Jack Acid, Freelance Priest

By Miracle Jones

Man, I love reading about sex. I love writing about sex. I love it. It may not be as fun as actually having sex, but it is much more awesome than reading about people coming to terms with the past, or having important epiphanies about existence, or whining about truth and justice. All writing is essentially an intimate conjugal act between two minds, and sexual fiction (it is all fiction – nobody remembers pimples and despair) strips away some of the bullshit and gets right to the heart of the matter. Imagine somebody fucking you who just won’t shut up about the Standard and Poor Index, or the expressive way light ripples on water.

But after our grand encounter with what was probably God, I contracted a withering case of literary impotence. My pen just wouldn’t flow. I couldn’t stroke my brain hard enough, and the eternal feminine would only wear flannel. Every potentially tender caress froze my finger, and She only wanted to talk about her Father. I’d met Him, though, and He was a real bastard. A nunce. A ponce. A lunker, a wanker, a stinker, and a link. A glass-jawed pony boy, and not much of a musician, either.

Maybe I was just jealous. He definitely had a bigger organ than I did.

The worst part was that Jack seemed to be fine with it. Whatever his deal was before, he was a changed man. He spent more time out, leaving me to an empty trailer and an emptier head. He bought boxes of math books, and spent days filling up pads of paper with strange calculations. Whenever I tried to talk to him about the crazy crap we had experienced, he would just smile whimsically and say something cryptic, like:

“I never appreciated math before, but think of all those numbers!”

Or:

“Dancing! Dancing! Dancing! The whole world is dancing!”

And then he would leave with an insulting skip to his step, only to return exhausted with horribly evasive explanations as to where he’d been.

That was his other new deal. Dancing all night long. Often he had girls with him when he returned and I was forced to go for solitary walks in the woods, seething with frustration and trying to puzzle through his new obsessions to avoid thinking about my own failings. It was always either about numbers or the infernal boogey fever with him all of a sudden, but I couldn’t put my finger on the pattern, and he was too busy to discuss it.

I don’t dance, and I can’t even put two and two together. Dancing is just idiotic, and math might be the smartest, most noble thing you can do in the universe, but it makes ME feel idiotic, so fuck it.

In fact, I don’t like dancing so much I am going to digress about it. I think its necessary, and it might even work into the larger themes of this story somehow.

I have to warn you, though – I’m not very good with themes, so I can’t be entirely sure about that. Most of my other stories end with somebody spurting jizz all over the face of somebody else and a pun about meat products. It’s an artifact of the craft.

Short Digression about Dancing:

Even though I absolutely detest dancing, I often find myself dragged to clubs by friends and half-assed acquaintances, forced to slink along the wall and observe hell’s gyroscopic picture show. I also watch a lot of documentaries about the mating rituals of animals and insects. Based upon my writerly scrutiny of both, I have come to the conclusion that dancing exists for two reasons.

(1) To scatter the brain. People who like to dance are people who feel very uncomfortable with the rest of existence. They are people with poor linguistic skills and a highly refined sense of awkwardness in the face of authority and responsibility. In the course of their lives, they have to listen more than they talk. People bark orders at them, and they have to take them, not knowing what the hell else to do. Therefore, they absolutely go dingo bananas when they get to flip out to music in a dark little room. Suddenly, it’s the people who get through life using their wits and will who are uncomfortable and awkward! The tables have turned! They have their revenge! “Try to screw me out of provisions and dignity now, buddy,” they shout with their unleashed hips!

Plus, the trauma caused by flinging one’s brain around kills brain cells – as does alcohol – and keeps them from sealing the connections together that might remind them of their miserable banality.

(2) To present (the verb). When high-primate females are at their most sexually fertile, they go through something called “estrus.” Their vagina becomes swollen and sensitive, and they spend all day running up to dominant males and rubbing them with this wonderful new thing. They stick out their ape asses, bat their ape eye-lashes, smack their ape lipstick (it’s how you can tell the males from the females), and say “Mount me, King Kong!” with every prickly hair on their inflamed ape libidos. The subsequent rutting comically drives whole flocks of hooting parrots out of the underbrush. Someday I am going to open a nightclub called “Estrus” with a jungle theme and make a million dollars while I laugh all night long behind a two-way mirror.

