Exquisite Corpse, pt 5: A Secret Service Salsa
Sharon K's contribution to this holiday medley
Well, well, well, here we are at the denouement of our little writing game, and I am absolutely pleased as spiked Christmas punch to host my very good friend and fellow Substacker: Sharon Kozinsky. Sharon writes Anthony Eastwood’s Diary, a stack that oozes mystery and dry humour, and luckily, some of it has oozed here for your eyes.
Sharon is an agent to a whole motley crew of reprobate actors, performers, and the occasional writer and moonlights as a digital prostitute for the esteemed literary agent Anthony Eastwood.
Even though she doesn’t fancy herself a writer, I think you’d agree with me that her contribution to The Exquisite Corpse appeals to both low brow and high brow and draws from a wide-scope worldview and understanding of our twisted realities. She manages to tie a great big holiday bow on the wrap-up, making story telling seem effortless in the process.
Thank you to all who participated in this creative project and to all of you, dear readers, for lending us your attention. If you celebrate, I wish you a very Merry Christmas and good cheer for the whole year.
If you have missed the previous entries, here’s a refresher:
and now, for the denouement of our Exquisite Corpse medley, here’ part 5:
A Secret Service Salsa
Through the plate glass of the floor to ceiling windows Jantine (Jane) de Groot could see in her reflection the snowflakes gently drifting to the ground under the compound lights lining the fenced perimeter. Like some sort of dystopian Christmas card she thought. As the sounds of ‘Oh holy night, the stars are brightly shining…’ trickled through her headphones she stepped off the treadmill and onto her scales. Two hundred and forty pounds! She groaned in dismay like a pregnant Rottweiler and reached for her bathrobe. At five feet five inches she had clearly offended the tyrannical BMI index and was, officially, morbidly obese, aged only thirty nine. And to think she once harboured ambitions to be Miss Nevada, an aspiration which hadn’t panned out too well after all her hair fell out one boozy night in Vegas when her rival for the crown had spiked her haemorrhoid suppository tablet with liquid crystal meth. (She wondered whether in some subliminal way her haemorrhoid history was why that anally and bowel-fixated agent Charlotte Chatley had been assigned to her. The universe was perverse like that. She’d soon find out as Chatley was in the compound downstairs waiting for her debrief. Debrief! She’d be debriefed alright, all the way to sodding Mars if Jane had her way. Along with that other moron Angelica Deville, also waiting, in a separate part of the compound, each blissfully unaware that they’re both part of the same agency. God help us. ‘Oh holy night…’)
After the hair falling out debacle, the denuded Jantine had decided she wanted to be a secret service agent. When she was at school she'd dreamed of being a circus clown but Clown College wouldn’t have her on account of a lack of empathy and refusal to compromise her Miss Nevada make-up so she decided, once shorn, that the secret service was the next best thing. You didn't get so many laughs but you sure got to chuck loads of buckets of excrement over the general public. (Charlotte Chatley territory.) And after seven years of applications she finally made it aged thirty. Thank God for DEI - just making inroads then - she had thought. Her blubbery facade (podgy even then) wouldn’t have made it without that little scam. She even managed an attachment to the President’s detail. (When recounting this achievement she omitted the salient fact that the President in question was president of West Wendover Coffee Filters and not your actual POTUS. Even so, she was Janey Bond compared to those two flobbing idiots she had in the compound. You just can’t get the spooks these days.)
‘Flobbing’ was the nearest Jantine ever got to cursing, being from a devout Dutch Mormon family who got kicked out of Salt Lake City City for bootlegging back in the day. Even in these times she couldn’t bring herself to utilise expletives. Surrogates would have to do. And ’flobbing chunt’ was the worst possible insult she could fling at anyone, and she had two of them incarcerated in the compound down below right now, albeit in separate cells.
It was the box set of The Man From Uncle which her grandfather had gifted her that inspired Jantine to be an agent, but she never dreamed she would be joining MKUltra. Emulating Napoleon Solo or the dashing Ilya Kuryakin in their HQ masquerading as a tailor’s and dry cleaning shop would have satisfied her. Taking part in assassinations and Satanic Ritual Abuse and child trafficking weren’t really on her bucket list but needs must she supposed. It hadn’t occurred her that some of MKUltra’s methods, including ‘Tailoring’ and ‘Dry Cleaning’ were direct lifts from Uncle.
She'd not anticipated running two agents who didn’t know each other, nor that it would would pose such enormous problems (the fact that both agents were superannuated dipsticks wasn’t on her radar at the time.) But ‘Choirmaster Cantus’ was such a delicate operation and keeping tabs on Phillip Gar (aka Dmitry Arkanov) so crucial to National Security - at least whilst the transition was in place - that she hadn’t had any other choice.
