TeeHeeLawrence
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***The following tickle double feature is copyright 2005 by the author.
***This “director’s cut” must be rated “X,” so it is not meant for readers younger than 18. (You minors might as well get back to bypassing the parental blocks on your families’ adult cable accounts.) Both of the participants in this romp are well over 18, too.
***This is a significantly revised version of a PG-rated M>F tale that ran, under a slightly different title and without the closing reel fireworks, on TICKLETOWN, when that bustling metropolis was a mere village.
***A specific apology is directed to Munchausen (estimable author of THE VOYAGE OUT, one of the TMF’s finest story series), who requested this tale’s reappearance eons ago. My propensity for revisions does have a way of running amok.
***My general apology is directed to the TMF at large, for my abysmally scanty
number of posts during the last three years. It’s embarrassing to enjoy the creativity here and find myself not contributing my fair share. I’m hopeful that this entry is a sign that my colossal writer’s block is finally, irrevocably crumbling.
Fay Wolfe was justly reputed to be America’s toughest movie critic, but one frustrated filmmaker decided it was time that somebody took pains…
FINDING FAY’S FUNNY BONE
by Tee Hee Lawrence
Fay Wolfe finished her column for the weekly newsmagazine for which she served as house film critic. Without stopping to review it—for she vehemently hated rewriting—she transmitted it to the office with a decisive click. She sighed with noisy pleasure as she indulged in a prolonged stretch, then rocked back in her chair and crossed her bare ankles upon the railing of her balcony.
She waggled her pale, pink-edged bare feet, which extended over the edge of the railing beyond the hem of her sky-blue silk kimono. She wiggled her petite toes, which sported opal nail polish as well as two flashing silver rings, which she had purchased to celebrate her recently finalized divorce. (Her ex was an older, tippling journalist, who could not bear how well and easily she could write.) Lighting a cigarette (She always permitted herself just one after completing an assignment.), she indulged in a panoramic gaze at the park below and the skyline of midtown beyond under dusk’s surreal purple twilight.
Feeling infused by a sense of privilege and power, she recalled Burt Lancaster in SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS, when he—playing a monstrous gossip columnist--surveyed Times Square from HIS apartment balcony like a vulture primed for the scent of carrion. Or maybe it was just the nicotine rush from her Marlboro. Letting the cigarette dangle from the corner of her mouth (Just like Belmondo!), she sighed and again stretched grandly. Thirtyish, 5’, 6” tall, flatteringly figured, Fay wore her straight sandy hair in a page bob inspired by the feisty silent film star Louise Brooks. She had large, expressive blue eyes, a heart-shaped mouth ready with (as an industry rival once quipped) a predator’s chilling, perfect-toothed smile, and a fetching dimpled chin. She had been born in America of British academic parents, and had enough English public schooling to have developed a saucy British accent which enhanced her brittle, mocking air.
Indulging in some smug career stocktaking, she recalled being the hilariously hostile film critic of her college newspaper ten years ago. Then, her arch pose--as the critic who panned EVERYTHING--had started as a joke, a parody of all the pull-quote pandering, undiscriminating reviewers in newspapers and on television. (“There are so many flies buzzing around THE BRIDGES OF MADISON COUNTY that it appears that local pooper scooper ordinances have been repealed.”) But her take-no-prisoners prose persona had caught on. She went from school right to a post at a hot new style magazine, where her relentless poison pen (“Melanie Griffith in this movie reminds me of nothing so much as that pale zeppelin Gregory Peck harpooned in MOBY DICK.”) drew fanatical reader feedback (including a marriage proposal from a smitten masochist). Her nascent notoriety led to an independent video channel commentary slot, where she mercilessly (with the tenderness and vocabulary of a Marine boot camp drill sergeant) savaged hapless Hollywood blockbusters (“TITANIC goes to great lengths to reassure us that finding a great lay really takes the sting out of an icy swim in the North Atlantic.”) to the growing delight of viewers.
She became second film reviewer for a big city daily, and, before long, its lead reviewer, resulting in national syndication. (“You can tell that GLADIATOR is set in Hollywood’s mighty Rome because every Roman official is played by a British queen.”) The paper’s corporate parent, desperate to goose the 18-to-34 readership of its national news magazine, launched Fay as its movie critic with an alluring cover depicting her naked (except for a few strategically draped strips of film.) and wielding a blood-crusted hatchet. (“Mark Wahlberg amidst a lot of apes? Now how in hell was I expected to find him?”) Then called the producer of the popular daily entertainment news TV show, where Fay, flashing teeth and claws, was smashingly paired with the teddy bear affability of an avuncular male critic for a thumbs-up-or-down survey of the week’s multiplex premieres. (“Roger, if you’d ONCE taken your face out of your usual VAT of popcorn, you’d have seen…”)
Fay felt like standing then, and (grateful she wasn’t ACTUALLY atop a flaming gas tank like Jimmy Cagney in WHITE HEAT) screaming, “Made it, Ma! ‘ Top o’ the world!” Instead, she picked up her Blueberry and considered her evening’s social possibilities--where to have a sinfully extravagant (expense account) dinner and with whom--when the house phone bleeped.
A messenger soon arrived, bearing a lovely arrangement of exotic flowers and an engraved invitation to a screening the following Tuesday. It was from a distributor she’d never heard of. The screening was at an unfamiliar location. The film was not mentioned by name, simply described as “the blossoming of an exciting, new independent talent.”
Fay returned to her balcony and settled back with the flowers into a lounger. She ruefully sniffed at an orchid and sighed. While she was most celebrated for her swinging-from-the-heels hatchet jobs, it simply wasn’t true that she NEVER praised anything. Despite her rep as a scorched earth critic, she had—in her comfy berth in the mainstream press--increasingly come to champion a few films, directors, and performers. This apparent ascendant benevolence in “America’s Critical Cutthroat Cutie” (as Fay was dubbed in a recent lavish magazine profile) caused many determined distributors to ply her with screening invitations and tapes, hoping she’d provide a rare blessing.
She admired a bougainvillea and thought, smiling, that some of these invites
should come with lilies, because the film screened were so bad, they merited only a curt obit from her. She had dealt thusly with an indie wannabe in her column last week. She chuckled, thinking that she’d really done a Lizzie Borden on THAT disaster.
Tapping her Blueberry, Fay saw that next Tuesday evening she had another engagement, so she was about to toss the invite, when she spied the business card clipped to the arrangement’s foil next to some cyclamen. It was the card of one of the town’s major media moguls. Handwritten on the back in his unmistakable script (He often signed his corporation’s ads in trade publications.) were the words, “See you there,” followed by his distinctively swirled first initial.
“Well,” she thought, resting a bare right foot on her left knee as she tickled her dimpled chin with the card, “if HE’S going to be there, it looks like a good opportunity to network and make another attempt at securing that lucrative book contract I want. If the movie is dreck, I can always slip out under cover of darkness. After all, it’s NOT like I’ll be a prisoner…”
***********************************************************************
A morning, one week earlier…
Billy Baxter was almost unbearably proud of his new film, which he had carefully nurtured from a germ of an idea to an eighty-seven minute feature in six years. Well, twenty-one years, really, he thought, remembering a marble composition book of story ideas he had painstakingly compiled while in high school. Time and again over the years, he had consulted that battered old notebook with its minute ballpoint scrawl. It had been with him at the creative writing program at a venerable Midwestern college, during his stints as free-lancer, staff writer, head writer, script editor, assistant producer, and producer for several television production companies, and his more recent years as a screenwriter of major Hollywood movies.
As his career progressed, he’d been stoic while his original stories and screenplays suffered the grind that is TV and feature film production. It was, he thought, not unlike what gradually happened to pebbles buffeted by the cruel sea against a pitiless shore, only a lot faster, and without the resultant good of a sandy beach that one could lie oiled upon while counting one’s residuals. His words, often lovingly crafted in nightlong solitude, were, in the course of rushes, rewrites (more often than not by others), recasts, reshoots, reedits, previews, and still more reshapings—most of which he had little, if any, say in—markedly altered, when they weren’t flat out unrecognizable as his own.
It had been suggested by venal producers and even sympathetic colleagues that the large paychecks he was then cashing weekly must have assuaged any authorial discontent he felt as a Hollywood writer. For years, he did allow the money to serve as distraction from and even consolation for the hurt he felt watching his words being disfigured on the screen. However, it wasn’t until he attended an awards ceremony as one of a team nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay (of a hit bloodthirsty computer game) that his complacency was shattered.
Not up for any awards that same year was another film, as forgotten as it was forgettable; reviewed poorly when it met critical notice at all; and released to video, it seemed, within hours of its one-city theatrical opening. It had been based on Billy’s original script, one labored over for years--what he had considered his finest work to date. The finished feature so appalled him, with its inept, unfeeling, slapdash rendering of his heartfelt work, that he asked that his name be removed from the credits (And the writing credit went, fittingly, to the clueless director and his producer brother-in-law, whose sledge-hammer-and butcher-knife-rewrite had doomed the project.). The idiots had even cast a fading, over-50 action star to play his supposedly 27-year-old shy and sensitive poet protagonist! What few lines of Billy’s carefully wrought dialogue that survived the in-laws’ rewrite were delivered by the star in his usual accented monotone. He might as well have been droning pre-flight instructions. (“Put-your-mask-on-first…then-your-child’s.”)
At the awards ceremony, a teenage pop star on the podium read out his name as one of the team winning for Best Adapted Screenplay. The movie’s discordant theme song blared as he fixed a grin on his face and jauntily joined his three collaborators (co-conspirators?) on stage. All the while, Billy’s head rang irony struck. He was being applauded for artless hackwork on a long, loud, soulless moneyspinner, which 500 other SWG members could have rendered at least as well. But, no one but he would know how GOOD his original script had been for the OTHER misbegotten movie. Standing at the podium, waving his statuette and mugging with the other three stooges for the camera, he vowed that he—if it cost him EVERY buck he’d hoarded as a hack-for-hire—would produce AND direct his next original screenplay. He’d would personally see to it that, finally, every word of his screenplay would make it intact to the big screen (And--Damn it! --a copy of the screenplay would be included as an extra on the DVD!).
That was six, long years ago: months of lovingly crafting and honing a screenplay and years of gathering together a rickety consortium of independent investors and assembling a crew of simpatico artists—designers, technicians, actors, and musicians to join him in making HIS baby. Into the production, he’d poured every cent from his blockbuster script doctor jobs and his savings; he’d mortgaged his house and borrowed on his credit cards to the max. He
had even decided to play the lead after the fashion of his idols Chaplin, Lloyd, and Keaton. The result was a comedy that he hoped was worthy of the legacy of Laurel and Hardy, Preston Sturges, Jerry Lewis and all the other comic geniuses who’d inspired the kid with the marble composition book of ideas.
This morning, clad in a blue sweatsuit with a well-known wittle gwey wabbit and little black duck exchanging pronouns on his back, he sat--trembling with rage--in his kitchen, his cooling omelet untasted before him. His normally pleasant features were pale and pained, his large, brown eyes fighting to withhold tears. His left hand idly ruffled his wavy black hair. Clutched in his right hand was a national news weekly, folded over to the movie review section.
The reviewer was hot, despite—perhaps, BECAUSE she was usually comically hostile. She’d become surprisingly influential, as he could testify, from industry message boards to studio water coolers. However unlikely, a laurel from this reviewer would mean serious attention from media and exhibitors—especially vital for a maverick film bypassing the majors. The expected sneer from her—and his little film could vanish almost instantly from the few domestic screens it had managed to secure, unlikely to acquire further theatrical and video distributions deal any time soon.
Billy put the magazine down and pushed away his untouched breakfast. He got up and went to a cabinet, from which he extracted a bottle of Glenlivet and a shot glass. He poured himself a stiff one and downed it. He returned with the bottle and glass to the table. He poured himself another and sipped it to steel himself as he picked up the magazine again. Then he read the closing paragraphs of the review column again:
MONDO MOVIES
Fay Wolfe on the current cinema
“…Last, and certainly least, is AN ORDINARY MAN, a film so incapable of inducing mirth that, if its advertising didn’t include the words ‘The new comedy,’ I would have assumed that the press was being screened the director’s idea of his own funeral. Every so often, someone gets the bright idea of making a sentimental Chaplinesque comedy with a minimum of talk and an excess of physical business. It WAS a bright idea when Chaplin did it, but when he retired, the mold should have been broken, so no one would take it and debase it.
“Writer-turned-actor/director Billy Baxter is a man so utterly lacking in comedic skill—as a writer, a performer, AND a director —that a mob wielding torches and farm implements should have descended on his soundstage the very first time he spake ‘Action!’ I’ll spare you the grisly details of this atrocity. Suffice it to say that the only way one could possibly laugh at his alleged ‘new comedy’ is if one were being mercilessly tickled during its screening. I had no such luck….”
