The tight end

It was mid-afternoon when she answered my doorbell ring. She was wearing a pink bow in her hair, pink lipstick, pink eye-shadow, a gauzy pink negligee over a pink shortie nightgown, fuzzy pink slippers with pink pompoms, and a wide toothy smile that revealed healthy pink gums. “How nice of you to come, Mr. Victor.” She held out a martini to me in one hand and a plate of brownies in the other.

Dripping gin and dropping crumbs, I followed Cindy Lou Marzipan into the livingroom. She was easy to follow. The way her hips and bottom rolled reminded me of making it on a waterbed. Soft. Basic rhythm. Lots of bounce.

She arranged herself fetchingly on a pink couch with a floral design of pink flowers and indicated that I should also seat myself there. She looked at me intensely. It was probably an illusion, but I could have sworn the pupils of her eyes were star-shaped.

“I wanted to speak with you, Steve-—you don’t mind if I call you Steve, do you? Good. And you can call me Cindy Lou. Anyway, I wanted to speak with you about this lady quarterback, Miss Terry Niemath.”

“All right, Cindy Lou.”

“We Whittier wives are worried about this wench,” she alliterated.

“You mean because of your husbands, Cindy Lou?”

“Oh, no, Steve. We know our husbands won’t stray. We are, after all, Total Women!” She rearranged the negligee to display a sleek and shaven thigh. “Total!” she stressed.

“I see. Then what is the problem?”

“Appearances, Steve. We are very concerned about the team image. How will it look? One lady and all those big, brawny, lovable men? When they go on the road, for instance. The fans are bound to wonder who she’s sleeping with.”

“We’re taking precautions to see that she isn’t sleeping with anybody.”

“But she’ll have to share a room with somebody on the road.”

“It’s no problem. We’ve got her rooming with Bubba Weaver.”

“The gay safety? But how clever of you, Steve.”

I saw no reason to tell her it had been the Coach’s idea. “Then you think Bubba and Terry will manage to keep it platonic?” I asked.

“Oh, yes! Absolutely! Every one of those cheerleaders has tried to seduce Bubba and failed. He lusts for men, and only for men. Confidentially, Steve, a couple of wives—Total Women, mind you!—made themselves available to Bubba. Their fidelity was not even dented. That’s how single-mindedly gay he is.”

“I thought Total Women never strayed. Particularly pro football wives.”

“Ordinarily, we don’t. We devote ourselves totally to our husbands—to fulfilling their domestic needs, their erotic needs, and their spiritual needs.”

“Coach Newtrokni isn’t going to like that last.”

“Our strategy is to avoid confrontation with him while continuing to meet our wifely obligations. We would no sooner stop praying for our husbands than we would cease cooking their favorite dishes or anointing and packaging our bodies to attract them.”

“But you said these two women almost did stray.”

“Strain, Steve. Can you imagine what a strain it’s been for us wives to be Total for our husbands when they never win a game?”

“Never even score,” I sympathized.

“Exactly, Steve. They never score. We drench ourselves in perfume, cook them aphrodisiac meals, pray for the split-second timing to achieve mutual orgasm, and do you know what the result is?”

“What, Cindy Lou?”

“0 for 36. That’s what, Steve! Is it any wonder that, occasionally, temptation proves too much for us?” She leaned forward pinkly, blinked her five-pointed eyes, and allowed the pink negligee to slip from her bosom to reveal the pink outlines of pink nipples under the extremely thin pink material of her shortie nightie. “Our husbands don’t score, Steve. That’s our problem. My problem! We Whittier wives are at our wits’ end. We simply can’t wait any longer for them to score. We need satisfaction now! Now!” Cindy Lou leaned towards me panting, lips moist, generous breasts heaving, thighs flushed. “What should we do, Steve?” Her hand burned on my thigh. “What should I do?”

“I don’t really think—” Considering my counseling position, it didn’t seem a good idea to take on the team captain’s Total wife.

“Help me, Steve!” Cindy Lou put her arms around me, pressed her soft breasts against my chest, and leaned back with her eyes half-closed and her pink lips parted and waiting to be kissed. “Help me!”

“Listen.” I tried to resist. “The first game is just around the corner. With Terry quarterbacking, the team’s bound to score. Just be patient, and your husband—”

“I can’t be patient.” There were tears in her eyes. “I need satisfaction. I need it now.” She unzipped my fly and slid to her knees in front of me. “I’m desperate!” Kneeling with her thighs wide apart, she slipped one hand under the shortie nightie. She pushed aside my jockey shorts and pulled my prick out of my pants. “You have to help me, Steve!” She opened her pink, girl-next-door mouth and took the head of my prick between her pink lips. “You have to help me!” she insisted in a muffled voice, speaking around it. “I need you!”

I’m a bleeding heart. I always come through for charity. I can’t resist a fellow human being in need.

I came in Cindy Lou Marzipan’s mouth.

A few nights later I was awakened by a rhythmic thumping over my head. The room above me was occupied by Terry Niemath and gay safety Bubba Weaver. It way my responsibility to investigate.

When I entered their room, the condition of the quarterback and the weak safety was in flagrante delicto, to put it mildy. Naked as uncracked eggshells, they had just broken the bed with their unbridled athletic enthusiasm. Terry had her long legs locked around Bubba’s neck. Her plump, rosy bottom was vibrating like a Mixmaster. Her voluptuous breasts were being shaken as ferociously as a bone in the mouth of a terrier. Their nipples stood up like bright red lipsticks.

As for Bubba, his meager ass was a blur of erotic motion. His brandy chest was huffing like a steam engine. And his fully erect cock was plunging in and out of Terry’s willing quim with an unquestionable heterosexual fervor.

Was it possible? Had Terry done the trick? Was it possible that the Whittier Stonewall’s gay safety wasn’t gay any more?

The following afternoon Terry Niemath played in her first professional football game. Watching her, I started thinking once again about Buffy Smith’s suggestion regarding a chastity belt.

CHAPTER EIGHT

“There’s only one solution, Victor. You’ll have to room with her yourself. Now, get outa here. I’ve got a gameplan to go over with my offense.” Such was Coach Newtrokni’s response to the sexual overindulgence of quarterback Terry Niemath when we discussed it shortly before the first game of the season.

The game was being played at home in Whittier’s Milhous Stadium before what was anticipated to be a record-breaking underflow crowd of ten thousand. (Capacity was 68,000.) Nor could those who attended be characterized as loyal Stonewall fans. What pulled them out was the prospect of seeing the Pittsburgh Steelers in action— even if the action was expected to he no more than a one-sided scrimmage for Terry Bradshaw and his teammates. There was no such thing as an optimistic Whittier fan. Two scoreless seasons had made cynics of them all.

To pit the Whittier Stonewalls against the Pittsburgh Steelers, cracked one sports columnist, was the most uneven sports contest since the lions chewed up the Christians. There was one difference that the columnist couldn’t have known about. The morale of the Christians had been much higher than that of the Stonewalls. Both groups, however, sought mercy by the same means, one which was frowned upon by the Establishment responsible for their plight.

My first inkling of this insofar as the Stonewalls were concerned came when I slipped into the locker room john at Milhous Stadium to take a piss. There, kneeling on the tiles of the lavatory floor, were two members of the secondary and a wide receiver. Standing in front of them and reading from an open Bible was defensive linebacker Simon Sabbath.

“Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. . . .” I watched unnoticed as he read the entire psalm. When he finished, he bowed his head. “Let us pray together,” he suggested. “Dear Lord, please just get us through this day without fatal injury.”

“Lead me not into the path of Franco Haiirs, Lord.”

“Deliver me from John Stallworth.”

“Yea, though I walk in the shadow of Mean Joe Greene, protect my weak ankles, Uh Lord.”

“Hear us, O Lord,” Simon Sabbath prayed fervently. “Save us, we pray, from the terrible and bone-breaking destructive wrath of the Steeler’s offense and from the cruel and merciless crunch of the Pittsburgh defense, as well.”

“Jiggers!” Another player stuck his head in the door behind me. “Coach is heading this way!”

Immediately the four praying Stonewlls leaped to their feet and affected casual attitudes. Simon Sabbath hid the Bible under his jersey. One of the secondary defense players lit up a joint and passed it to the other one. The wide receiver began talking in a loud, jocular voice: “. . . so the farmer’s daughter has her feet in the stirrups and the traveling salesman’s just getting on top of her when all of a sudden the farmer sticks his pitchfork in the hay and . . .”

Coach Newtrokni shouldered through the door, his hands already unzipping his fly as he headed for the urinal. “What are you guys doing here?” he demanded over his shoulder as he started to pee.

“Just relaxing before the game, Coach, like you said we should.”

“You sure you didn’t sneak in here to pray?”

“Break training right before the game, Coach?” Simon Sabbath replied in an injured voice. “We’d never do a thing like that.”

“Well, you’d better not ever let me catch you doing it! Game or no game, I’ll bench any player caught so much as folding his hands suspiciously!” He zipped up his fly. “Why are you standing there in the corner like that, Victor?”

“Just meditating.” I said the first thing that came into my mind.

“Is that like praying?” Coach Newtrokni had a suspicious nature.

“Only if you write Zen poetry,” I assured him.

“How long you been here?”

I shrugged.

“You see these guys do any praying?”

Half a ton of Stonewalls managed to look at me pleadingly and threateningly at the same time.

“Nope. All I saw them do was sniff, shoot up and jerk off.” I like to think I wouldn’t have finked even if I didn’t bruise so easily.

Coach snorted and left the john. The players followed him out. I did what I’d come in to do. While doing it, I reflected. (Nope, Coach, that's not the same as praying.)

Pre-game prayer meetings were common among some pro football teams, most notably the Dallas Cowboys. Such rites usually took the form of praying for victory. Praying for victory was considered to be a way of keeping up morale.

But the Stonewalls who prayed had never mentioned victory. They had prayed only not to be seriously injured. They had no morale to keep up. It was no attitude for players to take into a ball game.

“God help us!” I said aloud. And then I found myself looking around guiltily for fear that the Coach might have heard. Nevertheless, I whispered it again. “God help the Stonewalls!”

Pittsburgh won the toss and chose to receive. Word was that Bradshaw had injured his arm in practice the day before and Swann was playing with a badly sprained ankle. Because of this, the point spread against Whittier only totalled twenty. Still, the bookies couldn’t give away the short end.

The rumor about Bradshaw’s arm was probably true. He called a running game through most of the first quarter. Pittsburgh scored only one touchdown on an eight yard run straight up the middle by Franco Harris. But the seven-zero first quarter score didn’t really tell the story. That was reflected by the respective times of possession which were Pittsburgh twelve minutes forty seconds, Whittier two minutes twenty seconds. During the time they held the ball, the Whittier Stonewalls managed to lose only twenty-seven yards.

Coach Newtrokni chose not to put Terry Niemath in during the first quarter. He was understandably nervous about what the response would be to the league’s first lady quarterback. Besides, he was saving her for when things got really bad.

“Really bad” is a matter of definition. When it began to rain quite heavily at the start of the second quarter, it was a break for Whittier rather than for the Steelers, because Pittsburgh continued to maintain its one-sided possession of the ball throughout the period. This meant they had more of a chance to slide around in the mud, take occasional pratfalls, miss passes, and fumble the slippery ball.

Pittsburgh lost possession through fumbles three times in the second quarter. (Whittier lost it back the same way and added three more fumbles all their own.) The ball popped in and out of Stallworth’s hands twice on long passes and Lynn Swann fell on his face twice diving for incompletes. Bradshaw’s legs slid out from under him in the pocket before he could pass and he managed to do what the Whittier defense hadn’t even come close to doing yet—sack himself. He switched back to a running game in which the mud continued to give Pittsburgh more problems than the Stonewalls’ secondary. The result was that Pittsburgh scored only one touchdown in the second quarter, so that, going into halftime, we were behind only fourteen-zip. Considering the Stonewalls’ history, we were doing fantastically well.

“Don’t let it go to your heads,” was the kickoff to Coach Newtrokni’s locker room pep-talk. “They’re a powerful team and they’re known for piling up points in the second half. We have to guard the lead.”

“Pittsburgh ahead by fourteen, Coach, sir,” the f.a.c. reminded him.

“I know that. It’s their lead I’m talking about. My strategy is not to let them add to it.”

“What about winning, Coach?” the team captain wondered.

“Don’t ask for the moon, Marzipan. Not when we have the stars.”

“What stars, Coach?” The center was confused.

The Coach merely winked at him and changed the subject. “Now, I want you guys up for the second half,” he said, “so, to get our blood boiling, we’re going to have a rousing cheer for Ralph Ingersoll, Madeleine Murray, and atheist Americans everywhere.”

“Who are they?” Freck Foley whispered to Grinder Meade.

“I think Ingersoll played secondary for the old Chicago Bears,” the tackle replied. “I never heard of Murray.”

“RAH-RAH-RAH! SIS-BOOM-BAH!” Coach Newtrokni led the cheers. “HERESY! HERESY! RAH-RAH-RAH!”

“YAY!” the team responded. “YAY! YAY! YAY!” and they trotted back onto the field for the second half, mudsliding the last ten yards into position to receive.

Defensive weak safety Bubba Weaver plopped down on the bench beside me to watch the Whittier offense in what passed for action. “How’s it going, Bubba?” I asked him, angling my umbrella to share it with him.

“Did you know every man on the Pittsburgh offensive line can bench-press up to five hundred pounds?’

“That bad, huh?”

“You try playing ‘bump-and-run’ with Webster and Kolb. The way it works out is, I bumb, and they run all over me. It’s like charging into a steamroller head-on every time. Oh, well,” he sighed. “At least it keeps my mind off my problems.”

“What problems?” I recalled his enthusiastic heterosexual performance with Terry Niemath the night before. “I thought you solved your main problem.”

“And I thought you were supposed to be a sex expert!”

Time out was called on the field. The Whittier quarterback had attempted a sneak and been brought down behind the line of scrimmage by Number Seventy-five, Mean Joe Greene himself. Now they were digging him out of the mud where Mean Joe had planted him. It took a while.

Finally, they carried the quarterback’s unconscious body off the field and past us to the locker room. I expected Coach Newtrokni to put Terry Niemath in to replace him. But, evidently, things weren’t bad enough for that yet. He signaled the third string QB onto the field instead.

“I am a sex expert.” I responded to Bubba Weaver’s comment.

“Then why do you think balling a woman solved my problem?”

“It means you don’t have to be gay.”

“Being gay was not a problem for me, Mr. Victor. I was happy gay. I was well-adjusted. I cruised. I had variety. And, sometimes, I had satisfying relationships.”

“You didn’t exactly look like you were suffering last night with Terry,” I reminded him.

“I wasn’t suffering. I was tempted and I gave in. Just the way some straight guys are tempted into a gay act and give in. But one act doesn’t make them gay, and one act for me doesn’t make me straight.”

“Okay,” I granted. “I can appreciate that.”

“But it gave me problems. I mean, a little while ago, I caught myself looking at one of the cheerleaders with lust in my heart.”

“Like Jimmy Carter.”

“What?”

“Nothing. Go on.”

“I started noticing breasts and legs and asses. Women ’s breasts and legs and asses!” ‘

“Nice, huh?”

“It confuses me.”

“Maybe you’re bisexual,” I suggested.

“Everybody’s bisexual. I’m not talking about potential. I’m talking about preference. I’m talking about commitment to what makes me happiest.”

“Which is?”

“Guys. Women just mix up my head. I don’t need it. I want to be happy again. I want to stay gay!”

“Okay,” I shrugged. “Suit yourself.”

“I will. But I need help,” Bubba Weaver confided. “I need you to tell Coach I shouldn’t room with Terry Niemath any more. I can’t stand it. I mean, she walks around nude all the time. Tits flying. Ass wiggling. Pussy puckering. It’s more than I can stand. I’ve got to get away from her. Will you help me, Mr. Victor? Will you talk to Coach Newtrokni?”

“Relieve your mind, Bubba,” I told him. “It’s already done. You can room with Rhino and I’ll room with Terry myself.” I didn’t tell Bubba that the Coach had decided that before the game began. It couldn’t hurt for him to think I was doing him a favor. You never could tell when I might want one in return.

By now, the Whittier third-string QB had succeeded in reaching a fourth-and-twenty-seven situation on the Whittier eighteen. Our punter went in and kicked a long one. The mud fouled up the Steelers’ punt return, and their offense took over on their own thirty-eight yard line.

“Problem solved,” I reminded Bubba as the Whittier defense dragged back onto the field.

“Now get out there and play your heart out.”

Three plays later, he tried to stop Franco Harris and was helped off the field reciting a Gay Rights platform in a voice like Woody the Woodpecker’s. On the next play, Number Twelve lobbed a long one into the waiting hands of Number Eighty-eight, and the Bradshaw-Swann connection left Pittsburgh with a first-down-goal-to-go situation. On the second attempt, Franco Harris took the handoff straight up the center for the TD. Mike Bahr kicked the extra point.

In possession again, Whittier chewed up time without much to show for it. Although the luck of the mud was on their side and they managed to eke out three consecutive first downs, they still weren’t even within field goal-kicking distance of the Pittsburgh goal posts when they were forced to give back the ball.

Coach sent Bubba Weaver back into the game. Two plays later, Bradshaw lobbed a long one towards Stallworth. But dependable old Eighty-two slipped in the mud and the ball went over his head. Bubba, too far back to have covered, nevertheless turned in time to see the ball in the air and took a hopeless dive back towards it. He landed on his back and slid ten yards to where the ball fell into his upstretched hands.

It was ruled a valid interception. Once again, Whittier had possession. Miraculously, they still had it two plays later when the whistle blew ending the third quarter. The score was Pittsburgh twenty-one, Stonewalls zilch, which took care of the point spread.

With the start of the fourth quarter, Coach Newtrokni decided that the situation was severe enough to warrant putting in Terry Niemath at quarterback. On his instructions, the team slogged through the mud to the scrimmage line as a unit. Terry was in the center of them. Her helmet was on, and her loose jersey and certain strategic padding camouflaged her figure. Like Rhino, the Coach figured it was worth a shot at least to try to conceal her womanliness.

Pete Gorgonzola, the wide receiver I’d counseled about sustaining relationships, followed in their wake. As he passed me, I called out to him. “How’s it going, Pete?”

“The same.”

“This is your chance to change it.”

“Huh?”

“Score a touchdown, and I guarantee things will be better.”

“Fat chance.”

So much for team spirit. I sat back under my umbrella and watched the Whittier Stonewalls line up in the rain. It was third down with seventeen to go on their own twenty-two. Some situation for a quarterback to face in a first professional football appearance.

With the exception of Terry, the team was soaked to the skin and covered with mud. Mean Joe and the rest of the Pittsburgh defense didn’t miss that fact. It made this new undersized quarterback easy to watch. Translation: easy to sack.

The fans, drenched and disgusted, were already starting to drift out of Milhous Stadium as the teams lined up for the first play of the fourth quarter. The whistle blew, and center Mitch Marzipan snapped the ball to Terry. She faded back into the slot.

Pete Gorgonzola did his best to break loose and head deep for the left-hand comer. Pittsburgh safety Mike Wagner, however, was with him all the way. He did a bump-and-run number an Gorgonzola that had the wide receiver bouncing around like a basketball being dribbled by the Harlem Globetrotters. The result was that Pete was nowhere near in position when Terry was ready to throw.

