Her shoot was full of the same nonsense as the others. I was getting to know these men well. Darth Callous worked best from behind. Dripping with sweat, dreadlocks bouncing, dark sunglasses adjusted by an index finger’s push back to the bridge of his nose. Bert was slightly more creative—sometimes I’d find him suddenly standing up, knees slightly bent, thighs firm and strong and hamlike, eyes alive and burning with a child’s delight.
I could hardly pretend my working life was satisfying. But the money provided a constant, soothing balm. And shooting camera for a living—never mind the context—satisfied my deep-seated need to feel like a working artist, further corroborating my fragile conviction that I was living a life altogether unique and unequaled by my peers. Guilty.
After the shoot, when I’d folded a bundle of cash into Honey’s unbelieving hands, and we were driving back to her NoHo home, I asked jokingly, “So, those dicks big enough for you?”
“Oh, they were nothing,” Honey remarked casually, laughing. “I used to get raped with a Clorox bottle on the regular.”
“What are you talking about?” I whispered, feeling suddenly sad and sick all over.
“Sure,” said Honey, still smiling. “These foster parents I had when I was thirteen? They used to do it every night.”
“That’s so fucked,” I mumbled.
“Oh, boy, you think that’s bad? They used to shove scissors inside me, too. That was a lot scarier.”
We fell quiet for a while. Although, admittedly, not that long. Soon we changed the subject and spoke of other things. And on the way home, I got us Burger King, because it was too late to cook.
The months passed, and something about my life felt broken. I remember an AA meeting at a church in Echo Park, which Isaac convinced me to attend. Hot coffee and plenty of cigarettes. “I’m an . . . addict of marijuana,” I confessed to the group, red-faced. Then I sat down, feeling like a total ass. They applauded anyway.
“These people are mindless,” I whispered to Isaac.
“I know,” he whispered back, smiling politely. “It’s torture.”
I remember New Year’s Eve on the streets of Echo Park, nursing a tallboy with Tenzeno, leaning up against his storefront window. At the stroke of midnight, I watched someone throw up into a trash can. I remember January, when the days got shorter, and the wind had a bit of cut to it. One afternoon, a city employee came. I watched him try to plant a small tree in a squarish hole in the concrete sidewalk. He struggled for an hour, then gave up and threw the tree in a Dumpster.
February came. I remember thinking, I must find a hobby. Hoping for the best, I signed up for some improv classes. Such a bad idea. My ability to be funny on cue was, shall we say, exceedingly limited. I coasted for two weeks on old material, then ground to an agonizing halt. I quit. The Zing Bats would have to get by without me.
Bizarre cornflowers bloomed in cow dung in the fields, though, and I started getting fan letters from a porn addict who’d bought one of my early tapes. He lived in Oakland and went by the name of “Willie Timberlake.”
Sam,
I’m a filmmaker with no productions in the can, I’m a musician with no albums made, I’m a movie scorer but I haven’t written a complete score, I’m a writer who hasn’t written a fucking book; and that’s lazy. I’m all about lazy. I wish I smoked pot so I could use it as a fucking excuse. At this point I’m just a manic writer, harvesting my inner pom flower.
I am struggling to explode, fucking spit out product and be someone, but I feel like every time I jump to my feet I just as dramatically drop my ass in front of my computer and commit myself to an exhaustive three hour search for “+Israeli+pom + 1970’s.” Am I the only one?
He was not the only one. I gathered the letter closer to my breast and read on, a small smile slowly spreading across my features.
Christ, my only achievement is a fucking BA in communications. Ouch! I still can’t find a job where I can be something other than a chump drone. Ebb and flow back to bed. All this goes to say that it’s great to see somebody being creative and it’s pretty fucking inspiring. Keep working behind the scenes, and eventually it will catch on.
Can I tell you something embarrassing? I used to jack off with my friend Clint before I could even cum. We would do it for like an hour, both of us hiding under the same blanket, somehow not ashamed to be grabbing our cocks, but still too modest to be unexposed. We were just doing what seemed ap-. propriate. It definitely felt mature.
Clint had this huge stoner dad who had every single Hustler since ’76 stacked in his bedroom. I remember going into the bedroom and thinking to myself as I walked around huge columns of Larry Flynt’s brew, “Your mom sleeps here too?” Jesus.
Not only did his dad have every Hustler ever made, he had tons of tapes, too. The VHS revolution of the early 80’s hit him hard. Clint’s dad also made tapes of him fucking Clint’s mom. One time Clint’s little sister, 5-year-old Tina, threw in a tape. “Look at this1.”
On comes Clint’s mom giving Jerry a sweet hummer. Clint’s mom was trying to keep her eyes in the monitor to see what she looked like, so she was constantly looking off-screen. Tina died laughing. Clint was really embarrassed. For years, I fantasized about Clint’s mom giving me a blowjob and taping it. For years.
Sam, there is a darkness!
March came. I endured several more AA meetings. My apartment grew dirty, and I decided to let it stay that way. Cleaning while sober was about one-tenth as fun. Feeling lost, I decided to try growing my hair out. Soon, it looked like I was ready for my Bar Mitzvah.
Bert and Darth started to bore me. Bert lived in Oxnard, where he held down a good job as an electrical engineer. And yet he would drive two and a half hours through bumper-to-bumper traffic to get to Long Beach, over and over again, just to “get the pussy.” It depressed me. I met a boring twenty-eight-year-old who taught fifth grade in the Valley and started courting her. We talked on the phone every night. Boy, she could talk. She could talk with the best of them.
If I think about it real hard, I can remember the night we shot Divina, an eighteen-year-old Latina with baby fat still on her cute bones. She showed up to Darth Callous’s on a Tuesday evening in a blue-black convertible pumping bass, with a stoned friend and a see-through plastic backpack. I escorted them up the stairs and into the bedroom, where Divina got half naked and squinted up at me with red eyes, hair in rollers, and I tried to explain to her that I needed facial cum shots—and that was okay, right? My guys come three or four times a night apiece, they are like genetic freaks that way, and that was okay, right? She stared up at me blankly, giggling every so often, hollow-eyed in a black bra with a tiny little stomach and braces.
Willie Timberlake’s letters kept popping up in my mailbox. I devoured them gratefully, chuckling at their savage self-deprecation and naked hope.
You know,
As a teenager I would always beat off straight onto the floor as a testament to supreme laziness and depression. I would bust a nut on the floor and lamely dab at it with a paper towel a few minutes after I goddamn felt like it.
When I first started having sex, I couldn’t wait to bust out some of the pomo moves I had seen. St. Patty’s day, 1998:1 was twenty one. I got really, really fucking drunk and buttfucked this fat chick in the living room while my friend and his roommates slept in their bedroom. And I didn’t just quietly slip it in, either. I made her fucking squat on her knees and open that fucker up. I asked her, “In your mouth or in your face?” She responded mouth, so I ejaculated onto her face. Fade out, fuck the credits, and just show the goddamn copyright.
J didn’t feel cocky the next day. I didn’t normally gloat over sexual conquests. I was always too busy moving on to the next mission.