Dmitry Arkanov (aka Phillip Gar - he had modelled himself on Phillip Jennings from the TV drama 'The Americans', the vain Russki dilettante that he was) had chosen an obscure piece of Slavically-influenced music for his climactic choral denouement - so obscure that MKUktra’s double-agents posing as directors at one of the many not-so-secret bioweapons labs the CIA had in Ukraine couldn’t get a handle on it. They suggested it was probably Islamic, which was red rag to a bull to the current Nevada MKUltra regional director since he, sorry she, was Trans and Islam didn’t have no truck with Trans, baby. Terfs and raging transphobes the lot of ‘em. No way was Jane’s director getting involved in anything remotely Islamic, which was probably restricting the operations of an allegedly anti-terrorist agency, but then the regional director of MKULtra (Nevada division) knew full well that the anti in that double-barrelled adjective was superfluous. As a way of assuaging the mood Jane had ventured to the director that her grandfather had been very fond of Cat Stevens but that cut no ice with him, sorry her. Which was a shame since Jane had thought of asking Cat, sorry Yusuf, if he could have sussed out the Islamic symbolism of Dmitry’s, sorry Phillip’s, music to keep her director Alan, sorry Alison, moderately on side. (Her grandfather’s best friend had played piano for Cat, sorry Yusuf, on ‘Tea for the Tillerman'.) Alan, sorry Alison, wasn’t buying the suggestion which meant that for Jantine, sorry Jane, the bottom line therefore was that they had been in deep doo-dah (Charlotte Chatley territory) which is why the operation had been so difficult and why she currently had two flobbing chuntish morons in the compound to interview instead of singing ‘O Holy Night’ at her midnight mass.
Her director’s intransigence had given her no choice but to run two educationally subnormal agents neither of whom, as it turned out, knew what they were doing. That intransigence coupled with his downright single-mindedness were legendary. For example, it hadn't escaped Jane's notice that Alan, sorry Alison, spent a good deal of his, sorry her, spare time aggressively lobbying for the age of consent in children to be lowered to four and a half. This, she admitted, had made her a little uneasy but if you couldn't do these things in the CIA where could you do them? After all, if there wasn't someone around to create any evil in the world what would be the point of striving for good?
Okay, where were we? enquired her imaginary interlocutor impatiently, routinely kicking in when Jantine was wandering off on some philosophical safari. Ah yes. Agents! Dumb ones. She couldn't believe the trouble she had gone to with regard to both their covers, only for the two of them to end up with this dog's dinner (nothing to do with the bloody shi-tzu.) Training a nest of scorpions to do a tap dance in Death Valley would have been marginally less demanding than preparing these two. And all to no avail as it turned out, because only the night before Phillip got flattened by a finickity and fraudulent Florence Nightingale wannabe Jane had learnt that dear forlorn Phillip (aka despondent Dmitry) really did want to defect, having been dreaming of little houses with white picket fences and family dinners with hot butter rolls and steamy claw bathtub times. An all-American fantasy cooked up by the cavalier Charlotte and Phillip had fallen for it. Sadly for Phillip, given he wasn't to know Charlotte was a raving, unreconstituted dyke. Currently only Jane knew of this intention to defect, a decoded message from Phillip's last drop. Only she had the ciphers. And she was going to keep it from the director for now. Leverage was such a wonderful thing when you were trying to usurp a superior. (And, no, that didn't make her transphobic.)
Yes, the bloody effort she had put into those covers! First she'd gotten Deville trained as a respectable alto (up until then all the birdbrain could sing was 'Twinkle, twinkle little star' - badly.) And then, at the last minute, she'd had to get Angelica false credentials so she could pose as a nurse. Which would have been entirely unnecessary if the dumb broad had not flattened their subject because she couldn't drive a flobbing hybrid. The whole point of the Prius (when it wasn't doubling as a dogs' toilet) was so Deville could keep tabs on Chatley who Jantine suspected of being a double-agent. Her suspicions almost confirmed when the idiot agent took that cop Middle back to Phillip's. (More of that anon.) But given dear Angelica had done a pretty good impression of terminating Phillip with extreme prejudice, Jantine had had to rush to ensure her recruit could at least take a pulse. Up until that faux movie climax when she tried to total the Prius Jane was pretty sure Deville thought the words chanteur and suture were interchangeable.
Oh yes, and what was the PoA bulshit all about? Was that a device to distract from the fact that she was an agent assigned, in part, to keep tabs on Chatley?
