Like Warm Sun on Nekkid Bottoms (2 page)

If you were asked which you think a man would prefer: a long, hot, road trip to a comic book convention with the hygienically challenged Morgan Wiggen; or hours in a room full of sexy supermodels wearing wispy undergarments, the answer might seem rather a no-brainer, wouldn’t it?

No, it would not. I went to the comic book convention.

Wipe that look off your face. I am decidedly heterosexual (assuming we are, of course, excluding that awkward seventeen minutes in Mervin Wosserman’s gym locker after the annual homecoming ‘drink-yourself-sick-athon’, which wouldn’t even merit a mention if not for that damnable video which, for obscure legal reasons, is still available on some offshore websites).

The fact is: anything can get old, even beautiful, sparsely clad women shamelessly baring their this ‘n’ thats—especially when you’re not allowed to touch. It’s a lot like going to a strip club, for those of you who have never been. I imagine there are still one or two of you out there, mostly women, or, wink-wink-nudge-nudge,
Republicans
, no doubt.

Some men consider a strip club delightful fun, but most of us find it a rather uncomfortable exercise in sexual frustration—though we’ll still run right out and do it again if there’s nothing good on television. There are far more colorful terms that might do a better job of conveying said frustration: ‘Too much wood up for no good’, for example. ‘Called to attention with nowhere to march’, would be another. Or my personal favorite: ‘Stiff as a bored’; which really works only in written form I suppose. Maybe that’s why I’m the only one who laughs whenever I say it.

Food for thought.

In my grandfather’s day, the semi-naked parade was far more entertaining I’m sure. Hanging with the feminine undressed has far greater appeal when you’re not even supposed to see your own
wife
in the all-together. How children were conceived in those days is not something I ever want fully explained.

My grandfather, himself, certainly found girls vastly amusing, particularly
unclad
girls, at least until they acquired rights and became unclad ‘women’. Once what my grandfather considered ‘flirting’ became ‘unwanted sexual advances’ all the fun seemed to go out of it for the old bird. The birth of the sexual harassment lawsuit truly, and forever, destroyed his impressively active sex life.

Of course, even after a good several million was turned out in settlements, the randy old fart continued to enjoy the aforementioned ‘semi-naked’ variety of female while managing—mostly—to avoid actual physical contact. And as long as he could call it ‘business’, the many restraining orders allowed him to ogle and drool to his vasoconstricted heart’s content without legal entanglements. But for myself, women in skimpy underwear have become rather an annoyance. I’m sure you see what I mean.

You don’t? I’ll elaborate.

Did I explain that we run an undergarment company? I
didn’t
? Good God, I’m so sorry! No wonder things seem a bit confusing. Drove into a mental tree there apparently. Let me back up the brain truck a bit and reroute, so to speak.

We run an undergarment company. Rather, more correctly, we
own
an undergarment company. My family. One of the world’s largest (the business, not the family, although we do seem to have an ungodly number of relatives, most of them apparently waiting for Grandfather to die). Wopplesdown Struts, purveyors of fine briefs. (Wopplesdown is pronounced ‘Woo-puhls-duhn’. I don’t know—it’s an old-world English sort of thing. Somewhere back in the depths of time we may have been British. Or pretended to be. Now we’re just snobs.)

So, part of my job at Wopplesdown is seeing how our undergarments look on actual women. Well, not
actual
women rather supermodels who stand
in
for actual women.
Real
, actual women look more like my secretary, Mrs. Abrososa, a rather smart-looking, grayhaired sixty-year-old, but hardly the kind of vision to hold up traffic when seen semi-naked on a very large billboard; at least, not for the reasons that sell undergarments. Not that I’ve seen her naked on a very large billboard, but I can imagine, unfortunately.

And me? My name is Corky. Corcharan Wopplesdown, to be more formal. But please don’t. Corky works just fine. It beats the hell out of having to explain the proper way to pronounce ‘Corcharan’ (Cock-ran). Or worse, ‘Wopplesdown’ (one paragraph up). With a name like mine at least once a day someone is seemingly required to point out to you: “But . . . it’s spelled Cor-CHAR-an WOP-puhls
DOWN
.” Which requires me, in return, to open my eyes and mouth wide in mock surprise, shake my head politely and pretend that particular pronunciation never once occurred, nor was ever tactfully pointed out in the twenty-some years I’ve possessed the name, and had it endlessly sounded out to me by kind-hearted, amateur, English pronunciers.

