WARNING: This book is not transferable. It is for your own personal use. If it is sold, shared, or given away, it is an infringement of the copyright of this work and violators will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
This book is for sale to ADULT AUDIENCES ONLY. It contains substantial sexually explicit scenes and graphic language which may be considered offensive by some readers. Please store your files where they cannot be accessed by minors.
All sexually active characters in this work are 18 years of age or older.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are solely the product of the author’s imagination and/or are used fictitiously, though reference may be made to actual historical events or existing locations. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cover Design: Selena Kitt
The Last Mustang on Earth © September 2010 by P. S. Haven
eXcessica publishing
Smashwords Edition
All rights reserved
The Last Mustang on Earth
By P.S. Haven
Dedication
For Ronda and Paul
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank his beautiful wife, Ronda, for her love, support, patience and inspiration. I would also like to thank my brother, Paul, for being my friend and chief partner in crime since he was born. Thanks to my dad for passing along a love of busted knuckles and dirty fingernails. Thanks to Sommer Marsden for her encouragement and help with this project. And thanks to Selena Kitt and eXcessica for giving me this opportunity.
The ‘80s didn’t end until 1991. At least for me they didn’t.
A lot of my friends would look back and say the decade ended with the release of Nevermind. For others it was the invasion of Kuwait and Operation Desert Storm. For most, it was high school graduation and going away to college.
But for me it wasn’t any particular album or band, no specific cultural event that signaled the end of the era. No, for me, the 1980s ended September 21, 1991. The night I got my first blowjob.
I could just as easily pinpoint the start of the ‘80s. They began on Christmas Eve 1983 when I received Def Leppard’s Pyromania along with a Sears portable AM/FM radio/cassette player from my mom. Earlier that year I had saved two weeks of allowance and got a subscription to Car Craft magazine. And it was around that same time my mom and step-dad put a satellite dish in their front yard, and I promptly discovered pornography. Thusly the stage had been set for the three obsessions that would see me through my teenage years; heavy metal, muscle cars and sex. (or more specifically: highly polished, over-produced pop-metal; highly polished, over-priced muscle cars; and highly polished, overwrought sex. None of which would even remotely resemble the genuine articles once I would ultimately experience them first hand.)
If the 1980’s didn’t begin until ’83, they certainly didn’t end on midnight December 31st, 1989. In fact, in the summer of 1991 the ‘80s were still in full swing. Poison, Cinderella and all their spandexed compatriots still ruled MTV, the girls giving head on American XXXtasy still had big hair and I still had my first car. Not even my graduation from high school in 1990 could end that decade.
Still, things were changing, even if I didn’t notice at first. My best friend, Dorsey Bennett, had gotten a job. Not just some part-time gig bagging groceries like I had, but a real, 40-hour a week job. Which was seriously cutting into the time Dorsey was able to dedicate to cruising Buena Vista Road with me. And my little brother, Paul, had been accepted to UNCC. The campus was less than two hours down I-85, but it was a world away, and we both knew it. As for me, I was two semesters away from graduating from Piedmont Tech and looking for one of those dreaded real jobs myself.
So it was that on the last weekend of summer, two years behind schedule, the 1980s officially came to a close in Peacehaven.
I liked being from Peacehaven. I knew a lot of people who didn’t. Most of my friends couldn’t wait to go off to school the next fall in some other city, in some other state, some other part of the country. And the friends who stayed put didn’t do so willingly. It was more of a default decision, really. Either they didn’t get into school or didn’t want to go to school or had a job waiting for them with their old man’s general contracting business or whatever. But either way, they didn’t want to be here. Or at least they acted like they didn’t want to be. There’s nothing to do, they’d complain. Like they’d do it even if there was, like they’d be a part of some vital scene if only we had one.
But I liked being from here. I liked being of here. I liked being a product of my environment. I liked knowing how to properly mispronounce Buena Vista (byoona) and Pfaff’s Ferry Road (poff’s). I liked knowing all the shortcuts and the fact that the bridge over the Shallowford River was exactly a quarter of a mile. I liked seeing my last name on a street sign and more than a few headstones.
My own decision not to go to college wasn’t default. I actively decided not to go. Well, let me rephrase: I went. I went to Piedmont Tech, about ten minutes from the house. But there’s a big difference between a university and your local community college. Kids who went to Piedmont Tech didn’t think of themselves as “going to college”. I had made sure Piedmont Tech was going to be my only real option when I decided not to take that second year of German in my Senior year, which automatically disqualified me from acceptance in a state-system school. Since I only applied to state schools, I knew I’d get nothing but rejections. Which is exactly what I wanted and exactly what I got.