Ah yes, Chatley! The fussbudgety, fastidious Charlotte. Why did she insist on the ugliest dog in the world to front her disguise? The budget on that one! And Jantine wasn't sure it had fooled Phillip either. (Not that it would matter now, in light of the defection). Though he did seem to be fooled by the slippers, maybe they made him feel homesick - all that fur. And he was seriously duped by her being besotted with him, which was an achievement given she batted for the same side. But that's what spies do, they lie. About the only thing she did right, to be honest. The dog though! All the bloody time it took to train loopy Luna to dump in exactly the right place! Since last Christmas to be precise, when Chatley moved in next to Phillip. The idea was the dog's movements (of the anal variety) would always coincide with the halfway point in the walking cycle (fourteen and a half to fifteen minutes to be precise) so Charlotte could inadvertently deposit the code in the poop bin on that precise bit of the sidewalk along with the actual ‘droppings’. Manna from heaven probably, for a coprophiliac like Chatley. Pity the whole thing turned to metaphorical shite. (As the Celts are wont to say.)
All this time Jane had no idea that Charlotte had a regular Fentanyl prescription, the dosage of which her crooked doctor kept on upping. Could explain the coprophilia but most certainly did explain the fact that she couldn't remember whether the cop she encountered was a detective or in uniform. First he had a nightstick and then he didn't. First she was calling him officer and then detective. First he was soft on her and then he wasn't. And did she really believe she could fly, or was her feet not touching the ground for four blocks until she touched down in the hospital parking lot a figure of speech as she claimed in her first debrief? In which case the dog must have the strength of those creatures who hailed from the planet Krypton. Worse, was she so stupid that she didn't see that the officer/detective's (take your pick,) crush on her was a ploy to get in the flat? That he was a flobbing FSB agent, evidenced by the fact that he had nonchalantly folded the crucial clue on the manuscript paper into his pocket and gone off allegedly to do a 'stake out.' And had she been so obsessed in her Fentanyl haze by the dog and the cat sniffing each other's rear ends that she hadn't seen the words 'Cantus Firmus' scratched into the coffee table by the organ. 'Cantus Firmus' had been the Choirmaster's code for abort. And that had been that. Five million dollars of MKUltra's budget down the pan. (Oh yes, the toilet imagery is the gift that keeps on giving.)
Jantine de Groot leant back and scratched her bald pate in frustration. Cantus Firmus? Chuntus Idiotus felt more appropriate. Plural. Chuntae Idiotae perhaps. And now she hd to interview these buffoons. How dare their incompetence threaten her Christmas celebrations!
The intercom on her desk buzzed. She pushed the switch to the 'on' position.
'Apollo is here.' said a voice.
'Tell Apollo they can wait,' she said and signed off.
She sighed and looked over to her sleeping area. What type of wig should she wear for the executions, sorry interviews. (Freudian slip.) Then a brain wave hit her. Let Apollo do the executions interviews and she could go and celebrate midnight mass. 'Oh holy night…'
On second thoughts. If Apollo screwed up it might damage her chances of usurping Madame Trans. No, leave Apollo out of it.
She crossed to her dressing table and opted for the Nikki Minaj Double Pony wig. It was Christmas after all. And the mirror told her she was, indeed, the fairest of them all.
The phrase 'It was the night of our dear Saviour's birth' was singing in her ears as she descended the steps into the still fluttering snowflakes so beautifully lit by the prison camp, sorry compound, lights. The snow was settling. Unlike her stomach. She really didn't enjoy this bit.
'O night divine. . O flobbing chuntish night divine…'
Many many thanks to all who participated in this holiday medley and a special thanks to Sharon for taking on the hardest task of wrapping it all neatly in a bow and giving our little project a title. I am especially proud that this creative moment in time spanning three different continents featuring contributors with various writing styles managed to produce a fairly entertaining story. Making art with people is my favourite past time.
Creating art isn’t just a hobby for me, I actually do that as my vocation. Lots changed during the plandemic, of course, but I’m still out here doing it. Speaking of which, my theatre company will be celebrating its 20th anniversary in 2025. As a way to celebrate this milestone, I started a Substack in which I am beginning to transpose our live productions and digitizing them for anyone to enjoy. I hope you have it in your bandwidth to look at another stack, but perfectly understandable if you decide to skip. I would just be remiss if I didn’t tell you, for those who are curious. I hope to see some of you theatre lovers pop in!
And on that note, here’s a little Christmas fare to spread some good cheer for you. I directed this production the year I gave birth to twin boys. My relationship with their dad had just come to heads and he was the lead actor in the show. It was such a rough time for me that I didn’t look at the footage for thirteen years. But time heals most wounds and I look at the production fondly now. Merry Christmas, friends!
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As always, thank you for being a part of my journey.
Merry Christmas, Tonika! :) And wishing you an exciting New Year of good health, productivity, and most of all, time well spent with friends and family. Love, Liam and Sam <3
This was SO good, sorry excellent, sorry flobbing brilliant! Oh my how I laughed. Well done Sharon, really well done!!! How much fun was it to be part of this. Thank you all so much for such ridiculous silliness in which I feel we shared through shit talking, exactly what we think ha ha.