I checked my lipstick in the rear-view mirror, then took note of my odometer so I could expense the mileage. "Ready to roll?" I asked.
"Ready!" Jovie was my intern, here to learn from me and work for free. Despite this burden, she was irrationally enthusiastic about everything and I loved her for it.
We got out of the car and walked toward the midway, tottering on our heels across the gravel parking lot. It was pitch dark under our feet, but ahead the lights were bright and the rides were moving. Squeals of laughter floated toward us over the sounds of calliope music.
I couldn't help but smile. When I was a little girl, the carnival was a magical place. The lights, the rides, the smells, the sounds, even the feel of the crushed grass on the midway combined to make it an enchanting world. At that age, the view from atop a Ferris Wheel was the most exotic sight I could imagine.
Growing up diminished the magic, as it does with most things. I now noticed the peeling paint, the sagging safety rails, the rough-looking carnies. The smells had a little more grease in them, the sounds a little more harshness. But even now, there's magic. Sometimes you just have to look a little harder. And that's why we were here.
"So what's our plan?" Jovie asked. She was a cute little thing, Filipina by ancestry, petite and perky. She was a full five or six inches shorter than me, barely over five feet tall and bouncing with energy. She was a sophomore at the local college, studying English, and I couldn't turn her down for the internship.
I nodded sagely, per my mentor role. "We're looking for a good interview story. Something that's fun and engaging and edgy."
"Okay." She looked ahead, scanning the scene as if there might be a big neon arrow pointing to our good story. I had to smile at her exuberance.
The lights got brighter as we reached the midway, the merry go round on one side and a row of funnel cake and snow cone booths on the other. Inside a cotton candy stand, a rough-looking carnie scanned me up and down.
"Oh, I love me a hot redhead," he chortled through rotten teeth. "Are you red everywhere, honey?"
I gave him a condescending smile that was worse than ignoring him. Yes, my dress was probably too short. Yes, I was doing it to draw attention to myself. But I'll admit it; I like being checked out by the guys, even if they don't have all their teeth. It's fun to torture and tease them. And it's easier to get interviews when you're showing some thigh and a lot of cleavage. That's one of the first things you learn as a magazine writer, particularly when you're working for a local mag with no name recognition.
"We want to find someone with an interesting story," I said to Jovie. "Most likely, it'll be someone who works at the carnival because they're new blood, but it could be someone just wandering around. We'll just meet people and chat them up and if they seem interesting we'll go further."
Jovie nodded eagerly, her dark eyes alight with anticipation. This was the first field assignment of her career and she clearly wanted to knock it out of the park. To me, it was just another gig, but to her, it was Chapter 1, her opening act.
I bought us each a lemonade and we started strolling. It was your typical roadside carnival, though this one was much bigger than most. Kids ran from ride to ride, young couples pushed strollers, and men impressed their women by throwing baseballs at milk cans. Music and popcorn and conversation filled the air.
"How about those people?" Jovie nodded. She nodded stealthily toward a young man with a big beard and his toddler-carrying wife. She was a blonde with big braless breasts, swinging loosely under a wife beater t-shirt.
"Why?"
"They just look interesting. I like his beard."
"Maybe. But the kid will start crying at some point, and it gets annoying."
After a half-hour, we'd met carnies, teenagers, parents, and one darling old couple that had met on a tilt-a-whirl sixty years earlier. People are always friendly to me for some reason; it's just a natural talent of mine. But their various stories had all been done a million times. I wanted something fresh, something that wasn't your normal Parade Magazine interview.
"They still have freak shows?" Jovie saw it first.
We'd wandered toward the back of the fair, and instead of a fence, the rear area was a large curved stage, easily a hundred feet long. It was cleverly designed, with a caravan of carnival trailers forming the back wall and large platforms folding down and interconnecting from their sides to form the stage. There were five different acts along its radius, the nearest of which was Stella the Strong Woman. She was a gorgeous platinum blonde, tall and sleek and muscular with a fitness instructor's build. She was lifting a set of barbells that were labeled as 400 pounds.
