The Movies

by George Gauthier

Chapter 3

Corwin

Kyle's brother Corwin was back from his two year assignment in Luxembourg. On his behalf, Kyle and I had looked for suitable rental properties something like the old farmstead where Corwin had lived before his company sent him to Europe. He needed a place that could accommodate an outdoor cat like his Esmeralda whom we had been caring for these past two years.

Their reunion was touching. Corwin had half wondered if Esmeralda would even remember him. His worries were for naught. When he entered Kyle's apartment, she let out an interrogative meow as if she could not believe her own eyes then ran over to him and climbed all the way up to his shoulder, purring furiously and rubbing her facial scent glands to mark him as her own. She could not have been happier to see the human who had raised her and her sister for the first four years of their lives. The sister was gone now, savaged by a pit bull, but now she had her Corwin back. It brought tears to everyone's eyes

Over the next two days we visited each of the final five rental properties Corwin had already explored through virtual visits. This final selection had to be in person. Before signing a lease for his final choice Corwin planned to hire a private investigator to check out the neighbors lest he find out too late that he had problem neighbors, whether too nosy, too entitled, or just too difficult to live next door to. Life is too short to spend any of it engaged in a feud over the back fence. For similar reasons, none of the properties was governed by a Home Owners Association or HOA.

Like his brother, Corwin was a red-head, but his copper top was a lighter shade than Kyle's auburn locks. The two brothers were only eighteen months apart and had a lot in common, though Corwin was straight. They expected to share Kyle's apartment till the beginning of the month after next. Corwin's furniture and effects would be retrieved from long term storage.

A week later Paolo got back from the state capital. Thanks to his demonstrated skill as a pursuit driver, he had been nominated to attend a training course on improved highway intercept techniques. Running late on the return journey, he did not go by his house to change. Instead he got himself dropped off at our spooky old mansion, climbed to the third floor, and knocked on Kyle's door while still in uniform. Corwin opened the door.

Although initially startled by the sight of Paolo in uniform, weapons belt and all, he quickly recovered.

"You must be Paolo Franco." he said offering his hand.

"And you can only be Kyle's brother Corwin. The family resemblance is unmistakeable. Sorry but I didn't have time to go home and change into civvies."

"No problem. You cut quite an impressive figure, Constable. My brother has always had a thing for guys in uniform."

Kyle and I soon joined them. Instead of going out to a restaurant we decided to dine casually and have something delivered. We voted unanimously for Chinese, a cuisine hard to find in Luxembourg. As Corwin soon realized, all three of us were past masters of chopsticks, whereas his own technique had gotten rusty from his two years in Europe.

Paolo congratulated Corwin on the promotion which his completion of his overseas assignment had earned him. Congratulations were also due to Kyle for finally getting his doctorate. Kyle had had to defend not only his thesis but also three articles published in peer-reviewed journals before a panel of expert examiners. It was understood that Kyle was not going into university teaching and would not be a competitor for appointments in their departments.

Kyle visibly shuddered at the very notion of a career in academia.

"Academia these days is much too chancy and far too political, and I do mean partisan political and woke. It is getting that way even in STEM fields. It's been several years since I cancelled my subscription to "Scientific American" after they endorsed the trendy notion of gender fluidity and multiplicity. Too bad, I had relied on the publication to keep me aware of developments outside my own fields but alas is now hopelessly woke. No, I will be going into research at a top-drawer industrial laboratory right here in town."

"It is a subsidiary of one of Franklin Dyson's companies," he explained. "We only wish our fourth, Will Laurier, could be here this evening but he and Dyson are both out of the country. Will is not only Dyson's personal secretary, lover, and close-in bodyguard, but also the pilot of his personal autogyro."

"Your Will sounds terrific from what I have been hearing of him these last couple of years. I have lost track of how many times one or more of you four has made the news. I have never been prouder of my younger brother than when I heard of the rescue of those kids from the river."

Kyle grinned and joked.

"I suppose that is my cue to indulge myself in a bit of false modesty of the 'Aw shucks, it weren't nothing' variety, but I really cannot. I am sure that I have never done anything more worthwhile in my entire life. Of course it is still early days yet. So: Look Out World; Here I Come!"

During the meal Corwin mentioned that his sojourn in Europe had sharpened his already good command of both French and German. He explained that those were two of the three administrative languages of the Grand Duchy along with Luxembourgish. That meant that a citizen could pose a question to the administration in Luxembourgish, German or French and almost always get an answer in the language in which the question was asked.

Not a mere dialect, Luxembourgish is an official and standardized language and is in daily use as the mother tongue of the natives of the duchy. It is deemed the sole national language of the Luxembourgish people though French is the most widely spoken language despite having fewer native speakers.

