We struck up a modest friendship, Tenzeno and I. We would meet in early mornings for homemade coffee filtered through paper towels. After ten minutes or so, Tenzeno would produce a rolled cigarette clogged with brown bits of marijuana. Riding the wave of a small buzz, we’d debate art, or porn. To his mind, excessive focus on human genitalia elicited deep waves of sadness in the viewer. Whereas I believed a full frontal of a shining, shaved labia could, given the right context, provoke euphoria. We discussed.
But when Tenzeno’s water pressure went on the fritz, he began sneaking through my back door and washing his crusty dishes in my sink. I found that upsetting. We got into a screaming match, during which he called me a “voyeur.” Later he apologized and presented me with a scavenged electric wok. We dined on hot red beans that night.
Poverty was back, stronger than ever. My parents sent me some raisin cookies in the mail; they got me through a tight spot. My friend Michael arrived in town one day, desperate to make porn. Instead we squandered his budget watching live nude oil wrestling. Defeated, I rode the bus to Venice Beach and tried my hand at staring glumly at waves. Wasn’t too bad at it. Then an old pair of blue jeans washed up onshore next to me.
I took to the boardwalk, where Rollerbladers whizzed by and fat bums removed wet Camels from their mouths to throw up gently into paper bags. I kept walking, head down. What did I care? All around me, the smell of cheap pizza and baby oil.
Various leads came and went. A Manhattan fashion photographer who loved porn dangled a photo retouching job in front of me, and I bit. But he got cold feet, reneged on our deal. I sank further into depression. When I couldn’t justify spending my cash on yoga anymore, I begged a skinny woman who ran a local studio to let me clean up her place after hours in exchange for free classes. She loved the idea and handed me a mop.
It wasn’t so bad, being a yoga janitor. I swabbed the wooden floors of the shala with a monk’s precision, a little black stereo floating late-night soft rock treasures into the air. Spiritual work is easy work, men. Not to mention, some of those rubber mats smelled pretty good. The funk of honest sweat clung to them. It felt sort of vicious, in fact, to spray them down with my alcohol solution. As if the bacteria were doing cool little headstands and things.
I ate more broccoli. I sold half my CD collection. I found change in pay phones and claimed it.
Finally, one night, everything changed. I’d been trolling the Web for an hour or so (purely research purposes, you understand) when I came across an “interracial” website, one in which hordes of black men frolicked among the montes pubis of tiny white girls, to the perverted delight of the site’s paying members. Recalling that I, too, had an “interracial” in my vault—Black Dave vs. Sandy Spago—I contacted the site’s administrator, a man named Pitts, and offered to sell him my scene.
Pitts responded quickly, offering that he’d actually been hoping to create some videos of his own for some time now, but had been stumped, due to being based in Seattle. His talent pool there was limited. How would I feel about trying my hand at producing a scene for him? I told him I’d consider it. I quoted him my rate—a very reasonable four hundred dollars—and told him to give me a week.
My first responsibility, of course, would be to procure the actors.
Finding fellas would be simple A quick post to any online adult message board would spawn hundreds of drooling responses in one day. Getting a girl? That would require the help of professionals. Following a lead and my best intuition, I headed over to the second-largest porn agency in Los Angeles: Reb’s PGI, which stood for Pretty Girl, International.
But if Reb’s agency was indeed international, then it spoke overwhelmingly of the third world. Stark tobacco nests had been ground into the yellowing fibers of his stairwell carpeting by the tread of one thousand boot heels. The walls fairly cringed, wanting for a fresh coat of paint, or at least a wipe down. And that old familiar porn aroma, eau du blowjob, followed you like a grim virus, all the way up the stairwell, right in through the flimsy front door.
I was greeted at the front desk by Clarence, a wiry, cheerful fifty-year-old hophead with a gleaming shaved dome and a Newport cigarette. Clarence’s job was to deal with walk-ins like me.
“Can I help you?”
“I certainly hope so,” I said, somewhat haltingly. New to this sort of thing, I wasn’t quite sure how it all operated. Maybe this would be like trying to buy a bong at a head shop, where they threw you out if you didn’t ask for the thing with the right term: water pipe. “I’m looking for... a white girl.”
“Oh, we have that.”
I scratched my head and searched for the proper terminology. “A white girl, who’s into the concept of black guys.”
“The concept?”
“She’ll be sleeping with them,” I clarified. “I want to do an interracial.”
Clarence considered. “You going to need A?”
“Who’s A?”
He hooted. “A’s anal, man! Do you want it up the pooper?”
“No,’ I said, flushing “I don’t think that’ll be necessary.”
“Then it’s eight hundred bucks,” said Clarence, happily. He lit his smoke, rubbing his bald dome with the meat of his palm, still holding the red lighter. “Plus seventy-five dollars to the office. That’s our referral fee.”
“Sounds fair,” I said, cheered that the whole process had been so simple. I’d had more trouble getting gym memberships. “Agreed.”
He grinned at me. “Lemme show you the Book.”
Pretty Girl’s Book was legendary. Each girl the agency represented had the right to two crude Polaroids and a list of dos and don’ts. The heavy, overstuffed directory contained the rap sheets on literally hundreds of working porn actresses. Porn producers in good favor with the office were allowed to spend whole afternoons thumbing through the catalog, drooling over the photos, which always featured one full-body shot from the front and one from the rear, doggy-style, looking back over one shoulder.
I shuffled through the pages rapidly, observing the toned, often heavily tattooed young bodies before me. Many of the actresses were surprisingly hard-looking, as if they were fresh from murdering somebody with a hammer claw, or on some sort of leave from hooker’s prison. More than a handful sported disappointing names: Butter, California, Charity. That was a bad career move, to my mind. One-namers didn’t last. One-namers ended up slogging away in mediocre leather dungeons in San Bernardino, toiling away in eternal obscurity to atone for their lack of creativity.
“How about her?” I asked, pointing to a small, frowning girl with kinky brown hair, who went by the slightly more inventive “Amber Ways.” I supposed she had based her name on the character Amber Waves in Boogie Blights—a weird sort of twist. She glared up at me nakedly, almost angrily, but someone had scrawled “Interracial” next to her Polaroid.
“Great choice. Amber’s one of our best girls. You’ll love her.”
So we set it up. Easy as that. I found my guys just as smoothly— they were two best friends named Bert and Vance, and both were plugged into the SoCal swinger scene. They were willing to do the job for $50 each. Bert was a touch old for public nudity—he was at least forty, with a small, somehow muscular belly extending roundly over the belt of his jeans. But he moved with the confident intensity of a former professional athlete: agitated, jumpy, ready to bang.
“I do this kind of thing all the time,” he insisted. “We both do.”
“I can come four or five times in an hour,” Vance interjected.
“Oh, me, too,” Bert assured me. “None of this one-nut business!” He and Vance cracked up, slapping hands.