All my stories are designed to be read with particular music playing. In this case the pieces are: Myon & Shane 54 ft. Natalie Peris - 'Outshine' (Nigel Good remix), and Martika 'Flow With The Go' for the hot scene. So, as the sun rises on the opening scene, get Myon & Shane 54 up on YouTube, pump it through your best speakers, and crank them up loud!
*****
One day recently I got a telephone call at home from someone announcing themselves as the personal private secretary of a certain Mr. Peter *. (I won't name him), a very wealthy industrialist from Shenzhen in China. I remember the caller's underscoring the fact that the gentleman was very wealthy.
Now I have business in China, and I have friends in China, and I have friends who are ethnically Chinese who live in New York City too, and I am pretty sure that somewhere in my files there is even a hand-signed letter from Sir David Tang, the founder of the Shanghai Tang fashion group, so initially I wasn't really too surprised by the phone call.
So I was wandering around then, I guess kind of in a glow of imagined self-importance, a mug of coffee in one hand, Nokia Lumia in the other held up close to my ear, when I heard the woman explain in perfectly-British accented English that her boss wanted to know why 'all you top Literotica writers' virtually never wrote about the products her boss made his fortune on.
Something of an entrepreneur myself, I knew the importance of not giving away that you have been figuratively shot between the eyes in a negotiation and that the effect on your brain was much like that of having become a stunned mullet.
I quickly fired off some stock phrase or other: 'well, that's a very good question you see!' 'Ah!' 'Well...'
The fact was you could have peeled me off the ceiling. I'm sure I spilled some of my coffee.
Yeah yeah yeah now I remembered the significance of this guy. He was a billionaire. God almighty I even had a long-time-ago one-time business partner (and friend) of mine who had gotten out of the stock broking game back in the Eighties to do a joint venture with this same tycoon years and years ago with some particular design innovation... Sex toys. That's what these people were making. Sex toys. Making - and selling them too... Millions of.
Then again I hadn't heard from Hank for years; last I knew he was living in Vietnam or Thailand or someplace. Never heard that he'd become a billionaire anyway, that at least my lack of general humbleness assured me was almost certainly the case.
In the background, behind the cultivated, educated, Brit-accented voice of the personal private secretary, I could distinctly hear someone with a very Chinese accent say: 'get me de jemsbee-jonshon. I wan de jemsbee-jonshon.'
*
Peter the tycoon, it appeared, wanted to make a full-length feature movie, and wanted an 'adult-themed' script development, that could use top-flight A-list actresses and actors, and that would have more or less the same widespread international impact of a 'Basic Instinct,' but which would in this case somehow or other also highlight his company's products. Which were, of course, vibrators and assorted other sex toys. How the -?!
And Peter - the tycoon - wanted the 'jemsbee-jonshon' to work on the script development.
Holy fuck.
China money is not small money of course, not these days. And now it seemed, it was educated money too. The 'jemsbee-jonshon' was certainly no kind of cut-rate Joe Eszterhas!
Who the tycoon probably really wanted was Ira Levin, but then Ira Levin would only be accessible via a psychic medium. Jemsbee-jonshon, on the other hand was real, he was now, and he was going through a decidedly noir phase in his style at the moment and so, he was cheap.
I told Peter the tycoon five hundred thousand on the basis that Eszterhas had gotten two million from Mel Gibson up-front - and then hadn't even delivered in the end too; and told jemsbee-jonshon twenty thousand plus airfares and hotels fully-found. And stuck the rest into Russian ten year bonds multiplying everything fifteen-fold so that I could have financed the whole movie myself if Peter wanted to shoot 'the jemsbee' in 'the jemsbee ass' at some point. It's the usual thing producers want to do to writers.
Turns out though, that the very cyber infamous, highly trolled, and otherwise also much-maligned jemsbee-jonshon was just about the nicest man you ever would really want to meet in rl. Which was all for the best too, since Peter the tycoon had arranged a meet-up at the Hong Kong Peninsula with one of the world's best (and best-looking) A-list actresses - in order for 'the jemsbee-jonshon,' to sound her out on script ideas.
*
Cathy-Lee - it's not her real name, but let's call her that - had this modus operandi in any public situation of throwing a Cecchetti trained, stage production laugh-and-head-tilt to the presumed cameras at almost every requirement for a response in English, and she cultivated the impression in public, that she didn't really speak English all too well.
But she spoke it well enough in fact.
The other thing was, she was not generally known for wearing leather or anything even slightly less than 'superior class' and 'total elegance' in matters of dress. She did have this Louis Vuitton blue voile silk set though, that included thigh-high black leather boots that made her look much much taller than she was. And she was tall for a Chinese actress to begin with.
James B. Johnson, the American adult fiction writer, modestly cast himself as a kind of a Wilford Brimley type - Republican to the core, gun-owner, somewhat cynical, wordly-wise, realistic. All that kind of nonsense you get from the 'hard-core' manly-imagining fantasists who automatically assume they know what 'tough guy' means and it means them, of course.
Cathy-Lee had been raised where Cantonese street toughs would regularly pick on the upper middle class Chinese girls with the narrow selection of vocabulary that all street urchin Cantonese possess along with their mime actions that these words bestowed. Virtually the entire vocabulary of street Cantonese consisted of 'fuck,' 'cunt,' 'mother-something,' 'wank,' 'asshole,' 'prick...' - and that's about it! The entire sum total vocabulary. It was the way you spun the word that gave it some kind of implied ordinary sense or meaning so that the whole thing was any kind of language at all!
James B. Johnson, though, was in real life more like a slightly older Colin Farrell, than a Wilford Brimley at any age, although there was an all-Humankind-generous look in his eyes that was indeed somewhat reminiscent of Brimley about to lecture a young child in a movie scene.
The sweat that had poured off the JBJ's brow all throughout the whole entire plane flight - tough guy though he was - had nothing whatsoever to do with any fears of terrorism or off-beam BUK missiles or anything of that commonplace kind. This was from much more of an intellectual form of pressure. He knew he had to be able to come up with something meaningful and significant as far as a real script idea went. That would be the only way to bridge the gulf between who he was and who she was. People with money had ideas that defied any kind of the sense of 'normal.' Here was this amazingly glamorous woman, featured prestige brand ambassador all over the world, and he was being expected to converse with her about dildos!
This is what people with money arrange, though. It's what they do all the time. Well let's say some people, with money. And especially some of those people in the movie producing racket. Simpson, Flynt, Polanski, Milchan, Vadim, even Kubrick. They all did it. Or had done it.
Even when JBJ thought he had finally come up with something, the sweat still didn't stop.
She was more prepared than he. He quickly picked up something else too that he read from her body language and eyes and tone - she was tired and she was serious and this was a task of some real importance and not just 'some game.'
"So." She said, when they were seated in the deep cushioned and floral-pattern cotton cording covered seats of the Peninsula Hotel afternoon tea room, looking out across the amazing vista of a misty, cloudy, rainy, Victoria Harbour Hong Kong. "Welcome to China, Mr. Johnson."
