Harry and the Bikini Bandits by Basil Heatter - Chapter 03

1971 Genre: Vintage Sleaze / Casino Heist

A wildly erotic novel of intrigue, suspense, and adventure...

There's a lot to be said for my Uncle Harry. Mostly unprintable. All my life I'd heard about him, and from a distance he was a kind of legend. But the moment I signed on as one-man crew to his beat-up old bucket, Jezebel, I found my hero of the sea was really a pirate. Broads and booze kept him afloat between capers—and so far, his luck was holding...

But this new harebrained scheme—to heist the loot from an island gambling casino—was the daffiest—and most dangerous yet.

And there I was. Right in the middle. Up to my virginal ears in naked nymphs and Nitrous oxide—with nothing between me and the future but a leaky getaway and a pot of gold that was fast disappearing behind Harry's private rainbow.

CHAPTER 3

So I wrote him a letter. I figured he probably threw his mail away without opening it, but i took a chance anyway. I told him about having seen his picture and how much I admired a man who was living a free, independent life in this kind of stifling society in which we were all imprisoned and how I had to get out of Peckinpaugh one way or another and if he would just let me sign on for a cruise I would scrub bilges or climb masts or paint bottoms or anything else that needed doing. He hadn't seen me since I was twelve, so I went on about how I had grown some since then, now being six two, etc. I concluded by saying that I'd had some nautical experience, although I didn't say where or when.

A month passed with no word from Harry, and I had about given up. Then the answer came. It was mailed from Beaufort, South Carolina, and was written in pencil on a piece of brown paper torn from an A&P bag. All it said was: "You must be out of your mothering mind. But it would be worth it just to bug your old man. Meet me Miami."

Right away I ran off a travelogue in my mind. December in Miami. Golden beaches and girls in bikinis. Life at sea with Captain Hook. Back the jib and ease the main. Rolling down to Rio. Yeah man.

I had been saving for six months to buy an electric guitar but I parted with that idea without a tremor.

It was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to me, and I had to share it with someone so I told Mary Ann. Mary Ann Mobley, that is. I've known her since we were in the third grade together. That was the year I had the chicken pox and she got it too. It certainly gave us a lot in common, and I suppose we were what you would call childhood sweethearts. After that it seemed natural that as we got older we would pair up at parties, dances, hayrides, proms, football games, and snowball fights. Sometimes I asked a different girl to a movie and sometimes Mary Ann went with a different guy, but not often. We were going steady but not making out.

We were at a drive-in movie in her old man's Buick the night I told her. She listened to me without saying anything except that her face got kind of small and cold.

"Well?" I said.

"Well, what?"

"Haven't you got anything to say?"

"What is there to say? I mean you're not discussing it, are you? You've already made up your mind. So that's that."

I don't know what I had expected from her but I couldn't help being a little disappointed. I guess I had expected some kind of scene. This way I was relieved. But a little disappointed.

Then her face sort of crumpled up, and there were tears on her cheeks. The tears sparkled in the hard blue light from the movie screen. She was wearing a parka hood trimmed with white fur, and when her face got small and kind of folded-in on itself she looked about twelve years old.

All she said was, "I'd like to go home, please."

Jerry Lewis was capering around on the screen like a monkey with fleas. He had never seemed unfunnier. The remains of a cold hamburger and chocolate shake lay on a paper plate between us. It was all pretty depressing.

"But what about the rest of the show?" I said.

"Damn the show. And damn you too."

So I took her home. When we got to her house she jumped out of the car and ran in and left me sitting there with my mouth open.

I put her old man's Buick in the garage and walked home. It was a clear, cold night, and there was a three-quarter moon shining over the dead corn stalks. A bunch of kids in an old jalopy went by yelling something. They seemed to be having a hell of a time. I waved back at them, but I couldn't put much life into it.

I thought about the two big games we still had to play that I would not be in, and how Billy Grindlemayer would be subbing for me. I thought about the hayrides they would all be on Christmas Eve. And I thought about how tomorrow morning at dawn I would be thumbing rides down that long lonesome road to Florida. To snap myself out of it, I tried humming a few of the capstan songs the sailors used to sing when they were squaring away before the Trades. "Rolling Down to Rio" and "Whiskey for my Johnny" and "Fare Thee Well My Bonny Lass."

But I only felt foolish.