by Brion Boyles

For those of you who have never been, the Carousel was a little sex club at the back of a tiny alley near the station.

You paid a pretty fair entrance (seems to me it would have been about the equivalent of $20 today), which also got you an Ichiban Kirin and access to all the entertainment activity within. Inside, it was dark and cramped, lined with smoked-stained, red velvet curtains… like that in Belle Watlins’ whorehouse in “Gone With The Wind”.

There was a stage at the rear, with a narrow runway that projected out into the center of the room, ending at a circular platform with thick, furry pink “carpet”. Performers put on “artistic” shows on the stage, sometimes using transparent rice-paper screens to tease and give illusions… but they performed their more “intimate” acts on the platform, which was ringed by chairs and small tables.There were a couple of other tables/chairs scattered around, and then the walls were lined with chairs, also…which terminated at a curtained-off doorway in the corner.

If you sat around the platform, you could be called upon to join the performer on-stage.If you sat on the chairs along the wall, you were taking your place “in line” to join an off-stage performer in the curtained-off room for a few minutes.While the act was going on aboard the platform, the last guy in the “line” would go into the curtained-off room, and everyone else would shift over one chair.

MEANWHILE, the girl onstage would reach out and pull on the the guys up from around the stage at some point, for his bit in the “show”.While this might sound like a good time, “performing” in front of a darkened room of onlookers was “harder” than it sounds.(pun intended).

One night, a few of us were in for a show. Two girls were on the round stage, and one of them reached out and grabbed a Japanese sailor, pulling him up to the center, cheered on by his own band of shipmates…

He stood there, trembling… eyes squeezed shut, hands clenched in fists at his side, while one girl pulled his pants down…”PLINK!”… out came this tiny little dick…The girls kept their composure, though… one girl winking back at the audience with her finger to her lips, “Shhhh…!”

..and the other girl trying to slip a condom on his mighty cocktail spear, using her mouth…

,,,but with so little real estate upon which to unroll the thing, the little mushroom-capped condom kept falling off with each attempt. No matter how she tried to clamp that puppy onto his desperate, throbbing little unit, the condom would drop into the pink fur, as if to escape such an unworthy fate.

FINALLY, she gave up, and our hero quickly pulled up his pants and disappeared into the welcoming anonymity of the smokey darkness.The winking girl reached for another audience member…this time selecting a 6′ 6″ Iowa farmboy, a Fireman from the USS MIDWAY, dressed in coveralls and a Black Sabbath T-shirt.

He stood there as she undid his coveralls, and out flopped the finest specimen of schlong the US Navy ever offered for the benefit of local cultural advancement.The room erupted in cheers… and the other girl went back stage for a bigger condom..

.If memory serves, some admirals’ wife heard about the Carousel and had it shut down.

So much for “showing the Flag”…