Beer and Clothing in Las Vegas

The Making of “Doctor’s Orders”

Devlin O’Neill,

with apologies to Hunter S. Thompson and Raymond Chandler

It was one of those sticky, sweltery SoCal afternoons that bake the cherry-vanilla scent out of the bougainvilleas, the sweat out of the asphalt and the creativity out of a writer, even sitting in his air-conditioned ivory tower. Every sentence turns to dreck and every metaphor to hackneyed cliché. The phone rang and I got ready to blow off a telemarketer, glad even of that distraction from the daily grind of inventing new ways to say, ‘he pulled her panties down and spanked her.’

But the voice on the other end of the microwave signal wasn’t selling, she was buying, and I sat up a little straighter in my ancient oak desk chair when I said hello to Eve Howard, Empress of All Spankdom West of the Appalachians.

“How’s it going, Eve?”

“Skip the small talk, Dev. You asked about a video gig and I’m offering, if you’re interested.”

“Always. When and where?”

“Vegas, end of the month. Do you have a doctor bag?”

“Nope. Got a few doctor-type gadgets … stethoscope, thermometer ….”

“Bring ’em. We’re playing doctor for real.”

“You got pages for this or you just want me to wing it?”

“You’ll get pages, and you can skip the Tim Allen impression, too.”

“Yeah, yeah. So who’s my patient?”

“Eva Lux. She’s cute, you’ll like her.”

I finessed a couple more specifics, enough to kick my actor glands into high gear, and she rang off. Most unemployed thespians have Macjobs to while away the time between gigs, but I sweat out novels sixteen hours a day and my only joy in life is fighting with publishers, so I danced around the house yelling the Rocky theme at the top of my lungs for a little while, and then called my thoroughly vanilla Norwegian attorney in Vegas.

“Hey, you up for company the end of the month?”

“Yeah, no problem. Your room’s all ready. Another one of those parties?”

“Nope, another one of those videos.”

He snorted a laugh. “You say that like you do a lot of ’em.”

“Everybody starts somewhere. James Dean only made three movies his whole life.”

“I think it was more than that, and he didn’t start his career at fifty. And if you’re comparing yourself to James Dean you’ve got more issues than I thought.”

“I’m more the Sam Shepherd type.”

“Slim Pickens maybe. And as your attorney, I advise you to pick up a case of cold Coronas on your way.”

“Got it.”

Working on a new novel made the time pass, and I even ignored the fact that the book club was three months late with my advance check on the last one, then went out in the cool one morning to polish the convertible. As I hunkered down to buff the rims, I got an image flash. Usually the car looks like a boat, but right then it resembled a fish … a big fish … a huge fireapple-red shark. I shook my head but the image wouldn’t budge, so I blamed it on the mega-vitamins I’d been taking and finished the buff job.

Eve e-mailed and asked about the doctor bag again. She wanted an authentic carrying case so ‘Dr. Craig Morgan’ would have a place to put his rectal thermometer, K-Y Jelly and lascivious toys. I scanned the local antique shops until I found one, and the shopkeeper asked if it was for a movie prop. When I said yes, she knocked 30 percent off the price. Smart, I thought … she wants to get in good with the industry people. She acted friendly until I handed her my card – Devlin O’Neill, Doctor of Literature – and then she went icy. Some other Doctor of Something must have run a savage burn on her, so I took the bag and left.

A few days later the Shark and I sped north up the 15 toward Vegas. I was wired like a cheap stereo on actor-endorphins, vitamin supplements and suphedrine when I stopped at the rail station in Barstow, now a mishmash of cheesy souvenir stands and fast-food joints, with chairs and tables inside old Pullman cars – for that realistic railroad dining experience. I leaned on the Shark’s fender to smoke a cigarette and watch the busloads of tourists watch the freight trains fly by, and got to see a guy honk at an 80-year-old man who went the wrong way into a parking space. Ruined the guy’s whole day, I could tell. He got out of his car right in front of me, sneered and said the rules must not apply to him. I didn’t want to know what he was strung out on – maybe just normal road rage – and I memorized his plate in case our paths crossed again.

