Imp!: (A Comic Romp)

By Gus Franza

Wally Androsch, helluva nice guy, has a serious problem he and Mimi, his beloved wife, want very much to solve. To relieve the reader of anxiety, let me say here that they do solve the problem, but not before an incredibly hilarious and complicated series of bawdy experiences and obstacles are confronted and eliminated.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 30, 2015
• ISBN: 9781514415757

Gus Franza

Gus Franza, a.k.a. August Franza in his more serious guises, is the author of twenty published books (novels mainly, plays, and short stories).

Book preview

Copyright © 2015 by August Franza.

Interior Graphics/Art Credit: Gus Franza

ISBN:      Softcover      978-1-5144-1576-4

                eBook          978-1-5144-1575-7

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 02/23/2016

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CONTENTS

PART ONE

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

PART TWO

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

PART THREE

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

…the narrow seam between the soul and the body, through which the experience of the one is communicated to the other….

Montaigne

PART ONE

1

I’m calling the doctor, not my regular doctor, but a dick doctor and I’m anxious as hell. First of all, I’ll have to talk to a secretary. A female, right?

Uhhhh, I’d like to make an appointment with Dr. Shillalegh, please.

Okay. What is it in reference to, please?

There it is. The simple deadly question.

My dick! It’s in reference to my dick! My wonderful friend, my companion, my joy, my life, my love, who seems to have abandoned me, the sonuvabitch!!

Uhhhh, I say with astonishing cool, uhhhhhhhh–sexual dysfunction.

I see….

What does she see? What could she possibly see? Is she laughing? Is she smiling? Is she making faces at the nurses, calling them over to listen to and mock this unhumper?

I’m checking his calendar,

I pray: Let him be filled up for the next decade, please, so it won’t be not my fault!

I have a 5:45 pm slot for December 6th.

This year?

Yes, of course.

Too close to the holidays!

Well, I say, after a stall, okay.

Okay? I’m petrified.

You’ll have to fill out a questionnaire, the girl says with great cheer. I’ll put it in the mail. Please fill it out completely and follow all Instructions. Bring it with you when you come for your appointment.

Hmmm. I don’t like the sound of that. There’s a lot I don’t like the sound of. A ‘5:45 slot’. That’s all I am, right? A slot. And there’ll be a lot of other ‘slots’ in the office. There’s my dick, then his dick, then his dick…and all the other limp dicks sitting in the dick doctor’s office. It’s devastating. I’m not a slot. But I’m a man with a limp dick, the only one I care about. Help me! Take care of me! Talk to me! Do you realize what I’m dealing with here?

Mimi–my wife–says I’m being a baby about it.

Do you realize what I have to go through everytime I get a pap test? Or a breast examination? she says. Do you think I like it? And the doctor’s a male.

No, I don’t think you like it, Mimi, but this is my dick! It’s different from vaginas. How different are vaginas, anyway? Who cares whether you’ve got a large one or a small one? It’s all inside you.

But a dick—now there’s a problem!—a dick hangs there, vulnerable, visible, limp, flaccid. If we all walked around with continuous erections, it would be different. Ready! Salute! There’s strength and pride there, there’s purpose! Aim! Fire!

But limp and flaccid, it’s an embarrassment, a short rope that gets caught in your zipper, that feels like uncooked pizza dough in your hand. Do you get my drift?

Grow up, Mimi says.

Why should she understand male psychology? We’re sensitive plants, especially when it comes to our dicks. Only we actually know its joys and agonies. The joys of erection! The agony of limpness!

Don’t get me wrong, Mimi is great. I love her, she loves me. We’ve eaten at least two meals a day together for twenty-five years. And fucked plenty. I’m not complaining. But little by little, The Great One has been failing me. Us. It’s not like it used to be. Why is this happening?

Mimi is not pushy. She is not forcing me to do anything about it, but she’d like me to do something about it. She’s not one of those who think that as you get older, cuddling is more important than sex. Bullshit! She loves sex. She wants it. But she’s not without sensibilities; she’s not without understanding. She’s not a goader. And I’m not completely impotent. It’s just that my dick has a mind of its own. I’m beginning to think I’m seasonal like the animals. It rise and falls, comes and goes, all by itself. A period of time will go by—very limp. Stone dead. And then, suddenly, I will have very furious hardons, one after another. I don’t know why. I can’t identify any changes in my behavior, in my stress levels, in family crises, in anything. Life’s a mess all the time so what difference does it make?

