franksolich signs on the dotted line

[franksolich]

this, a two-chapter story that is complete, and rated “PG” throughout--no dirty stuff in it--is a special Christmas offering to the Four Horsewomen of the Femapocalypse on Skins’s island--BainsBane, redqueen, seabeyond, and boston bean--with the hopes that in this season of joy and goodwill, it may help them exorcise some of their rage and hate towards things that are good and decent.

franksolich signs on the dotted line.  The property caretaker and I were sitting at the dining room table eating lunch when he spied something atop the nearby cabinet.

“That’s new.  What’s that statue of a really ugly fat person?”

Oh damn, I thought, regretting that I’d omitted to shove it into a drawer, where it’d be unseen when he was here.

It wasn’t anything I wanted to describe; the caretaker’s in his early 30s, and is mellow, with a sense of humor, and long ago got used to me, but still, he‘s not originally from around here, and might not understand why we are the ways we are.

“It’s what they call the ‘golden Andrea,’ or the ‘golden Dworkin,’ or something like that,” I explained vaguely, “after some famous late women’s-libber.  It’s just a token, a geegaw, bagatelle, a trifle.”

“But why do you have it?” he persisted; “it’s the ugliest thing in this house; a pile of cow shit on top of the buffet would look better.”

“It’s an award given out by the women’s-libbers down in Lincoln,” I answered, desperately trying to remain as vague as possible.

“For what, though?” he asked as he cut his baked potato.

I took a deep breath.  “There’s a women’s-libber film festival in Lincoln every December, and this was one of the awards.”

“But you haven’t been in Lincoln for months,” he pointed out.

“It was brought up here to me,” I said, “by that one woman you’ve seen before.”

“That one woman, or that other woman?” he asked.

“That one woman you met that one time,” I replied.

“Oh, her,” he remembered; “she’s that angry, bitter bitch, who’s ‘married’ to that sourass woman we met the other time.

“But what are you doing with something from the she-women?”

“It’s the award for ‘best actor’ in a film showed at the festival,” I explained.

“I had a bit part, a cameo role, in a film shown there,” I minimized.

“But one doesn’t get ‘best actor’ for a minor role,” he insisted.

I wasn’t going to get out of it.  “Okay,” I said, “actually I was the main star, the focus of the film.  It was a film noire, an ‘art’ film in black-and-white, and silent.

“It’s no sort of movie you’d be interested in seeing anyway.

“Okay, time to clean the table,” I announced, hoping that was the end of it.

The caretaker didn’t budge.  “What’s the film about?”

Oh man, I sweated.  He was born and raised in Iowa, a blue state where people are more uptight about, uh, certain things.  They don’t have much sex in Iowa, if at all. 

And even though he and his wife have lived around here for several years, and he’s gotten used to me, well, sometimes he has problems reconciling my being a God-fearing church-attending well-thought-of upstanding member of the community, kind and courteous to children, ancients, women, and animals, but on the other hand being a hot-blooded male who wants nothing more than to poke women, and to poke them as much as possible, as many of them as possible.

“It’s porn,” I finally admitted; “it’s about one of those bitter she-women who seeks to dominate and enslave men, but who ends up being seduced by a man who knows how to please women, who subjugates her into being mellow, laid back, and at ease with the world.

“This movie broke a lot of new ground this year; there’d been worries because she was taking a big risk, showing male-female sex at an event attended by nasty women who don’t want to have anything to do with men.



“It was a hit.  I was a hit.

"Some of these sapphos even wanted to have my baby.

- - - - - - - - - - -

“The day after she’d brought the award to me, she came back, bringing with her a mogul in the porn industry who’d seen the movie, who wanted to sign me up, make me a star. 

“He was accompanied by another guy, an Italianate-looking character with an evil eye, who reminded me of one of the associates of the sparkling old dude, Finger-Chopper Louie.

“The mogul was a gay guy with flopping wrists and a mincing walk, and I felt squeamish that they might demand a personal up-close inspection of my goods, despite that they’d obviously seen the movie, and so knew what I looked like.

“But they were actually gentlemen; when my attorney later checked them out, he learned from sources in Hollywood that they have an impeccable reputation, treat their clients fairly, and pay them well, and on time.

- - - - - - - - - -

“They gave me a two-page contract to sign, but I wanted legal advice first, in case I forgot to remember something, which they said was fine, and so the next day I went to see my attorney in [the big city].

“’It’s just a standard boilerplate contract common in the porn industry,’ I told him, ‘and even though it’s standard, there’s some things in it that make me uncomfortable.’

“He read it, and asked, ‘Well, how badly do they want you?  If they really don’t care, either you sign it or don’t sign it, and that’s that.  If they want you badly enough, they’ll compromise.’

