Saturday 9 July 2011

On the set of the movie

"Mr. deNeel will see you now," said his secretary, a woman having the mother of all bad hair days. She reminded me of growing up in the eighties, and of drag-queens I'd watched in the very late nineties. She wouldn't have looked out of place as some conquest of the first Captain Kirk, come to think of it.
"Are you sure?" I said, trying to stand without irritating my hip any more than necessary. The reason I was here -- the real reason -- was that I could use the money to get a hip replacement operation done. I was having trouble believing that I was actually wanted though.
"Yes, we're sure. Oscar is very good about getting the right person for the role," she said. The product supporting the left-hand side of her hair in a gravity-defying halo around the back of her head lost some tension and her hair sank gracefully down until it covered her eyes.
"Yes. Yes, but..." I couldn't let it lie. "Yes, but the film's called Abigail Spanker. And... and, it's Oscar deNeel."
"Mr. deNeel will explain the reasoning behind it," said his secretary, prying eyeholes in the ring of hair around her head. And don't, no matter how amusing you think you are, refer to him as 'O'."
I went through the connecting door to Oscar's office, favouring my right hip and shaking my head, unable to believe that I was going through with what was going to be utterly humiliating for me.
"Lazarus!" shouted Oscar, his wrinkled face breaking into the kind of grin Hugh Hefner manages when he sees the new intake of Playmates. "It's been an age, old boy!"
"Oscar," I said, offering him my hand to shake. "Well, I retired, didn't I? What good is a middle-aged porn-star, after all? And Lazarus was just my screen name, you know."
"Laz, I know you retired. I know that was twenty years ago. I want you to come out of retirement and start again. I want to make you famous all over again, I want you to make films with me."
I just stared at him, and lowered myself into an easy chair, that turned out to be all too easy. My hip started a low-level grumble of pain.
"I'm a bit old, Oscar," I said. "Even if you find co-stars willing to work with me, I think we'll be needing quite a lot of Viagra and possibly prosthetics. Maybe a cock-double."
"No, no! We won't need any of that!" said Oscar, waving his hands expansively around. "That's not what we're after at all!"
"I won't do animals or children, Oscar. That's not changed."
"No animals," said Oscar straight away. "Some of your co-stars may be young enough to be your daughter, but that's still a good thirty-five these days, isn't it?"
I spent several seconds feeling very grateful that I'd never had a daughter.
"Right, fine," I said. "What's this about then, Oscar? What's the big plan?"
"The thing is," said Oscar rocking back in his chair, and staring up at the ceiling, "the thing is that our demographic is changing. We used to appeal to the middle-aged and the young, and there was a lot of fantasy in there. Men wanted to see women they couldn't get and see them acting like what they really wanted was slightly mediocre sex with men who wanted to punish them for being too good for them. Women wanted something that wasn't too offensive or explicit and wouldn't result in the man watching it with them wanting to do anything too kinky. Now though, all those people have aged, but they still want porn. So our demographic now wants a bit more realism, something they can relate to. They don't want to see young people enjoying themselves, or doing things that they've never done, and now can't do on account of being too fat, too inflexible, or having a career that stops them going to A&E after an accident."
"Really?" I said, not believing him.
"Absolutely! I made 'Viagra Virgins last year. Fifty-five minutes of a man struggling to get it up, then fourteen minutes of slightly embarrassing sex with a woman who clearly doesn't have a clue about satisfying anyone. We got so much fan-mail I had to hire someone to write replies; we included a bottle of Viagra with each letter and still made a profit! And, get this, the company that makes Viagra is now sponsoring us on the quiet!"
I was quiet while I thought about this. I'd see Viagra Virgins of course, I'd torrented it a few months after it came out, and I'd actually quite enjoyed it because I'd been there so many times before. The slapper from the fish-shop I'd been with that night had enjoyed it a whole lot less when I pointed out she knew less than the girl in the porn movie.
"So what would I be doing, then?" I figured a supply of Viagra would come in handy and it sounded like Oscar could get his hands on the good stuff.
"Do you remember a show from the eighties called 'My two dads'?" said Oscar too casually.
"No children!" I snapped back, reflexively.
"No, no kids, you ethical old rogue, you." Oscar grinned in a way that made me uncomfortable and reminded me that I'd never been unhappy to have stopped working with him. "We're going to call this one 'Abigail Spanker', but the working title is 'My three grannies' and you're going to be the stud. The plot's simple enough, you call by your granny's house because you've been told she's dead, but it turns out it's all a plan to get you there so she and two of her bridge buddies can grab you."
"It takes four people to play bridge," I said.
"Yes, well the fourth is actually dead at first," said Oscar and as he went on, his mad schemes of things I probably didn't want to do a litany in my ears, I realised that I was going to do this, partly because I needed a new hip and partly because I wanted to be part of this new, exciting, utterly dysfunctional porn.

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