Andrea was awakened the next morning by the sharp, irregular pitching of the ship and the sound of someone slapping wet towels off their bedroom walls. She opened her eyes to find that there was a whole lot of strange junk in her bed and the walls had been replaced by a three-dimensional representation of the open ocean.
"Holy fuck! We're in a goddamned lifeboat! That son of a bitch has set us adrift! Sean! Wake up!"
Sean's head was resting on a rather unusual pillow-a case of pate foie gras with perigord truffles-and his right foot was dangling in an ash-can full of Mumm's Cordon Rouge on ice. Andrea shook him as she counted the land formations visible on the horizon and reached a total of zero. "That maniac has set us adrift in the diametrical center of noplace!"
It didn't take Sean long to confirm that Andrea had made a correct assessment of the situation. "Jesus Christ. I wouldn't have believed it. I don't believe it. I didn't believe it. I won't believe it. Shit!"
Andrea's guitar case and their luggage, including Sean's typewriter and all his manuscripts, lay in the bilge of the thirty foot craft, which was crowded with some of the oddest provisions ever to be provided anyone marooned at sea.
"Look at this shit," Sean snorted in disgust when they'd taken the inventory. "A dozen cases of champagne but no water. Tate jots gras, three kinds of caviar, smoked oysters, camembert cheese, herring in cream sauce, smoked anchovies, sardines, and fifty other kinds of appetizers. A goddamned tub of sour cream and onion dip. Radishes and celery and carrot-sticks. Triscuits and sesame crackers and melba toast, fritos… enough potato chips to stuff every teeny-bopper in Des Moines for ten years. But no real food. Five pounds of Columbian tops with pipes and papers. Acid and mescaline and every other drug known to freak-kind. But no first-aid kit."
He opened a chest marked "navigation aids." He pulled out a set of charts and a sextant and a compass. "Look at this." He came up with a gallon can of KY jelly. "There's a note on top. It says, Wise up and mellow out. Sex is the key to salvation. After you have fucked one hundred times you will be able to reach land safely. Have fun. Your friend, Johnny Popper.' That dirty son of a bitch!"
Sean wound up to throw the can overboard but Andrea grabbed his arm. "That's for me, stupid, not for you, and we can't afford to start throwing things overboard for giggles." She confiscated the can and opened it. "Jesus, he's dyed the KY green! That loony doesn't miss a trick. Now why don't you see if you can figure out where the hell we are and how we're supposed to go about getting somewhere else."
Three hours later it was plain-to Sean at least-that where they were was in trouble. There were painstakingly explicit directions with the sextant, and the charts were quite clear. They were sixty miles from Martinique and a slow current was carrying them straight out to sea. Ordinarily the lifeboat, equipped with sails and a powerful engine, would have carried them to Martinique in time for a late lunch, with leisure for a little sport fishing on the way. But although the rigging for the sails was there, the locker marked "sails" contained seven dirty red bandanas. And although there was enough gasoline in 50 gallon drums to get them to Mexico City, the engine was missing its spark plugs. To add insult to injury, the standard oars had been replaced by two plastic toy paddles-one red, the other yellow. There were other alterations, subtle and not so subtle, in the boat's emergency equipment. The short-wave radio had turned into a battery-operated record player. The library consisted of the Mickey Mouse Club song and Frank Sinatra's version of I'll Be Home for Christmas." The drawer marked "flares" held a cap gun and two dozen rolls of caps. The chest labeled "fishing equipment" was occupied by a bamboo pole fitted with ten feet of purple knitting yarn, a red and white bobber, and a hook not quite large enough to land a guppie.
"What the fuck are we going to do?" Sean asked in exasperation. "I mean, to all intents and purposes we've been murdered, right?"
"Let's fuck."
"What?"