Meanwhile, Terry’s blocking was dissolving around her. For once, Nuke Outlaw had made the right move and considerably slowed down his side of the line. Plowboy Palmer was also performing yeoman service at left guard, considering that he had to contend with Steve Furness. Nevertheless, the Whittier line, after giving Terry their all, was now being overrun.

Terry reacted smoothly. Fading still further back in the pocket, she waited for Furness to commit himself and then twisted smoothly away from his bulk. She headed for the right side where Mean Joe Greene was waiting, spotted him, and quickly reversed herself. And all the time she was watching Pete Gorgonzola in order to gauge her pass so he’d be where he was supposed to be to catch it.

She faded still further back. Gorgonzola was free of Mike Wagner now, but the timing was way off. The whole defensive line descended on Terry like a wall of brick toppling in an earthquake. Gorgonzola twisted his head, looked for the ball, didn’t see it, turned away and threw up his hands to indicate the hopelessness of the situation as he trotted towards the goal line. Terry tossed the pass and back-pedaled away from the tacklers without being touched.

The ball soared through the air. It was a beautiful pass, sixty yards or more. It was heading straight for where Gorgonzola was going to be—in the left-hand corner just beyond the twenty-yard line. But he was making no further effort to catch it. He was still looking in the direction and waving his hands loose-wristed over his head, resigned to failure. Pittsburgh safety Mike Wagner had stopped trying to cover him and was just watching his receding figure and laughing.

At the eighteen-yard corner, the ball fell from the air and right into Gorgonzola’s upstretched hands from behind. Automatically, he closed his large palms around it. He stood there for an instant and stared at it.

Upfield Mike Wagner’s jaw fell open. He blinked. He muttered what might have been a curse. And then he was off like a shot after Gorgonzola.

Seeing him coming, Gorgonzola emerged from his daze. He sprinted down the sidelines towards the goal. He crossed the goalline standing up. Wagner, still ten yards away, braked to a halt and shook his head in disgust.

For a long moment everything was very silent in Milhous Stadium. Everybody—fans, players, officials, coaches—was having trouble believing his eyes. Had the Whittier Stonewalls—zero points for thirty-six and three-quarters games—really scored a touchdown?

Pete Gorgonzola was the first to recover. He raised the ball high over his head and yelled “TOUCHDOWN!” He started to fling it to the ground and then caught himself. “TOUCHDOWN!” he yelled again. And he bent from the waist and laid it very gently in the mud of the end zone.

Pandemonium broke loose. The first one to reach Pete was a small brunette cheerleader named Taffy. I could hear her yelling all the way from the bench. “I’ll move in with you, Pete,” she was shouting. “We’ll have a relationship. Maybe we’ll even get married, have kids.” Pete Gorgonzola looked pleased, but a bit overwhelmed. As for me, I felt pretty smug.

While the stadium security guards were clearing the astounded and exuberant fans from the field so that the game might proceed, I found myself watching Horseshoe Cohen, the field goal kicker I had counseled regarding his difficulty positioning his penis between his sex companion’s labia. Horseshoe was carefully inserting the contact lenses I had recommended. Then, he positioned one of the cheerleaders about ten yards away from him and had her raise her short skirt. As usual, she wasn’t wearing any panties. Holding the ball out in front of him, he lined up with her naked crotch and practiced placing his kicks. A little while later, Horseshoe scored the extra point, and Whittier was trailing only twenty-one to seven.

“Ain’t that wonderful?” the cheerleader he’d been lining up with commented to me as she passed. “Put it in just as easy as last night.”

Terry Bradshaw is possibly the most even-tempered player in professional football; nevertheless, his mouth was a grim, thin line when he trotted onto the field to take charge after the run-back. It was even grimmer and thinner after the astounding second play.

On the first play, Steeler tight end Benny Cunningham had picked up five yards on an end run. As the teams lined up again, my eyes happened to light on Ambrose Pierce, the Whittier defensive lineman I had advised regarding penetrations of the neutral zone and premature ejaculation. He was muttering to himself. I read his lips.

“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” he was repeating, under the impression that Ronald Reagan (who quoted it as fervently as if Franklin D. Roosevelt had been a right-wing Republican) had originated the phrase.

No matter. The ploy worked. Ambrose stayed on-side until the snap, following which his first move was precision-timed. He moved as if intending to charge over offensive guard Sam Davis. But the instant Davis committed himself to the straight-ahead confrontation, Ambrose slid smoothly around him to the left to shake up Bradshaw’s timing in the slot.

The Steeler quarterback, looking for the short yardage that would give them the first down, had called a slant-out—a quick pass to tight end Randy Grossman out in the flat. The general ineptness of the Whittier defense, however, had lulled Bradshaw into expecting more time than Pierce’s penetration now allowed. Bradshaw wasn’t about to be sacked, but he did have to spin away from Pierce in order to fire the bullet.

Meanwhile, Sam Davis had recovered and came hurtling in to block Pierce from the side. Ambrose’s concentration held, and he sidestepped the second block, although not quite so smoothly as he had the first. What happened then was one of those flukes that gridiron buffs talk about for years afterwards.

Ambrose saw a chance to dive over Davis and tackle Bradshaw. Sensing this, Davis rose straight up from the ground, erupting like a righteous volcano. He came up flush between Pierce’s legs and Ambrose, flailing, locked his thighs around the guard’s neck as he rose. Shaking himself, Davis broke the grip and Pierce went flying sidewise through space. He and Bradsha'w’s bullet pass to Crossman met in mid-air—converging vectors—and, when Ambrose Pierce hit the mud, the pigskin was lodged securely in his gut.

The turnover had the rain-soaked Whittier fans on their feet again. When they spotted Terry trotting out onto the field with the Whittier offense, they actually cheered. The team looked pleased but embarrassed. It was the first time their appearance had been greeted so enthusiastically.

Coach Newtrokni was a pixie play pusher. He sent Terry out with instructions to fire off the exact same sideline pass that had been intercepted from Bradshaw. It worked. The Whittier tight end, out in the flat, picked up exactly ten yards for the first down and stepped out of bounds to stop the clock. Terry Niemath, however, did not get off so easily in her success as Terry Bradshaw had in his failure. Remembering the long touchdown pass, the Steeler defense had paid their respects to the arm that had thrown it with an all-out blitz.

This time they nailed her. Twist as she would, Terry couldn’t get away. A split second after the pass was fired, she went down under a saturation bombing of Pittsburgh blockbusters.

The pile-up included both linemen and backs. Middle linebacker Jack Lambert was the first to extricate himself from it. Immediately, the feared Steeler wild man began jumping up and down on the muddy field in an off-the-wall fashion which was decidedly uncool.

“A WOMAN!” It was a Tarzan yell to warn the natives of an alien presence in their jungle. “THE QUARTERBACK IS A @%!&‘!#$!!! WOMAN!” (Later, there were some who claimed to have seen froth on Lambert’s lips but, doubtless, they exaggerated.) “A WOMAN!!!”

The pile-up unraveled. Cornerback L. C. Greenwood walked away shaking his head disbelievingly. Jack Ham was looking at his hands and talking to himself as if he couldn’t believe the answers they were giving him. Banaszak, who had been sprawled atop Terry and was the last up, slouched off with a face the color of an over-ripe tomato.

Lambert was still shouting and doing acrobatics in the mud. Steeler Coach Chuck Knoll, used to wild Jack’s fierce shenanigans, at first ignored him. Finally, though, he marched onto the field to calm him down. A moment later it dawned on Knoll that Lambert wasn’t horsing around and that the Whittier Stonewall quarterback was actually a female. Immediately Knoll started yelling for a referee so that he might lodge an official protest.

The two line judges reached the scene first. Considering the circumstances. Knoll was pretty calm in voicing his objections. He repeated them for the back judge and the downfield judges. When the umpire, whose authority was over-riding, joined them and Coach Knoll started in all over again, Coach Newtrokni decided it was time for him to join the fracas.

In the stands, still being pelted by raindrops, the fans had little appreciation of what the disturbance was all about. Used to Lambert’s tumulting, they had given little credence to his shouts about a woman. Now they waited for the last quarter, which was half over, to resume.

“Is it true?” The umpire confronted Coach Newtrokni directly. “Is your quarterback Niemath of the female gender?”

“Yeah. So what?” Coach Newtrokni brazened it out.

“Women can’t play professional football,” the umpire told him.

“She’s already playing.”

“I mean, they’re not allowed.”

“Sez who?”

“Sez me!”

“How come?”

“It’s against the rules!”

It was the statement Coach had been hoping would be made. “Uh, yeah?” He pulled a copy of the rulebook out of his hip pocket and handed it to the umpire. “Show me where in the rules it says any such thing.”

The umpire leafed through the book. Chuck Knoll peered over his shoulder. Coach Newtrokni stood and tapped his foot. “Well?” he said finally.

“I can’t find it,” the umpire admitted.

“Cause it isn’t there.”

“Well, it would be if they’da thought it would ever come up.”

“That’s not good enough. There’s nothing there stops my quarterback from playing. Let’s get on with the game.” He turned on his heel and headed back for the sidelines.

The umpire scratched his head. The line judges scratched their heads. The downfield judges scratched their heads. The back judge scratched his head. Finally, still scratching, they walked to their respective positions and signaled for the game to proceed.

For a moment it seemed as if Steeler Coach Chuck Knoll might refuse to let his team continue play against a woman. But then he shrugged his shoulders and went back to his side of the field. The shrug seemed to say that with the game almost over anyway and Pittsburgh ahead by fourteen points, there was no point in making an issue of it.

“Jeez! Look at Lambert.” Beside me on the bench, defensive linebacker Freck Foley was worried. “He’s got rabies! If the rest of their defense feel that way, they’ll tear off Terry’s tits.”

“Not Mean Joe Greene.” Grinder Meade spoke from Freck’s other side. “He respects womanhood, little kids, and Coca Cola.”

Aware of how rattled the Steeler defense must be, Coach sent in a play for Terry. Following it, she got off another long one to tight end Craig Cramp, who ran a post-hook pattern to the right. Loose as a goose since I’d guided him into water sports, Craig beat out cornerback Mel Blount and came up with the sphere for the Stonewalls’ second TD. A couple of minutes later, Horseshoe Cohen kicked the extra point to make the score Steelers twenty-one, Whittier fourteen.

It was fantastic for the Stonewalls, of course, but time was running out in the last quarter, and it was Pittsburgh that was lining up to receive. Running back Sidney Thornton gathered in the pigskin on the Steeler seventeen, lowered his head like an angry bull, and started upfield through the mud as if his orders came straight from General Patton and the Whittier goal-line were the River Rhine. Skill, luck, mud, and a driving downpour were all on his side. A fake here, a quick move there, three successive straightarms, and he was leaving Whittier defense players behind him in the mire like croquet wickets on a rained-out lawn. By the time he crossed the fifty, more than half the Whittier defense was sprawled out on their face in his wake.

Blockers took out Freck Foley and Simon Sabbath, and Thornton crossed the forty and then the thirty. The only thing between him and a touchdown now was Whittier tackle Grinder Meade. Coming in from the side, Grinder committed himself at the twenty. Thornton twisted away and his lethal arm shot out. Grinder instinctively ducked the straight-arm, managing to bump Thornton, but not getting a grip on him. The jolt, however, was enough to make the mud-slick ball pop out of Thornton’s clutch. It shot up behind him, Grinder got under it, and grabbed it just long enough to insure possession before Thornton reversed their positions and brought him down with a tackle. Through the rain I saw one of the referees signal that it was Whittier’s ball on their own seventeen.

“What a break! What a break!” The s.a.c. was pounding the f.a.c. on the back.

The f.a.c. dampened his enthusiasm somewhat by pointing to the clock. The two-minute warning had gone by while the play was in progress. There was now a minute fifty-one left in the game.

Two plays later, there was a minute four left and Terry had not managed to budge them from their seventeen. Both long passes she had thrown had been batted down. The Steeler defense wasn’t taking any chances. They were playing her deep and concentrating on the possible receivers.

So now, it was third and ten on the Whittier seventeen, and the clock was ticking. No matter that the defense was onto her. Terry had no choice but to call an option play which gave her two down-field receivers to choose between.

Her blocking held, and she had plenty of time to throw, but it was obvious that the defense was all over the wide receivers. She could throw the ball away, in which case the next play would be fourth and ten and they’d have to kick, or she could run with it. Terry chose to run.

She twisted away from the three-man rush, doubled back to avoid Mean Joe Greene coming up the other side, and found a hole that left her in the open for a sure first down. It would have been no more than that had not Jack Lambert become the latest player to fall victim to the mud. His tackle turned from a fait accompli to a pratfall, and Terry was once again in the clear. Her next serious challenge came at the Steeler twenty from Mel Blount and, when he hesitated for a fraction of a second (later, Mel told reporters it was because he’d never before tackled a woman during a game), she twisted away from him. She was too fast for Mike Wagner to reach her before she crossed the goal line for the Stonewalls’ third TD.

With thirty-two seconds left to play, Horseshoe Cohen fell into position with the team to kick the extra point. I noticed the cheerleader he’d been practicing with before drifting over to the fence behind the end zone. She positioned herself dead center between the goal posts, although well behind them. She raised her skirt. Raindrops glistened on her lush blue-black bush.

Horseshoe kicked. The ball landed right between her widespread legs. The kick was good. The score was twenty-one to twenty-one, and we were into sudden-death overtime.

“Wow, Coach! I’m speechless!” It was the only thing I could think of to say to congratulate him. “Nothing to it.” He winked. “We just got there Faustest with the mostest.”

If our atheist coach had made a deal with the devil, however, old Beelzebub must not have been paying attention when the coin was tossed before the start of the overtime period. Bradshaw won the toss and, naturally, elected to receive. A disappointed sigh swept over the Whittier bench.

Despite the rain, the kick was a beauty. Thornton took it in his own end zone. The mud had slowed down the defense considerably, and so he had almost half a clear field in front of him. He elected to run with the ball.

There was no joy in Pittsburgh this day. And Sidney Thornton surely stood at the head of the joyless. On the one-yard line, his left foot encountered a mud-slick, and his butt hit the dirt. Even as he was recovering, the downfield judge was zooming in to call the ball dead.

Some situation! On the plus side for Pittsburgh, they had possession in sudden death overtime. On the minus side, their first-and-ten was on their own one-yard line. On the plus side, their quarterback was Terry Bradshaw, perhaps the coolest head in pro football, and he had the protection of an offensive line experienced in blocking as much weight as it could bench-press as well as three plays to make a first down, which would remove them from the goalline situation.

Bradshaw took one step back with the snap—no more—positioning himself just behind his own goalline. Within the next two seconds, several other things happened at the same time. Ambrose Pierce valiantly faced off with Pittsburgh center Mike Webster. Number Thirty-two, Franco Harris, crossed behind Bradshaw to take the handoff. The handoff was blocked from the view of Hans Brinker (the Whittier middle linebacker I thought I’d cured of plugging the wrong hole by recommending anal sex) by his own lineman. Thinking Bradshaw still had possession, Brinker rushed to stop up an obvious opening through which Number Twelve might have slipped.

The blitz was on and, in the split seconds all this was occuring, Brinker moved too hastily. The ever-treacherous mud snagged him, and his feet went out from under him. His pratfall was much worse than the one Thornton had taken earlier. It carried him on his back and across the mud like a greased pig on a sliding pond. In this position he slid right between the braced and widespread legs of the grunting, butting, contending Ambrose Pierce and Mike Webster and emerged behind the Steelers’ goal line. He arrived just in time to trip up Franco Harris inadvertently as he started to run with the handoff.

Harris went down. The line judge’s whistle blew. The play was dead. Whittier had scored a safety in sudden death overtime. And that, kiddies, is how we beat the Pittsburgh Steelers twenty-three to twenty-one!

It was pandemonium, of course. The fans were sobbing on the field and mobbing the players. The offense formed a ring around Terry Niemath and managed to hustle her off to the locker room before the focus shifted from Hans Brinker to her.

Coach Newtrokni elbowed his way through the crowd towards the Pittsburgh bench and Steeler Coach Chuck Knoll. I trailed along behind him, curious to see how he’d behave in victory. The two coaches met in the midst of the throng, embraced and shook hands.

“Great game,” Knoll said sincerely. “You earned the win.”

“Nonsense, Chuck,” Coach Newtrokni replied. “You outplayed us all the way. There’s only one reason we managed to pull it out.”

“What’s that?”

“Why, it was God’s will, Chuck,” Coach Newtrokni told him with a perfectly straight face. “The Lord was on our side.”

It was pouring cats and dogs but, to my surprise, Coach Newtrokni was not struck by lightning.

CHAPTER NINE

The next day, we made front page headlines as far away as the New York Times, which ran the story right beside one headed “Reagan Denies Budget-cutting Fiscal Policy Responsible for Lepers’ Business Failures.” Two parallel columns covered the Stonewalls-Steelers upset and the debut of professional football’s first woman quarterback. Inside the paper, an editorial discussed the implications for the sport, for women, and for the American way of life generally:

. . . As John F. Kennedy observed, “Life is not always fair.” Certainly it has not been so in the de facto segregation which has kept women out of professional football. Now, however, there must be an agonizing reappraisal of this policy. Whatever the result of this reappraisal, there is no denying the shock of a feminist-inspired earthquake whose tremors are even now spreading beyond the gridiron and throughout the entire male sports world. Anxious hockey players are already vowing that they will not countenance any females’ pucking around on the ice.

... And what does this event portend for the status of women generally? The National Organization of Women asserts that quarterback Terry Niemath’s right to play football is inviolable. The Moral Majority views it as a dastardly attack on family values and feminine daintiness. This newspaper leans toward the opinion that women should be allowed to participate in pigskin activities, while reserving the right to staff our sports department according to our time-honored traditions of experience, seniority, and access to all-male locker rooms.

. . . There can be no doubt that this is one more indication of how the American way of life is changing. While change for the sake of change is surely not desirable, there is also nothing to be gained by stubborn resistance to change; In this spirit, one of reasonable compromise among reasonable men, this newspaper recommends giving women the right to participate in professional football, while feeling obliged to question the wiseness of allowing them on the playing field past the onset of the second trimester of pregnancy. Feminists will say that the right to decide rests with the individual woman, while anti-feminists may wish to bar women with child altogether. The reasonable man, however, will surely agree to the wisdom of a compromise de- signed to keep the pregnant out of the huddle once they begin to show.

During the following week, the controversy escalated, spilling over from the sports pages and the editorial pages. A suit was filed on behalf of a twelve-year-old girl in Connecticut challenging the local Little League rules barring her from participation on the football team. The Governor of a southern state vowed personally to stand in the locker room door and block it to keep any “gal” from invading the hallowed male premises of the State University gridiron program. An ad hoc organization of born again Sunbelt ladies issued a statement that “real women” would never engage in such roughhouse activities, only lesbians; an immediate response from women athletes spearheaded by Billie Jean King²⁴ denied vehemently that participation in even the roughest sports was any indication of sexual preference; this in turn was attacked as “reactionary” by the Sappho League, which demanded that the contribution of lesbians to professional sport be recognized and that their entrance into professional football be expedited.

