A Sad State of Affairs by Sam Vargo
Calvin’s blubber hung out all over the place, making for the appearance of a very large jellyfish caught up in the steaming hot jets of white water. He looked like Big Bubba Brother sunk inside a pool of little bubble brothers. Pale as foamy water, suds rose in popping platoons around him. It was a wretched, ridiculous sight. “The water’s hot,” Calvin C. Clean complained. “I get paid to lay in here with you. So it don’t bother me none. Where did you say you was from?” asked the naked, anorexic girl sitting in the whirlpool with him. “The Gulf Coast,” C. C. Clean answered. “Florida?” she asked, with a bored yawn. “No. Alabama,” he answered. “Oh. Sounds nice,” the naked young woman chirped in a falsetto voice, as soprano as a chipmunk or a very small insect. Her southern drawl dragged like 40 acres and a mule. Laying beside Calvin C. Clean in a steaming, whirling hot tub was a very skinny, but pretty, naked young woman who made her living at a “strip club” (a nightclub where young women dance with little or no clothing on their bodies) on the west side of Atlanta, where all the women talk and look like angels. This visual brothel, selling lust, legs and a number of other delicious, specialty side items, had the following title on its neon marquee that jutted up 100 feet above the interstate like some crazy comet about to hit Mother Earth: THE SEX STILL. The young woman would be considered one of the subculture that in today’s society is termed “a cocaine slut.” To be fair, however, this woman that C. C. Clean has been lying in the hot whirlpool with, Mona Lisa Lezzardio, has always been a few steps up the stigma ladder from the more common, generic “crack whore.” This entertainer would do virtually anything for two forms of currency only: dirty, seedy green money or white, powdered cocaine.Virtually all the bills she made went to powdering her pretty little nose.Yes, Atlanta, Ga., to both whirlpoolers, has always been, and will continue to be, a wicked and wonderful wayward city. It’s a far cry from the New South, where the young woman was raised by two good-looking, hard-working parents. There were only two Baptist churches and a gas station at the crossroads that served as her childhood family home. That place, today, is about as useful to her as is a closed checking account with a zero balance. Now old and gray, her dear old Ma and Pa would surely have nothing to offer her. She never visits, never calls - even on holidays like Christmas or Halloween (any dancer’s big cash cow day). She never called her Mom on Mother’s Day or any other occasion. Meantime, Calvin lives in a little city on the eastern Gulf Coast of Alabama that offers about as much in the way of nightlife as the slow, epoch-long movements of rock formations and/or tectonic plates. In a little hamlet where time is set in stone, a rolling stone with an eye for naked ladies is never a welcomed mineral. That’s why Calvin traditionally has been spending all his weekend and holiday time in the Big South’s two biggest - craziest and most sexy of all places — Atlanta, Ga., and New Orleans, La.
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Well, Calvin C. Clean used to spend a lot of his time in New Orleans. That is, before the great Flood and all. Yes-sir-eeee: Before FEMA Flops, Attaboy Brownies and dirty water so filthy it has become a primordial ooze, The Big Easy was either the prim and proper Belle of the South or the wicked daughter run away with the circus, depending on which street you were on and with whom you were associating on any given day. Sadly, today the city is still recuperating from drowning. But back when New Orleans was more like a city than a village, that sultry piece of swamp water could be spooky during the day. And it wasn’t because of the ghosts that haunt the city. Yes, there have always rumors of spiritual relics of long-deceased voodoo practitioners drifting around obscure little corners and crevices of The Big Easy. And around 3 a.m., 12 hours after Christ’s death on the Crucifix, the Devil’s chosen come out to play on all those graves. Each grave in New Orleans, by the way, is above ground. With a city below seawater, corpses rise in a mess of spooky, harrowing Old World Dark Ages terror. So if you’re not going into that mausoleum into the afterlife, it’s ashes to ashes and dust to dust to you. No. Calvin wasn’t intimidated by the rumors that actual vampires roamed around the Big Easy’s alleys late at night, or that malevolent ghosts supposedly amble around in the foggy, blackness of night, just beyond where shapes and likenesses end and shadows and unending darknesses begin. And of course, on most Saturday nights when she lets her hair down and hypothetically travels in time, space and place, Atlanta can sometimes be a white witch or a red headed bitch in fishnets, too. But Atlanta isn’t crazy crazy. She’s just a little fun and funny, most nights. Atlanta, to those who love her, can’t actually be seen as just a bigger and hipper version of Jackson, Miss., or Birmingham, Ala. No. Atlanta has always been akin to a prim, proper Southern girl who everyone respects - except, of course, for those who know her quite well. This girl is a big girl. She’s got wide, round hips, a low-cut halter top showing those gorgeous, soft headlights and she’s strutting around with big taste and big hunger. New Orleans, on the other hand, has just left the bar after dancing and flashing herself all night. She’s tired, jaded and wants to get consummated by a real man and a real bottle of radioactive lightning!!! Oh Atlanta! It would be so nice if she offered all the fun on the blade that The Big Easy offered, yet did not have the sharp, biting edge that New Orleans possesses. If voodoo, jazz, hot aphrodisiac foods and crazy drunken people have anything to do with the rebuilding, New Orleans will come back more petrifying and schizophrenic when all that mud dries for good.
