It was hard to say who thought of it first, taking credit for the idea. When everything was going smooth, or smooth-ish, all five of them wanted to be the one thought of it. Later, when there was only blame to be had, they all agreed: it was Fancy Pants, the Women’s Warden. Her, and the Tennessee Department of Corrections, equally.
What happened was, the powers that be had decided to outsource prisons, and they’d let the contract out to a company that agreed coed prisons were the way of the future. Not together – half the men locked up were probably in there for stuff they’d done to women, and half the women, or a good few, were in there for killing men. Or other offenses that hadn’t yet gone as far as killing them. Yet. While that was equality of sorts, it couldn’t be said to be, in any way, promising. So, they’d apparently settled on a prison with two separate wings — one for the men, one for the ladies – with a handful of cottage-y looking buildings besides, for the conjugals. And then, someone had chosen that woman – Cambridge Donaldson Smythe-Wallace – as the Chief Warden, Women’s Section. The name was a real mouthful, but it took those women no more than a month; they started calling her Fancy Pants.
Fancy Pants was an Ish sort of woman: tall-ish, slender-ish, with auburn-ish hair. If you looked at her in the right way on the right day you might have said she was busty, but she wasn’t that either. She wasn’t built big, but she stood right out. All in all, just… ish.
It was Cleo who hung the nickname on her. Cleo, who had worked in a series of high-end women’s stores over the years, when she wasn’t too busy giving up on bad men and heroin.
“That’s five days in a row she’s come in here,” Cleo’d said, “and never once wearing the same thing. I’ve seen her wearing Chloe, Derek Lam, Dolce & Gabana, and Armani too. Where does she get off, all the time, with the fancy pants?”
“And… and half the time she’s g-got… she’s c-c-commando,” said Jenny-Jenny. She had a tendency to stammer, when she got tense or excited – though she’d been perfectly calm and lucid when she’d called in to report that her husband was shot dead. Help was on the way, she’d been told, but… was she sure he was dead? Rumour had it, there’d been a pause, and the sound of another shot, before Jenny-Jenny came back on the line.
“Quite sure,” she’d said, “I don’t think I’ll need to shoot him again.” Anyway, Jenny-Jenny was a little puzzled, and her remark almost, but not quite, changed the Warden’s nickname to Commander Commando… but ‘Fancy Pants’ was the nickname that stuck.
***
It was Straight Lacey who walked up to them, by the fence, bubbling over, no… beaming … with secret humour, and passed out cigarettes from her precious supply. “Fancy Pants is screwing Mayo,” she said. “They’re hooking up in the conjugals cabins.”
Cleo coughed, trying not to laugh. Hillman Seward, the Men’s Warden, was not her idea of a fun time. Or anyone else’s, she’d always thought, though he was apparently married.
“No fuckin’ way,” Cleo said. “He’s got a poker up his ass at the best of times. Did you actually see something?”
“Can you count to 69?” Straight Lacey asked. “I walked in on them, me with my mop and pail, them with their heads down.”
“They notice you?” Cleo asked.
“Not till I started applauding.”
“You d-d-dint,” Jenny-Jenny leaned back against the fence. “You applauded? What did Fancy Pants say?”
“Said she was just finishing up and could I come back later,” Straight Lacey said. “Said we’d talk.”
“She said it that way?” Cleo said. “Doesn’t sound like her, with her million-dollar words.”
“Not really, no – she used hand gestures…on account of, her mouth was full.”
“Ewwwwww,” Cleo and Jenny-Jenny said it together, but Jenny-Jenny took a long deep drag on her ciggie right after and looked thoughtful.
“You heard anything more about the call centre?” Cleo asked. Straight Lacey shook her head.
“Just that it’s closing in two weeks.”
“Still.”
“Uh-huh.”
“H-H-How is that even p-p-possible?” asked Jenny-Jenny. “We’re next thing to … to free as… as it is.”
Lacey shrugged. “Somebody else made a sweetheart deal, I guess. Had to be a bigger kickback, cause there’s nobody else working for less.”
“Be hard to pay for the smokes,” Cleo said. “And I don’t want to go back to that other shit we were doing.”
“I’ve got an idea,” Straight Lacey said. “Might help.”
“What?”
“Need to run it by Fancy Pants first, make sure she approves.”
“You m-m-mean, while she still remembers, who walked in on her and Mayo,” Jenny-Jenny said, and ground out her cigarette.
