SEE MARILYN MONROE'S.

PANTIES!.

Bentley Little.

We'd been seeing the signs for the past hundred miles: SEE HITLER'S SS UNIFORM!.

SEE JOHN LENNON'S GUITAR!.

SEE ELVIS'S TOUPEE!.

They were s.p.a.ced twenty-five miles apart, the only man-made objects on this G.o.dforsaken stretch of desert highway, and as advertising, I had to admit, they were pretty d.a.m.n effective. There was nothing else to focus on, nothing else to remark upon, and without any visual compet.i.tion, the signs captured drivers' undivided attention. The s.p.a.ce between them gave them time to be discussed, the next one antic.i.p.ated, and that only increased the attention they received from motorists.

As a communications major with an emphasis in advertising/public relations, I admired the billboards and their ability to intrigue and involve, in a crudely simplistic way, their captive audience. At the same time, I knew that the audience was smalla"most people preferred to fly to their destinations these days rather than drivea"and that, as effective as they were, the signs were little more than quaint relics from an earlier marketing age.

I stared through the front windshield. Another sign was coming up, the bright red rectangle growing as we sped toward it.

SEE MARILYN MONROE'S PANTIES.'.

Ray looked over at me. "What kind of place is this?"

I shook my head. "How would I know?" I took a sip of warm melted ice from the McDonald's cup between my legs.

Another billboard was already visible a mile or so ahead. Whatever it was, we were getting close. I realized that we still did not know the name of the museum, store, or tourist trap whose wonders had been spelled out for us. Clever hook.

FIVE MILES TO THE PLACE!!.

'"The Place'?" I said. "Is that what it's called?" Ray grinned at me. "How would I know?" Ahead, we could see a series of signs, s.p.a.ced approximately a mile apart. The signs counted down the distance to The Place. Four miles. Three miles. Two. One. "Let's check it out," Ray said as we pa.s.sed the last sign. I nodded. "Sure."

I could already see a small run-down building by the side of the highway. A final billboard stood directly in front of the short drive, this one with an arrow pointing toward the building and the words THIS IS THE PLACE!! printed in huge letters. Ray slowed the car, pulled in.

I don't know what I was expecting, but it sure wasn't this. We parked in the dirt lot next to the only other vehicle there, a dusty red pickup. At the very least, I'd a.s.sumed that The Place would be bigger. I'd known that the trail of billboards was meant to lure in suckers, but in my mind, the building had been larger, gaudier, in keeping with the signs. The ramshackle wooden structure before us was definitely not what I had been led to expect from all the hype and buildup.

I guess I was one of the suckers.

I got out and stretched my legs. Ray did the same. We looked at each other over the roof of the car. "Still want to go in?" I asked.

"Might as well. We're here. Besides, I gotta take a whiz."

The front door was mirrored gla.s.s, reflecting the highway and the desert beyond. We pushed the door open and walked inside.

The interior of The Place was dark, lit only by a single bar of fluorescent light and the filtered sunshine that was strong enough to penetrate the dust on the skylight. The air was humid and only marginally cooler than the air outside, circulated by an ancient swamp cooler I'd spotted on the roof. It looked like a gift shop, the type of slightly seedy tourist trap usually attached to gas stations in towns that had been on the main highway before the newer freeways had pa.s.sed them by, and on the shelves and counter I saw cut geodes, fake Indian jewelry, a.s.sorted candy bars, and the type of novelty items that were ma.s.s-produced in Asia but had local names added on in an attempt to make them seem like legitimate souvenirs. An old man who was probably in his sixties but whose sun-leathered face made him look more like he was in his eighties stood behind the cash register, smiling at us.

"How do today," he said. "Welcome to The Place."

"You got a bathroom here?" Ray asked.

"Public facilities are outside and around to your left."

Ray looked questioningly at me.

"I'll meet you back in here," I said.

He went back out the front door, and I turned toward the old man. "I thought this was, like, a museum."

"Oh, it is," the old man said. "This is just the gift shop. Museum's through that door there." He gestured over his shoulder at a doorway behind him. "Admission's a dollar."

"A dollar, huh?"

"Can't beat that price," the old man said. "Not out here." He laughed wheezingly.

Why not? I thought. I dug through the wad of bills in my pocket and pulled out a one, handing it to the old man. "Here."

He took the bill, stepped aside, and flipped a light switch next to the doorway. A series of low lights flickered on in the museum behind him. He motioned toward the entrance. "Step right in. We don't have a guided tour, but all of our exhibits are pretty well marked. If you have any questions, give me a holler."

I nodded and stepped past him into the museum.