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Back on the fake tits plantation, Calvin Clean was happier than ever. Far from being the wildlife craver that Lou Reed sings about in those sordid songs he recorded in the 1970s, this displaced furniture salesman has always been quite content with just seeing one set of naked breasts after another. The wild side need not hyperventilate while emitting orgasms and throwing sharp darts. Calvin, a former volunteer fireman and furniture and appliance salesman, knew that Sweet Jane need not be a beast from mythology who grows facial hair, howls at the moon and prays on lions and tigers. No. Calvin’s cinnamon tastes bordered on the sweet, not the hot-hot-hot. A set of unblemished ‘D’ cups would do for Calvin. And THE SEX STILL had enough `D’ cups (along with ‘C’, ‘B’ and ‘A’ cups) to start a Deep South revolution. Just call it the more risqué version of the Boston Tea Party - the Atlanta Tea Party. Throw in a complimentary bottle of champagne, a pair of funny Groucho Marx glasses and a box of thin, ribbed condoms and you’ve got something bordering on guerilla whore fare. - Up in the front, near the bar is where he’s sitting. See him there?
Looking like a zeppelin with an overload valve about to implode. Yep, that’s Clean, all right, that’s the Calvin Clean so many of those pretty little ladies know well. So many breasts are always jiggling around The Sex Still. They’re always flopping here, there and everywhere in a virtual smorgasbord of T & A lust. Calvin’s eyes are a window to an expert’s chamber. Yes, Calvin C. Clean has always been an authority on the overall texture and quality of women’s breasts. In fact, Calvin C. Clean could be considered a quality control expert of this very narrow, limited specialty. Yes, he was like a watchtower judge in a Henry Ford assembly line, of sorts, and his focus was always on those flesh sacks that hold the female Homo Sapien’s mammary glands intact.