“That’s right,” Straight Lacey said. “She needs to be open to it, cause she’s gotta help.”
“Can’t you at least give us a hint?” Cleo said.
“Sure,” said Straight Lacey. “You girls still remember how to talk dirty?”
***
The sign on the warden’s door read ‘Dr. Cambridge Donaldson Smythe-Wallace, D.Phil’ plus a bunch of other alphabet soup, and the title ‘Warden’ in black right beneath it. The sign on her desk said essentially the same thing, again, in brass. And the plaques and diplomas on the wall testified that a woman of that name had earned a long list of degrees, accreditations and honours on her way to this post. None of them bore the name Fancy Pants, but that was how the girls thought of her, except perhaps Straight Lacey, who had a great visual memory. Straight Lacey noted the Kate Spade bag on the back credenza, thinking that Cleo would probably have known, on sight, exactly which high fashion designer had crafted the little strappy high heels resting on their sides, next to the desk. But she complemented them just the same.
“Nice shoes.”
“Thank-you,” said Fancy Pants. “I understood you wanted to talk to me? About the call centre? I’m sorry, but it’s definitely closing.”
“I understand that,” Straight Lacey said. “I thought we could… maybe… keep the equipment?”
“Keep it? It belongs to those treacherous weasels… I won’t even speak their names. They took our money, and moved the business anyway. Cancelled the contract.”
“So, tell them you’re keeping their equipment. They can hardly send someone to seize it.”
“Why would we do that? What do we want with it?”
“Do something else with it?”
“Something else?” Fancy Pants raised her eyebrows slightly.
“A different call centre.”
“I’ve tried reaching out into the business community. The usual players… weren’t interested.”
“I was thinking of something… home grown,” Straight Lacey said, and laid it all out for her. When she was finished, Straight Lacey stopped talking. What followed was long, deep silence. It stretched. But gradually, Fancy Pants looked at Straight Lacey and smiled, slightly.
“I thought you were going to try shaking me down,” Fancy Pants said. “I was waiting for it – you could have tried. You seem to be trying to make me rich, instead. That surprises me.”
“I am shaking you down,” Straight Lacey said. “Making you rich first just means you can pay me, instead of having me killed or beat up or some other shit. Besides, I know you like nice things… designer clothes, fashionable stuff, like that Kate Spade bag. That costs money, so I figure you’d want more of it. The money.”
Fancy Pants nodded, smiled full on now. “Let me think it over,” she said. “Might be a few wrinkles we need to work through. Did you have a name in mind, for this… new service?”
Got her, thought Straight Lacey. “I thought we’d call it ‘Fancy Pants’,” she said.
***
The first couple of months were the worst, but for reasons nobody had really expected. The money was fine – in fact, it just rolled in like a high tide, almost from the start. As Straight Lacey had suspected, a decade or so of prison had done nothing to erode their ability to talk dirty to strangers. Also, it turned out, there was no shortage of strangers who wanted to talk dirty right back, and were willing to pay for it.
Not that there weren’t setbacks, and a learning curve. One of the early recruits, a lifer named Sad Shelley, had to be told, in the end, she was not suited for this type of work. Straight Lacey had to break the news, which she opted to do… somewhat gingerly. Sad Shelley was a large woman, not overweight, but big-boned and muscular into it, and she spent a lot of time working out, even before she’d been sentenced to life. It was rumoured that her late husband had punched her, in a fit of drunken but ill-conceived aggression, and Sad Shelley had responded by reaching out and snapping his neck like a tooth pick. The male-dominated jury had convicted, it was said, mostly out of fear, but jury selection had never been a strong point for Shelley’s court-appointed defence counsel, a weedy little twerp named Sheldon. What it meant, for Straight Lacey, was that Shelley had to be managed, gently.
“You can’t keep doing this, Shelley,” said Straight Lacey. “We get paid for keeping those dudes on the phone. You get all cross with them, ask them ‘What the fuck do you want?’, well what do they do? They hang up. And that’s five times this week, actual count, where we know you just called someone a ‘sick fuck’ and hung up on them yourself. You see where this is going?”
“He was a sick fuck,” Shelley said. “You know what he was asking for?”
“Yes, I do, and as it happens, I agree with you. And we don’t want to let you go. That’s… it’s not what I want, or any of us want. Thing is, I don’t think you’re really suited to this shit, you know what I’m saying to you?”