Andrea spread some caviar on a cracker and popped it into her mouth. "Has your command of vernacular English forsaken you? I said, Let's fuck." She made a circle with two fingers and pushed another finger in and out of it
"Oh, I get it. You believe what the Guru wrote on top of that KY can-that after we've fucked a hundred times well reach land safely? Well as far as I know sexual intercourse has no influence at all on ocean currents, and I'm goddmaned if I'm going to fuck with you because the Guru tells me I should. It's probably some trick to keep us from figuring out anything that'll really help. Or maybe he thinks what he did will be okay if we die happy."
"Are you not going to fuck with me just because the Guru says you should? Listen, there's not a whole lot else for us to do out here."
"Fucking expends semen, which is very high in nutrients, which then have to be replaced… "
"Sounds like a high school biology teacher's reason why you shouldn't jerk off."
"But we don't have a lot of nutrients around to replace them with on this goddamned floating hors d'ouvres tray."
"I've got the solution to that."
"What?"
"I won't eat. You'll eat and I'll suck you off and swallow it. You'll fuck me without coming and I'll get off, and then I'll suck you off. Those nutrients you're so worried about won't be wasted. Great ecological breakthrough. Perfect recycling. May be the answer to the world's food problems."
"For Shitsake!" Sean laughed in spite of himself. Andrea was sampling the onion dip and rolling a bunch of joints.
"The way I figure it" she said, "Johnny Popper's just goofing on us. Trying to teach us some kind of lesson. If he'd wanted to do us in he could've tied a couple of those Cordon Rouge cases to our feet and dropped us overboard instead of putting them on ice and throwing them in a lifeboat with us." She lit up a joint, took a hit, and passed it to him.
Sean started to take a hit, suddenly became furious and threw the joint overboard. "I suppose you think we're bound to be spotted by a fishing boat or a plane or something? Well for your information we're not in anybody's fishing grounds, we're nowhere near commercial shipping or air lanes, and even if we were we'd have no way to attract anybody's attention. Except with this." He picked up the cap gun and fired three shots into the air. He looked all around the vacant horizon. "Where are they? Why aren't they coming? Do you think maybe they didn't hear that?"
Andrea lit another joint. "Throw these damned things overboard if you want to throw something. We've got these to burn." She handed it to him. He took a hit and obliged. "The way I figure it," she said, "the Guru's gonna come back and pick us up again after a little while. He's got to. I mean, John and Joanna and Joe Lee are on that boat, and they're going to start asking questions."
"Not for a while. After all, we did tell them not to wait up for us. The ship'll be docking in Martinique today and maybe Baloney can get away with telling them that we suddenly decided to go back to New York, had a plane to catch, and didn't get a chance to say goodbye."
"Hardly likely they'll believe it."
"Maybe he'll tell them we asked to borrow one of his lifeboats for a little cruise of our own."
They continued in this vein for some time, with Andrea rolling joints, lighting them, and passing them to Sean, who took one hit from each and threw them overboard. "We ought to be writing notes on these damned things," he said. Andrea sampled half a dozen kinds of hors d'ouvres. "Why don't you open bottle of champagne? These things are making me thirsty."
Sean pulled a bottle out of the ice. "There's no corkscrew, and these bottles aren't the kind you can open with your thumbs. He found a knife, chopped the cork up trying to pry it out, and finally extracted it with his teeth, nearly blowing his head off in the process. "And incidentally," he said, swaying a little bit under the influence of the marijuana as he passed the bottle to her, "even if the Guru wants to come back and pick us up, how the hell's he going to find us? The ocean's a big place, you know."
"Maybe he'll home in on the vibrations of our fucking." Andrea was getting horny and Sean was getting drunk as well as stoned. "So as I said before, let's fuck."
"Will you forget that, please? I told you, I refuse to fuck."
Andrea smiled sweetly at him and pulled down her jeans. She spread out on the floor with her legs wide open. "Okay. Have it your way. You resist just as long as you can."
He eyed her with obvious temptation. She fluffed up her cunt-hair and wiggled a finger casually back and forth on her clit. "By the way, Johnny Popper may be a gold-plated bastard, but he's one hell of a fucker. Before I realized what he'd been saying last night he took me for the ride of my life. Incredible. If you won't fuck me I guess I'll have to get myself off remembering that."
