Sex and Bacon (18 page)

What was it about Baby Ruths in particular, though? Why would no other candy bar do? Were Baby Ruths just somehow inherently sexier than other kinds of candy? Or did he have an erotic fixation on someone from his past who favored them? None of us knew. He saw all of us indiscriminately but never varied his candy bar.

“We’re good to go, sugar,” I said. “Follow me.”

I led Baby Ruth Man back down the hall from where I’d emerged and waved him into the showroom I’d claimed at the beginning of my shift.

“Go ahead and get comfortable, baby,” I said. “I’m going to put on something sexy for you—be right back.” I waved the paper bag containing the Baby Ruth at him temptingly, then shut the door between us.

“Who is it?” asked Lenore, as I returned to the lounge. She was sprawled indolently across the couch like a well-fed lion basking on a sun-warmed rock. Her belly strained against her evening dress, giving her a rakish knocked-up air. I smelled sulphurous onion-farts.

“Baby Ruth Man,” I said.

“What the fuck is up with him?”

It was an old conversation. Baby Ruth Man was inscrutable, and no matter how precisely we shared with each other the details of our sessions with him, none of us knew anything more about him than his candy preference and the shape and size of his penis.

“I don’t know,” I said. “But I kind of wish I hadn’t eaten so much pizza.” I eyed the denuded slices lying haphazardly in the grease-stained pizza box. Suddenly I had to fight the urge to fling myself on the unoccupied sofa across the room, to kick off my shoes and loll like a sybarite until my stomach felt a little less vacuum-packed.

“Twenty-buck tip,” said Lenore, shrugging.

I didn’t mention the forty I’d made the last time I’d seen him.

“Yeah,” I said. “And all the Baby Ruth you can eat.”

Lenore giggled, then flopped over on her side. “Fuck, I’m full,” she groaned. “Glad it isn’t me.”

I WENT INTO
the dressing room, stripped off my dress, and exchanged my comfortable cotton drawers for a flashy thong, as brittle with sequins and snaky straps as a stiletto shoe. I added a lace slip, then sniffed my own armpits. I was a little garlicky, but with any luck Baby Ruth Man would be so revved up he’d come before I had to get within smell-distance of him.

Once properly attired for my modeling session, I glanced down at the paper bag of Baby Ruth on the makeup counter. No need to put on more lip gloss—he preferred melted chocolate to fruit-flavored shine. The chocolate-smeared mouth meant a $20 tip for sure, but it was hard to get the waxy chocolate coating sufficiently soft in the time allotted. Sometimes you’d end up rubbing the candy bar on your skin so hard it was painful.

Suddenly, I had an idea. I opened the Baby Ruth and put in on a paper plate. Then I slid the plate into the dorm-size microwave oven we used for leftovers and bags of popcorn. I gave it thirty seconds, then thirty more. When I pulled the hot plate out of the microwave the bar was steaming slightly and when I prodded it, chocolate coated my fingertip. Perfect! Baby Ruth Man would get the chocolate clown-mouth of his dreams! I pictured three twenties laid out neatly on the table at the conclusion of my show—my tip, earned by my own candy-bar-wrangling ingenuity!

I hurried to my showroom holding the plate of hot Baby Ruth. I had to admit, it smelled good. It was nice to be inhaling something other than Lenore’s pungent gas.

Did Baby Ruth Man give out thode mini fun-dize Baby Ruthd for
Halloween?
I wondered. Or would that be an uncomfortable collision of erotic fantasy and real life? I wondered if he even ate Baby Ruths himself. He’d never seemed motivated by a sense of the candy being delicious—it was the spectacle of his models wallowing in messy brown gluttony that seemed to get his dick hard. I suddenly wondered if he only brought Baby Ruths because they were so widely available—even the smallest convenience stores tended to stock them.

I entered the showroom. Baby Ruth Man was naked, sitting cooperatively on the bath-towel-covered sofa. His penis was curled in his lap like an old sock. When he saw me holding the steaming paper plate of Baby Ruth, his back stiffened. “
Yes,”
he moaned.

I set the hot plate on my chair, since I didn’t want to put it on the floor and the table was off-limits, that being the place where the bottles of baby oil used by the customers were stored. The idea of eating anything that close to communal cock-and ass-lube made me shudder. I didn’t even like Windexing the oil-smeared glass-topped table in latex gloves.

The bumpy peanutty Baby Ruth was still steaming, and the smell of melted chocolate filled the room. I put in my CD, turned it down low, and set the plastic kitchen timer next to the boom box for fifteen minutes. When it went off, his show would be over. Hopefully, the deluxe, hot Baby Ruth clown-mouth I’d contrived would shave five long minutes or more off his show time. Like short-order cooks, our motto was
Turn and burn, baby:
We got paid by the orgasm, not by the minute, and it was one to a customer.

