Peter Pišťanek - The End of Freddy

At one end of this scattered settlement stood pointed yurts patched with burlap, old pelts, and pieces of sealskin. This is where the oldest or laziest inhabitants lived.

It was night and a wild storm blew in from the sea. Özgett Glebąâr stumbled up from somewhere between the seashore and the frozen tundra. Icicles hung from his beard, moustaches, and eyebrows. He kept falling and getting up and a rattle came from his chest. He used his last ounce of strength to crawl to the first yurt and collapsed against a piece of corrugated iron over the entrance: he and the iron sheet crashed inside.

The people at home were then all drunk on industrial alcohol they had stolen somewhere. It tasted good and it relieved the pangs of hunger and cold. They lay prostrate on the floor, breathing heavily. None of them noticed Glebąâr’s entrance. Özgett Glebąâr grabbed a bottle and took a swig. His cracked gnawed lips began to hurt. He cursed wildly and smashed the bottle against the floor. He ran like a madman round the dark yurt and hit his head on a succession of teapots and cold lamps hanging from the ceiling. The blows on his head, added to the heat from the alcohol, soon stupefied and pacified him. He stopped in the middle of the yurt, his fist raised in an angry gesture. Without a word, he crashed close to the family and fell into a sleep as deep as theirs. His posture still expressed the leap he took as he lost consciousness.

* * *

Before he became a porn star, Zongora lived in a Slovnaft refinery dormitory. He was a passionate body-builder and collector of porn magazines. He wanted to be more in life than a technician in an oxygen plant.

For some time he yearned to become a money-changer and for a while he even felt like one. He dressed like them: he wore baggy black trousers and a gaudy shirt. He always wore white socks and black moccasins. He had to compromise on the leather jacket and bought an artificial one from the Vietnamese. He couldn’t afford real leather, but at a decent distance, you couldn’t even tell fake from real leather.

He hung about the Hotel Ambassador Rácz, where the small-time money-changers gathered. He followed their moves anxiously and admiringly. In their presence he behaved as if he belonged. The money-changers accepted these admiring yokels, but only after their work hours. They sometimes used him for sending messages to their colleagues, a job he carried out enthusiastically. When he did it, he felt he was taking part in the exciting life of a superior class of people to whom he felt attracted. He felt that he belonged with them. All that ended with the coming of mobile phones. In the evening, the money-changers got into taxis and went to the all-night casinos and other entertainments. Zongora had no money for gambling or brothels. He had to do a night shift or go to the dormitory to sleep. Waiting for a bus at the stop in his white socks and black moccasins, he looked odd. A money-changer’s outfit was meant for sitting in a bar, waiting in front of a hotel and driving round in your car or a taxi. It did not fit certain occasions. Travelling in dusty and plebeian public transport was definitely one.

To his younger colleagues Zongora pretended to be a member of some secret brotherhood. Occasionally, he brought into the smoke-filled changing room and the always noisy workplace an echo of the attractive, alluring world of rich gangsters and their dolls, of bars and hotel lobbies.

Zongora longed to be more, but he lacked knowledge. He was just strong and his body was well tuned. This is not much if a man is stupid and untalented. Perhaps he could try for a career in pornographic films. He would make extra money, but, above all, he could fuck for free and eventually get into something better.

In some pornographic magazine he read that a basic criterion for choosing porn actors is penile length and ejaculative quantity and range. As for the first requirement, Zongora was amazingly well endowed: his proud thirteen inches towered up at times of maximum excitement. And the range? He experimented once in the dormitory shower. At least an ounce of semen sprayed a good six feet. Zongora concluded that he was a good candidate for the job of male porn star and decided to act.

In Zongora’s life it all began with an ad whose text he put together with much effort and secrecy during his night shifts. He published it in the magazine Perverse Sex:

Young man, 19 yrs/13 inches seeks lady partner 40–50 with own flat for purpose of fantastic sexual pleasure. Neglected, passionate and very perverse lady welcome if interested in oral, anal, fisting, pissing, and IQ.

When the magazine printed his ad, Zongora’s chest was puffed with pride; this was the first time that a text penned by his own hand had appeared in print. He read his own ad several times in a row, even though he knew it by heart: he had spent so long composing, editing and rewriting it. Imagining his sexual life taking a new, positive direction, he almost had a hard-on.

Several women wrote back. Zongora arranged to meet them but never made himself known. None of them were the neglected ladies he dreamed of: in fact, they were over-aged women who really had let themselves go.

He had also set the maximum age of his potential lovers too high. When he imagined a fifty-year-old he thought of a well-preserved woman like Ivana Trump or Catherine Deneuve. Alas, such women do not put ads in dubious magazines, or reply to them. None of the women who turned up resembled the touched-up, photoshopped beauties in porn magazines, such as Mature Sluts , that he relied on so much.

Instead, only tired, fat, and poorly dressed housewives came to meet him under Tesco’s bell tower. They were short of breath, sweaty and flushed as they thought that they were going behind the backs of their old men, who wore yellowing underpants and had greasy locks of hair to mask their glistening bald patches. Zongora was disgusted. He ran away and let his potential partner pace about under the bell tower, looking around nervously and blowing her fringe off her forehead.

He always took refuge inside the supermarket. He walked the air-conditioned floors. He unconsciously feared that the woman he’d spurned was also walking those floors. He was terrified by the thought that she might miraculously discover his identity, and flush him out now.

It did not take him long to realise that this was no way to go about it. He decided in future not to try meeting women through advertisements. He was still aroused and tempted by ads of the type: I am looking for a well-established gentleman with hard equipment. I don’t know the meaning of the word taboo. I approve of whipping, oral, and scat. Signed: Standard, but he was inwardly scarred by his bad experience.

He wholeheartedly threw himself into sexual adventures offered by the proximity of the male and female dormitories near Slovnaft refinery.

I want to know the unknown, so I’m looking for an opportunity to act in porn films and perverse type photo sessions. O, A, S/M, fisting, pissing, scat, preggo, clinic, bondage, very young girls, latex, rubber, plastic, everything interests me; I stop at nothing. I am 23, 13 inches.

Signed: Fees unimportant.

Even this second advertisement got no reply for a long time. He almost lost hope. He did his shifts in a bitter mood and thought for entire days how to get out of his degrading ordinary worker’s position when all around him were bagging the products and perks of early capitalism. Zongora was well aware that he was not very bright. A leaving certificate from chemistry trade school, the absolute peak in his life, was not the best capital for the era that was dawning. Moreover, he knew what it cost him to get that certificate and he did not even think of getting school matriculation. And he had no capital to start a business with, as he came from a simple working class family, so modest and honest that it stayed in poverty for that very reason. And even if he had any capital, he was cowardly and wouldn’t take risks. Besides, he was lazy.