Sick Transit, Gloria Monday

Gloria Monday poured the bottle of nail varnish over the head of the woman standing behind the counter. The woman said nothing and didn't move. The nail polish – Rotten Plum, Gloria thought – pooled on her scalp and slowly coated strands of her long, unwashed brown hair.
"Get out, please," said Gloria. Her voice was pleasant, low, and she'd been told by many people, lots of them members of her extended family, that she should get a job on the phone sex lines. She told them she preferred working as a travel agent, that it was respectable and something her someday-children could tell their teacher about, and she didn't tell them that she did the phone-sex telephone work in the evenings. Or that she'd recognised several of them when they called.
"But I want a holiday," said the woman, still not doing anything about the nail polish. "Johnny said that you give out holidays here. He said I just had to put out."
There was a moment of clarity between them as Gloria realised that her boss probably did accept such an arrangement, and the woman realised that someone as neatly dressed as Gloria probably didn't accept sex for holidays.
"I want my holiday," whined the woman, clearly too stubborn to give up just yet. A grubby hand with bitten fingernails scrabbled at the collar of her raincoat and Gloria had a prescient moment, realising that the woman was probably naked underneath it. She looked around the counter wondering what else she could use as a deterrent and spotted the stapler. She snatched it up and leaned forward, grabbing the woman's raincoat and pulling her in to the counter. The woman gasped, a little "Oooh!", and then looked slightly shocked as Gloria stapled her raincoat down its length, just below each button.
"Get out," said Gloria, letting go. "No holidays, no sex, no nothing."
"Now there's a shame," said a deep voice with a broad, southern accent, and both women looked towards the door. It was held open by a tanned hand attached to a tanned, muscular arm, which is turn belonged to a broad shouldered man with blonde hair and an insolent grin. "Isn't this the right place to come to pick me up a little something to take on holiday with me?"
"Not you, sweetheart," he continued as the raincoated-woman opened her mouth. "I have standards."
Gloria half-smiled but shook her head anyway. "No," she said. "We sell holidays here, nothing else."
"Well now," drawled the man, "that might be mostly what I want anyways. See, I have a busload of ill children I'd like to take down to Mexico for a few weeks. Get them some sun, sand, and kiddie-tequila, make 'em all feel a little bit better about knowing how they're going to be dead this time next year."
"Do you have a licence?" Gloria's hands were already moving over the keyboard, inputting Mexico and selecting for the cheapest available flights.
"For what, little lady?"
"For the children," she said. "They're ill, and terminally so, by the sounds of it. Technically you'll need a licence covering the transport of biologically hazardous material."
"Y'all think the custom's guys'll accept that?"
"It'll confuse them for long enough for you to get the kids through. Try to cover up any that have suppurating wounds or open lesions."
"You know, y'all, I like your attitude! You're a can-do little lady, aren't you?" The man's smile was infectious, and Gloria found herself smiling back.
"My name's Gloria Monday, not little lady," she said, but without rancour.
"Mine's–" said the other woman who was trying to unpick the staples from her coat, but the man cut her off.
"Gloria Monday it is," he said. "And thank-you very much for your help. Most other people don't seem to care about these poor children."
"Or they care too much about the Mexicans you'll be infecting?" She raised an eyebrow, but he just burst into laughter.
"I like y'all, y'all know," he said. "And in your honour, I shall be naming this little trip after you."
Gloria raised her other eyebrow, unaware that this made her look like a well-dressed but rather startled chihuahua.
"Sick transit Gloria Monday!" he said.

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.