*Disclaimer: I fully acknowledge that I am reading the following because I’m hungry for highly controversial and tasteless literature. I am a dirty piggy, and realize the following is nothing more than fiction for my underdeveloped brain. I like to fantasize about strange things and thus absolutely need to read this. Matthew Good is not responsible for my actions or any actions that may occur after I read this. I have been warned of the dangers concerning this sensitive material and I choose to read on because I am hungry for smut.

Most things in life start unexpectedly, though this was different because it involved a porn queen, two strippers named Debbie and Launa, and a large boa constrictor named Mr. Tickles.

First class is one of the biggest secret societies in the world. If you’ve only flown coach you have no idea what goes on up there. If you’ve flown first class then you know what I’m talking about. After the stewardess closes that magic curtain all the rules change. Booze flows like water, hand-rolled Cuban cigars are aplenty, they break out the blackjack tables (complete with topless, and quite often Swedish, vixen-like dealers). I would be lying if I told you that I was accustomed to these surroundings. I was merely a spy in the midst of decadent decay. I’m not saying I didn’t like it. I’m just saying I was a spy. As to whose spy. Well, that’s another matter altogether.

On this particular occasion I was accompanied by my somewhat incoherent co-conspirator, Todd Kerns. Three hours prior to being on the plane we were sitting quietly at a downtown restaurant eating oysters and throwing pieces of damp napkin at the ass of this rather large waitress. Things turned ugly when we attempted to use straws instead of our hands, we were quickly escorted to the nearest fire exit and discarded into an adjacent alley. It was then that we decided to go to Las Vegas for the weekend. Todd felt that we were long overdue for a vacation and Vegas might offer some solution to our hypertensive state.

There we were in first class, slipping through the night like a drunken teenage girl hopped up on illicit sugar smacks and Baby Duck. It seemed as if we were caught in some giant test tube filled with uncertain energies and strange, pig-faced people from some nightmarish land. I was lost and reeling in self-degradation and some strange warmth that always slips through my limbs when I know something morally irreversible is about to occur. I slumped down in my seat to try and sort the C-drive files in my mainframe when I gazed upon her legs. They were long legs. Long like a one-way street leading to some warped place of intimate viewing.

I knew her naked self from a thousand glossy-paged magazines. The sort that one procures from time to time to pass the never-ending hours of touring. But I was a stranger to her smile. It shocked me that her familiar lust-filled sneer didn’t immediately show itself when my eyes made their way to her face. You often think of them one way only to discover that they’re either much worse or doctors of astrophysics. This is typical of girls in dirty magazines. I was later to discover that she was in the “much worseâ€? category, but at the time she played me like a bad country song.
She was unlike any woman I had ever met. And even though I was convinced that the devil was now female, I was stumbling to produce some rational dialogue that would endear me to her favour. Maybe it was the alien air in that first-class cabin. Maybe it was the mesmerizing shimmer of the soft lights. Maybe it was simply the fact that I was talking to a woman that would do just about anything in front of a camera for money. I don’t know.

We continued talking in whispers and strange advances as the pig-faced people milled about the cabin snorting and laughing their pig laughs. Todd, strangely enough, was nowhere to be found. I would later discover him face down on the floor next to the rear exit with a Polaroid of him and a half-naked Swedish dealer in the bathroom. Memories are important.

Las Vegas: home to tens of thousands of fat people, buffets, superhotels owned by movie studios, and supermodel rejects. Las Vegas is where the low end of normality and botched plastic surgery meet to form something that resembles glamorous euthanasia. The lights of the strip, not unlike the star that led the wise men to Christ, beckon the average to be anything but themselves. Most victims of Vegas end up losers. Eventually everything comes full circle.

It’s one of those places that you enter as Superman and leave as the swamp thing. No one gets out of Vegas clean, despite the attempts of late to make the city appear to be something other than what it really is. And what it is, is dirty. The smart realize it. That’s why they go to Vegas, for the dirt. It doesn’t matter if the mob runs Vegas or if big business runs it. Both are ignorant to its true purpose. A gateway to hell exists beneath Las Vegas. Either that or a river of pure milk chocolate.

