"Evidence," said the lesbian husband in the top hat. "Anyone can fake a show, Pinchy. You've just taken us in."
All the others in that crowd nodded!
The brunette wife of a couple said, "Good show, Pinchy. Stirred one up. So if you don't mind, we'll go home and do it in the good old recommended way and keep up the great lesbian tradition."
"Marlene!" Miss Pinch screamed at her. "You stand right where you are. This show isn't over yet!"
Miss Pinch grabbed a box of drinking straws. "Now, listen, all of you. You may suspect that Spike and Lover-girl were in on it. But are you ready to believe that everyone in this room is in on it?"
"Oh, pish, pish," said Marlene.
"Nonsense," said somebody else.
"That would be impossible as it includes me," said the one in the top hat.
"Good," said Miss Pinch. "Now hear this. Would you be willing to BELIEVE if one of YOU, chosen by chance, reacted this way?"
They generally thought that that would be a proof. They seemed very uneasy.
Miss Pinch promptly presented the box. "The short straw gets it!" she said. "Agreed?"
There were up to forty people in the room, all of them lesbians. They each evidently thought they wouldn't get it, and amused at the idea of more show and possibly Miss Pinch's defeat, they began to draw. Each one looked at his/her straw with relief.
Then the husband in the top hat said, "Oh, no!" He/she had the short straw!
"Algernon," said Miss Pinch, "get out of those clothes!"
He/she didn't want to so they tore them off en masse. Miss Pinch forced what appeared to be a birth control pill in his/her mouth.
They dragged the groggy Spike and Lover-girl over against the wall. They threw Algernon, naked, onto the bed where he/she landed with a bounce.
"Inkswitch!" bawled Miss Pinch. "Get down off that God (bleeped) pillar and get to work!"
Homosexuality has always turned my stomach. I had avoided looking at Algernon. But a certain glint, when it occurs in Miss Pinch's eye, commands respect-which is to say, fear. From my perch up on the phallic-symbol column I looked down at the naked body which was being held flat and face up on the bed by willing and boisterous lesbians.
I saw what was really a brunette woman. They had torn off the breast compressors, and while the bosom was
not extraordinary, they were a woman's breasts. The hips, though a shade narrow, were woman's hips.
I got down. Algernon was looking at me with a wild and terror-glazed eye. She was trying to shrink.
I bent down from the pillar and a whiff of stale cigar smoke made me sneeze. I shook my head. Candy at once understood. She rushed away and came back in a moment with a quart of Spring Violets toilet water and dumped it with a splash on Algernon.
Still reluctant, I felt my ankle seized by Pinch.
Down I came with a thud upon the bed.
The crowd's faces made a circle above me.
I got to work.
Algernon's face was in gibbering terror.
A lesbian wife looked round-eyed at the bed.
A lesbian husband went stiff and then hid his/her eyes.
Algernon screamed.
A lesbian with a face like a madonna was turned sideways, praying. I yelled at her, "Shut up! Just because she's a virgin is no reason you have to invoke the Virgin Mary!"
"Oh, my God," a husband said, "Algernon's out cold!"
"No, he isn't!" another cried, peering between shoulders. "She's coming around!"
Strings of seashells began to swing.
Into the miasma of Algernon's groans, a lesbian husband said, "Hey! Look at that! He likes it!" His voice sounded stunned.
The seashell chains began to swing wider and wider.
"Oh, my God!" howled Algernon.
The whole circle of faces went into shock.
WHOOSH!
Algernon screamed deafeningly.
The top of the clamshell bed crashed down, hiding us.
The mob was struggling to lift it. They got it halfway up.
A lesbian, looking through the gap, screamed, "She's dead!"
Another cried, "No, no! She's just out cold!"
The mob of lesbians were looking at one another, stunned, unbelieving.
I crawled out of the clamshell slit, wrapping a sheet around myself. They were staring at me with awe.
Suddenly the whole bed convulsed.
"She's having another one all by herself!" a lesbian cried, round-eyed.
They looked at one another once more. The room was so quiet you could hear a faucet drip half a mile away.
Then Miss Pinch leaned into the dark of the half-open bed. She said, "Well, how did you like it, Algernon?"
The whole bed went into an earthquake convulsion.
"She did it again!" said a popeyed husband.
Miss Pinch and Candy were propping the bed fully open. They got it hooked back up.
There lay Algernon, sheet up to her chin. She had a beautiful, blissful smile upon her face. "Ohhhhhh, Pinchy!" she said. "Wonderful. Wonderful."
The whole roomful of people were suddenly wide-eyed and eager. Slavering, in fact.
Then suddenly Marlene folded up on the floor and had an orgasm of her own.
Spike was sitting up over by the wall. She said, pleading, "Pinchy, can't I have it once again?"
That set off Miss Pinch. She said, "Get out of here, you disbelieving (bleepards)." And waved shooing hands at the crowd.
A lesbian husband was tearing off her tie and shirt. "But, Pinchy, we do believe you now."
A lesbian wife was down on her knees, hands folded in prayer, " 'Fore God, Pinchy, tell us, tell us please, where can we get a MAN?"
"You can't have him," said Pinch with folded arms. "He's private property, under contract." She raised her voice and addressed the throng, "Now what do you think of Psychiatric Birth Control, you (bleepards)?"
"It's (bleep)!" said Marlene, coming to.
"From what I've seen tonight," said a lesbian husband, "Psychiatric Birth Control is pure crap." And she took out a cigar case and threw it violently into the fireplace.
"But Pinchy," said Marlene, "you've done us an awful dirty trick. You know (bleeped) well that every unmarried male in the company is a homo. There are no men left!"
"That (bleeped) Miss Peace has a monopoly on all the elevator boys and she'd ruin our reputations with Rockie if we took those," said a lesbian wife distractedly.
"The married men are so slugged up on drugs they're impotent," mourned a lesbian husband.
"We go outside the company, it's our jobs," said another.
"What the HELL are we going to do?" said another.
"You got to do something," said the naked Lover-girl from the rug. "After a bang like that I'll never go back to biting and scratching and calling it sex. No SIR!"
They got their heads together. They drifted into the back room, following Pinch.
I was pretty sleepy, really. Three was not all that heroic but it was just the emotional strain.
I must have dozed. Suddenly I woke up. Pinch in a bathrobe was standing there. All the company had gone. Candy had her clothes off but was licking cake plates over by the refreshment bar.
My apprehension rose when I saw that Pinch was holding something behind her back. In my groggy state I thought of the Greek sacrificial rites. Now that I had publicly performed, was I going to join Uranus in losing my (bleeps)?
My confidence was not helped a bit when she reached down and jiggled them.
"Inkswitch," she said, "I have a surprise for you."
I flinched. I did not like surprises from Miss Pinch.
"How did you like Spike and Lover-girl?" she asked.
"Surprisingly," I said.
"And Algernon?"
"Once you got rid of her stale cigar smoke, passing, passing."
"As good as me and Candy?" she said with a glint in her eye.
Fear, pure fear, dictated my response. "Nothing to compare!" I cried.