I had been standing in the lot of Holman Ford with Dorsey when I made up my mind about college. It was close to midnight, our last stop after cruising Buena Vista Road and before meeting our respective curfews, our favorite time to go because of the lack of salesmen. It has just started to snow and the rows of shiny new Mustang GTs were slowly morphing from Mimosa Yellow, Regatta Blue and Wild Strawberry Metallic to spring-flurry white. Across the lot, the half-finished addition to the showroom seemed to sprout from the asphalt, steel beams reaching up, connecting to others. And it had dawned on me, right then and there, that if I went off to school that fall I wouldn’t get to see Holman Ford’s new showroom completed. And as pathetic as that sounds, that’s the moment I decided not to take German.
Granted, I had been contemplating it for months. I knew I didn’t want to leave, but I felt I ought to. I wasn’t quite sure why. Maybe because that’s what the smart kids did, and I considered myself a smart kid. True, I made mostly C’s with the occasional B, but I took Honors classes. So I felt at least semi-smart. And even the semi-smart kids went off to college. The not-so-smart kids hung around town and went to work. But if you wanted to be an architect or astronomer of marine biologist, then yeah, you needed to go to school. But I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, and Peacehaven was as good a place as any to have no idea. And I couldn’t see the logic in abandoning a perfectly good hometown, forfeiting my history here, pulling up roots just for the sake of doing it.
So that night at Holman Ford, as Dorsey ogled new Mustangs and I looked at new construction, I decided to take Auto Tech at Career Center instead of German as my final elective, not thinking for a moment of the not-so-smart kids who had grown up and had to awaken in a few shorts hours to get back to work on the showroom I was admiring. When the letters started coming back the next spring and I had to tell my dad I didn’t get in and he tried to mask his disappointment that yet another generation wouldn’t be going to college, I could simply plead ignorance to the two foreign language policy the state had implemented a couple of years earlier. I could say I was robbed. I could say I was smart enough; I had the grades (barely), but simply didn’t have the right combination of credits. I was a victim of red tape. A casualty of bureaucracy. Had I only known about the new requirements…
My dad didn’t buy it, of course. Not for a minute. He knew I didn’t want to go and I think he sympathized. But he would’ve liked it better had I just come right out and said I didn’t want to go and told him why. He would have understood. He would have felt the same way. But I also didn’t want to disappoint him, so I had to at least try. Or rather, present the illusion of trying. Because maybe he’d be less disappointed that way. And I think he even understood all of that. So he pretended not to be disappointed in any of it. Me not getting in, me making sure I didn’t get in, making it look like I didn’t make sure I wouldn’t get it. All of it. And maybe he really wasn’t disappointed.
Either way, I stayed home and I was glad I did. I went to Piedmont Tech that next fall and got to come home every afternoon. I got to go to the grocery store every evening and bag groceries and mop the floor and get my paycheck every week and put gas in my car and cruise Buena Vista every Friday and Saturday night. While most of my other friends went off to college and changed the kind of friends they had and the kind of music they liked and the clothes they wore, I got an two-year extension on Buena Vista Road. Of course at the time I thought it was an indefinite extension, but it turns out that even if you never leave home, you still have to grow up.
But on the last Saturday of the summer of ’91, growing up didn’t matter. Not yet. As I sat on a five-gallon bucket in my driveway, polishing my car in the afternoon heat, that extension still felt indefinite.
The sun was dropping quickly behind the big old walnut trees, casting mottled shadows and orange and mauve patches of light. My favorite time of day, right before sunset. My car’s paint always looked its best in this light. The red seemed a little deeper and the swirls and scratches weren’t as visible. The uneven gaps in the panels were masked by shadows and the waves in the sheet metal seemed to disappear. Sunset made the old girl look ten years younger.
I drove a 1967 Ford Mustang Fastback. It smoked a little, used way too much gas and rattled like a hardware store in an earthquake. (Once, while bounding across Slater’s Bridge, I counted twenty-two separate noises coming from my car. Everything from a squeak behind the dash to a loose center cap on the left rear wheel to the passenger-side exhaust pipe scraping against the rear valence.) But I loved it. I had loved it from the moment I first laid eyes on it.