Baby Ruth Man was already stroking himself. “Pretend you just found it,” he breathed. I was used to customers who wanted to call the shots, micromanaging every gesture and line of dialogue for their sessions. Most clients preferred their models to improvise as long as they eventually stripped down to their bras and G-strings, leaving them free to masturbate without having to direct the action. But customers with specific fetishes tended to be rigid about what they wanted in their performances, and it didn’t pay to argue. It was best to comply, within reason. Butterscotch’s wasn’t Lee Strasburg’s Actors Studio—we were being paid to pander, not to emote.

I turned around and let my gaze fall on the candy bar on my chair. “Oh my goodness,” I said primly, pressing one hand to my cheek. I looked around. “Did somebody leave this here?” I approached the Baby Ruth with trepidation.

“Smell it,” urged Baby Ruth Man. “
Smell it
.”

I stepped out of my lacy slip casually and knelt at my chair, as if genuflecting. Suddenly remembering the pizza I’d eaten earlier, I sucked my gut in sharply. “My . . . what an aroma,” I said. I glanced at Baby Ruth Man for direction, but his eyes were squeezed shut in bliss. “My! What an aroma!” I said again. “It smells so . . .”
Good? Bad?
I didn’t know which way to go. Did he want me to like it? To hate it? Baby Ruth Man wasn’t providing any clues. His masturbation was rhythmic and brisk.

I took a chance. “. . . so
good!
”

Baby Ruth Man whimpered.

“I think I want to eat some of this delicious candy bar,” I said.

Baby Ruth Man frowned slightly so I tried again.

“Do I want to eat some of this—” I stopped. Maybe it would be better to cut directly to the action.

“
Mmmmmmm,”
I said. Then I stuck my tongue out and licked the length of the bar like a Popsicle. I turned to Baby Ruth Man, showing him the melted chocolate coating my tongue. I’d licked off nearly the entire coating on the top of the bar. Peanuts were visible, and underneath those, glistening nougat.

I rubbed my lips on the candy bar, smearing chocolate around my mouth. It felt yielding and-warm, like fragrant heated lotion—why hadn’t I thought to microwave the bar before? This was genius! I made a mental note to tell my coworkers of my discovery, so when they did shows for Baby Ruth Man they wouldn’t have to rub their skin raw trying to get visible chocolate on their lips.

“Eat it,” Baby Ruth Man urged. I glanced at the kitchen timer. We had ten more minutes. This was going to be a cakewalk. He was almost orgasmmg already! I could afford to torture him a little, just for fun.

“Ooh, I don’t know,” I said coyly. “I’m not sure about that. . .” I sucked one chocolate-coated finger thoughtfully. “I don’t think I’m really that hungry.”

Baby Ruth Man pounded his penis harder. “Please! Eat it!”

“Well . . . I guess one little bitewouldn’t hurt. It’s so nice and warm, after all.” I licked my lips. “You won’t tell anyone, will you?” Customers generally loved the idea of being complicit in their models’ taboo-breaking behavior, no matter how tame or softcore. It made them feel like we were on the same team—two horny people united in mutual depravity. Didn’t the classic
Playboy
pose feature a bunny-eared model bending over with a finger pressed to her lips in a playfully arch
shhh
—
don’t tell
gesture? Customers loved to imagine that deep inside every woman was a heart of indiscriminate perversity. At Butterscotch’s, it was our job to confirm that delusion.

I leaned forward, nuzzling the paper plate. Then, after a tantalizingly long pause, I took one single, feline bite of the softened bar. Salty peanuts, chocolate, and sticky-sweet nougat exploded across my palate as I chewed. I remembered not to swallow. Turning to Baby Ruth Man, I opened my mouth and showed him the mess on my tongue.

“Eat it! Eat—” and with that, he shot his candy-lovin’ load into a clean washcloth.

I was done. Once you got them to a certain point in their arousal, their orgasms tended to happen quickly and inevitably Baby Ruth Man knew I was going to eat the candy bar, because that was what I was being paid to do, and it was that surety that took him over the edge. My actualization of his request had only been a formality.

As I politely waited for his spasm to end, I swallowed the candy perfunctorily. Baby Ruth Man wasn’t paying attention, so I didn’t have to be sexy. It was good, but the taste of candy-bar-grade chocolate didn’t go well with all the pizza I’d eaten. I burped a little chocolate-and-garlic-scented puff then surreptitiously waved my hand to disperse the odor. I looked forward to wiping the chocolate off my lips, and to eating a few Turns.

I glanced at the cooling, nibbled candy bar on the chocolate-smeared paper plate. Then I looked again.

