Macho Sluts (22 page)

Alex nodded. EZ had shoved a cold beer into her hand, and she rolled it over her forehead. “Thanks,” she said shortly. EZ grabbed her hand and wrapped her fingers around the wrist to shake it. “We're gonna be like that, another pair of hands for you,” she promised. “Everybody got something to drink? Tyre, you're never gonna make no kinda alcoholic. That stuff smells like cough syrup.”

“Yes, I've always preferred it to Sterno. I'm afraid I have no palate at all. Kay, can we smoke one of those joints?”

“Yeah, sure. I was tryin' to roll the perfect doob, but I guess I oughta give up on that project and just get y'all too fucked up to tell if you're smokin' sins or horse-shit.”

Alex took the joint and a box of matches off the bar. She lit the match on the sole of her engineer boot and delicately twirled the end of the homemade cigarette in the dancing flame.

“Smoke it fast, now,” Kay warned. “Sins don't like to stay lit. Too full of resin.”

As smoke traveled from hand to hand, Tyre made her introductions. The first woman was carrying an old-fashioned doctor's bag and wore a nurse's uniform. As she stepped forward to give Alex her hand, Alex realized that the entire uniform—including the cap on her short, curly gray hair—was made out of white latex. The woman was at least forty-five, maybe fifty, inclined toward stoutness, but she had perfect posture and an air of invisible authority.

“Anne-Marie, Alex. Alex, Anne-Marie,” sang Tyre. “I promised you there would be no corsets,” she said under her breath.

But Anne-Marie had heard her. “I'm wearing a white-and-pink one under my latex,” she smiled. She had a British accent.

Alex groaned, and Tyre interceded. “What have you got in that doctor's bag, Anne-Marie?”

“The usual implements necessary for a physical examination—a rectal thermometer, KY jelly, an assortment of enema nozzles, vibrating eggs and ass-plugs, and a catheter or two.”

Alex relented and laughed. “Where are your canes?”

“Ah, you've heard about my canes. They're in a rack over the horse. Study of the classics is the best course for the improvement of young minds.”

“I couldn't agree with you more, although I come from a slightly different tradition,” Alex allowed.

“An icon is an icon is an icon,” said Anne-Marie. “Your Roxanne is an archetype in her own right. Please, Tyre, what are the names of our other compatriots?”

”Hello, Alex, I'm Chris,” the next woman drawled. They enjoyed a hearty handshake. Chris didn't have Alex's height or bulk, but her rangy body looked hard, strong, and fast. She wore leather pants tucked into her boots. Each boot carried a throwing knife. At first it looked as if she was wearing a chest harness, until you looked closer and realized they were crossed bandoliers full of Chinese throwing stars. Alex couldn't recall a single type of shuriken that wasn't displayed there. Every inch of Chris's torso, except for the traditional thin line down the middle of her chest where a kimono could fall open, was covered with tattoos. Tyre eyed the swirling water, fighting carp, Japanese chrysanthemums, and exotic goddesses with nostalgia, recalling the way the body suit ended at Chris's buttocks, the two scalloped halves of it framing the crack between her white buns. Alex, unaware of the full extent of Chris's tattoos, was still impressed by them, by the thirteen fish hooks she wore in her ears, and by her five-inch-long, purple Mohawk. It was enough to make one overlook the eight-foot-long bullwhip coiled in her hand.

“What's about to happen here is truly tribal, man,” she said, still shaking Alex's hand. “I've been fasting for the success of your ritual. We have to bring the sun dance back into the century, or we'll suffer spiritual extinction.”

Alex was finally getting behind the sinsemilla and the beer, and started to dig what was happening. So everybody was a little loony-tunes. She herself was a grown woman who had sex in the skins of dead animals. Her intuition was that all of these women were solid. Let it rock and roll.

“And this is Joyous Day,” Tyre said, giving the photographer a big hug. “If she likes you, you can call her Joy. How have you been?”

“I've been doin' fine, Tyre, but I'm doin' even better now. Alex! You got a dirty mind in a healthy body, that means you're definitely my kind of woman.” She had a Jamaican accent, a voice that made you want to keep talking.

Alex grinned and took her hand. “Somebody been talking about me?”

