A WORD IN EDGEWISE
HOW I LOST THE BEA STORY CONTEST
GONZO

     "Hmph," I said.
     Alexandra --who was exercising naked to an ancient Jane Fonda video-- craned her neck and peered at me over her cute little ass, which was at the moment suspended over her cute not-so-little chest in an upside-down imaginary-bicycle-riding exercise. "'Hmph' what?"
     "Oh, nothing really... the BEArchive's doing some sort of breast expansion story writing contest."
     "'Hmph' indeed. Any prizes?"
     "Cold cash, amazingly enough. Five hundred bucks for first prize."
     "Evelyn Oberlin down at Javelin Travel says she can get us four days in St. Thomas for five hundred," Alex said as she stood up, turned her back to me, and began a set of very distracting toe-touches. "Gonna enter it?"
     "Aaah, probably not. It says you have to use one of their suggested plotlines..."
     "Oh, and that's too hard?"
     "It's just restrictive," I said, then threw out my chest and inserted my hand Napoleonically between the buttons of my shirt. "I prefer to be unfettered when I'm creating my art."
     Still doing toe-touches, Alex threw me an upside-down wink as her face appeared between her knees, then giggled and winked again with another set of muscles entirely. "Well gee, Mr. Michelangelo, how does your artistic integrity stand up against five hundred bucks?"
     "I will starve to preserve my vision, and live in a cardboard box by the railroad tracks on McGuirk Avenue if necessary."
     "Better start writing, wise guy, unless you wanna live there alone. I'm not giving up the shower massage or the Black and Decker vibrator that plugs into the wall socket."
     I pouted, which probably looked disgusting. "Gosh, Ms de'Medici, aren't I man enough to satisfy you?"
     "How could you be?" she asked with another wink. "You're just one guy."
     "It must be exhausting to be so insatiable."
     "What can I say? I'm a direct descendant of Catherine the Great, and there's a horse shortage."
     "Seriously, though... look at these plotlines they suggested. I can't write anything good around these; they're all clichés..."
     "You can't let them box you in. You have to be creative. You have to invent ways to get around the clichés."
     "That's easy to say, but..."
     "Aw, it's a piece of cake, you big baby."
     "Prove it."
     "You're on, Hemingway. Read 'em to me while I work on my thighs of steel."

     "Okay, here we go... PLOTLINE 1: A woman suddenly develops an unusual allergy to dairy products. She never before realized how many different foods contain milk."
     "Oh, so she's an idiot?"
     "Huh?"
     "Who goes around not realizing how many different foods contain milk? Come on, she's a moron! She eats a spoonful of sour cream because she doesn't realize that sour cream contains milk, and has an unusual allergic reaction?"
     "Uh, guess so..."
     "So what sort of unusual allergic reaction might she have? Might she --oh, I don't know-- grow giant breasts?"
     "That's generally the way these things go, yes."
     "It'd serve the judges right if the allergic reaction just makes her a little smarter, and she walks around for the rest of the story going, 'Ohhh, I'll bet this hot fudge sundae has milk in it, too!'"
     "Uh, that's not..."
     "Or maybe she just goes right into anaphylactic shock..."
     "I'm sure that's not what they had in mind."
     "...And winds up in a hospital where they accidentally do a breast augmentation on her."
     "Hmmm, that sounded a lot like cheating."
     "Never mind; that plotline sucks. What's the next one?"

     "It's not much better... PLOTLINE 2: An apprentice sorceress peeks into a forbidden book of spells when her teacher goes away on vacation."
     "Christ, another idiot! Hasn't anybody in these stupid stories ever heard of Pandora's Box?"
     "Apparently not. That's a porn-links site, right?"
     "Cute. You sound just like a real comedian. So she looks at the forbidden book of spells, and accidentally casts one that causes somebody's breasts to expand, right?
     "Generally, yeah."
     "Okay, maybe it causes her vacationing teacher to develop an unusual allergy to dairy products."
     "That's definitely cheating..."
     "Get used to it, buddy boy; I'm a woman. This so-called teacher gets to go to St. Thomas and I don't, so I say the lucky bitch develops an unusual allergy to dairy products. In fact, she doesn't even get to St. Thomas. She eats some frozen yogurt on the boat ride to the island, her boobs grow to the size of grain silos, the boat capsizes, and everybody drowns."
     "You're not really proving your point, y'know."
     "Shut up and read the next one."

