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“My mom yelled a lot,” he explained to me. “She lost her temper a lot. Sometimes she was cruelly strict, and other times she didn’t care if I existed. Some days she would fly into an uncontrollable slap-and-scratch rage. Other days she was euphoric and bursting with love. You know what’s fucked? Now I’m the same way with my dog.” He grinned. “Sometimes I’m nice, other times I’m an asshole.”

Like me, Timberlake covered up a lot of his hurt feelings with humor; unlike me, he tended to push people away from him with alienating and annoying behavior before they could reject him on more concrete grounds. “Fuck your art fantasies, bro,” he told me. “Fuck your parents. There is just me and there is money. I have already had myself a million different ways. Now I must have money.”

A few days before work was scheduled to begin, Pitts flew down from Seattle, and we scheduled a Saturday Night Pornographers’ Assembly at the Saddle Ranch, a tourist restaurant on the Sunset Strip. All the boys were there: me, Timberlake, Pitts, and even Pitts’s little brother, who seemed to be serving as a kind of silent bodyguard. They made an interesting pair. Pitts looked like Mr. Clean, with a waxed bald head and piercing blue eyes and a great build, standing about five-foot-five at the most, while Pitts’s little brother was built just like him and he looked exactly like him, except he was even shorter and had no shine in his eyes. It looked like he had been built out of leftovers.

We made our awkward introductions and got seated at a mediocre table. Timberlake, hyped for the future, barely noticed. He fairly vibrated in his seat, the glamour of West Hollywood seeping directly into his impoverished bloodstream like a hypodermic shot.

“Oh-ту-GOODNESS that’s a fine chica!” He jabbed at the air with his index finger, making no attempt to disguise the motion. We turned to observe a girl at a table directly across from us who was wearing an indigo cowboy hat and what looked like an Oilers jersey over a sports bra and tiny Abercrombie shorts. An Indigo Cowgirl was about par for the course at the Saddle Ranch, but she definitely was a looker, with almond eyes and Hooters-quality silken hair. She was maybe twenty.

“So let’s get her a contract,” Pitts suggested.

Timberlake exploded with a saucy snicker. “Let’s get her a contract!” he repeated. In a good mood, Timberlake laughed as a matter of course (often at things that weren’t funny, sometimes at things that were, but truthfully, he laughed at every third thing that was said, although nothing got said by Pitts’s brother, who was staring down at the tablecloth with a kind of intensity that bordered on druggy fascination).

I was puzzled, trying to figure everyone out. Not only was this the first time I’d teamed up with Timberlake in anything resembling a professional situation, but it was the first occasion Pitts and I had ever met in vivo. We’d conversed so much over email that I had harbored a weird illusion that I “knew” him—but now I was realizing that, as in the case of Timberlake, I’d understood precious little about the real Pitts.

He was a compact piece of a man: but while Timberlake and I towered over him awkwardly, Pitts projected an impression of ultimate serenity and confidence, sitting there at the head of the table, studying his menu sedately. With his pumped-up biceps, shining head, and hard little jaw, the man was not quite handsome, and the blue in his eyes was too cold to be very appealing^ But you simply couldn’t stop looking at him. Diners from across the room continually flicked their eyes toward our table, watching him involuntarily for several moments before turning back to their own dinners.

In our society, charisma comes from many sources. Some are born with it; others accumulate it over time. Money, more than fame, remains the best modern-day shortcut—and Pitts had earned a great deal of money by understanding the growth potential in Internet pornography at a time when nearly everybody else in the business was still tied to DVDs. He was a visionary in a field full of guys who had stiff cocks for brains, and his business acumen had won him not only house and home, but had granted him a quiet power of personality that no stone could ever break.

He represented a side of the sex industry almost completely unseen by me: those who were driven by potency of character and cleverness, instead of pure, desperate salacity. Obviously, Pitts was at some level interested in sex; most men who choose to make porn their life’s work are. It was my guess that he didn’t mind the scum factor, either—the soul-crushing garbage one dealt with as a matter of course, on a daily basis, at every level of the sex industry. But by the unhurried, polished ease with which Pitts contemplated his menu and gazed about the room, taking in the city around him, it was plain to see he was, at bottom, a businessman.

“What will you gentlemen be having tonight?” our waitress asked.

“Steak,” Pitts said, folding his menu, handing it back to the waitress. “Medium. Mashed potatoes.”

“Steak,” Timberlake said, tapping the table rhythmically, inspecting our waitress’s pad to see if she wrote it down right. “Well done. Green beans.”

“Steak,” I said, looking into our waitress’s eyes politely, while I used my peripheral vision to calculate her tit-to-waist ratio. “Rare. Salad.”

Pitts’s brother remained silent.

“How about you, sir?”

“Steak, I guess,” he mumbled, staring at his hands.

“And how would you like that done?”

He glanced up at his brother, and Pitts nodded. “Medium,” he mumbled out the side of his mouth.

The waitress wrote it down dutifully. “Any sides with that?”

Pitts’s brother just shook his head glumly. After a long, weird moment, the waitress left.

“Okay, so let’s get down to business,” Pitts said. “First thing is, we clearly need to hire some new dudes.”

“Clearly,” Timberlake said.

“No more Bert and Darth,” Pitts said, laughing.

“No way, man,” agreed Timberlake. “Sam shot them into the groundl”

I frowned across the table at Timberlake. “I wasn’t aware they were so objectionable.”

“They were fine,” Pitts explained. “They served a purpose. But now we need to take a step up in quality.”

“Well, like I always say, Mr. Marcus and Lexington Steele, that’s the best black wood in the business,” ventured Timberlake.

I laughed. “Sorry, but how the fuck would you know?”

“Connoisseur,” Timberlake explained to the table in general. “Seen a lot of black dick.”

“No offense,” I said, “but I think Lexington Steele's a bit out of our price range. He gets about one thousand dollars per scene.”

“Hey, you want quality scenes, you gotta pay for it, right?” Timber said happily, tilting back in his chair until the front two legs left the ground. He looked back over his shoulder at the waitress’s high legs as they strode confidently, like a racehorse’s, across the floor of the Saddle Ranch.

“There’s a fine line,” I said, my eyes flashing. “Look, if we need new guys, I can get them for us. I know a guy, a black agent named DK. He can find good talent for us. And they won’t cost a grand a scene.” I smiled sharply at Pitts. “I got it taken care of.”

“Great,” Pitts said. “I like it.” He excused himself and got up to use the bathroom.

“Hey, Samuel,” said Timberlake, “we doing okay? I don’t want to step on anyone’s toes.”

“Then don’t,” I said.

“I didn’t mean to say anything.”

“Let me handle the talking, okay, guy? I mean, you’re the junior partner, are you not?”

“I am,” Timberlake assured me. He patted my hand. “Don’t get your panties all in a bunch. I’ll let you deal with all further negotiations.”