Walk on the Wild Side - By Karl Edward Wagner Page 0,124

and there were needle marks sullen against his arm.

Kim was removing latex surgical gloves. They were covered with blood.

Gale was at the bedside. As was Lana. And Ashley. And Jessica. And Terri. And others.

Maurice gurgled helplessly.

“All finished,” said Kim. “And he’s coming around. No more Demerol. Let him enjoy it.” She set aside his suture kit.

Along with Kim, the others also were all naked. They all must have recently shaved one another, but their filthy slits were open and wet again, showing only a few scars from his surgery. He must remedy that. It was all some sort of hallucination.

Maurice was still too groggy to move on the bed, or to feel pain. Kim was handed a Kotex napkin, and she strapped it firmly over his crotch, securing it in place with lots of surgical tape. It fit perfectly. No bulge. Just like in the retouched photographs in the magazines.

They’d shaved him. No ugly pubic hair. Just a perfect V between his thighs. There was some blood on the Kotex.

“Let’s just leave him like this,” said Kim. “I only rented this place for the week. Registered as May West. Can you believe? The maid will find him in the morning. He won’t be pressing charges. He won’t be pressing anything. Maybe flowers.”

They each bent over him and showed him their clean, smooth crotches. Just like his. The scars were nice. They needed to be stitched and air-brushed once again.

Maurice struggled with the ropes as they dressed and left him. He was still too far under the Demerol to grasp the situation.

He stared drowsily at his air-brushed crotch, wishing to masturbate. A smooth, clean Vee. Airbrushed. No bulge. His dick would rise soon beneath the Kotex.

Then he realized the nature of the gag that was taped inside his mouth. Somehow he still managed one final orgasm.

Old Loves

He had loved her for twenty years, and today he would meet her for the first time. Her name was Elisabeth Kent, but to him she would always be Stacey Steele.

Alex Webley had been an undergraduate in the mid-1960s when The Agency premiered on Saturday night television. This had been at the height of the fad for spy shows—James Bond and imitations beyond counting, then countermoves toward either extreme of realism or parody. Upon such a full sea The Agency almost certainly would have sunk unnoticed, had it not been for the series two stars—or more particularly, had it not been for Elisabeth Kent.

In the role of Stacey Steele she played the delightfully eccentric— “kooky” was the expression of the times—partner of secret agent Harrison Dane, portrayed by actor Garrett Channing—an aging matinee idol, to use the expression of an earlier time. The two were employed by an enigmatic organization referred to simply as The Agency, which dispatched Dane and Miss Steele off upon dangerous assignments throughout the world. Again, nothing in the formula to distinguish The Agency from the rest of the pack—except for the charisma of its co-stars and for a certain stylish audacity to its scripts that became more outrageous as the series progressed.

Initially it was to have been a straight secret agent series: strong male lead assisted by curvaceous ingenue whose scatterbrained exploits would provide at least one good capture and rescue per episode. The role of Harrison Dane went to Garrett Channing—a fortuitous piece of contrary-to-type casting of an actor best remembered as the suave villain or debonair hero of various forgettable 1950s programmers. Channing had once been labeled “the poor man’s James Mason,” and perhaps the casting director had recalled that James Mason had been an early choice to portray James Bond. The son of a Bloomsbury greengrocer, Channing’s Hollywood-nurtured sophistication and charm seemed ideal for the role of American super-spy, Harrison Dane.

Then, through a casting miracle that could only have been through chance and not genius, the role of Stacey Steele went to Elisabeth Kent. Miss Kent was a tall, leggy dancer whose acting experience consisted of several on-and-off-Broadway plays and a brief role in the most recent James Bond film. Playboy, as was its custom, ran a pictorial feature on the lovelies of the latest Bond film and devoted two full pages to the blonde Miss Kent—revealing rather more of her than was permitted in the movies of the day. It brought her to the attention of the casting director, and Elisabeth Kent became Stacey Steele.

Became Stacey Steele, almost literally.

Later they would say that the role destroyed Elisabeth Kent. Her career dwindled miserably afterward. Some critics suggested