That’s when I saw them. Big, flapping, gray things, dozens of them, all over the sky.

I reached for my Magnum to show those evil-winged bastards I meant business, then remembered I didn’t have one, so I fired up the Pontiac and got out of there. I cranked left onto the freeway ramp and floored it while I wiped cold sweat off my forehead. The Shark’s engine hit that high, sweet note at 4500 rpm, a gas-slurping thank you for saving her finish from the vile, caustic slop those desert-spawned hell-pigeons fling at unwary motorists.

I zoomed into Vegas and then crawled through town on the perpetually ripped-up 95 to my attorney’s place on the north side. He met me at the door and drank three of the Coronas before I could get the case into the fridge.

“Thirsty much?”

He snarled and grabbed another bottle. “As your attorney, I advise you not to be a smart-ass. Are you still not drinking?”

“I drink all the time, but I used up my alcohol quota.” I popped open a Mountain Dew.

“Sugar and caffeine. That stuff’ll rot your brain.”

“I ran out of cocaine in 1981. Sue me.”

“Don’t joke about that, you swine!”

We sat on the back porch and smoked cigarettes, and he asked about the video shoot, more to be polite than from any real interest. The whole spanking thing puzzles him, but he envies the fact I pull women’s panties down and get paid for it. We’ve been friends a lot of years so there’s always something else to talk about, and I changed the subject.

“Getting dark. The iguanas will awaken soon.”

“Set out the bait. I’ll get the guns.”

“All right, but none of those wad-cutter shells this time, you cheap shyster. I want hollow-points, so these scaly poison bags know they’ve been hit.”

******

Next morning Eve called, none too early – good thing after a late night of moving-target practice – and I drove to the house that would be our film set. Gretta met me at the door, looking as fine and pert and sexy as she did when I first saw her in Spring Fever, a personal favorite. Her place is nice, and less than a mile from my attorney’s, so I was first to arrive. Eve and crew showed up a few minutes later with the video gear, and my co-star.

I said hi and she said hi. Not a moment of interpersonal triumph, but a start, and we both knew we had a long, intimate day ahead, so we weren’t in a rush. She was slender but not skinny … not where it counts. Firm roundness pushed her skirt out in back, and she had full, pillowy lips – a pout waiting to happen – and cat’s-eye glasses perched on her nose, 50s retro with rhinestones, the kind Marilyn Monroe used in How to Marry a Millionaire. Then she disappeared for costume work upstairs.

Just to be polite, I asked Tony if I could help haul equipment. He gave me the stock response, the one actors love. The talent stays away from the gear – meaning either, ‘actors have more important things to do than schlep and carry,’ or ‘we wouldn’t trust you scatterbrained prima donnas with a burnt-out match.’ Regardless, it meant I could lounge and chat with whomever wasn’t doing Something Critical, meditate on my role, and get even more wired on even more sugar and caffeine. But Eve ignored the rule about the talent, and gave me Something Critical to do.

“Here you go, Dev.” She dropped a plastic sack on the kitchen bar in front of me and gave me a smirk. “Put the batteries in those.”

“What’s this?” I dumped the bag’s contents and tried to imagine sticking all of this into the tiny woman I just met. “Sweet mother of pearl! When you go to the toy store you don’t mess around, do you?”

“Not even. Think you can figure out which goes where?”

“You talking batteries or what?”

“Don’t be creepy.”