Short Digression about Math:

Math makes me very, very nervous. I mean think about it. Einstein sits in this little room in a patent office, giggling to himself and scratching his balls, and then ten years later, there are two holes in Japan the size of…I don’t know…Japan. With numbers and the way they fit together, we have put men on the moon and eradicated polio. Holy shit.

I figure that to a mathematician my entire life is the equivalent of some retarded cokehead bopping along to pasteurized techno beats in a crowded bar, and -- since I know how irritating that is -- I try to stay out of the way.

Anyway, to get back to the situation at hand, there I was writer’s blocked all to hell by that red-headed freak Jehovah. I tried everything I knew to get myself back in the game. Sleep deprivation, smoking an entire pack of cigarettes from start to finish, rabid and argumentative street theater followed by self-imposed days of silent contemplation. I even tried going on a road trip, but I only made it four miles hitchhiking, and that was just because the trucker had a broken side-mirror and didn’t see me squashed to the rims of his mud-flaps like an escaped con. Hitchhiking sucks nowadays.

I needed to sell something in order to eat, and all the cream reams were clamoring for something new from the self-proclaimed master of the fevered nib. Not clamoring, perhaps -- but a few of them definitely wanted to know what I had done with their advances.

It was a tough situation all around, and after one of the shittier weeks of my creative life, I decided to go visit Veronica to see if her Sexarium could jog my imagination. Since “Wank” had become insanely successful, she had been soaking up the public spotlight and had been much too busy to hang out with the likes of us. Plus, she had mentioned earlier that she was developing something else revolutionary with the money she was making, and I thought that if I surprised her in her lair I had a shot at finding out what it was.

Jack was at home when I declared my intention to head downtown and pay a visit to our favorite lady in black.

“Can I tag along?” he asked.

“Good lord – why?” I asked. “Since you’ve discovered clubs and the continuum, you’ve gone home with a different girl nearly every night. Surely you are sick of sex and those who profit from its scarcity.”

“I am very curious, and I’ve never been. I am welcome, aren’t I?”

“I don’t even know if I’m welcome,” I said, “There was an incident with a client in one of his personal movies. I accidentally might have turned a garden hose on him.”

“I see.”

“Don’t say it like that. I was perfectly justified. He had this dog fetish, and wouldn’t stop humping my leg. But since he was a paying customer, and I was just an idle layabout, Veronica sort of had to ban me or he threatened not to pay. I tried to explain that no one in their right mind would just let a dog hump their leg and that I was making the experience more realistic – but he wasn’t paying for realism.”

“Couldn’t we just go after hours?”

“There aren’t hours – just shifts. Besides, I don’t think it was an actual, binding ban. Just something token. She loves me. I’m great. And if you want to tag along, be my guest. The more the merrier.”

Since neither of us actually have a car, we were forced to rely upon Austin public transportation. We hiked down to the nearest bus stop and took the number 1 down to her “film studio” in the South Congress warehouse district.

The Sexarium didn’t quite fit in with the rest of the art galleries and boutiques down there. It didn’t have a campy Southwestern theme, for instance – or incomprehensible art deco sculptures that boggled the mind and pocketbook. It was a solid black cube with no windows that was in the middle of a tremendous sandlot ringed by a plastic, see-through fence. Veronica had rigged up a tractor with a rake attachment, and every morning one of her female employees raked the sand into therapeutic Tibetan patterns wearing nothing but a farmer’s hat, boots, and a bikini made out of a checkered tablecloth.

Going down to the Sexarium to watch the morning “raking” was a regular pass-time for both Austin’s largely male homeless population and the college frat daddies. It was nice that these two groups -- with their radically different lifestyles -- could rally together to appreciate crass female exploitation. Veronica was a damn genius. Almost made you want to write a haiku. Every once in a while the rider went publicly topless (something legal in Austin) and it was always entertaining to watch people smoosh their faces up against the plastic fence from inside.

Jack and I got off the bus, moseyed through the gate, and made our way to the front door – a door so embedded into the cube’s matte finish that you would only know where it was by watching people come and go. There was a secret entrance underground for more high profile guests in an apartment across the street, but getting in there was a real pain in the ass. Besides, being seen frequenting the most flagrant and notorious brothel this side of the border could only help my reputation as a lecherous snake, so I always tried to crash the place in high style.