     "Okayyyy... PLOTLINE 3: A girl is surprised upon meeting her cousin whom she hasn't seen for six months and who has developed an incredibly large bust."
     "And then what?"
     "That's it."
     "You mean it's just, Hi, Wilma; what the fuck happened to your tits; oh, that's very surprising; the end?"
     "I think it's meant to be a little more open-ended than that."
     "Oh, I can do open-ended," she said, and proved it right in the middle of one of the girl-style pushups she was doing.
     "Wow," I said, "When you leave your mouth open, I can see the kitchen through there."
     "Quiet, I'm concentrating. The cousin has been having a secret affair for the last six months with Bill Gates, who hired a team of evil geneticists to steal the relevant chromosome maps from the Human Genome Project in order to turn her into the first of a race of mutant big busty bitches who sleep with other women's husbands, and she's carrying Gates' warty, booger-faced love child, also known as The Antichrist, who will one day develop Windows 666 and lead the world into darkness."
     "Alex, that's just terrible."
     "Did I say it had to be a good story?"
     "Well..."
     "Did I?"
     "Uh, no."
     "Right," she said as she grabbed a towel and padded out to the kitchen. "I'm thirsty. Want anything from the 'fridge?"
     "No thanks; I'm still working on this beer."
     "What's this stuff in the yellow tupperware thingy?" she shouted from the other end of the apartment.
     "It's part of a peach smoothie that Annie left here yesterday."
     "Yummy," she said, and then I heard a slurp, a little yelp of surprise, and the double thump of two soft, heavy objects striking the kitchen floor.
     "You all right in there, kiddo?"
     "Goddammit, Gonzo! These watermelons keep rolling out of the refrigerator! I'm gonna chock them with this wedge of cheddar, okay?"
     "Whatever works."
     "Okay, tragedy averted," she said, bustling back into the room with a mug in her hand and a dribble of peach smoothie on the upper slope of one breast. "What's the next plotline?"

     "Let's see... PLOTLINE 4: A scientist discovers a device which can control a woman's breast size, as well as her mind."
     "Fine. The first time he turns it off, his victims cram the device up his ass, and then go looking for the misogynist jerk who thought up the plotline. Next."

     "It can't be any worse than that one, I guess... PLOTLINE 5: A college freshman arrives at her dorm to find all the girls suspiciously busty, then discovers the secret. What could it be? And will she soon join them?"
     "And will the readers doze off before anything interesting happens at all?"
     "That could be a danger, I guess..."
     "Well, obviously it's the food in the cafeteria. Those institutional cafeterias are just breeding grounds for breast-expanding bacteria, you know."
     "I wasn't aware of that."
     "Oh yeah... one bite of your average little dish of green Jell-O with tiny unrecognizable fruit chunks suspended in it can turn a freshman coed into Brittany Bazooms in a matter of seconds."
     "That's not a very interesting explanation," I said.
     "Well, you could make it a mad professor from the medical school who develops a process for stimulating fat cell growth, or a gym coach who hands out very special vitamin supplements, or an odd combination of notes in the school's fight song, but I think green Jell-O is the way to go. You just have to make it fly with strong characterizations. Susie, the sensitive girl from down the hall. Marti, the tennis scholarship student with a painful secret. And Louise the Lunchroom Lady, the most breathtakingly vivid literary villain since Hannibal Lecter, who poisons the entire student body in order to satisfy her deviant craving for heaving handfuls of juicy jug-meat."
     "What did you just say?"
     "Never mind, I got carried away. Read the next one."

