As he was leaving, Chuck remarked with a nervous laugh, “I guess you’ll have to edit all that stuff out.”
“Oh, no,” I said, clapping him cheerfully on the shoulder. “That’s going in. It’s great human drama.”
“Human drama?” he said, a horrified look dawning on his face.
I ushered him gently but firmly out the door. “Keep in touch,” I said. “I may want to use you for future projects.” I closed the door in his face.
I went back to Sandy’s room, where she lay sprawled out on the couch, wrapped up in a big blue bath towel, staring up at the ceiling. “That was agonizing.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said.
“Not your fault,” Sandy murmured. She hoisted herself up to a sitting position. “I always feel guilty when a guy can’t get it up—like somehow I wasn’t good enough, you know?”
“Ah, the guy was just spooked. It wasn’t you.”
She shot me a dirty look. “I know it wasn’t me, Sam.”
We stared at each other.
“Well, listen, here’s some money.” I handed her $400 in cash.
“Stop it,” she said. “I don’t want you to pay me.”
“Don’t be a fool,” I said. “I’m going to exploit your image all over the Internet.” I was only partially kidding, and probably we both knew it. Her living room got very quiet. I sat down on the floor and gazed at my sneakers stupidly.
“Let me take you out for a drink, then,” said Sandy. “We’ll celebrate. Do you want to go to the Lusty Lady? It’s right down the street.”
I laughed. “Yeah, sure.”
We walked down to Kearney in our flip-flops and got $100 in change and pumped quarters into the slots. You weren’t allowed to get into the same booth, but we did it anyway. Sandy knocked on the Plexiglas window and waved at the strippers like they were lions in the zoo. Then she went behind me and pretended to be buttbanging me, and I winked at the girls who were walking around in their typical loping, unhurried way. Sandy took off her shirt and pressed her titties up against the glass, nodding enthusiastically and pointing at herself: pretty good, huh? Eventually, one of the girls told on us, and we were made to leave. We went to another dirty hole up on Broadway. A dark-haired stripper with small, hard tits and a lean, fuckable torso danced up on top of the bar in platform heels. I stared up at her hungrily, unable to disguise my desire.
“You like that, huh, Sammy?” Sandy said.
“She’s okay,” I lied. In truth, I wanted to insert my tongue up her ass so bad that it hurt.
Sandy kept on buying me shots, but I wasn’t in the right mood. I had to drive all the way back to Santa Cruz anyway. Somehow, on the way out of the city, I got lost.
The film did lousy.
It didn’t even clear a hundred bucks the first week. I started waking up every morning right before my alarm clock, with an increasing sense of anxiety and hopelessness. My home, which had seemed so vibrant and unique only months before, suddenly felt covered with mold. A bumper sticker that I kept seeing around town on this decrepit brown Honda summed it up pretty welclass="underline" “Santa Cruz is an Irony-Free Zone.” One day, I saw the car parked outside a bakery and waited around until the owner showed up. He was a cheerfullooking, craggy-faced guy with black nerd glasses who was wearing a pair of small red devil’s horns on top of his head.
“Got your Halloween costume yet?” he asked, tweaking the horns.
“Uh ... it’s like a month and a half away.”
“Never too early. Never too early. I’m James T. Martin. Who are you?”
“I’m Sam. I was just admiring your bumper sticker.”
“Thank you kindly. I made it myself. Could I interest you in one?”
“No, that’s all right. . .”
“Well, how about some kitty-cat ears?” He dangled a pair of black ceramic triangles from an elastic thread. “Granted, they usually look a lot smarter on the ladies, but maybe for your girlfriend?”
“Don’t have one. Look, I was just. . .”
“Hey, do you need a job? High season’s just starting for me. I need someone to help me sell these handmade devil horns and kitty-cat ears, even though they really sell themselves. Move ’em for ten and I’ll let you keep five. Fifty percent commission, best deal in town. What do you say?”
For the hell of it, I agreed. James was the best salesman I had ever seen. It was astounding to watch him in action. He could walk into a gas station, buy a Mars bar, and just sort of offhandedly unload a jumbo pair of green glitter horns onto the cashier. Everything that came out of his mouth seemed to make this weird kind of sense. He had that gift.
“I do carpentry, too, when it’s absolutely necessary. But that’s only in the lean months, when I haven’t sold enough horns, or abstract paintings. I have some pretty nice abstract paintings over at the house, I could let you have one dirt cheap. What do you do?”
“I make porn.”
“I love porn. I’ve always wanted to make a porn, actually. Not be in it, of course —I’m far too unattractive for that. Just create one. How do you like it so far?”
“It’s a weird road.”
James and I started driving up to San Jose and San Francisco most weekends. I was the worst salesman who had ever lived. One time James and I split up, and I went to Haight Street, where for three hours I stood by myself in pathetic silence, waiting for someone to notice the black devil horns strapped to my head and ask me where they could get some, too. When James came back, I asked him how he’d done.
“Not so good, not so good. Just sold thirty pairs or so, that’s hardly the kind of numbers I should be doing this time of year. How about yourself?”
“Zero. Listen, I’d like to not do this, if that’s all right with you.”
“Nonsense. You just haven’t hit your stride yet. We have to get you into a more freewheeling type of atmosphere.”
We headed down to the Castro, where James made me go into gay bars and tell people I was selling the horns to put myself through junior college. I made some dough, and that made me happy, for a time.
But things weren’t all right at home. Santa Cruz was growing smaller and smaller. I was treading the finest possible line between sexual pride and sleazery, and I knew it. Some guys could preach the free-love gospel and make it sound proper, but I lacked the confidence, that gift of gab. I figured it was only a matter of time before the hippies discovered the real me, and denounced me in the town square.
My temper spiraled into blackness. More and more often, I’d sit at the kitchen table with a cup of cold coffee, staring at nothing. I wondered if I was having a nervous breakdown. I took on more shifts at the juice bar, just because they were there. A quirky nineteen-year-old girl who worked in the store’s vitamin section announced that she had a crush on me, and I promised her the moon, but she wouldn’t even let me eat her pussy. It hurt.
But I kept pushing. My dream depended on it. Desperate for action, I called up Spinach Brown.
“What’s the occasion?” she said brusquely. We hadn’t spoken for months.
I was too ashamed to speak for a second. “I need to talk to Casey,” I said finally.
“Casey who?”
“Casey’s Cumshots.”
She hooked me up with his cell. In the middle^ of the day, on a Tuesday, I screwed up the courage to call the guy. To my surprise, he sounded overjoyed to hear from me.
“There’s somebody else making porn in Santa Cruz? Well, no shit. I’ll drink to that!”
“Maybe we should get together sometime,” I suggested casually. “Work on some ideas?’
“Christ, let’s hook up right now! I’m at the Drop Inn. Drop on in!” He laughed uproariously. “Hey, would you mind doing me a favor? Could you bring me over a sandwich or something?”