James Franco Wrote About Not Banging Lindsay Lohan

James Franco’s short story, Bungalow 89, about a girl named Lindsay, showed up on Vice earlier today. The story is about how he didn’t have sex with Lindsay Lohan but, instead, read her Salinger.

There was a Hollywood girl staying at Chateau Marmont. She had gotten a key to my room from the manager. I heard her put the key into my front door and turn it, but I had slid the dead bolt and that thing—I don’t know what you call it; it’s like a chain but made of two bars—that kept the door from opening.

She said, “James, open the door.”

Across the room was a picture of a boy dressed as a sailor with a red sailor cap, and except for his blondish hair (closer to my brother’s color) he looked like me.

She said, “Open the door, you bookworm punk blogger f****t.”

Classic Lindsay.

My phone rang. She let it ring until I answered.

“You’re not going to let me sleep, are you?”

“Do you think this is me? Lindsay Lohan. Say it. Say it, like you have ownership. It’s not my name anymore.”

“Lindsay Lo-han.”

“I just want to sleep on your couch. I’m lonely.”

“We’re not going to have sex. If you want to come in, I’ll read you a story.”

“A bedtime story?”

“It’s called ‘A Perfect Day for Bananafish.’”

He really doesn’t want anyone to think he had sex with Lindsay Lohan. If I was Lindsay, I’d start to feel offended.

Once upon a time a guy, a Hollywood guy, read some Salinger to a young woman who hadn’t read him before. Let’s call this girl Lindsay. She was a Hollywood girl, but a damaged one. I knew that she would like Salinger, because most young women do. I read her two of the Nine Stories, “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” and “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor.” “Bananafish” was great because it has a nagging mother on the other end of the phone line, nothing like Lindsay’s real mother, but still, the mother-daughter thing was good for her to hear. And there’s the little girl in the story, Sibyl, and the pale suicide, Seymour, who kisses her foot and talks about bananafish with her, those fantastic phallic fish who stick their heads in holes and gorge themselves—it should be called “A Perfect Day for Dickfish”—and then, bam, he shoots himself.

Then I read “For Esmé,” which is basically the same story as “A Perfect Day for Dickfish.” A man goes to war. He is traumatized. Then he is saved by the innocence of a young girl. The structure of this story is very nice. Yes, stories, stories, stories, stories. S-t-o-r-i-e-s.

Alright, alright. We get it. You didn’t have sex with Lindsay Lohan. Geez. Give it a rest. Lindsay’s going to get a complex if Franco keeps going on like this.