“Six years,” thought Billy. “SIX, LONG YEARS. And she dismissed them in a couple of poison pen paragraphs.” He emptied his drink, and poured another. “OK, if I’m ‘so utterly lacking in comedic skill,’ perhaps I can change MY luck—and that of Ms. Fay Wolfe,” he snorted, “by following her suggestion. Let’s invite her to ANOTHER screening…”
*******
The aforementioned Tuesday of the screening…
Fay peered at the nondescript industrial building on a deserted stretch of 11th Avenue. She began hectoring the turbaned cab driver over his obvious mistake. His insistence that they were stopped at the right address caused her to pull the invitation out from her Fendi purse. Her sneers ceased when she realized that the address on the invitation matched the lettering on the building façade. She realized that budget-conscious indie producers sometimes chose out-of-the-way venues for screenings, but THIS was ridiculous!
Chastened, she paid the driver and stepped out. He zoomed off, leaving her--clad in a very short, tight black Yves St. Laurent dress, a pearl necklace, glistening silver half-moon earrings, very sheer black stockings, and strappy candy red high-heeled Cole Haan sandals—alone on the sidewalk. Where the hell WAS everybody? She must have misread the invitation and come at the wrong time or even the wrong night! But, no, the date and time were clear on the card. She glanced at her wristwatch, a Swatch with the face of Marlene Dietrich.
Freshly manicured hands on her svelte hips, she fumed. Oh, the idiots must have cancelled the screening! They didn’t call or even e-mail. LOVELY! And the cab’s gone! She reached into her purse for her cellphone. It was then that the shower began…
Eager to escape the rain and the creepy sidewalk, Fay tried the door to the building and, grateful that it was unlocked, she entered a small stark, white lobby. She was just starting to call a car service when she noticed the small printed sign on the unmanned desk. It read “Exclusive Screening: Third Floor. Use the elevator to your left, please.” Her brow knitting fetchingly, Fay thought, “Huh? Maybe the screening IS still on. Maybe it’s SO exclusive that it’ll be just me and Mister Big and a few other select movers and shakers. I may be able to schmooze my way not only to a FAT book deal but maybe even a contract to host MY OWN TV talk show.” Intrigued, she popped her phone back in her purse. She gave her face and hair a quick once-over in a pocket mirror. She brushed at her abbreviated black silk dress for the barest hint of lint. She made sure her sheer stockings flawlessly flattered her legs. Satisfied, she boarded the small, steel-walled elevator.
On the similarly stark third floor landing waited a short guy with a mop of curly brown hair, a bristly Fu Manchu beard, mirrored sunglasses and a tux. In a fruity French accent, he asked for Fay’s invitation and then checked off her name upon a clipboard. She smirked, “’Little low key for a press screening, eh? I almost went back home.” “
He smiled and replied, “Well, we’re VARY ‘appy that you didn’t, Ms.”—He consulted the clipboard. —“Wolfe. May I offer you zome refreshment?” He motioned to a little table bearing bottles of wine, spring water, and soft drinks. She chose the Italian white, and he soon handed her a small plastic cupful. She sipped it, and murmured “Mmmm!” before taking a deeper quaff. “Not bad,” she said, nodding at him. He smiled and held open a door. Sipping the wine, she entered a small, plushly appointed screening room.
There was no sign of other guests, let alone the mogul for whom she’d dressed so provocatively. She did so hate being the first to arrive, especially when she’d been hoping to make a head-turning entrance. It’s not like she could leave for a bit, walk down that scary block, and return more fashionably late. Puzzled and miffed, she chose a seat toward the back of the small room, on the aisle, so that she might make a discreet exit should the film prove too torturous to sit through. Staring at, but not really seeing the covered screen down front, and expecting the worst, she’d snappily drained the wine in consolation. Considering that her day had begun twelve hours ago with a network morning show appearance, it was hardly surprising, then, that, in the warm, dim murk of the screening room, she soon nodded off in her plush seat…
Fay awakened and saw the screen ahead still covered by curtains. When, with a theatrical yawn, she blearily tried to check her Swatch, she found her wrists held tightly by leather straps to the armrests of her seat. She cried, “WHAT TH--?” Fay realized that she was now unaccountably seated front row center. She realized further that her legs were stretched out and bound before her, with her ankles resting snugly in a set of padded and firmly locked stocks. She could wiggle her feet, but she couldn’t remove them from the sturdy, unfinished wooden fetters. “WHO THE DEVIL…?” She craned her neck around desperately, and realized—now with a chill--that she was, still, quite alone in the room.
Indignant, she cried, “HELP! Is anybody HERE? Hey, garcon with the clipboard! AU SECOURS! HEEEEY!”
She struggled a few futile seconds more. Then, summoning her arch public persona, cracked, “GREAT! You trapped a critic. Good joke. Ha-ha. Now can somebody—ANYbody—get me out of here?” The following prolonged silence increased her exasperation, edged now with a good measure of fear. “HEY!!! I’m NOT kidding! I’m going to call the police—and THEN my lawyer, so you’d better step lively.”
She looked around for her purse, with her cell phone. It rested on an armrest two seats away, quite beyond her restricted reach, and she, cursing with dismay, shouted, “^%$#@*&^?@!%! HHHEELLLPPP! ANYBODY!!!!!!!! STUPID @#!&%?*&#@ !
All the lights in the room darkened, except for one spot over her seat. From the echoing shadows came a reedy male voice with a hint of Boston, saying, “Uh-uh-uh, Ms. Wolfe! The movie being screened here today has been rated for all ages, so I’ll have to ask you to watch your language.”
Fay turned her body frantically as far her bonds allowed her. “Where the hell ARE you? WHO the hell are you? Show yourself and let…me…GO!”
A figure appeared out of the gloom and placed himself directly between her and the covered screen. Fay, startled, cried, “AAAHHHHHH! Who the HELL are YOU?” He was slim, perhaps 5’ 8”, clean-shaven, with short, wavy black hair admitting to gray, soft, brown eyes, and a puckish smile that in other circumstances Fay might have found attractive. Like the French guy outside, he was dressed in formal wear. She yanked at her bonds and spat, “Why am I STUCK here? What do you WANT from me?”
He sat beside her and said, “I’m very pleased you accepted my invitation, Ms. Wolfe.” Adopting a familiar French accent, he added, “I ‘ope you enjoyed ze wine. It izz a ruther sleepy vintage, non?” He brought the bottle of Italian white from behind his back and waved it under her nose teasingly before placing it on an armrest one seat over from her.
Fay scrunched up her face and snarled, “YOU were the guy at the door? What is this SHIT? Why the masquerade? And why drug me?”
“Now, Fay—by the way, are you named after KING KONG’s leading lady, Fay Wray? No wonder you scream so beautifully! Anyway, Fay, how nice that you’re showing an open mind by stopping your shouted demands and instead asking pertinent questions.” He stood and moved back between her and the covered screen. “You see, Fay, I was led to believe from your review of my film that you had a hopelessly closed mind. So, we both may come away with changed perspectives this evening.” He knelt at her bound feet, which wavered at his approach.
“I’m Billy Baxter. I made AN ORDINARY MAN. I’m an award-winning screenwriter.” He named the awarded video game-into-blockbuster. Fay blinked with lack of recognition.
Billy coughed and continued, proudly, “Fearing that you might recognize me at the door and bolt from a screening of a film you’d already eviscerated in print, I adopted a distinct Gallic pose, ala Inspector Clouseau, to pass you some wine, lightly spiced with a subtle but powerful sedative. This allowed me to, ah, secure you for a special encore preview of my baby.”
He began to undo the buckle of her right sandal. “And THIS time, I’ll make certain that you appreciate its carefully-crafted comedy much, MUCH more.”
“Stop THAT! Don’t TOUCH me!” she shouted, as she waggled her foot wildly, hardly deterring his strong fingers their unbuckling. “What are you blathering on about? What ‘baby’ are you talking about? WHO are you again? And are YOU responsible for that come-on business card from…”—She named the media mogul. —“…that lured me here?”
“Ha-ha! My, you ARE quick! Yes, I thought my little forgery would serve nicely as bait to lure an ambitious critic into my humble trap.” He paused as he finally undid the buckle.
“Again, I’m Billy Baxter,” he said, as he slid the sandal slowly off her waving stocking foot and set it aside. “Last week, you savagely reviewed my little film AN ORDINARY MAN, thus quashing any chance of any extensive theatrical run or serious interest in a video release.” He began to carefully unbuckle her other sandal, despite her petite foot’s spirited efforts to prevent him.
“Will you STOP that!?! Leave my shoe alone!” she shrieked, before taking a deep breath and pointedly modulating her tone. “Look, I review a lot of movies in very limited space. I’m sorry if you found my review, ah, Billy, a bit harsh, but I believe in honestly conveying my first impression. Sometimes my deadlines cause me to dispense with tact…”
He removed her other sandal and set it aside. “There,” he said, wink and smiling again at her. “Now you can relax and give my little film a second chance. And, thanks to your very own suggestion in your review, I’ll ENCOURAGE you to loosen up and laugh at it, openly, unreservedly.” He lightly danced his fingertips across the undersides of her petite toes, which clenched under the sheer nylon as she jerked her feet away.
She cried, “NO! S-stop THAT! You have no RIGHT to touch my toes!” The situation was absurd, ridiculous! This clown couldn’t do THIS to her! But, she was firmly bound, and try as she might to bury the thought, she WAS at his mercy if he intended doing what she feared…
“Oh, but Fay,” he insisted, as his fingers playfully persisted in teasing her tender toes, “you wrote that the only way that someone could laugh watching my poor little film was while being TICKLED. I think you’re wrong, but maybe you’re NOT. You’re America’s hippest, smartest movie critic. I’m willing to give you another chance to watch it…YOUR way.”
Eyes alight with mischief, he began to slide his wiggling fingers along the sheer dark nylon covering her lovely, soft soles.
Her face reddening, Fay stammered, “S-STOP! S-STOP T-THAT! I-I’m going to start SCREAMING…”
“Oh, I HOPE you’ll scream,” he said, winking, “with laughter.” He was happily occupied by tickling her desperately waggling feet. “Anyone who works hard making a film comedy dreams of sitting in an audience that is screaming with laughter at HIS movie. And tonight, YOU’RE my audience. So, feel free to SCREAM!” He held her left foot and dug his fingers into her sole just above her heel. At that, she did scream.
“AHHHHHH! NONONO! HELLPPPPP!” she screeched, giggles bubbling forth. “This-this PSYCHO-ho-ho is holding meee prisoner! Heh-heh-HELLLPPP! He’s TORTURING me! Heh-heh-HEEEELLLLPPPP! Heh-heh-HEEEELLLPPPP! PO-ho-ho-LEEHEEHEECE!”
He shook his head and said, “Now, Fay, like any good screening room, this one is WELL soundproofed. It’s a good SCREAMING room. Besides, we’re the only ones in the whole building tonight anyway. An assistant to a studio honcho owed me a favor, and generously provided the keys to this mothballed postproduction center. So, it’s just me…and you… and COOTCHY-COOTCHY-COOOO!” He had managed to snake ten strong fingers
under her scrunching toes.
“AAHHHHHHHAHAHA! NOOO! $#@$^%$$#@! Heh-heh-hehhehhehheh! C-cut-cut it OUTT! T-this ihihihisn’t-ISN’T FAIR!”
He stopped tickling her, cooing, “You’re SO right, Fay. You’re here for a screening. I think our little preview has proven that you’re TICKLISH enough for our purposes. It’s time to show you my sweet little comedy and help you to…reevaluate it.” He stood and began walking to the back of the room. “Excuse me. I’ll just get things rolling. I’m a one-man movie house this evening.”
He disappeared into the projectionist’s booth. Fay’s giggles gave way to groans peppered with sobs of frustration as she futilely pulled at her bonds. “Good God,” she thought. “I feel like I’ve been trapped in THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS. Where the heh-heh-HELL is Jodie Foster when you need her?”
The curtains parted in front of a pristine screen before her. The spotlight above her dimmed entirely and the Technicolor glare of a vintage Hollywood cartoon filled the screen, while its big band blare crashed throughout the room. Familiar characters began their minutely timed and orchestrated comic violence.
Fay was stunned into silence by the color and noise. She stared at the screen in disbelief for moments before she became aware of Baxter again sitting cross-legged by her feet. On screen, a black cat had a white stripe of paint accidentally poured along her back as she walked beneath a ladder.
“Please, PLEASE, let me GO!” Fay cried at Billy. “This is WORSE than a screening at a studio dinner party. Here I can’t even pretend that I have a headache and escape to the ladies room.”
