SKIMMING THE
GUMBO NUCLEAR "Facilis Descensus Averni" Chapter Four Tool Room Johnson and Shorty Stevens slept at the nuclear plant above Baton Rouge, a lot closer to Angola Prison than any other cultural site. They were pulling a turnaround on a grand-daddy whopping scale. They hadn't slept in over 80 hours. The looming concrete terminal and futuristic was all off white and ivory with alabaster patches of caulking and circles of lines etched. In the huge towers were housed the little nuggets and pilings and cadmium rods in white hot thermonuclear furnaces. The big modern charnel house, Exxon, up the river Styx had similar-looking leathernecks, but these men were depression-era faced and tired. Those college engineers and Japanese genius's, the same kind that were blowing all the exam scores at LSU to hell in an Easter basket told these grunts what to do. Man those controls like a good little nitwit, or you'll blow the Delta lands to little bits in the stratosphere. "Wake up, you string-bean pieholin' Crud!" Toolroom yelled at Shorty. The dials and levers and computer mainframes and networking and multi tasking and manuals were all about them like little children they had to tend to, or goats in a meadow. "Shut yours, Mister!" Toolroom said in his lowdown voice. "What time is it?" Shorty asked, after he yawned showing every tooth in his head. Ever alert to meltdowns and danger readings like he was the master of some galactic empire, not just an old fart who tooted around. In here he was a created god. One little glitch and he was beaming back at you, glaring with roentgens. But this place was so safe it was scary. Nice offices. Operators had it good. They made something like 30 dollars an hour. That beat the crud out of losing your good hand in a roustabout's screw-up on some Dog-crud offshore rig puking your guts out over the side after eating a big sweet ham that the cooking steward had been screwing all month. Louisiana industry was gossamer tidbits of apocryphal tales spun into the mainstream of the mega-millions that those Gashouses of refineries made. Sportsman's paradise turned into a chemistry set for mythological hellcats, gutless ward-heeling infidels and fat cats who blended into the woodwork of crooked Louisiana politics like white-on-rice. The one about the female fine-looking engineer lady who got screwed out at the tank farm at Dow. The tool shack woman who played titty peepshow at Exxon in the valley of the ashes. The homosexual antics of civil engineers or the plaster of paris collectible casts of female vaginas that some offshore worker proudly displayed to his buddies. That some hippie pipefitter took a hit of Yellow Sunshine and took a swan dive off one of those fire towers. The fellows whose anti-spark hammers somehow sparked in huge tank at Tennecco in New Orleans and blew them into little bitsy pieces of nothing. What about those guys who actually crawled into towers in body suits like Captain Nemo or some crud and the idiot up at the top pumping fresh air in their face masks accidentally went for a bite to eat and came back and the generator had puttered out and his buddies were now a part of some polymer or Glycol tank. That the teamsters were the butts of endless jokes; a box of jelly doughnuts sitting in the cab of their teamster trucks and a newspaper to read, cause they weren't worth a crud to have around. Not to mention the sex stories; these hard skinned guys were all future misogynists and/or sexual rapists of a freewheeling variety. The way they gestured and talked about women. They depicted them as genitals with legs, not the holy vessels that they were. But they were sons of the depression era men back during the Long administrations. And Uncle Earl Long was the last of the red-hot poppas hanging around strip joints in the seedy French Quarter or the nuthouse in Mandeville. A free lunch for every little brown body in the state. It was a legacy of ignorance. They were righteously thankful of their own blissful ignorance that they felt blessed at the mysteriousness of their vocational beliefs. In one breath they would talk about ripping off a piece of pink ass and then most reverent with the countenance however soil-streaked of Mississippi red clay, when someone of their klan had a misfortune. Maybe even if it was a good old black boy. Toolroom Johnson was looking through Mr. Slaughter's stack of nudie books. Diagrams, dirty pictures, erotica for the ham fisted everyman of the slack-jawed variety. Most of these men collected their wages by sitting around waiting for disasters or semblances of said disasters to occur. As long as no one was doing nothing and it wasn't a turnaround, even here at the nuclear