"If you think I'm going to ball you to prove I can shoot a better stick than Phony Baloney, you've got another think coming. Get off however you want, if that's what you want to do."
"Okay, schmuck. I'll wait till we polish off the champagne and get off on the bottle." She rubbed the mouth of the bottle against her pussy. "Or maybe I won't even wait." She kicked her legs up, shoved the bottle in, fingered her clit, and started moaning. The bottle shook and fizzed a column of bubbling champagne up into her hole. "Oh, if Lawrence Welk could see me now… "
"If you could turn that snap-dragon of yours into an opener my teeth would be a hell of a lot better off." Sean was staring at her frothing snap-dragon, much to the detriment of his celibate resolve. "You got me stoned because you knew it would be harder for me to resist!"
Andrea saw she had him going. "Look," she pointed out, "there's no law that says you have to come. Hold onto your silly nutrients, for all I care. Just stick it in here and wiggle it around." She pulled the bottle out of her hole and pointed. "That's all I need. Look-it's a beautiful day. The sun is shining, the waves are waving, the fish are flying… and I'm horny."
"Oh, all right," Sean agreed. "But this is completely ridiculous. I want you to appreciate that. Here we are stranded out in the middle of the ocean… " He pulled off his pants and stuck out his tongue when Andrea pointed triumphantly to his hard-on.
They balled for about fifteen minutes. Halfway through, as they changed position, Andrea said, "Dig it-maybe a plane!! go over, and there's nothing that attracts attention like two people fucking in a lifeboat." She grabbed the KY. "Give me a little of this, will you? That champagne doesn't seem to be getting changed into useful bodily fluids, and I sure as hell don't want to get sore."
Sean shook his head ruefully as he applied the dark green jelly. "I must say that makes you look ludicrous." He dabbed some on his dork. "Me too."
In the end Sean came in spite of himself. He was a little bit upset afterward, but not too much, because as usual it was really mind-blowing to fuck with Andrea, and it made him forget their troubles. Besides, he resolved not to let it happen again.
"All right," Andrea thought to herself when they were done. "One down, ninety-nine to go." She didn't really believe they could fuck their way home, but she'd decided she'd rather go out fucking than moping, and besides, there was always the chance.
For the rest of the day Sean went crazy trying to rig up sails with their clothing, beating the water with the toy paddles, and indulging in sardonic soliloquies about the poetic justice of their situation, mostly centered around their having mixed mercenary greed with altruism, which according to him had created a massive portion of pure stupidity. By dint of much ingenuity and not a little promiscuity Andrea got him to ball her four more times, although he managed to keep from coming each time.
By nightfall Andrea was a good deal more worried than she'd been in the morning. They hadn't seen a sign of life all day-except for an occasional shark's fin cutting the water, which scared the hell out of her. But as the sun went down and the moon came up she took out her guitar and started singing Rock of Ages. Despite the fact that she had a green cunt and a troubled mind, that made her remember back to the beginning of it all and she got excited thinking about her first night with Sean. He really was quite a guy. If they ever got out of this…
She and Sean started reminiscing, wondering about Joe and John and Joanna, dredging up memories of past orgies, and ended up fucking one more time. Sean just had to come because, as he later remarked, if he hadn't he would have ended up with the most humungous case of lovers' nuts in history, and his balls would have been likely to crowd them out of the boat. Still, he was determined to fuck as little as possible-if at all-and requested Andrea to please try to control herself.
After he was asleep Andrea snuck back toward the stern, moved aside a case of smoked octopus, and cut half a dozen notches in the gunwhale with a knife. She figured she might as well keep track.
For the next eleven days Sean and Andrea drifted helplessly out to sea. The currents, carrying them at an average of a little over a mile an hour at first, gradually slackened to nothing, so that they were merely being pushed back and forth by the tides and not going anywhere. Sean figured they were 312 miles from Martinique, still the closest land, at 8:30 in the morning on the twelfth day.