As usual we had completely forgotten to secure lodgings. Upon our arrival we found ourselves standing in the airport looking around in bewilderment at our surroundings. It dawned on us that we were actually standing in another city. Maybe we weren’t entirely serious back in that alley. Maybe the plane had flown through some kind of vortex that had brought us into a new reality, like teenagers waking up only to realize that the adults had vanished, leaving them in control of the world. Luckily my first-class seating companion spotted us and offered to put us up. She was working a show later that night at a strip club, but assured us that we wouldn’t be a bother.

We ended up in a luxury suite high atop the city. Looking down from those huge windows everyone didn’t seem so fat. Maybe it was the liquor talking, but I felt like I could drop a bomb and then casually order shrimp cocktail or some other kind of food that people rarely endeavour to make in the privacy of their own homes.

I felt like the god of Las Vegas up there looking down on pitiful creation. The slot jockeys and suburbanites bankrupted by the blackjack and poker tables. The hookers and the street trash, the well to do, the hope to do well, the well done. For a brief moment I saw myself from outside of my own body and was quite pleased for a change.

Todd was sprawled in the middle of the room trying to arm-wrestle a bottle of vodka. He knew he couldn’t win. But that hasn’t stopped anyone from trying for the past 500 years now has it.

So there we were. Sitting around a room that, in any other city, would be grounds for admittance into a mental institution. And sometime before 3 a.m. a blonde porn star was going to come walking through that door, possibly accompanied by other blonde porn stars, to slap me around. Or at least I hoped that was what would happen. I was perfectly wretched and deviant but completely at peace with it. Maybe that’s the secret of Las Vegas.

It wasn’t until well after four when she finally arrived. I’m sat on the sofa in one of those robes that expensive hotels have in the bathrooms and Todd was out on the balcony yelling passages from the bible at the miniature fat people down on the street. She looked tired, but tried to act like she was awake. She undressed right in front of us and went into the bathroom to get the other robe. Things were beginning to get weird.

For the first time I began to realized that my counterpart might be somewhat of a nuisance in this particular situation. I sat there on that sofa, my eyes following her across the room, while my brain tried to sort out the details of burying Todd’s corpse somewhere in the desert. The demon of lust had complete control over my body, turning me into a fiend of the highest calibre. She sat on the bed and began to roll around and stretch like a cat. By this time I decided to bludgeon Todd using one of the heavier-looking lamps and take her for myself. It’s times like this that require tact and unassuming movements. For all I knew Todd could have been planning to bludgeon me to death with the vodka bottle. Luckily, no violent action would be required, because at that moment there was a knock at the door. Enter Debbie, Launa, and the infamous Mr. Tickles.

Some of you might have seen Debbie and Launa do their show, known to most as Feather and Sky in Taming The Snake. Though banned from twenty-three states and four provinces, they still do their routine with the snake nightly in a variety of clubs. They’re also available for private shows as well (at the whopping rate of $1,000 an hour). I thought about asking them why they called the boa Mr. Tickles but realized that there could only be one reason to call it that.

They put Mr. Tickles in the bathtub and returned to the living room to exchange pleasantries and have a drink. It was then somewhere in the neighbourhood of 5:45.

My self-control was slowly melting into the carpet like a cheap candle as my head snapped between the three trying to get a fix on which one would make the best target. And that was my first mistake. I was sitting in a room with three women that were professional adult entertainers. This was my pathetic high-school mentality; it wasn’t a matter of what I wanted. It was more like what they were going to do to me and whether or not I’d survive.

It began to dawn on me that Todd and I weren’t the hunters in the room. We were the hunted. We had been brought to this lofty den of promiscuity not by chance, but by a cunning lioness that knew full well what she was doing. There was to be a feast and we were the main course. For an added measure of torture we were made to helplessly watch the three girls launch into one of their threesome routines right in front of us. I have never been so completely immobilized in my entire life.