She unloaded a couple of Trader Joe’s grocery sacks onto the counter – craft service for eight – while I opened the Marquis de Sade’s birthday presents. Along with an electronic rectal thermometer and a K-Y tube, there was a slim, pink vibrator in flexible plastic with a 45-degree crook at the business end – a G-spot stimulator; another the size and shape of a 20-mm cannon round, pointy-blunt and candy-cane striped; and a rubber plug in dark blue, soft and wiggly but no-nonsense firm, like Jell-O that’s been in the fridge since last Thanksgiving. That one had a remote control, connected by a hair-thin black wire to the plug’s base. The Marquis would have been a happy birthday boy, no doubt.

Once the batteries were in and the toys tested, I opened a garment bag and Eve picked out my costumes. I swear I brought suits in navy and charcoal, but they were both blue. Eve chose the lighter one and I went upstairs to change. Eva and I came down about the same time, and we took our scripts out back to smoke cigarettes and run lines. There were dogs – lots of dogs – loud dogs, restrained in titanium-alloy cages. Malamutes or huskies … or some savage wolf mix … but I gave them to understand, through fearsome messages broadcast by my hypothalamus, that they were not to interrupt. The woman and I were in the midst of a Highly Crucial Task, and their barking would interfere. They sensed my barely controlled, caffeine-fueled rage and shut up.

When we went back inside, our stage was set for Act I. Tony managed to jam 90 cubic feet of equipment and people into an 80-cubic-foot kitchen, and looked pretty pleased with himself. Cameras, monitors, lights and mikes, strung together with miles of cable, surrounded us like a womb wall as I sat across the table from Eva, my senses on full alert, my flesh prickly with galvanic energy, a thoroughbred champing and stamping, eager for the bell that looses him onto the track. Eve and Tony made last-minute adjustments, issued last-minute instructions.

I stood in an alcove, doctor’s bag full of naughty novelties in hand, ready for my entrance. Eve said action and we were off and running.

Eva complained, argued and sulked. I cajoled, scolded, and then spanked her bare bottom, before and after I pushed that embarrassing thermometer into her tiny rear vent. That’s the short version – it’s never that easy. A dropped line, a bad camera angle, a squinty director’s eye that says, ‘We can do this better,’ and we take the shot over … and over. Eva’s cheeks were tight, firm, with no fat to speak of, like the rest of her smooth body, and reddened nicely under my hand. Then there was a long pause, and I had to redden them again, with the cameras off, to Maintain Continuity. She never objected, trouper that she is, and I took my exit at scene’s end, turned and watched some serious pouting from my co-star while she rubbed red sting, playing to the camera but never looking at it.

No idea how long it took to shoot 20 minutes of usable footage – two hours? Three? I was focused, intent, and time had no meaning. I remember laughing between takes – at something Tony said, most likely. He kept up a running banter, when the cameras stopped, that softened the hyper-tense atmosphere to something breathable.

The crew reset for the living room scene while I went upstairs to trade my sweat-sodden Bill Blass for Wranglers and a t-shirt, and then we headed to dinner break at the Olive Garden. They should use us in their commercials. Eight hard-working cast and crew of America’s premier spanking network, gathered around a table to scarf their calamari and linguine and garlic-roasted chicken, drink their wine, talk of spanking glories past and future, and fortify for the job ahead – how could that not be photogenic?

Back on the set, dressed in gray slacks, a button-down blue oxford-cloth, and an undershirt to soak up sweat, I discussed with Eve when and how to use the toys. I’ve inserted implements during my checkered career, but never in public, and never into a woman I just met. But this was art – this was the craft. I was drenched in actor endorphins, a caffeine-crazed Hoffman, ready for Willy Lohman or Ratzo Rizzo, it didn’t matter. The blood of 5000 years of dramatists, troubadours, itinerate showmen, boiled and seethed in my veins.

Cameras rolled and my feet never touched the floor as I paced and fumed, awaiting the return of my errant, bratty screen-wife. Eva entered and we ripped through what little prepared dialog we could remember, and again she toppled with unwilling grace and ease across my lap as I sat at the end of a huge chaise longue, the most comfortable spanking place imaginable. No chair back to impede my arm-swing, no hard wood under my seat to distract me from the bare seat in front of me – no wonder I put one just like it in Michael Swayne’s study, for when Lisa, Beth and Teresa get out of line and need a long, serious spanking.

