The Myth of Wile E

A Goddess on Mount Olympus

Much like the spider almost hit the jackpot (or rather, the jackpot almost hit the spider), Gladys too almost hit the big time one day. And when she finally caught fame, she didn't know what to do with it.

After high school, Gladys worked in Hollywood for a couple of years. Hollywood the city, I mean; not Hollywood the movie business. She had a steady job as a dancer, of the "exotic" variety (not the fancy-apples-and-pears kind of exotic, but the kind truer to seed).

By then Gladys's hair had grown back, but she wore wigs to work anyway. I don't mean her awful Cousin It wig-she'd tossed that onto a bonfire during a high school beach party-but rather, a bubblegum-pink specimen that appeared to have been crafted from the mane of a My Little Pony. She wore matching pink platform shoes and a trench coat. She could have been a super spy in a manga comic. (Under the trench coat we will just assume she wore a tasteful 1950s one-piece swimsuit, because . . . she's my sister.)

Gladdy always said that the exotic dancing audition process was so much nicer than the TV and movie casting calls she was used to. No one told her that she should get her ears pinned back or her nose was too round or her chin was too small. From what I gathered, usually Hollywood types wanted everything big made small and everything small made big until you were as two-dimensional as possible. (I guess they shared the mogul's dislike of natural topography.) But at the exotic dancing audition, no one told Gladys she was too this or too that. No one criticized her dancing; or worse, ignored her and checked their messages while she wondered if she should go on. No; when she auditioned to be an exotic dancer the club owner simply grunted, "You'll do." The only thing the same about auditioning for movie roles and auditioning to be a dancer was that they expected her to take most of her clothes off. But Gladys told me she didn't mind so much. She said that wearing <s>almost nothing </s> a 1950s swimsuit was much less embarrassing than, say, the uniform her friend Brytonny had to wear at Hot Dog on a Stick.

The club used to be a firehouse, so there was a big pole going from the stage up to the room where the dancers got ready. The pole was used for sliding down, as originally intended, and also for off-label purposes. In keeping with the firehouse theme, the bar was painted fire engine red, and the decor featured a Dalmatian print which, the way Gladys described it, struck me as kind of disturbing, as if Cruella de Vil had been the decorator.

Gladys's brush with fame occurred when she was off-duty, hanging out backstage (or, technically, above-stage), where the dancers would knit, watch TV, or work on puzzles while on break. Apparently from up there you could see the whole club via some kind of security camera setup. Gladys had just finished sorting all the edge pieces of a new jigsaw puzzle when she happened to glance at the monitor in time to observe (in the club audience) a man lunging up from his chair, flailing his arms around. The man had a round red face and wore oversized glasses and a walrus moustache. Doing a Frankenstein's monster kind of walk, the man lurched toward the nearest cocktail waitress. She gently swatted his hands away and shook her finger at him, standard procedure when a customer was being "grabby." The waitress looked around for help but all the bouncers were busy ejecting a group of Japanese businessmen who were so drunk they thought they were in a karaoke bar.

The red-faced man clutched at his throat and gestured wildly.

"Charaaaaades!" one very drunk patron shouted at him. "Song! First word: Can't! Second word-"

"Charades suck!" shouted another drunk patron.

"You suck!" said the first guy.

"Your mama sucks!" said the second guy.

(It would later be revealed, when all the witnesses were interviewed, that both of these young men were rocket scientists from Pasadena, or at least, almost through getting their PhDs in Rocket Science.)

All the other drunken patrons (except for the singing Japanese businessmen) laughed when the red-faced man dropped to his knees, either praying or pleading. Meanwhile, the poor dancer on stage carried on with her exotic firefighting act, unappreciated.

The cocktail waitress finally figured out that the kneeling man was in trouble. So she slammed down her cocktail tray on the nearest table, got behind the kneeling man, and put her arms around him. A few of the drunken patrons whistled as she frantically tried to eject whatever (she thought) was stuck in the man's throat; they mistook the gesture for some kind of naughty floor show. The rest of the club patrons were distracted when a fight broke out between those who had just received a surprise tray of drinks, and those who had actually ordered said drinks.

Up above the chaos, Gladys viewed these goings-on with the amusement of a goddess on Mount Olympus watching humans do all the dumb stuff humans did. Her jigsaw puzzle was boring, "License Plates of America" or something like that, and she was beginning to suspect that some of the pieces were missing. (It was a common hazard of buying used puzzles from Goodwill.) Glancing up at the monitor, Gladys observed that the red-faced man's head and neck were fat way out of proportion to the rest of his body, as if he were a partially-completed balloon animal. She also saw a thin glint of metal on the man's wrist that didn't quite look like a wristwatch. The club's colored lights flashed off it like a coded message as the man was jostled by the waitress's futile Heimliching. Suddenly, all those years of TV medical dramas came back to Gladys, and she knew what had to be done. Perhaps it's true what they say, that there comes a time in every exotic dancer's life when she finds out what she's really made of. They do say that, right? Because if not, they should.

Gladys pocketed the knife she always carried when walking to and from work. She leapt onto the fire pole and zoomed down through the strobe-lit haze, pink wig askew and trench coat whooshing behind her like a superhero cape, landing on the poor dancer below, who was fortunately protected from concussion by her firefighter's helmet. Gladys untangled herself from the fire hose, jumped off the stage, and raced over to the red-faced man, whose face was now as swollen as a dodgeball. She scanned around for the closest available nerd, and discovered that both of the rocket scientists (who were not yet known to be rocket scientists) had Bic pens nestled in their pocket protectors. Gladys whipped out her knife-causing the nerds to put their hands up-and snatched one of the pens. She pried the cocktail waitress off the red-faced man, flipped him on his back, stabbed him with her knife between his Adam's apple and some other neck part that I can't even pronounce, gnashed the pen apart with her teeth, and plunged the empty pen-barrel into the man's neck.

The red-faced man's neck made a sucking sound not unlike a partially clogged pool filter.

The rocket scientists screamed.

One of them said, "My pennnnnn . . . !"

Then the whole club fell silent, except for a Japanese businessman who was singing "Can't Touch This" while being fireman-carried out the door.