plant, then doing nothing cost a lot of salary wages. As long as those little lighted dials and readings and printouts (that Toolroom Johnson couldn't even read for Christ's sake) were not acting erratically, then they could peruse the Hustler magazines, Penthouse and Meat magazines as though they were galactic overloads. After all, they were working on a nuclear pile. And they thought and knew deep down in their heart they were good men. "Hand me that Nugget thing . . ," Shorty mumbled as he pulled his coffee thermos to his lips until they were inundated with boiling muddy-ass Marine corps coffee. He was in the process of jump starting his heart at four in the morning, along with all the other rough neckers up and down the river. Operators in every plant talked about women, or screwing, or women, or cars, or screwing in cars. While the whole state was asleep, every critter in the Atchafalaya swamp was catching some redeye. Every little crawfish, every Egret, and up the food chain to these cro-magnon types who worked the night shift waiting for disaster like it was Death walking on the beach in a Bergman movie. There had been many disasters from the beginning of the century and many an good white man had lost his life for Standard Oil or whatever conglomerate was on their paycheck. They squinted and read dials and did those operations taught to them in rote fashion and if something really looked even the slightest bit strange they had beepers and phone numbers and hot-lines and all kind of safety crud. OSHA and Jimmy Carter were not to be screwed with. These animal mothers sat up and perused their boss's drawers of pornography and got well paid for it thank-you-very-much. Shorty Stevens scratched his fat ass and tried to break wind. He ate some rabbit stew and shelved the nugget magazine for the nonce. Somebody had to pay attention while Toolroom Johnson was over there nursing a Woody in his high-pocket pants and lanky self. The room was fluorescent and yet crackling whitish dull and dim, like they were in some kinda space craft. Hell, Shorty Stevens believed that if there was a meltdown that for one thing, a big long melting pile of nuclear crud would melt through the ground and pop up in a rice field on the other side of the planet. And the towers of pile drivers and cadmium cores would launch the whole nuclear plant somewhere in orbit between Mars and Venus. He didn't want to be no statistic. Tool room wanted to take a walk around the grounds. Get some fresh air, not that piped in crud they called air that just about blew your balls blue in the face. "I'm gonna go outside and talk to Security. Put that screwing magazine away. You want those supervisors to give us our severance pay? Mr. Slaughter said he didn't want anybody messing up his magazines." They were supposed to stare at the readouts and printouts and gauges until their eyeballs popped out. Even then, some more, until one felt like taking a swig of Jack Daniels that nobody was supposed to know about that Mr. Slaughter and those big shot contractors choked back, but one didn't dare. "Alright, but don't be gone all screwin' night. You know I hate this screwin' control room. The thought of me in charge of the whole God damm Crapshoot!" He wheezed and craved a cigarette but he was out. Shorty had some. He would bum off him till tomorrow. This was the life. Toolroom Johnson's gangly self walked out of the control room into a hallway that led to a few offices and more hallways. Where the business types did their college bullcrud that they got a lot more money paid for. He high-pocketed his high-water pants down the maze of corridors. He looked around in the fluorescent light overhead, the smooth pastel colors of the walls, the various offices. The farther he got from the operations control center to the fringed departments, the neater in appearance it was overall. He caught that emphysema thing from smoking and the time of year it was, and wriggled his gangly frame and face back to reality. He walked past the security station and went down the elevator to the first floor; he felt privileged not to have to use the stairs in his descent. He thought about his wife. How good it would be to be with her, after seeing the priggish foldouts gracing those meat magazines. It just whet his appetite for getting off this turnaround and sleeping next to Peggy Lou. He could barely see anymore. He was woozy to the max and the Relief was coming. All those contractors had to come back and redo stuff: maintenance on walls and wiring. Spots tested by welding experts and all kinds of people a million times. This nuclear pile was one big disaster. He had heard about the Fat cat deals and strange things with the