As a man you assume that, given the opportunity, you would jump right in if a situation like that ever arose. But that’s just not the case. There’s a good fifteen minutes of shock at first. It was so severe that my counterpart actually lost interest in the vodka bottle and started crawling across the floor to gain a better vantage point. It was like some scene one would expect to find in the depths of hell or in a girl’s locker room on the best day of your life.

We sat there motionless while various acts were performed right in front of us. I have never felt real terror like this before. I’m not talking about the kind of fear you feel when you know the school bully is going to be waiting by the bike racks for you after class, but rather the terror you feel when some skinhead that’s whacked out on pills and whiskey pulls a .45 out and puts it to your head. And judging from what I remember of Todd’s expression, that’s what he felt too.

Those fifteen minutes were the longest three days of my life. As if locked inside some terrible dream, I vaguely remember the girls crossing the floor towards us on their hands and knees. And if my memory serves me correctly, they were hissing. They say that war veterans usually remember the horrors of their ordeal far more clearly and vividly years after they’ve come home. I believe that to be true. I can only remember bits and pieces of the following twenty-four hours. Rivers of oil, chocolate sauce, and other fluids crowd my mind from time to time when I’m violently awakened by these memories. The cold and terrible images of silvery bindings, leather masks, three speed genies, circus midgets, and Miracle Whip also plague my recollection from time to time. I don’t remember the snake. But I’ve seen Todd’s face go absolutely white every time we see one on TV or in a photograph. I can only imagine the horrors that were thrust upon him.

Most of the time I try not to remember.

I woke up on the floor covered in what smelled like gin, though it could have been an antiseptic of some kind. Every muscle in my body felt like it had been removed and then put back slightly out of place. Sitting up, the horror of what had taken place started to hit me. Stumbling around the room I came upon the tattered remains of my clothes, the sofa, several tables, and the mini-bar. I later discovered Todd sandwiched between the bathroom wall and the toilet, wide awake, gazing blankly forward. His eyes were slightly rolled back in his head, like he’d taken a million sleeping pills and was beginning to see the rabbit people slowly encircling him. I hoisted him up and put him in the bed while I tried to figure out what to do next.

Escape was paramount. We would have to make a run for it and soon. Hopefully my counterpart would be up for it. We had little choice.
Swallowing panic every ten feet, I went to the lobby of the hotel hoping to find a clothing store or gift shop. The only thing I was able to get my hands on were two baby-blue Mickey Mouse t-shirts and two pairs of white tennis shorts. Having accepted the fact that insult would have to be added to injury, I headed back to the room and threw Todd in a cold shower. A half hour later he was able to realize that we had to flee before the succubus and her fellow demonettes returned from their daylight raids. Throwing on our clothes, we took the service elevator to the basement, slinked through a series of hallways, climbed a flight of stairs, and found ourselves in sunshine. We grabbed a cab to the airport, then home, followed by years of government-funded therapy.

Everyone in first class on the way back seemed to sense that we didn’t belong there. The whole trip was toned down to a semi-decadent level, with a handful of the pig people venturing out of their seats to get down to the disco quietly pumping through the cabin. I was, as fate would have it, seated next to a nun on the return trip. And though considered by most to be a servant of God, and therefore bound by some secret pact to be kind, she could smell my burning flesh and refused to engage me in conversation. My counterpart spent most of the flight throwing up in the bathroom, his head held gently over the vacuous receptacle by his lovely Swedish stewardess.

I felt as if I were running from something that I would never fully escape. But as we winged our way back into the bosom of the great Pacific Northwest, I remember thinking that I had survived some kind of test that had prepared me for a greater encounter in the future. And if so, then I was convinced that the future was x-rated. And in it I would remain a spy. As to whose spy. Well, that’s another matter altogether.