Frank & Stein

I love writing books that poke great fun at our sexual vanities. This sex comedy ebook is a novella entitled “Frank & Stein”, and like the original story has a monster who is, in the end, far more civilized than the humans around him. Interestingly enough, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, who published Frankenstein in 1818 when she was only 19 years old, wrote her story as a parody of Milton’s Paradise Lost. My other ebook, “Atom and Eve”, is a kind of parody of our lost paradise.


Excerpt:

Frank and Schrodinger and Stein, after the show, drove back to the Imaginatorium parking lot so Frank could get his car. On the way there things got a little testy after Frank made a pass at her (she: “you’re not a prospective boyfriend, you’re a lovesick barnacle”. He: “I thought your heart just had to be revived or resuscitated. I was wrong. It needs to be exhumed.”)

She dropped them off and squealed out. Off to a girlfriend’s house, at least until her dad came home and her step-mother-witch cooled down. She wasn’t too thrilled about leaving Schrodinger alone with Frank, but she seriously doubted her girlfriend would’ve understood the complexities of the issue. Besides, Frank was semi-trustworthy. He wasn’t really such a bad guy, she thought, and certainly on the edges of good-looking. But she was single-minded about not getting involved in any romantic entanglements until she graduated. This was a rock-hard promise to herself, and a twisted pay-back to all the put-downs she’d endured these last five years from that thing calling herself ‘step-mother’. Driving always helped her reorganize her thoughts. In two days they’d meet with Jolla-Smith, and hopefully everything’d work out okay. All this shit for a lousy Master of Fine Arts degree. All this shit and the vacuum suction of loneliness.

Frank and Schrodinger sat in the car and stared ahead. Eery green path lights shone on the lab’s cinder block walls. Schrodinger, so tall that his knees were bent way up by the dashboard, fidgeted in his seat. Frank gave him a ‘sit still’ look. “Hey, it’s not easy not having a butt-bone,” Schrodinger shot back. Then, to himself, “I’m the apex of Californian culture. I’m a hologram! A size zero! You can’t get any thinner than this! Hey Frank... What if I’m just some kind of electro-optical, quasi-plasmoid fluke or something? I guess it could be worse. I could have empty eye sockets or something. Although my scrotum flaps around in an empty kind of way.”

Frank cut him off. “Let’s not go there!”

Schrodinger chortled. “Easy for you to say. You’re packing your chestnuts.”

They ducked as a security guard (“Since when?” Frank wondered) made his rounds by the front door. “My worse sexual experience to date,” Frank shared, “was when a gorgeous bisexual coed I was dating told me I appealed more to her lesbian side.”

“Hey, let’s face it. You’re not that manly to begin with.”

“Well I try don’t I? All this alpha-dog crap. Besides, why do I have to keep sniffing the lead dog’s butt? I just want Stein to be my girlfriend.”

“Not exactly a love-dove is she? I don’t know what you see in her, Frank. She’s so... brambled.”

“I know what you mean. Every time I’m with her the air curdles around me. But you know, Schrodinger, decipherability is an important and confusing part of a woman’s feminine vexation. Anyway, things between her and I aren’t going too well right now. Things go black. And then they go pitch black. That’s just Mother Nature’s way.”

Schrodinger thought for a while, then tried to help with, “ninety-nine percent of lovemaking is half romance.” But Frank just continued wallowing in his funk. Schrodinger shook his head in disgust. “What are you so depressed about? Look at me. I’m just optical vapors.”

Frank patted him on the shoulder. “We all are, buddy. Hey, Schrodinger... What’s oblivion like? You know, the sweet by-and-by?”

“Labyrinthine. Luminous. Large. Does that paint a picture for you?"