commissioners from those State departments. He knew a lot about this place. He knew how to get it going, shut it down, and all kinds of stuff that made him feel superior to many men. This power supply above the winding Mississippi River was River Bend, and that was something to him. He always felt like somebody important, after an 80 hour turnaround. Nothing but Asses and elbows was what the bosses always said they wanted to see; asses and elbows. There were many isms around, but the bottom line was get your ass in gear and take that diaper off. Goddammit, get your butt in gear or I'll pull it! He made it down the main stairwell, passing under the emergency lighting and glaring exit signs that blinked like a nuclear sub. He pulled out his Marlboros (his wife told him to switch to a weaker cigarette but he wouldn't listen) and fumbled for his lighter. "Hey, Kemosabe!" "What it be?" Toolroom Johnson said with gravity and weariness woven together. "You been up there for two and a half days? When you gettin' off?" It was the security guard, the black one. The ex-football star from Louisiana State. That made all the difference. If he had climbed through the ranks and played in that big SEC conference against Alabama and Georgia and was a star, he was an okay black man in Toolroom's book. Hell, he was a superstar, not nearly a black man. He was on the front line; Noseguard? He came from one of the Feliciana parishes. Went from a home boy buck rice field black man into a wonder that commanded respect. The big shots picked the ex-football and basketball stars for jobs just to have them around. Johnny Raymonge was over at Dow; he was a punt-return super-bug. And Jimmy Boudreaux was over at Texaco. Mike Thibodeaux was over at Exxon. The state was sizzling with football players who could rest on their reputations. If you played in tiger stadium, you surely weren't no ordinary black man! It was weird and this security guard knew the game. He knew that if he was anything but a college football hero he would be out at those tar paper shacks across from the refineries, playing cards. But here he was, security guard with a pistol. The envy of all men who played against Herschel Jones and Johnny Mackey and other legends on the ball field. Toolroom walked out the door, his keys dangling from his pocket. He wanted that security guard to call him "High Pockets." That was his nickname when he played split-end for Springfield High. But he knew that was just single division. He shrugged. Just remember, he ain't just a black man. He knew Coach Charlie McGrew of the fighting tigers, Bear Bryant. He was dropped from the Miami Dolphins cut after he hurt his knee. Not just a black man. "Highpockets" Johnson, the split-end from nowhere, king of the crud heap at this nuclear reactor, lit a cigarette outside in the cold breeze. In the dark he was immersed in a bath of light surrounding the huge terminal-looking structure. Toolroom kinda looked like Lincoln if he had a lobotomy. There were those inner recesses of hollow cheeks. The troubles of unrest lining his countenance, the unruly black hair. Toolroom Johnson had seen a lot of crud in his life. He held himself up with notions that he reminded himself of that very fact. The night air was chilly, fit for man nor laborer nor operator. He sucked grey smoke deep into his lungs. The river was nearby. If it ever changed course there would be one party island of the nuclear variety. But his River Bend facility stood proudly on the bluff side of Old Man River, its muddy waters used to cool the piles. It stood up there like the battlement armaments of Civil War times at Vicksburg or even the Ramada Inn in Natchez. Toolroom always thought about this when he walked the grounds. Hell, even when he worked inside the belly of the beast. He walked off the sidewalk and looked to his feet as he traversed the cultivated lawns where Louisiana and American flag proudly flagellated against the breeze. The spotlights spun upwards to where the flags were waving o'er land and river. He looked at the sky. At the horizon were the pined woods, wobbly paddocks, thatches of underbrush and spanish moss. The woods were high and rather stilted and the city lights of Baton Rouge could be seen as a warm glow effect skirting this horizon. He pulled a drag on that Marlboro so hard the thing lost an inch or two in eight seconds or so. He dropped that ash on those purified grounds, and saw something about twenty feet away. It looked like a big snake, and was eerily silent and still. It was some sort of animal or reptile. He said "crud" silently and put his cigarette butt down on the damp ground and mashed it in with his sensible footwear. He skirted the