Notes:

Eons ago, I used to hang around a burlesque group--back when there was a resurgence of the artform. The group attracted a lot of characters (besides me), and "Isil" was one. An aspiring model at one point, she told us a version this story one night over drinks. I recently reached out and asked if she could write up the experience for me to edit and publish. She said yes and sent a draft. "How I Got Pied" is edited by me, with some parts fictionalized: there was no dressing room, she ran back to her car; the man with the clipboard wasn't very talkative; and I changed the prose and grammar. Copy-editing, in other words. The sequence of events is hers.

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"How I Got Pied" - Isil Montgomery

I want to tell you about the best ten seconds of my life.

I was at a bikini contest at the beach. I will not tell you which beach. It does not matter. What matters is that I was twenty-four and an aspiring model and I had entered the contest on a Tuesday afternoon impulse the way some people decide to get bangs, which is to say I had not thought about it for very long and I was not going to think about it again until I was in it.

Here is the relevant data on the entrant. Five-four. A hundred and fifteen pounds. Thirty-four C, working with what I have got, which is enough, a chest you would call a thirst trap and not a fetish. Twenty-four-inch waist. Hips that go where sexy hips are supposed to. Light brown hair in tight natural curls down to my shoulders. The kind of face that gets called cute more than beautiful and I have made peace with that because cute gets you in more doors than beautiful in the long run. I thought, walking onto that beach, that the numbers were going to be enough. I was wrong, and I want to be honest with you about how fast I figured that out.

I figured it out in four minutes.

There were ten of us. Two of them looked like they were going to be on a billboard before lunch. Three of them had brought their own crowd. I had brought myself and a tote bag with a paperback I was not going to read. The woman standing next to me in line was twenty-eight and beautiful in a way I am not. Long, smooth, the kind of body that does what it is told. She had been doing this circuit for three years. She told me so while we waited. She was nice. I liked her. She was going to make top three and she knew it and I knew it and there was no rivalry because rivalry would have been delusional.

The bikini was new. I had bought it for this. It was a tangerine color that looked great on the hanger and looked, on me, like I was trying very hard, which I was.

The sand was hot. I could feel each grain individually. I was hyperaware of every inch of my own skin.

They called the top three. She was in it. I was not. There was a small soft sound inside my chest that was oh, well, and then there was a second, louder sound that was "fuck it".

I cannot tell you where the decision came from. I can tell you what it felt like. It felt like a door I had not known was there swinging open in the back of my own head. It felt like an invitation I was making to myself, in front of three hundred strangers and a panel of judges I had already lost.

I reached behind my back. I untied the top.

I let it fall.

There was a sound from somewhere -- a sharp inhale, a laugh, a yelp of delight from the contest-winning woman next to me. I did not look. I bent. I hooked my thumbs into the bottoms. I pulled them down. I stepped out of them. I was naked on a beach in front of three hundred people in the middle of a contest I had just lost and I had never felt that good in my entire life.

The woman next to me -- the beautiful twenty-eight-year-old who made the top three -- laughed, delighted, and reached down and picked up my bikini. I will remember that forever. She did not hand it back to me. She held it up for one count, grinned at me, and tossed it underhand into the sand fifteen feet away, out of reach. "Stay naked!" she said, low, just for me.

No going back. That was the move that made it real. I could have grabbed the bikini back and put it on and apologized and gone home. I could not now. She had thrown my way out into the sand on purpose. I loved her for it. I still love her for it.

I threw my arms up over my head. I stood on my tiptoes. I yelled -- actually yelled -- "taa-daaa".

The crowd lost it. Some of them screamed. Some of them clapped. Some of them booed in the friendly way people boo at things they secretly enjoy. The judges were laughing. The woman next to me was cackling. I could feel the sun on parts of me the sun had never been on before, in public anyway, and the breeze off the water moving across the parts of me that were warmer than the air. My nipples were tight from the cool. There was a man in the front row with his mouth open. There were two women in the second row pointing at me and laughing in the good way. I felt enormous. I felt like a bell that had just been struck.

I held the pose. I was grinning so hard I could feel my whole face doing it.

And then I saw him.

He had a clipboard. He had a box. He was an older man, sixties maybe, gray-bearded, the kind of guy who looks like he has run sandcastle contests and three-legged races and oyster festivals for forty years and has seen everything. He was walking toward me from the official tent with a serious expression and a box, and I thought, oh, here it is, he is going to disqualify me, he is going to hand me a towel, he is going to walk me off the stage and tell me to put my clothes on, fine, I have had my taa-daa, I am ready to go.

He stopped two feet in front of me. He put the box down. He reached into it.

