Pool Party in a box.. rough draft

When I used to do house-call massage in Florida part of the fun was seeing other peoples homes, how they were decorated and how they lived. One client had filled his pool with giant blow up pool toys. It was really cool to see a rainbow collection of four foot tall beach balls and floaty ducks big enough for a full grown man to ride bouncing around in the wind. It looked like a dance party in a toy box.

That image always stuck with me so it was only natural when my ex and I bought our California home with a pool that I wanted to do the same thing. The local pool stores didn't have what I was looking for and neither did the toy stores so I had to look online. In the search engine I typed "blow up toys pool". The first sight was porn, the second was also porn, the third had what I was looking for. Almost. Forty Five dollars for a giant blow up duck? Seriously? it was just thin colored plastic and air... and I had to supply the air!

I wasn't about to spend five hundred dollars for my pool toy motif so I tried a new tactic. "discount sale clearance blow up pool toys" went into the search engine this time. First hit was still a porn site but this time I clicked on it. I had to see what a discount porn site sold after all. Among the half off dildos, refurbished pocket pussies, dollar videos (My Big Fat Greek Wedding Night and Whore Games were among the titles) and "gently used" leather gear I found something that might actually work! Blow up sex dolls! and only five dollars! I ordered ten of the little sluts and went about searching for other cheap inflatable objects that would make good pool toys.

In two to four weeks my packages started to arrive. To add to my blow up girls I found inflatable furniture that included a couch, two chairs and ottoman, a six foot palm tree and supplemented the rest with a few regular sized beach balls that were sold by the dozen. My plan for the girls was to weight the girls feet so they would stand upright in a floating living room party scene. I pictured the sun shining down and the breeze making them dance around in a slow jazzy hipster scene. This was going to be really cool .. eventually. For now though I stacked the boxes unopened in the living room. A great idea deferred.

Around May of 2003 I started working from home and had a personal assistant come over for a few hours every day. He wasn't really skilled in anything and wasn't even that helpful but I did work more when he was there because I didn't want to seem lazy or unfocused. Which I was. Most of the time we worked on my business projects but sometimes we'd do things around the house like hang a ceiling picture, install a ceiling fan or move furniture. He couldn't legally work in the US so he didn't really care what we did as long as he could get out of his house.


One day as I was pretending to work online and my assistant was wandering around the house looking for something to do he found the stack of boxes in the corner. They had been there so long at this point that they were treated like furniture and had two empty coffee cups on them and a plastic statue of the God Bacchus whose hands had broken off in my suitcase on the way back from Greece. "OoohhhHhh... what's this?" he asked in a voice that was meant to sound like I had been busted in a dirty little secret. Of course he was looking at a stack of boxes with the top one labeled IntimateOverstock.com so maybe his suspicion wasn't totally unfounded.

I was bored, he was bored and after explaining my vision of naked girls dancing around floating furniture my assistant thought I was a genius. We immediately got to work setting up the pool party because nothing motivates me into action more than someone thinking I'm as brilliant as I think I am.

At that point I had never seen a blow up sex doll in person and it had never really occurred to me that there were different quality levels in the inflatable sex partner industry. Now, thanks to HBO Real Sex and the movie Lars and the Real Girl, I know you can spend ten thousand dollars for a top of the line manikin sex slave. The less you spend the further you get from anything realistic. My girls cost five dollars each. The quality difference was obvious.

The first noticeable difference in quality was the face. I don't know what I was expecting really but something more than a Halloween mask with a really surprised look on its face. Maybe they would look better once they were blown up. Alas, that wasn't the case. If you're ever looking for ways to cut back on expenses in your own sex doll manufacturing here's a few tips.

First, of all don't bother with fingers or toes... or even hands or feet for that matter. It seems unless there's a specific foot fetish then stumps work just fine. My girls had stump ended hands and feet and looked like severe fire victim.

Second, there's no need for hair anywhere. Down there a smooth playing field can be considered exotic and different but a completely bald head looks like your having relations with a cancer patient well into her chemotherapy treatments. It will work fine just to hire some kids with magic markers to draw a few curls.

Third, at anything under $20 there only needs to be one orifice. I think if someone wants to "switch it up" then they'd be willing to pay over $100 or in other words $50 per orifii. Significantly more if said orifice is equipped with kung fu grip. A quick exam after inflation proved that my girls had no such grip.

The first girl was easy to inflate. Her little nozzle was the same ones you find on water wings or air mattresses and it was located in the small of her back. Not the best place to blow someone up but there are a lot of other places I could think of that would have been worse. Plastic hookers need more air than you might think and by the time her cone breasts were filled out and her neck finally had enough pressure to keep her head lolling about like a stroke victim I was dizzy. My assistant smoked and was often out of breath just from sneezing so I knew we had to come up with a better way.