grounds and trod to the thing, curious now. He stood over it. It was plain to see that it was not a snake, and the head of it was beastly. Unnameable horrid in its gashing mouth, those gaping teeth in that scaly head mouth were stuck open in a gnarly grin of death. It was plainly dead. It was like a planarian that you see in a microscope, he thought. It was essentially not cylindrical; it tapered from the largest head down to a tail. More a muscle, it had a stench to its boiled off-whitish-looking body. It was nothing he had even seen or heard off. It must have crawled out of the swamps a long ways off and slithered somehow (however it was locomotive) into the grounds. There was something else to it. It had an extra appendage that looked like a miniature deformed twin mate to its own head. The thing was, to tell those guys down in research and development, show them where it was and get them to identify the thing. He had caught everything that was in the swamps and rivers in this sportsman's paradise. But this was something of stygian nature (not that he knew what that was). This shrieking blob of protoplasm, this singularly violently-imaged thing. He wasn't going to pick it up with his hands. The thing had a stench like fish in a barrel, like a seafood market full of beheaded turtles. He was just going to point it out to the fabled linebacker and let those guys pick the thing up. He walked away, coughing from the vile pervading order throughout the ether. He walked back to the gates and entrances to the pantheon of nuclear piles and fissionable materials up the steps with a puzzlement and holding his hand over his mouth to keep from retching. Toolroom Johnson accorded himself the manner befitting a Louisiana Hayride anti-Long everyman and launched himself into the cloistered War-room of the facility from hell and brought to him from the folks at the Manhattan Project. Shorty Steven was in there arresting his crotch and fingering Ms. Lesion scores and Tool and Die Cover Girl. In the photo her labia were pinned back like a dissected frog with her dingy little fingers. Her manageable breasts had road maps of blue veins traversing them. She had a smile on her face that said 'give me more cocaine for this shot!'. Toolroom punched Shorty out of the chair and Shorty cussed him out. Toolroom laughed and told him about what-the-living-Christ was sitting out there about two feet long and dead as Martha Mitchell. "Bull screwing she-it!" Shorty said with utmost resolve. "I'm telling ya, I gave the security boys the idea to go get it for the R and D department and the screwing thing had two screwin' heads!" "Bull screwing She-it!" Shorty said with utmost resolve again. "I ain't never seen nothing like it, it was like some screwing eggsterrestrial or some crud! It was oozing out green crud! Looked like some screwing arm the water treatment plant drags up when they're trying to unclog the pipes. . ." Shorty could tell he was serious. Toolroom was a rubbing his face with some serious attitude trying with all his might to figure out what it was. "It weren't no half a water moccasin? Or grouper or eel or crud like 'at?" "No, man, no way." "Well, maybe this here screwing plant is leaking out radiation like them OSHA screwers are a sayin'. And the screwing wild fishes and animals are mutating. That could explain that two headed deal part you are talkin' about." "How could anything have two screwing heads?" They had both seen pictures of freakish looking animals: deer with six or eight legs, but that was just nature or God's playfulness. "I heard at that nuclear reactor in Oregon they found some frogs in a pond, maybe had four screwin' legs." "There's some mighty weird crud going on around here. Some crud nobody's telling us about. Or maybe we are the first ones to see radiation effects. Did you ever think about that?" "Bull screwin' crud on this radiation. This thing is safer than three screwin' rubbers on a eunuch slave!" "Bull screwin' crud yourself," Toolroom said, "You know these screwers that built and rebuilt this thing made it so it bulges out like a fat lady in a satin shirt, dog crud!" "Screw you." "Want some coffee?" he added. "Yeah. Anyway, we'll hear about it sometime from OSHA or DEQ." "The screwing Mississippi is so full'a gunk and crud. Hell, I worked at Dow for nine years and there was more chlorine spills every day or week than you could ever imagine. This screwin' place is filthy." "Yea, but we loves it anyway, don't we?" Short went on about a hunting trip. The relief operators arrived, Rhett, and Greg. Two younger guys with more intelligence but less experience. They didn't even tell them. Screw it, Toolroom thought. I gotta get some screwing