Regrettably, the only child of Ursula and Heinrich Frankenmuth was a peculiar looking boy who, with slight arms and legs attached to an oval torso, resembled an egg in lederhosen. Compounding the deportment of his unusual carriage were his natural, effeminate mannerisms. Encountering adults found his presence awkwardly uncomfortable, but the union of his afflictions was delicious as a sugar-glazed strudel to his peers and he was mercilessly tormented throughout his childhood. His name was Otto.

When he was seven years old, Otto’s pediatrician and a specialist from Heidelberg, concluded that the young boy had an IQ of 150. Further, they encouraged that he be privately educated to keep his mind appropriately challenged and assure a course of proper development. Heinrich and Ursula reluctantly followed the recommendation, but the two 1936 Berlin Olympians secretly fretted that Otto was retarded and kept him indoors as much as possible. The confinement didn’t seem to trouble Otto and he devoted his time to the volumes of leather bound books that his tutor, Klaus Ulrich, brought him. Otto’s mind blossomed under Ulrich’s direction and he entered the University of Munich to study Economics at the age of sixteen.

Unfortunately, Otto’s sexuality also blossomed and his course of proper development was interrupted during his junior year. Shortly after mid-terms, Heinrich and Ursula received a call from the Vice Chancellor of Student Affairs informing them that Otto was discovered performing oral sex on the Director of Student Housing, and he was to be placed on academic suspension. Sadly, the Vice Chancellor continued, Otto was wearing a schoolgirl uniform at the time.

The incident confirmed the Frankenmuth’s suspicions of their son, and they admitted him to a mental hospital in Berlin where he received cognitive behavioral therapy for three months. Upon his release, the Frankenmuths were presented with a thick document that catalogued their son’s psychoanalytical sessions and subsequent evaluations. It said that Otto was a remarkably gifted homosexual who had the misfortune of being oddly shaped. One, it was stated conclusively, was not related to the other. He was allowed re-entry into the University under extended probationary conditions and went on to earn several advanced degrees in Economics without incident.

As a young adult, Otto learned that genius or not, the German industrial caste system had no room for a humpty dumpty, man-child. Consequently, he was relegated to one back-office job after the next. Disillusioned and depressed, he moved to Frankfurt and grazed the undercarriage of the city wherein he took refuge with its Bohemian clique. Otto’s intellect and sexual peccadilloes were openly celebrated amongst the congregation, and for the first time in his life, he experienced unconditional acceptance.

Checking his financial credentials at the door of the Psychedelic Revolution in the late sixties, Otto and a small group of friends became the object of novel curiosity within the circles of the European fashion industry. And as though God orchestrated it as an act of emancipation, Otto found himself literally embraced by beautiful male and female fashion models. He never paused to consider the irony of his fate and ran fast and hard with the troupe whose pattern of abuses laid the foundation for the production and consumption of designer drugs for years to come.

Over time, Otto’s indulgences grew more varied and expensive. It became clear that he needed to supplement his small accountant salary to finance his jaunts to Copenhagen and Paris. Taking an intermission from the merrymaking, he put his intellect to work and constructed complex, oscillating-indicator models to predict movement in stock prices for select U.S. markets. His advanced formulas filtered common price action from normal performance equations, leaving derivative-rich data like panned gold from which to speculate. Confident that he had cracked the code to eternal wealth, he began investing small amounts of money into a broad spectrum of American companies. Over a one-year test period, Otto’s methodology bore 70 percent accuracy and he started upping the ante with borrowed money. As a giving person, he brokered the investments of his band of sinners and together they began their journey into the realms of excess.

Ten years later, Otto had successfully extended the standards of eccentricity and earned himself a chapter in the Lloyd’s catalogue of the rich and ridiculous. Although, much like an unemployed steelworker winning the trifecta, Otto spent his money as quickly as he won it. Shunning any seductions of long-term investments into the companies he’d ridden a few times around the track, he grabbed his bags of cash and threw them into low interest-bearing bank accounts throughout Europe for easy access. His accountants pleaded with him to distribute and shelter his wealth into diversified holdings, but their rants were ignored. What they failed to accept was that the Otto Life, by design, was not a model for perpetuity; it was a maxim for the expedient and unencumbered pursuits of pleasure.

