Robert Tanenbaum - No Lesser Plea

“That’s Fartin’ Martin,” said V.T. “Guma’s been plying him with beans and beer all afternoon. He delivered right on cue. What a sense of theater!”

Bloom flushed and popped his eyes, but took a deep breath and recovered his composure.

“I noticed a little while ago that there was a young lady singing for some people back over in the bushes, and I wondered if she would come up here now and sing for all of us.” He looked directly at Marlene, smiling broadly, except around the eyes. He started to clap, and others took up the applause.

Marlene said out of the side of her mouth, “Fuck this asshole, I’m not going to go up and perform for him.”

V.T. clapped loudly by her side. “Come on, Champ, do one of your specials. Knock ’em dead.”

“Yeah, Marlene, see if you can top Martin,” Karp said.

“All right, bozo, you asked for it,” she said grimly, as the crowd made way for her. She went up to the cleared space Bloom had spoken from, nodded curtly at Bloom and propped a foot up on a chair. Bloom sat down on the retaining wall that divided the terrace from the short slope that led to the pond. He had a front row seat. Wharton was at his side, as usual.

Marlene lifted the guitar onto her raised knee, adjusted the capo, and began to play. The tune was the “Wabash Cannonball,” but the version she sang departed substantially from the original:

Don’t put sand in the Vaseline, or you’ll hurt the one you love,

Sandy Vaseline will make chicken croquettes of your little turtle dove,

So, be real kind and gentle, and use a velvet glove,

But don’t put sand in the Vaseline or you’ll hurt the one you love.

That was the chorus. The fifteen verses that follow are generally considered to be among the filthiest ever written. But funny. Bloom was not laughing, nor was his immediate court of lackeys. He substituted a fixed, unnatural smile, like a model in a cheap clothing ad. Everyone else was on the floor, screaming with laughter and joining in on the chorus.

Unfortunately, Marlene was not able to finish all the verses. At verse four-“Oh, did he call the axman, to chop off both their heads, No, he just put sand in the Vaseline and they tore themselves to shreds”-the air was riven by an immense explosion. The famous fish pond was history. A column of greasy black water forty feet high-laden with pureed imperial carp and the immemorial slime of the pond bottom-hovered for an instant above the terrace and then crashed down on the crowd.

There followed a second or two of stunned silence, and then pandemonium. Nobody was seriously injured, except sartorially. Bloom was thrashing about like one of his late fish in a puddle of slimy muck, bellowing. Marlene was soaked and stained black from head to toe. V.T.’s immaculate white costume was covered with silver-dollar-sized patches of grunge. The place smelled like low tide near a sewer outlet.

“This is the end! This is the goddamn end!” Bloom was shouting. Wharton and his other aides were fussing over him, picking bits of glittering fish scales, guts, and other detritus from his jumpsuit, which was now a dark olive drab. He shook away from them. “Stop that, you morons! Get the police! We’ve been bombed, can’t you see that? There could be others planted.”

As Wharton rushed toward the house to carry out these orders, it became clear that this was not, in fact “the end.” An upstairs window flew open and Mrs. Bloom stuck her head out and began to shriek like a banshee.

What had happened was that Denise had decided to take a little nappie in the waning afternoon. She had been hitting the gin pretty heavily and thought it best to recover so she could bid farewell to the departing guests without swaying. She chose a spare bedroom and curled up under the covers on one of the twin beds.

But this was the same bedroom in which V.T. and Guma chose to deposit the zonked-out Richie Krier. Did they pull his clothes off and hide them under the bed? Of course. And did they inflate the life-sized sex doll and arrange it on top of Richie’s nakedness in the classic sixty-nine position? Naturally.

So that when the mighty explosion awakened both sleepers, and Denise looked around in panic and in the dim light saw Richie thrashing around under the doll, she concluded-not without reason-that two people were performing an act that she had read about with a combination of fascination and horror, but which was as yet outside her experience-and performing it in her house. She shouted, “Stop! What! Wha … Stop, who, who, what!!”

Richie was trying to put his mind back together. He seemed to have lost a considerable amount of time. He recognized the DA’s wife, but not what was three inches from his nose, which was a fairly good simulacrum of the female pudenda. That is, he knew what it was, but had no clue as to its owner, never a good situation to wake up into.

He sat up, which caused the doll to flip over onto its back. Now its welcoming arms, huge, red-tipped breasts, and gaping thighs were directed at Mrs. Bloom. Of course, Richie was out of bed by now, covering his crotch with a pillow and running around the room trying to find his clothes. Mrs. Bloom naturally concluded that this man, having reduced one woman to paralysis through that unspeakable act, was about to perform it on her. In her confusion, she shouted, “Stay away from me!” and picked up her most recent gin-and-tonic glass.

Richie said, “OK, lady, I just got to find my clothes,” but in so saying he advanced toward her bed to search the other side of the room. She flung the glass at him. It glanced off his head, flew up to the ceiling and shattered the ornate glass light fixture. A rain of glass shards fell down on the bed and the doll, one of which punctured its skin.

With a fizzing sound that might have come from Fartin’ Martin, the doll simultaneously deflated and flew across the room, a sexual gargoyle on the rampage. Which is why Denise Bloom was standing at the window screaming like a being demented. Which, at the time, she was.

Bloom was also screaming. “The terrorists have got my wife! Wharton, get the security guard! Do something, damn it!”

The security guard, who was, of course, Marty Konstantelos, burst out of the bushes brandishing his nightstick and his.38. He took several long steps on the terrace, slipped on the slimy surface, skidded twenty feet like a speed skater out of control, bowled over several people, including Wharton, and caught his head a nasty knock against the stone steps. As he sank into unconsciousness, his fabled gas reservoir let loose a cannonade that would have honored a chief of state, much less a district attorney.

At that moment an almost unidentifiable creature leaped up on the retaining wall. It was short and squat and glistening black in color, and stank. One might have guessed it was a sort of ape or a subhuman amphibioid creature that time forgot. A bottle of Scotch glittered in its grubby paw, not a usual accessory of such creatures. Perhaps an ape after all. Marlene identified it first. “Guma, you rotten son of a bitch! You stole my souvenirs!” she shrieked.

Guma-it was him indeed-jumped from the wall and raced across the terrace.

“Run! Run! It’s the fucking bees!” he shouted, and was gone down the path. And in fact the shock wave from the blast had upset half a dozen of the beehives in the meadow near the fish pond. The bees were not amused. In a moment the air was full of tiny yellow bodies and cries of pain. Marlene, Karp, and V.T. raced after Guma toward the parking area. They leaped into the old Mercury, rolled up the windows, and swatted bees as Guma peeled off down the drive, throwing a rooster-tail of gravel in his wake.

“Whoo-ee!” Guma exclaimed, as they roared onto the state road. “We stink like four inches up a penguin’s asshole. Anybody want some Scotch?” Everybody took a restorative belt. They also soaked V.T.’s ascot in Scotch and used it to dab at their stings.