Blonde Joke Chapter Five by Jeffrey M. Mahr   How many blondes does it take to make chocolate chip cookies? Three. One to mix the dough and two to sort the M&Ms to remove the “W”s, “E”s and “3”s.

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“I’m taking us to my younger sister, Maggie. Well, her real name is Magda, Magda Matra Isseksen, but she hates that so we always call her Maggie or M&M.” Glancing at the clock on the dashboard, she realized it was late afternoon.

“Drat, it’s late. We’re going to have to go to the club she works at.” Glancing over, Tommi was still staring forward, hugging her knees as if they might fall off if she let go.

“The club is on Fourteenth and Hamilton,” Katrina rambled nervously. Tommi was worrying her with her strange behavior. “It’s called ‘The Cravat.’ I got her the job there. It’s how I made my living expenses while I was in college. It’s a…ah…gentleman’s club, but there should be no one there but the staff now so we should be safe from annoying patrons. I was Kitty Kat Knutson. That was my stage name. It was...”

A glance at her passenger showed that Tommi was still silently staring ahead, but now she was crying, with huge tears rolling down her face. The tears grew into sobs as she shivered uncontrollably.

Quickly pulling over to the side of the road Katrina reached over to comfort her, but Tommi jerked away with a look of sheer panic on her face as she slowly slide off the seat to cower beneath the dashboard. The tears had stopped, but her eyes were wide, glazed and staring unfocused into the car window beside Katrina. There was even a small drop of drool running down her cheek. Katrina reached out again. This time Tommi shuddered again, but didn’t move when Katrina touched her cheek, however, that was only because she had nowhere else to go.

“Damn,” Katrina muttered as she turned the heat up to high and started driving again, “she’s gone into shock.” The remaining four miles of the drive to the club was white-knuckle time. Katrina drove as quickly as she dared, cutting off several other cars and running several lights where it was questionable whether the color was really yellow in her haste to get to the Cravat.

Pulling up to the club, she stopped in the no parking zone directly in front and ran inside, leaving the still unresponsive Tommi curled up under the dashboard.

The plush, conservative decor inside hadn’t changed. Where most strip joints went in for the cheap plastic, vinyl and chrome look, the Cravat was very much the exception with richly oiled oak and mahogany wainscoting, plush leather chairs, art deco style lighting, and huge elaborately framed portraits, albeit of scantily clad women in sexually provocative situations. Only the subject matter of the portraits gave away the nature of the establishment; after all, it was a “private” club. Katrina ignored all this as she trotted around to the rear of the building, kicked some trash out of the way of the stage door and pounded on the service entrance. When the door creaked opened, she pushed past the bouncer that had been assigned door duty calling out, “I need to see M&M. Now! It’s important.” Before he could decide to stop the beautiful woman, she was already by the bouncer.

Maggie was on the stage practicing along with a baker’s dozen of other beautiful women, all wearing feathers and little else. She was a younger twin of Katrina, younger by just four years. Katrina impatiently waited for the dance number to stop and then called out to her.

“Maggie! It’s Katrina. I need to talk to you.”

“Katrina?” Maggie squinted against the stage lighting to make out a grey shape beyond the stage. “What are you doing here?” They met at the edge of the stage.

“I’m in trouble, Maggie. I need to use your place to hide. There are two of us, not just me.”
“And everyone thought I’d be the wild one,” Maggie laughed. “Come on around to the dressing room and I’ll give you the keys to my apartment. When I see them, I’ll tell Barbie and Karen you’re visiting for a while.” Maggie headed off behind the curtain and Katrina walked around to the door beside the stage with the words “employees only” on it. Back stage was the usual controlled chaos with people and props everywhere but she quickly wended her way back to the dressing room where Maggie was waiting for her, keys in hand.

“So who’s this guy that has you head over heels?” Maggie laughed as she hugged her sister.

“You wouldn’t believe,” Katrina said with a brittle laugh. “When you get home I’ll give you the whole story.” Turning, she struggled through the maze of tables and chairs back towards the stage door.

Maggie continued to laugh and called after her. “Make it a juicy one, Kitty Kat.”

Keys in hand, Katrina made it back out into the alley and to the car without anything more than a dirty look from the bouncer. As luck would have it, there wasn’t even a ticket on the illegally parked car, but then again, the cops wouldn’t be around until later in the evening when they’d be able to multiple-ticket some of the big spenders from the suburbs coming into town for a night at this club or one of the other entertainment establishments in the area.

Tommi hadn’t moved. She was still huddled between the seat and the dashboard, but she was clearly shivering again so Katrina knew she was at least alive. Turning up the car’s heat, she quickly drove the several blocks to the loft apartment Maggie and her roommates shared.

Pulling into another illegal parking space, this time in front of a fire hydrant, Katrina saw that Tommi still hadn’t rejoined the living. Praying that the lift was in working order, she ran around to the passenger door, opened it and tried to yank the near catatonic Tommi out of the car. It wasn’t easy, but once Katrina had her moving, Tommi came willingly albeit leaning heavily against her. The two staggered to the lift. Fearing she’d never get Tommi up again if she curled up into a ball again, Katrina cursed as she propped Tommi against the wall while stretching to close the elevator door.