The only way you could get into the Sexarium was by knowing somebody else that was a member. Veronica had the exclusivity/demand/price quotient down cold. Members were issued their own private RFID chip that they could put in their shoe, and when they stood in front of the door or drove up to the plastic gate, it swished open and let them in. There was still conventional security, but Veronica liked the hidden puppet master feel.

“Shall I give you the grand tour?” I asked Jack as soon as the door closed behind us.

“That would be fine and dandy like summer candy,” he replied.

But we both just stood there with dumb expressions on our faces. Maybe that was because there was a pair of eighty-year old men (wearing nothing but neckties) doubly-penetrating a young, fusty (sic) maiden in the foyer who was craning her neck around the speckled back of one bonebag to type on the computer she was using. She was evidently trying to get some work done, and she wasn’t going to let the fact that she was being saddled like a coin-op drugstore locomotive stop her.

Lobby fornication used to be against the rules, but I guess there must have been some overcrowding going on. I guess since Veronica had become so popular.

“How’s it going, Samantha?” I asked, “Should I sign in or something?”

“Don’t bother,” said the receptionist in a blasé voice. Evidently, her world was not being rocked very hard. “Careful though – the cameras are running. These guys have cataracts the size of fish-tanks, they’ll fuck anything that struggles, and you don’t want to end up an extra. Believe me.”

She pointed, and I saw the digital video camera and tripod in question. I obediently moved six inches to the left. These were paying customers, after all. And by the embedded tan-lines, I would guess retired actors.

“Howdy, old-timers,” said Jack loudly. “Don’t mind us. We’re just passing through.”

Both of them grunted in garbled unison.

“They can’t hear a word you say,” said Samantha. “Too damn old.”

“Eh, what was that, baby?” one of them shouted.

“Nothing, Grandpa!” shouted Samantha sweetly at the top of her lungs. “I’m sooooo bad and you sure know how to punish me proper.”

“Eh, right,” he said, unsure of himself.

“How is this happening?” whispered Jack to Samantha through a closed fist. “They must be older than sodomy.”

“Nothing is older than sodomy,” I chimed in.

“Still…shouldn’t they be dead? Or at least quietly convalescing?”

“Viagra and Parkinson’s disease,” sighed Samantha. “They can go for hours.”

They did seem to be twitching rather pathologically. Like they were being goosed with electric current. If it weren’t for the delightful juxtaposition of young and old, there would be nothing at all erotic about the whole affair.

“They were famous in their day,” said Samantha, trying on a wan smile. “I suppose I should feel honored they’ve decided to blow their social security checks on little ol’ me.”

There were two doors out of the foyer. I steered Jack toward one of them, and we began our tour.

“Seeya, Sam,” I said. She didn’t even look up.

The Sexarium had two long hallways that made a cross on the bottom floor. These hallways bisected into four giant rooms. All of the private rooms were upstairs, only accessible by an escalator that ran up and down where the two central corridors met in the middle.

Three of the bottom rooms were considered public, and the fourth was Veronica’s private office and laboratory, where she did her mixing and pouring. There was a library with one of the world’s largest collections of erotic literature (I was fully represented), and a ballroom where some of the better parties of recent memory were held. The other room was probably my favorite place in the world, and our first stop. If even mousy little Samantha was on duty, the Rumpus Room was surely seeing some major action.

The sign out front said “Filming in Progress: Group Therapy 1116.” As soon as I opened the door, I knew this had been a good idea. You know -- creatively.

The Rumpus Room was the size of a small church, and it was facing Austin’s downtown. This was the only room in the Sexarium whose glass sides were see-through, and the lucidity was almost entire. If it weren’t for just the slightest amount of glare, it would be as if one were standing in some sort of climate-controlled atrium. The room was two stories tall, so you could also see the sky. I don’t have to tell you how beautiful it was on nights when smog didn’t block out the stars. With the plastic fence, it was just like standing inside some barren lot in the middle of Austin.

Except there was nothing barren about the place. There was probably more seed being spilled in Veronica’s Rumpus Room than anywhere on the planet.

The décor was Victorian pleasure garden. There were hedges and flowers and pissing Grecian sculptures. Somewhere, light classical music was playing. Perhaps early Mozart, but I couldn’t tell you. I like powdered wigs and intrigue, but only as scenery, not as a way of life.

