As Timberlake snaked through traffic like a demented Italian race-car driver, simply daring the complicated LA gridlock to stymie him, I stroked Veronica’s shoulders from the backseat. Sleazy, I know, but I couldn’t help it—she was glassy-eyed and her affect was weird, but all in all, she had something to her. She sort of reminded me of a dippy aunt or a matron on the Hebrew School bus, and something about that made my dick stand up on end. She seemed receptive to my rubbing, and looked back and let her hand come back into the backseat. We held hands for about ten minutes, her sweaty little palm in mine. She wore jean shorts and I looked at her thighs. They were illuminated by a patch of sunlight that came through Timber’s windshield and only disappeared for a few seconds at a time as the car would slip beneath an overpass.
“I’m exactly twenty-five-and-a-half-years old,” Timberlake announced to the car. “I start my porn career today.”
“I’m eighteen and a half,” Veronica Light said, bouncily. “I started my porn career two weeks ago.”
“My mother called me on my birthday, you guys,” Timberlake said.
“That was nice of her,” I commented, still stroking Veronica’s little hand, wondering if I could put it on my penis. Or if that would be too much.
“I did not enjoy her call. She called me at twelve-oh-five a.m. She has never called me past eight P.M. in the seven years since I left home. She seemed to be manic, and I found her emotional disposition and the very fact that she was calling me to be invasive. Her call made me angry. I was not super friendly. In fact, I was cold. She tried to get my fourth stepdad, a man whom I’ve only met once and spoken to once, to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to me. He refused. I said thanks anyway. She told me I was ruining something perfect and fun, and hung up on me.”
“Your mom probably missed you,” Veronica decided.
“She doesn’t know how to do it right,” Timberlake said. “Hey, am I headed in the right direction?”
You’re good/ I assured him. “Ride the Ten to the Pacific Coast Highway. Super easy.”
“I want to jack off,” Timberlake said. “I must be honest and say that the type of women in porn that I find most arousing have similar body types to my mom.”
“He does this from time to time,” I explained to Veronica. “He rambles.”
“I like it,” Veronica said, taking her hand back and caressing her own breast. She seemed to be checking it for lumps.
“I’ve let my mom back into my life several times,” Timberlake said, steering the car carelessly with one hand. “Each instance has been disastrous and ended with damage done to facets of my personal life that my mother never had access to in the first place.”
“My oh my,” Veronica Light whispered, clutching her tit.
“I remember when my mom forced me to go to her psychiatrist. He diagnosed me as bipolar in five minutes. I guess he thought he was psychic, I don’t know. He opened up his top desk drawer and it was filled to the brim with Zoloft samples, and he tossed a bottle to me from across the room. 'Give it a go.’”
We rode along, watching furniture stores and vintage shops stream by us. Soon we found the on-ramp to Highway 10 and merged into an army of vehicles. Wheels were turning in Veronica’s head. Finally she spoke. “I don’t think your mom is mad at you,” she said to Timberlake, shyly. “I think she wants to say . .. ‘I’m sorry.’”
Timberlake frowned grimly, pushing his maroon Subaru to its limit as it choked and sputtered. “Dude! That bitch was seriously unstable! To this day she’s nutty. Her Social Security benefits are about to run out so she’s thinking about going back to vocational school for the fourth time. She’s been a medical transcriptionist, accounts payable, data entry, and now I think she makes dolls in her spare time.
The kicker is, every time she goes back to community college for a shiny new career, she gets the highest grades in the class. She fucking excels! My mom isn’t dumb, she’s just really fucked up!”
Veronica Light patted Timberlake’s neck sympathetically.
We twisted along the Pacific Coast Highway, taking in the Santa Monica coastline and the brownish desert hills. On the right, we passed restaurants advertising grilled trout and malty brews. We spiraled up the mountain, a winding ten-minute drive. When we reached the house, Timberlake punched in the security code, and the gate swung open. On our way to the front door, the immaculate house loomed over us, huge and impassive. Veronica’s eyes widened appreciatively. “This is weird,” she gasped. To her, everything was a revelation.
Neither of our actors was. there yet, so I donned a brown Brazilian bathing suit and asked Veronica if she would like to stretch out in the sun with me. She said yes, although she had no bathing suit, so she just laid out in her bra and panties and in no time, she took those off, too. Some flab hung over her hips, but lying back on a white deck chair, gravity did its job, and all the flab settled back into the pit of her guts. Her tits moved off the center of her chest, hanging off the sides of her ribs like pale saddlebags. I squinted up at the sun, then gazed back down at my skin. I wasn’t quite as tan as I would have liked, but I was working on it, which is more than I could say for Timberlake, who was fretting over his XL-1, reading the instruction manual nervously, paying no attention to either of us. I had a bag of stone-ground tortilla chips with me and a yellow pack of American Spirits, and I offered both to Veronica Light, but she begged off.
“You feeling nervous?” I asked.
“Nope,” she said, smiling. “It’s not a big deal to me.”
“Do you want, like, a massage?” I said hopefully.
She shrugged
Then I asked if I could kiss her She grinned: “You really like me, huh?”
I nodded. Maybe I did, maybe I didn’t. She seemed pliable, though; more, she was there. We made out for a little bit, but there was no pulse. After a while, I just stopped kissing her. Veronica Light smiled peacefully and put her concentration back into her own head. Instantly, it was like her nose was buried in some invisible book.
Timberlake’s actors arrived soon thereafter. They were a pair of veterans named Darren James and Julian St. Jox. I knew St. Jox by name, because I had watched his high-top fade and big ass star in about a hundred ’90s pornos. He was the face of the black ’90s, along with Sean Michaels. He was about thirty-nine and had a great laugh and a nice belly on him. I liked the veterans—it was like having Wes Unseld and Elgin Baylor in your living room fucking a girl. Darren James was about thirty-five or so, a grown man with a perfect Marines body. He had about 1 percent body fat. Darren wasn’t as fun as St. Jox, wasn’t cool like him, but he was a Derek Fisher-like consummate professional, who could always be counted on to drain his free throws and maybe even sink a clutch three-pointer from the corner in the late stages of the game.
Timberlake got Veronica into the upstairs bathroom.
“But I don’t have my makeup with me,” Veronica said.
“Well, then take this,” he told her kindly, folding a Summer’s Eve douche into her young, troll-like palm.
Hurriedly, he photocopied Light’s IDs on the big HP scanner/ copier that Pitts had bestowed upon us, and then, before we could stop her, she was in her underwear, waiting expectantly for him to turn on the camera in the guest room. The lights were blazing up directly at the ceiling. St. Jox and James hovered nearby, curious.
Timberlake was ready to go, but his feet weren’t set. When he perched that heavy gray XL-1 on his shoulder, the machine wobbled, and he had a devil of a time finding the on/off button, and when the tiny wheels were set in motion, the DV tape whirring and stirring, Veronica Light was like Do I go now, and Timberlake was nodding furiously behind his giant ’80s shoulder cam, and she began frigging herself thoughtlessly, her thumb raking against the wrinkly skin of her clitoris, as she whispered, “This is how 1 do it at home.” Timberlake struggled to one knee to get a different take on her masturbation, then thought better of it—“Sweetie? I need you to bend over?”—then rose to his feet, grunting, the mouthpiece of the camera rapping awkwardly against his thigh, vibrations visible to all of us.