In 1995 Otto met a man ten years his junior and fell in love for the first time in his life. His name was Claude Jean Patrice. Claude Jean was a hydrotherapist at Spa Cinq, in Paris—a health spa that Otto frequented after month-long binges of sexual and substance abuse. Spa Cinq was an exclusive operation that appealed to the upper stratospheres of the indulgent class and had an unshakable reputation of discretion. Its patrons ranged from European politicians, to Hollywood starlets, to Arabic businessmen. Aside from its premier living accommodations and macrobiotic cafeteria, the spa was known for its use of ancient Hindu herbal compounds, early American leeching techniques, and European hydrotherapy as aggressive means of eliminating toxins, parasites, and bacteria from the guest’s body.

Otto’s preferred cure was the high colonic, or hydrotherapy. His sessions usually began with a water cleansing that consisted of a gentle wash of two gallons of warmed spring water over a two hour period, followed the next day with a strong coffee enema. As Claude Jean frequently assured him in his soft voice, See coffee stimulates see liver to excrete pahhsionous bilious toxins zhat eet has collected. Truth be told, Otto would have raised his bottom in the air for any lubricated tube without cause or explanation. The fact that he might actually gain some medicinal benefit from it was a delightful justification for his quarterly stays at the expensive spa.

To prepare for his visits, Otto employed the services of Binh Truc Duong. Binh was a high-ranking civil servant in South Vietnam before she fled to Paris in 1969. She and her cousin Bao opened the Saigon Salon on Rue Bonfette. Ironically, Binh earned five times her previous annual income as a public official by clipping the toenails and waxing the hair from the under quarters of people like Otto.

She had diagnosed Otto as a frail bleeder, and Binh would take precautionary measures to prepare his skin with a lotion made from a collection of Asian oils and extracts. The lotion opened Otto’s pores in a fashion that permitted an effortless and reasonably painless follicular extraction. He preferred a complete hairless presentation, and his sessions with Binh could take the better part of the afternoon through which Binh would burn incense and caw ancient Vietnamese folk songs like a crow. The following day, she would exfoliate his body and send him to the tanning beds with a subsequent aloe rub down. The routine was repeated for one more day or until Otto’s skin was smooth and glowing like a softened leather glove. Each time Claude Jean removed the towel from Otto’s bum, he would exclaim, Otto, your skin is so reech in colour and as supple as see baby’s. Delighted, Otto would turn his small head over his shoulder and smile like Bob Hope.

Fearing rejection, Otto kept his feelings for the Frenchman to himself. His little heart ached enough as it was. Hearing Claude Jean say, I’m sorry, mon cher, but eet cannot be so, would slay him beyond repair. After each session, Otto privately conceded that it wouldn’t require an IQ like his to understand that a dashing man like Claude Jean would never love an unusually shaped person like himself. The simple resignation revved the engines in the boiler room of the Otto Life and the cleanser of Otto’s sins became the root cause of his very debauchery. The perpetuation of his emotional chaos under this gyro magnetic model was the act of his subconscious genius.

In 1997, Otto received a postcard from Claude Jean announcing his retirement from Spa Cinq.

Dear Otto:

I’m happy to announce that I am hanging up the rubber bags and I’m retiring my career as a hydrotherapist. I’m moving to Monaco with Eldridge Weymouth III to live the enviable life of a kept man.

For your health, I urge you to maintain your cleansing regiment. If your travels bring you to Monaco… Claude Jean.

Otto’s pain increased threefold when Binh informed him that Eldridge Weymouth III was an elderly English Statesman whose liver stained skin resembled a Jackson Pollock painting. The Otto Life went into overdrive and the residues of sin built up in his organs like organisms within a failing septic system.

While on a three-month fornication tour of Copenhagen, Otto was introduced to Klel Verdkstit, a professional dominatrix. He was reclined in an overstuffed chair at Disco Ripe with an opiate-filled head, bobbing gently on its tiny spring. Klel extended her leg from her six-foot-two frame and firmly placed the sole of her boot into Otto’s crotch.

“Get out of my chair, you pathetic little man,” she ordered while gently rubbing her foot against his member. The physical expression was more intoxicating than the liquid opium swirling around in his martini.