Instead of a carpet of grass, there was green flexi-foam – one of Veronica’s inventions. It was a lot like jello, except it held its shape. Veronica called it “slow water.” If you stood in one place, you would slowly sink until you were eventually four feet down. If you kept moving, you could travel across only leaving footprints. It took an hour for the flexi-foam to return to level, but since it was soft as terry cloth, there was no chance of hurting yourself if you fell into a slow water hole while running to escape buggering by some randy nymph or satyr.

“Wow,” said Jack.

Wow was right. The whole place was like a suburban backyard in lovebug season. There was so much perverse and acrobatic sex going on, Veronica had to turn on vacuum pumps for the semen pools. It was like a snowstorm in there.

The sexual implications of slow water are immense and surprising, and it is a goddamn wonderful invention that needs to find its way into every home in America. Instead of beds for mom and dad: slow water pits, I say. Some of the best sexual positions known to man can only be held in free fall and in slow water. If slow water is a newly naked woman stretching to embrace you, water beds are a can of mace, and conventional beds are electric chain-mail chastity belts.

Plus, the slow water allowed you to regulate your desired level of privacy by letting you seclude yourself in a sinking love hole. Most people didn’t last long enough to sink all the way down, but there were a few professionals who spent hours down there – taking all comers and sending them out over the top like good little Jerries. The Rumpus Room was everything WWI trench warfare should have been. Plus, there was an open bar.

We watched the surface dwellers for a good ten minutes. Men with women, women with women, men with men, men by themselves, women by themselves, post-op transsexuals with farm implements, crudely constructed robots with bowls full of kidney pie. The Rumpus Room even had a partial second story – four balconies connected by nets, swings, and tightropes -- so there was a lot to look at. Closest to the door was a pair of middle-aged blonde women I recognized as the respective heads of the sociology and history departments of UT. They were servicing four Arabs with bejeweled turbans who looked as if they were in town on business. They all wore mauve cop sunglasses.

The sociology professor turned around and winked at Jack. He started to walk forward into the fray as if hypnotized. I had to grab him by the shoulder.

“See?” I said, “Better than dancing.”

“Maybe,” said Jack, his feet still moving him forward against my restraining grip.

“We should probably say hello to Veronica first,” I said. “Besides, there’s still more to see. We can always come back.”

He didn’t really respond, but he let himself be dragged away. I shut the big double French doors. If there had been a latch, I might have used it.


I figured that the ballroom and library would be in much the same state, so I decided we should go right to the lab. There were still the private rooms upstairs and the dungeon below, but I figured Jack was now sufficiently impressed to justify staying for awhile.

Even the halls were being used, and we had to fight our way through cramped and writhing tunnels of lust to get to Veronica’s relatively secluded oasis. The law was that everybody having sex also had to be filmed, so there were cameras everywhere, even though you didn’t always see them. Veronica was just flouting the pornography loophole, so it wasn’t as if the films ever got watched. It was only in dire financial circumstances that Veronica stooped to making porno movies. And even then, her productions were much more highbrow than random people doing it in hallways and alcoves. Often, I got to consult. The best director in town was the minister of the downtown Episcopal Church. He directed under the name Willy Club, and his wife made excellent potato salad for the cast parties.

When we got to the private, oak-paneled lobby of Veronica’s suite, I rang the buzzer and waited for Veronica to squawk at us over the PA. Veronica’s suite was the original and oldest building, and she had accreted the rest of the cube from this initial egg. I knew where the camera was here, so I stood on my tippy-toes and covered it with my palm.

“Yes? Hello? Who is it?”

“It is I, Don Diego Juan Carlos – here to ravish and mystify you. I demand your virginity.”

“Virginity? Who is this really?”

“It’s me and Jack.”

“Jones! I thought I banned you.”

“Yeah, but how was Jack gonna get in without me? Very thoughtless, Veronica. I had to un-ban myself to save you from being an embarrassing boor.”

“Jack can come in. You have to pay. Or beg.”

“You won’t let your own brother into the bowels of your awesome sex castle? I built some of this stuff with my own hands.”

“You are going to be doing a lot with your own hands.”

“I promise I’ll behave. The customer is always right. Let me in. I’m completely reformed. Plllleeeeeeaaaaassssseeeee.”