Each language has its own sphere. Most official business is carried out in French. Road signs and advertising displays are generally in that language. The legal system of the grand duchy is based on the Napoleonic Code, which is why French is also the sole language of the legislation though parliamentary debates are mostly conducted in Luxembourgish. Foreigners, mainly expats, make up nearly half the population of less than seven-hundred thousand plus many thousands commute daily from France, Germany, and Belgium. Unless they know German already, the foreigners stick to French. The German spoken in Luxembourg is slightly different from the standard varieties in Germany or Austria but is not a distinct dialect.

With a sly grin, Corwin added:

"Hardly any foreigners bother to learn Luxembourgish unless they are seeking naturalization, which I was not, but to give myself an edge I actually learned quite a lot of the language, rather more than I let on actually. Publicly though all I could seem to muster in Luxembourgish was basic phrases like greetings and courtesies."

"You sly dog!" Kyle told him.

Paolo sighed and confessed that he himself spoke only two languages and both of those he had learned as a child. An immigrant at age five, Paolo considered himself a native speaker of both Italian and English.

"Spanish is close enough to Italian that there is a considerable degree of mutual intelligibility. Sometimes I can communicate speaking Italian while my interlocutor speaks Spanish. Admittedly I do not have any real command of Spanish except for the stock phrases they drill us cops in like 'Pare!' and 'Manos Arriba!'"

[Stop! and Hands Up!].

Nanites Again

I had a visitor last night. Old Doc Asclepius made a rare trip to the Western Hemisphere. He usually roams about Europe where Olympus is located, by which I mean the pocket dimension just out of phase with Planet Earth rather than that windy mountaintop in Greece.

His purpose was to upgrade my nanites which are microscopic nanometer-sized machines each fairly limited but linked in a network become an intelligence though not a sentient one. They infiltrate many of my tissues while a goodly supply floats in my bloodstream ready to flow to where they are needed in a hurry. Nanites help my already supercharged immune and bodily repair mechanisms to keep me healthy and to recover from injuries. My nanites can stop heavy bleeding and repair even major trauma like crush injuries, lacerations, and bullet wounds. Traumatic amputations are another matter. I would have to get to Olympus, mostly to hide till Asclepius coxed a new limb to grow and long enough to establish a new identity for me and to wind up the affairs of my old one.

Now Zeus's initial rebuild of my body in ancient times included better stability of my physiological processes (homeostasis) and telomere rejuvenation to keep me ageless. Also denser bones reinforced with tensile fibers, stronger musculature, tendons, and ligaments (partly to keep me from getting hurt during energetic sex play). Also more efficient gas exchange for better breathing, faster reflexes, etc. I may stand only five-three but I have the strength of a Jack Reacher, strength which an opponent would never suspect until I sprung it on him. Kaboom!

All of that was to the good. The new feature which Asclepius brought me was a way to seem to age gracefully so that I would no longer have to break off contact so soon with the friends whom I make during a particular incarnation lest my unchanging youth arouse suspicion. My worst nightmare is that discovery and disclosure of my immortality which would force me to go into hiding on Olympus for at least a generation lest I be captured and turned into a lab rat for a government or some ruthless cabal of rich men anxious to wrest the secret of immortality from me or even burned at the stake for a demon in some of the benighted countries.

These new nanites will give me conscious control of cosmetic features like crows feet at the corners of my eyes, frown wrinkles on my forehead, slightly rougher skin on my face and even age spots on my hands, perish the thought. Those slight changes would let me portray a very well-preserved but clearly aging man into my early fifties, perhaps with a touch of gray at the temples for that distinguished look. Regardless, underneath I would still be a teenager. It was up to me when I should start making any changes, though sometime within the next few years certainly. You can claim to be in your twenties only so long when you look eighteen tops.

I would also be spared the occasional attentions of truant officers who mistake me for a high schooler playing hooky and not a fully grown human edging toward four thousand years old. I cannot fully convey my outrage when such an officious oaf grabs me by the ear to bring me under control as if I were a naughty child. A crushed instep was my usual counter to such a move followed by a shout for help against a sexual predator like "No! Help! Get your hands off me, pervert!"

That was to put him on the back foot in the eyes of onlookers.

With these upgraded nanites I could double the length of my friendships in each incarnation and cut in half the recurring heartbreak of cutting ties and moving on to a new life every fifteen or twenty years. This was truly a Gift of the Gods, though of course the Olympians are not divine but really an ultra advanced race of space aliens engaged in a form of cosmic cosplay during a sojourn of several millennia on Planet Earth. This means that I can look forward to many more years with Paolo and Kyle, and Will and the other friends I have made in my current incarnation as Troy Ganymede. Hallelujah!

