Peter Pišťanek - The End of Freddy

Since Bratislava at night was too small to provide an audience for his complaints, he goes to Prague to cry. Czech barmen and waiters have more patience and value more highly a customer who, even if he spends his evenings crying and complaining, spends money like water.

Finally he went to see Rácz and told him that he was interested in joining his highly exclusive Adrenalin Club. Rácz took him along to a meeting and introduced him to the other members. Freddy passed the initiation ritual, became a member, swore an oath and threw himself headlong into adventures that smelled of risk, death, and imprisonment.

Suddenly he was a member of a gang, what he had longed for ever since childhood. The club members are bored wealthy men like Freddy. They get their thrills from reckless, even insane activities: bungee jumping on a four-hundred-metre rope down a thousand-metre dark abandoned mine shaft, flying head down in pitch darkness and experiencing indescribable feelings of mortal fear; jumping out of an aircraft without a parachute, followed by a parachutist with a parachute who, during freefall, catches up with the adventurer and ties the two together, so they both land with one open parachute; driving at full speed on a highway with no headlights in total darkness; jumping on goods wagons and looting them while the train is moving; robbing shocked first class passengers on international Eurocity and Intercity express trains.

This highly risky, often criminal activity gives the bored rich men excitement and their blood a hefty dose of adrenalin, as well as much-needed physical exertion. It rouses their dulled nerves. They do anything prohibited. Each pretends to be a Fantômas. The police hunts for them, but no one suspects that this is a gang of men from the best society.

Freddy feels good in the club. It’s a highly conspiratorial society, much like the freemasons.

“I understand,” says Lanštiak into the transmitter. “Over.”

He turns to the men in the car.

“So the Octavias are in wagons three to eight,” he says. “The electronics are in nineteen. And twelve to sixteen are full of sand.”

The men are visibly relieved.

“It’s going to be child’s play,” says Otto Učok. His voice sounds tired and clearly disappointed.

Freddy hopes the men missed his micro-sleep and micro-weeping.

“Not like last time, when we jumped onto canvas,” he says.

“Oh, fuck, that was something,” Rácz remembers, chewing on a cigar. “Just like a trampoline!”

“And you didn’t know what was underneath,” recalls Lanštiak, starts the car and puts it in gear. “If there’d been machinery there, packed to the top, we’d be history!”

The men drive to an abandoned viaduct over the railway. It is totally dark all round. The lights of a far-off village shimmer in the thin mist.

“I’d love to steal a locomotive from a depot,” says Freddy. “I’d crank it up full speed and then jump out. And if I could watch at the same time the damage it did when it crashed into something!”

“Great idea,” says Rácz. “We’ll have to think about that one.”

“It’ll be here in five minutes,” says Lanštiak. “So break a leg, gentlemen! I’ll wait for you under the viaduct at the seventieth kilometre.”

His voice has a note of disappointment, since he can’t be with them.

“Cheer up!” Učok tells him and opens the back door. He places his foot, shod in a heavy army boot, on the wet road. “Next time you’ll draw a different lot,” he adds. “You’ll see action and maybe I’ll be the driver.”

The men get out of the car. They put on rucksacks full of tools, and pull masks over their faces. They quietly close the doors. Lanštiak steps on the accelerator. The Renault, its lights off, vanishes round a bend.

Freddy strains his eyes, but can’t see a thing. He hears a buzzing noise: it comes from Učok who’s put on a helmet with infrared goggles. Freddy does the same. He turns on the infrared reflector on top of the helmet and focuses the lenses. The countryside is bathed in greenish light. The moon is behind a cloud. The village lights do not reach here. He grabs the cold, dewy rail. He peers deep down. Only after a moment do his short-sighted eyes get used to the distortion of the night-sight instrument, and he notices down there a pair of shiny ribbons: the track.

They silently wait for the train. Finally engine lights appear. Soon an endless goods train is rattling beneath them.

“Ten, eleven, twelve,” Učok counts the wagons. “Let’s jump, men!”

Freddy closes his eyes. He hurls himself into the abyss-like depth, a bit to one side, to avoid the overhead power line.

The landing into a gravel-filled wagon is a bit harder than he’d expected, but he’s used to it by now. But he still has to catch his breath.

Rácz lands nearby. As he does so, he sprays Freddy’s face with a handful of gravel. Freddy wipes his eyes and jumps up. He takes a look behind. Učok waves at him from the next wagon.

“Everything’s fine,” shouts Rácz, drowning out the train’s rumbling.

Freddy points forward. “Let’s get to those wagons first!” he shouts. He begins to climb from wagon to wagon. He does not look down at the track, which sways wildly. Rácz and Učok hold firmly to the sideboard. They wait for Freddy to jump so that they can jump, too. There are five more shaking wagons ahead before they reach their goal for today.

For Freddy, the goal is clear: forget, forget, and forget!

100 % WATERPROOF

After a game of mixed doubles, two couples are taking a shower. A blonde decides to go somewhere. Her partner asks her where. “I want to take a pee,” says the blonde. Her partner suggests that she pee here, in the shower. The blonde pees on her partner. The brunette’s partner hears the sound and decides to take a look. He sees the blonde crouching and peeing into her partner’s mouth. He likes it a lot. He’d like to see it close up: he’s never seen a woman peeing before. The blonde’s partner is already excited. He has an erection. He sends the brunette’s partner to get the brunette and pee on him. The brunette’s partner comes to the brunette and tells her about it. Meanwhile the blonde’s partner starts to have sex with the blonde. The brunette comes and pees on all of them. Then she kisses the blonde, while the brunette’s partner pees on their heads. The blonde and her partner change their position: now the partner lies on his back and has anal sex with the blonde, who crouches on him, facing him. She uses both of her hands to spread her lips and pees in rhythm to intercourse on his belly and chest. In the meantime, the brunette performs fellatio on her partner while peeing in his mouth. A dog comes by and pees on the couple having sex. And so on. Everything ends in wild geysers of piss and sperm!

(From Freddy’s notebook)

* * *

One day the porn actor Zongora, known by his stage name Luigi Longo, vanishes without trace, never to be seen among the living. Only a few people know that he was anæsthetized and secretly, at Freddy’s expense, sent to the Arab mini-state and oil emirate Shut-al-Banja. Here, until his merciful death, he will be an erotic slave in the homosexual and also sadistic Emir Tariq ben Yusuf ibn Muhammad’s secret male harem, a place full of other desperate men like Zongora. There is no question of escape or suicide, only despair remains, as painful as the red-hot desert round them. This is the revenge that Freddy has devised for the man who hurt him where it hurts most.

But enough of Zongora. He disappears from this book. Why mention a person who no longer has any meaning for us?

Freddy finds his newly awakened desire for adventure can’t be fully satisfied by the sorties the Adrenalin Club puts on. Something else stirs in him. Something self-destructive. Unlike his colleagues, he has a quality that makes him immortal: knowing that if he’s ever caught and put in prison, he’ll just be glad. Finally, there’ll be a change in his dreary life. Something will finally change. He’s not afraid of prison. If it gets bad, he’ll kill himself. Nobody’s got any hold over him. He can’t suffer more than he’s suffering now, anyway.