“Maybe you better come back when you do,” said Lila.
“How much money do I need?”
“How much nakedness do you want? Be honest. So few people are able to tell the truth.”
“Let’s see.” Pendle took a deep breath and then poofed it all out. “I think I need twenty-four horny nude women at the same time.”
“Twenty-four?” said Lila. “I don’t often tell people this, but you know that a man can really only handle one horny nude woman at a time. Maybe two. Even with two, it’s like that trick where you have to circle your head and pat your stomach. Do you want to reconsider? Think.”
Pendle closed his eyes and visualized his dream of desire. He didn’t need twenty-four horny women, he realized, only eight. He wanted some of them to have merry little breasts, and some huge soft heavy sad hangers, and he wanted some of them to be fairly old and some of them to be fairly young, and some to have throaty brunette voices and some wispy chirpy blond voices. He wanted them all to be on their knees on couches and chairs with their asses up and ready and their slippy sloppy fuckfountains on display. He’d walk in front of them holding his generous kindly forgiving dick, saying, “Do you want this ham steak of a Dr. Dick that’s so stuffed with spunk that I’m ready to blow this swollen sackload all over you?” And they’d all say, “Yes, Mr. Fuckwizard, we want that fully spunkloaded meatloaf of a ham steak of a dick.”
Pendle explained all this to Lila as well as he could. “They’d be supercharged and overdosed with horniness,” he said, “be-cause for eight days beforehand each one of them would have been imagining that eight guys were in front of her staring at her and pumping off their meatsticks, and each guy who’s pumping his meatstick would have been imagining for eight days that he was in a room with eight lovely ultrahorny women, and those women would be imagining that they’re in a room with eight ultrahorny meatsticks, and so on.”
“Gee whiz.” Lila reached for a calculator. “So far your dream involves slightly more than four thousand people,” she said.
“If it does, it does,” Pendle replied. “Actually my dream involves every woman in the world.”
“Ah, does it?”
“Yes. I want every woman in the world to see my dick. I want you to see it, for instance.”
“Not right now,” said Lila.
“You could make a movie of me holding my dick and then project it on the moon. I’d like that.”
“That’s not really our style,” said Lila, “but I like your ambition. Tell you what. Daggett! Daggett will give you a twenty-minute tour now, so you have a sense of what you’re in for, and then why don’t you go away and earn, say, thirty-five hundred dollars somehow, and come on back and we’ll give you a work-study position here. That’s a steep discount. How does that sound?”
“Good.”
Daggett gave Pendle a brief tour of the House of Holes, and then Pendle went back to where he lived. He spent three weeks earning money at a landscaping company, spreading black mulch and digging holes and spreading sod. A woman came by in a van sometimes with flats full of purple flowers. She spent all morning planting the purple flowers, and then she washed the dirt off her hands and rested. Her name was Loxie.
“Why are you working here?” Loxie asked Pendle one day. “You look like your mind’s somewhere else.”
“I’m earning money to go to the House of Holes,” said Pendle. “It’s this incredible special place where sexual things happen and you get to see women naked. But it costs a lot, lot, lot of money. So I’m saving up.”
Loxie was puzzled. “You have to go to a special house to see a woman naked?” she said. “Can’t you just walk up to a woman and say, ‘I’d like to see you naked?’ ”
Pendle was scandalized. “No, that would be rude. Plus it wouldn’t work. And anyway I wouldn’t do that unless I wanted to become boyfriend and girlfriend with her, and that sometimes leads down a long and winding road, if you know what I mean.”
Loxie shook her head. “Whoa, tell me about it.” Then she said, “Do women go to the House of Holes, not to work there as naked ladies but just to go? To meet a man?”
“Sure they do,” said Pendle. “It’s for everybody. Everybody when they’re in that late-night New York state of mind. And any guy who brings a woman gets a fifty-percent discount.”
Loxie sat for a moment, thinking. Then she sniffed. “Will you tell me something that happened at the House of Holes so I’ll know kind of what to expect? I mean, if I ever go there?”
“Let me think for a second,” said Pendle. “I just had a quick tour. One thing is you can get an ass-squeezer’s license, which is a piece of paper that allows you to walk up to any woman you like and say, like, ‘Hello, I’ve got an ass-squeezer’s license, may I squeeze your ass now?’ And she has to say yes. That on its own is worth the price of admission.”
“What happens if the girl still says no when you show her the license?”
“Then the magical clothes-dissolving wind comes up, which is a special warm breeze that comes sweeping down the middle of O Street. It dissolves her clothes to a fine dust.”
“So she’s naked,” said Loxie.
“Yes, she’s naked. Which is not a bad thing, but maybe she liked those clothes. Women really pay attention to their clothes.”
“I have to say the ass-squeezer’s license does very little for me,” said Loxie. “What else happens at the House of Holes?”
Pendle picked up a chunk of mulch and rolled it in his fingers. “There’s the Porndecahedron, which is this special twelve-screen projection theater.”
“Porn, ugh. So sick of it. What else?”
“Oh, let’s see. There are the darkrooms, where it’s all pitch-black and you talk. And there’s the International Couch. Daggett showed me that one last.”
“That sounds interesting.”
“Yeah, it’s a whole lot of women from all countries, all ages, all weights, Finnish women, French, Chilean, Canadian — Toronto women are so hot, I think — and they’re all kneeling on this superlong stretch couch with their asses up, waiting, toying with their tender bits, and you get to hump your way right down the line.”
“You mean you just say hello and start fucking?” said Loxie. “Isn’t that a little cold?”
“No, it’s more like, ‘Hello, how are you today? What a lovely warm Tuesday afternoon.’ And she says, ‘Allo,’ or ‘Hi,’ and you say, ‘May I?’ And she says yes, and then you ease yourself into her for fifteen seconds, and you get the incredible sensation of those first few humps — I call them the groaners. You get that fantastic new groaning feeling, oh, oh, fuuuhck, oh, and she holds very still or maybe not, maybe she tosses her hair around, and then you pull out and give your cock a quick breather so that it doesn’t come, which it’s threatening to do, and you say, ‘Thanks, sweetheart,’ and you move down one and do it again. Groan it in.”
“Hm, I wonder how much the women enjoy the international stretch couch.”
“I think it depends on a number of factors.”
They were silent for a while. Then Loxie asked, “I take it there’s something similar for women?”
“It’s called the Squat Line. All these international dudes are lying on beach towels on the grass, aroused, with their dicks doing the Hokey Pokey, and the woman sinks down on one dude, humps him for a bit, then pulls off, goes to the next, humps that guy, etcetera.”
Loxie sat up. “The Squat Line? Don’t you think we should go together? I’d love to work my way down that line of guys and then maybe you’d be at the end, and I’d feel myself opening to take your hot wanky stick inside for a look around.”
Pendle lay back on the grass and laughed. His erection was doing obvious things in his jeans, but he didn’t care. “I wish that could happen, but I still have a thousand dollars to earn. I’ve got mulch to spread.”