Each morning, I woke up to the cheery LA sky. The weather started to feel vaguely mocking. After more than two months of laborious phone conversations, the schoolteacher finally consented to have sex with me, my first legitimate piece in quite some time. It was surprisingly bad. She kept getting on top of me. I did my damnedest, but it was no use: I just couldn’t fuck uphill properly.
My job repeated itself over and over and over, like a single frame of video caught on an endless loop. Only the girls were different. I remember goths with stringy hairdos, at whom even Darth Callous wrinkled his nose in disgust. I remember wiggers who slow-danced with Bert in long gowns, while I ate french fries mournfully. The seventy-five-pound weakling from Redlands whose husband adored her and waited patiently in the car while her little bones made rent money. The registered nurse with Lee Press-On nails who exasper-atedly separated her own thick buttocks to assist Bert in anal entry. The beautiful brown-haired girl who just giggled when they went to mount her, as if no one had ever tried that before.
I began fantasizing about leaving. In my head, I envisioned a horrible, fantastic event pulling me out of the industry by force. What would it be? A knife to the guts? A positive AIDS test? Somehow, I knew the bottom was going to fall out on me, and soon.
But nothing kept happening. One night, I picked up a buxom thirty-five-year-old blonde named Rikki Lixxx from a sad Woodland Hills apartment and drove us toward Long Beach. We rode in silence for a long time.
I’ve got to get out of LA,” Rikki said quietly, looking out the window. “I’m so over this town.”
“Aren’t we all.”
She turned to look at me seriously. “I’m thinking about Brazil.”
I gave Rikki the once-over. Her eyes looked very tired. Even her mouth looked tired. Her breasts were the precise size and toughness of bocci balls. “Brazil it is.”
You know,
Timberlake wrote,
Sometimes I think that watching a pom chick get fucked is almost like a celebration of serious issues, getting off on their issues because we all know it’s there, right? It’s really obvious with the amateur try-out shit. They are being abused, exploited, and just about the same time your dick gets hard it dawns on them that they are getting a really raw deal and sometimes that is enough to push us over into our socks or napkins. Pom is like the mosquito bite of the male soul; it fucking stays swollen.
April bled into May, and May into June. I maintained separate memberships at Video Hut, Videoactive, Jerry’s, Stan’s of Hollywood, and Mondo Video. I spent many, many thoughtful hours browsing under the fluorescent lights, comparing and contrasting their porn collections. I was becoming an authority. I was good for the industry.
One evening, I scheduled a shoot with a woman named Tess Nicole, a semiknown porn star who, like so many of Reb’s actresses, had long since shot her wad. Now, after years of inactivity, she was staging some sort of “comeback.” She was still beautiful, though.
Some women were simply destined to be beautiful for their entire lives, in spite of every peculiar destruction they chose to visit upon themselves.
“I had an . . . accident,” Tess confessed softly.
She was applying her makeup in Darth’s hot bathroom. I tended to hang out with the girls when they did their makeup. I considered it one of the perks of my position and didn’t allow Bert or Darth to follow me.
“How’s that?”
“I. .. hit my head.”
“When?” I gazed at her small breasts and delicate rib cage. Sure, maybe it was a trying job. But I got to be around many delicate rib cages.
“Maybe a year ago. I’m not exactly sure.” She looked up at me, in the mirror, and frowned. “I don’t remember stuff very well lately.”
“How has the work been?”
“Pretty good,” she said hesitantly. She offered a small smile, like a little girl. “Only, it’s weird. Sometimes, I think everyone is related to me.”
I left Tess to finish her makeup.
“She good to go, Sam?” asked Bert.
“Oh yeah,” I said quietly. “Red hot.”
Tess called to me from the bathroom. “Hey, look, I’m feeling kind of funny.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“It’s just . . . well, listen, do you think these guys have any vodka?”
“What do you mean? To drink?”
“Yes,” she said, firmly. “I think I need a drink.”
I fixed her a shot of vodka. She knocked it back cleanly. “Again.”
She had another. And then one more. I sensed our momentum fading.
“Tess, I don’t want to rush you,” I said, “but these guys have day jobs. We should probably get this thing rolling.”
“All right,” she relented. “Just a little baby one. And then I’ll be fine.”
I poured her a final drink, and she sipped deeply from it, and we both walked into the living room, where the boys awaited her with great anticipation and hunger.
Tess got down on her knees in front of the bed. She craned her head toward the men, who had already stripped to their boxers and stood towering over her like thick, damp trees. Her hair was blond and the strands were silky and fine. Her face was beauty itself, and her bright pupils were engorged with the blackest life.
“What should I call you guys?” Tess Nicole asked pleasantly, placing a demure hand behind each of their thighs.
“You can call me Bert,” explained the elder, smiling proudly, running his hands through Tess’s silky hair. “Bert the Lover.”
“And I’m Darth.”
“Darth?” Tess stared up at me for a second, and then burst out laughing. “You mean, like—DUH, DUH-DE-DUH . . . ?” She hummed the tune to Star Wars, then burst out in hysterics. “Luke!” she cried. “I am yourfatherl”
Wordlessly, we watched her giggle. “I’m sorry,” she gasped, finally, waving a hand weakly in the air. “It’s just, since my accident ... I think everyone’s related to me.”
Once under way, the scene progressed in fairly straightforward fashion. Tess, like a canny point guard in the twilight of her career, still had a few good moves left in her. Arching her behind, she looked back over her shoulder, touching her tongue to her teeth in a queenly, catlike gesture. Her nostrils flared elegantly; her lips quivered with passion. I was just starting to think she was one of the Reb’s patented hidden treasures, when, upon Bert the Lover’s third ejaculation—this one on the rim of her muscular vagina—Tess burst into wracking sobs.
“Get the fuck away from me!” she wailed. Her aristocratic face collapsed, her eyes twisting into pained slits and her chin protruding wildly.
Bert and Darth, scared, took a step back and reached for their shorts. Tess sobbed at a volume that hardly seemed prudent. We wrapped her in a towel and led her into the bedroom, where she fell onto Darth’s bed and continued to howl hysterically, like a traumatized child.
“How thick are these walls, bro?” Bert said nervously.
“Not very,” Darth answered. “Make her stop, Sam.”
Tess didn’t stop. She wept miserably, with the power of a natural disaster bent on destroying everything in its path. Her voice rose in volume and power; her sobs made the pavement shake. Then, quite suddenly, the storm broke, and she stopped. And Tess stood up, her eyes bugging wildly, and whispered, “I’ve got to get out of here.”
“No!” I said, leaping toward her. “Tess! You’re not dressed!”
'You stay away!” she screeched. “I need fucking air! Someone open this window or I’m gonna die!”
Darth looked at me questioningly.
'You better do it,” I said. “Open the window and close the blinds.”
Darth popped his window a crack, let the ocean breeze waft through. “See? That’s air.”
Tess pushed past him and bashed her head into the screen. She fell back hard onto her naked buttocks. “Fuuuuuuuuck!”
“Please, Tess! Please stop crying,” I begged her. “Just sit down on the bed ...”