It was Rangoon Red. 289 cubic-inch displacement V8. 4-speed. Bucket seats. My dad and I had looked for months before finding it, two counties away, wasting away in an abandoned tobacco barn. We had passed on a nice 1971 Torino, a rusty ’69 Mach 1 and came this close to buying a sharp 1966 Fairlane before reading about my ’67 in the classifieds. We drove out and looked it over. It was love at first sight for me. Dad, not so much. As I gazed down her knife-edged fenders and sleek curves with stars in my eyes, my dad was crouching and peering into wheel wells, rapping his knuckles on quarter panels and tugging on fan belts. He had pulled me aside, outside the leaning barn, out of earshot of the tiny, wrinkled woman who had answered the farm house’s door.
“Son,” he began gently. “I know this is what you’ve been looking for. I know you like it. But this car…”
He paused to peer back into the barn. The Mustang sat mute under a crate of crusty pop bottles, a cardboard tray of walnuts, an assortment of long-forgotten gardening tools and a quarter-inch of dust. Even under the weight of all the junk and debris and years, she was drop dead gorgeous. “This car is trouble, son. We don’t even know if it runs,” he said. I could see in his eyes just how hard he was trying not to break my heart. “Who knows how much money it would take to get it drivable.”
They were good points, all of them. But it didn’t matter. My mind was made up the moment we drove up.
“I know, Dad,” I said. And for the next fifteen minutes, I defended my intention of buying that car with the fervor and eloquence of a Founding Father espousing life and liberty. Finally my dad sighed, clapped a strong hand over my shoulder, and nodded with a smile.
On our way home, my father’s apprehension seemed to wisp out the open window along with the smoke from his cigarette until he finally flicked both away altogether.
“There’s nothing friendly about a car like that,” he began. “Those cars were built for one thing. Speed.” He tried to mask the enthusiasm in his voice. “It’s stripped down to the essentials. A big engine in a small car. They’re brutal, unforgiving cars. All the refinement of a battle axe.” I could see him gripping the wheel a little tighter, the slightest smile creasing his lips. “As subtle as a sledge hammer.” He drove a little faster. In his eyes I could see the ghosts of cars past.
For miles he stared at the road’s vanishing point as he talked to me about the car I’d just purchased as if he were warning me against marrying a dangerous woman he knew would break my heart. A woman he knew was no good for me. But a woman he knew I was useless to resist. And he did know. He had answered that same siren’s song, been smashed on those same rocks a generation earlier despite his own father’s wishes. And I realized as he spoke that he wasn’t so much trying to talk me out of it as he was trying to prepare me. For the good and the bad. For better or worse.
“These cars are intolerant mistresses. Take her for granted, just once, and she can kill you. The power-to-weight ratio in a car like that…” He trailed off and then started again. “If you want to just gas and go, and never have to worry about setting your breaker points or adjusting the float level in your carburetor, this ain’t the car for you. If you don’t want to have to learn all that stuff, if you’re scared to bust your knuckles, then let’s turn around and go get your money back.”
I assured my father I wasn’t scared. Promised him I wanted to learn. I felt like Luke Skywalker trying to convince Yoda I was ready to be shown the ways of the Force. Just like Yoda, my dad was dubious.
“It’s going to be loud,” he said. “It’ll make all your clothes smell like gasoline. It will shudder and shake and buck. It won’t be comfortable. You’ll sweat to death in the summer and freeze in the winter. It’ll make your arms sore and your feet hot.” I couldn’t stop smiling. He looked over at me and matched my grin. “And you’re going to love every damn minute of it.”
For the next three months, my dad and I lived in the garage. The guys at South Fork Auto Parts became good friends. After the first few nights I stopped trying to get my nails clean. Every shirt in my closet slowly turned 10W-40 black. My step-mom complained about the laundry. My grandma wondered how I would afford the insurance. My friends got tired of always having to drive. Never once did my dad say, “I told you so.”
It didn’t take us long to get it running. But running well would be months away. The 289 initially refused to confine its combustion to the internal side. It leaked oil like the Exxon Valdez and smoked like a Kuwaiti oilfield fire. Even brand new, its small block put out only 225 horsepower, and that was a quarter century and 100,000 miles ago. On our first few trial runs, anything that could break, burn or burst did so with Old Faithful regularity.
On the late nights, Dad would fire up the old wood stove, put on a pot of coffee and turn on the radio. We’d listen to Don Williams and the Bellamy Brothers and Tom T. Hall as we worked. Sometimes we were a tag team, ganging up a stubborn starter, Dad with a ratchet and me with a crow bar. Other times we worked solo, him hunched over a dusty fender, me doubled up under the dash. Endless hours we toiled, like a pair of mad scientists in a greasy lab. We replaced the heavy cast iron intake with a lightweight aluminum one. We scrapped the old, wheezing carburetor in favor of a heavy-breathing Holley four-barrel. We discarded the constrictive exhaust manifolds for free-flowing headers. New battery, belts and hoses. Light bulbs and fuses. Anything we didn’t replace got painted or polished.