“’I’m not sure,’ I told him; ’I think they want me reasonably badly, because they spent a lot of time looking me over.’

“So my attorney telephoned them the next day, and the day after that, I went back to see him.

“’Congratulations,’ he said; ’they want you badly.

“’At first, they didn’t seem so, thinking you wanted more money, and I got the impression that maybe they didn’t want you that badly.

“’But I told them your concern was with working conditions, not with money, and that in fact you’d be willing to work for less money if working conditions were made more agreeable for you.

“’They jumped on it.  “Yeah, sure, have him write something up about what he needs, we’ll look at it and talk.”’

“So I said okay, and asked the attorney to write up a new contract.

“’No,’ he said; ‘you know how to write; you write it, I’ll check it to be sure it’s all in the proper legalese, and you’ll save some bucks in fees too.’

“Well,” I continued, “that convinced me, and so I wrote up this contract.”

I shoved a 59-page sheaf of papers to the caretaker.

“As you can see, the attorney checked it over, made some corrections, and then it was submitted to the producer.  He made some suggestions and comments, and overnight air-expressed it back to me. 

“And so this is where we’re at right now; his hand-written comments are in red ink, and mine are in black ink.”

The property caretaker carefully perused through all the pages.

- - - - - - - - - -

second half, the conclusion to come, after at least 100 people have “viewed” this

[franksolich]

He read the pages the way he usually reads things; a quick-but-absorbent scan, and then back to the beginning, bringing up points he thinks important.

“This was wise,” he said; “’no sex, or even pressure to have sex, with any member of the professional staff; only with members of the cast.’”

“I had to have that,” I said; “I know my weaknesses, my vulnerabilities, and I’m too easily seduced by others, and so it’s for my own protection.”

“’No gay sex,’ the property caretaker continued; “‘no touching, caressing, fondling, taking in, or penetration of another man; only of women.’

“Well, that certainly sounds reasonable,” he said.

“I think that one disappointed the porn mogul,” I said, “but obviously he wants me badly enough that he agreed to it.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“’No costumes, no toys, no gadgets,’” he continued.  “Now that, that’s definitely a franksolich clause--”

“Right,” I said; “I feel strongly about that.  The human body comes already equipped with all the tools and toys to have good sex; people who have to use artificial means to get going and keep going have no imagination.

“Probably they shouldn’t bother having sex at all, if they’re that dull.”

“’No bondage, no sadism,’” he continued.

“That’s self-explanatory,” I pointed out; “it’s sick, it’s depraved, it’s disgusting, to inflict pain, or have pain inflicted.”

“I’m not sure what this one means,” he said, “’no amputation of body parts.’”

“Sure you do,” I insisted; “remember that one morning last summer you showed up here, finding that I’d been shaven bare down there by a weird woman?

“I’d rarely been so embarrassed in my life.

“If one has hair down there, it’s in the natural order of things to have hair down there.  It needs left alone.

“And right now, there’s an ongoing problem with the she-woman, the one who made the movie, and who was my co-star in it.

“Every time, after we’re done bouncing around in the sack, she takes a pair of scissors and snips off a curled lock of hair from down there.

“And just like lovers did during the Victorian era--excepting from the top of heads, not from down there--she places the lock of hair in between pages of a book, to preserve it.

“The book’s by the women’s-libber Malvina Reynolds, We Don’t Need the Men.  Her ‘wife’ once opened the hair-stuffed book, and raised Hell about it.”

- - - - - - - - - -

The caretaker flipped through a few more pages.

“’No entering in, or being entered, into, that which is not meant to be entered.’  I assume you mean the other hole.”

Right, I said.

“’No excretory functions.’”

“Right,” I repeated; “I cannot believe there’s actually members of the human race who get off on that crap.  It’s depraved.

“And that’s a problem I’ve had since the beginning with my woman--”

He looked at me, his jaw dropping and his eyes growing as large as saucers.

“Yeah, yeah, I know,” I reacted; “my woman’s a woman of impeccable class, manners, and taste, good breeding, exquisitely lovely, and intensely cerebral.

“But yet she gets off on watching me take a piss.

“When we’re together, she won’t let me empty the bladder unless she’s there to watch.

“She likes it best during the summer, when I stand on the railing of the back porch, and aim it towards some distant object on the ground below.  Sometimes she even has the temerity to grab it herself, and direct it like a fireman with a hose. 

“Well, because she’s who she is, I give her a good show, but I tell you, if she were one of those who gets jollies out of watching people do the sitting-down business on the commode, she’d be gone out of this life in a hurry.”

- - - - - - - - - - -

Near the bottom of another page, the caretaker read, “’no close-up pop shots…..’”

Yeah, I said, “but I might have to go halfway with them on that.