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THE SEX STILL, a gargantuan thing, looks like what the inside of a very large UFO would probably look like; at least on one of the Sci-Fi Channel’s own hoaky-fanoky, homespun projects. There are neon lights all around. The place is colored in pinks, purples, blues and reds. The carpet’s paisley design glows like drunken lightning bugs. And on a hot, humid night in July, sometimes drinking a lot of alcohol in the Deep South’s humidity can have the same weird effect as a wet fifth of primo-fino, $280 per bottle, glowing Russian absinthe. But those ice cold draft beers and cheap, ice-cold “well” drinks don’t have microscopic worm-like things swimming around in their murkiness that drill holes through the human brain, as the very illegal, Old World comforter is credited as doing. Anyhow, let’s just say THE SEX STILL is like one big candy factory for sexual addicts of man (but not all) persuasions. . . . The way the dancers flaunt their feminine wiles epitomizes the dysfunctional layout of THE SEX STILL. Big, whirling lights spin around everywhere and the center stage, along with several side stages, appears to be a pagan altar for the worship of the female Homo Sapien’s sexual organs and what highlights them: namely, her vagina; her ideally round, rectal area and those fleshly, delicious, sweet, mams. If THE SEX STILL was a human grocery store — let’s just say for selling womankind’s most edible anatomical accoutrements — the fruits and vegetables would appear so grotesquely genetically altered that one would wonder if this stuff wasn’t actually brought to earth by some extraterrestrial rapist. Yes, T&A takes on a totally different dimension at THE SEX STILL. What nature gave women as such generic and common commodities would be highlighted in this fantasy world as something to be worshipped and idolized. Why did throngs of frustrated beings with high testosterone levels keep THE SEX STILL open almost 24 hours a day? Why was it kept in the black and never in the red? And why were a legion of young, pretty girls willing to kill just to have an audition at this nightclub? Because sex sells in a capitalistic society. Even if the product’s lousy, if it’s sexy enough, or the service and window dressing surrounding it are sexy enough, just name the price and it will be in demand. Build the model of sex dripping like wax from a candle and watch them dart at the light. Hey Uncle Bob, I traded in that beat up old Camaro you signed over to me for this brand new Porsche Boxster. Isn’t it neat?! Yeah girl, go ‘head get down. That’s the answer. Simply. Brutally. Monetarily. Get used to it bubs, if you don’t cash in on what abounds in nature, some enterprising lad or lass certainly will!!! And any politician, even an alderman, would never enter this antiseptically secular, amoral, sleazy dive. A sophisticated system of video cameras rolled 24/7/365. The whole ordeal would undoubtedly consummate in a 30 second blip on Atlanta’s nightly news. And what about theft? The last person who got caught putting his hands in the open cash register during a strong armed robbery is now somewhere in the gulf part of the Gulf of Mexico. Meantime, Calvin could probably do just about anything in the confines THE SEX STILL short of murder or arson. He has always been a very big man at this hot spot. If the place was a casino, he’d be considered a high roller, which equates in commercial terminology to a big loser. Yes, he was cajoled, coddled and caressed by not only the beautiful dancers at this very refined visual whorehouse, but also, by the cowboy hats hiding balding good ole’ boys who kept it well lubricated with liquid cash and an estrogen flow as sweet as the secretions of Venus.
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Calvin C. Clean was the most successful furniture and appliance salesman who worked for a fairly large furniture store on the Gulf Coast. Although he was the top salesman, he rarely showed up for work. His salary was the highest paid to almost everyone on the payroll, except for the man who owned the store, Melvin V. Clean, Calvin’s father. And if Calvin went through his whole two-week paycheck at THE SEX STILL or any other house of dance, he had a trust fund that generated seven grand a month. And although Calvin C. Clean was at one time working for his father nearly 60 hours per week, after a series of horrid mistakes - generated by not tallying up itemized sales slips with the proper use of mathematics - Calvin was given a promotion of being “emeritus sales person;” and now, has less to do with his father’s company than ever before. But actually, this demotion was actually a promotion. His father gave him free license to try to familiarize himself with every woman with a cocaine or sexual addiction problem in the Deep South proper. Calvin was not only a privileged trust fund baby, he also wrote a weekly column for the super large furniture store’s weekly newspaper. The column was not on furniture, appliances or even light fixtures, but instead, C. C. Clean wrote on how to spray for bugs. The reason Calvin could get away with leading such a sleazy private life was that he wasn’t a threat to either his father’s privately held cash cow, nor to any of the women he met during his meanderings. The only thing that was the least bit controversial had to do with writing the column for the furniture store newsletter. Sometimes Calvin C. Clean would upset pest control personnel as well as a few obscure insecticide manufacturers. But the buried, bug-spraying columns he wrote were read about as much as the newsletter’s front page, which had about as much news on it as the label of some noxious insecticide you’d use to kill poisonous African ants and/or the Middle Eastern flying, biting and spitting locusts. Word got out on the furniture store’s floor that Calvin C. Clean was intentionally making mistakes in his bug columns to intentionally try to capture the attention of an exotic dancer named Cricket, whose ex-husband was an exterminator.