I had time to see it for half a second. Banana cream. Real one. Whipped-cream peaks holding. Graham crust visible at the edges. Huge -- fourteen inches across at least, piled high, a pie built by somebody who took their work seriously.

I had time to think one thing.

The thing was: "what."

He pied me.

I cannot describe the next half-second except to say that the world disappeared. The pie hit me square -- bridge of the nose first, then the spread, cream and custard pressing into my open mouth, into both my eyes at once, sealing them, filling my ears in the same motion. He pressed. He held the tin against my face for a full count. Two counts. He was thorough. And then he lifted it, slow, and the pie stuck to me for a generous second -- I felt it cling, I felt the weight of it deciding what to do -- and then it began to slide.

It slid down my face in a sheet. It went off my chin. The bulk of it -- the part that had been the center of the pie, the heaviest part, the wettest part -- fell as one piece and landed on my chest, splattering across both breasts at once, the cream sheeting down the slopes of them, custard pooling in the valley between, more of it cascading down the right side because that is where gravity took it. I felt that. I felt that very specifically. I felt the cream slide across both nipples, both already tight, and the cold of the custard meeting that specific tightness sent a signal up my spine I did not have a category for. The pie continued past my ribs, past my hip, down the outside of my thigh, off my foot, into the sand.

The woman next to me screamed. A short sharp scream, the good kind, the kind people scream when something incredible has happened in front of them. The crowd was a wall of sound. I could not make any of it out individually.

I was still posed. Arms up. On my tiptoes. Taa-daa.

I had cream from ear to ear. I had cream in my hair, in my eyebrows, on my eyelashes, in both ears, on my neck, on my shoulders, under my raised arms -- which had been open and unprotected, and which were now full of custard in the inside crease, in my armpits, dripping down my sides. I had cream on both breasts. I had cream on my stomach. I had a piece of crust stuck to my collarbone like a brooch. I had banana cream on my upper thigh where the bulk had passed on its way to the sand.

The gray-bearded man stepped back. He picked up his clipboard. He cleared his throat. He spoke into the microphone clipped to his shirt, and his voice carried across the whole beach, in the patient tone of a man who had been waiting fifteen years to read this sentence aloud:

"Per contest rules. Naked contestants. Will be pied."

The crowd lost it again. A second wave of screaming. The judges were howling. I could not see any of them because I had cream sealing both my eyes, but I could hear them, and I could feel the sound on my creamed skin.

I lowered my arms -- slowly, because I could not see and did not know what I was about to hit -- and I used the back of my own wrist, one bit of me that was still clean, to drag cream off the lashes of my right eye. The world came back into the smallest slit of vision. I saw the gray-bearded man. He was grinning. He was proud. He had clearly been waiting fifteen years to enforce that rule and I had given him the day of his life.

I started laughing. Not a polite laugh. A whole-body laugh, from somewhere I had not known was in me, and I felt cream move on my face when I let it out, and I did not stop.

And here is the part I am writing this blog post to tell you about.

Underneath the laughing -- underneath the taa-daa, underneath the cream, underneath the crust on my collarbone and the custard in my ear -- my body did something I had never felt it do before.

I got wet. Immediately. Fast. The kind of wet you cannot pretend is something else. The kind of wet that has a throb attached to it. I felt it in my whole pelvis at once. I felt it down both thighs. I felt my own clit announce itself in a way it had never announced itself in public in my life. I had to press my thighs together. I did. I stood on a beach with cream sliding off my body and I pressed my thighs together because if I did not I was going to do something in front of a crowd I would not be able to take back.

I did not understand what was happening. I want to be clear about that. I was twenty-four. I had had sex. I had had perfectly fine sex with perfectly fine men. I had never -- never -- had my body answer something this fast or this loud. Nothing in my history had prepared me for the equation banana cream pie in the face equals the wettest I have ever been. I did not have a category for it. I did not have a word for it. I had a body, and the body had voted, and the body had voted unanimously.

The gray-bearded man handed me a towel, kindly. He said something I do not remember. The woman next to me -- the twenty-eight-year-old, my friend now for life -- was cheering. People were clapping. Somebody whistled. I took the towel. I held it. I did not use it. I held it because somebody had given it to me and it would have been rude not to take it.

I walked off the stage. Fast. Faster than I needed to. I was holding the towel against my own stomach with one hand and using the other to keep the worst of the cream out of one eye so I could see where I was going. My thighs were still pressed together as I walked. I could feel myself getting wetter with every step. The friction of my own thighs sliding against each other was making it worse. Or better. I had stopped distinguishing.

The dressing rooms were behind the stage. Wooden, beach-built, four stalls. I went into the first one and locked the door.

I looked at myself in the mirror.

