Kinky Wazoo

By Argus Marks

Cory Sweeney is a young man with a family connection to an ancient secret practice known as the Taboo Act-- which leads him to an interesting new job, ceremonial performances, and revelations about his past, including a special reunion and an unlikely inheritance.

• Language: English
• Publisher: House of Erotica
• Release date: Feb 25, 2014
• ISBN: 9781783332991

Book preview

welcome

Book 1

The Damsel’s Due

Chapter 1

Rinse Do.

Cory found that brief message amusing, once he figured out what it meant. Maxine wasn’t reminding herself to wash her hair, obviously, since she surely wouldn’t be emailing him about it. It was a pun instead, he believed; three days earlier, she’d used the phrase Rent’s Due to express her intended meaning, so he understood exactly what she was presently referring to.

It’ll take 2 days, he responded, as a dare. Sat and Sun?

Time & ½? she wrote back.

He considered it. Sure, he replied. Donde?

? she wrote back.

Where?

YP, she replied. ODD?

He had to assume that YP meant Your Place. After a moment, he decided that ODD (since it was capitalized) was an abbreviation for Okey-Dokey, Dominokey, based on the list of unusual phrases he’d heard her use. Either that or Okay, Done Deal.

Fine, he wrote back, hoping he wouldn’t regret it.

He’d never paid for it before he met her, but that was a special occasion because of a specific circumstance. If all went as intended, she would receive more than money, and she would have to work very hard for whatever she did earn.

He’d been introduced to Maxine by a mutual acquaintance named GiGi Adams, surprisingly, at a premiere party where he was the last one to arrive. That was often the case, since he was usually responsible for shutting off the lights and locking up the playhouse when a show was over. He had copies of keys to at least three different such venues, after working on productions all over town, which meant he was the one who got called if a cast was locked out of their performing space. Luckily, he lived not far away.

In fact, he considered just going home and skipping that party altogether. According to the playbill, he was the stage manager for that show, but that was merely a title; they had their own show runner who was handling the cues, props, and other details, while he was employed by the playhouse itself to assist with any last-minute requirements or changes. He probably wouldn’t attend every performance of the run for that reason, and he had a stack of scripts for upcoming productions on his coffee table to be reviewed for staging ideas and technical challenges. But that spectacle was being put on by GiGi Adams, the grande dame of the local theater scene, and he always enjoyed seeing her.

He arrived alone, fortunate not to be acting as escort for one of those actresses who dared not show up stag to such an affair or serving as beard for the flighty young girl in the cast who was foolish enough to have gotten involved with the very married director. She’d wound up on the arm of the male lead, who was desperate to convince everyone that he was not gay, though the rest of his fellow performers had already decided the opposite. (As one crew member was overheard to say, when asked for evidence of the actor’s preference: On the last day of Christmas, when my true love brought me twelve lords a-leaping, he was one of ’em.)

The great GiGi Adams - Mrs. Adams, to most - was the center of attention, as usual. She was a lady in the truest sense of the word - a figure of great respect in that realm over which she reigned. She’d been an actress in her youth, who’d even appeared in walk-on parts in a few old B-movies, though her first love was the stage. She’d been on Broadway for a dozen shows, mostly in the chorus, before marrying well (several times) and returning home to settle down. She’d become critic, advisor, producer, and director of numerous regional projects and touring companies, drawn out of semi-retirement to offer her name and counsel to the next generation of performers. That was where Cory had developed an ongoing friendship with her, since he also had multiple connections to that scene, which included stage management, technical direction, and criticism.

GiGi presented Maxine as an aspiring actress, but (based on the girl’s appearance and demeanor) he had his doubts, since she didn’t seem the type. She was pale-skinned and solidly-built, with a blonde boyish haircut and the look and accent of a country bumpkin. She probably could’ve played Frankie in Member of the Wedding quite convincingly, in fact, if she hadn’t been so buxom. The two of them didn’t exactly hit it off; she was a woman of few words, and he had no gift for small talk. It was after the second round of champagne (to celebrate a show that’d been much better in the rehearsals he’d caught) that she felt comfortable enough to utter more than two words, and what she did say wasn’t what he’d been expecting.