A spokesman for the Administration told the press that, while President Reagan didn’t wish to become involved in the controversy, his views on the sanctity of motherhood, wifehood, and the family were well known, and it was therefore safe to assume that he would not want his son to marry a football player. Listener-sponsored Pacifica Radio reported this and tacked on an ironic reminder that Reagan’s son was a ballet dancer. A group of male ballet dancers protested the inference that his occupation might somehow make him less interested in female quarterbacks. Gay Rights activists protested their lack of sensitivity to the contributions of gay dancers to the art of ballet. The brouhaha fizzled out when somebody remembered that the President’s son was already married.

The Washington Post conducted a straw poll among public personalities on the topic of women in professional football and came up with the following responses: .

Budget Director David Stockman²⁵ : “There will be no government funding of abortions for football players, no matter how needy they claim to be.”

William F. Buckley²⁶ : “If women do not immediately withdraw from professional football, I shall form a group of minutemen, to demand male membership in NOW, the D.A.R., and the Girl Scouts of America!”

Bella Abzug²⁷ : “Congress should immediately push through a bill providing day care facilities for football-playing mothers.”

Reverend Jerry Falwell²⁸ : “God is‘ not pleased.”

Kate Millet²⁹ : “Not true; She is delighted.”

Muhammad Ali³⁰ : “Let ’em play ball/The ladies so sweet/But they get in the ring/I knock ’em off their feet!”

Warren Beatty³¹ : “The truth is, I never made it with a quarterback.”

Elizabeth Holtzman³² : “I support Terry Niemath’s right to play football without reservation.”

Phyllis Schafly³³ : “It is an appalling example to women everywhere.”

Mayor Ed Koch³⁴ of the City of New York: “Which way did you say the wind was blowing?”

Jane Fonda³⁵ : “We’re negotiating for the rights to Terry Niemath’s life story. If we get them, I of course will play Terry, with Jim Plunkett³⁶ standing in for me in the gridiron scenes. Terry Bradshaw³⁷ will play himself, and Coach Newtrokni will be portrayed by Lily Tomlin³⁸ .”

Governor Hugh Carey³⁹ of New York: “There will be no trade-in of Westway funds to purchase Terry Niemath for the New York Jets.”

Jimmy Breslin⁴⁰ : “Not much support for Society Carey’s position in the ginmills of Queens.”

Senator Edward Kennedy⁴¹ of Massachusetts: “As to the question of her right to play against them, the Patriots will simply have to cross that bridge when they come to it.”

Governor Jerry Brown⁴² of California: “Don't bother me; I’m meditating.”

Norman Mailer⁴³ : “I’m thinking about doing a book on Terry Niemath just as soon as she kicks off.”

Christie Hefner⁴⁴ : “We’re negotiating with the Stonewalls for our next center spread.”

Professor William Shockley⁴⁵ , controversial genetics planner: “We have not yet decided if Terry Niemath should be granted access to our superior sperm bank.”

Rock superstar Mick Jagger⁴⁶ : “A chick quarterback’s cool, man. What’s she on?”

Abbie Hoffman⁴⁷ : “Terry Niemath is a CIA android.”

Gore Vidal⁴⁸ : “The whole issue is a tempest in a chamberpot.”

Former Editor of The Realist, Paul Krassner⁴⁹ : “He means a shitpot!”

There were also reactions from abroad:

Pope John Paul II: “Holy Mother Church takes no position on women in American professional football as long as they do not use birth control.”

Ayatollah Khomeini⁵⁰ : “In Iran we would cut off her breasts for playing without a face veil.”

British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher⁵¹ : “It simply is not done in England.” ,

Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin: “Niemath? Is that a Jewish name?”

Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev: “The Russian government categorically denies that four female fullbacks have attempted to defect to the Houston Oilers.”

The day after the Soviet Premier’s statement, I came across an interview in the Los Angeles Times with the Secretary of the Baroquian Club. “While the Baroquians have no official connection with the Whittier Stonewalls,” he told the interviewer, “it is true that some of our most prestigious members have both a financial and sentimental interest in the team and that these gentlemen have endorsed the signing of Ms. Terry Niemath as quarterback, a decision which obviously played a major role in last Sunday’s victory over Pittsburgh.”

In response to the interviewer’s suggestion that there might be an inconsistency in the Baroquian Club’s anti-female membership and hiring policies vis-a-vis the endorsing of a female quarterback, the Secretary had this to say: “No inconsistency at all. One thing has nothing to do with the other. We believe firmly that women have the right to participate in professional sports in accordance with their abilities. We also believe that we have the right of free association as a club and the right to limit that association as we see fit. Now, we see fit to limit it in such a way as not to inhibit our members in those theatrical activities which give them so much pleasure. Surely, you must see that nothing would be so inhibiting as to be gawked at by the very gender we have chosen to poke good-natured fun at. But—and this is important—we are not rigid. Not only have some of us used our considerable influence to inject a woman into professional football but, also, I personally am on a committee which is dickering with a young lady to pop naked out of a cake at our next Baroquian Club anniversary dinner, as a compromise of our tradition barring women employees on the premises. Now, I ask you, what could be more reasonable that that?”

Public debate continued right up until the following Sunday, when Terry Niemath played in her second game for Whittier, against the Denver Broncos. Over fifty-one thousand people filled Mile High Stadium to capacity. Whatever else one might say about a female pro football quarterback, the front office boys couldn’t miss the fact that she was big box office.

Despite the victory over Pittsburgh, the Stonewalls went into the Denver game thirteen-point underdogs. The weather forecast was bright and sunny, and the smart money said that the Steelers had fallen victim to the mud, and that the Whittier victory over them had been a fluke. Denver was a well-oiled machine which always worked best under solar power. The bright light of the sun was expected» to decimate the Stonewalls and to melt away whatever dazzle their lady quarterback might have used to bewitch the Steelers.

Imagine the wise guys’ chagrin when Terry turned out to be a Bronco-buster par excellence. She dug in, her spurs, twisted their tails, and left them braying for mercy with four—count ’em, four!—touchdown passes that inspired the Whittier defense to dig in its heels and hold Denver down to a three-TD response. The final score was Whittier twenty-seven, Denver twenty-four, and just about every sports columnist around was wiping egg off his face.

“Congratulations,” I told Terry sincerely when she returned to the Denver hotel room we were sharing after the game. “You looked great out there today.”

“Y’all look again. I’m even greater right here in the privacy of our little ol’ home away from home,” she answered, shedding her clothes as she came across the rug towards me.

It had been like that all week. Since I’d moved in with Terry to protect the rest of the team from her advances, I’d been the focal point of her libido. It hadn’t been easy holding her off. As Terry kept reminding me, it wasn’t as if we hadn’t made it together before. “Sex is a right friendly act,” she kept reminding me. “Aren’t we still friends?”

“Sure,” I would answer. “But friendship is a delicate balance. We don’t want to screw it up with sex.

The answer was incomprehensible to Terry. Truthfully, it was more than a little lacking in logic to me as well. As she upped her campaign with more aphrodisiac perfumes, flimsier nightgowns and more pronounced wrigglings, heavings and undulations, I was hard-pressed to justify to myself not making love to her.

The original problem had been that if she made it with various members of the team, it would cause dissension among them. Above all, Coach Newtrokni didn’t want that. But I wasn’t on the team. And, in point of fact, most of the guys took it for granted that I was making it with Terry, since we were rooming together. Nuke Outlaw, in particular, glowered at me whenever our paths crossed like Godzilla deprived of his mate.

Why, then, was I withholding my favors? I suppose, because I like to think of myself as a professional in my chosen field. A professional does not become involved on a personal level. Such involvement invariably undermines effectiveness. If I was going to ride herd on Terry, then I had to maintain some distance between us no matter what had transpired previously; thus, frustration was a matter of honor, and blue balls the badge of my status.

All of which didn’t make it any easier now, after the Bronco game, when Terry, fresh from the showers, all powdered and perfumed, wriggled out of her panties and winked her pussy at me. “What say we celebrate, Steve, ol’ buddy,” she suggested, stroking my thigh. .

“I have to take a shower.” I backed off towards the bathroom. “A cold shower.”

I stayed in the shower until I was sure she’d gone out for dinner. Then I went out myself. I made sure it was very late when I came back so that Terry would be asleep. I contrived to crawl into the empty twin bed without waking her. Ignoring my erection, I managed to drift off to sleep myself.

Some time later, I was awakened by the sounds of sobbing coming from Terry’s bed. I switched on the night light on the side away from her. In the dimness of its gentle glow, I could see that she was quite sound asleep and obviously having a disturbing dream.”

“Yes!” she moaned. “No!” She opened her mouth wide and formed an ‘O’ with her lips. “Mmm!” she sighed. “And then: “I surely do not want any onions, lover!” She began crying, as if with frustration.

It was heartrending. I stood it as long as I could, thinking the dream might change. But in the end I reached across to Terry’s bed and shook her gently by her smooth and rounded naked shoulder.

“AAGGHH!” She screamed and sat bolt upright in bed. It took a moment for her eyes to focus. When they did, she looked at me and burst into tears.

“Terry! What is it?” I crossed over to her bed and sat on the edge. “What’s the matter?”

The sound of my voice, however, only seemed to inspire her to a greater flow of tears. I couldn’t stand it. Women’s tears are a universal solvent to the will. My resistance to Terry dissolved on the spot. For the past week I had avoided physical contact with her, but now I took her in my arms to comfort her.

“What is it?” I repeated.

“I had me a dream.” Finally she managed to get it out between sobs.

“Tell me about it.”

“It was about you-all.” She snuggled closer, her breasts warm and springy against me through the thin nightgown. “Sort of,” she amended.

“Sort of?” I prompted her.

“It was up north at that Shea Stadium, but I wasn’t rightly playin’.” She took a handkerchief from me and blew her nose. “Y’all might say I was more like a spectator.”

“I see.” I smoothed her short blonde hair from her brow. “What happened in the dream, Terry?”

“I was a-watchin’ the football game when a vendor came along with this here tray of hot dogs. Big, long weenies like they have sometimes, you know?”

“I've seen them.”

“Lordy, I wanted me one of them! I mean my mouth was purely waterin’! In the dream, that is. Fact is, in real life, I ain’t much for that Yankee food.”

“Stick to the dream.”

“Alrighty. Well, in the dream, eager as I was, I paid the vendor and I reached out to take me one of them frankfurters. Only—Only—”

“Only?”

“Only when I picked up the roll, it didn’t come free like you’d rightly ’spect it would.”

“I don’t get it. What do you mean?”

“It was attached.”

“Attached how?”

“The weenie was attached to the vendor. It was a-lying’ there all long an’ red an’ juicy in the roll, but it wasn’t a hot dog at all. No, sir! That there frankfurter was really his pecker.”

“Freud be praised!”

“What was that y’all said, Steve?”

“Never mind. Go on with the dream.”

“Well, now, realizin’ this, I all of a sudden was hungrier even than afore. I wanted that thang so bad! So bad I could rightly taste it! An’ that’s what I said to that there vendor. ‘Gimme my frank!’ I said. 'Give it here!’ “

“Then what happened?”

“The vendor, he asked did I want mustard on it. I said real polite. ‘Yes, thank you kindly.’ Then he asks do I want sauerkraut an’ I tell him no. He goes to hand me the pecker-in-a-roll, an’ my mouth gets real big an’ round like I'm gonna suck this weenie steada eatin’ it. Anyway, he pulls it back, like he’s teasin’ me, an’ he says do I want onions on it. One thang I hate on a hot dog, it’s onions! That is purely a Yankee trick!” Suddenly she was crying again.

“It was only a dream.” I tried to console her.

“I began a-suckin’ on that weenie an’ it was so good! So good!” She was half incoherent. “My box was on fire an’ I was rubbin’ it ’tween my legs there in the bleachers an’ a-suckin’ away when—when—”

“Take it easy.”

“Suddenly, this here vendor, he pulls it out of my mouth an’ begins a-laughin’ at me like the devil hisself. But that wasn’t all. That wasn’t the worst. The worst—The worst—”

“Shh, baby. It was only a dream.”

“No, it wasn’t! It was the way it is! Just the way it is!”

“What do you mean?”

“That there devil-vendor’s face—His face when he took that pecker I wanted so bad plumb out of my lovin’ mouth—His face—”

“Easy, baby.”

“His face was your face, Steve! Your face! You were him! An’, just like always, you were pullin’ your pecker away from me!” Once again, her wailing dissolved into incoherence.

Can you dig it, guys? Sigmund? August? Ingmar⁵² ? All aboard! First stop dreamland, next stop guilt. My guilt! Well, hell, hadn’t my holding out on her driven Terry to dreaming such a textbook dream? And wasn’t it my responsibility to kiss it and make it better?

Yeah, that’s what I did. So much for professionalism, and the devil take the hindmost. I kissed the tears from her wet cheeks. I kissed the frustration from her lips. I kissed away the hunger and the emptiness. I kissed and made it better.

Terry’s arms went around my neck and she clung to me. Her wet cheeks glistened. The silk of her nightgown rose and fell quickly. Her blue eyes were grateful and filled with desire. Her mouth moved over mine with lips that were warm and moist and a tongue that was electric and probing. “So good!” she sighed. “This here is so rightly good!”

The throbbing of my cock confirmed her judgment. I had been sleeping in only my jockey shorts, and now it stuck out between us un- ashamedly—aroused, stiff, and arrogant. Looking down from lowered lids through spiderweb lashes, Terry saw it and caught her breath. Her hand dropped from my neck and encircled its nakedness.

“My weenie!” Her laugh was low and throaty. “My hot dog!”

“Without sauerkraut.”

“Without mustard.”

“Without onions.”

“Praise be to the Lord! I surely do hate onions! You Yankees are plumb crazy puttin’ such a thing on your weenies.” She slid down my body and pulled down my shorts. “Delicious!” She fondled my cock and kissed it. Then she started playing with my balls.

I noticed that she wasn’t crying any more, but that didn’t make me back off. I was past that point. Her lips and tongue, teasing my hard-on, left me helpless to reverse the action.

My hands moved as if there had never been any question. They slid down her milky shoulders and bosom and under her breasts. These were heavy and hot as I squeezed and stroked them. The sun-tanned flesh glowed pale gold in the lamplight, and Terry’s large, strawberry-shaped nipples stood out stiff and hungry-red. When I palmed them, she moaned and took one of my balls between her lips, teasing its hairiness with her tongue, sucking it as if it was some particularly delectable piece of hard candy.

“I surely do have the most sensitive titties,” she confessed, lifting her pursed mouth for a moment. “Nothin’ I wouldn’t do for a man if ’n he plays with ’em just right.” She extended her tongue well under my balls and tickled my asshole with it.

Reaching down, I pulled her around so that her long, sturdy, shapely legs extended beyond my head and over the edge of the bed. The sensually sculpted cheeks of her delicious behind quivered and shimmered. Gently, unable to resist, I sank my teeth into the rose-gold flesh.

“Oooh!” She drew the length of my cock deep down her throat and sucked hard at the base with velvety, cunning lips. “Mmm!”

I spread her thighs apart, my fingertips tracing the flexed muscles of their insides and savoring the excited beating of the pulse there. The curly blonde hair of her quim was dewy and fragrant. Swollen purple lips opened to my mouth. The sweetest of female creams widened the walls of her inner pussy for my tongue. I found her clit and licked it slowly-teasing her, arousing her even more.

Her strong hot thighs tightened around my ears. In the mirror across from the bed I saw my cock rising like a flagpole, disappearing in Terry’s wide-stretched, lascivious mouth, and then reappearing, hard and throbbing and glistening with her saliva. She was crouched over me, and her large breasts were hanging down, the excited tips sweeping back and forth over my belly and groin as she moved. Now, as I watched in the mirror, she took one in her hand and worked the nipple around my balls. She took my cock out of her mouth and pressed her nipple against its crest. She forced the hard red berry into the lust-widened hole of my prick. When she removed it there was a sheen of premature jizzum over it.

I plunged my tongue all the way up her cunt. I sucked the juices from her writhing pussy. I pumped my cock in and out of her mouth.

“Wait!” Terry pulled away panting. “I want y’all to fuck me. Please! Please! Please! Y’all do me proper!” She scrambled around on the bed and straddled me, holding herself high so that her now slavering pussy was suspended over the tip of my thrusting, swollen prick.

I reached up and found one of her large, firm breasts. I sucked as much of it into my mouth as I could. I licked and nibbled at the juicy strawberry nipple.

Terry’s sharp nails clawed at the back of my neck. Her ass jutted high and backwards once and then slammed forwards. Her meaty quim slammed down on my pecker and spread out over my pelvis. She moved up and down, contriving to have the erect button of her clitty ride the length of my shaft.

I reached around her with both hands and clutched the burning, trembling cheeks of her behind. I widened the cleft there and dipped with my middle finger. The sensation drove Terry berserk. Her tight cunt wrenched at my cock and she jerked left and right wildly and slammed her cunt down harder and harder in order to feel the full length of my perpendicular prick all the way up her lusting tunnel.

“Y’all are a sly bastard!” she panted. “Tricky! A-suckin’ my titties like this an’ sneakin’ up my no-no all at the same time you doin’ me! Yessir! Sly an’ tricky!” She reached behind her, stretched her arm down the length of her back and contrived to palm my pumping balls.

I watched her fondle and squeeze them in the mirror as the length of my cock moved in and out of her bouncing quim. She strained her head to look over her shoulder to see what I was looking at. When she saw the reflection of us fucking, Terry emitted a sound that was half-laugh and half-groan. Continuing to stare, she redoubled her efforts, moving up and down faster and faster, fucking harder and harder and hotter and hotter.

“Come on!” she gasped. “Give it to me! Y’all lemme have that geyser of hot cream all the way up my hungry pussy!”

I shoved my finger up her ass and pulled her down hard on me. I sank my teeth into the damp flesh of her breast and sucked the strawberry nipple down my throat. I clawed at her ass and felt the pressure of the jizzum rising from my balls to fill the length of my cock. I held back, agonizingly, until I felt the muscles inside her pussy forming clutch-ridges around my shaft. There was a melting deep inside Terry and then she was screaming incoherently with the release—a gushing sensation-—-of her orgasm. I let go then, pumping hard and brutal, shooting high up her quim, releasing one hot spurt after another until her sucking cunt overflowed and we ended our orgasm soaked with the juices of our lust.

That first time was not, of course, the last time. Once I’d succumbed to the temptation, there was no holding back from further indulgence. Besides, Terry claimed that regular balling helped her game.

“I’ll bet.” I had been skeptical at first.

“It truly does, Steve darlin’.”

“How? Give me a for-instance.”

“Friggin’ you, for instance. Now that’s helped me develop a real smooth rhythm for hand-offs.”

“I’ll just bet!”

“An’ my broken field runnin’ is surely improved.”

“What’s that have to do with our balling?”

“Why, the way I move my hips, darlin’. Haven’t you noticed? Every time I see a tackle comin’, I just pretend you’re jumpin’ on my bones from behind an’ give my bottom that special wiggle an’ shake him off.”

“Don’t forget fakes.” I teased her.

“Not true. Y’all know I never fake in bed. But you have helped my passin’, sugah. Truly you have.”

“In what way?”

“I’m more relaxed in the pocket.”