     "It's...PLOTLINE 6: Something in the village of Hooterville is slowly turning every girl in town into a topheavy ditzy bimbo."
     "What a bunch of crap! That's exactly the same plot as the one before it!"
     "True, except that you're overlooking the 'ditzy bimbo' angle."
     "'Ditzy bimbo' is not an 'angle'. 'Ditzy bimbo' is an affront to womankind."
     "There isn't enough room in this apartment for womankind. Would you mind just remaining an individual for a while? At least until bedtime?"
     "Ditzy bimboism is gender oppression. It's fantasy foot-binding for men who can't handle real women. Gotta dumb the girls down, because the readers are afraid to form mature relationships with actual--"
     "You're ranting, Alex."
     "That's exactly the sort of reaction I'd expect from you. 'Find a man with brains and sensitivity,' mama said, but noooo, I always fall for horny dumb guys with credit cards and chronic boners..."
     "Okay, okay; I get the point."
     "Good; maybe you're not quite as dumb as I thought. Read the next plotline, bimbo boy."

     "Fortunately, it's the last one... PLOTLINE 7: A plain, flatchested girl finds that for 24 hours on her 18th birthday, everything she says comes magically true."
     "Oh, so the first thing out of her mouth is 'Golly, I wish my boobies were bigger', huh? I don't think so..."
     "You don't, huh?"
     "Hell no. First she'll want horrible revenge on Sandi Spencer for stealing Bobby McCandless from her in seventh grade, and a white Porsche Boxster, and slightly longer legs. After that, it's off to New York for the new wardrobe, the rent-controlled loft in Manhattan, and her new job as design director at Ikea. Once all those duckies are in a row, she'll be ready to fuck her way through the male cast of Dawson's Creek before embarking on the around-the-world trip with Tom Cruise and Sean Connery."
     "I'm impressed that you didn't seem to have to think about any of that before saying it."
     "My point is that a wish for bigger boobies is gonna be pretty far down on the list... somewhere after eyebrows that never need plucking, and just above all those things beauty contestants wish for in the question-and-answer round of competition, like world peace and an end to famine..."
     "So your brilliant idea of a way to work around this plotline would be...?"
     "Have her wish for more wishes."
     "Everybody wishes for more wishes."
     "Clichés don't get to be clichés because they're wrong, y'know."
     "No, they get to be clichés because they're boring."
     "Okay, what if she does wish for bigger boobs? Then what? Hours and hours of unprotected sex with a bunch of faceless strangers? She's just 'plain and flatchested', dammit, she's not some kind of ogre who'll never get a chance to have sex again."
     "You mean plain flatchested girls do have sex?"
     "Well, somebody out there has to fuck the four-eyed geeks who read these stories..."
     "So that brilliant workaround for this plotline is...?"
     "Screw it. Who cares?"
     "My point exactly."
     She took a sip from the mug she was holding and made a face. "Y'know, I think this smoothie may have started to ferment."
     "I kinda doubt it... Annie just got it at the mall yesterday, and it's been in the 'fridge ever since..."
     "Well something's wrong with it. It's making me feel all tingly."
     "Probably just the poor circulation to your brain..."
     "Oh, what's happening to me?" she cried, casting a desperate, searching, and entirely too melodramatic gaze in the general direction of the upper stratosphere. "Maybe there are dairy products in this smoothie! And tiny bits of emulsified green Jell-O! My breasts... my sweet, creamy breasts are growing bigger, heavier, fatter, blubberier! They're out of control! Whatever shall I do? They seem to have minds of their own! They're compelling me to turn into a topheavy ditzy bimbo who's highly susceptible to suggestion! Why, if you were to suggest at this very moment that I pour the rest of this peach smoothie into your pants and give you an extra-sloppy blowjob, I'd be powerless to resist!"
     "Anal sex," I droned hypnotically. "You are desperate for anal sex..."
     "Don't press your luck, smartass."