I don’t know if Miz A told ya or not, but I’m a starvin’ actress with bills to pay, she said, so I accept donations to cover my rent.

He was intrigued, unless it was just the one drink he’d enjoyed that enhanced his curiosity. How much is your rent? he asked.

She actually batted her eyes. Six hundred, she replied.

It was too much for a girl who was no drop-dead beauty queen, he thought, unless she had some special skills that made her worth every penny. What she said then surprised him even more than her original less-than-subtle offer.

I’m s’posed to ask ya about somethin’ called the Kinky Wazoo, she added.

He was glad they were off in a corner where no one could overhear, since that particular subject was highly confidential.

"Who told you to ask that? he replied. And do you even know what it is?"

She shrugged. It’s a secret, she said. And it don’t matter, ‘cause there’s almost nothin’ I won’t do for the price.

That remained to be seen. He still wasn’t satisfied by her answer, no matter how provocative, though. The term she’d misidentified was actually Kinkiwaza, allegedly from the Japanese for Taboo Act, after all. From what he knew, he might’ve been one of only a handful of people in the world who knew anything about its correct components and proper technique. He’d learned about it during college, though not as part of any approved curriculum, of course. The means and method of his education in that artform had been quite memorable, needless to say. But like other more traditional subjects he’d studied, he hadn’t seen fit to put it to use in his daily life as yet. He could only imagine a few people who knew about his familiarity with it, one of whom had died not long ago. Maxine wouldn’t say anything more, though.

He made no commitments but gave her his email address, assuming she wouldn’t have the nerve to contact him. But three days later, he received her first such brief message.

Rent’s due. Give me a holler. Maxine.

He couldn’t deny that she had a certain undefined appeal, and he had the money to spare. The idea of performing that sacred rite again was also very tempting, but he chose not to respond at first. Then he received that next message with the alternate spelling of her clever tag line. He’d asked for two days for the price of one, and she’d coaxed a bit more from him - with the added benefit of home-field advantage, he supposed. He wasn’t sure what was going to happen, though, and he was still suspicious of her motives. It wasn’t the end of the month, when rents were usually due, for one thing. Which made him wonder what she might’ve needed the money for, beyond regular expenses.

She sent another email on Friday, as a kind of confirmation.

Crib? she asked, which he assumed was a request for his address. He provided it, despite his nagging doubts about that arrangement.

Make a list of what ya like, she wrote back, as her version of a tease.

She was amusing, at least, he thought.

***

Cory Sweeney had been born with the heart (if not the natural talent) of an artist - but delivered to the wrong doorstep, he believed.

He’d met a few others like him in his chosen field. Theater people, for the most part, either came from creative clans where they carried on the tradition or they were rebels from families of squares or jocks who performed to get the attention denied them. The rest were either untethered chameleons or borderline schizophrenics, but they were generally the exceptions. He fit the second category, since his father was an actuary - a job Cory had never even understood - and his mother a tax accountant. They lived to fill in little boxes with the correct figures, and their idea of art was in following straight lines or finding ingenious ways to get around the written rules on rare occasions. His older sister had married young to an insurance man and started having babies, and Cory was convinced she would stop at precisely 2.3 offspring, to fit the latest national average. They were the definition of normal, in other words.

Cory took after his father’s brother, his Uncle Neil, who’d been the (so-called) black sheep of the previous generation. Neil had been a carefree jack-of-all-trades and speculator, in a family where nobody would flip a coin without calculating the odds first. He’d turned a thin bankroll into a small fortune over time by being in the right place, overhearing the right conversations, and risking the right amounts to make the majority of his investments pay off. He even had connections with the arts, like an unfulfilled wannabe performer himself. He befriended writers and painters and bought their work; he put money into shows, which either earned him handsome profits or served as occasional writeoffs. Neil Sweeney was the one who’d introduced Cory to the unorthodox artform called Kinkiwaza, of course.