Sad Shelley was saying nothing, but she’d started to leak some tears, and her lip trembled, like she might actually cry.
“I thought of one last thing we can try,” Straight Lacey said, “if you’re open to it?”
“What’s that?” Shelley was no dummy – she’d already completed a Masters in Social Work while she was inside – but she knew, when this meeting was arranged, she almost knew that Straight Lacey was gonna fire her fine ass.
“We got to add a new menu item, a fetish, call it ‘Talk mean to me’. So, you’ll only get those kinda calls, you can be aggressive as you want with them, call them all kinds of things, they’ll be spanking the monkey in no time. You can vent all you like… it’s what they’ll be paying you for. “
“Could try that, I suppose,” Shelley said. “Can I have a name, one of those S&M names, you know, makes me sound all black-leather-and-whips?”
“Why not? Did you have one in mind?”
“How about Mistress Morningstar?” Shelley suggested.
“After the planet Venus?”
“Oh, no – you can look it up. I was thinking, one of those medieval weapons… it was a club with a big round spiky metal ball on the end of it, for breaking people’s heads with.”
Straight Lacey shuddered, but smiled sweetly.
“That sounds perfect, Shel. We’ll go with that,” she said.
Mistress Morningstar. Sheesh, she was thinking.
Turned out, the S&M sideline was a real growth area for them, unexpectedly. And the real bonus came when they figured out that Mayo, the men’s warden, was one of their leading customers: he was a big fan of Mistress Morningstar. And as it turned out, Fancy Pants herself was happy about that, when she found out.
“Thank Christ,” Fancy Pants said. “I was afraid I’d have to keep blowing him for years, just to keep this job.”
“You m-m-mean?” Jenny-Jenny said.
“You don’t think I was doing him for fun, do you?” Fancy Pants said. “That man couldn’t find pussy in a cat shelter—and he damn sure didn’t know what to do with a clitoris.”
***
One of the unfortunate side effects of the call centre, for some, was that all the sex talk rapidly became boring. Chloe was the one brought it up. Again, one night after they’d done their shift, and they were sitting around, playing bridge, talking shit over.
“I have to admit,” Chloe said, “it was hard at first, doing this. Woke up all kinds of feelings I’d gotten resigned to. You know … any of you ever lie awake, or just wake up, middle of the night, wishing for a taste of that hard candy?”
“Uh huh,” Jenny-Jenny said. “Now and then. But it passes.”
“But now, we been doing this for a while, and we’re making money, I’ll come right out and say it: I’m finding this whole gig boring as hell.”
“Me, too,” Jenny-Jenny said. “I’m bored outta my skull.” She looked at her cards.
“Three no trump,” she said.
“I’ve got an idea,” Chloe said. “Why don’t we… we could figure out a way… I mean…” she gestured at the table.
“What?” said Straight Lacey. “You mean, play bridge, while we’re talking sex to the customers?”
“We could do it,” Chloe said, “if we remember… if we could figure out–”
“—how to bid without t-t-talking,” Jenny-Jenny finished the sentence for her.
“Exactly,” Chloe said. “Plus, we got to avoid laughing at each other, talking to callers. You know how it is with call centres… always a little background sound bleed, you can tell someone’s calling you to get your ducts cleaned, or whatever.”
“Yeah, that’s a real mood-killer, for sure,” Straight Lacey said. “What do you say, Fancy Pants?”
“Well, I’m really getting into this bridge thing… let’s give it a try. Why not?”
***
The reasons ‘why not’ rapidly became obvious. They were about forty minutes into their first bridge game – playing with real cards around a table, no less – when Fancy Pants, sitting in on both games, unthinkingly spoke her bid aloud, into her headset. Might still have been fine if she’d said something with a suit in it – ‘one heart’ for example, or ‘one diamond’… where she could have quickly skated around the non sequitur with some bullshit or other… but what she actually said was “two no-trump.”
“Excuuuuuse me?” said the caller. “Are you playing fucking bridge here?”
“I…” Fancy Pants was so busted, she couldn’t think of anything.
“That’s like… totally unprofessional, don’t you think? Talk about a mood killer.” Click.
There was a moment of silence, as the other ladies rolled their eyes and tried not to laugh out loud—laughter being another definite mood-killer during phone sex—then they started to howl, laughing until they finally had to take the headsets off and walk away for a minute. Compose themselves.