sleep. Those screwing contractors been trying to fix and patch up crud and I had to earn five weeks of overtime in two weeks. "I'm gonna go home, screw my wife doggy style and drink a couple fifths of JD!" There stood the ex-football hero, having been summoned by the Man, Toolroom. He was trying to put the snake into a cardboard box. He was coughing because the stench was so bad. It was turgid for Christ's sake. He pushed it in there with his nightstick, his broad shoulders pinching and flexing. Toolroom and Shorty walked to their respective hunks-of crud. Shorty's truck had added fiberglass filler to that huge dent in his old Dodge. Toolroom started his car, and the sun was coming up over the horizon. It was always spectacular the way everything looked up there in the hilly site above Port Hudson, where a civil war battle occurred. Toolroom's rugged face stamped with good country living was wizened with battle fatigue of staring at gauges and computer screen CRT's. That grotesque thing looked like some kind of arm, but really weird! God, he didn't know what to think. Walking-talking Nixon. Baton Rouge was just a heaping series of connected concrete slabs. An industrial community with slums on one side, suburbs on the other. The interstate was full of chuckholes. Toolroom's pap died of cancer, and he didn't even smoke those last fifteen years. He had heard some real heavy information rumors about some leaks in the plant. About some of those fat cats on the highway commissions. Bridge contractors, Big Four River Construction thugs. Hell, they were alright, they were crooked but they got stuff done. Crooked politics was okay in his book as long as he wasn't on the losing side. And he wasn't. The unions were bulging with dead wood. So were the nuclear plant construction crews and independent contractors for the six years it took to build that pile of concrete Play-do. He almost nodded off as his car careened down the I-12 exchange. Almost through the rich folks neighborhoods, into Denham Springs where the good blessed folks were. No room for these rich idiots. He was all country boy out of Springfield, split end for Springfield high. He had married a small town sweetheart. Hell. He sighed easy and sucked a half a cigarette into his chest, the ash falling on his gangly frame. He whisked it away and slapped himself a few times to keep awake. He had more coffee in him than a lab rat. He woke up in his driveway. Or he wondered what he had done since the exit ramp off the Super slab. That's a big ten-four in his noggin, it was. Sinewy mother-fricking thing. Trash fish? Sewer snake? Who the hell knew? It was probably Governor Thibodeaux's little peepus for all he cared. It was out of his gnarly hands now; the best hands in Single-A football in Livingston Parish, where white men ruled. He loved it. Every white man a king! Chapter Five Back at the Apartment hellhole, Ricky Harrison put up with rank harmless Tomer with his hairdo. And little lithe girls getting pumped by little bozos of fellowship. He had to get his own apartment. He thought about Karrie. How could he get her to fall for him? He had fallen for her hard, he thought to himself, in an anything but sage thrill of drinking his PBR. He found an apartment in Tigerland, far away from Nicholson Drive and Snowmass apartments full of his frat brothers who would stop at nothing to snake and dog his own girl, Carrie Kilshaw. It was reasonable. He had already gotten a cheque from his mamma, Marlene back at the spread in the suburbs. He had smelled like a chimney sweep when he had stopped by. Marlene was all for it. Anything to get away from those potheads. She had called the house frat mother and quizzed her at length about the exact drug habits of these ruffians. He had gotten worse since that stint in Acacia. He got used to getting high in the Porta-potty of heaven's own wasteland. He had his apartment. Pretty soon he would have a phone and electricity, and chose just to wait it out with a cassette player and stereo, portable. Karrie came over the night before and she stripped and he did, too. He was extremely excited over the dreams of empty sex. She was still unvotive about her feelings for him. "What do you mean, am I still going out with Don? He hasn't called me in a long time" she said. He looked at her little white breasts perfectly formed. She sat up after they finished making love. Her little white body shimmered in the moonlight coming in through the curtains. There was the mattress as before, but now he would not have to wade through coeds of all races, creeds and religions, with a side variety of sexual habits. And there would be not Atkinson's sexual prowess, Tomer's asinine imbecility, and