Half an hour after entering, I got lucky. A girl named Charlie— an inebriated but sexy waitress, fresh off the evening shift at a nearby seafood restaurant—approached me at the bar and started talking to me. Hot tonsil-breath beat against my face, but I nodded earnestly. Charlie’s well-proportioned body was beckoning to me.
An hour later, we were back at her little beachfront apartment, licking each other’s faces hungrily. She moaned inside my mouth. I seized a hank of the hair at the base of her skull and pushed her up against the living room wall.
“Don’t wake my sister,” Charlie whispered, chewing on my neck, her nails digging into the flesh of my upper arms, making tiny cuts.
“She’s sleepin’.”
“Don’t worry, I won’t,” I promised.
“She’s pregnant,” Charlie added, struggling out of her shirt.
“That’s great,” I breathed, staring at her enormous, amazing tits for one long moment. “Boy or girl?”
“Who cares?” Charlie shot back, angrily, covering her chest with thin, dishpan hands. “Who are you with, me or her?”
“You, babe,” I assured her. “You!”
“That’s better,” Charlie said, smiling a child’s contented smile. “C’mon, let’s do it already! I’m probably gonna pass out soon, so we better get started.”
But neither of us had a condom. It didn’t matter much to Charlie, who was straight up ordering me to fuck her, but I was hesitant. As eager as I was to create a child who had her perfect tits and my gigantic nose, I realized that, for the moment, I was unfit to raise a child. So I had sex with her leg, and ejaculated onto the arm of their couch.
Charlie hardly noticed. She was drifting badly. I gave her face a small, unobtrusive nudge with my thumb, then a gentle slap. When there was no response, I pried open her mouth, separating her jaw with both hands, and took a look inside. Everything was okay in there: no vomit, no obstructions to the airway. I was still peering into the depths of Charlie’s oral cavity with curious, drunken fascination when her pregnant sister unceremoniously appeared on the scene. She fixed me a hard look.
“Who are you?”
“Friend of Charlie’s,” I said awkwardly. I removed my hand from her mouth, letting her jaws snap shut. I looked down at myself, at the small pool of semen drying on the couch. “I was going to clean that up”
“Right,” Charlie’s sister said.
She was a fraternal twin, I could see, but a twin nonetheless: a fatter but still-alluring version of the groggy vixen by my side. The rim of her fertile belly protruded from the bottom of her T-shirt. She poured herself a grapefruit juice over ice, offering me nothing.
We stared at each other for a long, weird moment.
“So, are you just gonna stay like that all night?” the sister said.
“What do you mean?” I asked, confused. “Oh, naked. Sorry.” I covered myself with Charlie’s leg.
“Not that I mind, especially. You have a pretty decent body.”
“Oh. Well. That’s very ... kind of you.”
She gazed at me sidelong, caressing her placental lump in a bizarre fashion I couldn’t decode. Finally, she said, “Listen. Why don’t you stick around for a while? Get freaky.”
Frightened, I gathered up my belongings and ran. Streaking home, the mean California wind in my face, I felt a stab of childish despair. With no real income to speak of, I was clearly doomed to assume the life of a degenerate. What was my next move—how could I make a buck?
TWO
I remembered that Santa Cruz held a flea market every weekend, in the parking lot of an old drive-in. I knew a little bit about beat-up movie cameras, used stereos, and kooky magazines. Maybe there was a buck to be made in scavenging old stuff, giving it a polish, and reselling it at sky-high profits.
I set out for the Skyview Flea Market, keeping an eye out for cool vinyl, Super 8 cameras, and slide projectors that still had their bulbs intact. I cruised the aisles amid armies of big-breasted rockabilly chicks, their Elvis-haired boyfriends, and thin-bearded antiques store owners who came early and fought dirty and wore terribly sad taut corduroy pants that had little indentations where their balls had rubbed up against the wales so very endlessly.
I sped around the massive market, trying to focus on making an investment in my future. A naive vendor sold me a stack of “naturist” magazines from the early 1960s—Eden, Sun, Jaybird, and so on— and I found a functioning Polaroid SX-70 Land Camera that I was certain I could sell for more than a hundred bucks. Then my eyes fell on a table crowded with beautiful, beat-up microphones.
“Any of these work?” I asked the guy behind the table.
“Many of these work,” the guy said, with a smile that was incredibly warm, almost inappropriately kind. “My bro,” he added. He was a ragged-looking old mountain hippie, disheveled and most certainly unshowered, but he emanated this rather extraordinary aura of serenity. I found it pleasant just to be in his presence. “Are you interested in any particular one?”
“I’m interested in one that works,” I said, laughing.
“Are you thinking of recording something?”
“Well, I might do that,” I said evasively. “Actually, yeah! Show me something a musician might use.”
“Well, here’s a nice Shure. It’s a real beauty, isn’t it? It’s a condenser mic, but of course you already knew that. It’s superflexible: good for both acoustic and electric, hardly any distortion to speak of. It’s basically your totally cool, all-around magical, do-it-yourself studio microphone.”
“Yeah, I guess I could take a chance on that,” I said. “How much are you asking?”
“Twenty bucks.”
“I’ll give you three.”
He laughed. “You strike a hard bargain, sir. Perhaps I could show you something more in your price range.”
“Do you have anything else?”
“Now that you mention it,” he said, “I do. Come and take a look at Dusty’s back room.”
I stepped behind the table. Dusty took a look over his shoulder and then slid open the rusty side door of his vam Inside, a stack of about thirty ancient VHS tapes, some in boxes, some bare, lay sprawled out on a blanket.
“These are adult videos,” Dusty announced, regally.
“From the 1920s?” I asked, inspecting a tape dubiously. The yellowing, hand-printed label read: Her Welcum Waggin.’.
“No, mid-eighties,” Dusty said, seriously. “The guy who owns the land up in Boulder Creek where I’ve been parking my van has decided it’s time to divest himself of his own personal collection. These are vintage, bro—a real slice of erotic history. Not much use to me, though. I cater to a more musically oriented clientele, as you’ve noticed. With that in mind, I’d let you have ’em all for three bucks apiece.”
“Two.”
“That’s what I said. Two.” Dusty grinned, producing a wrinkled paper sack from somewhere within the recesses of his musty van. “Now then. May I wrap these up for you?”
I couldn’t wait to get home and try out my new pornos. Like most reasonable people, I had a real soft spot in my heart for sex videos. To me, they were kind of like a specialized wing of Video Art, reserved especially for degenerates. Happily, Dusty’s tapes appeared to reflect a serious and dedicated porn aficionado. They represented a wide range of erotic interests: there was big-studio stuff, displayed in oversized boxes, like VCA’s Whore of the Worlds, and guy-on-the-street porn, like early Buttman and Ed Powers. But the greater part of his collection consisted of amateur tapes. They boasted generic titles like Cheaters and California Dreamin, and bore labels that had been stamped out in small batches by dot matrix printers, proclaiming copyrights to companies by now doubtlessly defunct ( Power Productions, Ltd.”). I imagined all manner of sex acts, performed by anonymous fuck machines, recorded on clunky Betas by bumbling videographers who’d landed inside the world of adult film by accident. With a sense of childlike joy, anticipating hours of doltish fun bracketed by short, meditative bursts of whacking, I sat down to begin my pornographic education.