“Yeah,” he said. “Straight to bed.”
Oh, what was the use? I wasn’t going to prove my masculinity to anybody on this set. The main thing was, I was getting some attention. Now I could understand how all the porn girls felt. Sometimes you just needed to be looked at, no matter how dumb the project. You just wanted to be acknowledged.
Soon I was introduced to my partner-to-be, Lysette, a hefty Cuban mulatto power dyke with freckles on her brown skin and strong softball player’s forearms. I’d seen her type before, roaming the Mission, shooting confident glances all over the place, manufacturing sizzling sexual connections with everything in her path. At twenty-two years of age, she looked like a young Condoleezza Rice, with bigger tits.
“Ever take it from a girl?” asked Lysette.
“No,” I admitted.
“Then I’ll probably have to go easy on you,” she said, reluctantly. “But let’s warm you up anyway. Follow me.”
We found a bathroom and locked its door. Lysette stripped me naked and lay me on my stomach in the bathtub. “This is lube. It’ll feel all juicy. That’s a good thing.” She administered the liquid gel to my asshole, like a mother bird feeding her children’s hungry mouth. It was a profound experience, like a rebirthing or something.
“Now let me start with this baby dildo.” She took a pink vibrator, about the size of her thumb, and began shoving it up my anal canal. “What’s that feel like?”
“Feels like ... I gotta poop?”
“Exactly. That’s exactly right. But you’re not pooping. Don’t worry. No poop.”
Slowly, she increased the size of her instruments, stroking my hair and whispering gently to me the whole time. After some time, I could handle a respectable girth.
“I never thought it’d come to this,” I mumbled.
“Sorry?”
“Nothing. I’m ready.”
We walked out into the great outdoors. Limping slightly, I nodded to Felice. We were standing by.
Sensing drama, the mob of camera operators surrounded us, locked us in a tight clinch. Lysette pointed to the ground; I undressed hastily, intimidated. My dreadlocked lover kissed me on the head, then pushed me toward a pink blanket. In the summer breezes, sequoia trees towered above me hundreds of feet high.
I was powerless. It was very exciting, in a way, to be so not in control. Lysette penetrated me from behind, and I rode the wave of her desire. Then she flipped me over and fucked me on my back, my knees around my ears. “You okay down there?” she asked. I nodded weakly. I could barely speak. She tried to go easy on me, but by the end, her natural rhythm took over, and she fucked me down into the ground hard, no apologies offered.
Postcoitus, my insides coiled, hot and glowing, the rough fucking perhaps dislodging some ancient trauma. Sarah, my producer-crush, spied me, naked, carrying my crumpled clothes in a bundle. “Way to go, Sam!” I rushed past her to go weep in the woods.
Later, feeling more stable, I scored half a joint and smoked it by a creek. Deep breathing helped me get myself back together. Without a doubt, I was mortally embarrassed. But there was no sense in waffling now—the die had been cast. And the more I thought about it, the better I felt. It took guts to do what I did. I was up on my hind legs, now. Crying to be heard.
Feeling stoned, slightly mystic, I stumbled up the path toward the house. Felice was directing an orgy scene. Two guys and two girls rolled on top of one another like suckling puppies, popping members both real and prosthetic into every available orifice via methods God had never foreseen. A mangled Slip ’N Slide lay beside them, a telltale marker of Good Clean Fun.
I watched them play for a while, reflecting privately that in LA, porn had never really looked like this. Down there, the players looked more like cartoon superheroes, with their synthetic vaginas, their double-wide cocks. These people, were all sorts of imperfect, and some of them quite hairy, but they were having fun. And they were having real sex. It sort of blew my mind.
Suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a figure waving at me. It was Sarah. Oh, I thought. I’m in the camera’s line of vision. How embarrassing. I moved a few steps over.
She continued to wave at me. I frowned, pointed at myself. Me?
She nodded, beckoning me toward her again. I walked over, obediently, and she put a finger to her lips, motioned toward the house.
The producer led me into the kitchen, stood inches away from my face. I trembled, amazed at our closeness. “I saw you watching that scene, Sam.”
I nodded, hypnotized by her strong beauty. Her perfect lips.
' You want to be in that scene. Don’t you, Sam?”
I nodded again, this time in wonder. A wave of gratitude crashed over me, and without warning, I felt a strong urge to cry. Sarah was like me. She understood. Sometimes, you just wanted to be looked at.
Without warning, she jerked open a large Frigidaire freezer. A blast of cool air pressed against my body, and I shivered uncontrollably. I watched dumbly as Sarah, backlit, in slow motion, retrieved from within the freezer’s depths one of our picnic props: a Jell-O mold shaped like the United States.
Then something broke in me and I seized the Jell-0 from her grasp like a fumbled football. I sprinted back to the scene, stripping the clothes from my body along the way.
“Felice!” I whispered. “Look!” I laid the Jell-O on the ground directly in front of the orgy and began lapping at it happily, like a dog.
Felice grimaced, annoyed. The performers raised their heads and glanced toward me with curiosity. I performed a few more showy licks for their benefit. Then, very carefully, I removed the America-shaped gelatin from its mold and placed .it, quivering and cold, onto my naked chest.
“Watch this,” I whispered. I held up a finger, breathless. “Just watch.”
I fell into Urdhva Dhanurasana, the yogic backbend. The cold sweet fruit jiggled atop my abdomen, traversing my pectorals, covering my heart.
“What in the fuck is he doing?” Felice mumbled sadly.
“No idea,” said her cameraman. But he tiptoed closer to me, to get a better shot.
I arched my back farther, my head nearly brushing the ground. The United States of Jell-0 wobbled, nearly toppling from my chest. But it quieted, evening out, and I closed my eyes, ecstatic, breathing in deep. -
For one brief moment, it was as if the world had imploded. All was quiet; all eyes laid on me. My hands shivered in the late-afternoon chill; my shoulders quaked, begging for surrender. But I held my ground. And it sounds so stupid, but looking back, it was truly one of the ecstatic moments of my life. My pelvis rocketed toward the sky; my heart pushed forward, almost out of my chest. And my flaccid, tiny penis waved bravely in the Northern California wind.
NINE
I cashed my entire Slide Bi Me check in order to move into my new little roach den. The grimy Echo Park storefront space boasted plenty of character, in the form of dangling electrical sockets, no gas, and deranged neighbors. To my immediate right, a mean, bulky woman ran a pet shop that contained basically no animals. She owned an iguana that was two hundred years old, a rabbit that was covered in what looked like human shit, and that was it. Her menacing scowl warned me not to investigate further. To my left lived a tiny, dapper Mexican artiste named Tenzeno, who spent his days smashing up painting after painting. He seemed to throw a new one together almost every afternoon. They stacked up against the wall in depressing heaps.
Though I found Tenzeno’s paintings striking, he never sold one, ever—a fact that caused the little fellow about an equal amount of pique and pride. “I’m left out of the gallery system, Sam,” he announced to me one day, extinguishing a wretched cigarette into one of his huge jade ashtrays, a stylish orange jersey draped across his chest. “Socioculturally, I’m a desaparecido.” He glared at me pointedly, knowing that I had just graduated from college, that my parents had spent the bank on me. “The system is really corrupt, which I don’t have to tell you.”