It’s much more subtle than any of that. It’s too subtle for the mind. That’s why I’d want to talk to Dr. Shillalegh before we do anything; before he does anything; before we embark on some dark anatomical journey, I want to talk to him over a coffee or a drink.

I want to sit around and chat; work up to it. IT. But can you imagine talking to a doctor at the length I’m suggesting? You don’t even get five minutes of his time anymore. Mimi was ready to chuck one of her doctors when she went back to one of his isolation cubicles with a question she forget to ask. When he walked in, he was caught short and looked pissed. Mimi said she had forgotten to ask him one other question. He said, near hysteria, But I’ve got a schedule! Mimi will never forgive him for that, if she ever sees him again.

I’ve got a schedule!

Is that what I can expect from Dr. Shillalegh? Horseshit!

2

Dr. Thomas Shillalegh, (I find out when the questionnaire arrives) M.D., F.R.C.S (C), F.A.C.S., Professor of Urology. What do those menacing letters after the friendly M.D. mean? Do you think they’ll ever tell you? It’s mysticism. And what’s that C in parenthesis all about? I’d better not guess. And Urology: from the Greek word meaning urine. But urine is not my problem. Maybe I have an Ur problem. And that’s primitive. We’re talking about the Primitive.

The questionnaire is twenty pages long and I’m cautioned (in CAPITALS) NOT TO SEE THE DOCTOR WITHOUT COMPLETING THE CHECKLIST SO AS TO AVOID MISCOMMUNICATION AND MISUNDERSTANDING. I must answer all questions on the confidential sexual questionnaire, and check with my insurance company to see if the treatment I am seeking is covered (Organic Sexual Dysfunction Code). That’s the very question: What treatment AM I seeking?

During one of my bouts of total failure, of emptiness, of downright deadness, of feeling like a castrated goose, I caught a tv show on sexual dysfunction. The smiling host and an avaricious saleman were showing viewers the paraphernalia that can increase sexual activity, The gizmos looked like they came out of a medieval torture chamber designed to force heretics to confess to unspeakable crimes against God. Clamps for my dick. Clawlike inserts that get implanted in my dick so I can have an erection. Needles to Jab at the base of my dick so I can maintain an erection. Pumps to blow it up. I’m sorry! I picture myself walking around with a monster in my pants ready to rip through and claw some unsuspecting citizen to death. Hey! That’s not sex to me. The eversmiling host and all the happy phone-in witnesses and testimonial-givers proclaimed greater sexual potency. It made my fucking blood run cold.

Not as cold, though, as the questionnaire.

And then I saw an ad in the newspaper: IMPOTENCE in big letters. YOU. CAN DO SOMETHING! in big letters. TRY THE ELEVAY SYSTEM! in big letters. Get free literature and videotape!

ELEVAY! Another beautiful bilingual word, a pun, and a simplifier of all life’s stresses.

I sent for the lit. There’s vidlit. They wanted fifty bucks for the vid. Mimi says, Go to the doctor!

That was a relief.

3

My name is Wally Androsh. I’m an average guy. At my age, you realize you’re an average guy (everybody’s an average guy), regardless of your level of education which, for me, has been considerable. But so what? When it comes to sex, education is a hindrance.

I’ve been married to Mimi for (what did I say?) twenty-five years. I don’t need to count. I don’t need to keep track. It’s not a prison sentence. We’ve known each other for a long long time. Two thirds of our lives. I’ve never been with another woman and Mimi’s never been with another man. Or so we’ve convinced each other. What does it matter? Whatever happened long ago is part invention by now. The mind cannot stand too much reality and has a very bad memory. I have had opportunities which I’ve rejected, partly because I was scared and partly because I thought about the consequences. So I’d fuck this woman, I said to myself, who was offering me sex—and then what? The then what always stopped me. And it wasn’t as if I was sexually hungry or deprived. Yes, I was curious about what it would be like to fuck another woman besides Mimi, but I wasn’t ready to pay the potential cost, whatever it might be: exposure, guilt, deceit, hatred, divorce, transmission of disease, bad karma. If Mimi and I have a bad time in bed, we always know we can make it up the next time. We think that way. You can say we have perspective. And I would have to say our sex life has been satisfactory when all is said and done, When all is said and done. What a phrase, BUT WE’RE NOT DONE YET, GODDAMMIT!