For the first few days their spirits remained good. It turned out that actually their hors d'ouvres were more nutritious than Sean had thought, although he was sure they were eventually going to be hurting for some essential vitamins. But that was hardly his main worry. Twelve cases of champagne weren't going to last forever, which he suspected might be how long they'd be drifting around before anyone found them, and liquids would be their most vital need. And then there was the possibility of storms. The weather was good, with only a few relatively calm rains to drench them down and give them the unpleasant task of bailing out the bilge with sardine cans. But the weather couldn't hold forever any more than the champagne. Still, Sean couldn't believe they were really going to die in a lifeboat in mid-ocean, even though he didn't see how they were going to avoid it either, and when he had his sense of humor about him-especially when he was stoned, which was a good deal of the time-he spent long hours composing meticulously typed letters to the New York Times exposing Baalow Nee for the crook he was and parenthetically mentioning their predicament. These he committed to empty champagne bottles and cast in the direction of New York City with great gusto.
After the fifth day, however, the joke started to wear thin. Andrea, who had kept her seduction plan in high gear all the while, marked off number thirty-nine before going to sleep on the fifth night, and suddenly had a fit of discouragement. She cursed out loud and Sean woke up, forcing her to pee over the side quickly to cover up her notches on the gunwhale. They were going to have to start eating the smoked octopus soon, and then Sean would find the notches anyhow and get pissed off and absolutely refuse to fuck.
She was rapidly realizing how loony it was for her to keep up the facade of blithe sensuality necessary to her seductions. She began to feel like Sheherezade, constantly having to devise new techniques to keep the king's fancy engaged. But the more obvious it became that there wasn't any mortal way for them to help themselves, the more determined she became that they weren't going to lay down and die without giving the mystical solution a chance. She only hoped they wouldn't run out of KY before they reached number 100, because what with drinking only limited amounts of alcohol each day and being constantly exposed to the sun and the elements, they were both getting dehydrated, and without the KY her cunt would get rasped to a frazzle in three seconds. She resolved to use it more sparingly.
She spent many hours trying to figure out how in the world fucking could possibly do them any good. She imagined the wildest things. Maybe the Guru had planted a bug someplace in the boat that allowed someone in the radio room of the True Enlightenment to count off their fucks and he'd come get them or send somebody after them when they'd reached a hundred. Maybe in some mystical telepathic fashion he could just tell when they were fucking and where they were. She worried about whether a fuck counted if both of them didn't come. Then she cursed herself for being so silly as to think about all this in the first place. But she was going to get to 100 come hell or high water, and in the middle of the fifth night she discovered a way to make things go faster.
Sean was, as usual, deep in an exhausted, stoned, and partially drunken stupor. She greased herself up, rolled him over, sucked him for quite a while until he got fairly hard, then crammed him in. "If he ever wakes up and catches me," she thought, "he'll throw me to the sharks." To her surprise she found fucking this way quite pleasant. She took it very easy, letting the rhythm of the rocking boat do most of the work, and built herself up to a peaceful but nonetheless powerful orgasm. She put things back where she'd found them and went to sleep.
Her new technique stood her in good stead for a while, augmenting the countless strip-shows and head-on attacks and protestations of unmanageable sexual appetite with which she managed to bewitch, beguile, and bully Sean into an average of seven or eight fucks a day in spite of himself. She took to copping as many as three or four freebees every night, at the price of having to listen to Sean's wild tales about how the cumulative effects of exposure and a life on rich food and champagne were giving rise to the most unusual and vivid sexual dreams… also his complaints that she seemed for some reason to wake up unusually tired, and napped frequently during the day. But disaster struck on the tenth night when the inevitable happened: Sean woke up in the middle of an orgasmic fantasy to find himself shooting his wad into Andrea's honey-pot and, amid a ceaseless jabbering diatribe about nutrients, forbade her ever to fuck him in his sleep again.
