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  This is a work of fiction. Believe me.

  The characters, incidents, situations, and all dialogue

  are entirely a product of the author’s bizarre imagination,

  or are used fictitiously and are not in any way representative

  of real people, places or things.

  Unfortunately.

  Any resemblance to persons living, or dead is entirely coincidental.

  First published in the United States of America By Wild and Wooly Press, Inc.

  3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  © Chuck Austen 2007 All rights reserved

  No part of this book may be used, or reproduced in any manner whatsoever

  without written permission except in the case of brief quotations

  embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Like Warm Sun On Nekkid Bottoms / Chuck Austen

  Edited by Mark Hooper/Angel Editing

  ISBN 978-1-4357-0779-5

  All artwork © copyright 2007 Chuck Austen/Wild and Wooly Press

  Dedicated, with love and admiration,

  to the woman who makes all things possible.

  My beloved wife, Ann.

  If, on that particularly warm night in April, you had been anywhere near the one hundred seventeenth exit of the US 108, just south of the city where the road first wanders off like a drunken frat boy and begins to flirt with the dangerous curves of the coast, you likely wouldn’t have been able to see anything anyway because of the fog.

  But if you had wound up there—in spite of the lack of visibility, and the fact that no one goes there unless they’ve read the map wrong, gotten directions from an incompetent friend, or been forced to stop due to some bladder-related emergency—you likely would have parked somewhere near the old stone fence off the side of the recently resurfaced road to wait out the sudden, surprisingly thick and disturbingly dark mist that had swept in from nowhere to envelop everything, including the hypothetical you.

  Had you been there, you might have yelped a bit at the unexpected, unusual, and more than a little scary, low-to-the-ground lightning that suddenly erupted from the center of that eerily dense fog. Perhaps you would even have turned off the engine, moved away from anything metal, and begun muttering a prayer or two to whatever god you thought wasn't too busy to help.

  Had you been there, in the right place, at the right time, and had something been visible once the low clouds and mist had begun to fade along with the intense lightning strikes, and low, rumbling thunder, you might have seen the deeply worn, patchy, and faded, ostensibly white 1956 Rambler explode toward you from the center of those flashes and booms like a cannonball shot from the mouth of hell.

  Had you seen, you undoubtedly would have watched with fear and concern as the dingy car slid headlong toward you with considerable speed and lack of control until its brakes locked, its tires skidded, and the heavy machine swerved to an eventual stop on the rain-slicked asphalt mere inches from where the front of your bumper would have been, had you been there.

  If you had then stepped out of your automobile and moved closer to the steaming, pinging, rusted old driving machine that had nearly crawled into your lap, you would have seen a very pretty— and very frightened—young woman staring out the front windshield. She would not have been staring at you, not at anything so much physical as the flickering ghost images of her short, but mostly happy life as it continued flashing before her eyes, complete with end credits, catchy song and special thanks to the producers.

  You might have noticed she was sweating a little, shaking a bit, and breathing heavily as she gripped the steering wheel tightly in white, blood-drained fingers. You might have seen her swallow, once, very hard, as if downing a small rodent that had become lodged in her mouth but would have preferred to stay right where it was.

  As she would have sat there staring emptily at the space before her, and you would have stood there staring emptily at her, you might have noticed movement along the side of the road, and—with her—turned your gaze to see one of those irritatingly healthy couples who do everything together, including power-walk their excess caloric intake away in public with the specific intent of shaming the rest of us for our lonely, passive, and sedentary lifestyles.

  You might have seen them smile nervously at the frightened woman in the Rambler and then continue along their way as the driver, in turn, watched them stride off energetically toward their evening protein drink, relaxing sauna, and erotic massage.

  If you had paid particular attention, you likely would have picked up on the fact that the woman in the Rambler was paying particular attention to the tight-fitting tank tops, spandex shorts, and name-brand running shoes of the passing pair.

  And if you were close enough, you couldn’t have helped but notice the nervous, sweating, yet still remarkably lovely young woman glance down at herself and say quietly, “Damn.” Then shake her head sadly as she—and you—realized that she was entirely naked in her little car.

  “I knew I forgot something.”

  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 beco
me 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-puhlsDOWN.” 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 grandchild, 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 oneself.

  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.

  I was moving my chair around the varying bits of discarded fabric and thread that had become glued to the tile floor, trying to situate myself in such a way that any . . . em . . . ‘unexpected stiffening of the joints’, as it were, could easily be hidden with a simple and nonchalant flourish of the legs, and a subtle movement of my clipboard, when our newest model, Wisper Nuckeby, stepped in wearing only the bottom half of ‘Satin-Lace-Babydoll # 43’ and nearly blew out the front of my trousers.

  Panicked by this instant…em…eruption of embarrassingly obvious sexual attraction, I flourished my legs rather too ‘chalantly’ and fell over into the water cooler. Most of its contents sloshed over my groin area as if Moses himself had ordered them to do so, before I could fumble the thing off myself and onto Mrs. Abrososa’s lap.

  She, as you can imagine, screamed at the top of her sixty-year-old lungs and with the strength of ten Mrs. Abrososas managed to grasp the gurgling tank, Hulk-like, and hurl it and its furi
ously flowing contents, several feet mind you, back onto me. With a precision born no doubt of many years playing lawn-darts in the backyard with the grandkiddies, the elderly woman corked a ringer, and for one seemingly infinite and utterly horrifying moment I sat there staring at the bottle as the thing pointed down into my lap, its remaining contents now ‘plugged’, as it were.

  Ms. Nuckeby seemed, surprisingly, to approve.

  “Nice save,” she said.

  “Yes…wuh…well,” I stammered efficiently, dropping my voice an octave in an effort to sound more in control of the situation than a man with a sopping wet erection stuck in a water cooler bottle could ever possibly sound. “I’ve been practicing.”

  “Really?” she asked, seeming genuinely surprised.

  “Um…no. I’m kidding.”

  “I knew that. I was also kidding.”

  “Oh.” She was good. “Well, I knew that.”

  We both chuckled slightly at one another and the loveliness of her smile helped tighten the fit of my newly acquired codpiece. I looked at my lap and considered removing the blue plastic container from my whatsit. But the image of said whatsit exposed to the air—soaked, bolt-upright, clingy, silken Natazzi slacks revealing its every swell and curve as they gripped the thing more tightly than a sailor’s wife greeting a husband who’s returned home on leave—possibly her own—froze me into immobility. After assessing various rapidly considered options, I simply laid my arms across the bottle as if I’d planned for the thing to end up there all along and smiled at the seminude Ms. Nuckeby.

  “Well,” I said finally. “Shall we get started?”

  “Get…what? You want to…?” she asked, amazed, as I struggled desperately to make it seem as though every high-powered executive must, from time to time, conduct business with a water cooler bottle clamped tightly to his mighty manhood. “Get what started?”

  “The posing. The modeling.”