“Hello. Anybody home?” Silence greeted the two women as the elevator stopped at the loft’s third floor entrance. With a brief curse at the unsurprising lack of help–after all Maggie had said she’d tell her room mates so they were probably at the club or on their way there from classes–she dragged Tommi off to Maggie’s bed and let her collapse onto the bed. With another muttered curse, Katrina covered the shivering form with several blankets and headed out to find a legal parking space for her car.

The shrieks of laughter almost drowned out the creaking of the ancient elevator. Seconds later Maggie and two other young women fell giggling through the apartment door. Seeing Katrina, Maggie almost bowled her over as she ran over to her and hugged her.

“Barbie. Karen. Come here and meet my older sister, Katrina. Dr. Katrina Isseksen, or Kitty Kat as I like to call her, works at GTI. She’s the one responsible for developing that new wonder drug I’ve been telling you about, ViTaGeSeM.”

Over the greetings of others, Maggie started looked around. “So where’s this guy you’ve run off with?”

“In your bedroom, but before you go in we really need to talk.” Maggie’s smile faded with each word, Katrina’s voice sounded so ominously serious. Katrina gently pulled her over to the couch to sit. Barbie and Karen started to excuse themselves but Katrina waved them down onto the couch next to her. “Please. You should all know what’s happening.”

“Well, she’s not catatonic or her hand would stay in the air where I put it, but she is in bad shape. Shock at the least, and I won’t know what else until she comes around. You did well by bundling her up under the covers and leaving her alone.” Escorting Katrina back to the living room Maggie continued, “Now there are a couple of options, but I recommend waiting for her to come around on her own.”

“Kat, it’s been two days and she hasn’t come around. We need to get her medical help or she could die.”

“We can’t. I told you what happened at GTI. If anyone finds out where we are, we could be at risk again. You, Barbie and Karen could all be at risk. Isn’t there something else we can do?” Katrina was pleading now. “Anything?”

“Well. Maybe.” Maggie paused a moment to collect her thoughts. “I have an idea, but it’s pretty weird. First you need to answer a couple of questions.”

“Anything.”

“First, you told me what she did to you. Why do you care about her?”

Katrina was silent for several minutes while Maggie patiently waited for her to respond. “I won’t say I like her. She’s been a cruel and evil person. She tried to destroy me, at least professionally, and for nothing more than money,” the word was spit out like a curse, “but I guess I got my revenge when she was injected with my DNA. If nothing else, she’s a human being and even if she doesn’t know it she’s genetically my twin sister. I won’t let her, or any other human being, die because of my inaction. Besides, she was trapped with me and helped me escape.”

Another long pause, “To add another besides, I did kind of get even with her already. Remember what I told you that I told Tommi about the modified DNA we received. I lied to her. I did have time to analyze the samples and I knew what he was planning. I changed them so we both got versions of my DNA. I figured that was safer than guessing which injector had the inhibitor and having it be a crap shoot as to whether anything happened to her. She’s not really becoming the air-headed, hormonally driven, sex object she thinks she’s becoming.

“Okay, next question. Do you want to get even?”

“The temptation is strong; I admit it, but no. I just want what’s rightfully mine. I developed ViTaGeSeM. I want the royalties due me and the right to insure that it’s used for the benefit of humanity, not just to line the pockets of some company.”

“You understand you’re probably going to have to go public to fight for that, don’t you Kat?”

“Yes, but first I need to ‘lay low,’ as they called it on those westerns you loved to watch as a kid, until I can figure out how to do it safely. I’ll send a letter to my attorneys, but without money they’re not likely to push very hard, so this is an interim solution at best.”

“Okay, last question. Unlike me, you’ve always been embarrassed about the time you spent at the Cravat. Do you think anyone knows about it?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Good. Then I think I have an answer big sis. You stay here. The loft’s under Barbie’s name, not mine. You work at the Cravat again to get enough money to fight back. We all help you come up with a way to get even with GTI.” Maggie stopped Katrina from objecting with a gentle touch of her finger on Kat’s lips. “I know, you say you don’t want to ‘get even,’ but I know you better. You’re going to stew and stew and make life miserable for everyone around you until you feel you’ve evened the score. Remember when I accidentally broke that porcelain doll mom gave you for you’re tenth birthday?”

“That was no accident. You dropped it out the attic window when I wouldn’t let you play with my friends.”

“I told you a million times that was an accident. I never intended to drop it only hold it ransom...and besides, that’s not the point. The point is, you made my life a living hell for the next five months until I saved enough and got you a new one. The same thing’s going to happen here; I just know it. So, let’s admit it and get it over with so we can move on.”

“Spoken like a true psychologist,” Katrina laughed. “Okay I admit it, little M&M. You’re right. I’m a bitch. So do you have any ideas what we should do about GTI, Franklin Brodsky and his ex-son Tommi?”

“I’m glad you asked m’dear,” Maggie said, doing a really poor W. C. Fields imitation before switching to Groucho Marx, waving an imaginary cigar and twitching her eyebrows, “Say the magic woid and win a prize.”

Katrina hugged her sister as they laughed. “You win. You’re right. ‘The magic woid.’ There. I’ve said it. Now what’s your idea?”

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