So call me ‘Corky’. Not a
significant
improvement, but at the very least simple, and more pithy. (I like the word ‘pithy’, though it does tend to remind one of dead frogs.)

I am the third grandson, fourth grand
child
, of the aforementioned oft-sued-elder Wopplesdown, and as such remarkably useless. My job for the family business became—some two years ago, and roughly coinciding with the expansion of the scope and limits of various restraining orders, now also encompassing my father, brothers, and sexually ambiguous sister—to perform any and all functions necessary within a fifty-foot radius of whatever supermodels we may employ. Initially, for a man whose main interest had been, to date, masturbation, this function was a godsend. But as I mentioned on a previous page (or in a previous lungful, depending on whether you’re reading this, or having it read
to
you), anything can get old. Especially when you learn, as we all should eventually, to prefer
being
touched over touching one
self
.

So my job—specifically—with Wopplesdown Struts, is to convey information to and from management, to and from designers, and so forth, after viewing and taking notes upon countless minimal forms of garmentry. This could ordinarily be accomplished by seeing our clothing on rather surprisingly attractive plastic mannequins, which also barely resemble real women. But since mannequins rarely file lawsuits, that job can still be handled by my various and sundry— and I do mean sundry—relatives. So my job is—
exclusively—
to view our clothing on
actual
near-naked women and not get sued. There is, of course, a men’s division, but that’s handled by Mervin Wosserman. The family gave him a kind of ‘pay-off’ job after the drink-yourselfsick incident, and it’s worked out quite well actually, as I have even less inclination to see
men
in wispy undergarments, and Mervin seems to rather enjoy it.

The thing is (and there’s always a thing that ‘is’, isn’t there?) The thing is: I want to keep
this
job, and do prefer it to my previous one; that job being primarily lying around inhaling, then occasionally exhaling whenever the need might arise. Being the useless, inert, pampered grandson made it rather shockingly easy for me to live up to family expectations, largely because family expectations were so incredibly low.

So now, having
exceeded
minimal familial hopes and dreams by actually
performing
a job with arguable efficiency, and a complete absence of subpoenas, I have discovered something extraordinary, something I believe may be referred to as ‘pride’, though I can’t be sure, and want to maintain the illusion of relative competence in my family’s eyes by only escaping my ‘work’ from time-to-time. One of those times, of course, being right this very minute.

You see, at this particular moment, my employment is in serious jeopardy. My long and valued career—all eight months of it—is,
at this very instant
, as they say (whoever ‘they’ are),
on—the—line
.
The
line. That infamous line no one ever seems to notice until they have pretty much trampled past it, scampered over the hill into the next town and are getting dangerously close to some other unnoticeable line.

But now, as I said,
right this very instant
, I am merely
on
the line. My life is flashing before my eyes, every second of it playing before me like a long, boring movie about a man asleep on a couch, and I’m realizing with horror how much time I wasted that I could have at least spent playing video games (or going to strip clubs). It is that serious and life-changing a moment.

So naturally I’m not going to tell you about it, yet.

Instead, let me take you back a little.

This mess began right after Mrs. Abrososa and I entered the room we have set aside for viewing garments. In the business it’s called, interestingly enough, ‘The Garment Viewing Room’. Mrs. Abrososa was present as a chaperone/potential witness for the defense, and I was there to do what many around the company laughingly refer to as my ‘job’.

The Garment Viewing Room is a small antechamber just off the designer’s workshop and its primary function is to hold clutter. Most of the time it’s filled with fabric scraps, loose sequins, discarded feather boas, cardboard boxes, old bolts of cloth, and dead mannequins. But once a week it becomes a makeshift runway for…well…looking at semi-naked girls.

“
Joe Rudi led the league in total bases with 287. . . .
”

“Muttering stats already, Corky?” Mrs. Abrososa asked, amused. “Have you
met
Ms. Nuckeby?” I asked.

“I have not yet had that pleasure, no.”

“Attractive and charming.”

“Ah, I see.”

“An enchanting sense of humor.”

“Oh, dear. Well, I understand the preemptive strike, then.” “Better safe than sued,” I said, smiling.

She winced. “You sound like your grandfather.”

“Isn’t that the objective?”

“I hope not,” she said distastefully.

Mrs. Abrososa had her issues with the old man, as did we all. But my grandfather owned the place and you followed his rules, no matter how arbitrary. Fortunately, the laws of the state often superseded his and were generally more socially and morally correct, which pissed him off to no end.