“I noticed.” I was being sarcastic.

“I truly am. And our lovemakin’ has taught me patience, so I don’t fire off my passes too soon.”

“You never know what that old O.R.G.Y. expertise is going to accomplish.”

“Fact is, our sack time’s improved my timing all around.”

The funny thing is that what she said had more than a little truth to it. As time passed, Terry’s performance on the gridiron was looking more and more professional. Also, like a pebble in a brook, it was throwing off ripples of inspiration which were positively affecting the other members of the Whittier Stonewalls.

The offense began operating as a cohesive unit. The blockers gained the confidence to take on the largest defensive lines in the league. The wide receivers developed an almost religious faith in Terry’s ability to get the ball to where it was sup- posed to be and, along with it, they began to have faith in themselves to be there to catch it. Even our ground game improved as the offensive backs realized that there really were holes there for them to plunge through. Morale mounted, and there were fewer fumbles and more smoothly unified plays.

The team spirit spread to the defense, as well. With wins under their belt, they seemed to develop a sense of obligation not to relinquish the gains provided by Terry and the other offensive players. They began reading the opposition plays more accurately and quickly. They took more risks, moved more quickly to break up pass plays, and hit harder. And they began piling up a quite acceptable record of both sacks and interceptions.

All this was adding up to one victory after another for Terry Niemath and the Whittier Stonewalls. The Colts, the Browns, and the Chargers all went down to defeat. Nor was there any joy in Buffalo, Cincinnati, or Kansas City after the Stonewalls came to town. The season moved right along, and still we were undefeated.

The teams we faced were not the only ones who had to make an effort to adapt to a woman quarterback with all-around playing ability. Their cheerleading squads also had to evolve a strategy aimed at dissipating Terry’s Superwoman image. “Hold that blonde!” and “Hit her again, harder! Harder!” were not enough. Soon the various cheerleading squads had developed special cheers specifically aimed at exorcising Terry’s gridiron magic. For instance:

“HIT HER IN THE LEFT TIT! HIT HER IN THE RIGHT! HIT HER IN THE BOX AND FIGHT, TEAM, FIGHT!

And,

“SUNNY OR SHADY, WATCH HER ASS! SPREAD THAT LADY ON THE GRASS!”

Also, in a Nietzschean vein:

“HIP! HIP! HIP! LET ’ER RIP! WOMAN PASSING? USE THY WHIP!”

Nor were the cheerleaders the only ones forced to adjust to Terry’s presence on the gridiron. At the highest levels of professional football, the grand pundits of the game were engaging in a bitter debate regarding the rule changes necessary to accommodate female players. Their arguments spilled over into the press and soon, the fans were taking sides.

Hard-liners thought that new rules should be instituted to limit the effect of women on those against whom they played. More pliable fans, less threatened by the toppling of tradition, thought the rule changes should concentrate on providing women some special protections in keeping with their femininity. The debaters voiced their views as follows:

“Their breasts should be bound to flatten them, so they don’t distract the guys on the other team.”

“A ten-yard penalty should be instituted for holding a woman player above the waist.”

“Wiggling should be declared illegal motion!”

“Fifteen yards for groping a female in the pile-up.”

“If a chick quarterback gets caught flashing, she should be thrown out of the game.”

“They should automatically penalize ’em half the distance to the goal line for buggering a female tight end.”

Sports announcers were also having problems dealing with a woman player. Commenting on Terry’s games, more than once they found themselves trapped into double entendres. For instance:

“Fumble! And, making the recovery, Terry Niemath goes down on it like a real pro!”

“When it comes to fly patterns, this lady quarter-back sucks ’em in every time!”

“They have to play deep and hard, and so she always has that defense breathing heavy!”

“Few quarterbacks can lay ’em down like Terry Niemath does!”

“Ahead or behind, Terry just keeps banging away!”

Aside from game coverage, TV took cognizance of Terry in other ways. Suddenly there were women appearing in the formerly all-male commercials slotted into the time-outs. Lissome blonde kickers shaved their long legs for Gillette. Curvy, bosomy brunette linebackers arm-wrestled for light beers. A redheaded defensive guard with hips like Raquel Welch’s⁵³ did a Danone Yogurt ad with a male ballet dancer famous for his entrechats. An Afro-American beauty in the bedraggled post-game uniform of a defensive left tackle accepted a coke from a starry-eyed waif-fan and tossed the kid her sweaty bra by way of appreciation. Inevitably, Terry herself was signed up to do a commercial.

It was for a manufacturer of sanitary napkins. “I never have to worry no matter how rough the game gets,” Terry informed the viewing audience. “I’m always secure in the knowledge that I have the utmost in feminine protection.” The video accompanying her voice-over showed Terry taking three tackles, one right after the other, all in the crotch. Then, there was a quick fade-out and fade-in to show her in organdy drinking champagne with a guy in a tuxedo against a background that was all candlelight and soft focus. “I may be a football player,” Terry confided, “but I’m a woman, too.” The guy kissed her hand, and she sighed. “Just like you,” she told all those women stuck with husbands nailed down in front of the Sunday afternoon football game.

The day that particular commercial debuted, Terry’s arm propelled the Whittier Stonewalls into contention for the Western Division championship. The playoff game was set for the following Sunday. It was a stunning achievement for the Stonewalls. We’d started the season in the cellar and here we were with a shot at being Number One. If we made it, that meant the Superbowl. Most of us didn’t even dare think about that out loud.

Charles Putnam called me. He wanted to tell me that he and his associates were delighted with my handling of the Terry Niemath situation. If we took the Division championship, there would be a bonus in it for me. And, if we won the Superbowl—well, perhaps it was premature to look that far ahead, but he could assure me that I would be a very happy man. Even if we should fall short of that, he wanted me to know that the gentleman from Whittier was out of his depression and proud as a peacock of the team established in his honor. “He hasn’t been in such high spirits since the bombing of Cambodia,” Putnam assured me.

His call was followed by the news that Terry Niemath had been named “Woman of the Year” by SWAP (Sensual Women Against Pornography). Stephanie Greenwillow, one of the founding members and an officer of the organization, was coming to Whittier to present Terry with a scroll honoring her. Despite our falling out, I couldn’t help looking forward to seeing Stephanie again.

An unexpected happenstance, however, spoiled my anticipation. It occurred the night of the win that put Whittier in the playoffs. I had made a date with Rhino Dubrowski to go out and have a few drinks to celebrate. Rhino, however, had gotten a head start on me, and so, along about nine in the evening, I found myself putting him to bed, and our celebration was aborted. I’ve never been one for celebrating by myself, and so I decided, the hell with it, and went to my room to hit the sack early.

Terry, obviously, wasn’t expecting me. I walked in on her and Grinder Meade performing the old in-out with the kind of energy you might expect from runaway slaves hotfooting it across the ice-floes with the bloodhounds at their heels. Grinder’s ebony ass was going like he could feel their fangs snapping.

“What the hell do you call this?” I exclaimed.

“Y’all mean you can’t tell?” Terry panted, not even bothering to stop.

It was pointless trying to lay a guilt trip on her. “Grinder!” I tried him. “You know this is against the rules!”

“You got to be kidding, boy!” Grinder wasn’t buying it.

“You think this is right?”

“Miz Scarlett here ain’t hardly complainin’.” Grinder was both sarcastic and undeterred.

I closed the door on them and went back downstairs to the bar. Sometimes, drinking alone isn’t so bad after all. My only complaint was the hangover I had the next day when I bumped into Grinder in the hallway. “I’m surprised at you,” I told him, my liquor-dulled brain incapable of much more by way of an opening line.

“It bother you ’cause I'm black?” He towered over me, but his voice was more sad than hostile.

“No. It bothers me because it’s not good for the team.”

“You mean good for the team like when you fuck the lady?”

“That’s different,” I rationalized. “I’m not on the team.”

“Oh! I see! You’re all upset ’cause somebody on the team is balling her.”

“That’s right.” I had too much of a hangover to keep the self-righteousness out of my voice.

“Well, then, you’d best get un-upset. ’Cause, you see, Steve boy, everybody on the team, black and white together, has been ballin’ the quarterback in the locker room all season.”

“Why didn’t anybody tell me about this?” I demanded.

“We figured you were getting yours in a nice soft bed, so why bother you with the seamier side of locker room life?”

“Listen, Grinder, if you’re telling the truth, we’re all in trouble! Can you imagine what Coach Newtrokni’s going to do when he finds out?”

“He ain’t goin’ to do nothing!”

“How do you figure that?”

“Hell, Victor, he’s the one said we shouldn’t bother telling you we were all fucking her.”

“You mean the coach is screwing her too?”

“Hell, it was him set up the schedule for the team, and you'd best believe he wasn’t getting no sloppy seconds.”

So much for duty! So much for professionalism! So much for the Organization for the Rational Guidance of Youth!

For the rest of that week, I brooded over how I’d been had. I’d thought I was servicing Terry in order to maintain the team’s equilibrium. I'd thought I was at least partially responsible for the team morale that had brought us victory after victory. And all the time it had been Terry screwing the whole team, as always, which had been behind, it. I brooded . . . oh, how I brooded!

The presentation of the SWAP award was Satur- day evening, the night before the playoff game. Terry dressed in virginal white to receive it. Stephanie was wearing a particularly sexy green evening gown.

Watching them up there together on the dais, I was struck by how much alike they were physically. Despite the fact that Terry weighed about ten pounds more, their heights and builds were identical to the eye. The ten pounds was all hidden muscle. They were both bosomy, long-legged, and pinch-waisted. They both had hips made for lovemaking and high, beautifully sculpted derrieres. Terry had short blonde hair and blue eyes, while Stephanie’s tresses were long and red and her eyes jade green but, nevertheless, their faces resembled each other. They had the same high cheekbones, full, erotic lips, and firm tilted jawlines. They could easily have been sisters.

Sisterhood, however, has its limits. This is true even for the most dedicated feminists. I learned that after the ceremony, when Stephanie and I found ourselves alone together while Coach Newtrokni and Terry, with whom we were sharing a table, were dancing.

“Are you sleeping with her?” Stephanie asked me, her green eyes flashing true to their nature.

“Of course not!” I lied with real indignation in my voice.

She stared at me and said nothing.

“Why are you looking at me that way?”

“Your nose just grew three full inches, Pinocchio.”

“I don’t see that it’s any of your business anyway. You said you were through with me.”

“I am.” Stephanie sighed. “I miss you, you bastard!”

“Yeah. Well, I miss you, too.”

And so, of course, we went to bed together. I almost blew it while we were undressing.

“Why,” I wondered, “did your group give Terry Niemath, of all people, an award for her contribution to the fight for women’s rights?”

“Because she’s the first woman in organized football.”

“But she’s not interested in women's rights. She’s only interested in screwing.”

“That's a woman’s right, too,” Stephanie murmured.

I bit my tongue and let it go at that. She was naked. It was a time to make love, so that’s what we did. It was great.

The next day, Terry completed nineteen for twenty-seven. The Whittier Stonewalls won the playoff game twenty-eight to fourteen. Next stop, the Superbowl!

That night, Terry Niemath disappeared!

CHAPTER TEN

“What the hell do you mean, she disappeared?” Coach Newtrokni demanded.

“She never came back to her room last night,” I told him.

“Maybe she met some guy and she’s shacking up with him.”

“Could be.” I shrugged. “Only she’s never done that before. Probably,” I added maliciously, “because she was getting enough around here.”

“Maybe she wanted variety.” Coach was optimistic.

“Yeah, Victor.” Nuke Outlaw threw me the zinger. “Booming with you, that’s probably what she wanted all right.”

“She’s never missed the post-game movies before,” Rhino pointed out while the tackle and I exchanged glares. “And it’s already cohabitating afternoon and she hasn’t called or anything.”

“Let’s get on with the flicks,” Coach decided. “Maybe she’ll turn up.”

But she didn’t turn up. Not that afternoon. Not that night. And not the next day, either.

“Where’s your star quarterback?” the sports reporter wanted to know at Tuesday practice.

“Coach “was” so happy with her performance Sunday that he gave her the day off,” the Stonewalls’ publicity man told him.

Obviously, we could only get away with that excuse once. With the Superbowl game less than two weeks off, more and more attention would be focused on Whittier every day. If it came out that our star quarterback was missing, there was bound to be a furor in the press. '

Late Tuesday night, Rhino and I went to Coach Newtrokni’s room to discuss the situation. We were a little puzzled to find the team physician waiting there with Coach. What did he have to do with Terry’s disappearance?

“Tell them what you told me, Dr. Fink,” Coach instructed him.

“I examined Terry Niemath the day before the playoff game,” he told us. “I have a friend at the local lab, so I got the results of certain tests back very quickly. I told Terry what they were just after the game on Sunday.”

“That was just before she disappeared,” Coach Newtrokni pointed out. “

“What kind of tests and what kind of results?” I asked with a sinking stomach.

“Pregnancy tests,” Dr. Fink replied.

“And?”

“Terry Niemath was pregnant.”

“Why don’t you call the rest of the team in here?” I suggested to Coach Newtrokni. “We could all congratulate each other on our impending fatherhood.”

“Pregnant!” Rhino exclaimed. “Feces! That must be why she took off.”

“It’s gonna be one helluva paternity suit!” I realized.

“It’s the logical explanation.” Coach Newtrokni responded to Rhino and ignored me. “The question is, now that she’s gone, what do we do?”

“Maybe she went to get an abortion.” Rhino looked on what he thought was the bright side. “Maybe she’ll come back after and play in the Superbowl.”

“Will she be able to?” Coach asked Dr. Fink.

“Perhaps. With the right drugs . . . We’ve done worse things medically in pro football. . . Of course, I’d have to examine her first .”

“Then you have to find her,” Coach decided, looking straight at Rhino and me. “And meanwhile, we have to think of something to keep the press off our backs about her not being at practice.”

“Like what?” I was dubious.

There was a long silence. Rhino broke it with a snap of his fingers. “A ringer!” he suggested. “What we need is a maternal-mating ringer!”

“Where are we going to get a quarterback like Terry to be a ringer?” I wanted to know.

“Season’s over. I’ll bet any one of the pro quarterbacks would do it for the right price.”

“I can’t think of one who’s built like Terry,” I reminded him.

“In drag,” Rhino offered optimistically.

“Rhino, you’ve got to get over the idea that people who watch football—even practice sessions-—are blind. You can’t pass a woman off as a man on the football field, and it‘ won’t work vice versa either.”

“Right idea. Wrong approach.” Coach shut us both up.

“What do you mean?” we asked him, speaking in tandem.

“What we need is a woman ringer to stand in for Terry. Someone who looks like her enough so that, if we put a uniform on her and a helmet and don’t let anybody too close, it’ll fool the press.” ‘

“It’ll only fool them until she gets on the field,” I pointed out. “As soon as-this woman throws a pass, they’ll know it isn’t Terry.”

“This ringer won’t have to throw a pass. She won’t have to do anything. She won’t even have to go on the field. All she’ll have to do is sit on the bench.”

“How come?”

“Because we’re going to leak it that Terry has a back injury that temporarily keeps her from passing or running. We’ll say that it’ll be okay by Superbowl Sunday, but that meanwhile, Terry has to take it easy.”

“That’ll wreak Hades with the point spread,” Rhino commented.

“So what?” Coach Newtrokni shrugged. “It can't hurt us to go into the Superbowl the underdog. It won’t be the first time this year the experts have figured us to lose. The big question is, where do we find a woman who looks enough like Terry to pass for a ringer and who’ll be willing to do it?”

“I think I have the answer to that,” I heard myself saying.

“Who?” Rhino, Coach, and Dr. Fink all wanted to know.

Who? Why, Stephanie Greenwillow, of course. Who else?

She wasn’t ' exactly easy to persuade. “Why should I?” was her immediate reaction.

“Sisterhood,” I suggested. “Here's a sister in trouble. Pregnant. In need of help. This is how you can help her.”

“I don’t even know her.”

“I’ve heard it said that the women’s movement was too theoretical and had no real empathy for poor women beset by the realities of, the real world. Of course, I never believed it, but . . .”

“That’s nonsense! Terry Niemath isn’t a poor woman. On the contrary, her income is way above that of most working women.”

“She’s a symbol, an important symbol to women everywhere. Her breakthrough into pro football is a major step forward for women. Do you want her accomplishment obscured by the irrelevant facts of pregnancy and possible abortion if it comes out why she’s not at practice?”

“You really think I could pass for her?” Stephanie weakened.

“If we cut your hair short and dye it blonde, it shouldn’t be any problem.”

“What about the other members of the team?”

“Don’t worry about them. They’ll keep their mouths shut.”

“You mean because of their possible paternity?”

“Nope. I mean because they’re hungry for their shares of the Superbowl pot. Their only chance at the winning pie is if Terry plays. If it comes out that Terry’s been pregnant and had an abortion, there very likely would be an outcry that could keep her from playing. That would hit the rest of the team right smack in the pocketbook.”

“I’m not so sure it would be right for her to play myself.”

“Isn’t that her decision? I mean you’re always talking about how women should have control over their own bodies. Isn’t the overriding feminist policy that Terry should have the right to decide for herself whether or not to play?”

“I suppose so,” Stephanie granted reluctantly.

“Then you’ll do it? You’ll cover for her?”

“I have all kinds of reservations.” Stephanie took a deep breath. “But I’ll do it.”

In uniform and helmet, it was really impossible to tell Stephanie from Terry at a distance. The entire team cooperated in seeing that the sports press was kept at just that from Stephanie—a distance. In other ways, however, they weren’t so cooperative. Rhino, Coach Newtrokni, and I perceived this when we walked into the locker room after practice and faced a scene of violence and chaos.

Stephanie was backed against a locker with her jersey off and her proud breasts heaving and beckoning in naked splendor. She had half of a broken stool clutched in both hands and was waving it threateningly over her head. The three aisles converging on where she was standing were strewn with injured players.

“What the hell’s going on?” Coach Newtrokni demanded.

“They tried to rape me!”

“Who tried to rape you? Be specific.”

“I am being specific. They did. All of them.”

“What the hell’s the matter with you guys?” Coach was indignant.

“We didn’t try to rape her, Coach.” Linebacker Freck Foley was the first to speak up in the team’s defense.

“No, sir!” kicker Horseshoe Cohen chimed in. “All we did was party like always. You know, like with Terry.”

“They all took out their organs and went for me.” Stephanie was furious.

“Terry never minded,” Plowboy Palmer remembered.

“They were all stiff!”

“That was a compliment, Ma’am,” Grinder Meade told her. “Wasn’t no call for you to take on so.”

“Just look what she done to me, Coach!” Wide receiver Pete Gorgonzola held up his genitals. They were bruised and swollen. “Whacked ’em with that chair leg she’s swinging. Hell, you call that ladylike?”

“I am not a lady!” Stephanie snarled. “I’m a woman who’s not about to let herself be gang-banged!”

“How many injuries are there?” Coach was concerned.

“Eight down, sir.” The f.a.c. had computed rapidly.

“Jesus!” Coach Newtrokni was shocked. “What are you trying to do to me, lady? Don’t you know these men have to play in the Superbowl a week from Sunday? And why in the groin? Don’t you know groin injuries shake up their confidence worse than any other kind of injury?”

“They deserved it for attacking me!”