But even with this setback and Sean's consequent refusal to give it to her all the following morning and well into the afternoon, on the eleventh night she pulled aside the case of octopus and cut the ninety-seventh, ninety-eighth, and ninety-ninth notches in the gunwhale. And when Sean took their position the twelfth morning she was possessed of not a little excitement-along with not a little apprehension-at the thought of consummating her appointed task some time during the day. What if they hit a hundred and nothing happened? That would be the ball game as far as she was concerned. Their potato chips were soggy, their champagne was hot, they had enough food for perhaps another week if they stretched it, and then they'd start to starve and drink sea water and go crazy and jump overboard to wrestle the sharks.
And what did she expect to happen? Was a big balloon supposed to float down out of the sky? A yellow submarine from the depths, maybe? Or-this had to be it-a whale had been assigned to come gobble them down and they'd ride back to New York playing dominoes with Jonah.
After Sean had got over his usual first-thing-in-the-morning swearing streak and general dissertation on the hopelessness of their situation Andrea rolled some joints and stripped off her clothes and proceeded to the greasing ritual. She was slightly bitter at the fact that she'd used up just about all the KY-there was no more than an inch and a half in the bottom of the tin, looking thicker and greener and muddier all the time-on her insane project, because fucking would be one of their few remaining pleasures if they really were going to be marooned in mid-ocean for what little remained of their natural lives, and even that would be limited now. She handed Sean a joint.
"Not again," he said, as he took a toke and watched her preparing for action.
"I've got to have it," she insisted. She rubbed up her clit and grabbed for his crotch.
"Not before I have some breakfast," Sean replied. "No way. Jesus, I guess it's the goddamned octopus. I hate octopus, but… "
"Waaaaaaaah!" Andrea screeched, throwing her head back and forth and writhing around in the bilge. "I've got to have it right now! Right now!" She clawed at her cunt and humped up and down. "I cant stand it! I'll go crazy without it!Give it to me right now!"
"Jesus," Sean thought, "she's cracking up." He knelt beside her and tried to quiet her down.
"Don't stroke my head, stupid! Fuck me! I'll be okay if you just fuck me! I know I will!"
Sean was bewildered and confused but he didn't know what to do except humor her. He took his pants down and pressed his limp rod into her crotch.
She calmed down immediately. "Oooooooh. Yeaaaaah. That's right… " She stroked his cock for five minutes till it produced an adequate erection and shoved it in. She humped like crazy, got really excited, and came three times. Afterward she was herself again. She got up and searched the horizon hopefully.
"Damn," Sean said, scratching his head and making for the octopus. "That was weird. I'm really worried about you."
He moved the case.
He stared.
"You bitch!" He examined the notches on the gunwhale, grouped neatly in fours with slashes through them. "Ninety nine! And that was the hundredth!"
He glowered at her.
He burst out laughing.
He started to cry.
"Okay, Miss Seductress. You're gonna get it now."
Andrea was wiping her cunt off with her jeans. "Huh?"
"I said, you're gonna get it now. All these tricks and acts and games and ploys-to get me to do something I didn't want to do, to get me to make a fool of myself fucking you because Baloney put one last funny joke over on you-I'm gonna rape the shit out of you!"
Andrea didn't know whether to be scared or what, but she could sure as hell see Sean meant it. For the first time since they'd been cast adrift he ripped off his pants and his cock sprang to instant erection and he came after her.
"Wait a second! I've got to grease up again! I wiped it all off! You'll kill me!" She dove for the KY can.
Sean dove on top of her and struggled to turn her over as she plunged her fingers into the goo for the hundred and first time.
From inside the can something bit her. At least it felt like a bite. There was something sharp in there. Something metal. "Hey!" she screamed as she felt around and grasped one cylindrical object about three inches long, then another, at the bottom of the can.
Sean froze. "What?"
She fished the things out. "I'll be fucked." She smiled. "What would you say these were?"
Sean grinned and shook his head. "Offhand, I'd say they were spark plugs."