I’m tired of being the odd man out. I want some victory for a change. I want you to leave your husband and marry me.”

  “If that’s what you want then help me get this part.”

  ~*~

  Pismo Beach, Warm Leatherette

  Daisy took a deep breath.

  So much had changed in the last six months of her life, but there was one thing she had to get back—Noble Sinatra.

  “Send her in.”

  “Thank you,” Daisy said as she strolled pass his secretary’s desk and into the quietly masculine décor of his plush office at the Warm Leatherette corporate tower.

  He had the back of his chair to Daisy, apparently staring out of the huge bay windows behind his desk. And from those windows, Daisy could see the waves of the blue ocean beating against the shores of Pismo Beach.

  “I know now that I was wrong,” Daisy said. “It’s been proven by the Pismo Beach Police that you had nothing to do with the attempts on January’s life.”

  No answer. Was the chair going to turn around and have someone other than Noble sitting in it, she wondered?

  But, of course, Noble was scared; frightened that perhaps Ling Mae had told her lioness of a big sister that he’d raped her. He couldn’t turn around so easily.

  “I want you back,” Daisy intoned, dryly. “I want our love back.”

  Finally, Noble turned to look at her.

  As always, her stunning Asian beauty made his heart skip a beat. She was absolutely breathtaking.

  “Congratulations,” he told her. “You’re the first Chinese person ever to have the number one song in America—and you did it on a small indie label.”

  “Only nobody knows that it’s a Chinese woman singing the song,” Daisy demurred. And that, too, because of January, would soon change.

  “You can’t stay in hiding forever.”

  “January has something planned—something big planned—for Mardi Gras. You could call it my coming out.”

  “Wonderful!” Noble enthused.

  Fucking rapist, Daisy thought in secret. What made you think I wouldn’t detect your scent in her hair, on her naked trembling shoulders that night? You…mother…fucker. But, alas, it was in her best interest for him to believe that he’d gotten away with it, that she didn’t know, and that he could now have his sexy China doll back.

  “Customers at the Clinton Library have been asking me, whatever happened to your sister, Ling?”

  “My mom broke our family curse and came down from Washington. She sold my dad’s house and fetched Ling Mae. They’ve bought a nice little place in San Luis Obispo and Ling’s stopped stripping. She’s going to college now.”

  Handsome as ever, Noble stood up. He spoke like a politician saying, “I love you so much, Daisy. And I never told you this, because I didn’t wan
t to hurt you or cause a problem—but now I feel I have to. Your sister tried to seduce me, Daisy, many times. Ling was always throwing herself at me.”

  Daisy stared at him for a long moment. She said, “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “I never touched her, though. You’re the only woman I could ever desire.”

  Daisy could hardly keep from laughing. She said, “Even though you started fucking Fox Holden while we were split up these last few months? But don’t worry about it, Noble. I’m not mad at you. Men will be men…and all I want…is to have you back.”

  Noble said as his eyes beheld her, “You always were a smart one.”

  ~*~

  …you say I don’t exist;

  You say I’ll never fly.

  You tell me what to believe…you tell me what to believe.

  But I’m free, big brother…

  …I believe in nothing…

  The song was weird and unusual, but like most of America, Fox Holden found herself constantly humming to the beat of Daisy’s first number one radio hit, “I Believe in Nothing.” As an intoxicating house-mixed groove featuring languid lyrics about the mysteriously reclusive Daisy not believing in the power structure that insisted she was invisible, it was quite addicting.

  No video; no national television appearances; no print or radio interviews.

  “Who are you, bitch?” Fox wondered aloud as she lounged by her brother Tiger’s personal swimming pool at Warm Leatherette following bites of Barbados-style jerk chicken with swigs of Merlot. More than pondering the mystery of “Who Is Daisy?” she was excited about her role in soon uncovering it.

  “We’ve just signed a deal with a major television network,” January and Tiger had informed Fox two weeks earlier.

  “It’s a major coup for Warm Leatherette, because our resort has never had this kind of exposure before. Not only are you going to headline our Mardi Gras spectacular for millions of television viewers—but you’re going to be the one to reveal for the first time ever to the American public who Daisy is. A press release will soon be distributed announcing that the black girl’s face on the website is not Daisy and that her best friend, superstar Fox Holden, is the only one who knows her true identity.”