It was bigger than I thought it would be. The gift shop was small, and I guess I'd a.s.sumed that the museum would be equally tiny, but though it was narrow, it stretched pretty far back. In contrast to the rough exterior of the building and the cheap paneling of the gift shop, the museum's walls were finished white, more suited to a metropolitan art gallery than this collection of kitsch in the middle of the desert.

I walked up to the first exhibit, a large gla.s.s case housing an electric Gibson guitar. A low spotlight in the ceiling directly above the case was trained directly on the instrument, dramatically highlighting it. A simple sign on the side of the case read: "John Lennon's Guitar." There was no other description, no explanation, only those three words.

I didn't know if the guitar really had been Lennon's, but I wasn't quite as skeptical as I had been earlier. Something about the museum and its layout bespoke authenticity.

I glanced around the room, not certain where to start, and decided to tour the room clockwise. I walked over to the next case on my right and read the sign.

"Marilyn Monroe's Panties."

I looked through the gla.s.s. On the floor of the case was a grayish greenish clump of what looked like mold on wadded cloth. I blinked, stared, moved around to the side of the exhibit. The disturbingly fuzzy material in the case could have conceivably been moldy panties, but the sight was so unexpected and so bizarre, so at odds with my perception of Marilyn Monroe, that it startled me. I had been expecting exotic lingerie, satin or some sort of frilly lace, not this disgusting wad of filth, and I couldn't take my eyes off the object. If these really were Marilyn Monroe's panties, how had they gotten to the state they were now in? Had they been tossed in some dump or garbage can? Had they sat for years next to rotting food? They had to have been moist to become moldy.

Moist from her?

The thought aroused me. No matter that the mildewed wad of material in the middle of the case looked like it was putrifying, the idea that the mold was growing from Marilyn Monroe's lubricating juices stimulated me. I stared into the case.

And the clump moved.

It did not move a lot, did not crawl around or jump against the gla.s.s. But there was a definite shift in the material, almost a shrug.

And there was something exciting about it.

I felt a stirring in my groin.

Another shift. I breathed deeply, continued to stare. Were the panties . . . beckoning to me?

I touched my hand to the gla.s.s and the illusion was gone. There was only a dark fuzzy clump of wadded cloth in the bottom of the case. It had not moved. It could not move.

Still, the attraction had not gone away, and an erection pressed hard against the denim of my jeans as I looked in at the panties.

"Dude!"

Ray's voice carried across the silent room, and I turned to see him standing on the other side of the counter back in the gift shop.

"Anything worth seeing in there?"

I hazarded one last look at the panties, then shook my head and walked toward the museum entrance, surrept.i.tiously pressing down on the front of my pants. "Not really."

"Ready to hit the road, then? We're losing time."

I nodded, walked out of the museum. For some reason, I didn't want Ray to see the panties. I felt protective, almost jealous, of what I had seen, and I didn't want to share it. I glanced behind me, at the other cases I hadn't yet viewed, but I realized that I didn't care what was in them. Whatever curiosity I had initially felt had fled.

I stepped around the counter to where Ray was drinking a c.o.ke he'd bought. The old man grinned at me as I pa.s.sed by him, and though it might have been my own paranoid imagination, it seemed as though he knew what I had experienced in there, what I had felt. "See anything you like?" he asked.

My answer came out harsher than I intended. "No, your mama's vibrator wasn't in there."

He laughed, a high harsh cackle, and I did not look back as I followed Ray out of the building into the parking lot. "See any of that stuff they advertised on the signs?" Ray asked. "Hitler's toupee, Elvis's uniform, Marilyn Monroe's panties?"

I shook my head. "It was all fake."

"That's what I figured."

I did not feel like talking, and once in the car, I leaned my head against the pa.s.senger window and pretended to fall asleep. I tried not to think of what I had seen in The Place, but I could think of nothing else, and I kept my hands in my lap, pressing down on my erection, hoping Ray wouldn't notice. Eventually I did fall asleep.

I dreamed of Marilyn Monroe's panties.

Phoenix was where we were to part company, and we reached the city three hours later. I was going to stay at my brother Jim's house there for spring break, while Ray was going on to Palm Springs, where he hoped to get into some serious partying. He'd come back through in six days to pick me up, and then we'd drive back to Albuquerque together.

I was silent as I unpacked my bag and suitcase from the trunk, and Ray looked at me strangely as he helped me carry the ice chest into my brother's house. "Are you okay?"

"Sure. I'm fine."

He nodded, but I could tell he didn't believe me, and he still looked uneasy as he said good-bye and pulled away ten minutes later.