"Don't overdo things, young Ganymede. Your watchwords for these transformations are slow and subtle. In time you will achieve sufficient control to disguise your appearance by having your hair grown out a different color. Quite soon now you will no longer have to get haircuts but will have active control of the length of your hair, shedding the longer strands as the follicles go into periodic dormancy. You could also change your eye color but better switch to blue or hazel eyes which are easier than brown because closer to your original green.

All such changes would take a week to ten days so you should go into occultation in Olympus during the process. That will let me change your fingerprints too. Don't try that yourself. The process is quite intricate and takes an experienced hand."

"Take your height and body mass as a given. Don't try to transform into someone else as if you were a shapeshifter out of human myths and legends. Your nanites are not that sophisticated. You would only kill yourself trying. Remember life is a highly complex and interdependent series of physical and chemical processes which must all work in step. Get anything out of kilter, and you die."

The upshot was that now I can rely on nanites to maintain my health, repair injuries, communicate over cellphone networks by spoofing a cell phone, and even engage in a form of technological telepathy with my fellows in the Olympian community of heroes and favored former mortals like myself and Hyacinth who also had the nanites. (The gods themselves do not need instrumentalities of any kind.) And now I can even alter my appearance. Combined with my enhanced physical powers and senses, I am practically a comic book superhero, though forget spandex as flattering as a skin-tight costume would look on m. I much prefer to go around sky-clad as the Hindus call it.

Call me shameless but I come by my attitude toward nudity honestly enough. After all it was my own royal father, the king of Troy who preferred me naked. He passed me around as a teenager, making my charms available to successful generals, officials, and favored ambassadors. Zeus really set the mold when he ravished me then carried me off to Olympus. He did make up for it by giving me a job as his perpetually naked wine boy cum cupbearer cum boy toy, always conveniently to hand whenever the king of the gods got the itch but wanted a change of pace from his wife or other females, whether human or divine.

Asclepius also provided me with a very special type of nanite, a weaponized nanite. On command a few would transfer from my body to anyone whose skin I was in contact with. A handshake would do it. After multiplying itself to the level required by my target's age, gender, and health, the nanites would generate and release potassium chloride into the bloodstream of the target. (Potassium chloride is the heart stopper ingredient in the toxic cocktail used in public executions.) After which the nanites would disassemble themselves, leaving it up to the pathologist to puzzle over how the deadly chemical had been introduced without leaving a trace in food or drink and without a puncture wound diagnostic of an injection.

The impossibility of detection and the delay between infection and release of the poison would give me a solid alibi. The nanites made me the ultimate assassin, though I would use that capability only at great need.

Hollywood

Who would have thought it, but my friends and I are going Hollywood. Well, not actually to the physical Hollywood in California but rather into the movie business as actors. We are getting roles in a first season of a TV series produced by Franklin Dyson's movie studio Palimpsest Pictures. Its initial distribution will be over the Palimpsest Streaming Service on cable.

This development was the fruit of remarks I had made almost two years ago to Dyson about the possibility of a series of jungle pictures for the gay audience reviving the old Bomba the Jungle Boy series of yore or alternatively a retelling of the story of a young Danish boy shipwrecked on Ceylon in the seventeenth century which was the factual inspiration for two fine adventure novels "Where the White Sambhur Roams" and its sequel "Wild White Boy", both by R.H. Spittel. [A sambhur is a large Asian deer.]

The kick off was at a barbecue one Sunday afternoon at Dyson's estate on the outskirts of the city. Besides the two residents, Dyson himself and Will Laurier, the others present were myself, Paolo Franco, and Kyle Kavanaugh plus two strangers, the veteran producer Martin Ginsburg and a cute dark haired Latino lad named Ramón age nineteen and Dyson's helper at the grill. A truly stunning beauty, the boy also served beverages -- particularly a tasty and refreshing non-alcoholic fruit drink. Kyle asked what it was made of. Ramón told him that the main ingredients were orange juice and squeezed lemons, plus certain undisclosed flavorings, a secret family recipe to hear Dyson tell it.

This serving boy wore nothing but a super skimpy European style bikini, its white fabric a contrast to his smooth olive skin. He wore it horizontally and very low across the hips. In front, the single ply fabric did little to conceal the shape, size, or placement of his organs of generation. In back, the waistband rode two fingers below the top of his cleavage. Kyle's own garment was only marginally more modest, a tan-thru swim brief, something which pretty Ramón could not help but notice. He visibly gulped as Kyle briefly laid a hand on his arm to ask for a slice of lime for his drink. When he brought it over, he gave us boys a sly smile before fading discreetly back to the drinks station.