“I’m not an uninhibited person, after all; my split-second of popping off’s not for the world to see.

“If they insist, I’ll allow close-ups of my face, but not down there.  It’s too personal.”

- - - - - - - - - -

The caretaker flipped through the pages, until he found what he was looking for; several paragraphs surrounded by heavy red ink, with a lot of dark red “x” and “NO!”s sprinkled on the body.

Yeah, I said, “we still got a few other issues to iron out.

“The big one’s my insistence that Romeo be part of any movie, while they don’t want to have a damned thing to do with Romeo.

“Romeo’s a good friend of mine, and I owe it to him, to let him in on some of the fun--”

“You’re the only friend Romeo’s got,” the property caretaker interrupted.

“Nobody else can stand him; he‘s too good-looking, too conceited, for his own good.

“And it’s not jealousy because he’s got a big dick; he is a big dick.

“A big dumb dick.”

Oh now, I said; “when playing around with women, Romeo does a lot of the heavy lifting I don’t want to do.

“He’s even willing to work for nothing, but they keep saying, ‘we don’t want Romeo; we want only you.’

“And even the head women’s-libber is being a bitch about it; ‘Hell no, no Romeo, no way.’

“I need Romeo; we’ve made a scientific endeavor of this, observing, analyzing, and correcting each other’s techniques with women, and after each session, we usually find it’s better than it’d been the preceding time.

“It just keeps getting better and better.

“Given that nearly all problems between men and women are rooted deeply in sexual dysfunctions of one sort or another, it’s a public service we’re doing, for the Good of Humanity, learning more and more about how to please women.

“Excepting when I’m with my woman, I need Romeo, and this might be the sticking-point on which all else hangs.  If they don’t let him act in a film, I suppose I’ll insist he at least be named co-director.”

- - - - - - - - - -

Reading something else, he let out a low whistle.  “You seem a little, uh, draconian in some of your requirements for women you’re willing to star with.”

He pointed to a couple of paragraphs circled in red ink, with writing hand-scribbled in between the lines.  Height, weight, bust, waist, hips, thighs, color of hair, length of fingers, shape of nose, &c., &c., &c.

“Well,” I said, “they want the best possible performance out of me, meaning they’ll have to provide me with women who most turn me on.

“I can’t be expected to put on an award-winning show if the woman’s nobody who gets me all aroused, awakens the carnal animal inside of me.”

“And you want 10% more for doing it with a blonde, and 25% more for doing it with a redhead,” he commented.  “What’s up with that?”

“Well,” I explained, “I encounter a woman with dark brown hair, and right away the trouser snake wakes up.

“I’m not especially turned on by blondes or redheads, and for a movie where I’m supposed to be all excited and upright, I’d have to work at it.

“I think it’s only fair to get more pay for more work.”

“I’m confused,” he said; “but [the neighbor’s wife], she’s your best friend and female confidante--”

“Right,” I said; “I love her I love her I love her, with a passion that’s matched only by my love for debk and mamacags.

“But ’love’ and ’lust’ are two different things.  Because of her dark red hair, I don’t lust her.

“And [the neighbor] knows it; that’s why he so unconditionally trusts me with her.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“I can’t believe there’s a whole page and a half here, about the size of jugs,” he said.  “But since it’s you, I suppose it’s something to expect.”

“Oh, you know as well as I do, that women with big jugs don’t turn me on, even with rebar rods inserted in it.  I got no intention of flopping in stardom, and so it’s got to be the right sort of woman, a woman who uplifts me.

“You notice I’d typed ‘appropriately sized jugs,’ which the porn mogul crossed out and wrote in ‘reasonably sized jugs,’ something that gives them some wiggle room.  I don’t want anything bigger than a 34, but they might try to sneak in a big-busted woman who’s a 36 or a 38, insisting that’s ‘reasonably close’ to being the proper size.

“They suggested that this ‘appropriately sized’ standard should apply to me too, so as to be fair, but the porn mogul lost that argument even before he made it.

“I’m not insisting I’m perfect, and I’m light-years away from alleging I’m good-looking--but what I am saying is that at least I’m of all the appropriate proportions; everything‘s exactly the right size on me.



“I’m not hung like a horse like Romeo, or a chubby stub like primitive males; I’m exactly, precisely, the right length, either sagging or pointing, for a person my height, frame, and weight.

“They already saw my features from the movie--but movies can be photoshopped, and so insisted I go to a doctor, to confirm that.  After I was measured, they agreed that yeah, I’m not even a centimeter off, when it comes to proportions with the rest of my body.

“I’m exactly ‘appropriately sized,’ just right.

“It’s a two-way street; if I’m going to provide proper proportionality on what makes me male, whoever’s my co-star should herself have to similarly be properly proportioned on what makes her female.”

the end