He sat by the left side of the stocks so that he could watch the screen and her reactions. An excessively amorous skunk was pursuing the desperately fleeing cat. Billy chuckled and shouted to Fay, “I always feel cheated when I go to the movies these days. They rarely EVER show a cartoon before the feature like they used to. A great ‘toon can be a wonderful warm up to a good comedy feature. Oh… but you’re not LAUGHING. Here, let me HELP…”
He reached over and began to spiritedly spider his fingers upon the sleek black nylon stretched across her soft sensitive soles. No matter how violently she moved her feet, his fingers continued stroking them. Immediately, she bounced in her seat and shrieked, “NO-hohohohoho! Pleaheeheese! Dohohohon’t TICKLE me! I-heh-I-hehhehheh-I hate-hehheh-HATE it-heh-heh-heeeeee! Oh, pleheeheeheehees! Oh-ah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-haaaaaaaaaaaaa!
Sta-ha-sta-hahahahahaaaa-STOP it, plee-hee-hee-hee-heeeeeee.”
He grabbed one of her big toes and, holding her foot still, firmly scratched her stocking sole alongside her arch. Even louder, she shrieked, “OHNOhohoho! NottherenottherenotthereNOTTHERE! Ahheh-ahheh-ahhehhehheh…” Whenever she managed to jerk her big toe from his grasp, he quickly secured it—or the other—again and persistently tickled this supersensitive area.
“Oh, ho!” Billy teased as he allowed his fingers to ski down her nylon-covered arch. “Even the world’s hardest critic has her soft spots.” His fingers dug into the fleshy places just above her heels, then clambered back up her sheer insteps, before torturously tracing the nylon smoothly coating the soft skin leading to her spasming toes.
The persistent skunk had the terrified freshly striped feline cornered, when—adding “None softer than under these toes, I’ll wager.” —Billy pulled back her left toes with one hand and gleefully glided his free fingertips under Fay’s tender toes before teasingly poking between them.
Fay jerked her sandy blonde head back and shrieked, “No! No! NO! NOOO! STOP! Ah-ha-ha-ahhahahahaaaa! You-hoohoohoohoooo-sta-ha-sta-hahahahaaaa-STOP IT! RIGHT NOWahheh-heh-hehhehheh-ahhahahahahaAHHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAAA…”
Billy giggled at the closing line of the cartoon as he relentlessly tickled the woman’s toes. Then the closing music swelled, the end credit loomed, and the screen faded to black. His fingers slowed, then stopped. He squeezed her toes affectionately, then let them go.
“I love a GOOD cartoon, don’t you?” He allowed one forefinger to persistently tease the outer edges of her soles. Her stockings made his delicate touch all the more torturous.
Fay, her vision blurry with tears, her breathing short and giggle-strewn, stammered, “P-please, pleheease n-no more. P-Please leheht me-eee goho! You must—you MUST stop—STOP thihis! I can’t—I CAN’T stand it. B-besides, how can, how can I-AIE reheeheevaluate your film if I’m laughing sohoho!”
“Tsk-tsk-tsk-tsk! It HAS been a while since you laughed at the movies, huh?” mused Billy, as the darkness gave way to a lengthy leader projecting upon the screen. “’Sorry about this, but it’s my personal print. A bit rough. But you’ll be glad to know it runs longer than the release version. With all the good little bits my co-producers made me remove, supposedly to pick up the pace. This cut’s not as slick, but I believe it’s funnier. You lucky devil!” He snaked his wiggling fingers under her unprepared toes, and she shrieked.
The opening credits to AN ORDINARY MAN unreeled, and Billy removed a tall, thin object from his breast pocket. A nervous Fay strained in the varied light from the screen to see what it was. On screen, the film opened with Billy, playing the hero, wearing a bowler hat, bowtie, a jacket too small and pants too large, encountered several unfortunate people in the ornery revolving entrance door of a large downtown bank. At Fay’s stocking feet, Billy removed a firm-bristled toothbrush from its package. Clutching the toes of her left foot, he began vigorously brushing up and down the middle of her sheer stocking sole. The nylon of her stocking seemed to conspire with the short nylon bristles of the brush, sending tickling sensations rippling from her soles up her body.
Fay threw her head back and yelped, “AIIEEEEEEEEEE-EEHEEHEE-HEEHEEHEE! Pleeheeheese! You’re—aha-ahahaha-ahahahahahahaaaaaaa! Don-don’t DOHOOHOO that! D-hohohon’t! Aaaahh-haha-ahhahahaaaaa!” This bastard seemed determined to find and brush every tender spot on her tootsies. Nigh breathless with laughter, she feared that if he didn’t stop, he might tickle her to death.
Grinning wickedly, Billy brought the brush down to her heels, aggressively stoking their nylon smoothness as if they were two front teeth. He would alternate this rough treatment with light fingertip sweeps along the softness of her insoles. Fay roiled in her seat as copious tears and breathless laughter poured out of her. At her feet, Billy was casting an eye to the screen, trying to time and locate his brushstrokes to complement what he felt were the highlights of hilarity in the gag work. Onscreen, Billy’s battle with the door caused a security guard to be flung into a gumball machine, which crashed, releasing a cascade of gumballs undermining dozens of incredulous people. As chaos ensued, Billy dug his fingers into Fay’s soles just above her heels—and she howled!
Billy couldn’t tell how much of the film Fay was watching through her tear-flooded eyes. Hearing her hysterical, high-pitched laughter echo through the room as the bodies flew onscreen, however, filled him with thrilled delight. Hungry for more, he eagerly pulled back the clenched toes of her right foot. Chuckling, he began brushing along her petite toes, wiggling with ticklish agony. The plastic bristles terrifically teased the delicate flesh between Fay’s lovely little toes through the sheer smoky nylon.
“OhGodStop! Plee-hee-hee-hee-hee-heeeease! Bwah-ha-ha-ha-ha-haaaa-ahha-hahaha!” Billy was merciless, however. His tickley toothbrush relented only when a bridge of plot exposition unreeled.
“B-B-Billy, p-please! No more tickling! I’ll-I’ll re-retract--”
“SHHH! No talking now! Watch!”
Her respite was not a long one. The onscreen Billy encounters a police officer, who soon gives chase. When the cop falls into an open manhole, Billy cocks an ear--it seems forever-- waiting for the absurdly long scream to end in a kersplash. During the wait, Billy began lightly teasing Fay’s waggling soles, to her giggling dismay. At the splash, he violently dug his fingers under her toes, causing her to helplessly scream with laughter. Laughing himself, he reveled playing her like his private laugh track.
A moment later, a scene change found the hero absent-mindedly bumping into a passerby in front of a bakery. Fay breathlessly moaned, “Oh, God! Enough…enough…” although it wasn’t clear whether she meant the tickling, the movie, or both. Billy sidled down the second row and settled into a seat behind hers. He was munching from a bag of popcorn as he looked with pleasure upon the developing scene. The disagreement on screen had moved into the bakery. Blinking away her tears, Fay murmured, “Please. Lemme go! I haven’t peed watching a movie since HALLOWEEN.”
Billy set aside the popcorn and leaned forward in his seat so that his head loomed over Fay’s right shoulder. She was startled by his sudden appearance behind her and cried, “AAARGH! You scared the SHIT out of me!” He brought a finger to his lips and shushed her, then pointed at the screen. A character had picked up a pie off of a counter in the bakery and hurled it at the hero, who ducked. The pie landed on the face of a large, well-dressed woman, who stoically allowed pastry to slide off her face for a moment before grabbing another pie nearby and letting fly.
At this point, Billy brought his hands over the seatback and began poking Fay’s sides through the sheer fabric of her dress. Squirming ineffectually, she howled, “NOAOWWW! Ple-hee-hee-heese duh-DON’T-oh-ho-ho-ha-haaaa! AAHHH-ha-ha-ha-haaaaa! No-NO! -Nuhahahahahahaaaaaaa…” His frisky fingers expertly stroked along her ribs and dug eagerly between them. Fay rocked in the seat as much as her bonds permitted, trying, even in her hilarity, to bang his head with hers. He kept his noggin clear, however, and was intent on working his wiggling fingers down her sides to her hips. Before too long, he brought his fingers up her sleeveless dress to frolic upon the sensitive shaven skin under her arms.
Fay’s head rolled violently from side to side, her face contorted with laughter. “HEEHEEHEEEE! PUH- PLEEHEEHEESE! Oh-oh-oh-ahha-ahahahaha-ahahahahahahaaaa! STAH-HAAHAP! Ha-ha-oh-ahhahahahahaaaaaaa…” Her big blue eyes were wide open, but it was dubious whether she was capable of appreciating the mammoth pie fight unfolding onscreen. Billy, however, was reveling in her hysteria as fluttered his fingers upon her tender underarms. He watched the custard choreography build to one last splat: onscreen he heaved a towering wedding cake onto the head of the just-arrived, still sodden police officer.
During the quieter scene that followed, Billy produced two goose quills and showed them to the panting Fay. “Oh-ohno-waitaminute…!” As another gag began to build, Billy grazed the feather tips under Fay’s upper arms. “Ohhonohonono! Plee-hee-heese! Loo-hoo-ook, I-heh-can’t-hehhehheh pay a-hahaha-attention! I’ll-hahahahaaaa-watch your-hehhehheh-your film if youhoohoohoo’ll sta-hahahaha-stop TICKLING me! Plee-hee-hee-heese!” When a fleeing postman escaped a pursuing dog only by the seat of his pants, Billy spun the feather tips into her armpits. “EEEEEEEEEEK! STAAAAHHHHPP! AHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!”
He gave her another brief respite, only to move the torturing feather tips to her soft neck and her tender, shell-like ears. She found that maddening, and, under the circumstances, highly conducive to helpless giggling—“Ohnononono-teeheeheeheeheehee!” --before he returned the plumes to her unprotected bare underarms. “AAAAIEEEEEHEHEHEHHEH! STAAHHP!” Wielding the feathers with gleeful skill, he induced helpless bubbly laughter in her as the gags onscreen merited.
As his film moved to its final stages, he returned, with the quills, to his cross-legged position at her feet. Though exhausted, Fay nonetheless tried to humor him into freeing her. “Heh-heh. I can see your influences quite clearly, Billy.” He glared at her and shushed her, pinching her left big toe. “Oww!” She persisted, “You admire Chaplin, right? And Keaton very much. And you’ve studied the way Preston Sturges would fill a shot with tumbling bodies.”
Billy, miffed both that she was talking and dropping the names of his heroes, grabbed her left foot. Using the point of a quill, he poked a hole in the nylon near her big toe and peeled the stocking back past her heel. Fay screeched, “DON’T! Haven’t you done ENOUGH to me? STOP!” Billy, efficiently peeling her right foot bare as well, whispered loudly, “Hush, Fay! It’s time for the WOW finish!”
The movie’s climax involved the hero and his buddy trying to move a piano from one hotel suite and hide it in another by carrying it outside on the thirtieth floor ledge of the building. They proceed to narrowly escape one perilous near miss after another. “Harold Lloyd,” Fay hissed. “Shhh!” responded Billy, who, as if he were scoring the scene, began to sweep her soft bare soles—already tickled richly red--with the soft blades of the goose quills.
“EEEEEHEEEEahhahahahahaha! NO! Ngh-naha-nahahahaha-ohahhahahahaaaaaa! Staahhahahahaaa…”
Billy pulled back one set of toes and deftly feathered beneath them. Separating her big toe and second toe, he twirled the quill between thumb and forefinger therein, causing her shrillest screams yet. “EEEEEEEEBILLEEENOOOO! EEEEHEEHEEEHEEHEEHEE…”
He patiently feathered between her other toes, moving his tickling quill methodically from one helpless bare foot to the other, as the climactic scene developed.
Soon, the two men onscreen desperately hung onto the piano as it began to roll rapidly towards a corner of the ledge. Billy abandoned the goose quill and applied his fingertips to the irresistible softness of Fay’s bare soles. She shrieked anew, bouncing on her plush seat, as his fingertips traced the wrinkles fetchingly etched upon her upper soles. Her wild laughter was complemented by her spate of hiccups when he zeroed in on particularly sensitive spots just above each of her heels. He dug his fingers into those perfect spots, heightening her laughter and her struggles as the scene built.
When the two men were balanced on the piano perched precariously on a flagpole thirty stories above a busy city intersection--the soundtrack trilling at the outer range of human hearing--Billy leaned forward and, licking his lips, gave Fay’s lovely little toes a tentative taste. Smacking his lips with cartoon approval, he fell upon her tootsies and began licking and nibbling their tenderness in earnest.
“GAWD! NOOO-hohohohooo! Nuh-nuh-not THAT! Aaaah! Aaaah! Oh-ohstop-ohstopwillyou? Ooo-ooo-hoohoohoo! Plee-ohplee-hee-hee-heeheehee! Aaahh! Aaaahhh! Hehhehhehheh…”
He firmly stretched her toes and snaked his tongue between them, as he teasingly tasted her salty digits and inhaled the lingering sweetness of her bath oil. He was as intoxicated by this tongue tickling as she found herself helplessly, hilariously aroused by it. Neither noticed the men onscreen ride the piano off the flagpole, onto a window washer’s platform, into a 28th floor window, through a suite past a lovemaking couple, down a corridor, and into an elevator. Nor did Fay immediately notice that, in her laugh throes, she had loosened the strap pinning her left wrist to the armrest. When, in spite of her giddy arousal, awareness came, she soon freed her hand with a violent yank.