“We wasn’t attacking her! We was just being friendly like we always was with Terry!”

“I’m not Terry! I’m not friendly! I’m not available for sex!”

“Oh, yeah?” Nuke Outlaw was skeptical. “How about him?” His gargantuan finger was pointing at me.

“What about him?”

“You room with him just like Terry did. You trying to tell us you’re not balling him?”

“Not anymore, I'm not!” Stephanie assured him. “What’s past is past and, while I’m with this team, I’m not going to have sex with anyone! And that includes Steve!”

“I know you had to say that, Stephanie,” I told her when we were alone in our room later that night. “But, of course, you didn’t mean it. Right?”

“Wrong! I meant every word of it.”

“Now, Stephanie, let's not be rigid . . .”

“Let’s not you be rigid!” She waved a lamp in the general direction of the erection sticking out of my shorts. “I’m serious, Steve! One more step, and I’ll do to you what I did to those eight guys on the team this afternoon!”

I made the mistake of taking that one step more. The lamp zinged for my exposed and rigid penis like a missile homing in on its target. I had no choice but to take evasive action. This consisted of hightailing it from the room and closing the door between me and Stephanie’s deadly aim. I held onto the knob so she couldn't open it for another shot at my wanton wang.

“Mr. Victor!” the voice came from the hallway behind me. “I have to see you.”

I wheeled around and found myself facing Bubba Weaver, the gay defensive safety. His eyes were staring at my tumescent penis and his jaw was hanging open. “You are seeing me,” I pointed out to him. I did my best to tuck my equipment hack inside my shorts. No offense to gays anywhere, but it’s not smart to dangle a bone in front of a wolf.

“I mean privately.”

“I don’t swing that way, Bubba.” No point in leading him on.

“Then there’s no problem, Mr. Victor. See, you don’t appeal to me, anyway.”

I had a flash feeling of rejection but dismissed it immediately lest my manhood be imperiled. Straights like me, it seems, may have a few things to learn from gays. “We can’t go to my room for privacy,” I told him, understating. “My roommate’s in.”

“Mine’s out. Come on. It’s just down the hall.” Bubba led the way.

“What’s up?” I asked when he’d closed the door to his room behind us and we were alone.

“I figure I owe you a favor, Mr. Victor, because you fixed it so I didn’t have to room with Terry and be tempted by heterosexuality.”

“Forget it, Bubba. It was my pleasure,” I told him quite accurately.

“Well, I’m grateful. And I figure it’s only right I repay you.”

“Repay me how?”

“I know something I think you might want to know.”

“Oh? About what?”

“About the disappearance of Terry Niemath.”

“Go on.” Bubba had my full attention now.

“Well, Terry didn’t just take off on her own. She was snatched.”

“What do you mean 'snatched’?”

“Taken away. I saw it. Right after the game. Terry went into Doc Fink’s infirmary behind the locker room. I wanted to see Doc myself because I had this sprained thumb. But I didn’t want to go in while Terry was there. See, ever since you got me out of rooming with her, Mr. Victor, Terry would tease me. I mean she’d make remarks and she’d wiggle and that kind of thing. So I sort of hung back to wait until Doc was through with her. Where I was, I could see through that glass partition to the infirmary, but I couldn’t hear what they were saying.”

“What did you see?”

“First Doc seemed to tell Terry something that upset her. She kept shaking her head ‘no’ as if to deny what he was telling her, and Doc kept nodding ‘yes’ like he was telling her it was so true. She seemed to get more and more upset. Finally, he had her roll up the sleeve to her jersey and he gave her a shot.”

“A shot? What for?”

“I don’t really know. Because she was upset, I guess.”

“But he didn’t force her to take it, or anything like that?”

“No. From what I could see, she went along with it without any fuss.”

“I don’t suppose you could see what was in the hypo?”

“No. But, whatever it was, it must have been plenty powerful.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because Terry went out like a light. She just sort of keeled over and curled up on the floor like she was going to sleep. But it must have been a pretty deep sleep, because she didn’t move a muscle when they came to take her away.”

“When who came to take her away?”

“I don’t know who,” Bubba told me. “All I know is, Doc unlatched the door that leads out to the lot behind the stadium, and these two gorillas came in and carted Terry out like she was a sack of oats. Like I said, she never even twitched when they took her.”

“Why didn’t you try to stop them?”

“They had guns sticking in their belts. I’m not that heroic.”

“How come you didn’t tell Coach Newtrokni about this when there was all the guesswork going on about Terry’s disappearing?”

Bubba took a long count before he answered. “I guess I wasn’t sure whether or not he was in on it,” he said finally in a low voice.

Now it was my turn to think before I spoke. “How come you’re so sure about me?” was what I said after the extended pause.

“I’m not.” Bubba shrugged. “I just took a chance. Like I said before, it was because you did me that favor.”

So I thanked him for the favor. It was obvious from his attitude that Bubba didn’t want to get any more deeply involved than that. If there had been any doubt about that, it was banished by the way he clammed up when his roommate entered.

Bubba’s roommate was Rhino Dubrowski. He looked happy to find me there. He had tried to get over his hang-ups, but the truth was that Rhino was always a little on edge when he found himself alone with Bubba. He felt this way even though they’d been rooming together all season and Bubba had never so much as winked at him. So, Rhino was glad I was there.

“Come on downstairs, and I’ll buy you a drink, old buddy,” I suggested.

Rhino’s face lit up. Now, he was gladder. He trotted right along with me to the hotel bar.

When he’d slowed down enough over his second bourbon so that I was sure I had his full attention, I told Rhino what Bubba had told me about Terry’s being snatched. “Doc Fink slipped her a knockout needle and then turned her over to two cohabitating goons,” he summed up. “Well, I think we should have a talk with Doc Fink, Steve.”

“I was thinking the same thing myself. The trouble is that he probably won't want to talk to us. Particularly if he’s part of a plot to snatch Terry.”

“Then I guess we’ll have to insist.” Rhino shifted his bulk on the barstool; muscles rippled menacingly. “There are ways to make feces talk.” Rhino’s lip curled, showing fang.

“What do you mean?”

“There are things I learned in intercourse-ing ’Nam!”

“You mean, torture him?” There was shock in my voice.

“ ‘Nam wasn’t always pretty.” Rhino lapped up another bourbon-and-beer.

“What the hell are you talking about, Rhino? You were a Marine, not a Green Beret.”

“I kept my eyes open.”

“You were a goddam embassy guard, for Christ’s sake! You never even met a Cong any closer than rifle range!”

“Fecal matter! That’s no way to talk to me, Steve! Hades! I saved your life!

“Sure you did. And I’m grateful, too. You’re a brave man. But you weren't ever any torturer that I know about.”

“I saw things!” Rhino insisted mysteriously.

“Okay.” I gave up. “Okay. So, you were the Torquemada of Saigon. So, get your fingernail-pullers and your thumbscrew and your rack and your Chinese water-torture device and let’s go pay a call on Doc Fink. Only I’m warning you, Rhino. I can’t stand the sight of pain. If you make him suffer too much, I’ll go to pieces.”

“So don’t look, you old, yellow illegitimate child!”

We made our move the next day. We waited until the team was out on the field practicing and then we cornered Doc Fink in his infirmary. Before he knew what was happening, I’d thrown a sack over his head, and Rhino was carting him down to the clubhouse cellar, where we could interrogate him without worrying about being seen or overheard.

“What’s the meaning of this?” Those were Doc’s, first words when we removed the sack. He was a small man with a bristly moustache too imposing for his skinny face. Although he sputtered well, indignation made him ludicrous. “What do you two jokers think you’re doing?”

“Never mind that, feces-face!” Rhino raised one hamlike hand threateningly. “We’ll ask the questions.”

“Are you threatening me?” Doc Fink was quick to pick up on things.

“Darn straight!” Rhino glowered.

Doc thought about it. “I don’t get it,” he said finally. “What is it you want from me?”

“We want to know about Terry Niemath!”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” But his face gave him away.

“You’re a lousy liar, Doc,” I told him. “We know you gave Terry a shot to knock her out and then turned her over to a couple of strongarm men. Now we want to know why you did it. Who’s behind it? Where did they take Terry Niemath?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” It was even less convincing than the first time he’d said it.

“Think again.” Rhino lifted him from the chair by his earlobe.

“Violence won’t intimidate me!”

“You think he means that?” Rhino grinned ferociously.

“Let's find out.”

Rhino propped a thick wooden stave against the wall and broke it in two with a karate chop. He picked up a steel poker and bent it like a pretzel with his bare hands. He lit the stub of a cigar, puffed on it until it was red-hot, and then swallowed it, glowing ash and all.

“I’m not scared!” First impressions are misleading. Doc Fink was obviously a lot tougher than he looked.

“The thumbscrew,” I suggested, playing along with Rhino.

“Nothing compared to the E.S.T.⁵⁴ sessions I’ve been through,” Doc countered smugly.

“I’ll get the whips,” I threatened.

“It won’t work. I’ve had primal therapy. I’m all screamed out.”

“The Chinese water-torture.”

“No chance. I’m into TM⁵⁵ , too. I’ll just recite my mantra and ignore it.”

“This calls for extreme measures,” Rhino realized. “This offspring of a female canine is tough.”

I looked at him pleadingly. Tough as I might have talked in an effort to scare information out of Doc Fink, I really wasn't into torture. Basic morality, or something.

“They’ve got Terry,” Rhino reminded me gently. “There’s no telling what they’re doing to her. We have to fight fire with fire. Watch him. I’ll be right back.”

“Where are you going?”

“There are some things the toughest illegitimate child can’t stand up to.” And with that he left.

The waiting should have made Doc Fink sweat. It didn’t. When Rhino returned he was still cool as a refrigerated cake. He was curious though. “What’s that stuff?” He referred to the items Rhino had lugged back with him.

“What's it look like?”

“A TV set.”

“You’re a smart illegitimate son.”

“But what’s that?”

“A video cassette player, you phallus!”

“Then that’s a cassette.”

“You got it.”

“But what’s it a cassette of?” Doc Fink wanted to know.

“You’re gonna find out.” Rhino turned to me. “Help me tie him to this chair, Steve.”

“You’re going to torture him with that stuff?” I was bewildered.

“Just help me tie him.”

I helped Rhino tie Dr. Fink to the chair. When he was secured, Rhino set up the TV set and the video cassette player in front of him. Then he stuck a gag in Doc Fink’s mouth. “So nobody hears his screams,” he explained. He plugged earphones into the TV and put them on Doc Fink. Last of all, he plugged in the cassette.

The cassette was a replay of the last Monday night football game the Stonewalls had played against the Miami Dolphins. It had been a pretty good game, fast-moving, packed with action, the score seesawing back and forth.

Watching it, I wondered what Rhino could possibly be up to. After all, Doc Fink was looking at the same replay I was. The only difference was that I couldn’t hear the sound and he could. But why should that make any difference? Why should that make him crack and tell us what we wanted to know?

It seemed ridiculous, and yet his screams, muffled by the gag, began before the first quarter was even over. Rhino let him suffer a little before he removed the gag. “Ready to talk?!’ he asked.

“No! I’ll never talk! Never!”

Rhino replaced the gag and the earphones. By halftime, tears were streaming down Doc's face. “Please! Please!” he begged when Rhino removed the gag again.

“Who’s behind the snatching of Terry Niemath?”

“I don’t know! I swear, I don’t know! Please! Don’t make me—”

But Rhino was merciless. He replaced the gag and the earphones once again. The Stonewall-Dolphin game proceeded.

The next time he removed Doc Fink’s gag, there was no doubt that Rhino’s technique had worked. “I’ll talk!” he babbled. “I’ll talk! I’ll tell you anything you want to know! Just turn it off! Please! Please! Turn it off! I’ll talk!”

“Who set up Terry Niemath?”

“The Baroquians! Somebody named Putnam. He paid me to knock her out so his men could snatch her. The Baroquians kidnapped her!”

The Baroquians! I was floored. I’d figured the mob, maybe, trying to narrow the point spread. But the Baroquians? Charles Putnam? Why would they kidnap Terry Niemath?

“Why?” Rhino demanded of Doc Fink. “Why’d they do it?”

“I don’t know! I swear I don’t know! I’d tell you if I knew! Don’t torture me any more! I would! I swear it! Just don’t make me listen to Howard Cosell⁵⁶ announcing any more! Have mercy! No more, Howard Cosell!”

Howard Cosell! That's torture!

CHAPTER ELEVEN

“Shut up, Howard!” Doc Fink was still babbling from the results of the Cosell torture. “I want to know who tackled who! Shut up, Howard! I don’t care that the home city of the Stonewalls was named after the poet John Greenleaf Whittier! Shut up, Howard! I want to know if the pass was called back or not! I already know that the Watergate wimp played football for four years at Whittier College and could never make the first team. Shut up, Howard! I want to know if they made the first down or if they were short, not how the incumbent was shafted in Whittier’s Twelfth Congressional District in 1956. Shut up, Howard! Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!”

“Get hold of yourself, man.” Rhino slapped him lightly back and forth, across the face to cut off his hysteria.

“Sorry.” Doc Fink calmed down to a shudder. “It was just so awful!”

“Lots of people watch Monday Night Football,” I reminded him. “Millions of TV fans listen to Howard Cosell.”

“But not without commercials,” Doc Fink reminded me. “You have no idea how horrible it can be uninterrupted.”

“Where did they take Terry Niemath?” I got back to the business at hand.

“They’ll kill me if I tell you.”

“It’s either that or more Cosell.”

“Some place they called ‘the Orchard’. That’s all I know.”

“The Baroquian Orchard?”

“They just called it ‘the Orchard’.”

I turned to Rhino. “Let’s go.”

That afternoon, on the plane to San Francisco, Rhino explained to me where he’d gotten the idea for using the Cosell cassettes to torture the truth out of Doc Fink. “There’s this bar up near Buffalo I read about in the papers. The owner bought up a hundred used twelve-inch black-and-white TV sets at scrap prices. On Monday nights he’d turn ’em to Cosell one at a time. For twenty bucks, a customer could kick in a TV set when Howard started talking. In three weeks, the guy had tripled his business. The only trouble was that, by that time, he’d run out of sets. They’d all been kicked in by Cosell-tortured fans. Isn’t that a urinator?”

“Perfectly understandable.”

We fell silent as the stewardess brought us our drinks. When she’d departed, I turned to Rhino once again. “I think we’d better talky about what we’re doing,” I suggested. “Has it occurred to you that we work for Charles Putnam and his group of Baroquians? They’re the ones who hired us to put Terry Niemath across as a quarterback in the first place. And now it looks like they’re the ones who grabbed her. I think, before we actually do anything about getting her back, we’re going to have to decide exactly where we stand.”

“My first cohabitating obligation is to the Whittier Stonewalls,” Rhino answered. “I’m a scout for them.”

“Suppose the Putnam group, finding out Terry was pregnant, decided the best thing for the team would be to have her vanish?”

“You think that’s what happened?”

“I don’t know. I guess it’s one of the things we’re on our way to San Francisco to find out.”

“What if they had another reason for snatching her? Are we going to try to get her back?”

“That, old buddy, is the question,” I told him.

“What do we do first?”

“Get a good night’s sleep after we land. Rent a car in the morning. Drive out to the Baroquian Orchard and case the situation. Depending on what we find out, we’ll decide then what to do.”

“In other words, we get our feces together and play it by ear.”

“You got it.”

It was mid-morning when we reached the access road to the Baroquian Orchard the next day and were forced to make our first decision. Since we weren’t expected, there was a good chance that, if we drove up the road to the guard booth, we would be turned away. So we stashed the car behind a clump of bushes at the foot of the road and set out on foot.

We did not, however, set out empty-handed. Remembering the chain-link fence which surrounded the Baroquian’s property, we had thought to buy a pair of stout wirecutters in San Francisco, and now we took them with us. Emerging from a grove of redwoods which reduced us to ant height, we faced a remote stretch of this fence with no guards in sight. In a matter of minutes we had cut enough of it away to pass through to the other side.

It was straight uphill from there through a tangle of underbrush that crackled like breakfast cereal. Was it any wonder that we attracted the attention of one of the guards who patrolled the Baroquian Orchard? Fortunately for us, this particular sentinel wasn’t very long on imagination. He jumped me without bothering to determine if there was more than one of us. Rhino plucked him off me with no more trouble than if he’d been a tick on a spaniel’s ear.

“What should we do with the maternal mater?’ Rhino dangled him by his uniform collar.

“Possession is nine-tenths of the law,” I told him. “You decide.”

Rhino decided to relieve him of his underpants and pants and hang him upside down from an oak tree branch. Bound, gagged, and half-naked, the guard presented a sight that would have the mountain forest animals chattering among themselves for days. Rhino patted his cheek and we continued on our upward trek.

A quarter of a mile or so later, we struck a path and, a little while after that, the terrain leveled out, and we found ourselves just behind the ninth hole of the Baroquian golf course. As we were getting our bearings, a golf ball fell from the sky and bounced off poor Rhino’s skull. A half-minute later there was a jovial shout: “FORE!”

Rhino was just coming around when the man who had shouted stumbled on us. He was driving a golf cart and chewing gum. He braked to a halt when he saw Rhino stretched out on the ground. “Good Lord!” he exclaimed. “What happened?”

“I was hit by a cohabitating golf ball!” Rhino told him groggily.

“But I yelled ‘FORE!’ “

“You’re supposed to yell before you hit the ball.” I recognized him as one of the ex-Presidents of the U.S. we had encountered on our last visit to the Baroquian Club.

“Really? I didn’t know that. You see, I’m new to the game. Football and skiing have always been my sports.”

“You look familiar.” Rhino’s eyes began to focus.

“Gosh, thanks. I don’t get recognized too much any more. Not like when I was President.”

“Of course!” Rhino snapped his fingers. “You were President of the United States.”

“Not for long.” There was a wistful note in his voice. “None of us seem to last in office as long as Presidents used to last. Maybe that’s why there’s so many of us ex-Presidents wandering around.”

“How’s it feel?” I asked Rhino.

“Sore as a boil on a phallus.”

“I feel just awful,” the ex-President confided. “It’s all my fault. Is there anything I can do for you?” he asked Rhino. “What would make it feel better?”

“You wouldn’t have a shot of bourbon with you?”

“No. I’m afraid not. Wait a minute.” He snapped his fingers, almost catching his ear-lobe between them. “We can get you a drink at the main building. Perhaps I could even buy you gentlemen lunch to make up for my carelessness.” There was a wistful note in his voice as though he wasn’t often successful in enticing someone to have lunch with him since leaving the White House. “Just get in the golf cart with me and I’ll drive us there in a jiffy.”

His jiffy was about five minutes at a thrill a minute, the way he drove. Hanging on for dear life, I tried to think about our situation. Since we were now guests of the ex-President, nobody would question our right to be in the building. We’d be okay as long as we didn’t run into anyone who might remember us from our last visit. Even then, we’d probably go unchallenged unless the somebody was Putnam or someone else who was in on the snatching of Terry Niemath and who was also aware that we weren’t privy to the latest game plan.

And so, we sailed into the Baroquian mansion as his guests with no questions asked. After a somewhat boring lunch of some dish that was both fishy and creamed -- my two pet hates—an upper-level Exxon executive, fully bearded, skipped through the dining lounge dressed in a miniskirt and tube-top. “Hi there!” He waved flirtatiously at the ex-Prez.

