Chapter 11 Frankie Hogan Joke Notebook - July
FRANKIE HOGAN JOKE NOTEBOOK - JULY
Here’s something that isn’t funny at all and will never ever find its way into my act or an actual conversation with another human or back into my brain again. Ever. I’m just going to let myself think about it now. Once. And then I will forget about it. Again.
Or maybe I’ll write a short story about it and submit it to some online lady porn magazine—that’s a thing, right? Under a pen name. Hoagie Frankin, perhaps.
A sweet, funny, annoying, eventually erotic little wisp of a story about a fourteen-year-old girl whose childhood best friend had just moved to another state and her other friends had suddenly grown massive boobs over the summer so they weren’t nice to her anymore, and she was so lonely.
To make matters worse, she had seen pictures of Kristen Stewart with kind of short, messy black hair and begged her mum, who’s a hair stylist, to make her look exactly like that.
Her mum cut her hair exactly like the picture, and yet she did not look like that.
At all. Because, as her mother told her, her hair shafts are too thick and smooth, so they just want to hang straight.
She looked like Keanu Reeves, and this was unacceptable.
So she went back to her mum’s hair salon and asked her to cut it again, a different style.
If she was going to look like a boy, she wanted to look like Taylor Lautner.
With hair that stood up. While she waited for her mum to finish up with a client, she looked through the magazines in the waiting area.
And there was this one ad in this one magazine of this one guy.
She’d never seen a guy who was that handsome before.
Pretty, even. He must have been a few years older than her, but the way he was looking at the camera, with those electric-blue eyes, it was like he was staring deep into her soul.
She felt seen. She felt pretty. She felt adored.
She tore that page from the magazine.
She flipped through every other magazine in the pile, looking for more ads with more pictures of that guy, but she didn’t find any.
She told her mum she didn’t need a haircut anymore and went to the nearest drugstore to calmly peruse the magazine section and then used her babysitting money to purchase two teen magazines that featured ads and spreads of this pretty, handsome guy who was not quite a boy, not yet a man.
Hot dog, he was hot. He was so much hotter than Justin P. and maybe even hotter than Justin H.
She carefully tore the images of this boy-man from the magazines and then carefully taped them up on the wall of her bedroom.
He was the only Person of Penis on the walls of her bedroom.
But he looked right at home there, with Taylor Swift and Rhianna and Kelly Clarkson (this was before she had gotten into comedy and put up pictures of comedians).
She didn’t know his name, but she felt some kind of connection to him nevertheless. It may have been the loneliness. It may have been the hormones. Or maybe. Just maybe. She was destined to meet him one day.
Then one night she was watching something on TV—doesn’t matter what—okay fine, it was Glee.
And she saw a commercial for Levi’s jeans, and there he was again—that guy.
Looking over his shoulder, at the camera.
Looking down at the camera through the hazy glow of golden-hour light.
Gazing directly into the camera and her soul. Giving the lens that Hot Guy Look.
Now she had something to Google.
It didn’t take long to find a YouTube video of the new TV commercial for Levi’s jeans and many comments about the name of the hot guy who was featured in it.
Owen Brodie.
Eighteen years old.
Son of soap star Joe Brodie.
Older brother of child actor Dylan Brodie, costar of the Disney Channel hit That’s So Wizard.
Younger brother of another model named Miles Brodie.
Further Googling of “Owen Brodie, model” led her to the website of his modeling agency.
She wasn’t an online stalker or anything—she just liked to have information.
All the information.
She never put pictures of him up in her locker.
She never talked about him with friends.
But she did like to daydream about how they might one day meet and fall in love.
When December rolled around, she decided to send him a Christmas card, care of his modeling agency.
Why the hell not, right?
She sent him a Christmas card. It said, Hi, Owen Brodie.
Just wanted to say that you’re really good at what you do and I hope you’re having a great life and all.
Merry Christmas (if you celebrate it) and Happy New Year, and if we ever meet in the future I hope you’re as nice as you look and not a total douchebag like all the other guys in Los Angeles. Love, Frances.
She was Frances back then because she wasn’t cool enough to pull off being a Frankie yet.
And she felt really good about sending him that sweet, funny card.
Even when he didn’t write her back.
Because she didn’t even know if he got the card.
It could have been lost in the mail. The agency might not have forwarded it to him. He might have gotten it and written her back, and his card got lost in the mail.
She’d never know.
It was so romantic.
Or…it finally occurred to her that maybe he did get the card but didn’t have a sense of humor. Maybe he was offended. Maybe he really was a douchebag.
She eventually decided that he was definitely a douchebag.
She took down the pictures from her wall.
She didn’t tear them up or get rid of them—just in case it was taking the modeling agency a really long time to forward her card to him.
But eventually she forgot about how much she had liked him and about how much she hated him for being a douchebag, and then Justin P. asked her if she wanted to go out with him, so she barely ever thought about Owen Brodie at all.
Until she just happened to be flipping through a magazine while she was waiting for her mom at her hair salon—five years later. She saw a picture of a celebrity charity event that was attended by model and fledgling stand-up comic Owen Brodie and his very pregnant wife, Ashley.
By now, she too was a fledgling stand-up comic, so she found this hilarious.
She definitely didn’t Google him once she got home.
She totally did not read every single one of his tweets on Twitter.
She absolutely did not think he was funny.
She may have gotten really, really drunk and heckled him when he dared to show up at a comedy club in Tampa.
But she certainly never expected to see him again, even once she moved to Los Angeles.
To be clear—she moved to Los Angeles for her. Not for him.
And she definitely didn’t think about the way he kept looking at her in his kitchen while utilizing a percussion massage therapy device to pound away the unbearable hot, wet tension in her throbbing clitoris multiple times.
Because she can’t bang her boss, especially when he’s not funny, especially when he’s Owen fucking Brodie.
I’ll have to make up the erotic part that comes later if I ever do write this short story.
Because the erotic part isn’t actually going to happen later in real life.
For many, many reasons.