Veronica sighed way too deeply, and then opened the door herself. I immediately picked her up and put her on my back. She giggled and didn’t protest. I marched in, and Jack followed, shutting the door behind him. Veronica and I did a lap around the foyer like we were at the Churchill Downs. Jack just hung by the threshold and gaped.

“This is absolutely amazing,” said Jack, once he had taken it all in. “Stunning beyond all belief.” I caught my breath and joined him. He gawked, and I felt home.

Veronica’s offices are also called the “Black Lab.” Most of the time, when you think of the laboratories of scientists and researchers, everything is polished and shiny. Antiseptic white and chrome. This makes sense: you can see spills, and there is enough reflected light to keep you from making any dumb mistakes out of blindness. Veronica was never interested in making sense, however. She was interested in making things, and therefore her laboratory suited her. It was completely jet black, counter-pointed only by fluorescent crimson highlights. The tables, the beakers, the floors, the ceilings, the walls, the curtains -- the art -- all black as pitch, and yet fully functional. No overhead lights. No chrome anywhere.

So -- in addition to the already impressive nature of a well-stocked and fully-funded research facility – the Black Lab was pretty overwhelming in its aesthetic intensity. Whatever your opinions on the matter, it definitely said a lot about Veronica.

“So what’s this new thing you’ve been working on that’s kept you so busy lately?” I asked.

“That’s none of your business,” she snapped at me coldly. But, of course, she had a warm smile for Jack. I could hear it in her voice.

“A pleasure to see you again, Mr. Acid. I wish you had told me you were coming – I would have prepared a more grand entrance for you. As it is, the place is at peak operating hours and therefore a bit frayed around the edges.”

“I noticed,” said Jack.

I set Veronica down and gave her a big kiss.

“So this is where all the magic happens, is it?” asked Jack.

“Oh, yes,” said Veronica, “I am currently between projects, but – now that you’re here --I could use your opinion on something minor. I eventually want to do a market focus group on this new little concoction of mine, but I could use the taste of two trusted gents before we go that far.”

“I don’t know about Jack,” I said, “But I have to believe you already know how I taste.”

Everyone ignored me, as usual. I tried again.

“Does that mean you’ve finished with this amazing new thing you keep teasing me with?”

“Months ago,” said Veronica. “But it’s still a secret. If you help me out -- and if you are very, very, very sweet -- maybe I’ll tell you about it AND even lift your ban. Maybe.”

“Hot damn,” I said, giving Jack a nudge. “Nepotism is my new favorite fetish.”

“Perhaps we will get to explore it further,” said Veronica. “But first – follow me.”

Now that she was done being surprised by our unexpected materialization, she was all composure and drama. She clacked down one ebony hall, her nose pointed high in the air, her palms down, stroking the aura of the floor with each swing of her muslin-clad arms. We had no choice but to follow.

Veronica led us down a snaking trail through the maze of her own endless creativity and the detritus of forgotten projects. There were lots of great toys I wanted to play with immediately, but I was supposed to be on my best behavior, and Veronica didn’t slow down to explain her oddities.

We first passed through Veronica’s Sextech section. There were whole racks of dildos laid out in baffling patterns that loosely corresponded to size, shape, and method of manufacture. Legions of sex robots lounged in baffling states of con and destruction, some of them whirring and flapping rather suggestively, many of them actually making love to one another in incomprehensible ways. There were giant scale models of every human erogenous zone, and plastic genitalia mock-ups so large you could climb them. I knew from experience that the gargantuan vagina, at least, was actually functional. Once, while dangling from the clit and doing a very passable orangutan impression, the damn thing broke off in my hands and sprayed me with several gallons of near-boiling Astroglide.

There were tubes, and coils, and burners, and bubblings vats of noxious – yet strangely enticing – perfumes. I even congratulated myself on recognizing Veronica’s signature “Wank” blend, concocted as it was from the composite smell of a billion ground-up porno magazines.

Veronica just strolled right on by like we were needed in surgery – and we certainly didn’t have time to properly linger. Jack’s eyes bugged out at some of the things in there, but he kept his questions to himself.

“This way, please,” she said calmly, taking a hard right into what looked like a wall. She passed right through. I looked at Jack, grinned, and followed. When I looked closer, I realized that it was just a trick with three mirrors and a piece of spray-painted cardboard.

Black had its uses after all. Truly, there was no end either to Veronica’s ingenuity or to her demented sexual funhouse.

