A shop window stopped me in my tracks last night. Or rather something in the window stopped me; it was a blue velvet Playboy bunny girls costume.
A costume iddentical to the one that Babs had worn for a few weeks while working at the Playboy club in Chicago back in the sixties.
I had caught sight of Babs as she bent to tie the shoelace of a young folk singer who I could quite plainly see would be soon tangled up in blue, the scut on her arse sending alarm signals as it bobbed in the neon glow. I ducked behind a pillar as she leant into him to pick a piece of lint from his coat then left when she was out of sight.
I stood at that shop window transfixed as the Blue velvet spoke through the glass.
It said: I first came to consciousness in 1962 as a girl called Gillian slipped into me and then twirled for Hugh, then giggled nervously as he adjusted the gusset and smoothed the knap on her breasts and her arse.
A string of men begged her to slip out of the club and then out of her costume and then post-coitally out of their lives. Until the last one (to my knowledge anyway) took me as a memento, a trophy.
I hung on his wall until he handed me on to a new girlfriend who kept me for many years in the dark with occasional outings to be slipped into and out of prior to her being slipped into and out of.
Over the years I developed my patina of cynicism.
that woman handed me on to her son who handed me onto his girlfriend who has slipped into me from time to time and now hangs me in this window, in all my faded glory for all the world to see.