“Promise me one thing,” my dad said one night near the end. I nodded wordlessly. “Drive it,” he intoned simply. “Don’t baby it. I want you to be safe, obviously. Don’t do anything stupid. But drive this car. Drive her within an inch of her life. Then we’ll replace the shit that breaks or falls off. Then drive her some more. That’s her only purpose. Her sole reason. You do a car, a car like this, no higher honor. That’s what she’s made for.”
“I promise.”
And when that garage door finally opened, and the windows shook and the neighbors peered through the blinds, instead of staggering out to the school bus bleary-eyed and half-alive, I drove to school in my own car, a car my father and I had resurrected. And I didn’t have to justify it to anyone.
I smiled at those memories as I flipped my bucket over and pulled it up next to the front driver’s side wheel. On the ground next to me sat my old boom box from Christmas of ‘83, splattered with paint, nicked and chipped, the volume knob missing. A knotted orange drop cord lead away from it back to the house, like an umbilical cord. Only about an inch of antenna was left from where it had snapped off long ago, but it was enough to pick up Rock 92.
I squirted some polish onto the folded square of old white t-shirt I held in my hand and then began to work it onto the chrome of the wheel, onto all five spokes, around the tiered rim and onto the center cap that read Cragar S/S, until the whole thing was a cloudy white. Then I wiped the clouds away, revealing again the gleaming chrome, staring into it as it reflected semi-circular distortions of me and my surroundings; the inky blue and magenta of the sky above, the verdant green of the poplars, the bricks and white boards of my house, and in the center of it all, me, twisting and spiraling, encircled by chrome and home. I gazed into that wheel, and the other three that followed, like they were some kind of crystal balls, but I didn’t see the future. All I saw was the present.
According to the calendar there were two days of summer left. But any kid in school could tell you that the summer actually ended before the equinox. It was the last Saturday before Piedmont Tech started back up after summer break. The public schools had been back for weeks. On Sunday my little brother was moving to another town so he could go to college with all the smart kids. For all intents and purposes it was the last Saturday of summer.
Dorsey Bennett didn’t have to worry about any of that, though. Dorsey hadn’t worried about school for three years now, ever since he dropped out after his second attempt to pass 10th Grade. It had taken him two tries to get through 9th and the thought of being a 19-year old high school sophomore was more than he could bear. Not that I could blame him. And besides, Dorsey was a much better mechanic than student.
Dorsey drove a 1982 Mustang GT. It was white with red stripes that ran down the rocker panels between the wheel wells, the stripes made famous by the Carroll Shelby’s Mustangs in the Sixties. The interior was black and mostly plastic. The grill looked like a milk crate. Ford had introduced that boxy style in 1979 and they were still building Mustangs from that same platform 12 years later, albeit with a few facelifts along the way. The engine in Dorsey’s Mustang started life as a 302 V8 that squeezed out 157 horsepower of pure mediocrity. There were more powerful minivans, a fact which Dorsey could not abide. So, 302 cubic inches were increased to 347 by swapping in a crankshaft with a longer stroke. Carburetor, intake, exhaust, cam, were all transplanted. And before Dorsey was done, his unassuming small block mutated into a ground-shaking fire-breather capable of humbling engines twice its size.
Dorsey and I had rendezvoused that Saturday afternoon in the parking lot of the mall, like we always did when we had divergent destinations. I had the whole day off and Dorsey didn’t have to be at the gas station for another two hours. We meandered through the parking lot, Dorsey in his growling ’82 GT, me in my ‘67. Dorsey wandered into a vacant patch of pavement and stopped, and I pulled up even.
We sat for a moment in a shimmering mirage of exhaust fumes and baking sun. It felt good. Inside our cars, we were masters. Masters of the road, masters of our machines. The cars did anything we wanted them to. If life was too slow for us, we simply stepped on the gas. If things were moving too fast, all we needed do was hit the brakes. From within the confines of our automobiles, everything seemed that simple.
I soaked it in. The sweet smell of gasoline mingling with decades-old decaying adhesives. Soft vinyl and carpet on the inside, the candy-colored shell of the body on the outside. Oil and hot metal. Organic and mechanical.
