Tess whirled to face me, her eyes puffy and red. “Get your hands off of me!” she hissed. ‘ Get your fucking hands off me, or I’ll call rape.”
That shut me up quick. “Take your time, hon,” I whispered, and backed into the living room, praying.
Eventually, the sobbing stopped. Tess walked out slowly to join us, still clad only in her towel. “I’m sorry,” she said quietly. Her hair and eyes were ruined. She pointed at Bert. “I thought he was my brother.”
1 hat’s okay,” Bert said. He attempted a weak laugh, but it came out terrible.
“Things just . . .” She sighed, seemingly lacking the strength to finish the thought. She looked beseechingly at me. “Things just haven’t been the same since the accident.”
A few hours later, we escorted Tess back to her Redondo Beach motel room, because she didn’t feel all right to drive, and we understood that we had to get her home. Bert drove her car, and Darth and I followed behind. The 405 was black and peaceful. We got to her motel, and her room was on the second floor. We clopped up the steps, and inside, the bedclothes were distressed. The floor was littered with all kinds of porn clothing and powders and suitcases and agate crystals and blocky pyramids of half-charred green incense and purple astrology books. On the west wall, there was a framed painting of a seashell. In the corner on the floor, there was a black hair curler still plugged into the wall. Tess looked over at me as she drank a glass of motel water, and she shook her head at me while the liquid was still in her mouth.
She swallowed. “I feel a lot better.” She looked around at all of us. “If you want... I think we can finish this.”
FOURTEEN
A saner person would have quit right there. And I thought about it. But circumstances conspired to keep me in the game.
Once again, it was Pitts: in the form of a single tempting electronic missive, he took me one step deeper into the world of high-stakes pornography.
Ive been thinking about this for a while, Sam, he wrote. We gotta say good-bye to Long Beach. We need to ramp up our game if we’re going to compete with the big boys. We need production value. I found a house in Malibu, a real peach: Oceanfront view, sprawling 18 acres—you never seen anything like this. Private. In the hills. Gated entrance. That sound okay to you?
Puzzled, I said yeah, sure, it sounds great—and before I knew it, he’d promised me not only a bedroom in the house, but a healthy raise to boot.
Were gonna get real busy, Pitts warned me. In fact, you may want to bring someone on board. Help carry the load. Who do you know who can shoot camera?
I pondered that one for a while. I was set to give one of my friends the ride of a lifetime—but who? The question was, did I know anyone who really got porn? A regular person wasn’t going to be able to hang for long. They’d do two weeks, see the bleeding insides of a person’s body, and bolt.
But the answer came to me in a flash: the guy who’d been sending me letters. Willie Timberlake. Granted, I didn’t know him from Adam, but the guy was my age, and his writing style had me interested. A healthy disregard for the laws of common decency notwithstanding, he was a damn good read—full of rage, torment, and confessional vigor. Bit by bit, I’d begun to look forward to his letters, to the experience of reading them and laughing at their crazy, manic hope. How could I not love someone who had the balls to confess this to a total stranger:
As 1 got older, I fucked a lot of crazy chicks, I mean true red-flag chicks (one girl told me as I slipped my cock into her big ass that I was a lot like her dad). Their pussies were always sopping wet, and 1 thought dealing with psychosis was okay as long as I was getting laid.
At some point, I learned to disengage my penis from chicks that needed to be saved by daddy, and redirected my radar to women who had self-esteem. The weird part being I still like the fucked-up chicks, and the self-esteem chicks don’t get it. My girlfriend couldn’t possibly comprehend pom. To her, it is gross and foul. She saw an email that said, ‘amateur Japanese teenagers” and freaked. “This is what you like?” she cried. I’m a dirty old man at 24. I still don’t know how to deal with her not understanding.
You’ve asked me what pom I like. The pom I like makes me feel like shit, but it doesn’t have to. Maybe it could still be “bad” but good at the same time. I’d love to see a woman finally say “You know, I DON’T like being called a bitch, but I DO love your huge cock spreading me wide open and it feels excellent!” I want to witness pom from the point of view of DWARVES, POORLY HUNG BLACK MEN, RUSSIAN MAILORDER BRIDES, ASIAN SCHOOLGIRLS, UPTIGHT HOUSEWIVES, FEMALE COPS, AND BITCHY RESTARAUNT STAFF. The other side!
Feeling quite sure I had the right man for the job, I impulsively asked Timberlake to quit his job, move down from Oakland to Malibu to join me as brothers-in-porn, and to make a little money while doing it. Quite a little bit of money, actually.
“Is this happening, man?” he asked me, when I made the call. “Am I really being invited to Los Angeles?”
“Malibu,” I corrected.
“Okay, to Malibu, to shoot porn?”
“You’ll shoot so much porn, your head is gonna fall off,” I promised. “Buddy, you’ll shoot so much porn, you’re going to hate porn.”
“Couldn’t happen,” Timberlake bragged. “I love porn more than any man in America.”
“You have a place to stay, too,” I said, smiling. “Rent-free. A room in a mansion. I’m gonna live there, too. Beautiful, no?”
“But. . . why me? I mean, how the hell is this even possible?” “I saw something in you. Baby, you were made for this business.” But in person, Timberlake wasn’t quite like his acerbic letters— or perhaps, he was too much like them. Redheaded and skinny, Timberlake’s cartoonish face appeared to have been thrown together with a random mix of ingredients: incongruously pretty eyes, closely shaven facial hair, and a big, beak-like nose. Jarringly, he often seemed not to know at all what he was talking about, yet was highly verbose nonetheless. It was my first lesson in the fact that we, as people, are often not quite the characters we appear to be on paper.
“Southern California is chock-full of schmucks,” Timberlake declared. “Boy oh boy, I think I knew that in my bones before I came down. Still, seeing these assholes in person stings a lot worse than I thought.” I squired him around Echo Park for a while, taking him to taco shops, trying to decide whether I’d made the right call. It was hard to tell. I remember getting stuck with him on the 101 freeway, turning to the radio for some relief, and immediately getting into a squabble over what year some Eddie Money song had come out. We started out laughing and bantering like brothers, but soon, when it became clear neither of us was going to budge, the conversation turned sour and snappish.
And it didn’t take me long to realize that Timberlake was given to some pretty volatile mood swings. He’d appear crazily enthusiastic one second, then dark, depressed, and distrustful of me the next. “We’ve landed a really big fish here, man. I’m in the mood to make some money. I WANT NICE SHIT! AND I WILL GET IT!”
“Slow down there, partner,” I said, frowning. “We’ll get you some money.”
“Slow down, my ass! I’ve worked so many hellish and shitty jobs in my young life, and already I’ve got a mountain of debt under me. Porn’s my big chance to get over, man! I am staying down in LA, getting fucking dirty. We’re gonna get so rich, we’ll use twenties for shitpaper.”
And then he’d laugh.
Timberlake may actually have been more self-aware and emotionally intelligent than much of his behavior implied. He analyzed himself continually. In more introspective moods, he could be as open and funny with his difficult past as any person I’d ever met. He had no problem, for example, letting me or anyone else in on the fact that he’d been conceived on a one-night stand and had never met his father, or that his mom was verbally abusive to him for his entire childhood.