No Doubt cut short its set-most of the crowd had its back to the stage anyhow-and while her band shuffled back to its backstage quarters, Gwen turned on her heels and stormed down the backstage halls, past the roadies and the stacked Marshall amps, to the room that had "Hole" stenciled on the door.
She wore a typical Gwen outfit: the brazen belly-whore of pop-rock Babylon in all her sultry splendor in a skimpy white tube top and hiphugger blue jeans cut a good six inches below her belly-button. The backstage air was hot and stale. Sweat glistened on her brow, in spite of her pancake makeup, and it glistened on her chest and in her belly-button as she strutted the hall, the little plump shelf below her navel jiggling like a pretty pillow above the belt of her low-slung skin-tight jeans.
"Fuck that scumbag at the label for sending us down here," Gwen thought. "This isn't our crowd. We shouldn't be on the same bill with these nasty sluts." Her red lips remained tight-set, but all the while Gwen was scared. And all the while she was relishing a confrontation. Headlines flashed in her head, the slant, urgent typeface of the National Enquirer: Pretty Baby Gwen Stands Up To Grunge Bad Girl. This was important. CD sales had been flat all summer, the follow-up single had never made it into heavy rotation. The critics, never kind to her band, had handed them the ultimate insult of silence.
Gwen kicked the Hole door open and stormed in. A glorified closet, windowless, with a mountain of sound equipment filling half its space and a ratty brown couch taking up most of the rest. Three women sprawled on the couch, and Courtney was on her feet beside the little liquor table. Gwen had thought of a million things to say, but face-to-face at last all that came out was a pouty "I hate you!"
"Ooooooh!" Courtney's bandmates said in mock shock. Luckily for Gwen, Courtney had just set down her tequila bottle, or else the younger girl might have caught it across the teeth.
"What do you want," Courtney stared, and smiled with her big, crazy eyes. "At least I was wearing panties." Half the sounds misfired in her blasted voice box.
"You're so foul, you make me sick," Gwen whined. "I'm amazed I didn't puke up there on stage."
Courtney just laughed. She stood up to her full height, almost a head taller than Gwen. A broad hand, veiny and raw, clapped itself on Gwen's shoulder. Gwen flared her arrogant nostrils.
"Oh, come on, bitch," Courtney said, licking her lips, "don't pretend you don't know what pussy tastes like!"
Gwen lunged at her rival, talons clutching for
Courtney's laughing face. But Courtney was ready. She ducked
the headlong rush easily, and a fist in the belly stopped Gwen
short. OOP! Another slammed her back against the black amp.
UUOOOAAAH! And a third pinned her there like an
expiring insect in a science lab. WUUUUUUHH! After holding her
fist as deeply as it would penetrate in the middle of Gwen's belly,
for the silent count of five, Courtney jerked it out again.
She looked on with gritted teeth and clenched fists as Gwen slowly
slumped to a sitting position, clutching her belly and jerking
her head forward, open-mouthed as if to scream but no sound coming
from her except a quiet, desperate gasping. She dropped to her
knees and fell on her face on the floor.
Courtney stepped a foot on Gwen's ear as she lay
flat, and ground her face against the cold, dirty carpet. "Welcome
to the real world, princess," Courtney hissed. After a second,
the pressure let up on Gwen's cheek. Gwen whimpered a bit, told
herself sternly not to cry, and grunted to her knees. Frowning,
she reached for her back, first with one hand, then the other,
and checked her fingers for blood.
She saw Courtney's hand extended in front of her,
the left hand, palm open. Gwen surrendered her own hand to it.
The fingers gripped her wrist, pulled firmly, and Gwen rose with
it, till on her soles again she stiffly straightened and arched
her spine. But no sooner this than Courtney's free fist slammed
wrist-deep in Gwen's bare belly.
"OOOOOOOOPPHH!!" Gwen stooped, sick
with a bellyfull of agony.
Open mouth grovelling for air to bellow out her suffering.
No girl now, just a punched gut.
The Hole girls laughed. Courtney kicked the door
shut. "It's not punching her in the gut that's fun,"
she said, "it's what comes just after." The long daze
of ache and dehumanizing breathlessness, dragging on the air like
a harsh cigarette, the gasp and suffer and shoulder-shuddering
convulsion. The arched back and gaping yawn of a girl howling
from her belly.
Courtney gave Gwen time to catch her breath, then
she grabbed Gwen's hair, pulled her to her feet, and said, "you
wanted a piece of me? Come and get it." Trapped, Gwen tried
gamely to fight. She staggered forward, blinded by tears, but
with her long arms and strong wrists Courtney kept the wild-swinging
Italian girl at a distance. The Hole girls whooped nad laughed.
