Peter Pišťanek - The End of Freddy

Order N o: 1813 0034

Price: 699 Czech Crowns

Club Member Price: 65 °Czech Crowns.

(From the catalogue of Freddy Vision )

* * *

Urban stands at a high round table in an empty corner of a snack bar. He is drinking a lethal dose of coffee from the vending machine and studying the blurred image of his pale face in the window opposite the petrol station.

The microwave oven bell rings and Urban takes out a hot sandwich. He eats gingerly so as not to burn his lips. His cousin Tina’s fridge is sure to be empty; by day she grazes in vegetarian restaurants; she might have a peach, or a bunch of grapes in the evening. No square meal for him in her house.

Soon he’s speeding towards Prague. As he passes the motel Pruhonice on the right and a moment later a water tower on the left, an indescribable feeling seizes him. He is back in his beloved city again.

Once, when he was a little boy, his father took him to a railway station.

“Daddy, where does this track end?” Urban asked.

“Nowhere,” his father replied.

“What do you mean: nowhere?” the boy couldn’t understand.

“Well, it’s a kind of network,” his father said, “it doesn’t have an end.”

When Urban, then a university student, first came to Prague for a sports festival he arrived at Masaryk Station, then called Prague-Central. Urban saw the huge buffers of the railway terminal. So this was where the track ended. Or began, depending which end we look at it from. From that moment on, Urban sensed that Prague was an extraordinary city which would one day mean a lot in his life.

He sharply slows down to one hundred and fifty. He passes over the Nusle Bridge and rushes towards the station and the Hlávka Bridge. He can see, on the other side of the Vltava, the black towers of St. Antony’s cathedral emerging from the heavy rain. “I’m home,” he thinks, overcome by emotion. Soon he is driving up glistening Veletržní Street and Milada Horáková Avenue. He crosses the Letná and turns into Střešovická Street. He climbs the hill, passes the imposing houses, and drives round the pretty church finally to park in front of a two-storey art-nouveau villa overgrown with ivy. This is where his cousin Tina lives.

Urban pulls his travel bag out of the trunk and unlocks the gate.

* * *

What can one expect from an ox, but a pound of flesh?

Junjan Slovak proverb

Zongora wakes up the same morning next to Sida Mešťánek in a hotel room. He needs a while to grasp what has happened. So he has, after all, actually become her lover. And it didn’t even take that much effort.

He admired her from the very start, when he borrowed Mad Angel of the Torture Chamber, one of her first films, in a video shop. In his feverish masturbatory fantasies he imagined himself as her partner in a porn film. This desire finally came true when they offered to star him with Sida in a film, The Goddess of Vengeance . And although his first raging orgasm was lit by two lamps and watched by an omnipresent camera eye that couldn’t miss even the smallest drop of the white hot liquid dripping down Sida’s face, neck, and breasts, it was beautiful. And the presence of Sida’s husband, in the director’s chair somewhere behind the reflectors’ white-hot boundary, gave it a peculiar perverted charm.

“You were quite good,” Mrs Mešťánek told him later the same day opposite the studio building in a bistro, where all the company’s creative team and the actors in Freddy’s movies liked to go for an aperitif. Zongora was alone in the bar, celebrating his baptism by pornographic fire, and Sida dropped in to have a coffee with her women friends.

“Really?” Zongora rejoiced.

“It made me, like, come,” smiled Sida with the shy expression of a schoolgirl taught by nuns. She turned round. “But don’t tell anyone. I don’t want my husband to know. He’s insanely jealous.”

Zongora puffed himself with pride. Knowing there was an exciting conspiracy between Sida and himself made his pulse race.

“Can I order you anything?” he asked, barely able to speak.

Sida looked at her friends, who had now taken a window booth.

“Why not?” she smiled coquettishly.

“What would you like?” the barman asked.

“Another beer for me,” said Zongora and turned to Sida. “And you?”

“I’ll have a Margarita, please,” Sida told the barman, sat down on a bar chair and crossed her legs. “But with Cointreau, please.”

“Perhaps we can be on first-name terms,” she suggested after clinking glasses. “I always think it’s silly to be formal with someone who’s just come on my face…”

And so they called each other by their first names and chatted for a while about unimportant trifles and then Sida left to join her friends and Zongora left to get ready for the afternoon shift in the Slovnaft refinery.

After that, Zongora acted in several more films; the pleasant conspiracy and friendly tension between them deepened. In time, Zongora felt a desire to seduce her for real, with no camera or film crew looking. What they did when the camera was running, to a script by her husband, didn’t satisfy him. Having sex for a film and for oneself are two different things. In a porn film, the woman has to make her genitals face the camera all the time; that makes it quite tiresome for her partner. Even when changing position, the first consideration is whether the viewer can see it, since he is buying or renting the film. So the repertoire of positions is quite poor. No long foreplay, since that’s boring. Porn actresses don’t have time to get ready for sex, so they must lubricate themselves artificially. Even the arousal of their nipples is simulated with the help of clear varnish. That was why Zongora wanted more and more to do it with Sida in private: romantically, slowly and with pleasure.

After a long day shooting in rented rooms and the Red Stone Castle’s torture dungeon, he invited himself to her hotel room and opened a bottle of sparkling wine that he’d brought. Another bottle followed the first and finally they both quite naturally ended up in bed. To Zongora it was clear from the very beginning: he gave her an intense pleasure, which her husband, that perverse and impotent fat slob, could never induce.

For a while he tried to make out the outline of the objects in the dark, but then he gave up. Darkness without an importunate omnipresent neon light has an unusual effect on him. In the Slovnaft dormitory there is bright light even at night. The reflections from the burners bounce off the room’s walls and ceiling. You hear incessantly the sound of machinery, the hissing of steam and the buzzing of transformers. A repulsive stench from the asphalt plant permeates the room. Here, the night forest rustle and a cool moist breeze come through the half-opened window.

Zongora is overwhelmed by a pleasant sensation of victory. Wealth is within his grasp. Soon he’ll live like this all the time and not have to think about his holiday ending in a couple of days and him going back to the Slovnaft oxygen plant, to the machines and stupid colleagues who’d never understand any of the great things that he’s experienced here. Right after shooting he’ll see Mešťánek and ask him to increase his fees. He’d like to leave Slovnaft and devote himself to filming. He no longer feels like being a part-time porn actor, alternating between the seductive world of porn and the unbearable factory.

He turns round and presses against Sida’s back. His youthful body reacts to the pleasant feel of soft female skin. Sida, half asleep, senses that Zongora wants to penetrate her. She moves away.

“No,” she hisses.

She raises herself and gropes for her watch. She looks at its phosphorescent dial. “Oh God, it’s almost three!” she says.