"A fan, obviously," Will observed drily.

"Maybe so," I told him, "but your boy there must have a ton of fans of his own. I just love that mestizo look which so many Mexican boys have, a delightful combination of Hispanic and Aztec strains."

"Ramón is actually half Zapotec so not an Aztec at all."

"Whatever, he is one-hundred percent scrumptious, which is what really counts."

"Tut, tut. Remember, as the help Ramón is off limits. Just like that blond scamp of a chamber boy in your spooky old mansion, pretty little Jaeden. Not that my principal and I are blind to how sexy he is, but since the help is off limits, Ramón's physical beauty serves only an aesthetic purpose."

"Well he is practically asking for it. I mean does he always run around like that in next to nothing?"

I gestured to indicate the exiguous garment barely clinging to the boy's hips.

"Only on formal occasions like today. Most of time Ramón works in the nude. He is the assistant gardener who takes care of the plantings close to the house including the flower beds and borders, perennials, hedges, and those low terraces with native plants which enclose two sides of this English style garden. He also doubles as our pool boy. We pressed him into service today since the domestic help normally has Sundays and Mondays off. He lives close enough to ride over on his ten speed bike."

"Ramón keeps in shape swimming and running the same trails we ourselves use on the back forty. And since nudity is the rule around the pool, no one is scandalized, not even our cook or our housekeeper, both Hispanic ladies themselves. They smile indulgently at a boy whom they describe as 'muy guapo', as indeed he is. Plus he is a really nice kid. Smart too. He takes courses on-line toward certificates in functional fields to build upon for the future. Despite high test scores he elected not to waste his effort, time, or money on a useless credential from our broken system of supposedly higher education.

I nodded. Dyson's complaints about woke academia were well-known and well-founded.

After we had all eaten our fill, Dyson called our group to order and explained that he had green-lighted a trial season of eight episodes of an adventure series. He thanked me for my suggestions about Bomba and Spittel's works which had got him thinking. He decided that doing Bomba with a white boy in the lead would run into flak from the woke crowd and race baiters. They would insist on a black actor in that role. The role I had suggested for his cute white boy lover would then have to be rewritten as only a sidekick and love interest, a male damsel in distress. Not wanting to pander to wokeist racial preferences under the guise of race-neutral casting, Dyson nixed Bomba.

Dyson re-read Spittel's first novel then the sequel which he had never heard of before and loved them except for the part where the young hero takes up with a young native lass. So someday he might do a gay version, but the novels offered little scope for spin-off stories.

"My trusted producer Martin Ginsburg helped me hone the final concept. Why don't you tell them, Martin. This was your idea even more than it was mine."

The producer nodded then explained:

"We looked for inspiration to an old movie made in 1966 called "Naked Prey". It was a jungle tale of survival, a tour-de-force by Cornel Wilde who starred, directed, and co-produced a very fine action adventure indeed. Though 'Naked Prey' was set amidst a native uprising in Africa, it was inspired by the real life adventures here in North America of John Colter, a member of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. He is usually considered to be the first of the mountain men of the American West, fur trappers who went after beaver skins.

"In 1809 Colter was captured by Blackfeet Indians, stripped naked, and given a chance to run for his life. The Blackfeet gave him a decent head start then chased after him. Colter opened up the distance between their front runner and the rest of the pack, doubled back and surprised and killed the front runner with a rock, and armed himself with the Indian's knife. That opened up enough of a lead for Colter to go to ground. He hid in a beaver lodge overnight with the Indian braves running all around looking for him. Once he got into the clear it took him eleven days to walk to a trader's fort on the Little Big Horn River."

"Colter became a legend in his own time and was the inspiration for at least two Hollywood movies one starring Clark Gable plus the concept for our own projected series, the shorthand description of which is 'Twinks in Peril'."

He hunched in his chair forward, clearly excited about his latest brainstorm, ignoring the dubious looks from his interlocutors.

"Our concept more fully is this: one or more cute twinks on the run from danger while bare-ass naked. We will have them fleeing mortal danger from pirates, Indians on the warpath, Saracen raiders, or headhunters. You name it. And the threat doesn't have to come from humans. It could be a man-eating lion, a killer grizzly, a rogue elephant, a saltwater crocodile, sharks, or -- and, get this -- dinosaurs. The list is endless. We'll never run out of ideas!"

"So your young heroes, those twinks won't be wearing any clothes at all? Why not have us in clingy tan-thru bike shorts or maybe my parkour outfit or a loincloth?"