“Oh, hi there, Chip. What’s up?”

“Rehearsal. I’m late. Gotta run.” He bounced off.

“Oh, the show!” The ex-Prez snapped his fingers again, just managing to miss his nose. “Gee whiz. I forgot all about it. Would you fellows like to watch them rehearse?”

Rhino and I exchanged glances. We had no better plan for how to proceed. We went along with the ex-Prez to watch the Baroquians rehearse their show.

They were in the middle when we entered and took seats in the back of the hall. There seemed to be a good deal of confusion. Men in a variety of female garb—some half-in and half-out of costume-—were limbering up and rehearsing dance steps without regard to the turmoil around them. A choreographer was trying to plot out a dance routine with a quartet of burly, cigar-chomping cabinet officers in tinkerbell costumes. A corporation president in a pulled-up evening gown sat with his legs propped up against the back of a scenery flat so that he could shave them with an electric razor. Another mogul was struggling with a lipstick and a hand-mirror. The overall scene looked like a cross between Guccione’s Caligula⁵⁷ and Where ’s Charley⁵⁸ ?

A former Secretary of State appeared with a former National Security Advisor, who hadn’t quite made it to Secretary of State, at his side. He called for order. Both the call and his accent were echoed by the other man. They were evidently the director and assistant director of the show. Their combined Germanic persona quieted things down.

“That Henry⁵⁹ !” the ex-Prez whispered worship-fully at my side. “He sure knows how to make them listen!” He popped his gum.

“We vill take ze Havaiian number right from ze top,” he instructed. “Everybody else, off ze stage. Mach schnell!”

A semblance of order appeared onstage. A group of male chorines wearing grass skirts and leis arranged themselves in a line. They were made up with Man-tan, and some kind of eye make-up had been used to try to angle the corners of their eyes in what someone had conceived to be an Oriental slant. Now they began to dance a hula and sing to an accompaniment of mandolins playing Wicki Wacki Woo. Half of them had shaved their legs; the other half looked like tree trunks with caterpillar blight. They were about as graceful as a herd of hippopotami splashing around the waterhole.

“The boys are pretty talented, aren’t they?” the ex-Prez whispered to me.

“Sure are,” I lied.

“I always envy them that. I’ve got two left feet myself.”

The chorus line could have used two more left feet, but I didn’t tell him that. He should have been able to see it for himself. Henry was stamping on the floor like a drill sergeant in an effort to introduce the errant ones to the beat of the music. They stamped back, but the tempo still eluded them.

The chorus line receded toward the back of the stage, fading toward the wings on either side. A spotlight created a diffused and amber puddle in the empty space between the two halves of the line. A new figure—tall, curvy, sinuous—appeared in a sarong dating back to Dorothy Lamour. The chorus subsided to a supporting role as this ‘star’ performed a hula-style tap dance and sang the lyric to Wicki Wacki Woo.

I blinked and did a double-take. Beside me, Rhino’s jaw fell open as though the hinge had just rusted away. Despite the long black wahine wig, there could be no doubting the identity of the newcomer. It was Terry Niemath!

“Isn’t he great?” The ex-President was admiring.

“He’s sensational.” I went along with the gender. “Who is he?”

“New fellow. A real find. I mean, you talk about talent! Just look at that chest!”

“Nice legs too,” I agreed.

“You betcha. If I didn’t know it was a man impersonating a woman, I’d think it was the real thing.”

“He could have fooled me,” said Rhino.

“When the number’s over, do you think you could introduce us to him?” I asked the ex-Prez.

“Golly, I don’t know. I haven’t really met him myself. He’s new. A friend of Charlie Putnam’s, I believe.”

“I see.”

The number wound down to a bump-and-grind finale. It may not have been authentic hula, but it was effective. The ex-Prez was still applauding enthusiastically when the assistant director and former National Security Advisor held up his hands for silence. “It iss two-thirty,” he announced when he had everybody’s attention.

Audience and cast stood up as one and started for the various exits.

“What’s up?” I detained the ex-Prez with a hand on his arm.

“It’s two-thirty,” he explained.

“So?”

“Piss call.” A passing wood nymph with five o’clock shadow paused to explain.

I looked blank.

“Tradition,” the wood nymph elucidated, scratching his stubble. “Every day at two thirty, we Baroquians go outside and empty our bladders against the trunks of the redwood trees. You fellows must be guests, or you would have known that. You should have told them,” he chastised the-ex-Prez.

“Gee, I forgot.” He was on his feet and moving towards the exits with the other men.

“Suppose you don’t have the need?” I inquired.

“It’s tradition!” the wood nymph told me in an injured tone of voice. “You can’t go against tradition.”

“Like not letting women join or work at the club?”

“Sure. We couldn’t relieve ourselves against the trees if there were women around, could we? I mean, how would that look?”

“A lot of women are probably wondering about that very thing right now.”

“Gosh, do you really think so? I mean, I didn’t think that ladies—-” The ex-Prez was troubled.

“I was only kidding.”

“Oh. Ha ha.” The ex-Prez laughed politely. “Well, I have to go.”

“When you gotta go, you gotta go.

“What about you fellows? The tradition includes guests, you know.” The wood nymph was concerned.

“We’ll be along in a minute.”

“Don’t be late. We try to do it all together. In the spirit of good fellowship, you know. We call it the ‘unit rule’.”

“Right behind you,” I assured him, lying in my teeth.

The hall emptied out quickly. Soon the only ones left were Rhino and myself and the hula skirted ‘star’ up on the stage. We approached her.

“Steve!” She sprang to her feet as she recognized us. “Rhino! What are you-all doin’ here?”

“Looking for you,” I told her. “The question is what are you doing here dancing a hula with a bunch of honchos in drag when the Superbowl is only a week away?”

“Seems I got me a problem, Steve.” Terry hung her head. “Bun in the oven.”

“We know all about your problem. But what are you doing here?”

“I done passed out in Doc Fink’s office ’count of my condition. No way I could be playin’ them practice scrimmages now that I’m in the family way. I mean, I’d surely lose the little bugger. So they brought me here to the Baroquian Orchard for my own sake.”

“Did it occur to you that the shot Doc gave you might have had something to do with your passing out?”

“Nope.” Terry looked bewildered. “Why would I thank a thang like that?”

“Because you were shanghaied,” I told her. As far as the team is concerned, you just” vanished.”

“Why, that Mister Putnam said as how he’d explain it to you-all, an’ there wouldn’t be any problem a-tall.”

“That wasn’t done, Terry. What else did he tell you?” I wondered.

“He explained as how it would be immoral to get an abortion.”

“I’ll bet!” Charles Putnam, champion of the all-male exclusivity practiced at the Baroquian Club, would of course have had the last word on morality for women! “Do you have any idea who the father is?” I asked Terry.

“Why yes, I do declare I thank I do.”

“Do you think it’s me, Terry?” I faced up to the responsibility squarely.

“Why, Steve darlin’, next thang you’ll be offerin’ to make an honest woman outa me. No, sugah, I surely do not believe it’s your doin’. I was always careful to use my diaphragm with us.”

“Somebody else on the team?”

“Not our team. No. I was always‘ protected.”

“Who then?”

“Way back, early on in the season, there was this pile-up in one of the games. One of the opposing tackles—I’m still not sure which one—he put it to me there under the mess of bodies.”

“Are you trying to tell me that he had sex with you right on the field?”

“I do believe so.”

“But—But—”

“I never did put in my diaphragm before the games. Didn't rightly seem to be any need.”

“I should think not!”

“Never figured it would come up during a game.”

“Not with the TV cameras and all,” I agreed. “But listen, Terry.” I shook my head disbelievingly. “The time element—?”

“Well now, whoever this fellow was, he had some mighty fast moves. I’m not denyin’ that. Slid down my pants. Put it in. Came. Pulled out. Pulled up my pants. It was all over by the time the referee blew his whistle.”

“But what about you?”

“Tell the truth, I didn’t have me no orgasm, Steve. Now, that surely doesn’t happen to me too often.”

“That’s not what I mean. What I mean is, why didn’t you say something?”

“You mean like to the referee? Or the line judge? Didn’t hardly seem worth makin’ a fuss, Steve. I mean, suppose they penalized him ten yards for illegal procedure? Why, I’d just have had to turn down the penalty. You see, I’d just completed a pass for a first down before they piled onto me.”

“Are you sure that was when you got pregnant?

“That’s the only time it could have been.” Terry sighed. “Sure wasn’t much fun for so much trouble.”

“Mr. Victor!” The voice came from the other end of the hall-cold, commanding, and familiar. “What are you doing here?” Charles Putnam demanded. He strode towards us, an imposing authoritative figure.

“Rescuing Terry Niemath.” I refused to be intimidated. “The question is, what’s she doing here?”

“That doesn’t concern you.”

“The hell it doesn’t.”

“You are in our employ, Mr. Victor. Hired to do our bidding. You and Mr. Dubrowski. I recall no orders summoning you here. Nor is Miss Niemath in need of rescuing. She is being looked after very well, thank you.”

“What about the Superbowl?” Rhino blurted out.

“Due to circumstances which needn't concern you, she will not be playing in the Superbowl.”

“They already know ’bout my delicate condition,” Terry informed him.

“I see.” Putnam nodded. “Then no further explanation is needed. You two will return to your duties with the team. Miss Niemath will remain here with us.”

“It won’t wash, Putnam. It’s not just her being pregnant. There’s something very fishy going on here.”

“Nonsense!” You are being unnecessarily melodramatic, Mr. Victor. I can’t imagine why you should think there is anything more to this than the obvious embarrassment to the team of a quarter-back who is—as the French say—enceinte.”

“I think there’s more to it,” I said carefully, “because you wouldn’t allow a female on these sacrosanct male premises unless there was some really overriding reason.”

“Don’t be naive, Mr. Victor. Certain females have graced these premises on other occasions. We are men, after all. Our needs are the needs of the masculine gender.”

“I’m not talking about the tootsies for your stag parties and you know it. I’m talking about a woman that’s not here for your pleasure, a woman who sees you in your tutus, a woman who might even see you watering the redwoods, a woman so important to you that you even pass her off as a man impersonating a female and stick her in one of your silly shows.”

“Oh, Steve, but that’s such downright fun!” Terry exclaimed.

“You’ve sucked me in, Mr. Putnam.” I ignored her. “I don't know into what, but I'm going to find out. There’s more involved here than Terry's condition, and I want to know what it is. What's more, Mr. Putnam, you’re going to tell me.”

“I don’t think so, Mr. Victor. I think that what I am going to do is discharge you. Mr. Victor, you are fired.”

'°Mr. Putnam.” Rhino spoke up. “If you fire Steve, I quit.”

“So be it.” Putnam’s haughtiness reached its peak. “You two will be so good as to leave the Baroquian premises immediately. If you delay, I shall have you removed.”

“It won’t wash,” I told him. “Not only won’t we leave, but if you don’t tell me what the hell is going on, we’re going straight to the newspapers and tell them everything that’s happened so far, including how you shot Terry up with a loaded hypo so you could kidnap her and bring her here.”

Putnam looked at me for a long moment and then sighed. “I had forgotten just how obnoxiously persistent you can be, Mr. Victor.” His voice was no warmer, but there was a note of resignation in it. “Very well. It seems you have me over a barrel. I will tell you the truth and throw myself and my Baroquian associates on your mercy.”

“Get out the handkerchiefs,” I advised Rhino, trusting Putnam no more than ever.

“ ’Scuse me.” Terry interrupted us. “I have to go to the necessary. I’ll be back soon as I finish my business.” She left.

“Are you going to listen to me, Mr. Victor? Or are you going to make wisecracks?” Charles Putnam wanted to know after she had gone.

“I’m going to listen,” I replied. “Shoot.”

“Very well. Now, you may remember, Mr. Victor, that on the occasion of our first telephone conversation regarding the Whittier Stonewalls I described how our little group had enfranchised the team as a tribute to the most famous malefactor of modern American politics.”

“You didn’t describe Kim that way back then.”

“Exactly. I was, I suppose, sugar-coating the truth.”

“You don’t mean that you lied to me, Mr. Putnam?” I mocked him. “I can’t believe that.”

“Not exactly. I sugar-coated the truth,” he insisted. “It is true that the team was set up to honor this man. It is true that we paid for it. It is not true, however, that we did so voluntarily. The fact is, we were forced into doing it.”

“Forced how?”

“The gentleman in question had come into possession of certain files compiled by a long-time head of the FBI, since deceased. These files contained certain unsavory information relating to each member of our little group.”

“Surely not you too, Mr. Putnam.”

“We are all of us vulnerable, Mr. Victor. I can only tell you that my own not inconsiderable files would have been enough to have silenced the original compiler, had he but lived.”

“But not enough to keep the whiz of Whittier off your back? You didn’t have anything on him?”

“Considerable. Enough, believe me, to have deterred a more savory man. But what is there one can threaten to reveal about him that could compare with what is already known? Alas, Mr. Victor, his threat had more weight than any counterthreat might have had for the simple reason that we are all vulnerable, whereas disgrace has placed his reputation beyond threat.”

“So, he blackmailed you into setting up the team, and you went along with it. Go on.”

“Blackmail is an ugly word, Mr. Victor. He did, however, persuade us against our will.”

“Call it what you will, it pissed you off.”

“We are not the type of men who get angry, Mr. Victor. We are the type of men who get even.”

“And getting even has something to do with snatching Terry.”

“Her pregnancy did indeed provide us with an opportunity to avenge ourselves. But timing, as you know, is everything. We do not want her condition known until the last possible moment. We do not even want it known that she has disappeared. You have a ringer, and that is working out. All I ask, Mr. Victor, is that you let us decide when to reveal the truth.”

“And all this is to get even?”

“Yes.”

“Is he betting heavily on the Stonewalls? Is that it?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

I thought about that. I had a flash of insight. “The stock market!” I exclaimed. “It always shoots up or down depending on whether an original AFL or NFL team wins the Superbowl. That’s it, isn’t it? He’s shifted his stock market holdings because he thinks the Stonewalls will win with Terry at quarter-back. He’s in deep, and you’re letting him get in deeper. You’re trying to ruin him completely!”

““It’s no more than he deserves.” Putnam confirmed my deduction in a soft tone of voice. “And we’re not really doing anything so wrong. We’re only delaying the inevitable revelation. Terry Niemath wouldn’t be able to play in any case. After all, she is pregnant.”

“Y’all hold on there a minute!” “Terry had returned and stood now in the doorway to the rehearsal hall with her hands on her hips. “That there doctor made a real bad mistake with that test. I just got my monthlies!”

“What did you say?” I was startled.

“I thank Doc Fink was put up to lyin’ to me. I’ll ain’t pregnant no more. Ask me, I never was!”

I stared at Terry. She wasn’t pregnant. The Whittier Stonewalls quarterback wasn’t pregnant.

Terry Niemath could play in the Superbowl!

CHAPTER TWELVE

Superbowl Sunday! The television was on and I was already guzzling the first cold brew. In the bed beside me, Stephanie Greenwillow was warm and willing. Whittier ‘kicked off to the Philadelphia Eagles. Stephanie stroked my balls. All was right with my world. But not quite . . .

“I’m still mixed up.” Stephanie’s voice drowned out announcer Engberg. “Why would Doc Fink tell Terry she was pregnant when she wasn’t?”

“So she wouldn’t make any fuss when she woke up at the Baroquian Orchard and realized she was missing practice for the Superbowl.” Distracted, I didn’t see the Philly runback.

“And Doc was working for this Charles Putnam and his Baroquian friends?”

“Yeah.” Montgomery picked up three yards.

“So he lied to the coach.”

“Yeah.”

“And Coach Newtrokni didn’t know anything about all this?”

“That’s right.” Jaworski’s first pass went incomplete.

“I see.” Stephanie kissed me. Her lips were soft, damp, parted. Her mouth was warm, inviting. Her tongue was teasing, clever. It was a long kiss. I missed the next play entirely. When I opened my eyes, it was to find that Philly, short of the first down, was punting.

“So what it really adds up to—-” Stephanie resumed talking, “—is that Putnam and the others built Terry and the team up all the way to the Superbowl just so they could yank the rug out from under Terry to make the Stonewalls lose.” Indignant, she popped up to her knees at the foot of the bed with her hands on her hips. Her red hair, cropped when she had been standing in for Terry, was like a fiery halo surrounding the anger in her face. Her high, round breasts heaved emotionally under the black silk of the nightgown she was wearing, their creamy top halves rising out of and then sinking into the bodice. The flare of her generous hips from her narrow waist blocked the TV set. This time I missed the Stonewalls’ runback and their first play.

“That’s what it adds up to.” I sat up and reached out to put my hands on Terry’s hips to move her so that I could see the screen.

She misunderstood and slid over me. Sharp nipples bit through the silk and into my naked chest as she lay over me. The warmth of her thighs blanketed mine. I stroked her warm, plump, jutting bottom as we kissed again. It was another long kiss and throughout it her body moved slowly and invitingly over mine. My penis began to rise between her squirming thighs. My next look at the TV set over Stephanie’s round shoulder showed me that the Eagles had regained possession of the ball. I never did find out how.

Sensing my distraction, Stephanie rolled off me and sat up again. “And they put that poor girl through all that trauma-drugging her, telling her she was pregnant, convincing her not to have an abortion—they did all that just so they could get even with that man for blackmailing them into buying him a football team in the first place!”

“Yeah . . . Steph, you’re blocking the set again.”

“Well, you know what I think?” She ignored my complaint.

“No. What do you think?”

“I think they’re childish.”

“Okay.”

“I mean, these are big important men, the men who run the country, the world. And look how they behave! Petty! Childish!” she railed. “But you know what really gets me?”

“No. What?” I gave up on the first quarter. From what little I could gather, it was pretty seesaw anyway, and neither team seemed able to get within scoring distance.

“The rest of us let them do it! They’re schoolboys playing silly games with grudge matches and all kinds of kid manipulations, and they’re running the world the same way, and the rest of us let them do it!”

“I guess you’re right.” I really didn’t want to argue with her. I wanted to watch the Superbowl, drink my beer, and maybe fool around a little during the time-outs. Was that so much to ask?

“They run an automobile company and get petulant when it turns out that they’re not selling cars because the Japanese are building small ones, and they’re building big gas-eaters, and the public prefers the little ones—something any man on the street could have predicted -- and then we taxpayers have to give them money so they can stay in business. What do you call that?”

“It’s called free enterprise,” I told her in a neutral voice.

“That's not what I call it! I call it a government handout!” Her green eyes sparkled with fury.

“You’re gorgeous when you’re angry.” I reached out with the middle fingers of both hands and stroked the nipples of her breasts through the black silk. I wanted to calm her down; sex or football, one or the other, but please get off the soapbox.

She purred. She took the two long fingers in her hands. She kissed their tips. Then she replaced them over her now erect nipples.

“. . . and so at the start of the second quarter it’s still a scoreless game . . .” I heard Olsen announcing.