This was what it was all about for us. All the late, cold nights spent flat on the driveway under a leaking oil pan. All the spring afternoons spent under the hood with a shot water pump. All the sore backs and busted knuckles. All the girlfriends who just didn’t understand. It was all worth it for these moments. These and a thousand others like them.
“Where to?” Dorsey called over to me.
“Let’s hit Peaches first,” I replied. With a nod, Dorsey tached up to about three-grand and dropped it in gear, the rear tires breaking loose and sending the back end of his car fishtailing away, barely avoiding my front fender. As he bolted away he hung his head out the window and looked back at me, laughing that silent caricature of a laugh he did whenever he narrowly escaped disaster.
From our earliest days back when Dorsey was the only one with a driver’s license, Peaches Records and Tapes, along with Holman Ford, had always been our destination when skipping school, killing time or simply hanging out. The two businesses opposed one another at the far end of Buena Vista Road, each being the primary outlets for the two things that mattered most in our lives then: cars and music. Peaches was in a box-like wooden building that resembled a fruit crate. On the upper façade were large, square panels, maybe six feet per side, with hand-painted reproductions of iconic album covers. There was Journey’s Escape, Paradise Theater by Styx, Foreigner 4, and Stevie Nicks’ Bella Donna, among others.
I took my eyes off Stevie long enough to pull into the parking lot. Dorsey and I found the two spaces furthest from would-be door dings and then proceeded to back in simultaneously, an automotive ballet we had perfected over the years. We each gave our throttles a blip and switched off the ignitions, shutting down our engines with a flourish of RPMs, all for the benefit of no one but ourselves. Quite pleased with our parking prowess, we strode across the parking lot and entered the record store.
We didn’t even have to navigate the R&B, Country and World sections this time. What we came for was right there in front of us, displayed in an array of those ubiquitous peach-crate storage bins, in assortments of vinyl, cassette and CD.
“You getting both?” Dorsey asked. It had been the question on the minds of every self-respecting budget-minded rock fan for weeks now. Did you buy both Use Your Illusion I and Use Your Illusion II? Because, if you were like me, it was rare to have the extra cash to buy a new CD on any given week, let alone two new CDs. And if you only had the funds for one, which one? Did you buy I, simply because it was numerically first and despite the fact that you’d heard nothing on it yet; or did you go with II, since it had “You Could Be Mine”, which you were familiar with from Terminator 2: Judgment Day? Or did you decide on the spot to sell your REO Speedwagon vinyl to Record Exchange the next week to offset the cost of buying both CDs?
“Yeah,” I answered. “I’m getting both.”
I grabbed up my CDs and Dorsey grabbed his, and we made our way to the cash register via the Rock section, each of us pausing every few steps to flip through the racks. Dorsey was back at the F’s and I was already down to the R’s, holding in my hand Ratt’s Invasion of Your Privacy. Despite the fact that I’d owned that record since it came out, I still took a moment to fully appreciate the cover. On it was 1983’s Playmate of the Year, Marianne Gravatte, sitting in her bedroom, wearing only white cotton panties and a halter top, pulling on a pair of lacy socks, her high heels kicked just under the edge of her bed.
“Greatest Album Cover of All-Time,” I said to Dorsey, holding up the CD case for his perusal, knowing full well he had it at home, too.
Dorsey regarded it momentarily then gave a slow shake of his head.
“I don’t know, dude.” He produced a CD from the rack and slowly turned it to reveal its cover to me. Out For Blood, by Lita Ford. A contender, no doubt. Lita stared at me, all black leather and chrome studs, blonde hair teased a mile-high, her black B.C. Rich Warlock guitar resting against her fishnet-clad thighs, surrounded by a veil of dry ice fog.
“Not bad,” I conceded and then slid down the aisle to the W’s and found Warrant’s Cherry Pie. I presented it to Dorsey, and he nodded appreciatively at the roller-skating waitress, a juicy slice of pie having just slipped from its hoisted plate, caught in mid-plummet right at crotch-level.
We went back and forth, Dorsey answering Warrant with .38 Special’s Wild-Eyed Southern Boys and its airbrushed depiction of the boys in the band ogling a sweet thang in pink satin hot pants. I came back with Candy-O by The Cars, a pin-up of a buxom strawberry blonde reclining on a Ferrari. Dorsey countered with Lovedrive by the Scorpions and I came right back with Virgin Killer.
Then Dorsey pulled Slaughter’s Stick It to Ya from the rack. On the cover was a lovely young lady perched upon a wooden carnival-style “Wheel of Death”, wearing a sheer white teddy, a trio of gleaming daggers embedded in the wheel all around her, each one scant inches from our heroine’s exposed flesh.
