In 1973, some movie called The Three Musketeers, Oliver Reed got to sword-fighting in a windmill, and somebody stabbed his throat. Just about bled him to death.
Dick York trashed his spine while filming a movie called They Came to Cordura in 1959. Kept acting despite the pain until 1969, as the witch's husband in Bewitched. Spent fourteen episodes in the hospital and lost the role.
Ms. Wright shrugs her shoulders, still jogging, her hands tossing the exercise stone back and forth, the weight making her biceps muscles pulse big with each catch. She nods for me to turn the page. Trading this crop of ceiling-spacklers for the next six weasel-teasers.
Turning the plastic page, I tell how Annabel Chong compared a gang bang to running a marathon. Sometimes you felt full of energy. Other times you felt exhausted. Then you'd get your second wind and feel your energy rise.
The actor Lorne Greene, Ms. Wright says, who did the TV show Bonanza, years later he was filming his other show, Lorne Greene's New Wilderness, and an alligator bit off his nipple.
Saying this, she's looking at the Polaroids. Her knees pumping, her boobs bouncing, her eyes stay fixed on one single picture. A young carpet-seeder. Number 72. Same eyes as her, same mouth. Nice. Not somebody who'd bite off your nipple.
For my part, I've tried to pace the gang bang the way Messalina would, spreading out the ugly yogurt-yankers, the old and obese bone-honers, the dirty and deformed gland-handlers as far as possible. A monster inserted between every eight or ten ordinary sea-monkey sprayers.
Ms. Wright nods at a familiar face, joystick-jerker number 137, and she says, "He's hot…" A washed-up TV ham looking to toss some baby gravy.
At Ms. Wright's crotch, something new swells under the black spandex. The bump jiggles down her leg. Pops under the elastic. Flashes bright green across the sidewalk and is gone into a storm drain, rattling, banging, pinballing down metal pipes in the dark.
"Fuck," Ms. Wright says, watching it gone, "that one was genuine jade."
The two of us, heads bent to stare into the iron grate of the storm drain, I say how Aristotle used to write philosophy while holding a heavy iron ball in one hand. The moment he'd start to fall asleep, his fingers would relax, and the ball would crash to the floor. The noise woke him, and he'd keep working.
"Aristotle?" Ms. Wright says. She looks from the storm drain to me.
Yeah, I say. True fact.
Ms. Wright's eyes squint, narrow, and she says, "The man who married Jackie O?"
And I say yeah. Turn the clear plastic page in my three-ring binder. Show her another six Florida-floggers.
Ms. Wright tells me how the famous lover Casanova used to stuff two silver balls inside the ladies he was dating. He claimed it prevented pregnancy, the silver did, because it was a tiny bit poison. The same reason why folks wanted to eat food with silverware, because silver kills bacteria.
Vaginal weights, she calls them. Some ring with bells inside them. Some could be little rolling pins. Some in the shape of chicken eggs. You carry them while you run or bicycle or do housework.
Jogging along, tossing the stone from palm to palm, where it lands with a hard clap, Ms. Wright says, "My only beef with jogging is when I rattle." She says, "Sometimes I feel like I'm a can of spray paint."
The stone smacking into her other palm, the sound of one hand clapping.
I turn another page in my three-ring binder. Another six fly-fishers.
At rifle rubber number 600, Ms. Wright says, "Good ol' Branch Bacardi…" Looking into the distance, the green grass horizon where the dog disappeared, Ms. Wright says, "That cairn terrier? That little dog Terry, who played Toto in the Wizard of Oz movie? You know that pooch is still around?"
When the dog died, the owners had Terry stuffed and mounted. In 1996, the dog sold at auction for eight thousand dollars.
True fact.
"Toto wasn't even a boy dog. Terry was a girl," Ms. Wright says. "Even dead, that girl is still making people money."
Something round and heavy, it's already inching down one leg of her shorts.
13. Mr. 600
The Sheila babe yells for everybody to shut up. She checks the call sheets and says, "Number 21… I need number 21."
We're all not breathing, fingers crossed, ears pointed to hear our number.
Checking her clipboard, Sheila goes, "Number 283 and number 544." One hand, she waves for dudes to follow her onto the set, saying, "Right this way, gentlemen."
On the monitors, we're looking at Cassie Wright wearing a white slip, playing a frustrated Southern belle desperate to fit into her husband dude's rich plan-ration family. The dude's a used-to-be semi-pro pitcher who drinks too much and ain't slipped her the bone for so long she's worried he's queer. Cassie's fretting about her dad-in-law, named Big Daddy, and her nieces and nephews she calls little no-neck monsters. Rubbing her hands up and down her white satin hips, Cassie says, "I feel…" She says, "I feel like a twat on a hot tin roof."
This here was later released as Slut on a Hot Tin Roof.
Later re-released as Cunt on a Hot Tin Roof.
Cord is playing the maybe-queer husband, and, sitting in a wheelchair, he goes, "Well, jump on, Maggie! Jump on!"
Only nobody's watching. We're all eyes squinted, watching Sheila and the three dudes, waiting for them to get to the top of the stairs, when Sheila swipes her mag card and the door to the sound stage clicks open. All of us dudes, holding one hand with the fingers spread to block that blast of bright light, the spots and fill lights, halogen bulbs, and the glare off Mylar reflectors, so bright it hurts to look. But dudes look, anyway. The side of every face flashed white as the dark shapes of Sheila, and the three dudes melt and disappear into the bright white.
Dudes still waiting, squinting, mole-eyed blind, and peeking through eyelashes, we can't see nothing but maybe white skin against white sheets, white-blond hair and fingernails, all that faded under white, white, baking-bright lights. The smell of bleach, ammonia, some cleaner. And a draft of cold air-conditioning.
In that flash, the silver cross the kid wears, the gold locket I got from Cassie, they both spark and flare, hot with caught light for just one heartbeat.
Dudes' eyes start to adjust, and the door's already closing, closing, closed. Our basement we're waiting in, the floor gummy with spilled soda and potato-chip crumbs sticking to dudes' bare feet, this here's that much darker after just that look. Our peek at bright nothing leaving us blind.
I'm touching the necklace Cassie gived me, the locket, saying something to the television dude with the teddy bear.
And kid 72 shows up at my elbow, asking to talk.
"Not to you," the kid says to the 137 dude. Kid's fingering something that hangs from a chain around his neck, the little silver cross, a church kind of cross, and the kid goes, "I need to ask Mr. Bacardi something."
My bet is the television dude, number 137, has got some dirty blood running inside him. He shrugs and goes off, but not too far, just a couple steps.
To the kid I go, this is me poking my finger in the kid's face, I'm going, "Dude, you here to help your old lady or punish her?"
The kid's, like, all shaking his lips, no, going, "I'm here to save her."
The reason babes in this business, why they don't do some birth control, is because the pill can make your skin break out. Give you greasy, stringy hair. The diaphragm or the sponge is nothing you want in your works, not if you're double-teamed with a pair of professional dicks like Cord or Beam or yours truly. No babe doing a double penetration wants anything wire tucked up inside her, I tell the kid. It ain't half impossible he's the son of Cassie Wright.