"Wow, she's strong," Jovie observed.
The woman then challenged two men from the audience to come up. One was a young college guy, fit and in shape, and the other was a redneck, complete with tobacco chaw. She pointed them to each end of the barbells and dared them to lift it. Each man grabbed an end and tried to lift.
Nothing.
"Whoooa," Jovie exclaimed.
"It's a trick," I explained. "I'm sure she's strong, but I bet they've got a magnet under the stage. She lifts the weight - and it's nowhere near 400 pounds, by the way - and then when she sets it down they electrify the magnet and lock the barbells to the stage."
The men gave up, scratching their heads and shrugging. Stella the Strong Woman dismissed them and picked up the weight again. The crowd laughed.
The next act was a tall man and a short man, labeled as 8 feet and 2 feet respectively. Both of those were exaggerated and not really that interesting. Then we had a fire eater and a person balancing spinning plates. All your usual fare.
Then we got to the fifth one, and it was different.
Very, very different.
"Orgasma, the Erotic Goddess", the large overhead sign said. Underneath, in smaller red letters, was the mysterious explanation of her powers. "The Queen of Female Pleasure." This part of the stage was covered with a tent, and a female barker was outside, calling people in with some ribald comments.
Okay, this had my interest.
"Show in five minutes!" the barker called. She was a short, curvaceous blonde, her hair more highlighted than golden, and it tucked around her ears in a cute gypsy shag. More notably, she was wearing the smallest bikini I'd ever seen, little more than three small bits of strategically based cloth. In our little town, she was taking no small risk with the conservative police. "Women, come in and have the best carnival experience ever! Men, bring your women in and see what they REALLY look like when they cum!"
Couples were milling about, laughing and daring each other to attend. Men were cajoling women, and women were playing coy, and the whole scene itself was worth a story. No one knew quite what to make of it.
"We have to check this out," I said.
Entry was $20, which was ludicrously expensive, but cost matters less when you can file expense reports. I coaxed Jovie up with me, her young eyes wide with wonder and fear, and dug $40 out of my pocket. The semi-naked barker eyed me up and down happily. "Yes!" she shouted to the crowd. "These beautiful women wish to experience the secret powers of the Great Orgasma!"
Seriously, that was a tiny bikini. The woman was small, only about Jovie's height, but with a more fulsome American build. Whereas Jovie was small and slender and built like a gymnast, this woman was filled out, with nice C or D cup breasts and proportional hips stacked onto her small frame. She appeared to be a few years younger than me, maybe her mid-20s, though her green eyes betrayed a lot of life experience.
She looked at Jovie. "I'm going to need to see your ID." She pointed to a prominent sign that said, "21 or Older - Strictly Enforced".
"Oh." Jovie's face fell. "I'm not 21."
The blonde girl looked Jovie up and down. "You look 21. Did you forget your ID?"
"No, I have it here." Jovie dug into her pocket for her driver's license. She did not look 21.
Ah, the naivete of youth. I put my hand on Jovie's wrist. "She forget her ID."
The barker smiled knowingly and winked at me. "We'll let you and Andrew Jackson vouch for her," she said in a low voice.
As she tucked away the money in a small leather bag, I scanned her up and down. The shadows and lights of the carnival provided more cover than one would expect from a distance, adding mystery and illusion to what one was seeing, but up close ... wow. She was very light skinned, and most of her breasts were exposed other than an inch-wide vertical strip down the middle that took the place of standard bikini cups. My eyebrows arched when I noted the brown outer arcs of her areolae clearly extending beyond them. Below the waist, a similar inch-wide cut ran from lower belly to her crotch and down under, and I suspected that the back was just a string. And was that just a shadow, or could I see the darker pink of her outer labia peeking out? That was a bold, bold uniform.