I wasn't equipped with an air compressor but as luck would have it there was a little air pump in my assistants car. It was meant for emergency use in case he got a flat. It wasn't ideal since we had to create a seal between the air hose and the airhead and because it ran off of his cigarette lighter in his car so we had to blow them all up outside in my front yard.

The process was a little macabre. Each girl was taken out of her thin plastic bag. Her body a was a flattened but wrinkled peach colored form that looked like it was cut from a chalk outline of a murder victim. As she inflated the body would slowly fill out and the sheets of plastic would separate sounding like velcro being pulled apart. I know the face didn't change but her surprised look seem to look just a little more surprised as she was coming to life. Her chest was two cupholders until the pressure was enough to pop them out creating two perfect cones pointing in the same general direction.

I didn't want my girls to blow away so I just put them in the car after they were inflated. Any neighbors driving by probably wondered why the car was so full of topless bald women and what were they singing.

Three hours later we had transferred the balls, the blow up furniture and the ladies to the pool. It wasn't the result I expected. For one thing I expected the balls and ruby red couch and chairs to spread out around the pool but instead they all congregated in one corner seeming to cower away from the dolls.

In my head I pictured them bobbing around the pool like a burlesque version of the vibrating football field we had as kids. A campy little middle finger to traditionalists with an artsy undertone.

Not so much.

Instead it was more like a scene from a horror movie recreated in cheap latex. The little bags of rocks tied to the stumps of their legs didn't work the way I expected. For the girls that were slowly losing air it gave the impression that they were sinking in quicksand. Their mouths in big O's as if they were screaming. A little more air and a lighter weight meant they were higher up out of the water but not completely erect. They were either leaning forward in the stance commonly used for projectile vomiting or leaning back as if playing invisible limbo or trying to catch imaginary snow flakes in their forever open mouths.

It was time for my assistant to go home but he promised that tomorrow we could fix it. I was despondent and fixed myself a drink and and listened to my dog bark at the failed pool party until he got too creeped out and came inside.

The next morning was worse. None of the girls were upright. Several were weighted to the bottom of the pool like a mafia informant. One or two were flat on the bottom. The few that still floated only had enough air left to inflate their breasts leaving pairs of pointy peach colored teepees breaking the surface.

I've done a lot of really cool things in my life that I'm proud of. When it's something I'm not proud of I do what I can to remove all evidence that I even tried. I had failed and failed miserably and there was nothing left to do now but get rid of the bodies.

It was easy enough to fish the corpses out with the pool skimmer and toss them in the large garbage can for pick up. The balls and a few of the girls still held on to some air so I had to take a knife to them so that they would all fit. and for a five days I put the matter out of my mind.

On the fifth day the garbage truck came. I was out walking my dog when it pulled up to my place and the arm grasped my dumpster and lifted up and upside down. As usual the lid flew open and out came a plastic bag of household trash. The arm moved again to shake out what was left. A red clump fell into the truck then sliding out slowly was the outline of three of the girls sliding slowly down the inside of the garbage can. Stuck to the sides by pool water and dirt. They looked at me as though shocked I would let this happen, surprised that I would just throw them away like that after all we'd been through.

Didn't bother me though. What did they expect? there were just a bunch of five dollar whores.

10 tips on carving a pumpkin

Carving pumpkins means a lot of planning.

first... have a pumpkin. Few other vegetables carve as well and almost no meat products will work even a little bit.

second...have a really good carving knife. Good grip long sharp blade. Hold it like a crazed killer to double the fun

third... even if you have a really good knife leave it at home when you go to buy the pumpkin. For some reason people at the piggly wiggly freak out over great cutlery.

fourth... if you don't have children when carving a pumpkin then you need friends and alcohol around for the irony.... otherwise it's just sad carving a gourd by yourself

fifth... if you cut yourself while carving so bad that you have to go to the hospital. Lie.. lie lie lie... tell them you were fending off an intruder.

sixth... triangle eyes and nose is very 3rd grade.. come on people.

seventh... know where you're going to put your newly massacred vegan food before you buy it. Especially if you live in an apartment.

eighth... The jack-o-latern vomiting seeds has been done to death. Also.. do not carve the following peoples faces into pumpkins... Chuckie, Dracula, Barack Obama, Abraham Lincoln, Hannah Montana.

ninth... if you use a candle put it in a little clear glass. This will keep it from blowing out and will keep white wax from oozing out of the mouth. (if you did carve Hanna Montana.. white wax oozing out of the mouth is ok)

tenth... having a jauntily decorated pumpkin on your porch up to halloween is cute and shows holiday spirit. After November first you're just a slob with rotting vegetables in front of your house.