Utterly beguiled by the effect his tongue tickling was having on her tender tootsies, Billy was blind to Fay’s efforts. He played his lips over the ball of her right foot before settling in to tickle her silken instep with kisses. Meanwhile, his right fingers sought out her left foot and began tickling the sweet spot just above her heel. Screaming with laughter, bubbling with erotic excitement, she was not too far-gone to try to loosen the strap holding her right wrist down.
Onscreen, the piano had rolled out of the building, with the two men still aboard, and sped down a thoroughfare. Below, Billy was dancing the tip of his tongue along the middle of her right sole. His fingers snaked under her left toes. Her shrieks and gasps and giggles hampered Fay’s attempts to unbuckle the strap. However, while Billy blissfully and obliviously tongue-tickled her toes, her determination saw her right wrist freed at last.
The piano rolled into the bank where the hero’s girlfriend worked, and it stopped before her teller window, where he revealed—hidden behind the keys—the money stolen earlier in the film and now rightfully returned. As the couple embraced onscreen, below, Billy’s eyes were closed as he giddily clutched Fay’s left foot and lasciviously licked up-and-down her luscious sole. Thus, he never saw the bottle of Italian white crash down upon his noggin. His jaw thwacked against the hard wood of the stocks, and, as the closing credits to his film crawled on the screen, Billy had fallen, unconscious, across the critic’s trapped legs. Struggling to catch her breath, Fay dropped the bottle. Staring at her slumped captor, she thrilled with satisfaction that his last torturous licks hadn’t prevented her from fighting her giggly arousal and desperately stretching to grab the bottle and “christen” him.
The reel ended, and the screen was bathed in a bright, white light, aiding Fay as she ferreted the key to the stock’s padlocks out of one of Billy’s pockets. Soon, she was free
and standing, in her bare feet, torn stockings, disheveled dress, and damp underpants, over his fallen form. She fumbled in her purse for her cell phone to alert the police.
She spat, “Baxter, you psycho cinephile, you may have tickled me half to DEATH, but I STILL say your movie’s dated, derivative, and not worth the extinct dinosaurs it’s printed on! Now, for the cops…”
Her fingers, though, hesitated before they punched 911. She cast a thoughtful glance at the snoozing Billy. She juggled the phone a bit in her hand. Then, still feeling the erotic warmth flooding her system, she smiled wickedly at her erstwhile tormentor. She flipped the phone closed. “Why be hasty?” she thought. “The cunning cutie here might be good for a few REAL laughs after all.” She tossed the phone back into the bag. “And this time, I’M the auteur!”
With strength borne of craving—and not simply for justice-- Fay wrestled the unconscious Billy into the plush front row center seat. As he slumped forward, she pulled off his jacket. After pushing him back into the seat, she yanked off his tie. Grabbing the two sides of his shirtfront, she ripped it open with buttons popping all over. With glee, she tore the shirt apart, leaving him wearing only the frayed collar and torn sleeves. She fastened his wrists tightly to the armrests. She set his ankles in the open stocks. She removed his highly polished dress shoes. She unbuckled his belt and opened his pants before sliding them off his legs. His stiff penis comically sprang forth. One could almost hear the “Boing!”
“The little bastard! He was ENJOYING torturing me! Look at that BONER!” She slammed the stocks shut and padlocked them. She nodded her head with exaggerated satisfaction (in the best Laurel and Hardy tradition) at sleeping Billy.
She reached into her purse for the wafer thin digital camera she’d brought, hoping (She sighed.) to have someone take a shot of her all kissy with the media mogul. She took a few choice shots of the exposed Baxter from a number of highly compromising angles, guaranteeing his silence about her humiliation tonight. To keep these pix from the Internet, she thought, he’d agree to that. He’d agree to ANYTHING! “Yes, anything,” she mused aloud, her gaze fixed on his boner.
She ran up into the projection booth, figuring she’d rewind Baxter’s movie and make
HIM suffer through it. Most conveniently, a studio contact had recently provided her with a day’s primer in projection technology for an article she’d written on “The Last Days of Sprockets,” about the imminent digital projection revolution. She’d insisted on hands-on experience on a movie projector comparable to this—and was she ever grateful now!
Waiting for the rewind, she nearly tripped upon an open backpack. She gave it a kick, causing some packaged DVDs to spill out. Picking them up, she realized that the bag was Baxter’s, and that all these must be DVDs of films that Baxter had written for. She smirked. What a ghastly array of megabuck idiocies! She was only grateful he hadn’t subjected her to these, too. One DVD in a slipcase bore in scrawled marker: “Public TV interview.”
“Oh, God!” she thought. “I’ll bet this is Billy Baxter blathering on about the serious art of film comedy. Oh, save me! This must be hilarious!” Her eyes narrowed and her lips smirked mischievously, as she considered, “Maybe even Billy will find this funny—with MY help!”
The projector beeped as the film’s rewind finished. She clicked the DVD button on the projector display screen. She loaded the interview DVD into the projector. After previewing the disk to satisfy her suspicions about the contents, she clicked “Play All.” Noticing a feather duster hanging on the wall behind the projector, Fay smiled, nodded, and lifted it before heading out.
As the public television logo led into the nationally popular chat show, Fay knelt again before the stocks. With a nasty chuckle, she grabbed the toes of Billy’s gray socks and, with a grunt, tugged mightily. Soon, she had bared his very pale, and, she noted with satisfaction, very soft bare feet.
“I wonder how,” she thought, twirling the feather duster between her thumb and forefinger, “Baxter here came up with the idea of torturing me by tickling.” She indulged in a sinister grin. “Wouldn’t it just be TOO, TOO terrible if he turns out to be just a little bit ticklish himself?
As the host interminably introduced Billy, she thought that she really owed the still Baxter her thanks. He’d given her a potent demonstration of how perversely exciting it felt to be tickled while being tied down. Baxter had been right about her not laughing much—whether at or away from the movies--for a very long while. If she hadn’t freed herself when she did, she would have ecstatically surrendered to climax and been his helpless pawn for who knows how long! She’d be sure to see from now on that her bed partners knew about her newfound hunger to laugh so helplessly.
Furthermore, she thought, she should reward the horny bastard for showing her the intoxicating feeling of power that tickling another can give someone. If he hadn’t surrendered to it, she mused, she might still be bound, laughing herself to death. If BEING tickled without mercy is fun, TICKLING without mercy is almost a drug without compare, as Baxter’s boner demonstrated. She noticed with regret that the Big Boy had noticeably softened. Well, maybe, she thought, feathering her palm with the duster, I can perk it up…
Her mouth formed a hungry, toothy smile and her blue eyes glistened as Billy began to stir…
Onscreen, following an absurdly meandering question, Bill haltingly began, “Ah, well, comedy is the most serious business on earth. Was it Edward Kean who, on his deathbed, said, ‘Dying’s easy. Comedy is hard.’? An unfunny comedy’s like a flat souffle: it just lies there.”
She rolled her eyes and muttered, “Oh, God!” She slapped Billy’s soles and shouted, “C’mon, Baxter! Wake up!” She reached over the stocks with the feather duster and began to tickle along between his bare legs until the tips of the dancing plumes teased his once ceiling-aspiring member. “Cootchy-cootchy-coo, Sleeping Beauty!” Billy’s eyes fluttered open as his penis awakened with renewed vigor. “That’s right!” Fay teased, as her feathering quickened. “Cootchy-cootchy-coo! Rise and shine! It’s showtime! Laugh at the funny man claiming to be a comic genius.”
Still dusting his manhood, Fay dug five short but sharply manicured opal fingernails into the ball of his bare right foot. His head jerked up and his eyes opened wide. He sputtered, “Hey! Wha-hehheh! Stoppit! Ha-ha-ha! OhGodStop!” He was helpless to suppress his giggles.
“Now, WHAT should I stop, Billy honey? Feathering this little guy here?” She swirled the feather around the swelling head of his penis. “Tickle-tickle-tickling your little tootsies?” She
dug her nails fiercely under his clenching toes. “Or the idiots onscreen?” Billy surrendered to full laughter. “WHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAAAAAAA!”
Onscreen, Billy said, “No-no, do it like this. THIS is a double take.”
Fay turned to look at the screen and saw Billy lecturing the host on the fine art of the comic reaction shot. She turned back to Billy and, seeing that his cock was aspiring nicely, dropped the feather duster. Bringing ten energetic fingers to bear on his feet, she gushed, “Just listen to YOU! Laughing like some wicked movie critic was tick-tick-tickling your helpless bare feet!” She swept her nails across his soles, digging her nails into the tender skin just above his heels. “Do you like it THERE? That’s where you tickled ME! Cootchy-cootchy-coo!”
“AAAHNOOO! NONOHEHHEHHEH! S-S-S-STAHHAHAHAAP! AHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAAA!”
She pulled back his toes and began sawing one of killer goose quills between them, back and forth, back and forth, mercilessly. She delightedly moved the plume from one toe space to the next and back. Glancing up, she was stunned to see that her relentless feathering had his penis far longer than it had been when she first beheld it.
“Whoa, look at you, Junior! If I thought you were big when I was in the tickle seat, it’s nothing compared to your excitement when YOU get the treatment! I simply MUST take advantage of this!”
Onscreen, Billy opined, “Some things make you laugh because of their very absurdity.”
She dropped the feather and leaned back to grab her purse. As she did so, she raised her toes and wiggled them upon Billy’s bare soles. Opening his eyes to behold her silliest means of tickling, his laughter surged to a higher pitch. While her frisky toes tickled between his, she withdrew from the Fendi a small plastic packet, from which she unfurled a condom. It had been sitting in her purse for weeks since she’d absentmindedly accepted it from an eager AIDS Awareness volunteer at some screening. Amused that she was finding a use for it at last, she stood and began deftly sliding the lubricated sheath over his straining shaft.
“Not my usual style of cock couture,” she quipped as she worked. “But, you Hollywood types, who knows WHERE you’ve been?”
Shaft sheathed, Fay straightened up, reaching under her dress to clear the way even as she let five fingers dance again on Billy’s soles. As he giggled anew, she told him, “You tricked me into coming tonight, Laughing Boy. Now, I’m going to tickle YOU to make ME CUM!”
Onscreen, Billy insisted, “All the classic comedies have wow finishes. Building to a good climax is ESSENTIAL.”
Fay clambered over the stocks. She snaked her fingers along Billy’s sides, digging into his ribs. He howled, completely oblivious now to the interview but gasping as he felt her mount his thrusting shaft and felt himself move deeply into her snug warmth. She moaned and began to rock slowly upon him, her fingers seemingly still tickling him of their own accord. He continued to giggle, but as her rocking persisted, his hilarity was peppered by gasps. Her rocking quickened, as did her moaning. Her fingers tickled even more savagely, and his laughter gave way to yelps and groans.
Onscreen: “Once you’ve got them laughing, you can lead an audience anywhere.”
Fay, almost breathless astride him, began teasing Billy’s underarms and cried, “When I call you--Oh! --day or night--Ah!--and command that you rush to me--Ah!-- with ball gag—Oh!—fetters—Ah!-- and feathers—Oh!--to be my tickle slave—AAAA!—you--you’ll do what?”
She skittered her fingers down his sides and up again to wiggle under his arms.
“AHHAHAHAHAHAHAAAA, I’LL—AAHH! AAAH!—I’LL…”
“Oohh! Y-you’ll what--WHAT?” She pressed her forefingers between his ribs.
“I-I’ll d-do it! AHHAHAHAHAHAAA!”
Behind her, the video Billy was insisting, “There’s a fine art to throwing a custard pie!”
“Oooo, baby! Yeah! Cream me!” Fay cried, as she rocked.
Almost immediately, she was too caught up in roughly tickling his sides as she rode his swelling member to pay any attention to the waning interview. Her moans and his giggles overwhelmed the soundtrack, anyway. Finally, her breath caught, her rocking ceased. She then thrust her head back and yowled with unleashed pleasure. Beneath her, he came as well, with a shout peppered with laughter.
A few minutes later, the interview ended and the room went dark. All that could be heard was their labored breathing, with an occasional faint “Oh, God!” from him.
Finally, Fay rose up, stepped back, stretched, and pronounced, “Now, THAT'S entertainment!”
*No film reviewers or filmmakers were harmed during the writing of this story.
* I sincerely hope that no one construes from this story that I believe that public television is, under any real circumstances, an aphrodisiac. Well, maybe ANTIQUES ROADSHOW...Only kidding!