No fucking way
.

But yes—the mystery of Baby Ruth Man had suddenly become completely clear to me, and, once known, the terrible information could not be suppressed or disavowed. I felt it as a physical weight in my poor swollen gut as I gazed at the mess on my chair.

The melted Baby Ruth’s resemblance to fecal matter was undeniable.

The smears of chocolate on the plate were unmistakably shit-inspired. The size and the shape of the bar suddenly made absurd sense. Other candy bars were smooth and aerodynamically squared-off like Tokyo supertrain coaches. Only Baby Ruth was organically round and bumpy.

The peanuts added a touch of realism.

Baby Ruth Man was paying to watch us eat shit.

That was his fantasy, anyway. The brown mess on our faces—the way he liked to watch us smell, then nibble—the fact that he’d frowned when I referred to the Baby Ruth as a candy bar. Of course! I felt like Isaac Newton, dive-bombed by the gravity of a single earthbound apple. My cheeks felt hot, and all of a sudden the chocolate around my mouth felt unendurably caked-on and muddy. I swore I could actually smell shit.

It wasn’t that I was humiliated. No, I found it far more humiliating to pretend to be aroused by normal lingerie show customers, as if their uninspired yanking was somehow responsible for my own histrionic faked orgasm.
That was
humiliating. This was merely disgusting. Eating shit—who would get turned on by that? I felt a little self-righteous. I considered myself fairly kinky in my personal life, but I drew the line-well before coprophagia. Baby Ruth Man was a great big shit-loving freak!

I couldn’t wait to tell the other girls. I’d finally cracked the mystery of Baby Ruth Man. I felt like punching the air in triumph.
Case closed!

“
Pretend you just found It. . . .”
Yeah—a steaming brown log! I’d found it, all right.

I excused myself to the dressing room, telling Baby Ruth Man to dress and to wait in the room for me so I could escort him out. I wiped every trace of the chocolate from my mouth, chin, and cheeks, put my dress back on, and knocked on the door of the showroom. Baby Ruth Man was dressed and ready to go. I glanced over his shoulder and noted the two twenties on the glass-topped table next to the couch.
Cheapskate
, I thought. The nibbled Baby Ruth log cooling on my chair looked unbelievably obscene on its paper plate, like a foul practical joke. I couldn’t wait to trick Lenore into looking at it. “I really had to go,” I planned on saying. “I couldn’t wait till the show was over.” I imagined her outraged screams with pleasure.

I saw Baby Ruth Man out of the lobby and onto the street, then I went back to the lounge and told Lenore about my discovery.

“I’ve got him figured out,” I said.

Lenore looked up from her magazine. It was
Seventeen
. The cover model’s eyes had been cut out, and someone had drawn a pentagram on her freshly scrubbed forehead.
Back to school!
the cover trumpeted. I Figured going back to school as a Satanist probably wasn’t what the editorial staff meant. The articles were probably about wearing plaid and patent leather Mary Janes, not sacrificing goats. Though, in these post-Sassy days, you never knew what angle the fashion magazines would try to gain“edgy” readership.

“Who?” she asked.

“Baby Ruth Man,” I said. “I’ve got him figured out.” I told her everything. When I showed her the melted Ruth on the plate, she screamed satisfyingly. I knew I was right.

NEWS OF MY
discovery—the cracking of Baby Ruth Man’s mysterious code —swept through Butterscotch’s like wildfire. Some girls were indignant and vowed not to take shows with him in the future. The older girls just shrugged and made mental notes to play up the shit-eating, poo-smearing scenario like the pros they were. I was in the latter camp—his shit fixation was gross, sure, but no more terrible or degrading than any of the other contortions we went through to make our customers come. Frankly, I preferred getting paid to eat microwaved candy to pretending to finger-bang my own pussy through the cotton gusset of my thong.

A few weeks later, after most of the Baby Ruth Man hubbub had died down, I bought a five-pound jumbo bag of fun-size Baby Ruths on my way to work and put them in a big bowl on top of the television set in the lounge. EAT ME, read the note I taped to the bowl. I wasn’t sure if anyone would, though. Maybe Baby Ruths were forever ruined for the staff of Butterscotch’s. Which would be a shame, because regardless of Baby Ruth Man’s shit fixation, they were a damn good candy bar. Peanuts, chocolate, and nougat, blessed by a butterfly kiss of caramel—classic ingredients in lovely proportion, without any newfangled gimmickry or flashy sales hooks, named in sweet, old-fashioned sincerity for President Grover Cleveland’s daughter. It wasn’t Nestle’s fault that a lone pervert liked to use them as scatological masturbation material. Why couldn’t he pick on Oh, Henry! instead? I didn’t know anyone who liked those.