“For your consideration,” Dorsey said as he flipped the case around to display it to me.
“Yeah, that’s a good one,” I granted. “But you know what’s bullshit? Look at that picture.”
Dorsey did so politely, even though I knew he’d memorized that image two summers earlier, just as I had. I sidled up to the CD he held.
“It’s obviously a thong, right?” I said.
Dorsey gave the cover a cursory glance, and even though the young lady’s backside was flat against the Wheel of Death, the teddy was cut gloriously high on the hip, so high that the back couldn’t possibly be anything but a thong.
He nodded. “Obviously.”
“Okay,” I went on. “Now, check this out.” I went to the rack and flipped through the CDs until I found Stick It Live, the 5-song EP follow-up to Stick It to Ya. There on the cover was the girl from Stick It To Ya, walking away from us, being escorted into the carnival by a mulleted, leather vest-wearing biker-dwarf. No problems so far. But upon further examination, it became clear that our Wheel of Death girl was not wearing the same teddy as before. That teddy, which had been cut so high on the hip on the earlier album cover, had inexplicably gone from thong to something more akin to what the swimsuit catalogs called “Brazilian cut”. And what should have been an unobstructed, unadulterated view of her fully bared cheeks had become simply a run-of-the-mill ass shot. Sure, it was a nice ass. But the bottom line was that the promise made on the cover of Stick It to Ya wasn’t kept on Stick It Live. It was a fraud. A lie.
“What a fucking rip-off,” Dorsey said.
“Tell me about it.”
The two of us stood in silence for a moment, mourning what could have been. I stuffed the broken promise that was Stick It Live back in the rack and stared down at the cover of Stick It To Ya, my gaze drifted past the girl on the wooden wheel, to the carnival behind her, its warm glow seeming to illuminate the gathering storm clouds above. Dorsey was still mining CDs, talking about the censored cover of Poison’s Open Up and Say…Ahh!, but his voice was slowly distorting and fading, giving way to the sounds of buzzers and bells and disembodied screams of delight from the unseen revelers at the carnival. The peach incense that flavored the air in the record store became the smells of popcorn and cotton candy and straw strewn across raw dirt. As I watched, the previously static Ferris wheel started to lazily spin and the slender pennant atop the big top tent unfurled, fluttering and snapping. Lilting calliope music drifted on the wind and I moved trancelike toward it. A warm hand took mine and I turned to see the Wheel of Death girl walking with me.
We strolled, hand in hand, into the carnival’s midway. Every few steps I would glance over my shoulder, down her back to get a look at the gauzy white thong that bisected the jiggly perfection of her ass. The fairgrounds were full and loud and we stood for just a moment, unsure of where to go, overwhelmed by the amount of people. The carnival seemed to be populated solely by the denizens of the record store racks. Tossing darts at balloons was Iron Maiden’s Eddie, the zombie-cyborg version from the Somewhere in Time album, his exposed musculature and tissue augmented by a latticework of circuitry and a metallic skeleton. Duran Duran’s Rio had sprang to pastel monochromatic life, her full, smiling lips redder even than the candy apple she was eating. I watched the diner waitress from Supertramp’s Breakfast in America stepping on the scales to try to fool the guesser, never once breaking her Statue of Liberty pose, tall glass of OJ poised on her hoisted tray. The nude blonde from Roger Water’s The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking was standing in line for the House of Mirrors, wearing only her red high heels and backpack.
The Slaughter girl pointed mutely and I looked to a clearing in the crowd. There, on a mound of scorched earth between the Himalaya and the Tilt-a-Whirl, the cover for Molly Hatchet’s self-titled debut album had become manifest. Astride a massive onyx steed was Frank Frazetta’s Death Dealer. He sat motionless on his horse, his hulking, armored frame barely concealed by a scarred metal shield. In his hand he clutched a battle axe, blood dripping from its talon-like point. Beneath his horned and spiked helm, his eyes burned a hellish red. A snort of steam burst forth from his steed. With beating flaps of its great wings, a vulture took flight from behind him.
Slowly, deliberately, the Death Dealer dismounted, the dirt crunching under his steel boots. He looked to be twice the size of a normal man. As if a wordless command had been issued, a host of females gravitated toward him, moving like sleepwalkers, until they surrounded him in harem fashion. The two girls from Roxy Music’s Country Life, the pretty one in the white bra and panties, and the topless, manly one, crawled to the Death Dealer’s feet. They were soon joined by the fierce, inked woman from the Rolling Stones’ Tattoo You.