After following the click-clack of Veronica’s heels through oppressive sheafs of unlit darkness, we finally found ourselves in a glowing cave I had never been in before. Veronica changed up where she hid her unreleased treasures as often as she changed the layout of her suite, and this must be where she was presently hiding her stash. Easily bored was our sultry, smoldering gal pal V.

“Take me. Take me here,” I said.

“Later, you walking hard-on. And only if you are on your best behavior.”

In this cramped and concentrated space, Veronica had taken up temporary residence. There was a queen size bed in one corner, and a satisfied-looking couple asleep in it. Veronica snapped her fingers. They stood up, bowed, and went out the way we had come. Not a stitch of clothes. The girl reminded me of “Barbie,” but only because the guy reminded me of a “Ken” doll. Hmmm.

“Newlyweds,” said Veronica after they had left. “He’s a conceptual artist, and she married him for his incredibly tiny penis. She loves it – prefers direct stimulation to penetration. I am teaching him how to use his nubbin for maximum orgasmic effect. Let me tell you: it’s a good thing this place is soundproofed.”

A word about Veronica’s Sexarium admissions policy. Veronica only has one membership rule. Members of the Sexarium must be creators. It doesn’t matter what age, what stripe, what method, how prolific, how minor, how major, or in what medium. Members of the Sexarium must be people who make things -- people whose driving force in life is to fill up the world’s crushing white space with the milk of human handywork. This could mean through business, the arts, trade, manufacturing. Patronage. Anything.

But this also meant that if you were middle-management, a politician, an accountant, a security guard, or a soldier, you were shit out of luck. Master manipulators and agents of destruction were expressly forbidden.

This meant that everybody enjoying themselves in Veronica’s Sexarium was almost invariably fascinating, and shared a higher sympathy than religion or politics could forge.

Ah, you protest, but what about doctors and teachers? They don’t create anything palpable, you say, but surely they deserve the most satisfying and kinky sex society can provide. And I say to you: what’s more palpable than health and knowledge? (FYI: doctors and teachers tend to spend most of their time down in the dungeon, disciplining each other. That’s not my thing, really…but goddamn, it is cute.)

At any rate, her membership policy selected for people I generally respected. Most people kept their sex here, and at the required monthly VD screening, there were almost no surprises.

Veronica clacked over to a black refrigerator and removed two chilled pint glasses. I noticed for the first time that an entire wall of this cave was filled up with rows and rows of stacked beer kegs.

I sprawled out on Veronica’s bed and pretended to go to sleep. I was not looking forward to whatever this was going to be. I’d been recruited for taste-testings before, and this could take hours. By the time she was finished, you wouldn’t know what you liked and what you didn’t.

Taste doesn’t hold up well under scrutiny. Taste is only honest when it first wakes up, and right before it goes to sleep. But Veronica would stab and stab, and wring and wring, until you were all used up and worthless to her.

Jack, however, was blissfully unaware what I had gotten him into. He stood politely in one place with his arms behind his back – still trying to take everything in. I knew that soon he would be cursing me for dragging him away from what could have been the best orgy of his life and instead making him try every gastric iteration of some radical new (possibly poisonous) aphrodisiac. He could wait, though. The orgy wasn’t going anywhere. In fact, according to the placard, it had been going for 1116 days.

Veronica poured each of us a heaping glass of beer, drawn expertly from one of the unmarked kegs. I hid my head under a pillow, but she threatened to pour it on me if I didn’t drink it. Rolling my eyes, I made a big production of getting up and taking the beer like hemlock from the 30 tyrants.

“Try it,” said Veronica, “It’s something special. I imagine it is going to change everything.”

“Down the hatch,” said Jack. We both took mighty draughts. Tasted like beer to me.

“How is it?” asked Veronica.

“I got to tell you…it’s nothing special,” I said.

Jack nodded.

“It just tastes like normal beer?” asked Veronica.

“Yup.”

“Nothing extraordinary or overwhelming? Nothing that curls your whiskers or toes?”

“Nothing,” said Jack.

“Excellent,” said Veronica, plucking the glasses from our hands.

Somehow this was more ominous than anything I could possibly imagine.

“Excellent? What the hell does that mean?” I asked.

Jack looked at the bottom of his glass suspiciously. He scraped a smudge with one neatly-clipped fingernail.