"Usually not authentic as not of the period of the film. Even for a modern setting we might start the film with you guys dressed that way or perhaps just climbing out of bed in the morning already naked, regardless you would soon lose your clothes, ideally for the rest of the movie. In others your characters would be introduced as say farm boys in coveralls, no shirt, and with straw hats atop your heads. You might be dressed in the singlet of a varsity wrestler, or a bicycle messenger in bike shorts. So sure your characters will be clothed to begin with but by the time their foes take after them they will be stark naked. That is why the title of the series is Naked Prey just like the movie."

We four looked at each other and rolled our eyes. All right, given my personal history and current employment as a nude pole dancer and often totally naked fashion model, I had no problem with appearing nude in front of a camera. I had done it often enough as a fashion model in front of a still camera. Kyle and Will for their own reasons were not particularly body shy either. That left Paolo's Catholic upbringing, though Paolo himself shrugged and sought to put my mind at rest on that score.

"For Catholic prudery no one can beat the Irish. We Italians are different. Just look at public art in Italy. Nude statues are everywhere as during Roman times. At the beach young guys compete to see whose outfit is the scantiest and most scandalous. My parents already know about our skinny dipping and nude forest runs on Dyson's estate. I am sure I will not be disowned though I'd rather not be in the room with them when they watched my debut on TV."

Ginsburg reminded us about how "Naked Prey" was filmed back in 1966. Although Cornel Wilde's character was stripped naked during the first act, the audience never saw his naughty bits. There were a lot of coy camera angles, strategically placed shrubbery, and so forth -- not to mention the actor wore a modesty pouch. Toward the end, he put on the loincloth of a slain foe. Such considerations need not detain us, not in the twenty-first century. As long as nudity is presented tastefully it will titillate rather than offend our target audience of gay males and straight women."

"Women?"

"The series will be the cinema version of the bishonen manga in Japan, which are graphic novels about boy love. They sell big to lovelorn Japanese women. Understand, this is not some adult movie nor even soft-core porn but more like the peekaboo shots in the old style Abercrombie and Fitch catalogs. We are doing action adventures the way the gay audience always hoped to see them. The love scenes will be no more graphic than those in "Skins" or "Queer as Folk".

Paolo asked:

"You do know that we all have full-time jobs, mine as a cop. And none of us has any experience in front of a camera."

"As unknowns you are exactly what we want and need for this venture. New faces. New bodies as well."

"It's true Paolo that you work full time, but many cops moonlight after hours. If you take this gig, instead of working as a security guard you would earn a lot more and be a movie star! Besides, the original commitment is only eight episodes most of which will need only two of you at a time. Also, since we never shoot the story in sequence we can schedule your scenes for two or three days for each episode in which you appear. So this is highly workable, if you are willing."

"Besides you all do have experience in front of a camera, whether it was surveillance video, the iPhones of passersby, ATM or Ring cameras, and the body cams cops wear. For instance, with Troy we can point tto the video of the robbery on that city bus. And we have all seen how quick on the uptake you all are, with those clever ad libs or adaptations of tag lines from the movies. And if we don't always have video, we do have audio from the judicious use you guys have made in past confrontations of the Just Press Record App. You might not realize it, but you guys are naturals."

Dyson thanked Ginsburg for laying it out then added:

"One thing more; we have chosen a fifth actor to fill out the regular cast, our gardener Ramón. We have high hopes for him, based on an outstanding screen test plus he went to drama school for nearly a year before he had to drop out for financial reasons. And yes we were a bit sneaky about introducing him to you, but it is clear you will all get along famously."

"Ramón's mixed heritage is Spanish and Zapotec Indian. That will let him convincingly play all sorts of ethnic characters. With his high cheekbones and light toned reddish brown skin he could play an Indian, a Mexican, a lascar, a Hindu, an Arab, almost anything except for East Asians or sub-Saharan Africans. That was how two time Oscar winner Anthony Quinn, himself of mixed Indian and Mexican-Irish ancestry, got started in the picture business, playing such roles. Check some of his old movies where he parades about the sets in a war bonnet or turban.

Ramón will be your utility infielder and will appear in all the episodes as different characters. You won't have to carry the teleplays all by yourselves. And we will line up top character actors as guest villains.

"Guys, I know that this is a lot to lay on you, but please give it serious thought. Think of this as an opportunity to strengthen your bond with each other. You are already friends, lovers, and have sometimes been comrades in arms against various foes, but this will give you a chance to work together, despite your very different day jobs."

Think it over, talk it over, and let's get back together next Sunday. Ramón has your contact info so he or Will will be in touch.

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