***This “director’s cut” must be rated “X,” so it is not meant for readers younger than 18. (You minors might as well get back to bypassing the parental blocks on your families’ adult cable accounts.) Both of the participants in this romp are well over 18, too.
***This is a significantly revised version of a PG-rated M>F tale that ran, under a slightly different title and without the closing reel fireworks, on TICKLETOWN, when that bustling metropolis was a mere village.
***A specific apology is directed to Munchausen (estimable author of THE VOYAGE OUT, one of the TMF’s finest story series), who requested this tale’s reappearance eons ago. My propensity for revisions does have a way of running amok.
***My general apology is directed to the TMF at large, for my abysmally scanty
number of posts during the last three years. It’s embarrassing to enjoy the creativity here and find myself not contributing my fair share. I’m hopeful that this entry is a sign that my colossal writer’s block is finally, irrevocably crumbling.
Fay Wolfe was justly reputed to be America’s toughest movie critic, but one frustrated filmmaker decided it was time that somebody took pains…
FINDING FAY’S FUNNY BONE
by Tee Hee Lawrence
Fay Wolfe finished her column for the weekly newsmagazine for which she served as house film critic. Without stopping to review it—for she vehemently hated rewriting—she transmitted it to the office with a decisive click. She sighed with noisy pleasure as she indulged in a prolonged stretch, then rocked back in her chair and crossed her bare ankles upon the railing of her balcony.
She waggled her pale, pink-edged bare feet, which extended over the edge of the railing beyond the hem of her sky-blue silk kimono. She wiggled her petite toes, which sported opal nail polish as well as two flashing silver rings, which she had purchased to celebrate her recently finalized divorce. (Her ex was an older, tippling journalist, who could not bear how well and easily she could write.) Lighting a cigarette (She always permitted herself just one after completing an assignment.), she indulged in a panoramic gaze at the park below and the skyline of midtown beyond under dusk’s surreal purple twilight.
Feeling infused by a sense of privilege and power, she recalled Burt Lancaster in SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS, when he—playing a monstrous gossip columnist--surveyed Times Square from HIS apartment balcony like a vulture primed for the scent of carrion. Or maybe it was just the nicotine rush from her Marlboro. Letting the cigarette dangle from the corner of her mouth (Just like Belmondo!), she sighed and again stretched grandly. Thirtyish, 5’, 6” tall, flatteringly figured, Fay wore her straight sandy hair in a page bob inspired by the feisty silent film star Louise Brooks. She had large, expressive blue eyes, a heart-shaped mouth ready with (as an industry rival once quipped) a predator’s chilling, perfect-toothed smile, and a fetching dimpled chin. She had been born in America of British academic parents, and had enough English public schooling to have developed a saucy British accent which enhanced her brittle, mocking air.
Indulging in some smug career stocktaking, she recalled being the hilariously hostile film critic of her college newspaper ten years ago. Then, her arch pose--as the critic who panned EVERYTHING--had started as a joke, a parody of all the pull-quote pandering, undiscriminating reviewers in newspapers and on television. (“There are so many flies buzzing around THE BRIDGES OF MADISON COUNTY that it appears that local pooper scooper ordinances have been repealed.”) But her take-no-prisoners prose persona had caught on. She went from school right to a post at a hot new style magazine, where her relentless poison pen (“Melanie Griffith in this movie reminds me of nothing so much as that pale zeppelin Gregory Peck harpooned in MOBY DICK.”) drew fanatical reader feedback (including a marriage proposal from a smitten masochist). Her nascent notoriety led to an independent video channel commentary slot, where she mercilessly (with the tenderness and vocabulary of a Marine boot camp drill sergeant) savaged hapless Hollywood blockbusters (“TITANIC goes to great lengths to reassure us that finding a great lay really takes the sting out of an icy swim in the North Atlantic.”) to the growing delight of viewers.
She became second film reviewer for a big city daily, and, before long, its lead reviewer, resulting in national syndication. (“You can tell that GLADIATOR is set in Hollywood’s mighty Rome because every Roman official is played by a British queen.”) The paper’s corporate parent, desperate to goose the 18-to-34 readership of its national news magazine, launched Fay as its movie critic with an alluring cover depicting her naked (except for a few strategically draped strips of film.) and wielding a blood-crusted hatchet. (“Mark Wahlberg amidst a lot of apes? Now how in hell was I expected to find him?”) Then called the producer of the popular daily entertainment news TV show, where Fay, flashing teeth and claws, was smashingly paired with the teddy bear affability of an avuncular male critic for a thumbs-up-or-down survey of the week’s multiplex premieres. (“Roger, if you’d ONCE taken your face out of your usual VAT of popcorn, you’d have seen…”)
Fay felt like standing then, and (grateful she wasn’t ACTUALLY atop a flaming gas tank like Jimmy Cagney in WHITE HEAT) screaming, “Made it, Ma! ‘ Top o’ the world!” Instead, she picked up her Blueberry and considered her evening’s social possibilities--where to have a sinfully extravagant (expense account) dinner and with whom--when the house phone bleeped.
A messenger soon arrived, bearing a lovely arrangement of exotic flowers and an engraved invitation to a screening the following Tuesday. It was from a distributor she’d never heard of. The screening was at an unfamiliar location. The film was not mentioned by name, simply described as “the blossoming of an exciting, new independent talent.”
Fay returned to her balcony and settled back with the flowers into a lounger. She ruefully sniffed at an orchid and sighed. While she was most celebrated for her swinging-from-the-heels hatchet jobs, it simply wasn’t true that she NEVER praised anything. Despite her rep as a scorched earth critic, she had—in her comfy berth in the mainstream press--increasingly come to champion a few films, directors, and performers. This apparent ascendant benevolence in “America’s Critical Cutthroat Cutie” (as Fay was dubbed in a recent lavish magazine profile) caused many determined distributors to ply her with screening invitations and tapes, hoping she’d provide a rare blessing.
She admired a bougainvillea and thought, smiling, that some of these invites
should come with lilies, because the film screened were so bad, they merited only a curt obit from her. She had dealt thusly with an indie wannabe in her column last week. She chuckled, thinking that she’d really done a Lizzie Borden on THAT disaster.
Tapping her Blueberry, Fay saw that next Tuesday evening she had another engagement, so she was about to toss the invite, when she spied the business card clipped to the arrangement’s foil next to some cyclamen. It was the card of one of the town’s major media moguls. Handwritten on the back in his unmistakable script (He often signed his corporation’s ads in trade publications.) were the words, “See you there,” followed by his distinctively swirled first initial.
“Well,” she thought, resting a bare right foot on her left knee as she tickled her dimpled chin with the card, “if HE’S going to be there, it looks like a good opportunity to network and make another attempt at securing that lucrative book contract I want. If the movie is dreck, I can always slip out under cover of darkness. After all, it’s NOT like I’ll be a prisoner…”
***********************************************************************
A morning, one week earlier…
Billy Baxter was almost unbearably proud of his new film, which he had carefully nurtured from a germ of an idea to an eighty-seven minute feature in six years. Well, twenty-one years, really, he thought, remembering a marble composition book of story ideas he had painstakingly compiled while in high school. Time and again over the years, he had consulted that battered old notebook with its minute ballpoint scrawl. It had been with him at the creative writing program at a venerable Midwestern college, during his stints as free-lancer, staff writer, head writer, script editor, assistant producer, and producer for several television production companies, and his more recent years as a screenwriter of major Hollywood movies.
As his career progressed, he’d been stoic while his original stories and screenplays suffered the grind that is TV and feature film production. It was, he thought, not unlike what gradually happened to pebbles buffeted by the cruel sea against a pitiless shore, only a lot faster, and without the resultant good of a sandy beach that one could lie oiled upon while counting one’s residuals. His words, often lovingly crafted in nightlong solitude, were, in the course of rushes, rewrites (more often than not by others), recasts, reshoots, reedits, previews, and still more reshapings—most of which he had little, if any, say in—markedly altered, when they weren’t flat out unrecognizable as his own.
It had been suggested by venal producers and even sympathetic colleagues that the large paychecks he was then cashing weekly must have assuaged any authorial discontent he felt as a Hollywood writer. For years, he did allow the money to serve as distraction from and even consolation for the hurt he felt watching his words being disfigured on the screen. However, it wasn’t until he attended an awards ceremony as one of a team nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay (of a hit bloodthirsty computer game) that his complacency was shattered.
Not up for any awards that same year was another film, as forgotten as it was forgettable; reviewed poorly when it met critical notice at all; and released to video, it seemed, within hours of its one-city theatrical opening. It had been based on Billy’s original script, one labored over for years--what he had considered his finest work to date. The finished feature so appalled him, with its inept, unfeeling, slapdash rendering of his heartfelt work, that he asked that his name be removed from the credits (And the writing credit went, fittingly, to the clueless director and his producer brother-in-law, whose sledge-hammer-and butcher-knife-rewrite had doomed the project.). The idiots had even cast a fading, over-50 action star to play his supposedly 27-year-old shy and sensitive poet protagonist! What few lines of Billy’s carefully wrought dialogue that survived the in-laws’ rewrite were delivered by the star in his usual accented monotone. He might as well have been droning pre-flight instructions. (“Put-your-mask-on-first…then-your-child’s.”)
At the awards ceremony, a teenage pop star on the podium read out his name as one of the team winning for Best Adapted Screenplay. The movie’s discordant theme song blared as he fixed a grin on his face and jauntily joined his three collaborators (co-conspirators?) on stage. All the while, Billy’s head rang irony struck. He was being applauded for artless hackwork on a long, loud, soulless moneyspinner, which 500 other SWG members could have rendered at least as well. But, no one but he would know how GOOD his original script had been for the OTHER misbegotten movie. Standing at the podium, waving his statuette and mugging with the other three stooges for the camera, he vowed that he—if it cost him EVERY buck he’d hoarded as a hack-for-hire—would produce AND direct his next original screenplay. He’d would personally see to it that, finally, every word of his screenplay would make it intact to the big screen (And--Damn it! --a copy of the screenplay would be included as an extra on the DVD!).
That was six, long years ago: months of lovingly crafting and honing a screenplay and years of gathering together a rickety consortium of independent investors and assembling a crew of simpatico artists—designers, technicians, actors, and musicians to join him in making HIS baby. Into the production, he’d poured every cent from his blockbuster script doctor jobs and his savings; he’d mortgaged his house and borrowed on his credit cards to the max. He
had even decided to play the lead after the fashion of his idols Chaplin, Lloyd, and Keaton. The result was a comedy that he hoped was worthy of the legacy of Laurel and Hardy, Preston Sturges, Jerry Lewis and all the other comic geniuses who’d inspired the kid with the marble composition book of ideas.
This morning, clad in a blue sweatsuit with a well-known wittle gwey wabbit and little black duck exchanging pronouns on his back, he sat--trembling with rage--in his kitchen, his cooling omelet untasted before him. His normally pleasant features were pale and pained, his large, brown eyes fighting to withhold tears. His left hand idly ruffled his wavy black hair. Clutched in his right hand was a national news weekly, folded over to the movie review section.
The reviewer was hot, despite—perhaps, BECAUSE she was usually comically hostile. She’d become surprisingly influential, as he could testify, from industry message boards to studio water coolers. However unlikely, a laurel from this reviewer would mean serious attention from media and exhibitors—especially vital for a maverick film bypassing the majors. The expected sneer from her—and his little film could vanish almost instantly from the few domestic screens it had managed to secure, unlikely to acquire further theatrical and video distributions deal any time soon.
Billy put the magazine down and pushed away his untouched breakfast. He got up and went to a cabinet, from which he extracted a bottle of Glenlivet and a shot glass. He poured himself a stiff one and downed it. He returned with the bottle and glass to the table. He poured himself another and sipped it to steel himself as he picked up the magazine again. Then he read the closing paragraphs of the review column again:
MONDO MOVIES
Fay Wolfe on the current cinema
“…Last, and certainly least, is AN ORDINARY MAN, a film so incapable of inducing mirth that, if its advertising didn’t include the words ‘The new comedy,’ I would have assumed that the press was being screened the director’s idea of his own funeral. Every so often, someone gets the bright idea of making a sentimental Chaplinesque comedy with a minimum of talk and an excess of physical business. It WAS a bright idea when Chaplin did it, but when he retired, the mold should have been broken, so no one would take it and debase it.
“Writer-turned-actor/director Billy Baxter is a man so utterly lacking in comedic skill—as a writer, a performer, AND a director —that a mob wielding torches and farm implements should have descended on his soundstage the very first time he spake ‘Action!’ I’ll spare you the grisly details of this atrocity. Suffice it to say that the only way one could possibly laugh at his alleged ‘new comedy’ is if one were being mercilessly tickled during its screening. I had no such luck….”