It would be hard to say which of the two, Chris or Joyous Day, was the most outrageous. Joy was an inch or so taller than Chris, and had long dreads. One of the dreads had been bleached. She also had facial cicatrices, like deep scratches from a tiger's paw, on each cheek. Her back and shoulders were ornamented with spirals formed from raised dots, and she wore long brass gauntlets on each arm. In her nose, she wore a gold ring decorated with an ivory bead. Her leathers—a bikini top, bottom, and leggings—were a mixture of fur and skin. The natural, uneven edges had been left on the hides. Nothing was hemmed or evened up. Her earrings were made out of bells and wooden beads. A white horsehair flywhisk with a scarlet tip hung from her belt.

“Roxanne is going to lose her mind over you,” Alex said.

Joy smiled. “Just give me the flesh and the mind will follow, is what I always say.”

“Kay, EZ, come over here and get properly introduced,” Tyre snapped. EZ was diffident, and Kay apologized again for their lateness. Alex put a stop to that (and finally relieved her feelings) by slapping them both on the back. Hard.

“Fine, fine,” she said heartily. “'s okay. I can't tell you all how glad I am have you here and how turned on I am. It will probably take Roxanne awhile to realize it, but she is a very lucky girl.”

She gathered Tyre under her arm, and Tyre embraced EZ, who pulled Kay close. Kay and Anne-Marie held hands, Anne-Marie put her arm around Chris, and Chris stood hip-to-hip with Joyous Day, who put her arm around Alex's waist. They edged in until they were as close as possible. Someone started to hum. The hum got louder. It was like standing inside a beehive. EZ yipped like a coyote, and Joy hissed back like a cougar. The background hum rose and fell, but persisted as each of them found herself making animal noises. Tyre and Joyous Day moved Alex into the middle of the circle, and they all pressed up against her, hugged her, lifted her, and put her down. And the circle gradually separated, fell apart.

“Look where we are,” Chris said. “Isn't this the most amazing room? Magick with a K is going to be set loose tonight.”

The dungeon was long and high-ceilinged, with thick wooded beams. Where there was no exposed brick, the walls were painted with black enamel. Wooden boards hung between each of the major pieces of bondage equipment. The boards were covered with s-hooks or cup-hooks that held a variety of restraints, clips, straps, and other useful miscellany.

At the far end of the room was a Saint Andrew's cross, fitted with a leather waist-belt and outlined in eye-hooks. A round stained-glass window surmounted it, and a candle burning behind the window cast colored patterns at the foot of the cross.

To their left was a platform. A set of chains and pulleys dangled from the ceiling, and from the chains hung a thick sheet of leather— the sling.

To their right was a padded, leather-covered horse. On the rack above it gleamed several thin yellow canes. In the middle of the floor was an operating table set up with obstetrical stirrups.

The room was so big that a scene could take place simultaneously at each of these stations without tops bumping elbows. Tyre was a little worried about the energy getting dissipated, but she figured if everybody clustered around the action, Roxanne would not be able to see beyond the grim faces of her once and future mistresses.

Even though they had been here before, most of them more than once, each of the women wandered off to examine the area she was most interested in using. Tyre was congratulating herself for the way everyone had pulled together when she heard EZ say, “Where did you get a weird name like Joyous Day?”

“I guess
my
mama just loved me,” Joy said contemptuously. “Tyre, where is that little cart with the wheels?”

“On the other side of the operating table. Anne-Marie was using it earlier today.”

“Let me get it for you,” Anne-Marie said.

“Will it interfere with your setting up if I take some practice shots?” Chris asked. “My aim is true.”

“Uh-huh, nex' thing I know you gonna be telling me that Haile Selassie be the Messiah.”

“No, mon, everybody knows Elvis Costello is God.”

Joy shook her head sadly. “I and I know Jah is dead, only Babylon lives,” she said.

“C'mon! If the children of Israel could make the walls of Jericho come tumbling down by clapping their hands and blowing their shofars, I figure anything that makes a lotta noise has got to do some good. I play drums myself.”

“I fool around a little with the keyboards. Just for comfort, t'hear another thing talkin' back at me. Dat thing you got make a fearsome racket, ain't it so?”

“Oh, yeah, yeah. Lemme show you how to throw it. You are going to liiiiike this.”

“Jeez, I just can't handle this serious atmosphere,” EZ whined. “I think somebody put something in the water.”