Mimi and I love each other. So when I’m making love to her, I really mean it, right down to my toes, right down to the bottom of my soul. If it doesn’t go well on a particular occasion—Dickie having a mind of his own—the love is still there. I’m a married man, and not complaining about it, but this obscene affair I’m having with my dick is driving me crazy.

Mimi is nifty. What do you think she looks like? Well, you’re wrong if you think she’s over the hill, so I’ll tell you. Every morning, while she is showering, I go into the bathroom with my New York Times, under the pretext of sharing some news of the day. (Why do I need a pretext, you ask? Okay, you got me there.) I sit on the edge of the bathtub and I watch her through the steam and there she is, hour glass figure, a still shapely woman with those breasts and those hips, that narrow waist, and that lovely bush. I GET AROUSED AS SHE STEPS OUT ALL WET, GRABS A TOWELS AND DRIES. Or, rather, hear an echo of arousal. I hear an ancient rhapsody. Chloe’!

Oh, yes, there’s a little bit of drag and sag on her here and there, and a few wrinkles, too, but compared with me she’s Playboy material. I’m bald, a little thick in the middle and the bags under my eyes should be delivered to an airport. Still, she says she loves me, and I believe her. 0, I believe her. So then what’s the problem?

Damned if I know.

Come on, now, Wally, don’t be coy or evasive or stupid. You know you want a rockhard dick that does the job, all the time, love and all, day in day out. I’m not a fool. I know what love is. But love without sex, love without the physical thrill—Look, I’m as spiritual as the next guy. I love the idea of the fall of Communism and all that, but love without sex?

4

So the first thing I do is call my insurance company to make sure my coming terrifying visit is covered for the treatment you are seeking (I’m not seeking. any treatment! I want a solution!) which is organic sexual dysfunction code.

Simple enough, right?

Wrong!

First of all, a nubile-sounding young lady answers the phone. Clearly, she is being fucked regularly with a very large hard dick and she has four orgasms a night, each of which lasts ten minutes:

Hello, she croons, Chickenshit Insurance Company.

Hello, I’m one of your clients. I need some information. Okay.

I have to see a urologist and I need to know if he’s with Chickenshit and if I’m covered under the… (gasp!) organic sexual dysfunction code.

Silence. Do I have to repeat it? Please don’t make me repeat it.

Uh, sir, can you explain that?

I call up, who do I get? Alice in Wonderland. Well, I stumble…. it’s sexual dysfunction.

Can you explain that so I can….

Explain it? Jesus Christ! Don’t you have any training? I know, you were just hired this morning and you have a learning disorder.

Uhhh…… I say with my usual savoir faire, uhhhhh……impotence.

Really? she squeals.

I can see her putting her hand to her mouth to suppress further squeals. She can’t believe what she’s hearing. Sure. Her Jack is twenty-five and a bull moose. Sure. She’s young, he’s hung, he’s slung, and I’m unsung.

Yes, I dribble, confessing.

Hold on.

Hold on? Why is every word, every phrase so pregnant with sex?

Sir, who is your urologist?

Well, I don’t have one yet, but is Dr. Shillalegh…?

Yes. Dr. Shillalegh is one of our doctors. He’s with Chickenshit.

And am I covered for it?

For what?

I heave breath out of my palpitating lungs.

Sexual dysfunction?

Impotence?

Yes. Fuckhead.

Have you seen Dr. Shillalegh before?

So this will be your first time? Yes.

So you haven’t had it long?

Silence, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?

What has length got to do with it? I ask, cringeing, as if she were staring in my eye sockets.

Well, there’s a two hundred dollar deductible.

Oh.