“Six years,” thought Billy. “SIX, LONG YEARS. And she dismissed them in a couple of poison pen paragraphs.” He emptied his drink, and poured another. “OK, if I’m ‘so utterly lacking in comedic skill,’ perhaps I can change MY luck—and that of Ms. Fay Wolfe,” he snorted, “by following her suggestion. Let’s invite her to ANOTHER screening…”
*******
The aforementioned Tuesday of the screening…
Fay peered at the nondescript industrial building on a deserted stretch of 11th Avenue. She began hectoring the turbaned cab driver over his obvious mistake. His insistence that they were stopped at the right address caused her to pull the invitation out from her Fendi purse. Her sneers ceased when she realized that the address on the invitation matched the lettering on the building façade. She realized that budget-conscious indie producers sometimes chose out-of-the-way venues for screenings, but THIS was ridiculous!
Chastened, she paid the driver and stepped out. He zoomed off, leaving her--clad in a very short, tight black Yves St. Laurent dress, a pearl necklace, glistening silver half-moon earrings, very sheer black stockings, and strappy candy red high-heeled Cole Haan sandals—alone on the sidewalk. Where the hell WAS everybody? She must have misread the invitation and come at the wrong time or even the wrong night! But, no, the date and time were clear on the card. She glanced at her wristwatch, a Swatch with the face of Marlene Dietrich.
Freshly manicured hands on her svelte hips, she fumed. Oh, the idiots must have cancelled the screening! They didn’t call or even e-mail. LOVELY! And the cab’s gone! She reached into her purse for her cellphone. It was then that the shower began…
Eager to escape the rain and the creepy sidewalk, Fay tried the door to the building and, grateful that it was unlocked, she entered a small stark, white lobby. She was just starting to call a car service when she noticed the small printed sign on the unmanned desk. It read “Exclusive Screening: Third Floor. Use the elevator to your left, please.” Her brow knitting fetchingly, Fay thought, “Huh? Maybe the screening IS still on. Maybe it’s SO exclusive that it’ll be just me and Mister Big and a few other select movers and shakers. I may be able to schmooze my way not only to a FAT book deal but maybe even a contract to host MY OWN TV talk show.” Intrigued, she popped her phone back in her purse. She gave her face and hair a quick once-over in a pocket mirror. She brushed at her abbreviated black silk dress for the barest hint of lint. She made sure her sheer stockings flawlessly flattered her legs. Satisfied, she boarded the small, steel-walled elevator.
On the similarly stark third floor landing waited a short guy with a mop of curly brown hair, a bristly Fu Manchu beard, mirrored sunglasses and a tux. In a fruity French accent, he asked for Fay’s invitation and then checked off her name upon a clipboard. She smirked, “’Little low key for a press screening, eh? I almost went back home.” “
He smiled and replied, “Well, we’re VARY ‘appy that you didn’t, Ms.”—He consulted the clipboard. —“Wolfe. May I offer you zome refreshment?” He motioned to a little table bearing bottles of wine, spring water, and soft drinks. She chose the Italian white, and he soon handed her a small plastic cupful. She sipped it, and murmured “Mmmm!” before taking a deeper quaff. “Not bad,” she said, nodding at him. He smiled and held open a door. Sipping the wine, she entered a small, plushly appointed screening room.
There was no sign of other guests, let alone the mogul for whom she’d dressed so provocatively. She did so hate being the first to arrive, especially when she’d been hoping to make a head-turning entrance. It’s not like she could leave for a bit, walk down that scary block, and return more fashionably late. Puzzled and miffed, she chose a seat toward the back of the small room, on the aisle, so that she might make a discreet exit should the film prove too torturous to sit through. Staring at, but not really seeing the covered screen down front, and expecting the worst, she’d snappily drained the wine in consolation. Considering that her day had begun twelve hours ago with a network morning show appearance, it was hardly surprising, then, that, in the warm, dim murk of the screening room, she soon nodded off in her plush seat…
Fay awakened and saw the screen ahead still covered by curtains. When, with a theatrical yawn, she blearily tried to check her Swatch, she found her wrists held tightly by leather straps to the armrests of her seat. She cried, “WHAT TH--?” Fay realized that she was now unaccountably seated front row center. She realized further that her legs were stretched out and bound before her, with her ankles resting snugly in a set of padded and firmly locked stocks. She could wiggle her feet, but she couldn’t remove them from the sturdy, unfinished wooden fetters. “WHO THE DEVIL…?” She craned her neck around desperately, and realized—now with a chill--that she was, still, quite alone in the room.
Indignant, she cried, “HELP! Is anybody HERE? Hey, garcon with the clipboard! AU SECOURS! HEEEEY!”
She struggled a few futile seconds more. Then, summoning her arch public persona, cracked, “GREAT! You trapped a critic. Good joke. Ha-ha. Now can somebody—ANYbody—get me out of here?” The following prolonged silence increased her exasperation, edged now with a good measure of fear. “HEY!!! I’m NOT kidding! I’m going to call the police—and THEN my lawyer, so you’d better step lively.”
She looked around for her purse, with her cell phone. It rested on an armrest two seats away, quite beyond her restricted reach, and she, cursing with dismay, shouted, “^%$#@*&^?@!%! HHHEELLLPPP! ANYBODY!!!!!!!! STUPID @#!&%?*&#@ !
All the lights in the room darkened, except for one spot over her seat. From the echoing shadows came a reedy male voice with a hint of Boston, saying, “Uh-uh-uh, Ms. Wolfe! The movie being screened here today has been rated for all ages, so I’ll have to ask you to watch your language.”
Fay turned her body frantically as far her bonds allowed her. “Where the hell ARE you? WHO the hell are you? Show yourself and let…me…GO!”
A figure appeared out of the gloom and placed himself directly between her and the covered screen. Fay, startled, cried, “AAAHHHHHH! Who the HELL are YOU?” He was slim, perhaps 5’ 8”, clean-shaven, with short, wavy black hair admitting to gray, soft, brown eyes, and a puckish smile that in other circumstances Fay might have found attractive. Like the French guy outside, he was dressed in formal wear. She yanked at her bonds and spat, “Why am I STUCK here? What do you WANT from me?”
He sat beside her and said, “I’m very pleased you accepted my invitation, Ms. Wolfe.” Adopting a familiar French accent, he added, “I ‘ope you enjoyed ze wine. It izz a ruther sleepy vintage, non?” He brought the bottle of Italian white from behind his back and waved it under her nose teasingly before placing it on an armrest one seat over from her.
Fay scrunched up her face and snarled, “YOU were the guy at the door? What is this SHIT? Why the masquerade? And why drug me?”
“Now, Fay—by the way, are you named after KING KONG’s leading lady, Fay Wray? No wonder you scream so beautifully! Anyway, Fay, how nice that you’re showing an open mind by stopping your shouted demands and instead asking pertinent questions.” He stood and moved back between her and the covered screen. “You see, Fay, I was led to believe from your review of my film that you had a hopelessly closed mind. So, we both may come away with changed perspectives this evening.” He knelt at her bound feet, which wavered at his approach.
“I’m Billy Baxter. I made AN ORDINARY MAN. I’m an award-winning screenwriter.” He named the awarded video game-into-blockbuster. Fay blinked with lack of recognition.
Billy coughed and continued, proudly, “Fearing that you might recognize me at the door and bolt from a screening of a film you’d already eviscerated in print, I adopted a distinct Gallic pose, ala Inspector Clouseau, to pass you some wine, lightly spiced with a subtle but powerful sedative. This allowed me to, ah, secure you for a special encore preview of my baby.”
He began to undo the buckle of her right sandal. “And THIS time, I’ll make certain that you appreciate its carefully-crafted comedy much, MUCH more.”
“Stop THAT! Don’t TOUCH me!” she shouted, as she waggled her foot wildly, hardly deterring his strong fingers their unbuckling. “What are you blathering on about? What ‘baby’ are you talking about? WHO are you again? And are YOU responsible for that come-on business card from…”—She named the media mogul. —“…that lured me here?”
“Ha-ha! My, you ARE quick! Yes, I thought my little forgery would serve nicely as bait to lure an ambitious critic into my humble trap.” He paused as he finally undid the buckle.
“Again, I’m Billy Baxter,” he said, as he slid the sandal slowly off her waving stocking foot and set it aside. “Last week, you savagely reviewed my little film AN ORDINARY MAN, thus quashing any chance of any extensive theatrical run or serious interest in a video release.” He began to carefully unbuckle her other sandal, despite her petite foot’s spirited efforts to prevent him.
“Will you STOP that!?! Leave my shoe alone!” she shrieked, before taking a deep breath and pointedly modulating her tone. “Look, I review a lot of movies in very limited space. I’m sorry if you found my review, ah, Billy, a bit harsh, but I believe in honestly conveying my first impression. Sometimes my deadlines cause me to dispense with tact…”
He removed her other sandal and set it aside. “There,” he said, wink and smiling again at her. “Now you can relax and give my little film a second chance. And, thanks to your very own suggestion in your review, I’ll ENCOURAGE you to loosen up and laugh at it, openly, unreservedly.” He lightly danced his fingertips across the undersides of her petite toes, which clenched under the sheer nylon as she jerked her feet away.
She cried, “NO! S-stop THAT! You have no RIGHT to touch my toes!” The situation was absurd, ridiculous! This clown couldn’t do THIS to her! But, she was firmly bound, and try as she might to bury the thought, she WAS at his mercy if he intended doing what she feared…
“Oh, but Fay,” he insisted, as his fingers playfully persisted in teasing her tender toes, “you wrote that the only way that someone could laugh watching my poor little film was while being TICKLED. I think you’re wrong, but maybe you’re NOT. You’re America’s hippest, smartest movie critic. I’m willing to give you another chance to watch it…YOUR way.”
Eyes alight with mischief, he began to slide his wiggling fingers along the sheer dark nylon covering her lovely, soft soles.
Her face reddening, Fay stammered, “S-STOP! S-STOP T-THAT! I-I’m going to start SCREAMING…”
“Oh, I HOPE you’ll scream,” he said, winking, “with laughter.” He was happily occupied by tickling her desperately waggling feet. “Anyone who works hard making a film comedy dreams of sitting in an audience that is screaming with laughter at HIS movie. And tonight, YOU’RE my audience. So, feel free to SCREAM!” He held her left foot and dug his fingers into her sole just above her heel. At that, she did scream.
“AHHHHHH! NONONO! HELLPPPPP!” she screeched, giggles bubbling forth. “This-this PSYCHO-ho-ho is holding meee prisoner! Heh-heh-HELLLPPP! He’s TORTURING me! Heh-heh-HEEEELLLLPPPP! Heh-heh-HEEEELLLPPPP! PO-ho-ho-LEEHEEHEECE!”
He shook his head and said, “Now, Fay, like any good screening room, this one is WELL soundproofed. It’s a good SCREAMING room. Besides, we’re the only ones in the whole building tonight anyway. An assistant to a studio honcho owed me a favor, and generously provided the keys to this mothballed postproduction center. So, it’s just me…and you… and COOTCHY-COOTCHY-COOOO!” He had managed to snake ten strong fingers
under her scrunching toes.
“AAHHHHHHHAHAHA! NOOO! $#@$^%$$#@! Heh-heh-hehhehhehheh! C-cut-cut it OUTT! T-this ihihihisn’t-ISN’T FAIR!”
He stopped tickling her, cooing, “You’re SO right, Fay. You’re here for a screening. I think our little preview has proven that you’re TICKLISH enough for our purposes. It’s time to show you my sweet little comedy and help you to…reevaluate it.” He stood and began walking to the back of the room. “Excuse me. I’ll just get things rolling. I’m a one-man movie house this evening.”
He disappeared into the projectionist’s booth. Fay’s giggles gave way to groans peppered with sobs of frustration as she futilely pulled at her bonds. “Good God,” she thought. “I feel like I’ve been trapped in THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS. Where the heh-heh-HELL is Jodie Foster when you need her?”
The curtains parted in front of a pristine screen before her. The spotlight above her dimmed entirely and the Technicolor glare of a vintage Hollywood cartoon filled the screen, while its big band blare crashed throughout the room. Familiar characters began their minutely timed and orchestrated comic violence.
Fay was stunned into silence by the color and noise. She stared at the screen in disbelief for moments before she became aware of Baxter again sitting cross-legged by her feet. On screen, a black cat had a white stripe of paint accidentally poured along her back as she walked beneath a ladder.
“Please, PLEASE, let me GO!” Fay cried at Billy. “This is WORSE than a screening at a studio dinner party. Here I can’t even pretend that I have a headache and escape to the ladies room.”