Klel was the anti-Claude. She was a bullish woman who wore black outfits and drank Canadian whiskey from the bottle. She was prone to grabbing and pushing. She aggressively ate plates of greasy food, then force herself to vomit. She had a filthy mouth, Your fecking balls are so small they cause me to laugh and shit my pants, you fecking worm-man, and she chewed the tips of her cigars spitting bits of tobacco everywhere. Otto was powerlessly aroused in her presence. Aside from his mother, Klel was the first woman to ever give him an erection. Otto’s fascination with her became addictive. He began employing her several times a week, and then eventually bought out the contracts of her other clients for exclusivity rights.

Klel preferred public displays and frequently slapped and swore at the frail bleeder in cafes and clubs. Those close to him begged him to end the dark relationship, but too embarrassed to admit that her abuse engorged his pituitary glands with endorphins, he permitted his submission to continue for a year.

Sitting on his hands with a small rubber ball taped inside his mouth at Café Vive on the Champs-Elysees, Otto’s abnormal profile caught the eye of Binh and Bao.

“Otto! Jesus Christs, where have you been? Why you not come to salon? Look at you, you pale and sickly looking. You come to salon and Binh work on you.”

“Rohh Rohhhhhh.”

“What? What in your mouth?”

“That vil be enough. Otto ees occupied. Go avay.”

“What? Who this is Otto? Why you have tape on your mouths?”

“Lllleeeeese rohhhhhhh nnnnnrrrayyyy.”

“What you saying, what wrong with you? Bao, take tape Otto’s mouth.”

Klel stood and admonished the Asians. “Listen to my voice zis time you slant-eyed leetle urchin, get avay from here or I vill hurt you. Do you understand me?”

“Bao, lady call you slant eye clam, you gonna take that from her?”

Bao, a small but solidly packaged individual, bore the stern look of a man long in pain. He looked at Klel, then walked to Otto and removed the tape from his mouth. Klel attempted to shove him away from their small table, but as she reached in his direction, he quickly grabbed her arm with two hands and threw her to the ground. Otto spit out the rubber ball. “Oh no! Bao, this isn’t necessary. I think you and Binh should leave before someone gets hurt.”

“Big lady-man get hurt, that’s all. You had better come with Binh and Bao. You look ill. I bet your rectum opens wider than your mouth. Look at you, your skin is gray and your eyes pink, that not good, maybe your liver has seized from all your whoring and you die soon. You had better to come with Binh and Bao.” Bao grabbed Otto’s hand, and the three of them scurried down the street as Klel sat dazed on the sidewalk.

Otto spent the next six weeks as Binh’s Special Case. Binh nursed and fed him a strange diet that included meals like minted root ball soup sprinkled with powdered fish essence. Not wanting to return to Spa Cinq, Otto convinced Binh to administer his healing enemas.
Bao insisted that the enema practice was not only unhealthy but spiritually harmful and argued with Binh in their native tongue over Otto’s elevated behind. At times, Bao would become animated and tug at the rubber tube extending from Otto’s rectum. Binh on the other hand, while referring to Otto’s impacted colon would slap his bottom in disgust while crowing out dramatically drawn out syllables, Yaaoooo sun lonnnnh, yaaoooo sun lonnnnnh. Needless to say, the proximity of their arguments proved to be an aphrodisiac and Otto moaned like a porn queen in heat while his friends loudly enunciated their sing-song dialect over his exposed quarters.

Binh had low expectations of the frail bleeder’s ability to sustain clean living for any duration, but sensed that his perverse sexual orientations would now steer clear of Klel and her ilk. Bao wasn’t convinced and as the two waved goodbye to him from the train station six weeks later, he predicted, “Special Case be licking boots in a week, just you wait Binh.”

Taking his seat next to the window, Otto blew kisses to his Asian friends. He held the Journal de Monaco on his lap as the train departed the station. With a determined sigh, he opened the paper and re-read Weymouth’s obituary.

William Charles Weymouth III (75) of Bournemouth, UK on Tuesday, December 15. A twelve year resident of Monte Carlo died peacefully in his sleep of natural causes. A retired Lieutenant Colonel of the British Royal Navy, Weymouth is survived his brothers Henry and Paul…

Story by Jim Solomone
Photography by Winni Wintermeyer