That lasted until they sat down again, attempting to resume their game, and their work, but the rest of that shift was profoundly disrupted by outbreaks of snickering, most of which prompted immediate outrage from their callers, and a hang-up. The only one who sailed through the night was Sad Shelley, aka Mistress Morningstar, whose clients were paying to be laughed at, ridiculed, or otherwise abused.
At the end of the night, they put it to a vote: the bridge game had to go.
***
Another short-lived sideline was an idea, should have been a success they figured, to have their own name brand of personal lubricant. It was totally a scam, to begin with, that Jenny-Jenny had come up with. She’d developed it with outside help, and a distant family member who had an unused warehouse and time on his hands. The basic operation consisted of transferring tubes of a well-known and affordable lubricant, squeezing the contents into an empty jar, and relabelling it as the ‘Fancy Pants Pure Pleasure Lotion’.
‘Apply generously’ were the only instructions. It sold well, at first, at double the cost of the original source product.
It was unfortunate that the two stoners employed by Jenny-Jenny’s distant cousin were also engaged in a similar labelling fraud with a super-intense horse liniment; they got the jars mixed up, and apparently, the potent warming effect of the liniment did not combine well with people’s private parts. The resulting screams and howls were, at the very least, indiscreet and difficult to conceal. Questions began to percolate through official channels.
The final nail in the coffin was a blackmail scheme that one of the other women had cooked up. Afterward, Straight Lacey admitted, she should have seen it coming.
“Well, she’s in for prostitution and extortion,” Straight Lacey said. “I should have thought twice about the extortion part, before I let her near the conjugal cabins.”
Dominique had been supporting herself that way for a long time, and with the help of a guard or two, she’d figured out a way to book conjugal visits with a long parade of ‘husbands’ who’d paid handsomely for the opportunity to canoodle with a raven-haired, voluptuous and allegedly sex-starved goddess like Dominique. Her little brothel-within-the-walls was doing nicely when she and a guard friend went another step further by installing video and sound recording equipment in the conjugals cabin. Almost to a man, her paramours paid up in a hurried sweat when they were offered a chance to buy their own personal fuck-flick, under generous terms. One of them, however, was unwilling or unable to pay: he’d just entered into a nasty divorce proceeding, his finances were all tangled up and grim, and he just didn’t have the money to spare. Even his campaign for re-election wasn’t going well, and he couldn’t afford that kind of scandal. It’d be hard to reconcile a ‘family values’ platform with, well, whatever that was he was doing with that woman in that bed. Since the woman he was supposed to have been doing such things with, if she ever would, was frequently photographed on the society pages, Dominique’s decision to leak the video bore immediate catastrophic consequences.
He blew the whistle. The leak was traced. The film was identified, and the participants were both easily identifiable.
When she was asked, Dominique gave up everything: the call centre — Straight Lacey and Jenny-Jenny and Chloe, and the rest – and she gave up Fancy Pants. Spilled the whole thing to a lethal and relentless interviewer from the FBI, who’d been a nun in her past career, and who, despite her renunciation of a life of chastity, wasn’t in the slightest at the mercy of her own libido. No sympathy there.
Warden Hillman Seward, aka ‘Mayo’ did not escape the scandal, as he appeared in Dominique’s films numerous times, as well as on Mistress Morningstar’s billing records. He probably should have done some time for it, but boys will be boys was how they looked at it. Regardless, Mayo’s next career as a ride-share driver wasn’t nearly as lucrative.
As for Fancy Pants, she stepped down from her job at the Women’s Prison, and landed a role as Communications Director for the whistleblower who’d brought it all tumbling down.
“How’d you pull that off?” Straight Lacey asked her, the last time they met, while Fancy Pants was clearing out her office.
“Well, you know,” Fancy Pants said, “there were a lot more films of a lot more guys, and billing records too, that the FBI somehow didn’t try to locate. Turns out, a lot of those guys, or more than a few, they’re politicians. Some of them work with my guy, and some of them, don’t. Well… they’re reconsidering their political options about now, I’d guess.”
“Did you manage to keep any of the money?” Straight Lacey asked.
“I did, you know,” Fancy Pants said. “A surprising amount of it. And you know, a lot more of it got spent, just as you expected it would.”
“Let me guess,” Straight Lacey said. “Shoes? Purses?”
Fancy Pants smiled, and put the last pair of Ferragamo pumps into a box.
“That’s right,” she said. “All those things. And I spent the rest of it on fancy pants.”
[Image Credit : Photo by Tristan Hill on Unsplash]
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