Her body, while feminine, was taut and toned, and the sales pitch worked as she drew the prolonged attention of every male who wandered by. Women wavered and grinned with embarrassment, and men persuaded them, and the crowd of onlookers grew. "Only room for six more!" the sexy petite blonde called, and the crowd shuffled itself based on income and desire. She turned to lead the purchasers in, and I noted that her clothing in the back was indeed merely a thong string and a bikini top string, rendering her effectively naked from that angle. She had a natural hip sway that women would kill for as we followed her under the canvas.
Inside the tent, it was dark other than the bright stage lighting. Folding chairs were neatly arranged into rows, ten seats wide and five seats deep. Jovie and I had to do some negotiating to sit together, taking seats near the back.
I was definitely growing curious now. Displayed up on the stage were three odd contraptions, square wooden frames with basic white sheets stretched inside. About four feet square and composed of a beautiful but beaten oak, they were raised off the floor like an old-time shower stall, where you could see a person's feet at the bottom up to mid-calf, and then their shoulders and head up above, but the sheet shielded everything else.
However, two other distinct features caught my eye. Built onto the sides of each frame, two thick posts rose to a height of about eight feet, and from them hung heavy ropes with leather cuffs. I noticed the same thing at the bottom; two short chains with leather cuffs attached to the legs. If you bound a person inside it, the audience could see the head, hands, shoulders, and lower legs of the person being held, but everything else was hidden.
The tent was hot and stuffy inside, but I thrive on heat. I enjoyed the tickle of a small droplet of sweat falling through my cleavage, and tucked my red hair back over my ears to keep it off my face. My summer dress was strapless and short, so I at least had some ventilation, whereas Jovie's tiny white denim shorts and snug t-shirt didn't offer the same benefit. She stood and fanned herself while I settled into my seat. I would kill for that girl's ass.
After a few minutes, our nearly nude barker came in and stepped up to the stage.
"Welcome, ladies and gentlemen!", she said in a practiced stage voice. "You have arrived within the mysterious world of Orgasma! I am possessed of a skill that makes men envious, and that makes women delirious. I know the secrets that drive a woman into the uncontrollable throes of infinite pleasure. And that is what I will show you tonight."
She spoke with her hands, and her full breasts bounced as she did. One of them popped out of the small ribbon that covered her nipple, and the ribbon relaxed into her cleavage, leaving a large brown nipple bare. She looked down. "Ohhh," she said. "It's a good thing that I haven't noticed yet, or I would be embarrassed." The crowd laughed, and we knew that this wasn't going to be your normal carnival hucksterism.
She engaged the crowd in some friendly banter. "How many men here think that they satisfy their wives sexually?" Of course, every man raised his hand. "Now, how many women are sexually satisfied by their men?" Nearly all of the women raised their hands as well, though I noticed that they didn't go up as quickly. I raised my hand too, even though my most recent boyfriend was a flop in that department. We women are too afraid of being labeled as frigid to dissent. I noticed that Jovie didn't raise her hand, but wasn't sure if she even had a boyfriend, and she was probably too shy to admit it anyway.
Orgasma also noticed the slower rise of hands, and laughingly called it out. "Men! Did you see that? The women aren't as convinced of your prowess as you are. What do you think about that?" A few men booed, and she egged them on. "Do you think a woman could please them better? Do you think a woman like me, a woman endowed with magical powers, could drive them to the brink of pleasure and beyond on stage and in mere minutes?"
The crowd laughed and a couple of people hooted and hollered. There had likely been a bit of drinking tonight in some sections.
"I need three volunteers from the audience, three women who want to scale the heights of ecstasy!" She held a hand to her eyes as if scanning the horizon, and I laughed at the fact that her large, pert boob was still hanging out.
She waded into the crowd and there was a ruckus. People laughed and hooted and cheered, and when she re-emerged she had a woman in tow. The guinea pig was an attractive brunette, tall and lean with tight curves and a boyish haircut. Her hand was over her face in shame, but she was grinning. She was obviously part of a group, because a half-dozen people in the crowd were howling with laughter.