Kay grabbed her by the back of the neck. “Are you gonna pull this shit all night long? 'Cause Mama doesn't want any badboys usin' up all the good air in here. You understand me? Now you make yourself useful or you make yourself scarce. Tyre!”

“Yo.”

“Can we put this pissant in charge of music?”

“Um … That tape deck behind the bar is real expensive and real complicated.”

“In real life,” said EZ with wounded dignity, “I am a recording engineer. I make the things you play on your itsy-bitsy obsolete tinkertoy tape machine.”

“Go for it, champ.”

“Yo,” EZ said sullenly.

Kay smiled and shoved another can of Crisco under the electric can opener on the bar. She already had a small mountain of cans stacked up and ready for use. “I like that little swirl that's always left on the top of the can after they fill it up,” she said, tucking a strand of blue-back hair behind her ear. “It's the simple things in life, you know?”

Tyre laughed. When she had first invited them to join in Alex's scene, she had expected EX (who read like a lesbian to her) to jump at the offer. Instead, it was Kay who seemed eager and EZ who grumbled and held back. “Women don't like the kind of shit we're into,” EZ had said. “They're just playing at it.”

“So what?” Kay said. “You're always tellin' me I don't know enough about how to get in your pants. Seems like a perfect opportunity for me to find out if there's really any difference between the G-spot and a prostate gland.”

“Aw, Kay, I'm gonna feel like a fuckin' faggot.”

“If you don't feel like one now your're dim, girl, just dim. I wanna see this. An all-girl version of the CMC Carnival. And if you don't come with me I'm gonna leave you home all tied up with the TV turned to an empty channel.”

Since Tyre had approached them and solicited their help with one of the Calyx's fantasy scenarios, they had come back to the Calyx of Isis more often than any of the other dominatrices Tyre had enlisted. EZ alternated between eagerly helping Kay and getting underfoot until she got slapped down. Kay had acquired a following among the leather dykes, and EZ had acquired a nickname that nobody was going to say to her face unless they were ready to replace her.

Kay flashed Tyre a grin as she went by juggling a stack of clean towels and cans of Crisco. “Never know when you might want some of this life-savin' equipment right at hand,” she explained, and went around the room leaving trick-towels and grease in several strategic locations, singing, “Ur-gent, ur-gent, eee-mergency.”

Tyre looked up to see Alex wiggling her eyebrows quizzically. “Shall we get poor Michael off the street before some cop asks her what's in the body bag on the back seat?” she asked.

“Absolutely.” They walked over to the bar together. While Tyre dialed the number, Alex went after another beer.

“Where the fuck did you find a black refrigerator?” she wondered.

“It was a hell of a lot harder than finding a sling, I can tell you that,” Tyre smiled. “Michael? We are ready. I'm going to send a couple of the thugs here outside to help drag the body in. Thank you. You are indispensable and irreplaceable.”

Chris had followed Joyous Day down to the Saint Andrew's cross and was uncoiling her bullwhip. She picked a spot to stand about nine feet from the X-shaped beams and began to take practice shots. The crack of the long whip was as loud as a pistol going off. Joy looked up from arranging her equipment on the cart and shot a fist into the air. “Jah love!” she shouted.

“I thought you was an atheist,” Chris shouted back.

“I could mebbe bring myself t'believe in your right arm, Chrissie.” The two of them cackled like the hags in
Macbeth
.

Alex put a hand on Tyre's shoulder. “They all look like pros, madam.”

“They are,” she said.

Apparently some doubt still lingered. “Yeah, it's a hot-looking bunch, but how do you know if they'll follow through?”

EZ, absorbed in the tape deck, was still close enough to hear them. She snorted, then smothered her laugh.

“Because they got the same test every dominant who works at the Calyx gets. I've played with all of them,” Tyre said. “They won't have any performance problems, believe me.” Take that, you supercilious switch-hitter, she thought.

“Well, well. All of them?”

“All of the women here tonight. Except Roxanne. Think she'll follow through?”

“Damn straight.”

Tyre shrugged. “So don't sweat the small stuff. Everybody knows it's really the bottom who runs the scene. EZ, quit dickin' around with that deck and put on some music. We need something high-energy and mean. Alex, who do you want to bring Roxanne in?”