My mother spoke up. “This is some kind of elaborate joke, right?”
“Look,” I continued, “I can understand your reaction. Heck, if I had a son who went to work in the porn business, I might be a tad bit disturbed, too. But what you don’t get yet is that I’m out to produce a different kind of porn. A progressive kind.”
“What does that mean?” he snapped. “Porn is pom. Our son, the pornographer.”
“Sam, you’re not ‘acting,’ are you?” pleaded my mom. “I don’t care what you do, just tell me you’re not ‘acting.’”
“Our son, the pornographer?” repeated my father. “Holy God. I can’t believe I’m saying this out loud.”
“But don’t you see? All porn isn’t cut from the same cloth. My mission,” I proclaimed proudly, “is to change the game. From the inside out. I am going to make porn that’s art.”
“Ellen, did you know about this? Have you two been keeping this from me?”
“Have you lost your mind?” said my mom. “What are you implying?
“Jesus,” I said, annoyed. “Will you two listen? I’m making movies that are actually movies. I’m trying to make videos that help you know the people inside the bodies. You know, their personalities and stuff. Their motivations.” I paused, then took a small chance. “It’s very Freudian.”
“Don’t you dare try to hook me!” yelled my dad.
“Seriously, Dad?” I said. “You might like them. Listen, I have an idea. I’m going to send you one of my movies. Would that be all right with you? Would you watch it? It’s about domination. And urination.”
“Oh, wonderful,” he said, exasperated. “We’ll screen that very soon. Then we’ll both wheel ourselves over to the hospital and have a brain aneurysm.”
“You guys,” I said, “I have to go now. I have to go make porn. For the record, I think you were right: I haven’t let you in on my life enough recently. From here on out, it’s all about truth, openness, and honesty. Talk to you later.”
My new life was full of promise, but my wallet was still thin. I had never really been a broke person before, and to be honest, I wasn’t very good at it. I spent a lot of time hanging around the house, just sort of fretting over unknowns.
Bob had nabbed a new boyfriend, a close-mouthed, long-banged musk ox of a guy, just off the bus from rural Michigan, and he liked to fuss over him, preparing plates of fatty, pinkish hamburgers topped with melted Kraft singles, sweet neon pickle discs, and PepsiCola. I was always invited to share in the cheap-meat festivities, though my own contributions to the table (rice cakes, for example) were politely ignored.
One night, after a few teacups of Captain Morgan, Chester, the boyfriend, revealed to us that he knew how to make McDonald’s special sauce. And he set out to prove his word. “It’s just ketchup, mayonnaise, and mustard,” he said proudly, mixing a taster’s plate. “Why should I go out and pay for it, when I can get it at home for free?”
Bob nodded his head, smiling in an agreement that was probably lust influenced. It had to be. Special sauce? Was this my life?
One day they invited me to the beach, and although the idea of being a “gang” with them depressed me terribly, I decided it would be impolite to refuse. Chester drove us down Highway 1 in his tiny green hatchback, and we found a beach, spread out our ragged towels in the hazy sun. Bob played solitaire and smoked cigarettes while I paged slowly through an old Artforum; Chester ate three bologna sandwiches in a row. Then the wind came. On the way home, I fell asleep in the backseat, waking up in a Food 4 Less parking lot to the sound of “One More Time” playing on someone else’s car stereo. I was thoroughly sad.
Poor, man! I wasn’t used to this. The month was coming to a close, and I hadn’t even made rent yet. Situations such as these coiled my innocent stomach into a tight peptic knot. I envisioned calling my dad, but quickly I realized that would never do. I was twenty-four years old and an aspiring pornographer. Calling Daddy was no longer an option.
No, I would have to handle this myself. There were a million ways to make money in LA. I settled on answering a couple of the ads in the back of the LA Weekly—the ones that call for “Hot Guys! X-rated Photo Modeling! Earn 1,000’s daily!!!” I wanted $ 1,000s daily.
The first lead took me to a totally regular-looking living room in West Hollywood, where a sloppily dressed guy with a beard and a Polaroid camera told me to get naked on his couch and make myself full-sized. He stood there, waiting patiently. When I failed, he fished around in his smut stacks and found a straight porno magazine. “Try these puppies on for size,” he said, and folded his arms, hovering over me. I spat on my palm and took a good look at the pages of Tight. There was something oddly tranquil about beating off in a total stranger’s living room in the middle of the day, listening to the faint buzz of the noisy streets. Soon I would be out there, fighting traffic. But not just yet.
Fifteen minutes passed. Finally, I managed a small, uncertain boner. The photographer asked me if I would consider sucking his dick. I said that wasn’t really my scene. He showed me the door.
The second ad led me to a large building on the Sunset Strip, just a block east of the Whisky a Go Go, where a very old man took a look at me with my shirt off and said, hesitant to overcommit, “You look decent.” Then he put me to the Polaroid test, which I failed resoundingly. When he mentioned offhandedly that he usually did his shoots “in the woods,” I exited quietly, that old desperate feeling making its slow creep up my stomach.
They had me up against the wall. But I wasn’t beaten yet. I was a young man in a strange city; yet somehow, Los Angeles felt right. Up north, they’d called LA “plastic,” but they were wrong—dead wrong. LA was better than that. It was stranger than that. LA was a sudden blowjob in the cheap seats at a Dodgers game. LA was watching your sister do yoga in fuckable heels. Los Angeles was a traffic jam at midnight; a six-year-old wearing lingerie; a famous newscaster nude on a mauve beach towel, examining his testicles for cancerous lumps.
Everyone here was flashy and evil and alluringly fit. The homeless had the best tans of anyone, and don’t think they didn’t know it. A thick, Calvinistic sense of ambition pumped quietly through the city streets: This is gonna be my year, you could hear each struggling screenwriter, each terrorized backup dancer, each would-be real estate developer whispering to themselves, and I’ll gut the first bastard who gets in my way.
My intuition told me to follow their example. If I could stick with porn, if I could withstand the heat, I stood to make enormous gains. After all, our society needed someone like me, a guy willing to venture out into the muck in order to record careful, diligent notes about this quintessentially American subculture. We needed a courageous cultural anthropologist—someone unafraid to don the loser’s mask, to enact the total douche bag, so as to ingratiate himself into this gaggle of pimps and whores and crooks and retards, in the process educating the populace at large.
J could be that douche.
Hunger remained the only truly egregious thorn in my side. Santa Cruz had attuned my palate to biodynamic produce and nitrate-free meats, but those days were long gone. More often than not, lunch was a sixty-nine-cent can of Goya kidney beans, washed down with a cloudy glass of tap water. Still, I survived. Maybe fried beans weren’t the most delicious meal you ever heard of, but doused in hot sauce, salted to hell, and served with a side of raw banana, they became something unusual, almost memorable. Secretly, I kind of relished my pennilessness.
Not that being broke wasn’t without its disadvantages. One day, out of nowhere, my Volvo stopped working. Just wouldn’t start. I couldn’t afford to get it to a mechanic, so, drawing upon my severely limited automotive knowledge base, I figured it was the U-joint acting up; either that, or the transmission pipe needed fluid. I couldn’t decide. In either case, the dilemma was academic, because I didn’t have the money to fix so much as a burned-out taillight. I abandoned my car on a corner of Heliotrope Avenue, and took up Bob’s purple Schwinn.