He sat by the left side of the stocks so that he could watch the screen and her reactions. An excessively amorous skunk was pursuing the desperately fleeing cat. Billy chuckled and shouted to Fay, “I always feel cheated when I go to the movies these days. They rarely EVER show a cartoon before the feature like they used to. A great ‘toon can be a wonderful warm up to a good comedy feature. Oh… but you’re not LAUGHING. Here, let me HELP…”
He reached over and began to spiritedly spider his fingers upon the sleek black nylon stretched across her soft sensitive soles. No matter how violently she moved her feet, his fingers continued stroking them. Immediately, she bounced in her seat and shrieked, “NO-hohohohoho! Pleaheeheese! Dohohohon’t TICKLE me! I-heh-I-hehhehheh-I hate-hehheh-HATE it-heh-heh-heeeeee! Oh, pleheeheeheehees! Oh-ah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-haaaaaaaaaaaaa!
Sta-ha-sta-hahahahahaaaa-STOP it, plee-hee-hee-hee-heeeeeee.”
He grabbed one of her big toes and, holding her foot still, firmly scratched her stocking sole alongside her arch. Even louder, she shrieked, “OHNOhohoho! NottherenottherenotthereNOTTHERE! Ahheh-ahheh-ahhehhehheh…” Whenever she managed to jerk her big toe from his grasp, he quickly secured it—or the other—again and persistently tickled this supersensitive area.
“Oh, ho!” Billy teased as he allowed his fingers to ski down her nylon-covered arch. “Even the world’s hardest critic has her soft spots.” His fingers dug into the fleshy places just above her heels, then clambered back up her sheer insteps, before torturously tracing the nylon smoothly coating the soft skin leading to her spasming toes.
The persistent skunk had the terrified freshly striped feline cornered, when—adding “None softer than under these toes, I’ll wager.” —Billy pulled back her left toes with one hand and gleefully glided his free fingertips under Fay’s tender toes before teasingly poking between them.
Fay jerked her sandy blonde head back and shrieked, “No! No! NO! NOOO! STOP! Ah-ha-ha-ahhahahahaaaa! You-hoohoohoohoooo-sta-ha-sta-hahahahaaaa-STOP IT! RIGHT NOWahheh-heh-hehhehheh-ahhahahahahaAHHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAAA…”
Billy giggled at the closing line of the cartoon as he relentlessly tickled the woman’s toes. Then the closing music swelled, the end credit loomed, and the screen faded to black. His fingers slowed, then stopped. He squeezed her toes affectionately, then let them go.
“I love a GOOD cartoon, don’t you?” He allowed one forefinger to persistently tease the outer edges of her soles. Her stockings made his delicate touch all the more torturous.
Fay, her vision blurry with tears, her breathing short and giggle-strewn, stammered, “P-please, pleheease n-no more. P-Please leheht me-eee goho! You must—you MUST stop—STOP thihis! I can’t—I CAN’T stand it. B-besides, how can, how can I-AIE reheeheevaluate your film if I’m laughing sohoho!”
“Tsk-tsk-tsk-tsk! It HAS been a while since you laughed at the movies, huh?” mused Billy, as the darkness gave way to a lengthy leader projecting upon the screen. “’Sorry about this, but it’s my personal print. A bit rough. But you’ll be glad to know it runs longer than the release version. With all the good little bits my co-producers made me remove, supposedly to pick up the pace. This cut’s not as slick, but I believe it’s funnier. You lucky devil!” He snaked his wiggling fingers under her unprepared toes, and she shrieked.
The opening credits to AN ORDINARY MAN unreeled, and Billy removed a tall, thin object from his breast pocket. A nervous Fay strained in the varied light from the screen to see what it was. On screen, the film opened with Billy, playing the hero, wearing a bowler hat, bowtie, a jacket too small and pants too large, encountered several unfortunate people in the ornery revolving entrance door of a large downtown bank. At Fay’s stocking feet, Billy removed a firm-bristled toothbrush from its package. Clutching the toes of her left foot, he began vigorously brushing up and down the middle of her sheer stocking sole. The nylon of her stocking seemed to conspire with the short nylon bristles of the brush, sending tickling sensations rippling from her soles up her body.
Fay threw her head back and yelped, “AIIEEEEEEEEEE-EEHEEHEE-HEEHEEHEE! Pleeheeheese! You’re—aha-ahahaha-ahahahahahahaaaaaaa! Don-don’t DOHOOHOO that! D-hohohon’t! Aaaahh-haha-ahhahahaaaaa!” This bastard seemed determined to find and brush every tender spot on her tootsies. Nigh breathless with laughter, she feared that if he didn’t stop, he might tickle her to death.
Grinning wickedly, Billy brought the brush down to her heels, aggressively stoking their nylon smoothness as if they were two front teeth. He would alternate this rough treatment with light fingertip sweeps along the softness of her insoles. Fay roiled in her seat as copious tears and breathless laughter poured out of her. At her feet, Billy was casting an eye to the screen, trying to time and locate his brushstrokes to complement what he felt were the highlights of hilarity in the gag work. Onscreen, Billy’s battle with the door caused a security guard to be flung into a gumball machine, which crashed, releasing a cascade of gumballs undermining dozens of incredulous people. As chaos ensued, Billy dug his fingers into Fay’s soles just above her heels—and she howled!
Billy couldn’t tell how much of the film Fay was watching through her tear-flooded eyes. Hearing her hysterical, high-pitched laughter echo through the room as the bodies flew onscreen, however, filled him with thrilled delight. Hungry for more, he eagerly pulled back the clenched toes of her right foot. Chuckling, he began brushing along her petite toes, wiggling with ticklish agony. The plastic bristles terrifically teased the delicate flesh between Fay’s lovely little toes through the sheer smoky nylon.
“OhGodStop! Plee-hee-hee-hee-hee-heeeease! Bwah-ha-ha-ha-ha-haaaa-ahha-hahaha!” Billy was merciless, however. His tickley toothbrush relented only when a bridge of plot exposition unreeled.
“B-B-Billy, p-please! No more tickling! I’ll-I’ll re-retract--”
“SHHH! No talking now! Watch!”
Her respite was not a long one. The onscreen Billy encounters a police officer, who soon gives chase. When the cop falls into an open manhole, Billy cocks an ear--it seems forever-- waiting for the absurdly long scream to end in a kersplash. During the wait, Billy began lightly teasing Fay’s waggling soles, to her giggling dismay. At the splash, he violently dug his fingers under her toes, causing her to helplessly scream with laughter. Laughing himself, he reveled playing her like his private laugh track.
A moment later, a scene change found the hero absent-mindedly bumping into a passerby in front of a bakery. Fay breathlessly moaned, “Oh, God! Enough…enough…” although it wasn’t clear whether she meant the tickling, the movie, or both. Billy sidled down the second row and settled into a seat behind hers. He was munching from a bag of popcorn as he looked with pleasure upon the developing scene. The disagreement on screen had moved into the bakery. Blinking away her tears, Fay murmured, “Please. Lemme go! I haven’t peed watching a movie since HALLOWEEN.”
Billy set aside the popcorn and leaned forward in his seat so that his head loomed over Fay’s right shoulder. She was startled by his sudden appearance behind her and cried, “AAARGH! You scared the SHIT out of me!” He brought a finger to his lips and shushed her, then pointed at the screen. A character had picked up a pie off of a counter in the bakery and hurled it at the hero, who ducked. The pie landed on the face of a large, well-dressed woman, who stoically allowed pastry to slide off her face for a moment before grabbing another pie nearby and letting fly.
At this point, Billy brought his hands over the seatback and began poking Fay’s sides through the sheer fabric of her dress. Squirming ineffectually, she howled, “NOAOWWW! Ple-hee-hee-heese duh-DON’T-oh-ho-ho-ha-haaaa! AAHHH-ha-ha-ha-haaaaa! No-NO! -Nuhahahahahahaaaaaaa…” His frisky fingers expertly stroked along her ribs and dug eagerly between them. Fay rocked in the seat as much as her bonds permitted, trying, even in her hilarity, to bang his head with hers. He kept his noggin clear, however, and was intent on working his wiggling fingers down her sides to her hips. Before too long, he brought his fingers up her sleeveless dress to frolic upon the sensitive shaven skin under her arms.
Fay’s head rolled violently from side to side, her face contorted with laughter. “HEEHEEHEEEE! PUH- PLEEHEEHEESE! Oh-oh-oh-ahha-ahahahaha-ahahahahahahaaaa! STAH-HAAHAP! Ha-ha-oh-ahhahahahahaaaaaaa…” Her big blue eyes were wide open, but it was dubious whether she was capable of appreciating the mammoth pie fight unfolding onscreen. Billy, however, was reveling in her hysteria as fluttered his fingers upon her tender underarms. He watched the custard choreography build to one last splat: onscreen he heaved a towering wedding cake onto the head of the just-arrived, still sodden police officer.
During the quieter scene that followed, Billy produced two goose quills and showed them to the panting Fay. “Oh-ohno-waitaminute…!” As another gag began to build, Billy grazed the feather tips under Fay’s upper arms. “Ohhonohonono! Plee-hee-heese! Loo-hoo-ook, I-heh-can’t-hehhehheh pay a-hahaha-attention! I’ll-hahahahaaaa-watch your-hehhehheh-your film if youhoohoohoo’ll sta-hahahaha-stop TICKLING me! Plee-hee-hee-heese!” When a fleeing postman escaped a pursuing dog only by the seat of his pants, Billy spun the feather tips into her armpits. “EEEEEEEEEEK! STAAAAHHHHPP! AHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!”
He gave her another brief respite, only to move the torturing feather tips to her soft neck and her tender, shell-like ears. She found that maddening, and, under the circumstances, highly conducive to helpless giggling—“Ohnononono-teeheeheeheeheehee!” --before he returned the plumes to her unprotected bare underarms. “AAAAIEEEEEHEHEHEHHEH! STAAHHP!” Wielding the feathers with gleeful skill, he induced helpless bubbly laughter in her as the gags onscreen merited.
As his film moved to its final stages, he returned, with the quills, to his cross-legged position at her feet. Though exhausted, Fay nonetheless tried to humor him into freeing her. “Heh-heh. I can see your influences quite clearly, Billy.” He glared at her and shushed her, pinching her left big toe. “Oww!” She persisted, “You admire Chaplin, right? And Keaton very much. And you’ve studied the way Preston Sturges would fill a shot with tumbling bodies.”
Billy, miffed both that she was talking and dropping the names of his heroes, grabbed her left foot. Using the point of a quill, he poked a hole in the nylon near her big toe and peeled the stocking back past her heel. Fay screeched, “DON’T! Haven’t you done ENOUGH to me? STOP!” Billy, efficiently peeling her right foot bare as well, whispered loudly, “Hush, Fay! It’s time for the WOW finish!”
The movie’s climax involved the hero and his buddy trying to move a piano from one hotel suite and hide it in another by carrying it outside on the thirtieth floor ledge of the building. They proceed to narrowly escape one perilous near miss after another. “Harold Lloyd,” Fay hissed. “Shhh!” responded Billy, who, as if he were scoring the scene, began to sweep her soft bare soles—already tickled richly red--with the soft blades of the goose quills.
“EEEEEHEEEEahhahahahahaha! NO! Ngh-naha-nahahahaha-ohahhahahahaaaaaa! Staahhahahahaaa…”
Billy pulled back one set of toes and deftly feathered beneath them. Separating her big toe and second toe, he twirled the quill between thumb and forefinger therein, causing her shrillest screams yet. “EEEEEEEEBILLEEENOOOO! EEEEHEEHEEEHEEHEEHEE…”
He patiently feathered between her other toes, moving his tickling quill methodically from one helpless bare foot to the other, as the climactic scene developed.
Soon, the two men onscreen desperately hung onto the piano as it began to roll rapidly towards a corner of the ledge. Billy abandoned the goose quill and applied his fingertips to the irresistible softness of Fay’s bare soles. She shrieked anew, bouncing on her plush seat, as his fingertips traced the wrinkles fetchingly etched upon her upper soles. Her wild laughter was complemented by her spate of hiccups when he zeroed in on particularly sensitive spots just above each of her heels. He dug his fingers into those perfect spots, heightening her laughter and her struggles as the scene built.
When the two men were balanced on the piano perched precariously on a flagpole thirty stories above a busy city intersection--the soundtrack trilling at the outer range of human hearing--Billy leaned forward and, licking his lips, gave Fay’s lovely little toes a tentative taste. Smacking his lips with cartoon approval, he fell upon her tootsies and began licking and nibbling their tenderness in earnest.
“GAWD! NOOO-hohohohooo! Nuh-nuh-not THAT! Aaaah! Aaaah! Oh-ohstop-ohstopwillyou? Ooo-ooo-hoohoohoo! Plee-ohplee-hee-hee-heeheehee! Aaahh! Aaaahhh! Hehhehhehheh…”
He firmly stretched her toes and snaked his tongue between them, as he teasingly tasted her salty digits and inhaled the lingering sweetness of her bath oil. He was as intoxicated by this tongue tickling as she found herself helplessly, hilariously aroused by it. Neither noticed the men onscreen ride the piano off the flagpole, onto a window washer’s platform, into a 28th floor window, through a suite past a lovemaking couple, down a corridor, and into an elevator. Nor did Fay immediately notice that, in her laugh throes, she had loosened the strap pinning her left wrist to the armrest. When, in spite of her giddy arousal, awareness came, she soon freed her hand with a violent yank.