“Are you ready to go back to the Rumpus Room now?” asked Veronica sweetly.

“Dammit, V, what was in that beer?” I nearly shouted. It came out as a slurred and playful whisper.

“Did you just drug us?” asked Jack in a similar slippery gloss.

“Of course. How silly. Follow me.”

I started to say something. To…you know…fucking QUERY what had just happened. But all of a sudden I really didn’t give a shit. In fact, I felt right as rain. Veronica clacked out of the cave, and Jack and I followed like smitten puppies. Suddenly, we were so carefree, we were almost whistling.

As soon as we made it back into the more public area of her private suite, Veronica stopped, turned on one heel, and leapt at me. She whipped out a penlight and flashed it right in my eyes, scanning my pupils. Slowly, she grinned, put her penlight away, and then continued on her way. I was too relaxed to even say anything.

Veronica led us through her suite, back out the door, down the long, cross-hallway, and back to the Rumpus Room, where the orgy was still in full swing. She threaded her way through see-saw mobs, slow water holes, and daisy chains, and sat us at a bench welded to the floor, right in the middle of the action. Everybody said hello to Veronica as she passed, and people were very careful not to fling any fluids in her direction.

“How do you feel?” she asked, sitting down next to me.

I stared at her. I should have been mad, but I wasn’t really.

“I feel duped. But pretty good, otherwise,” I said finally. “You know, comfortable. Content.”

“How about you, Jack?”

“I feel very lazy, actually. Like I could just sit here all day long and it wouldn’t matter in the slightest.”

“It wouldn’t, you know,” said Veronica, patting his leg.

“Yes, I see that,” said Jack.

“I could really use a sandwich,” I said. “Anybody else want a sandwich?”

In front of me, a group of enthusiastic weirdos were performing the rarely executed “Flying Buttress.” This involves a six-gallon tub of margarine, several strong women who have had experience with pommel horse exercises, and a team of “catchers” with very slender wrists. A man with a handlebar mustache was doing most of the tossing, and a large crowd had gathered to watch. Strangely, I could only muster mild interest.

“I am afraid I have been guilty of misleading you both,” said Veronica. “I have drugged you with an invention of mine I am calling “Dénouement,” and it is my most powerful creation yet. It is a medication exclusively for men, although very few human subjects have tried it yet at all. This afternoon, you are each amateur psychonauts, exploring the chemical soup of consciousness. Dénouement affects each person differently, and I’m afraid I couldn’t help seeing what it would do to such rarified gentlemen as yourselves. Please: tell me everything that bubbles up. Don’t be afraid to share.”

“Not that I really care,” said Jack, “But what does Dénouement do exactly?”

“It is a psychoactive sex drug that will soon be illegal, I’m sure. It probably won’t catch on at parties, but I bet it will save a few relationships.”

“The last thing I feel like doing is having sex,” said Jack.

Veronica wrote this down on a little pad.

“And what’s the first thing you feel like doing?” asked Veronica.

“I dunno…having a conversation with a dear, dear friend. Not that I really care,” said Jack, “But what does Dénouement do exactly?”

“It is a neuro-inhibitor. Well, more of a neuro-crystallizer. It takes the feeling in your head directly after you’ve had a very strong orgasm – right after your heart has stopped thumping and you are no longer flushed and sweaty – and holds it. It spreads it all over your brain for a good three hours. Some people are more susceptible than others, of course.”

“How did you come up with such a thing, V?” I asked laconically.

“Trade secret.”

“Then WHY did you come up with such a thing?”

“Why not? It might hurt my client base, but I figured the world could use such a drug. Imagine a world where everybody has already come. It certainly takes the pressure out of things. Instead of women being drugged and date-raped, men will be drugged and date-analyzed. Couples will be able to spend entire evenings just hanging out and enjoying one another’s company without the impending doom of sexual peril. The freaks of the future will all prefer intellectual congress to the sexual variety. Instead of science and war, people will get excited about really kick-ass drum solos, water colors, and metaphysics.”

“Isn’t that what heroin is for?” I asked.

“Why is it only for men?” asked Jack.

Veronica shrugged. “I’m still trying to work that out. It doesn’t work on women. They can come, and come again. There’s not as much release when they take it. It does something – but it isn’t as dramatic.”

