TEN
My new life was one of great leisure. I took long, pleasant walks around Echo Lake, attending to the ducks with bread crumbs; I participated in numerous classes at my yoga studio, where I held sway as a humble janitor. The woman who owned the place grew fond of the careful way I swabbed her floors. I saw no need to inform her of my double life. Instead I merely smiled beatifically and grew into a peaceful tree posture, my well-formed deltoids pumped up from diligently pushing my mop.
Yet my life felt imperfect. True, I could now afford foodstuffs that did not come canned for less than a dollar. But I was still alone and lonely. I saw vaginas up close and personal on a fairly regular basis, but those were not for me. They were greedily swallowed up whole by the twin thrusts of Bert and Darth, my Negroid swinger superstars from Oxnard and Long Beach.
I’d spat a good game at my parents about my artistic plans, but even I had to admit that the shenanigans I was pulling for Pitts were far from art. On my porch in Santa Cruz, I’d dreamed about giving the viewer something new, something totally unexpected, but in truth, the ill-conceived crap I was churning out was nothing surprising. In terms of my own edification, the only thing that I’d gleaned so far was that in this particular genre, it wasn’t just the female participants who were objectified (on the basis of their looks), but also the males (on the basis of their race).
My muckraking intentions had been real. But since I’d arrived in LA, I’d somehow found myself kowtowing to the status quo. A bisexual woman had fucked me in the ass, true; but I could not rest on those laurels for long. The truth was, I’d gotten lazy. I’d let my lack of cash serve as a convenient excuse to malinger creatively. With growing alarm, I realized I had to get back to my ideals, and quickly, before some terrible Invasion of the Body Snatchers-type change had been completed in me, and I lost all innocence forever.
These women weren’t props. They weren’t even really “porn stars,” except by label. They were regular people who, for some reason, had decided to get naked and raw. Only telling their complete individual backstory would humanize them. And only the honest explication of the filmmaker’s desire could legitimate his gonzoid enterprise. It was time to make some groundbreaking sexual cinema. It really was. Plus I was incredibly horny.
One day at Pretty Girl, as we were quaffing a few warm Budweisers and suffering through a screening of the latest edition of Party Pigs, Gus turned to me and said:
“So, you fuckin’ any of these girls?”
“Not really,” I admitted, with a laugh.
“What the hell’s the matter with you? These girls do like to fuck, you know.”
“Well... I don’t know how to talk to them,” I confessed. “I’m too shy.”
“Shy? Shy? What the hell’s shy got to do with it? Why don’t you just piggyback a scene or two?”
“Piggyback?”
“Oh, Christ,” Gus said. “Rookies all around me. Listen, man. You find a girl that you like, okay? A semipretty one, who’s not too far gone. Then you tape her for this thing that you keep shooting, the black thing, right?”
bure.
“But then you say”—he giggled, his voice rising squeakily like a teen’s—“How’s about a little something for me, too? How about a little something on the side?”
I frowned. “This kind of thing gets done?”
“All the time! I do it every time I go out. Nowadays, I don’t even shoot unless I can get my balls licked.”
“I thought you said . . .”
“I know what I said. But I was kidding. Look,” Gus said, licking the suds from the rim of his beer can with a grayish tongue, “I get my balls licked. Minimum.”
'You pay them?”
“Sure, I pay them!” Gus crowed. “I throw in an extra hundred, and they’re happy to get it.”
“And they usually say yes?” I asked, dubiously.
“They always say yes,” Gus said. He stared at me. “That’s their job, in a nutshell, right? They say yes.”
I made up my mind, then, to follow his directive, and when Clarence tossed me perhaps the best-looking girl at PGI, a twentyyear-old actress named Kate Frost, I was in business. Now, I knew Kate Frost. She was a name—not like Jenna Jameson or anything like that, but she had her own modest following. Kate had starred in a couple of Stagliano films, got flown to Rio with him. That meant something to me.
Nervously, I decided to call her. Kate Frost was very lively on the phone, the kind of person who was always hanging up on you about twenty times in a row because things were always happening to her while she was driving. But she had a good sense of humor and an open, honest manner that went along with her scattered nature, so, in truth, I didn’t mind that much.
“So, it’s eight hundred bucks,” I repeated.
“Eight? Wow, Sam, for two guys? This is so bargain basement. I mean it really is. I just want you to know that you’re getting a total steal here. My normal boy-girl rate for one guy is a thousand bucks.”
“I know that. I know, Kate. Thank you.”
“Oh, you don’t need to thank me, baby. It’s my pleasure.”
“Maybe, if you’re interested,” I said, shifting into gear, “you can make a little more.”
“How so?”
“Well, how would you feel about doing something on the side, with me? I’ll give you a hundred bucks.”
“A hundred bucks?” she squealed. “Come on! You must be kidding, my blowjob rate is four hundred.”
“Four hundred? Wow. I don’t know, Kate,” I said, grinning. Haggling was good footage. I held my video camera a foot away from my face, capturing the audio. “I could go up to two. That’s the best I can do.”
She was silent for a moment. “Are you cute?”
“I think so.”
“You’d better be,” she said doubtfully. “Two hundred dollars isn’t much money.”
In the end, I emerged the victor, as we agreed not only to do the add-on scene, but to postpone it to the day following her session with Bert and Darth. Good—she’d be coming to my house clean. I could ravish her alone, with dignity.
Now I started getting excited. Browsing in a thrift store, I came across a Superman suit. It was a kid’s costume, but made from a cheap plastic material that stretched easily. I managed to jam myself into it. Surveying myself in the store’s dressing room mirror, I liked what I saw. The plastic pulled my balls high. Compacted them neatly.
Kate’s evening in Long Beach went off without a hitch. Bert and Darth lashed into her with crazed devotion, of course, but they did that to everyone. Indulgently, I let them have their fun. Secure in the knowledge that I would get mine the following afternoon.
I slept fitfully that night, and when I woke, I immediately donned my costume, then set up the video camera to record myself chopping a crude aperture in the nylon fabric of the crotch, so I could get sucked off and be Superman at the same time. That taken care of, I moved on to hair and makeup. Blunt metal scissors made a chopping sound as they clopped their way through my tangled pubic garden. I had to be careful, so carefuclass="underline" any mishap would put me out of action permanently. I was in no position to give up an inch.
It was almost exactly twelve when Kate called me. “Sam? Hi, it’s Kate. Look, sweetie, I’m so sorry, but it looks like I’m going to be a little bit late. I am caught up in some really awful traffic here in the Valley. . .”
Porn actresses were notoriously late, of course, and this one, obviously of a mercurial, fiery spirit, would be no different. “That’s fine, Kate,” I said. I would charm her into my web. ' Just get here when you can.”
“Oh, great,” she sang. “It shouldn’t be more than an hour or two.”
“An . . . hour?” I repeated, my heart falling.
“Yeah. I’m up here on Sepulveda, and I just realized, Notorious is so close by. They owe me a check, so I’m just going to stop there for one sec.”