I had been looking forward to staying at Jim's ever since the semester started. I hadn't seen him for a while, and I figured we could hang together, maybe get in a little hiking, hit some of our old haunts. But I felt restless, and as I sat there in my brother's living room, drinking a beer, listening to him tell me about his job, about the babes he'd gone out with since the last time we'd spoken, I found myself tuning him out.

And thinking about The Place.

There was no doubt in my mind that the dirty mildewed material I had seen really had been Marilyn Monroe's panties, but I could still not figure out how they had ended up there, in the middle of nowhere, in the hands of that old man. The whole thing seemed creepy to me, unsettling, and the fact that I could not stop thinking about ita"and that every time I did recall what I had seen, I became arouseda"frightened me.

"So what do you want to do tonight?" Jim asked. "Want to hit some of the clubs?"

I didn't really feel like doing anything, but I found myself nodding. "Sure," I said. "That'd be great."

The hip nightspots had changed in the two years I'd been gone. Jim took me to the newest meat markets, and he met a tall blond bimbo while dancing who was more than willing to come home with him. I was sitting alone at the bar, trying my best not to meet or talk to anyone, and he sat down on the stool next to me and asked me if it was okay if the woman spent the night, and I said I didn't care and was ready to head back whenever he was.

I sat in the back of the car on the way home, with the two of them up front, and as soon as we reached Jim's house, I said good night and locked myself in my bedroom.

I awoke sometime in the middle of the night to take a p.i.s.s, and I pulled on my jeans and walked down the hall to the bathroom. I turned on the light, closed the door, and saw, on the shower rug next to the tub, clothes. Jim's and the woman's. I stared down at the black satin panties lying atop the wrinkled minidress. I bent down and slowly picked them up, running my fingers over the smooth material. It had been a long time since I'd had s.e.x, over a year, and this woman's underwear should have been exciting to me. But I felt nothing as I rubbed the soft panties over the skin of my face.

I kept thinking how much s.e.xier these panties would be if Marilyn Monroe had worn them.

If there was mold growing on them.

I dropped the panties, my erection springing to life as I thought of the grayish green fuzz on that wadded clump in the museum case.

What the h.e.l.l was wrong with me?

I hurried back to my bedroom.

I tried to fall asleep, but I was wide-awake, thinking, my brain unable to concentrate on anything other than what I'd seen in The Place, and finally I suc-c.u.mbed, pulling down my underwear, grasping my erection and stroking it as I thought of the sensuous way in which the moldy panties had shrugged at me, beckoning me. I came violently, the biggest o.r.g.a.s.m I'd ever had, so much s.e.m.e.n pumping out onto my chest that I thought it was never going to stop.

I cleaned it up with Kleenexes, dumped the Kleenexes in the trash can, and lay there breathing deeply until I finally fell asleep.

In the morning, I knew what I had to do.

I asked my brother if I could borrow his old Dart. He was reluctant at first and asked what I wanted it for, and I said that there was an old girlfriend I wanted to look up. I pointed out that he would still have the Lexus to drive around in, and he said okay, he'd let me borrow the Dart, but I had to promise to bring it back before nightfall because the taillights didn't work.

I lied and said I would.

I reached The Place just after noon.

The old man was again behind the counter, only this time he looked at me more suspiciously when I paid my dollar and walked into the museum. Or maybe I was just being paranoid.

The panties were as filthy and disgusting as I remembered. Green and gray and black and fuzzy. The allure was there, though. Stronger, if anything. My p.e.n.i.s grew, the erection straining against my pants. More than anything, I wanted to smash that gla.s.s so that there was nothing between the panties and myself. I examined the case and saw that one of the gla.s.s sides, the one opposite the identification sign, was hinged. There was no lock on it, and I touched it and it swung outward.

I glanced quickly toward the door, to make sure the old man hadn't seen me, but I could only see the back of his head and the right half of his body. I quickly closed the door to the case and glanced around the museum. There were two doors other than the entrance through which I'd come, and I gave Marilyn's panties one last loving look, and then walked over to the door on the side wall. Again I looked toward the entrance to make sure the old man wasn't watching me. I didn't see him at all, and I quickly turned the k.n.o.b and opened the door.

I closed it just as quickly. It opened onto the desert on the side of The Place.

A possibility.

I walked to the rear of the museum, glanced up front, then tried to turn the k.n.o.b on this door. It was locked.

That settled it. If I was going to break in, I would do it from the side.

I glanced around at the museum's other exhibits, then moved back over to the case with Marilyn's panties.

"Time's up."

I looked toward the entrance to see the old man staring at me.

"Your time's up," he said.

I walked toward him, reaching for my wallet.

"I don't want your money," he said. "I want you out of here."

I looked at him. "What?"