I started on Eva’s crinoline skirt – so that’s what crinoline looks like – then pushed it up and began on her panties, except she wore a thong so the panty issue was moot. She argued while I scolded and spanked, and when we ran out of written dialog, and I ran out of carefully prepared ad-libs, we were still going strong – too strong it turned out. I wasn’t mad – it was acting – but Eva used the safe word and my jaw dropped. Her round, tender bottom had absorbed as much sting as it could for a while, and I rubbed while we rested.

Eve gave us another way to go with our top-of-the-head bickering, and we went again. At some point I pulled down the thong … then farther down, and finally off. We stopped for publicity stills. By then I was no longer in the room – only the actor remained – I was the part. The cameras rolled once more. Eve cut in from time to time and fed us new directions for our argument. When the spanking was done I shifted mental gears for the insertion sequence.

A bare bottom can take a lot of mistreatment without real damage. Not so the internal membranes, and I know this with every fiber of my being. The exasperated, ill-tempered husband disappeared, replaced by the devoted lover, when I stripped Eva naked but for her shoes and put her across my lap. Shiny scarlet faded to rose in her cheeks, my voice softened, and spank-time became true playtime. She moaned, squirmed and shuddered as one after the other I thrust toys into her, slowly, carefully, more carefully than any doctor with any diagnostic tool in any hospital in the world. We talked – pillow talk – warm and teasing, then stopped because my hands were in the way of the camera, and started again. Both long vibrators hummed inside her at once, and I felt rather than heard her moans. I removed the vibrators, slowly, gently, and then showed her the fat blue plug. She grinned at me with genuine approval, and into her slippery rear entrance it went.

I thumbed the remote and she writhed while I swatted her full, quivery bottom with my left, upstage hand, gentle, true love-pats, a sensuous counterpoint to the quiet vibrations that tingled inside her. Eve stopped me – told me to put my left hand someplace else – and I stroked warm, puffy vulvae while the plug jittered inside the warm bottom. The cameras rolled for the finale, the hugs, the kisses, the forgiveness, and I carried Eva in my arms, still naked but for her shoes, up the stairs to bed … twice! Re-takes are a bear, so it’s a good thing she weighed no more than a hundred pounds.

That was a wrap, and Eva and I went upstairs to gather our bags. She was anxious to get going and asked for a ride, but waited patiently while Eve wrote me a very generous check. I heard Tony’s voice amid the after-shoot chaos … a Monty Python riff that failed to register in my endorphin-besotted brain until he got to Sheep don’t so much fly as plummet. He grinned when I said Plew-mit, with the deep, round U of the West Country, and he repeated the word.

There were goodbyes, good-jobs and thank-yous all round, then I packed our baggage into the Shark and headed for the freeway. While I drove with one eye on the savagely intricate directions to Eve’s house we talked, but not about anything we’d just done, not about the shoot, or the toys, or her sore bottom. We might have been clerks going home after a long day at the office, and that felt right. Somewhere between the front door and the car our on-screen personas slipped away and our real selves slid into place. I carried her bags into the house, once we’d maneuvered the devilish maze of a typical Las Vegas subdivision, then gave her a real hug, a real kiss on the cheek, and said goodbye.

The lights of the most exciting city on the planet, according to a local radio station, spread before me as I rolled downward off the mesa. Vast hotels shimmered in the distance, bright Leggo blocks stacked in a neat row along the Strip. I smiled as tension drained from my shoulders, through my fingers and into the wheel. The Shark’s engine purred a question – what’s next?

******

Author’s Note – Some of this happened; a lot of it didn’t. Eve doesn’t really talk that way; Tony does. Actors and novelists lie for a living; deal with it.