Dusty’s tapes didn’t disappoint. They were deliciously obscene, and almost deliriously cheap. A few of the rawest weren’t even really movies, in the strictest sense of the word: they had no dialogue, no plotline, and no discernable characters. Essentially, all they had was rutting. Some, though, made a rudimentary pass at maintaining a through-line. California Dreamin, for instance, was about an aging surfer who rents his house out to a procession of young blond girls— not real creative, and yet, the tape was fairly packed with gems.
The clothes that the Dreamin’ performers wore, for example, brought back a rush of vivid memories. A left-ear earring, a banana clip, and a pair of stonewashed jeans all hit me within the context of one blowjob scene. I loved how the ’80s-style pornos looked, too— they’d been shot on cameras that were predigital, but postfilmic, produced at some historical moment that fell between the Portapak and the Handycam. Adding insult, the sound was invariably subpar— uniformly tinny and almost always underlined by an unflappable background hum. More than anything else, they reminded me of cable access programming, with their charmingly degraded production values and their dolt-as-auteur authorial signature.
I snuggled deeper into my cozy nest of blankets, popping in tape after tape. The porn kept serving up the genius of accidental art. Her Welcum Waggin, for example, videotaped in a dilapidated trailer home by a director who kept reminding his starlet, “remember, don’t think about the camera, darlin’,” took great care in according to the most basic rule of progressive video art; that is, it avoided all narrative trajectory whatsoever. The film began wjth about half a minute of meaningless, perverted silence, after which a guy with a blond mustache who looked exactly like Matthew McConaughey (but for a tattoo of what appeared to be a leper on his right forearm) entered and immediately mounted the woman. They fucked on the kitchen floor, in exactly the same position and without saying a single word or changing so much as a facial expression for so long that, after a while, I was sure I was watching a “happening,” or some new endurance piece dreamed up by a disciple of Andy Warhol. But I wasn’t. This was just pom — incredibly ill-conceived, poorly executed, amateurish porn—and it contained a remarkable, unique beauty all its own, uncodified by, and unimaginable within, the context of contemporary art.
Greedily, I grabbed another tape, and then another. The Ed Powers stuff was creepy and reeked of sleaze, but I enjoyed that. Ed played himself, a shy nebbish in his mid-thirties who’d begun to invite pretty girls that he found on the street or located through channels in LA’s adult industry to come over to his house and fuck him on camera. Two charismatic adult film stars, Jamie Gillis and Randy West, both of whom were just beginning to show the first signs of aging, joined him; together, they were the Nasty Brothers. Jamie and Randy were in good physical shape, Ed not so much, but all three of them took turns interviewing and then sloppily porking the girls. It wasn’t very erotic, but it was real.
Amateur porn tossed you some regular girls—waitresses, substitute teachers, teenage fuck-starlets at the very beginning of their careers—and the frank, uncomplicated format of the videos left them unencumbered by unrealistic plotlines and idiotic costumes. The girls answered the prosaic questions about their lives more or less honestly, it seemed, as if they were participating in some odd anthropological film project about a highly specific subset of people, those drawn to fucking on stained couches for the entertainment of strangers. And even when Ed and his buddies quit the interviews and began pandering to a more prurient set of interests, the video was still documentary-like: you could learn a lot about someone by the way that they bucked when experiencing an ecstatic moment. To my bleary, late-night eyes, even the fakest orgasms seemed somehow confessional.
I sampled from almost all of the tapes that night. It was early morning before I pried myself away from my VCR. An expansive warmth had begun to emanate from the center of my chest, spreading outward to all reaches of my body. I threw on a hooded sweatshirt and wandered dreamily out to the porch with a bowlful of Periwinkle’s leaf, intent on catching the sunrise.
It was as if I had discovered a whole new universe, one that reflected back to a period of time that I’d long forgotten, or never experienced in the first place. What was it that Dusty had said—erotic history? These fuck videos were packed with intimate glimpses of real people, naked not just in dress but in action—momentarily unguarded, weirdly free.
Toking happily, I rocked back in my chair, imagining for a moment that I was there with them, starring in the worst movies of all time, playfully humping around with fun-loving, impulsive chicks, and earning a big paycheck at the same time. Or no, even better, filming the whole thing! I envisioned myself sitting in a big director’s chair, with a megaphone and a beret, a trustworthy underling taking dictation as I dreamed up the next retarded “scene” for a movie that no one expected anything of, a film everyone imagined would be utterly inconsequential. But I would show theni all. I would pull off a surprise—a sex film that had heart, one that had soul. I’d make a porno that was actually good ...
I stopped, mid-puff. My mouth hung open, and the lighter loosened from my grip, threatening to fall. A chill flashed through my body. Every hair stood on end.
Of course, I thought. My God, it was all right there in front of me.
Thousands of adult movies were produced each year. The majority of them were thoughtless garbage. And yet, they sold. They sold like crazy.
I could do that, I thought, wildly. I could do that. . . but better.
It was so beautiful—so incredibly simple—that I wanted to smack myself for not thinking of this sooner. I had no pretensions about becoming a “fine” artist. I sucked at drawing, painting, sculpture, graphic design, photography, and acting—and I knew it. But in truth, I didn’t want to be part of the contemporary art world at all. It felt phony and unreal to me, a playground for rich kids. Porn, on the other hand—that was relevant. People didn’t wax poetic about porn; they used it. And yes, maybe they often regretted doing so: maybe porn was junk food, a quick fix that left you somehow unnourished. But it didn’t have to be that way.
All you needed was a little ingenuity'. If you were going to make an adult video, you had to include a little nudity, a little intercourse, and a few bodily fluids. That’s all. Once you took care of those totally basic requirements, the field was wide open. I mean, if you wanted to, you could make a serious courtroom drama, as long as the last ten minutes featured a dildo scene between the DA and the defendant. If you did that, you were set; if you did that, you had just made a pomo. And people were naturally curious about pornos. They would want to watch.
People would watch. The words rang in my head as I sat there on the porch, the sun now beginning to rise and swell in the sky. An audience'. If I made a рото, I wouldn’t have to beg my friends to watch it—they’d be begging me. And strangers would pay me. I could sell my tapes on eBay. They had a Mature Audiences section, tucked away at the very bottom corner of their Category page. I’d peeked there before. Amateur porno tapes, VHS dubs with hand-printed labels, were doing serious dollars.
I could do this. I knew it in my gut: I could make this happen.
I began fantasizing about scenarios. I wasn’t sure what direction I wanted to go in, but I was certain that it had to be different than the rest of the stuff out there. Pornographers operated on that assemblyline mentality, but not me. I would edit my tapes carefully. What’s more, I’d make sure to record faithfully what went on during the making of the scene. If someone farted in front of my camera, that was going in the final cut. If a guy used Viagra to give himself an erection, then I was going to show him swallowing the pill.