the hangers-on. The assistant professors lured over with overtures of promised sex, and grad students wanting in on the train pulling wonderment of the barbecuers from hell. He felt he was drifting away from that. It was a rift; there was nothing he felt for the frat brothers. There was no common bond. He had about as much in common with them as the Iranian students ready to protest over the despotic Shah. He felt he wasn't cutting it in school. Could one just go inactive in the fraternity? He went to sleep alone. She had left to go back to her apartment several blocks away, where her sorority sisters stayed and honed their feminine skills and wiles, he thought. She had kissed him tenderly. Ricky Harrison's mother went for a Mammarian checkup and they found some sort of lump that would require immediate surgery. In the hospital she was staying there were incessant phone calls from her sisters and brothers, Mark's acadiana uncles and aunts. Dick Harrison often came over to check on her progress. After the surgery everything seemed okay. She was back home and cussing and putting up a wailing commotion. Ricky's brother Mark stayed in his room even more so, to grow every more distant to the tribulations ensuing forth. In that swelling winter Ricky Harrison made his tuition money, dated the Genitals of the Divine on and off, mostly off, and made his apartment rent and dropped out of the fraternity. Someone found Wayne Langouis's body floating in the water by the pirogue. The three headed thing was found in the ice chest with a stench of flesh beyond ripeness. Old lady Langouis went into a frightful bender of Catholicism and prayer vigils at Grand Couteau Church. In the baleful winds blowing through the quaint graveyard, she stood there many times wanting to remember him as she had for fifty years. Since she was a little girl in Sunset, Louisiana and their first date was "Gone With the Wind" that only cost 15 cents. They had necked through most of it in the Ritz Cinema. They had been happy together. He had fished and trapped and hunted everything worth eating in the Atchafalaya basin. It had been good to them. Now he had been caught up with some monster creation. A three-headed thing so ghastly she didn't even want to think about it. She went to Novena masses and all her sisters and friends and relatives soothed her and told her he was trying to do something good. Trying to bring back that specimen from radiation reactions or something like that. And it bit him. Those three bites in his leg like the coroner at Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital said. The sisters of the hospital feared the worst; that this was a sign like Medjugorje, Yugoslavia. This was the literal antithesis of the mirabile dictum of turning silver rosaries into gold, etc. This was the antichrist, child! And the sisters of the Sacred Heart were gonna pray for whatever evil Lucifer the fallen angel sent into the swamp. Wayne Langouis's brother-in-law petitioned a law suit pending investigation into why those kind of creatures were in the swamp. The grotesque organism that Toolroom Johnson gave to the black running back to give to the research labs: they had just shrugged it off and sent it to the LSU School of Biology. Those young whizzes just gawked at it. They gave a few interviews; the UPI wire service boys got a hold of it, and the hucksters started coming in for a look-see at the marvelous monstrosity. Marlene Harrison started getting chemotherapy for something new, Ovarian Cancer. She was in remission. She was a trooper, a fighter. She would be okay, they said, . . . for now. Ricky Harrison continued at LSU, changing majors like some people change brands of cigarettes. He finally settled at that certain point like he was trying for parole: just how long would it take to get me outta here, Warden? He had about three more semesters. The fraternity didn't fraternize with him anymore. He was basically out for good. Life went on in his languid anonymity. He dated infrequently. Karrie Kilshaw had went off and got herself married to a filthy rich Sigma Chi Alpha milk and doughnuts boy. His father was in the oil business in Texas and money is the honey after all. Ricky sat in his apartment and drank more frequently. He switched from beer to wine and then a bottle of wine or six pack a night. Then bourbon and schnapps and gin and vodka and hangover cures and b-12 vitamins and Alka-Seltzer tablets fizzing in late morning roundups. He still managed to get quite good grades. Chapter Six There was a grad student in biology and biochemistry who couldn't quite cut it in Medical school. She had gone into veterinary medicine and had several minors in etymology, reptile