From inside the spiral-striped spinning barrel of the Fun Haus, a Ferrari 365 GTC/4 launched, arcing through the air, its V-12 engine howling like a banshee. On the sleek hood, the strawberry blonde from Candy-O lounged casually in her sheer, smoke-colored body stocking, barely jostled even when the Ferrari landed from its jump and power-slid to a dirt-slinging halt in front of the Death Dealer. She held her pose for a beat as the Ferrari purred, her long legs scissored, one black pump perched on the car’s bumper, the back of her hand draped across her forehead as if she had swooned. Finally she slid off the swoopy fender and strutted to the Death Dealer, wrapping herself in one of his giant arms.
The sexy android from Autograph’s That’s the Stuff, every inch of her curved and chromed body panels reflecting her surroundings, moved before the Dealer and lowered herself to her cylindrical knee joints with a faint whir of servos. With unerring mechanical dexterity, she detached the warrior’s armored codpiece, peeled away the chainmail, and opened his leather breeches, his bulging cock expanding outward as she did so.
The Death Dealer’s cock was obscenely large, disproportionate to even his mammoth body. The android curled her slender metallic fingers around it and relaxed her hinged oral module, allowing the Dealer’s enormous cock to slide through the oiled O-ring gasket that formed her mouth. A synthesized, modulated moan escaped her and the green LED glow of her optical receptors flickered.
Enthralled by the sight before me, I almost didn’t notice when the ground beneath my feet began to tremble. A low rumble filled the air, rapidly growing louder, easily drowning out the noises of the carnival. Then there was a different sound, like the flapping of giant leather wings. I saw a bat, larger than a man, light upon the peak of the Himalaya’s tent, even as the digit-deficient carnie cut in over Bon Jovi’s “Let it Rock” to ask his dizzy charges, “Do ya wanna go faster?!?” The bat spread its wings, the span enshrouding the entire midway ride it was perched on, and the monster watched the spot on the ground where the rumbling seemed to emanate from. The Earth itself split, a gash the size of a city bus opening in the ground. Blinding white light and choking smoke spilled forth from the bowels of the underworld. With a bestial howl, a motorcycle burst from the fissure, its rider hauling back on the handlebars like reins, as if breaking a wild stallion.
For a split second, the scene perfectly recreated the Richard Corben-painted cover of Meat Loaf’s 1977 classic, Bat Out of Hell, the rider soaring through the air on his steel horse, back arched, head thrown back, teeth gnashed, every muscle on his nude body standing out angrily. The motorcycle hit the ground at full gallop and the rider wrangled it to a stop with a skidding spray of grit and gravel. The dust cloud settled around him as he took a moment to survey his surroundings, straddling his V-twin engine and bristling tangle of chromium steel pipes. Finally he kicked the stand out and propped up the monstrous bike before climbing off.
For a moment the Biker stood poised, bronze skin resplendent in the soft warm glow of the midway. His body was immense, every exaggerated and bulging muscle flexed, clad only in a jagged loincloth of tanned hide. His hair fell about the swells of his shoulders like a lion’s mane. Not to be outdone by the Death Dealer, the rider gave the slightest of head tosses, summoning a gathering of attendants to match his rival’s. From behind the ring toss booth came the half-tigress/half-woman from the cover of Open Up and Say…Ahh!, her unclothed body covered with striped fur. On all fours, she slinked to Meat Loaf’s biker from Hell, wrapping a long feline leg around his trunk of a thigh.
Somewhere out of sight, Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass’ Whipped Cream and Other Delights came to life, and a living, breathing Dolores Erickson strolled from behind the funnel cake stand, carrying a pink rose and wearing only a few strategically placed dollops of the titular fluffy dairy topping. As soon as she was within arm’s reach, the Biker snatched her up by her waist and effortlessly hoisted her into the air. Squealing and giggling, she spread her cream-slathered legs as the Biker set her down backward on his shoulders. He buried his face, licking the whipped cream from the insides of her thighs, sucking it from the wispy patch of hair between. Dolores tangled her sticky fingers in the Biker’s feathered locks as he lapped away the whipped cream (and other delights) from her cunt with long, slow passes with the flat of his tongue. The Biker seemed renewed, almost resurrected by the act, an eternity potentially passed since he had last eaten pussy. He sealed his hungry mouth over Dolores’ mound and began to devour her, grasping her with thick fingers that dug into the soft flesh of her thighs. I watched her chocolate-brown eyes flutter and close.