His beloved uncle had died of untold causes not long ago, though. The family assumed they would learn the size of his amassed wealth when they became the beneficiaries of his will, but all of Cory’s dull-eyed cousins had merely reacted stoically when they only received small bequests evenly divided amongst them. A lot of the money had gone to support some of Neil’s favorite charities, and the rest had been put into a trust for Cory himself - with the added proviso that he not tell anyone else, to spare any hard feelings from their kin. That account remained untouched, though, because it included instructions that Cory could only claim it when he discovered his true calling and presented convincing evidence of the same to the banker acting as trustee. What his uncle meant remained a mystery; but he did provide that the interest from the trust go to his favorite nephew in the form of a monthly check. Based on the amounts of those instalments, Cory could roughly estimate the size of the estate, but he wasn’t overly concerned with such wealth at that point in his young life.

His uncle’s generosity had allowed him to pursue a career connected to the theater, which was not a way to get rich otherwise. In college, where the drama department was small and the staff erratic (though the plays were generally well done), he’d started as a volunteer curtain-puller and gofer and ended up as the campus stage manager for his senior year, since acting was not his strong suit. He’d even tried his hand at writing a few one-acts without much success, believing that his muse - if she’d ever existed - had died of boredom during his childhood.

After leaving school, he’d ended up there in the city to pursue that same line, and he’d been fortunate to be introduced to GiGi Adams by one of his former classmates. He’d been a stagehand and background player for several of the local playhouses as needed, until he steadily worked his way up. One season, he even served as a general understudy for three concurrent productions, where he had to be familiar with a dozen minor roles in case of illness. He was only called on twice to fill in, to his relief; until the last week of one show’s run, when a flu bug struck the entire cast and he was promoted to the second lead for three nights. GiGi, who’d been the listed executive producer for that production, even sent him a single flower of thanks with an attached scorecard: C+ for Performance, A for Courage.

His secondary job writing reviews happened by accident. The regular critic for the city paper The Appeal was a pompous type who specialized in purple prose, praising those who showed the proper deference, and skewering those who didn’t. When an irate (and intoxicated) director broke the man’s nose after a particularly scathing write-up, the paper needed a fill-in while the critic healed and GiGi Adams suggested Cory for the gig. When the critic took a position in another city with a promise of syndication, Cory inherited the post. He insisted on using a pen name, though, to prevent any potential conflicts of interest for reviews of shows he’d done any work on, as well as avoiding being physically attacked by any insulted performers. So he wrote as Thea Terhune, which was a play on the nickname GiGi had given him right after they met - Theater Hound, her pet name for any of the backstage folks who didn’t act. The paper’s editor hoped to replace him, unhappy about his connections and assumed identity, but his lone attempt had been a flamboyant writer for the Food Section who tended to gush over every show. Thea Terhune’s reviews were trustworthy, at least, and never too mean; and the extra check Cory received wasn’t bad, either.

His social life during that time wasn’t much to sing about, though. Aside from a brief fling with an actress from a travelling company of Fiddler on the Roof, whose fellow cast members had warned him was an insecure nympho, there hadn’t been much in the way of romance of late. That relationship (to use the term loosely) hadn’t lasted long, and the girl herself had definitely not been a candidate for Kinkiwaza. GiGi Adams must’ve thought he needed a little helping hand finding companionship when she introduced him to her latest discovery, since she was known as a bit of a matchmaker amongst her casts and crews.

He sincerely doubted that the grande dame knew that Maxine’s affections (and possibly more) were for sale, though.

***

Cory was challenged by both Maxine’s stated willingness to do almost anything of a (presumably) sexual nature and her suggestion that he make a list of what he liked.

He didn’t feel comfortable setting the exact components of that taboo art form down on paper, though many of them were still individually practiced in the modern day. Inspired, he decided to mix them in with other unorthodox acts, as a kind of test for her (alleged) lack of inhibition. On his laptop, he scanned a few fetish websites, curious about the current trends in that world of the bizarre and offbeat. Most of what he saw was about what he’d been expecting, and the rest was too weird for words. The scenes he viewed depicted impressive physical dexterity and an occasional willingness to be humiliated for cash, but he was highly critical of the staging and camera work. Little of what he saw held much genuine appeal for him personally, though.