Again Stephanie reacted to my being distracted, withdrawing the pulsing, long tips of her quivering breasts from my touch. “Or we put them in charge of armies and massive weapons systems and they move them around like toy soldiers and battery-operated doohickeys you give kids for Christmas. They shake their toy swords and go all red in the face and start yelling that our father can beat up their father, and what they’re talking about is nuclear war! What do you call that?”

“Maintaining an arms balance for peace,” I suggested. “And don’t be strident. It makes your face go all red.”

“Strident!” Her voice wasn't strident as she said it; it was shrill. “You mean I should walk softly and carry a big neutron bomb like these men in their tutus do?”

“Make love, not war,” I suggested, falling back on an old saw. I sat up and drew her into my arms placatingly. Over her shoulder I saw Terry Niemath fading back into the slot and firing off a long pass. Kiss number three prevented me from seeing if it was completed.

Stephanie came to me willingly enough. She was all churned up with resentment and it worked on her libido. Anger, I’ve noticed frequently, has that effect on some women and some men as well. It makes them horny.

Her being horny made me horny too. Stephanie looked particularly delectable with the black silk clinging to her voluptuous body from bosom to knee. I pushed down one of the thin straps over her shoulder and bared one of her firm, melon-shaped breasts. The aroused nipple quivered in its center like a small lipstick. I bent and licked it with the very tip of my tongue.

“Ahh!” She moaned and her slender, graceful fingers tangled in my hair. “Ohh, Steve! You bastard! You know how sensitive my nipples are!”

I drew the nipple between my lips and bit down on it ever so gently. Her fingers tightened over the base of my neck. Holding the breast-tip that way, softly but firmly between my teeth, I proceeded to lick it rhythmically with the full length of my tongue. It was like running a swatch of velvet over it. Stephanie shivered and clutched me to her even more closely.

“. . . and it looks like it’s going to be a long one . . .” Engberg’s voice rose excitedly from the TV set. A long one? Who? Which side? Was it complete? Stephanie bent and licked the inside of my ear and I heard no more.

Her tongue in my ear spoke, blotting out whatever there might have been to hear. “Suck harder!” Her voice was husky. “Take more of my breast in your mouth. More!”

I drew the firm white flesh into my mouth and sucked with my lips. Panting and squirming, Stephanie clawed my shoulders with her nails. We were both in sitting positions on the bed now, me with my head bent to her bared breast, her with her tantalizing mouth nuzzling and licking and nibbling at my ear.

Dropping my hands, I reached under her nightie to caress her thighs. Shapely and sleek, they burned under my touch. Moaning again, she stretched her legs straight out in front of her, over the edge of the bed. Stephanie would loathe the description, but they are truly chorus girl legs. Their lightly-muscled perfection has always been a turn-on for me.

It worked that way now. Looking at Stephanie’s legs with her writhing breast in my mouth, ‘I became aware that under my jockey shorts my stiffening prick was climbing my belly. She noticed too.

“Oh, my!” Her agile tongue made the words a caress in my ear. “You’re getting so excited!” She turned her outstretched legs this way and that. Then she separated them, widening the space between them, causing her nightie to ride further up her flushed thighs until its hem was almost at the juncture of her insinuatingly twisting limbs. “Do I excite you, Steve? Is that it? Is it me?”

“Damn straight!” I raised my head to find her green eyes smoldering wantonly as they met mine. Holding her gaze, I slipped out of my shorts. Her eyes dropped to the naked erection bristling between my legs. They narrowed to greedy slits of green-gold. Her tongue circled her lips like a snake drawn from. its lair by the heat of the sun. She reached down and circled me with her fist. Under her touch my prick jumped with a will of its own. But when I ordered it to subside, it did so, albeit reluctantly. “Yeah!” I told Stephanie. “It sure is you!”

“I see.” She wriggled her bottom cunningly on the bed where she was sitting. The result was that the nightie tightened and climbed up higher. Her mons veneris was revealed like a choice, copper-colored, particularly succulent fruit. The silky triangle of red hair shimmered as with the dew of her desire. The high mound rose from her body like a small hillock as she leaned back on her elbows. The purple lips had a patina of moist cream and they were parted invitingly. The meatiness between them was throbbing and pink. The deeper red tip of her swollen clitoris. was just barely visible. Stephanie lifted her bottom slightly and her pussy opened still more widely. “You can play with it if you like,” she suggested.

“I like!” I ran my hands up between her thighs and she lifted still higher. The rosy flesh was slick with a mixture of perspiration and lusting lubrication. I traced the purple lips with my fingertips and Stephanie gasped. Tentatively, I dipped one fingertip. The mouth of her cunt closed around it like a Venus Flytrap capturing its prey.

Stephanie looked down the length of her body to where my hand squirmed between her legs. She laughed excitedly. Her pussy opened slightly and she slid down the length of my finger. Her clitty stroked it as she did so. Then, with a sudden gesture of abandonment, she flung herself backwards on the bed, raised her legs so that they were bent at the knees, and arced them as widely apart as possible. The movement presented her gaping pussy to view like some erotic feast. “I’d really like it if you kissed me there, Steve.” Her voice was quavery as she said it.

Three cheers for women’s liberation! If nothing else, it has freed up feminine bedmates to ask for what gratifies them. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned as the man from O.R.G.Y., it’s that satisfying a woman while making love to her always—always!-—-makes the man’s experience more gratifying.

I slid to the floor on my knees. I put one hand under Stephanie’s hot and writhing bottom. I reached my other hand up to her breast and grasped it, palming the long, quivering nipple. Then I bent my head to the treasure between her legs.

Stephanie moaned as I ran my tongue up between her muscle-tensed thighs. I felt her heart speed up wildly as I dipped into her honeyed well. When my lips closed over the swollen, purple lips of her quim in a sucking kiss, she let out a little yelp and raised her bottom to arch her belly so that the pressure there—and the suckling sensation—would be increased.

Continuing to suck her, I explored with my tongue. The inside of her pussy, while coated with syrup, was tightly ridged. When my tongue grazed her clitty, the ridges clutched at my tongue like the fingers of a hand transforming itself into a fist. Deliberately, I broke off contact with the stiff, aroused clitty. Immediately both of Stephanie’s fists pummeled my shoulders. I squeezed her nipple and she subsided. I pushed my tongue all the way up inside her and began moving it in and out as if it was a prick fucking her. The lower part of her body began bouncing frantically as if that was the case. The bounces were contrived to rub her clitty over my tongue, but again I avoided the contact. I didn’t want Stephanie to come this way. I wanted her to come when my cock was inside her.

“Oh!” she pleaded. “Please! I’m so hot! Please! I can’t get any hotter!”

She was wrong. When I slid my hand between the bouncing globes of her behind I found another furnace there and turned up the heat still more. My fingertip playing with her ‘quick’ while I sucked and licked her pussy made her even more frantic.

‘You devil!” Her fists were pounding my shoulders once again. “Suck my clitty! Lick my clitty! Play with it! . . . Something! Something! . . .” She writhed wildly over my double penetration of her most intimate recesses. “You devil! You devil!”

My cock was sticking out in front of me like a policeman’s billy. Stephanie couldn't reach it, but she kept clawing at my belly with the effort. Finally she managed to reach my pubic hair and tugged at it demandingly.

I got to my feet. I pushed Stephanie back on the bed. I lifted her legs over my shoulders. I drew back, ready to plunge, and --

And Stephanie Greenwillow rolled out from under. me and off the bed to the floor.

“What the hell—?” I stared” down at her, suddenly feeling foolish.

She looked back at me with gold-green eyes that were still cloudy with passion. Her lovely, ripe breasts were. still panting, the long nipples still bright red with lust. The swollen lips of her. cunt were still squeezing and unsqueezing regularly as if beyond her control. “Let’s not hurry things, Steve.” Her voice quavered.

“What the hell do you mean ‘hurry things’? Unless I’m nuts, we’re both as ready to fuck as we’ll ever be!”

“What I mean is that I know how important it is to you to watch the Superbowl.”

“The Superbowl . . .” I echoed blankly. Truthfully, it had gone out of my mind.

“Because of your involvement with the Stonewalls all -season,” Stephanie explained, I understand how important this game must be to you.”

“Stephanie!” I rallied my senses. Is this your idea of getting even with me for last year, or what?”

“Not at all,” she said. “Really. She certainly looked sincere. “I just think you should watch the game. And besides, we can sort of fool around while you’re watching and we’ll get so hot . . . so hot . . . Her voice trailed off. “It will be fun!” She looked very turned on by the idea.

“My balls will bust!”

“No they won’t,” she promised. “I’ll soothe them. She laid down beside me on the bed, her head on the pillow next to mine. She reached down and cupped my balls in one hand. She stroked them with the fingers of her other hand.

I looked at the TV screen. It was halftime. I had no idea what the score was. “Why don’t we just get laid now, real quick, and then relax and watch the second half,” I suggested to Stephanie.

“Why, Steve! Neither one of us has ever been much for quickies. Besides, it’ll be so-o-o-o much better if we build up to it slowly. . . “

“I'm already built up. And besides, it s halftime. There’s no game to watch.”

“Well, I didn’t finish what I was saying before anyway. There was one more thing I wanted to point out.”

“Please, Stephanie! Not politics! Not when I’m in this condition!”

“Your condition is perfectly delightful.” She squeezed my inflamed balls fondly. “What I wanted to say about those destructive boys playing their asinine games at the Baroquian Club is that the worst thing we allow them to do is run our governments—city, state, national and world—Democratic and Communist and Third World. We actually give these ninnies who have to exclude women from their clubs so they can urinate on trees—we actually give them the power to make laws to govern us, laws to dump food surpluses while babies go hungry, laws to subsidize nuclear plants they can’t control, laws to tell women what they can and can’t do with their bodies, laws—”

“Stephanie!” I interrupted desperately. '°You’re squeezing too hard!”

“Oh! Sorry!” She loosened her grip on my balls.

“Besides,” I said quickly before she could resume her diatribe, “the second half is starting.”

“Okay.” She patted my genitals soothingly and subsided.

I learned now, for the first time, that the first half had ended with the score Eagles 14, Whittier 10. Jaworski, ‘the Polish Rifle’, had evidently done his homework well enough to pierce the Stonewalls’ defense with two long passes that had set up the touchdowns for Philly. The Philly defense, on the other hand, had devoted themselves to a pass-rush blitz that had held Terry Niemath to one touchdown bomb plus a series of buttonhooks mixed with bootlegs that had culminated in a field goal. Coming out for the second half, the Stonewalls looked grim. They’d gotten out of the habit of being on the short end of the halftime score.

The kickoff was called dead in the Whittier end zone and it was first-and-ten on their own twenty. Stonewalls halfback Luther went around the right side for four yards. On second down, Terry’s pass to Pete Gorgonzola was knocked away by left corner back Roynell Young. On the next play, she con-nected with a slant-out bullet to tight end Craig Cramp, and Whittier had the first down. As they lined up on the thirty-six, Stephanie nuzzled her head on my chest, being elaborately careful not to block the TV screen, and tongued my left nipple. My semi-hard prick nodded acknowledgement.

On the second play, Terry Niemath threw a long one straight down the middle. This time Gorgonzola got under it and held on. Two plays later, Luther went over for the TD. Horseshoe Cohen kicked the extra point, and Whittier was ahead seventeen to fourteen.

“Go, team!” I exclaimed jubilantly. Stephanie, reacting, ran her tongue down from my chest to my belly. When I shivered, she laughed a low, throaty‘ laugh and kissed my navel. My cock came up like periscope investigating the action.

Ron Jaworski looked grim when the Eagles up after the kickoff return. The shadow of bowl XV hung over him and he probably help having visceral memory flashes of his defeat the hands of the Raiders. Nevertheless, he began mixing up his plays coolly and, just before quarter ended, Philly was back on the board to make it twenty to seventeen. Rushing through a hole made by Grinder Meade, linebacker Freck Foley leaped like a heavyset gazelle to block Tony Franklin’s kick for the extra point.

Twenty-seventeen, Philly’s favor, was where it stood going into the final quarter. My sighs at this state of affairs brought consolation from Stephanie. “Poor Steve.” She kissed the very tip of my prick. “They’ll come back.” Her long fingernails furrowed the hair over my groin. “Don’t you worry.” Her long nipples brushed my thighs ticklingly as she bent over me.

But the Philly defense seemed grimly determined not to end up as the scapegoats they’d been the year before. Hairston and Harrison, the left and right ends, kept rolling off Nuke Outlaw and Plowboy Palmer to keep the kind of pressure on Terry that prevented her from setting up for the long pass. Short gains carried the Stonewalls well inside Eagles’ territory, but then -- disaster! The Philly outside linebacker, Jerry Robinson, intercepted a crucial pass and, with the clock starting to run out, the Eagles once again had possession.

“Damn!” I reacted.

“Now, now.” Stephanie slipped to her knees beside the bed.

All I could see was the top sheen of her red hair between my thighs. But I felt her tongue as it dipped deep under my balls to lick the sensitive area there. “Ahhh!” Her facile tongue drew the exclamation of pleasure from me. Warm and wet, her lips formed around my right ball. Between my eyes and the TV screen my prick loomed up like a tower.

Whittier had that savage look defensive teams get in the last minutes of a game when their side is behind and they’re operating on reserve energy. Behind their safety masks, their lips were curled like the fang-filled mouths of trapped cougars. Grinder Meade was coming on like a steamroller, knocking aside everything in his way to get to the ball carrier. Ambrose Pierce slid off the blockers like greased lightning on every play. Even though it was obvious that Philly was playing a running game and not chancing an interception, Foley and Sabbath, the Whittier linebackers, were playing bump-and-run so viciously that two possible Philly receivers were carried off the field.

This kind of desperate—but effective—defense held Philly so successfully that, in the end, they were forced to punt. Once again, Whittier had possession of the ball, this time on their own twenty-seven yard line. There were three minutes left to play in the game.

“Now!” I breathed a fervent prayer. “Let’s go now!” I addressed the close-up of Terry Niemath on the TV screen as she called an audible at the scrimmage line.

I’m not sure if Stephanie misunderstood or not. In any case, she drew my prick deep inside her warm, wet mouth and licked the sensitive head voraciously. One of her hands squeezed my balls as she did this. The other one was between her own legs, toying lightly with her exposed and quivering clitoris. By angling my head, I could just barely see her fingers playing in her pussy as she sucked cock. It distracted me from the game.

Abruptly she stopped, removed her mouth from my stiff prick and looked up at me. Her red lips were glistening, her green eyes sultry, her breath coming in quick, erotic little gasps. “I don’t want you to miss the game,” she said. “You keep watching. Don’t pay any attention to me. I’ll just keep on doing what I like to do. But you watch your Superbowl.” And once again her sensitive and innovative mouth enveloped me.

I watched the screen. The Eagles’ defense was set up to guard against the expected passing blitz. Terry frustrated them with a series of hand-offs and fakes for the kind of short yardage that nevertheless added up. Thus, as Stephanie drew my cock deep into her throat so she could lick my balls while sucking it, the Stonewalls made their way to midfield.

The two-minute warning sounded. . . . Stephanie withdrew her mouth to rest a moment and squeezed my straining prick between the soft, panting globes of her firm white breasts . . . Terry handed off to her running back for five yards . . . Stephanie rubbed one of her long, red nipples into the wide stretched hole at the head of my cock . . . Terry completed a sideline pass to Pete Gorgonzola, who stepped out of bounds with one minute thirty-seven to play . . . Stephanie stood up alongside the bed to pull off her nightgown. The black silk slid up her voluptuous body with a rustle, the sensuality of which was confirmed by her straining nipples and honey-coated pussy-lips and by my hard-bucking cock . . . Two more of Terry’s passes went incomplete and the clock continued to run . . . Stephanie stretched luxuriously, her tall, beautifully proportioned body shimmering in the flickering light cast by the TV screen . . . Terry’s third bullet in a row connected and she had eked out another first down with fifty-seven seconds left in the quarter . . . Stephanie stretched out beside me carefully, not blocking the screen, and rubbed her hot, damp cunt against my thigh . . . Forty-two seconds left and six yards short of another first down . . . “I’m so hot!” Stephanie murmured in my ear. “You can keep watching the game, but please—Please!—fuck me now!” . .. Third down, one yard to go and thirty-six, thirty-five, thirty-four seconds left in the game . . . “I’m going to straddle you so you can see,” Stephanie promised, suiting the action to the word. Crouching with one knee on either side of my hips, she slowly -- savoringly—lowered her raw and quivering pink pussy over my upstanding cock until it pressed down and spread out over my groin. “Oh, God!” Her breasts swayed wildly back and forth as she rocked to increase the sensation of my hard prick filling her clutching quim . . . Twenty-three seconds left, and Terry called Whittier’s last time-out in order to go over to the sidelines and confer with Coach Newtrokni. She came back in with Horseshoe Cohen. They, were going for the field goal . “Fuck me!” Stephanie’s sharp fingernails clawed underneath me as she moved up and down along the length of my prick. I felt her clitty rubbing hard with the movement and the way she moaned testified to the arousal of the contact. “Fuck me!” she repeated and I began to thrust upward, deep and hard, in tempo with her movements . . . The kick was good! The score was all tied up at twenty-twenty with eight seconds left in the final quarter . . . Stephanie stretched her long legs out full-length up my body so that my hard-pumping cock might penetrate her more deeply. I grabbed her hips and pulled her to me as I continued to move in and out of her clutching quim. The inside of her pussy felt like an oven around the frankfurter of my lust . . . my balls bouncing against the underside of her thrusting ass, the two of us fucked away those last eight seconds of vain endeavor for the Eagles and sudden death overtime was now the situation facing both Superbowl teams . . . “Harder!” Stephanie panted as the beer commercial preceding the sudden death period came on the screen. “Faster!” She ground down on me so that her cunt circled my cock in such a way as to stimulate every tactile surface of both organs. “Oh! You fuck so goo-oo-ood!” Stephanie groaned. “Don’t stop! I’m coming! Soon! . . . Soon! . . . Soon I’m going to come!” . . . The team captains faced off. The referee tossed the coin to see who was going to receive. It spun high in the air . . . “FUCK! FUCK!” Stephanie scrambled to change position. She flung herself on her back and doubled her body so that her long legs locked around my neck. She pulled me over on top of her. I stabbed my frothing cock into her gaping, hungry cunt and resumed screwing her like a jackhammer. “YES! YES!” Stephanie’s arms flailed wildly behind her. “FUCK! FUCK!” . . . As the coin fell to the ground, her hand tangled in the wire to the TV set, pulling the plug. The screen went dead. . .“NOW!” Stephanie bleated “I’M COMING! I’M COMING! I’M COMING! . . .”

Stephanie came!

I came!

Can anybody tell me who won Superbowl XVI?

Notes

[←1 ]

Alfred Charles Kinsey (June 23, 1894 – August 25, 1956) was an American biologist, professor of entomology and zoology, and sexologist who in 1947 founded the Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University, previously known as the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction. He is best known for writing Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953), also known as the Kinsey Reports, as well as the Kinsey scale. Kinsey's research on human sexuality, foundational to the field of sexology, provoked controversy in the 1940s and 1950s. His work has influenced social and cultural values in the United States, as well as internationally.