So anything after two hundred dollars Chickenshit will pay for. But anything up to two hundred dollars you pay for. Do you expect to see him more than once?

I don’t know. How am 1 supposed to know that?

Well, I mean, is this a serious problem?

No, honey, it’s just my heart, my life, my meaning, my gonads, my wife, Why are you being so cruel to me?

Let’s assume it is, I murmur.

The conversation goes downhill from there. She’s got me on my knees. LAYLA!

5

The questionnaire and the accompanying papers are documents from hell. They would wipe the smirk off Jack Nicholson’s kisser. The treatment process is divided into five phases, each leading me out on the plank above shark waters and then shoving me off!

GERONIMO!

Cavernosography. Cavernosometry. Penile Duplex Doppler. And I haven’t even met Shillalegh yet. What is it about these guys that you always need a dictionary when you read their frightening prose? I’m so afraid of getting sick, I don’t even have a medical dictionary. Is Penile Duplex an apartment shaped like a penis? Doppler? I had a dentist named Dennis Doppler.

I’ve never been happy with doctors. Some people are happy with doctors. Oh, Dr. Fudge, isn’t he the most sensitive, caring man? I’ve never felt that way in my life about even one doctor. Maybe that’s because I go to a doctor thinking, Is this guy going to make me sicker? How do I know what grade he got in lungs in medical school? Suppose he got a 65? What did he get in fevers, knees, stomachs, and orifices? I mean, he couldn’t get a hundred in everything, could he? He must have fucked off along the way. He’s human. He must have cut class, doped off in lab, shut his eyes on the cadaver table. When they were cutting open penis and balls, was he thinking about a great date?

Maybe doctors sense my cynicism. Maybe I even give off an anti-doctor smell that makes them treat me like wrapping paper. I’m sick, I’m feeling like shit, I go to the doctor with a fever, I’m chilled, cold, sitting in the doctor’s office listening to happy music with a bunch of terminals. I finally get in there, he says, You ever had this before? I say yes. Well, you got it again, he says. That, of course, is a Henny Youngman joke. Henny understands doctors. He creams them whenever he can, or used to when he was physically able to spit those mordant lines out. He can’t now. So what good are doctors? What do they actually do for you? They give you pills.

And then, as a last straw in our relationship, my current doctor fired me. Yeah, fired me. Do you know ANYBODY who was ever fired by his doctor? I bet you don’t. I was.

It was the weirdest thing. Mimi and I moved to a new town, asked around, I got a new doctor: Basil Sliding, M.D., with a couple of menacing letters following the familiar ‘M.D.’ He was a fattish man with an unbuttoned white coat. He moved so fast from cubicle to cubicle he created a draft. His coat ballooned. How can I talk to a man like that? How can he help me relieve my woes at that speed?

He was treating me for rocketing cholesterol (impossible to spell right the first time) with a drug so obviously potent that I required a blood test every three months to see if my liver had disintegrated. I thought about this. If I need a blood test, this stuff must be dangerous. Weren’t there less threatening ways of treating high cholesterol? Every time I asked him that question he said, I take this drug, my wife takes this drug, my son takes this drug. Whatever other explanation he gave, I couldn’t understand because the words flew out the door as he headed for the next cubicle at mach two. So I repeated my questions on following visits. But he’s more interested in talking about that bitch Hillary. Everytime I visit him he asks, What do you think of that bitch Hillary?

I don’t much care about Hillary, I don’t think about her too often, either, but Dr. Sliding obviously does. He might have to slow down between circuits of his cubicles. Well, he goes on and on, fire in his eyes, about that cunt of a first lady who’s going to ruin my medical profile. How did I get in on this? I sit there mutely waiting for advice.

That bitch Hillary is going to make your life miserable, and even shorten it!

I’m mum. Is he giving me homework? Will I have to do research?

Will I have to think about the particulars of health care, too? Dr. sliding seems miffed that I’m mute. I’m not on his team. How do I know he’s pissed off? How do I know he’s looking for revenge? Maybe he gives off a smell, too. He probably failed the three week course in doctor-patient relationships.

Then one day, he increases my drug dosage without telling me. The