She smiled. We must have looked like a right couple of jackasses, gaping mildly at all of the debauchery around us without any desire to participate. I squinched up my eyes and tried to fight it.

“Not that I really care,” said Jack, “But what does Dénouement do exactly?”

“It makes men satisfied. And it is totally clean and non-habit forming, unlike other more volatile drugs. But check this out. Try doing a math problem. What’s 32 times 5?”

Jack stared at her blankly. I rested my head in my hands, and shook it back and forth like a toy spaceship. Fuck math problems: with every ounce of my being, I willed myself to become aroused. Nothing. I had never experienced this before. Ever. Was this more punishment from God in the form of his avenging angel Veronica?

“What was the question?” asked Jack.

Somebody had turned off the Mozart and was now playing circus techno music to accompany the “Flying Butress” performers. The scene had spread, and the whole room was watching – rocking to the same beat. Jack’s toes didn’t even tap. I watched a naked nineteen-year-old pianist with shaggy red hair slowly climb down from the ceiling on a human column of painfully erect sculptors. Her handholds were well chosen, but the whole thing just seemed quaint and sort of ridiculous.

“Sex and math used to be considered opposites,” said Veronica. “The best way to achieve scientific greatness used to be through physical and psychological purity. But I’ve discovered that it is almost impossible for men to give a crap about the phenomenal world at all under the influence of Dénouement. I’ve always known the split between logos and eros was bullshit, but now I’ll be able to write up a controlled clinical study. God, I’m awesome.”

I tried to cram my head full of the most twisted visions I could…to get at the center of my normally torrential libido. If I was dry before, I was practically Death Valley now. There was nothing. Not even a spark. Or was there?

“It’s two hundred or so, isn’t it?” said Jack. “Aroundabout there, anyway.” He smacked his lips and discovered his shoes weren’t fully tied. He bent down and picked up one foot and crossed it over his knee. The task of retying them seemed to baffle him beyond all belief, but he set his jaw and furrowed his brow, and dedicated himself to this all-consuming science project.

I started sifting through my consciousness, cutting and splicing, yanking cords and plugging them into dusty old amps. The part of my brain that dealt with sex was as hyperatrophied as the right arm of a javelin thrower, and drugging it into stupor was dangerous. Everything else rested on top of it in there. I mustered everything that made me human into a neon distress signal and started flashing it into my hindbrain.

In my minds-eye, buried deep within, in the pit where my secrets ate each other, I saw a girl wearing a red dress walking slowly down a beach. It was Her! She wasn’t gone after all! And that dress! She turned to me and smiled. That smile…

I screamed and fell writhing to the floor. When I finally picked myself back up, the whole room had stopped what they were doing and were watching. They immediately began fucking again as soon as they saw I was okay.

“Fascinating,” said Veronica, scribbling in her little book.

“What a cruel, horrible thing to do – robbing a pornographer of his imagination,” I started to say.

But then I realized my mind was chock full to the BRIM with sex, sex, sex. Sweet Jesus. I had never had so many competing ideas. I was cured! Being forced to rewire my brain from the bottom up must have jarred free everything that was stuck. The Deity – that BASTARD -- must have switched the libidos of Jack and I, but now that we had been chemically reset, I could feel the fire again. The Muse was whispering to me so insistently I could barely hear myself think. My hands started twitching, and I grabbed Veronica’s pad and pen and started furiously scribbling down scenarios and situations.

I now realized I had a boner that had actually put a hole in my jeans. But that was not important yet.

“Tell me Jones, how often do you masturbate? On average?” asked Veronica, sort of stunned.

“Five or six times a day. If I’m not getting laid,” I said, not looking up from my scribbling.

“How about you, Mr. Acid?”

Jack had taken off his shoes, and had become fascinated with his feet. He was spreading his toes apart and then squeezing them back together, letting out an exclamation of delight with each successful contraction.

“Can you hear me, Mr. Acid?” asked Veronica more loudly.

“I’m really more of a cuddler,” said Jack.

That was when I pounced. I crumpled up the paper I was writing on, shoved it in my pocket for later, grabbed V, and dove into the nearest vacated slow water hole. The entire Rumpus Room cheered.

I didn’t see Jack again for an entire month. Supposedly, he spent the whole time learning how to play the zither. He never got very good at it, but then again – neither of us really knew what good zither playing sounded like.