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And all this brings us full circle to the beginnings of this trite little tale (or tail? Which spelling really fits here?!). Right where Calvin C. Clean and his concubine laid in the hot, steaming bath; over a half century ago, a 24-year-old man, just home from WWII, lost his life in an illegal still explosion. The man couldn’t find a job after returning home from nightmare after nightmare that occurred in Nazi Germany; his own private viewing of a three-year war movie. So when he returned to Appalachia and couldn’t find work, Ben Waller made a still, just like his Daddy had done, and his Grand Daddy, had done, as well. The explosion’s effects on Ben’s body could have made him the poster boy for Prohibition, if he was born in his Grand Daddy’s day. All of Ben’s skin was burned off and his corpse looked like a black, stiff hot dog poking up from the cinders in the dewy morning that sits in the smoldering coals of a fire that burned and blazed all night long. Today, the Calvin C. Cleans of the Deep South spend a good portion of their paychecks to sit in the miserable, scalding water with crack cocaine-addled sick-o women who normally only practiced real sexual intercourse with other fine-looking young women. But the special effects are grand — young, nubile woman abound, bouncing their petite little thighs and hips around better than any other money launderer could ever hope to masque robbery. Gyrating like a primitive piece of industrial machinery, she’s the one, yes, she’s the one, they often say, late into the evening, when all the fun and all the money is gone from the wet bar top to the garters of these artful dodging strays. Meantime, the ghost of the man who died in the primitive, toxic, moonshine still visits his old haunts routinely. Ben Waller was a a much decorated combat Staff Sergeant during WWII. They say the dead who are dead due to violence, like still explosions, may hang around the scene of their deaths for a generation or two, before venturing down some other boulevard of the afterlife experience. But not the ghost of Ben Waller. Locked into a more spiritual state, those spiritual remnants of the good Sergeant just couldn’t handle the strange sights and goings on that constantly occurred inside the strip bar, named “THE SEX STILL” because of Waller’s own business misadventure. But when the ghost of Ben Waller returns for a good laugh at what he missed in a world of fleshly desires and earthly inebriations, he never comes up short. As a young man and as a soldier, Ben never got to spill his seeds the way things are spilled at THE SEX STILL. And sometimes, Waller’s spirit sits in the corner of the whirlpool room and laughs uproariously as old, balding, fat, ugly men sit in the steaming bath with paranoid, drug addled women with tight bodies, big tits and asses as smooth and round as planets. “What fools these mortals are,” he screams like a deranged crazy person. Nobody can hear him. Nobody can see him. He’s just part of the highly polished, rotting woodwork inside the nightclub. All of the sudden, the ghost’s laughter turned to a bitter, whimpering set of “yips” and moans. He reflects on his own life on earth — how sad and totally worthless his existence as a bootleg still operator had been. After fighting for Democracy and coming back home to live the American Dream, he had to resort to a life of crime just to feed and clothe himself. Nobody was flocking to The Old South then, not even WWII vets who grew up there. But some nights, when Ben Waller realizes that after watching these fools at the nightclub, he comes to the realization that he has no right to be so pessimistic. Even shooting a machine gun overseas beats the beat at THE SEX STILL, his spirit seems to say. These people are real losers, he undoubtedly thinks right before his spirit floats far into the beyond; but for a wavering moment just before that otherworldly, eternal window shatters, there is always a quick whistling of trees. And usually someone is out in the parking lot to hear it and feel it - like a dancer with a mean scowl on her face, smoking a cigarette and experiencing a hideous otherworldly chill. And this frail, broken spirit swears she hears another pale ghost utter a jubilant, “I’m free, I’m free, I’m free.”- That echo rings high above the mighty oaks that line the parking lot…And until the flesh becomes more attractive than the spirit, Ben Waller’s otherworldly self will remain in the rustle of the wind and the freshness of the rain.
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I’m glad you kept this story on your literary e-zine. Some words hang like widows in places. Maybe after an editing sometime, this will clear up. It’s minor, though. I’m happy to be part of Double Dare!
Keep publishing the stuff others are afraid to touch!
Sam Vargo