study and beer drinking with the boys at the Chimes Bar. That was where anyone from the seventies played once, to the latest coterie of punkers since Jesus played street ball and Caesar was slam-dance jerking down at the vomitorium. She was Kendra, who if she had not been endowed with a brain, would have had no trouble getting into the modeling business. She was of such beauty it made many a man build up his bollixed up sperm count beneath his belt. She had a face that launched a thousand ships. She was in danger of being perfect. She had a deep sultry voice. She had a beauteous blank face of pure charm and gorgeous eyes and a mouth that just plain was perfect. She was of aryan stature, tall, 5 foot ten. Her tanned skin covered every square inch of her radiant body. She was timeless, a classic. She had gone through undergraduate studies, going to rush parties, at the request of every heterosexual man and others. She was dated at LSU football games. She went out jamming and partying in legendary exploits unknown to modern civilization. Some of them were of mythic proportion. Getting so drunk at an LSU football game that she pissed in her pants. She went to the ladies room inside the bowels of the stadium and used a hand dryer blower to vaporize the affected area. Drunk many times. Would go to bed with any rock star on M-TV quicker than a possum eating a sweet potato or faster than you can spend 1000 bucks at Cortana or Bon Marche Mall. She went to Murphy's bar, home of the famed miniature Lolitas. Sorority babes, the noted Tri-Delts were smallish but perfectly beautiful, proportioned, and mature beyond their years. The place was covered with oily rosin of beer. There was many a nickel beer night there. She did have a talent in the biological and natural sciences. In high school she had a star in her notebook for every time her and her punk-rocker skull-ear-ring boyfriends partook of LSD and ecstasy! Many an boyfriend would call her using his one phone call from whatever jail they were calling from. She was a much chased byronic vision of splendor. An automaton of quality like a centerfold. But equipped with a brain that she just didn't apply. Instead she sought the wild side of life. Many a fraternity boy was after her; even Atkinson couldn't manage the miracle of getting into her fabled trousers. She had been to the White Horse Tavern, Fapps, Zacharies, after many a football game. The reason for her being made by the gods of muse above was to give men pleasure. She had gone to many a rock concert. She was queen of her high school once. Like Professor Moriarty, she spun her web of intrigue whose tendrils focused from a hub and spread to many intricate unseen corners. A celebrity on the night club scene during her Undergrad days. She had slapped many a frat rat for grabbing her breast. She puked up many a fifth of Jack Daniels. She learned not to take drugs anymore and went to graduate school to pursue biology. She could easily been on the cover of Vogue or sat in cattle calls in New York. And successfully made it in light theatrics and movies and television. The biology students didn't know what to think about this angel of lust and pouty, thick Kelly LeBrock lips glossed. And those eyelashes and that heaving bust. That tanned skin, the overall ambrosia of the gods embroiled in human form. Walking talking Jesus, she was fine off her ass. Many a frat rat would have liked to screw the dog crud out of her. She came waltzing in. The elderly professors took to her immediately. They saw her talent with nomenclature. She aced the biochemistry exams, the chemistry labs, all that good stuff. The students ogled her and loved every part of her. She was the stuff men dream of. And she made those grades. Her parents had split up during this time, but she took it well. Gone were the endless trips to New Orleans to Nick's Bar, where the theme from the Flintstones could be heard in 70 MM Dolby, and a 6'10" inch Tyrone, the bouncer took kindly to her and knocked the crud out of anyone pestering her. The plutonium shot, the abortion purple passion, the swamp fart shot were all her own, once. She had put in the long tedious hours, quite unlike her undergraduate days. Now she excelled in her studious application of bugs and lizards and crawfish and fishes and the dissection of the lot. She had to fight off her suitors, though pugilism with the frat rats enabled her to easily get along with the much more subtle graduate students. The professors loved her. She had a few various boyfriends off and on. Not ready to settle down into the real big LOVE thing yet. Chapters 7 thru 10 will be up on the February 1st. Visit M.F. Korn's web site, January 1999 HofP |