I want to tell you about the woman I saw.

She was twenty-four. She was small -- five-four, hundred and fifteen pounds, the same numbers I had walked in with and now meaningless -- with light brown curls that were now white with whipped cream, a cap of it, peaks of it still holding in places where the pie had pressed in hardest. Her face was unrecognizable. Both eyes sealed except for the slit I had carved with my wrist. Her mouth was the only clear part of her, because she had been open-mouthed laughing when the pie hit and the cream had gone in and around her mouth, and now her teeth were the only un-creamed thing on her whole head.

Her shoulders were doused. Her armpits were creamed, which was a sentence I had not known would ever apply to me. Both of her breasts were covered -- sheeted, custard from collarbone to ribcage, a brown smear of pie crust just under the right nipple where a chunk had ridden the slide down. Her stomach had a trail. Her thigh had a smear from where the pie had passed.

She was the most ridiculous-looking woman I had ever seen in my life. She was the most beautiful-looking woman I had ever seen in my life. She was me.

I laughed.

I laughed at her in the mirror and she laughed back and a piece of cream slid off her chin and landed on her chest with a small wet sound, and I felt that sound between my legs.

I leaned against the wall of the stall. I did not put down the towel. I did not wipe anything off. I put my hand between my legs.

I want to be honest about what happened next, because that is what this blog post is for.

I came so hard I had to sit down.

It did not take long. Thirty seconds, maybe. I was already most of the way there from the walk. I came watching myself in the mirror, eyes barely open, cream still sheeting off me in slow heavy slides, a full pie's worth of mess on a woman I had not known was me until ten minutes earlier. I came with my own hand pressed against myself and the other hand pressed flat against my creamed chest, smearing the pie around without meaning to, finding cream against my own nipple and gasping at the way that felt. I came with my mouth open and cream sliding into it from my upper lip, and the taste of it -- banana, graham, sweetness, the cheap good kind -- became part of the orgasm, and I came harder.

It was not one orgasm. It was a wave. It built and it kept building. I had to keep my hand on myself through three separate peaks before the wave receded, and even then it did not fully recede, it just stopped being acute and became this hum that sat in my pelvis for hours afterward. I have come a lot of times in my life. I have never come like that. Not before. Not since, until I met the man I am now with, and that is a different blog post. The dressing-room one -- the first one, the one with no one there but me and a mirror and a pie -- that one stands alone in my whole history as the moment my body told me something my brain had not yet learned how to hear.

I sat on the floor of the stall for a while after.

I was still pied. I was still pied. I had not used the towel. I sat on the wooden floor in a beach dressing room with cream drying on my hair and custard cooling on my chest and my own wet on my fingers, and I looked at the woman in the mirror, and I thought: oh. So this is what I am.

I did not know yet that there was a language for it. I did not know yet that there were other people who spoke it. I thought I had invented something private and strange and was going to have to carry it alone forever. I was wrong about that, but I did not know I was wrong yet, and the not-knowing did not dim it. The mirror was enough. The pie was enough. The wave was enough.

I wiped myself off, eventually. Mostly. Enough to get a sundress over my head. I left a lot of cream in my hair on purpose. I did not want to be done with it. I did not put underwear on, either. I could not. My underwear had been in the tote bag and my body was not in a state to receive it.

I drove home naked under the sundress.

I will tell you about that drive. The sundress was a thin cotton thing. It went on over the cream because I did not care. The seat of the car was hot from the sun and I felt every degree of it on the backs of my thighs. The cream on my body was beginning the slow transition from wet to tacky, and I could feel it pulling at my skin every time I moved. My hair was crisp in places. There was a piece of crust on my shoulder I could feel under the dress strap. I did not wipe it off. I drove with the windows down and the radio off because I wanted to be alone in my own head with what had just happened.

I pulled into the garage. I sat in the car for a minute with the engine off. The cream had finished going tacky and was starting to pull. I could feel it on my scalp, on my chest, on the inside of my thigh where the dress had stuck to a smear. It was time. I could not be done with it forever. The body has needs and one of them is shower.

I went upstairs. I peeled the sundress off -- it came away from my skin in a way that told me where the pie had been hardest. I stood in front of the bathroom mirror one more time, in the same body, in the same cream, but drier now, set, a woman wearing a pie like a costume. I looked at her. I smiled. I said thank you out loud to nobody, or to her, or to the gray-bearded man with the clipboard, or to the twenty-eight-year-old who threw my bikini in the sand, or to the body that had voted, or to whoever it is who sets up the doors at the back of our own heads and waits for us to find them.

I turned on the shower.

I let the water hit me.

The cream came off slow. I made it slow. I was not in a hurry.

-- Isil