On the ground, Poison’s cat-girl had loosed her foot-long tongue and snaked it behind the Biker’s loincloth. She coiled her elongated, prehensile tongue around his cock, curling her body underneath the Biker. Tilting her head back, she pulled the cock into her opening mouth, her tongue slithering out and constricting around the shaft until it was glistening with her saliva. Even over the din of the carnival I could hear the wet noises of her mouth and the feral purring coming from her.
With a gasp the Biker pulled free, coming up for air, breathing for the first time since he had begun eating Dolores. He raised his head and peered over her thigh, looking across the way at the Death Dealer, making sure he was watching. The Biker said nothing, smirking arrogantly. The Death Dealer’s eyes narrowed to envious slits, their crimson light burning with sudden envy.
The sexual arms race between the Bat Out of Hell biker and the Death Dealer ignited the passions of the carnival’s other patrons. Throughout the crowd I saw pin-up girls, breathing artworks, impossible fantasy creatures and a few former Playmates struggling to get out of their clothes, assuming they were wearing any to begin with. Everywhere I looked I caught glimpses of bare breasts and engorged cocks as the living album covers bent over, mounted up or got on hands and knees. From behind the Gravitron I saw the enormous horned serpent from Whitesnake’s Lovehunter slither into the open, a naked brunette riding it bareback as it coiled and hissed, her breasts bouncing, mouth hung breathlessly open. The demonic Minotaur from Dio’s Holy Diver threw Rio over his black lap and spanked. Her hands flew back to uselessly try to cover her titanium white acrylic backside, all while a one-eyed barker implored him to win his little lady a “Haulin’ Ass” mini-poster or 2 Live Crew mirror.
I saw Marianne from Invasion of Your Privacy riding the Scrambler, teased blonde hair flying about her face, sitting spread-eagle on the lap of the oiled and bronzed bodybuilder from Van Halen’s 5150. His heroically hardened cock had stood perfectly upright and Marianne stroked it a few times before lowering herself onto it, her eyes sparkling in the ride’s flashing blubs. As the Scrambler hurtled them through a spiraling, rotating figure 8, I watched Marianne ride the muscle-bound man, gyrating her hips in his lap, licking at his bulging biceps.
The doors to the Ghost Train flew open with a blood-curdling recorded scream and expelled a car occupied by the embracing couple on the cover of Love at First Sting by the Scorpions. The black leather clad man was simultaneously tattooing a scorpion on the woman’s creamy thigh and peeling her dress down to clamp his mouth over her nipple. A Number of the Beast-era Eddie was riding the back of the car, and now he climbed inside with the Teutonic couple, settling in and cupping the free breast, feeding it into his sneering mouth as the car lurched to one side and disappeared between a pair of gnarled iron gates to the sound of moaning ghouls.
In all the commotion I had forgotten the girl from Stick It To Ya was standing by my side until she began to walk away. I watched her as she navigated the orgy until she made her way to the Death Dealer, who had long since grown tired of face-fucking the Autograph android and now had Candy-O bent over the hood of the Ferrari, driving into her with a ferocity that rocked the entire car back and forth. The Slaughter girl stood patiently, waiting for the Death Dealer to sense her presence. Suddenly he ceased thrusting and turned, gazing at her with eyes of hellfire. He abruptly withdrew from Candy-O, leaving her empty and writing on the 365’s hood, and faced the Slaughter girl, his erection protruding in front of him like a jouster’s lance.
The Death Dealer reached for her, one massive hand clamping onto her wrists, pulling her arms over her head and lifting her off the ground until she dangled before him. He turned her, appraising her body before issuing an evidently approving snort. He draped her over his corded forearm and her body fell limp, doubled over at the waist, hanging like a towel. He looped the delicate thong of her lace teddy around a thick thumb and pulled it aside, clearing the way. I saw her eyes quiver and then slam shut, her mouth dropping open in a soundless scream as the Death Dealer’s elephantine cock impaled her.
Immediately he began to thrust into her with a frantic rhythm. She babbled a string of moaned “yeses”, his giant hands now clamped over her hips, fingers digging into the soft flesh there. He pounded her, rising on the balls of his feet with every penetration. She groaned her approval, pushing her ass back against him, spreading her legs and arching her back. Within minutes she came, her orgasm seemingly exorcized from her, driven out of her body by the force of his entries. Red-faced and paralyzed by the pleasure, she rode out her climax for everyone to see, their attention drawn by her garbled pleas for mercy.