He ended up writing down two dozen specific acts or categories, some with unusual names and others he couldn’t quite figure out, to be included with the sacraments of Kinkiwaza. After a quick review, he crossed off six that required either multiple partners or specialized equipment (or were just too damn strange).

He had a brief giggling fit as he reread that list, which ended abruptly when he heard a knock at the front door.

Chapter 2

It wasn’t even nine in the morning on the scheduled first day of that arrangement when Maxine arrived at his place.

She was more than willing to start early, it seemed. Luckily, he’d slept fairly well the night before despite a sense of nagging discomfort regarding that endeavour, and he’d been up for more than an hour. That was usually the case when he wasn’t actively involved in a current production, though. His name was listed in at least three playbills for shows at the moment, but only as either Technical Director, Consultant, or Stage Manager, which meant his work had been done early in the process when the sets were being constructed or he’d been called in during an awkward dress rehearsal for advice.

Maxine looked nice for that hour of the day, wearing a jean skirt, a sort of loose retro lace blouse, and clogs. She wasn’t much for cosmetics, preferring some version of the natural look. Her short blonde hair was a tousled mess, which didn’t detract from her overall image in the least. Seeing her again, especially with that ill-advised list of weird acts in his hand, made him think those next two days would be a genuine disaster.

Hey, she said, still a woman of few words.

Shot and a beer? he asked, recalling her beverage of choice from the party. Or is it too early for that?

She tried to hide her grin. Never ever, she replied. Got your list? Let’s have a gander.

He reluctantly handed her that page, then went into the kitchen to get her drink. He had a quarter-bottle of good Scotch and a half one of cheap rye, so he poured a juice glass full of the quality stuff and found a bottle of Jamaican beer in the refrigerator. She was sitting on one end of the old sofa, studying that sheet of paper as if having trouble reading his handwriting. She barely looked up as he handed her the glass, and she tossed it down in one gulp with her eyes never leaving the page. She shivered then swigged the beer as if it were thirst-quenching water.

My, oh, my, she said, deadpan. Well, there’s nothin’ on here I either ain’t done before or won’t do now.

He found that hard to believe, wondering if he should get a beer of his own, or at least another cup of coffee. She picked up the pen he’d been using and went back though that list to cross a few others off, then.

This’n needs at least three people, she explained, as she went. Coupla these others are stuff I don’t think you’d like, neither.

She handed the page back to him, complete with her corrections. There were twelve specific acts remaining, and he noticed that she’d put stars next to half of them, as if those might’ve been her particular preferences (or predicted they were his). Nearly all of those choices were elements of the ritual called Kinkiwaza they were going to perform, he was pleased to see.

She smirked then swigged her beer again, as he retrieved a necessary item from under the sofa and set it flat on the coffee table. It was a box made to resemble a small trunk, two feet by one, with a padlock securing its metal clasp. He opened that container to reveal that it was empty at the moment.

Put everything that isn’t you in here and then lock it, he told her, ready to begin.

She appeared to grasp the extent of that command without any further elaboration from him. She undressed herself in a quick but casual fashion, then placed her lace blouse, denim skirt, clogs, and pastel panties in that small trunk. She closed the lid and refastened the clasp, then handed him the tiny key that fit the padlock, which was the proper procedure.

All righty, boy, she said. I’m all yours, for the next two whole days.

With that, she strolled right past him and crossed to the door in the opposite wall that led to the only bedroom in that small apartment, in a naked state. Whether she was a real actress or not, she certainly had a flair for the dramatic gesture. He stared at her solid body as she exited, concentrating on her bare snow-white behind, which was broad and meaty but firm. At the moment, he wondered what it would feel like to use his open palm to strike that inviting target.

He looked over that list again quickly, like an unprepared actor desperate to remember his lines. He vividly recalled that episode in which he had to play an unfamiliar role during a major outbreak of the flu, including having a single day to study and no chance to rehearse. That experience had been both terrifying and thrilling, not unlike the present circumstance. He needed to get into character in a hurry and throw himself into that part without restraint, regardless of his lack of natural talent for the stage. He needed to earn another A for Courage, and do better than a C+ in Performance.

When he set that page down and started through the door to his bedroom, he suddenly couldn’t recall anything written there, which was also like that play. Half the