[←2 ]

The Masters and Johnson research team, composed of William H. Masters and Virginia E. Johnson, pioneered research into the nature of human sexual response and the diagnosis and treatment of sexual disorders and dysfunctions from 1957 until the 1990s. In the initial phase of Masters and Johnson's studies, from 1957 until 1965, they recorded some of the first laboratory data on the anatomy and physiology of human sexual response based on direct observation of 382 women and 312 men in what they conservatively estimated to be “10,000 complete cycles of sexual response”. Their findings, particularly on the nature of female sexual and orgasm, dispelled many long-standing misconceptions. They jointly wrote two classic texts in the field, Human Sexual Response and Human Sexual Inadequacy, published in 1966 and 1970, respectively.

[←3 ]

Alexander Comfort (10 February 1920 – 26 March 2000) was a British scientist and physician known best for his nonfiction sex manual, The Joy of Sex (1972), which played a part in the sexual revolution of the last third of the XXth century. He was an author of both fiction and nonfiction, as well as a gerontologist, anarchist, pacifist, and conscientious objector.

[←4 ]

Reference to indicted president Nixon’s famous phrase “I am not a crook”. Nixon made the declaration during a press conference in Orlando, Florida., amid charges related to the Watergate break-in and subsequent scandal (1972-73).

[←5 ]

Florynce Rae “Flo” Kennedy (February 11, 1916 – December 21, 2000) was an American lawyer, feminist, civil rights advocate, lecturer and activist.

[←6 ]

Jerry Lamon Falwell Sr. (August 11, 1933 – May 15, 2007) was an American Southern Baptist pastor, trelevangelist, and conservative activist.He was the founding pastor of the Thomas Road Baptist Church, a megachurch in Lynchburg, Virginia. He founded Lynchburg Christian Academy (now Liberty Christian Academy) in 1967 and Liberty University in 1971 and co-founded the Moral Majority in 1979. Falwell condemned homosexuality as forbidden by the Bible. Gay rights groups called Falwell an “agent of intolerance” and “the founder of the anti-gay industry”. Falwell told one crowd, “Gay folks would just as soon kill you as look at you.” When the LGBT-friendly Metropolitan Community Church was almost accepted into the World Council of Churches, Falwell called them “brute beasts” and stated, “this vile and satanic system will one day be utterly annihilated and there'll be a celebration in heaven.”

[←7 ]

Allusion to film star John Wayne, who died in 1979. He was nicknamed “Duke”.

[←8 ]

Poland born Karol Józef Wojtyła (18 May 1920 – 2 April 2005) served as Pope John Paul II from 1978 to 2005.

[←9 ]

Probable references to Nelson Rockefellerf, former vice-president, Henry Kissinger, political consultant, Zbigniew Kazimierz “Zbig” Brzezinski, National Security Advisor, Alexander Haig, commander of NATO forces in Europe, and commander in chief of United States European Command.

[←10 ]

Cotton Mather (February 12, 1663 – February 13, 1728) was a socially and politically influential New England Puritan minister, prolific author, and pamphleteer. He is most frequently remembered today for his involvement in the Salem witch trials.

[←11 ]

Jimmy Carter, who served as the 39th President of the United States from 1977 to 1981.

[←12 ]

Possible reference to general David Jones (1921-2013), Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under president Carter

[←13 ]

Probable refernce to Henry Kissinger an American statesman, political scientist, diplomat and geopolitical consultant who served as the United States Secretary of State and National Security Advisor under the presidential administrations of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. After leaving government, he formed Kissinger Associates, an international geopolitical consulting firm.

[←14 ]

Probable reference to Richard McGarrah Helms (March 30, 1913 – October 23, 2002) who served as the United States Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) from June 1966 to February 1973. His last post in government service was Ambassador to Iran, 1973–1977

[←15 ]

Allusion to president Ronald Reagan, an aging Hollywood actor.

[←16 ]

Wesley Branch Rickey (December 20, 1881 – December 9, 1965) was an American baseball player and sports executive. He was perhaps best known for breaking Major League Baseball's color barriers by signing black player Jackie Robinson and for drafting the first Hispanic superstar, Roberto Clemente.

[←17 ]

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (26 October 1919 – 27 July 1980), also known as Mohammad Reza Shah, was the last Shah of Iran from 16 September 1941 until his overthrow by the Iranian Revolution on 11 February 1979.

[←18 ]

Back in 1979, Chrysler was on the verge of bankruptcy and in desperate need of a $1.5 billion loan from the federal government. The bailout of Chrysler was an important milestone in U.S. history. It came at a time when the Cold War was at its height and the perceived economic decline of the U.S. was in full force. For many, the fall of an American icon would have led the country down a path of economic hardship that would be hard to break. Also, and perhaps more importantly, he fear was that if Chrysler went under, the national security of the country would be compromised by the loss of a manufacturer for tanks, trucks and other vehicles.

[←19 ]

The Vietnam War, also known in Vietnam as the Resistance War Against America, was a conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. America’s entry into the war was propagandized as”humanitarian”.

[←20 ]

Equal Rights Advocates (ERA) is a non-profit women's rights organization that was founded in 1974. ERA is a legal organization dedicated to protecting and expanding economic and educational access and opportunities for women and girls. The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), which states that “equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex,” was originally introduced to Congress in 1923 -- three years after women gained the right to vote -- but never reached the House or Senate floor. The National Organization for Women, which was founded in 1966 and advocated for a “fully equal partnership of the sexes,” soon endorsed the ERA and made passing it into the U.S. Constitution a top priority. (The amendment had been unsuccessfully presented to every session of Congress between 1923 and 1970.) In January 1977, Indiana became the 35th state to ratify the ERA. The amendment was now only three states shy of becoming law, but the effort was losing momentum. Many feminists saw the National Women's Conference in November 1977 as a chance to breathe new life into it. More than 14,000 women gathered to discuss the problems facing women and formulate a plan of action to deliver to President Carter. Still, the amendment was overturned.

[←21 ]

John Edgar Hoover (January 1, 1895 – May 2, 1972) was an American law enforcement administrator and the first Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) of the United States. From the 1940s, rumors circulated that Hoover was homosexual. The historians John Stuart Cox and Athan G. Theoharis speculated that Clyde Tolson, who became an assistant director of Hoover in his mid 40s, was a homosexual lover to Hoover (and became his primary heir) until his death. Hoover reportedly hunted down and threatened anyone who made insinuations about his sexuality. Rumors kept emerging, some of them categorizing Hoover as a transvestite.

[←22 ]

Reference to the Stanley Kubrick 1968 masterpiece “2001, a Space Odyssey”.

[←23 ]

Ronald Wilson Reagan (February 6, 1911 – June 5, 2004) was an American statesman who served as the 40th President of the United States from 1981 to 1989. Prior to the presidency, he was a mediocre Hollywood actor and trade union leader before serving as the 33rd Governor of California from 1967 to 1975.

[←24 ]

Billie Jean King (née Moffitt; born November 22, 1943) is an American former World No. 1 professional tennis player. King is an advocate for gender equality and has long been a pioneer for equality and social justice. In 1973, at age 29, she won the "Battle of the Sexes" tennis match against the 55-year-old Bobby Riggs. King was also the founder of the Women's Tennis Association and the Women's Sports Foundation.

[←25 ]

David Alan Stockman (born November 10, 1946) is an American politician and former businessman who served as a Republican U.S. Representative from the state of Michigan (1977–1981) and as the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (1981–1985) under President Ronald Reagan.

[←26 ]

William Frank Buckley Jr. (November 24, 1925 – February 27, 2008) was an American conservative author and commentator. He founded National Review magazine in 1955, which had a major impact in stimulating the conservative movement.

[←27 ]

Bella Savitzky Abzug (July 24, 1920 – March 31, 1998), nicknamed "Battling Bella", was an American lawyer, U.S. Representative, social activist and a leader of the Women's Movement. In 1971, Abzug joined other leading feminists to found the National Women's Political Caucus.

[←28 ]

Jerry Lamon Falwell Sr. (August 11, 1933 – May 15, 2007) was an American Southern Baptist pastor, televangelist, and conservative activist. He was the founding pastor of the Thomas Road Baptist Church, a megachurch in Lynchburg, Virginia. He founded Lynchburg Christian Academy (now Liberty Christian Academy) in 1967 and Liberty University in 1971 and co-founded the Moral Majority in 1979.

[←29 ]

Katherine Murray Millett (September 14, 1934 – September 6, 2017) was an American feminist writer, educator, artist, and activist. She attended Oxford University and was the first American woman to be awarded a degree with first-class honors after studying at St Hrilda's College, Oxford. She has been described as "a seminal influence on second-wave feminism", and is best known for her book Sexual Politics (1970).

[←30 ]

Muhammad Ali (born Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr.; January 17, 1942 – June 3, 2016) was an American professional boxer, activist, and philanthropist. He is widely regarded as one of the most significant and celebrated sports figures of the 20th century. From early in his career, Ali was known as an inspiring, controversial, and polarizing figure both inside and outside the ring.

[←31 ]

Henry Warren Beatty (March 30, 1937) is an American actor and filmmaker. He has been nominated for fourteen Academy Awards. Prior to marrying Annette Bening in 1992, Beatty was well known for his womanizing and high-profile romantic relationships that received generous media coverage

[←32 ]

Elizabeth Holtzman (born August 11, 1941) is an American politician and former member of the United States House of Representatives. She was the first woman to hold office as the New York City Comptroller, and the District Attorney of Kings County, New York. In 1978, Holtzman secured an extension of the deadline for state legislatures to ratify the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the United States Constitution (The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) was a proposed amendment to the United States Constitution designed to guarantee equal legal rights for all American citizens regardless of sex; it seeks to end the legal distinctions between men and women in terms of divorce, property, employment, and other matters.).

[←33 ]

Phyllis McAlpin Schlafly (August 15, 1924 – September 5, 2016) was an American constitutional lawyer and conservative political activist. She was known for staunchly conservative social and political views, antifeminism, opposition to legal abortion, and her successful campaign against ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

[←34 ]

Edward Irving Koch (December 12, 1924 – February 1, 2013) was an American lawyer, politician, political commentator, movie critic and reality television arbitrator. He served in the United States House of Representatives from 1969 to 1977 and was mayor of New York City from 1978 to 1989. Koch was a lifelong Democrat who described himself as a "liberal with sanity". A lifelong bachelor with no children, Koch rebuffed speculation about his sexuality and refused to publicly discuss his romantic relationships. After his retirement from politics, he declared that he was heterosexual.

[←35 ]

Jane Seymour Fonda (born December 21, 1937) is an American actress, writer, political activist, former fashion model and fitness guru. Fonda was a highly visible political activist in the counterculture era during the Vietnam War and later became involved in advocacy for women. She has also protested the Iraq War and violence against women, and describes herself as a feminist. In 2005, she, Robin Morgan and Gloria Steinem co-founded the Women's Media Center, an organization that works to amplify the voices of women in the media through advocacy, media and leadership training, and the creation of original content.

[←36 ]

Jim Plunkett (born December 5, 1947) is a former American football quarterback who played in the National Football League (NFL) for sixteen seasons.

[←37 ]

Terry Paxton Bradshaw (born September 2, 1948) is a former American football quarterback who played professionally in the National Football League

[←38 ]

Mary Jean "Lily" Tomlin (born September 1, 1939) is an American actress, comedian, writer, singer, and producer. Tomlin began her career as a stand-up comedian, and performing Off-Broadway during the 1960s. In 1980, Tomlin co-starred in 9 to 5, in which she played a secretary named Violet Newstead who joins coworkers Jane Fonda and Dolly Parton in seeking revenge on their boss. Tomlin starred in the 1981 science fiction comedy, The Incredible Shrinking Woman, a send-up of consumerism, and was the sickly heiress in the comedy, All of Me, opposite Steve Martin.

[←39 ]

Hugh Leo Carey (April 11, 1919 – August 7, 2011) was an American politician and attorney. He served as a seven-term (1961–1974) United States Representative, as well as 51st Governor of New York from 1975 to 1982. He is also remembered for preventing conservative legislators from reinstating the death penalty and preventing such legislators from taking away state abortion laws.

[←40 ]

James Earle Breslin (October 17, 1928 – March 19, 2017) was an American journalist and author. Breslin began working for the Long Island Press as a copy boy in the 1940s. After leaving college, he became a columnist. His early columns were attributed to politicians and ordinary people that he chatted with in various watering holes near Queens Borough Hall. Breslin was a columnist for the New York Herald Tribune, the Daily News, the New York Journal American, Newsday, The Daily Beast and other venues

[←41 ]

Edward Moore "Ted" Kennedy (February 22, 1932 – August 25, 2009) was an American democrat politician who served in the United States Senate from Massachusetts for almost 47 years, from 1962 until his death in 2009. Kennedy became a committed champion of women's issues and of gay rights, and established relationships with select Republican senators to block Reagan's actions and preserve and improve the Voting Rights Act, funding for AIDS treatment, and equal funding for women's sports.

[←42 ]

Edmund Gerald "Jerry" Brown Jr. (born April 7, 1938) is an American politician, author and lawyer serving as the 39th and current Governor of California since 2011, previously holding the position from 1975 to 1983. After his Senate defeat in 1982, many considered Brown's political career to be over. He traveled to Japan to study Buddhism. In an interview, he explained, "Since politics is based on illusions, zazen definitely provides new insights for a politician.

[←43 ]

Norman Kingsley Mailer (January 31, 1923 – November 10, 2007) was an American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, film-maker, actor, and liberal political activist. Mailer is considered an innovator of creative nonfiction, a genre sometimes called New Journalism, which uses the style and devices of literary fiction in fact-based journalism.

[←44 ]

Christie Ann Hefner (born November 8, 1952) is the former Playboy Enterprises Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, a company created by her father, Hugh Hefner. She stepped down from her position at Playboy on January 30, 2009. She has often worked with the progressive political organization Center for American Progress. Their site describes her as having "long been involved in electing progressive candidates, advancing women, First Amendment issues and advancing treatment for people with HIV/AIDS."

[←45 ]

William Bradford Shockley Jr. (February 13, 1910 – August 12, 1989) was an American physicist and inventor. Shockley was the manager of a research group at Bell Labs that included John Bardeen and Walter Brattain. The three scientists were jointly awarded the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for "their researches on semiconductors and their discovery of the transistor effect." Late in his life, Shockley became intensely interested in questions of race, human intelligence, and eugenics. Shockley argued that a higher rate of reproduction among the less intelligent was having a dysgenic effect, and that a drop in average intelligence would ultimately lead to a decline in civilization. Shockley’s views were heavily criticized, e.g. by Roger Witherspoon, who compared Shockley's advocacy of a voluntary sterilization program to Nazi experiments on Jews.

[←46 ]

Sir Michael Philip Jagger (born 26 July 1943), known professionally as Mick Jagger, is an English singer-songwriter, musician, composer and actor who gained fame as the lead singer and one of the founder members of the Rolling Stones. Jagger's career has spanned over five decades, and he has been described as "one of the most popular and influential frontmen in the history of rock & roll".His distinctive voice and performances, along with Keith Richards' guitar style have been the trademark of the Rolling Stones throughout the band's career. Jagger gained press notoriety for his admitted drug use and romantic involvements, and was often portrayed as a countercultural figure.

[←47 ]

Abbot Howard Hoffman (November 30, 1936 – April 12, 1989) was an American political and social activist, anarchist, and revolutionary who co-founded the Youth International Party ("Yippies").

[←48 ]

Eugene Luther Gore Vidal (October 3, 1925 – July 31, 2012) was an American writer and public intellectual known for his patrician manner, epigrammatic wit, and polished style of writing. As a political commentator and essayist, Vidal's principal subject was the history of the United States and its society, especially how the militaristic foreign policy reduced the country to a decadent empire. As a public intellectual, Gore Vidal's topical debates on sex, politics, and religion with other intellectuals and writers occasionally turned into quarrels with the likes of William F. Buckley Jr. and Norman Mailer. Vidal thought all men and women are potentially bisexual, so he rejected the adjectives "homosexual" and "heterosexual" when used as nouns, as inherently false terms used to classify and control people in society.

[←49 ]

Paul Krassner (born April 9, 1932) is an American author, journalist, comedian, and the founder, editor and a frequent contributor to the freethought magazine The Realist, first published in 1958. Krassner became a key figure in the counterculture of the 1960s as a member of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters and a founding member of the Yippies.

[←50 ]

Ayatollah Khomeini, was an Iranian Shia Islam religious leader and politician. He was the founder of Iran as an Islamic republic and the leader of its 1979 Iranian Revolution that saw the overthrow of 2,500 years of Persian monarchy and Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last Shah of Iran. Following the revolution, Khomeini became the country's Supreme Leader, a position created in the constitution of the Islamic Republic as the highest-ranking political and religious authority of the nation, which he held until his death. Shortly after assuming power, Khomeini began calling for Islamic revolutions across the Muslim world, endorsing anti-american politics and muslim fundamentalism.

[←51 ]

Margaret Hilda Thatcher (13 October 1925 – 8 April 2013) was a British stateswoman who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990 and Leader of the Conservative Party from 1975 to 1990. She was the longest-serving British prime minister of the 20th century and the first woman to hold that office. A Soviet journalist dubbed her the Iron Lady, a nickname that became associated with her uncompromising politics and leadership style.

[←52 ]

References to Sigmund Freud (6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939) was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis; he was the first psycho-analyst to attach importance to dreams and analysed them as wish-fulfillments. August Strindberg (22 January 1849 – 14 May 1912) a Swedish playwright, novelist, poet, essayist and painter - His A Dream Play (1902) – with its radical attempt to dramatize the workings of the unconscious by means of an abolition of conventional dramatic time and space and the splitting, doubling, merging, and multiplication of its characters – was an important precursor to both expressionism and surrealism. Ernst Ingmar Bergman (14 July 1918 – 30 July 2007) was a Swedish director, writer, and producer who worked in film, television, theatre and radio. Considered to be among the most accomplished and influential filmmakers of all time. His work mostly deals with death, illness, faith, betrayal, guilt, bleakness and insanity

[←53 ]

Raquel Welch (September 5, 1940) is an American actress and singer. Images of her in the doe-skin bikini which she wore in One Million Years B.C. (1966) became best-selling posters that turned her into a celebrity sex symbol. Welch's unique persona on film made her into an icon of the 1960s and 1970s. She carved out a place in movie history portraying strong female characters and breaking the mold of the submissive sex symbol.

[←54 ]

Electroshock Therapy.

[←55 ]

Transcendental meditation.

[←56 ]

Howard William Cosell (March 25, 1918 – April 23, 1995) was an American sports journalist who was widely known for his blustery, cocksure personality. Cosell said of himself, "Arrogant, pompous, obnoxious, vain, cruel, verbose, a showoff. There's no question that I'm all of those things."

[←57 ]

Robert Charles Joseph Edward Sabatini Guccione (December 17, 1930 – October 20, 2010) was an American photographer and the founder of the adult magazine Penthouse in 1965. n 1976, Guccione used about US $17.5 million of his personal fortune to finance the controversial historical epic pornographic film, Caligula, with Malcolm McDowell in the title role and a supporting cast including Helen Mirren, John Gielgud and Peter O'Toole.

[←58 ]

Where's Charley? is a musical with music and lyrics by Frank Loesser and book by George Abbott, about an Oxford undergraduate posing as a classmate's aunt from Brazil.

[←59 ]

Allusion to Henry Kissinger.

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