Utterly beguiled by the effect his tongue tickling was having on her tender tootsies, Billy was blind to Fay’s efforts. He played his lips over the ball of her right foot before settling in to tickle her silken instep with kisses. Meanwhile, his right fingers sought out her left foot and began tickling the sweet spot just above her heel. Screaming with laughter, bubbling with erotic excitement, she was not too far-gone to try to loosen the strap holding her right wrist down.
Onscreen, the piano had rolled out of the building, with the two men still aboard, and sped down a thoroughfare. Below, Billy was dancing the tip of his tongue along the middle of her right sole. His fingers snaked under her left toes. Her shrieks and gasps and giggles hampered Fay’s attempts to unbuckle the strap. However, while Billy blissfully and obliviously tongue-tickled her toes, her determination saw her right wrist freed at last.
The piano rolled into the bank where the hero’s girlfriend worked, and it stopped before her teller window, where he revealed—hidden behind the keys—the money stolen earlier in the film and now rightfully returned. As the couple embraced onscreen, below, Billy’s eyes were closed as he giddily clutched Fay’s left foot and lasciviously licked up-and-down her luscious sole. Thus, he never saw the bottle of Italian white crash down upon his noggin. His jaw thwacked against the hard wood of the stocks, and, as the closing credits to his film crawled on the screen, Billy had fallen, unconscious, across the critic’s trapped legs. Struggling to catch her breath, Fay dropped the bottle. Staring at her slumped captor, she thrilled with satisfaction that his last torturous licks hadn’t prevented her from fighting her giggly arousal and desperately stretching to grab the bottle and “christen” him.
The reel ended, and the screen was bathed in a bright, white light, aiding Fay as she ferreted the key to the stock’s padlocks out of one of Billy’s pockets. Soon, she was free
and standing, in her bare feet, torn stockings, disheveled dress, and damp underpants, over his fallen form. She fumbled in her purse for her cell phone to alert the police.
She spat, “Baxter, you psycho cinephile, you may have tickled me half to DEATH, but I STILL say your movie’s dated, derivative, and not worth the extinct dinosaurs it’s printed on! Now, for the cops…”
Her fingers, though, hesitated before they punched 911. She cast a thoughtful glance at the snoozing Billy. She juggled the phone a bit in her hand. Then, still feeling the erotic warmth flooding her system, she smiled wickedly at her erstwhile tormentor. She flipped the phone closed. “Why be hasty?” she thought. “The cunning cutie here might be good for a few REAL laughs after all.” She tossed the phone back into the bag. “And this time, I’M the auteur!”
With strength borne of craving—and not simply for justice-- Fay wrestled the unconscious Billy into the plush front row center seat. As he slumped forward, she pulled off his jacket. After pushing him back into the seat, she yanked off his tie. Grabbing the two sides of his shirtfront, she ripped it open with buttons popping all over. With glee, she tore the shirt apart, leaving him wearing only the frayed collar and torn sleeves. She fastened his wrists tightly to the armrests. She set his ankles in the open stocks. She removed his highly polished dress shoes. She unbuckled his belt and opened his pants before sliding them off his legs. His stiff penis comically sprang forth. One could almost hear the “Boing!”
“The little bastard! He was ENJOYING torturing me! Look at that BONER!” She slammed the stocks shut and padlocked them. She nodded her head with exaggerated satisfaction (in the best Laurel and Hardy tradition) at sleeping Billy.
She reached into her purse for the wafer thin digital camera she’d brought, hoping (She sighed.) to have someone take a shot of her all kissy with the media mogul. She took a few choice shots of the exposed Baxter from a number of highly compromising angles, guaranteeing his silence about her humiliation tonight. To keep these pix from the Internet, she thought, he’d agree to that. He’d agree to ANYTHING! “Yes, anything,” she mused aloud, her gaze fixed on his boner.
She ran up into the projection booth, figuring she’d rewind Baxter’s movie and make
HIM suffer through it. Most conveniently, a studio contact had recently provided her with a day’s primer in projection technology for an article she’d written on “The Last Days of Sprockets,” about the imminent digital projection revolution. She’d insisted on hands-on experience on a movie projector comparable to this—and was she ever grateful now!
Waiting for the rewind, she nearly tripped upon an open backpack. She gave it a kick, causing some packaged DVDs to spill out. Picking them up, she realized that the bag was Baxter’s, and that all these must be DVDs of films that Baxter had written for. She smirked. What a ghastly array of megabuck idiocies! She was only grateful he hadn’t subjected her to these, too. One DVD in a slipcase bore in scrawled marker: “Public TV interview.”
“Oh, God!” she thought. “I’ll bet this is Billy Baxter blathering on about the serious art of film comedy. Oh, save me! This must be hilarious!” Her eyes narrowed and her lips smirked mischievously, as she considered, “Maybe even Billy will find this funny—with MY help!”
The projector beeped as the film’s rewind finished. She clicked the DVD button on the projector display screen. She loaded the interview DVD into the projector. After previewing the disk to satisfy her suspicions about the contents, she clicked “Play All.” Noticing a feather duster hanging on the wall behind the projector, Fay smiled, nodded, and lifted it before heading out.
As the public television logo led into the nationally popular chat show, Fay knelt again before the stocks. With a nasty chuckle, she grabbed the toes of Billy’s gray socks and, with a grunt, tugged mightily. Soon, she had bared his very pale, and, she noted with satisfaction, very soft bare feet.
“I wonder how,” she thought, twirling the feather duster between her thumb and forefinger, “Baxter here came up with the idea of torturing me by tickling.” She indulged in a sinister grin. “Wouldn’t it just be TOO, TOO terrible if he turns out to be just a little bit ticklish himself?
As the host interminably introduced Billy, she thought that she really owed the still Baxter her thanks. He’d given her a potent demonstration of how perversely exciting it felt to be tickled while being tied down. Baxter had been right about her not laughing much—whether at or away from the movies--for a very long while. If she hadn’t freed herself when she did, she would have ecstatically surrendered to climax and been his helpless pawn for who knows how long! She’d be sure to see from now on that her bed partners knew about her newfound hunger to laugh so helplessly.
Furthermore, she thought, she should reward the horny bastard for showing her the intoxicating feeling of power that tickling another can give someone. If he hadn’t surrendered to it, she mused, she might still be bound, laughing herself to death. If BEING tickled without mercy is fun, TICKLING without mercy is almost a drug without compare, as Baxter’s boner demonstrated. She noticed with regret that the Big Boy had noticeably softened. Well, maybe, she thought, feathering her palm with the duster, I can perk it up…
Her mouth formed a hungry, toothy smile and her blue eyes glistened as Billy began to stir…
Onscreen, following an absurdly meandering question, Bill haltingly began, “Ah, well, comedy is the most serious business on earth. Was it Edward Kean who, on his deathbed, said, ‘Dying’s easy. Comedy is hard.’? An unfunny comedy’s like a flat souffle: it just lies there.”
She rolled her eyes and muttered, “Oh, God!” She slapped Billy’s soles and shouted, “C’mon, Baxter! Wake up!” She reached over the stocks with the feather duster and began to tickle along between his bare legs until the tips of the dancing plumes teased his once ceiling-aspiring member. “Cootchy-cootchy-coo, Sleeping Beauty!” Billy’s eyes fluttered open as his penis awakened with renewed vigor. “That’s right!” Fay teased, as her feathering quickened. “Cootchy-cootchy-coo! Rise and shine! It’s showtime! Laugh at the funny man claiming to be a comic genius.”
Still dusting his manhood, Fay dug five short but sharply manicured opal fingernails into the ball of his bare right foot. His head jerked up and his eyes opened wide. He sputtered, “Hey! Wha-hehheh! Stoppit! Ha-ha-ha! OhGodStop!” He was helpless to suppress his giggles.
“Now, WHAT should I stop, Billy honey? Feathering this little guy here?” She swirled the feather around the swelling head of his penis. “Tickle-tickle-tickling your little tootsies?” She
dug her nails fiercely under his clenching toes. “Or the idiots onscreen?” Billy surrendered to full laughter. “WHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAAAAAAA!”
Onscreen, Billy said, “No-no, do it like this. THIS is a double take.”
Fay turned to look at the screen and saw Billy lecturing the host on the fine art of the comic reaction shot. She turned back to Billy and, seeing that his cock was aspiring nicely, dropped the feather duster. Bringing ten energetic fingers to bear on his feet, she gushed, “Just listen to YOU! Laughing like some wicked movie critic was tick-tick-tickling your helpless bare feet!” She swept her nails across his soles, digging her nails into the tender skin just above his heels. “Do you like it THERE? That’s where you tickled ME! Cootchy-cootchy-coo!”
“AAAHNOOO! NONOHEHHEHHEH! S-S-S-STAHHAHAHAAP! AHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAAA!”
She pulled back his toes and began sawing one of killer goose quills between them, back and forth, back and forth, mercilessly. She delightedly moved the plume from one toe space to the next and back. Glancing up, she was stunned to see that her relentless feathering had his penis far longer than it had been when she first beheld it.
“Whoa, look at you, Junior! If I thought you were big when I was in the tickle seat, it’s nothing compared to your excitement when YOU get the treatment! I simply MUST take advantage of this!”
Onscreen, Billy opined, “Some things make you laugh because of their very absurdity.”
She dropped the feather and leaned back to grab her purse. As she did so, she raised her toes and wiggled them upon Billy’s bare soles. Opening his eyes to behold her silliest means of tickling, his laughter surged to a higher pitch. While her frisky toes tickled between his, she withdrew from the Fendi a small plastic packet, from which she unfurled a condom. It had been sitting in her purse for weeks since she’d absentmindedly accepted it from an eager AIDS Awareness volunteer at some screening. Amused that she was finding a use for it at last, she stood and began deftly sliding the lubricated sheath over his straining shaft.
“Not my usual style of cock couture,” she quipped as she worked. “But, you Hollywood types, who knows WHERE you’ve been?”
Shaft sheathed, Fay straightened up, reaching under her dress to clear the way even as she let five fingers dance again on Billy’s soles. As he giggled anew, she told him, “You tricked me into coming tonight, Laughing Boy. Now, I’m going to tickle YOU to make ME CUM!”
Onscreen, Billy insisted, “All the classic comedies have wow finishes. Building to a good climax is ESSENTIAL.”
Fay clambered over the stocks. She snaked her fingers along Billy’s sides, digging into his ribs. He howled, completely oblivious now to the interview but gasping as he felt her mount his thrusting shaft and felt himself move deeply into her snug warmth. She moaned and began to rock slowly upon him, her fingers seemingly still tickling him of their own accord. He continued to giggle, but as her rocking persisted, his hilarity was peppered by gasps. Her rocking quickened, as did her moaning. Her fingers tickled even more savagely, and his laughter gave way to yelps and groans.
Onscreen: “Once you’ve got them laughing, you can lead an audience anywhere.”
Fay, almost breathless astride him, began teasing Billy’s underarms and cried, “When I call you--Oh! --day or night--Ah!--and command that you rush to me--Ah!-- with ball gag—Oh!—fetters—Ah!-- and feathers—Oh!--to be my tickle slave—AAAA!—you--you’ll do what?”
She skittered her fingers down his sides and up again to wiggle under his arms.
“AHHAHAHAHAHAHAAAA, I’LL—AAHH! AAAH!—I’LL…”
“Oohh! Y-you’ll what--WHAT?” She pressed her forefingers between his ribs.
“I-I’ll d-do it! AHHAHAHAHAHAAA!”
Behind her, the video Billy was insisting, “There’s a fine art to throwing a custard pie!”
“Oooo, baby! Yeah! Cream me!” Fay cried, as she rocked.
Almost immediately, she was too caught up in roughly tickling his sides as she rode his swelling member to pay any attention to the waning interview. Her moans and his giggles overwhelmed the soundtrack, anyway. Finally, her breath caught, her rocking ceased. She then thrust her head back and yowled with unleashed pleasure. Beneath her, he came as well, with a shout peppered with laughter.
A few minutes later, the interview ended and the room went dark. All that could be heard was their labored breathing, with an occasional faint “Oh, God!” from him.
Finally, Fay rose up, stepped back, stretched, and pronounced, “Now, THAT'S entertainment!”
*No film reviewers or filmmakers were harmed during the writing of this story.
* I sincerely hope that no one construes from this story that I believe that public television is, under any real circumstances, an aphrodisiac. Well, maybe ANTIQUES ROADSHOW...Only kidding!