Gwen broke free and brought her right hand around
in a wild swing at Courtney's head. Courtney ducked and easily
avoided the blow. Gwen brought her right hand back around in
a backhand swing at Courtney's head, but the tall slut easily
dodged that blow as well. As Gwen was still in the process of
regaining her balance, Courtney moved in and punched her in the
stomach with her right fist. UUH! Gwen doubled over from the
blow, and Courtney caught her by the shoulder with her left hand,
holding her up, and pummeled Gwen's belly with her right. Gwen
grunted and her face puckered with each blow to her stomach.
Courtney bashed Gwen's head against a speaker, then clamped her
in a side headlock. With her free hand she drove fist after fist
up into Gwen's soft belly. She was getting good whacks up into
Gwen's gut-meat, but she couldn't get her weight into it with
one arm wrapped around Gwen's neck.
She called to her bandmates. "Help me out
here!" Two tall, lean, strong-armed women quickly rose and
clamped Gwen in an arm-lock. Both arms twisted, sinew-torture,
hands helpless against the raw spot amid her upper back.
Gwen panicked. To rob someone of the instinctive,
protective reflex of doubling up to shield the viscera is to create
an overwhelming sensation of panic and helplessnessness in that
person, which is almost as devastating to self-control as any
real act of violence could be. Thus being held or tied back,
and Gwen was, and threatened with being punched is part of exquisite
pleasure: physical suffering, personal humiliation, and emotional
trauma, all of which, by the reactions they provoke, erase the
identity. To feel your belly bare and unprotected in a place
of danger is a very real, animal fear. It's visceral, if you
will: maybe the most visceral feeling of them all, which is why
it might have lent its image to our use of phrases like "gut-wrenching"
to mean terrifying. Or visceral: to describe the most basic fears
of all with the term "-of the belly." A visceral fear
is a fear from the belly.
Courtney stood close to her. She grabbed a lock
of Gwen's hair. "Look: roots. Isn't it about time you paint
your hair again?" And she slugged Gwen in the gut.
"H-UUUUUUUHH!" the young singer heaved.
The two tall women held Gwen up. The glare of the room's one
bare bulb lit the hard flint in Courtney's eyes as well as the
dim flicker in Gwen's lazy gaze and the slack pant of her jaw.
A torso twist, a dipped shoulder and a spongy
"thud" announced another punch in Gwen's belly. Her
slack body sucked back from the middle and her face winced while
her cheeks chuffed. Courtney paused to enjoy the sobby rasp of
Gwen's breathless ache, and then when the pretty girl finally
sipped wind enough to moan, "uuuhooough," Courtney walloped
her again. Gwen's mind, too smeared to anticipate, to set the
flesh, offered open organ and naked nerves to Courtney's gut-shudder
slug. She speared Gwen's stomach with her fist. A dense slap
sounded and Gwen's belly flopped inside her.
Her knees went, but the big girls clamped their
grip on her arms before she hit the floor. Courtney pitched another
punch into her. The thud of a heavy mallet on thick beef. Gwen
heaved up her pride with a rolling moan.
"OOOOAAUHH! Uh ... uh ... uh ... uh!"
POW! A fist right in the belly. Gwen went over
hard, jackknifed at the waist, but the big girls held her fast
upright. Gwen was moaning, head lolling, unaware of her peril.
So the next fist, a knuckle shot two inches above the belly-button,
caught her as soft and unprepared as the first one had. OOUFF!! she spit, but she couldn't fold forward
or clutch her soft gut. She couldn't even think about resistance
or defense. Her brain, paralyzed like her diaphragm, had shut
down. But her reflexes were intact, and with that punch a gush
of liquid surged up Gwen's throat and vomited out her mouth.
Courtney stepped back just in time.
"Ew! She puked!" one of the girls holding
Gwen said. They both threw her forward and she fell on her chin
on the dirty floor.
The three women watched silently as Gwen writhed,
in slow motion, and kicked feebly. Her ladylike red-nailed fingers
clawed the carpet, and her face, red and pinched from breathless
sobbing, looked up at them, uncomprehending.
One of the beefy girls kicked her harshly in the
stomach. With a brief gasp, Gwen lay still. "Open the door,"
Courtney panted. Her bandmates did as told. Grunting, Courtney
hauled Gwen to her feet and balanced her in the doorway, facing
into the room. Gwen hovered there unsteadily. Her belly had
a pale pink blotch in the middle and her breathing was labored.
Courtney concentrated her power and her mental efforts in a martial
arts ritual and let all her hatred for Gwen and her kind explode
into a punch that walloped Gwen deeply in the pit of her bare
belly. "OOOOOOUHHH!" the sexpot groaned as she threw
her head back and suffered. Her body staggered straight back
out the door, across the hall, and slammed hard into the far wall where she collapsed like an accordion in a heap on the floor.
The Hole girls watched her in silence for a minute during which she didn't move.
"Smells like puke in here," Courtney
sniffed. "Let's go."