Peter Pišťanek - The End of Freddy

Freddy was nodding, but only half listening. When Urban paused, Freddy had his moment again. He started to talk about himself. And he talked and talked. He hadn’t had an opportunity for a long time to talk like this. He told Urban everything, including how good it made him feel knowing that thousands of men lecherously watched his wife Sida in the films he makes for the Danes. He was gradually getting drunk. His outpourings turned into incoherent blather.

A few hours later Freddy was most put out by the fact that every pub where they stopped, and from which he subsequently had to be carried out like a piece of luggage, was full of the sound of Czech. Freddy was drunk. He sat with his face pressed onto the table, occasionally lifting his forehead, imprinted with the tablecloth, and feeling a need to react to the ever-present Czech element, the Czech sea that constantly surrounded them, washed over them and, by dawn, threatened to engulf them.

“You prick,” he addressed Urban with his last bit of energy, “why do you speak Czech to them, when you’re a Slovak?”

“Because it’s a foreign language,” responded Urban. “In London I don’t try to communicate in Slovak, either. In Vienna I speak German. So why would I risk being misunderstood? I speak Czech, so I use it.”

Freddy looked at him with glassy eyes. He couldn’t understand a thing. He didn’t like those bloody Czechs. Then his head dropped.

“He’s not used to drink,” Urban said to someone in Czech; Freddy had no idea whether it was in the same pub, or another one.

“Which hotel are you at?” asked Urban towards morning in some night casino, where billiards players were banging in the background.

Freddy thought long and hard. Several times he fell into a light sleep, and then his head collapsed between the glasses of Guinness.

“No sleeping here, sir” someone objected in a night bar on Wenceslas Square.

At the time Freddy’s head was propped on a table, his eyes were closed and he was dribbling onto the carpet. A voice came from above, over Freddy. It was polite, but authoritative.

“Hotel!” Urban was shaking him on the pavement where he had half- carried him. “What’s the name of your hotel?”

“International,” said Freddy. “Or Intercontinental?”

He was being driven somewhere in a taxi. He heard Urban’s voice on a mobile phone.

“He’s not staying in the Intercontinental,” someone said: it sounded like a court judgement.

Voices conversed softly in the dark. Freddy thought it was about him. He pulled himself together and blabbed a few words. He needed to vomit. The taxi stopped and Freddy vomited on a roadside lawn.

“Better now?” he heard Urban behind him.

He silently nodded with tears in his eyes. Urban gave him a tissue and helped him into the car. The taxi moved off. On one hand, Freddy wanted it to slow down, as his head was spinning. On the other, he wanted it to speed up, so as to get to bed sooner.

He woke up as Urban dragged him past the hotel reception; as soon as he felt the cool, slightly mildewy touch of the hotel bedclothes, he passed out.

In the morning he awoke in the same position. At first he wanted to die. Any kind of thought led to an attack of nausea. He was afraid to open his eyes. When he plucked up courage, he found a note on his bedside table. He had to close one eye and screw up the other: “WHEN YOU’RE OK, CALL MY MOBILE.” The number was written down.

Freddy lay there like a dying man. Around eleven, a chambermaid knocked at the door, but Freddy just shouted out something wildly, as much as the pain under his forehead allowed, and cursed. It took him the entire morning to pull himself together. Only then did he call Urban. He knew that it was a splendid idea to set up a company and go independent, and there was no need to hesitate.

FORBIDDEN PLEASURES: The Best of Freddy Vision— dubbed into Czech: 120 minutes.

The cassette has four short films. The first one begins with a club’s two cleaning women who, instead of washing the floor, get off by torturing each other. But their female boss catches them in the act… she lights candles and the performance begins: hot pincers, whip, handcuffs, chains, punishment cross, rack, and hot wax all leave their marks on the tormented bodies. The second film shows a slave tortured, using similar instruments. The focus is on the torture of his balls and penis. In the third film, a policeman puts a very young girl in prison on a false charge. In a cell with a lesbian and a randy policeman, she suffers one humiliation after another. In the cell, we witness her strangulation, bondage, and gagging, beating and, above all, constant humiliation. In the fourth story a young village boy riding a bike is hit by a car and kidnapped. His two brutal female kidnappers drive him to their own torture chamber where he undergoes sophisticated torture. The boy manages to free himself and the roles are immediately reversed. The kidnappers now beg for mercy as they are brutally tortured, pissed on, shat on and sodomized again and again by the randy and, as it later turns out, utterly perverted primary-school pupil. The kidnappers cannot expect anything but prolonged torments and a death, not at all undeserved, from unspeakable torture and humiliation.

Order N o: 1820 0129

Price: 999 Czech Crowns

Price for club members: 95 °Czech Crowns

(From the sales catalogue of Freddy Vision )

* * *

Freddy found coming up with a title, logo and corporate culture for the new company the most interesting task.

Westerners come here to shoot films because it’s cheap, Freddy claimed. The films are unbelievably crappy. Viewers aren’t really interested in more and more luxurious settings and ordinary fucking. Nor are they interested in the minor variations: sex in a Rolls Royce, in a castle, in a fancy restaurant. People want something unusual in the actual fucking, not in its location. People are not interested in seeing more and more beautiful women and more and more beautiful and exclusive settings. Where will it end? Soon they’ll be screwing in the presidential office under the clock that you see in the New Year’s presidential address. And then what? Freddy knows what to offer people. He’ll offer them filth. The foulest filth you can get on a porn cassette. Filth with beautiful women is the right combination. Are we any worse than the westerners? Are our women uglier, our imagination inferior? No, no and no. Only we don’t have the stars. So we’ll create some. A few years ago nobody had ever heard of Hungarian and Czech porn stars, someone had to create them, too. So let’s make our own Slovak porn stars. We’ll have several genres. Straight fucking will be called Simply Fuck . Then we’ll have a series for the piss fans: Champagne Avantgarde . The shit series will be known as Caviar Avantgarde . The sado-masochistic one we’ll call Perversum Universum . Child pornography, and we want that, too, as it’s increasingly fashionable and popular, will be called Lolita Parade. And the series of bestiality porn can be called Animal Instinct .

Given his new, successful life, Freddy finally went to see a doctor for a complete health check. To know how things stood. He got surprising news: The blood clot on his brain that caused his childhood tantrums had been absorbed over the years and had vanished without trace. He was totally healthy and normal. That made Freddy happy. He had always known that he was not mad. Now it was official, on paper.

Soon all that was in the distant past. Urban scraped the money together and the first cassette in a Freddy Vision series was on the market. It was pretty filthy, so it flew off the shelves. Nobody minded the lack of hi-fi stereo sound. Soon Freddy and Urban were rubbing their hands. They didn’t have to wait long for a second cassette. Urban and Freddy had made it not just in the domestic market, but in Europe, too. They had become successful European-style porn producers.