“You running away to satisfy your guilt isn’t going to stop Leslie from staring up at the ceiling when she has sex. Is it?”
“Aha!” I said, pouncing. “I thought you said she wasn’t molested.”
“Well,” said Liz, crossing her arms guardedly, sipping from her water, “she wasn’t. But I’m not saying she doesn’t think about leaving, too.”
“I guess it’s complicated,” I said glumly.
“Look,” Liz said. “I’m not going to do this for the rest of my life. And, despite your current level of involvement, I doubt that you will, either. So listen, sweetie, why don’t you try to relax a little bit? Just pretend it’s all funny. That seems to work for everyone else.”
She gave me a small smile. Not one of her best, actually. But all things considered, it would have to do.
“Now,” she said. “How about we talk about something else?”
Timberlake was a pretty crazy fucker. I really couldn’t hate him, though, much as I tried. He was hyper and manic-depressive, yes, and I probably should have realized that before I brought him on board, but he did all the weird little amazing things right, like teach the girls yoga before their scenes. Instituting prescene Sun Salutations was a genius move on his part. He had Aimee Tyler reaching up to the sky and bending her stringy little arms, her sexy squashed thighs trembling before God in our secluded little compound.
Timber had other splendid ideas, too, like dressing up a girl as a Klanswoman for her shoot. He actually was talented at porn, when it came to the psychological side of things. He was excellent at creating scenarios, making up—off the top of his head—that Autumn Haze was a teacher for new immigrants; that Friday was trying out for an all-male baseball team. He inspired me to start using my brain once in a while, if only to better impress Pitts. Without even a word, the pace was starting to pick up. We felt Pitts’s odd centrifugal force when he watched our scenes, standing by, arms crossed, evaluating them. He never watched more than a few minutes at a time, the mark of a truly classy man (you had porn going down right before your eyes, but you chose not to watch it). Likewise, he never spoke to the male performers more than was absolutely necessary. Regardless, they all immediately realized who he was and what that meant to them, and they kissed his ass just enormously. God, they lined up to kiss his ass. The mountains of purple marijuana offered up to Pitts was legendary. Of course, he begged off all gifts. Wouldn’t have been appropriate. Like I said, the man was business-minded.
After a day or two of frowning observation, Pitts called a roundtable, the agenda of which was essentially a mandate to start including more male performers per scene—immediately. “Guys, I know it’ll be a little harder for you to organize, but it’s worth it. The subscribers love it. What can I say? They’re into nasty. You know? A girl who will do a two-on-one is nasty. But a girl who’ll do a three-on-one? Much nastier.” We shrugged. We didn’t care. Timberlake and I got paid an extra hundred bucks if we threw in another guy, so we were more or less thrilled about the new challenge.
Slowly, the house started getting more and more packed. We were basically the new employment agency in town for black male performers, and word was getting around. The organizational part of my brain, the same brain that liked to pretend I was the coach of a pro sports team, dug it a lot. I met so many damned Porno AllStars up there. Weed was one of them, a light-skinned half-black, half-Cherokee from Compton, a reformed drunk who was just incredibly, incredibly gentle, puffing his Newports, talking about going to pick up his daughter after the shoots, and only being able to come when the girl rubbed his left nipple clockwise. Though he was somewhat of a handful, due to the nipple complication, I nevertheless loved Weed. Then there, was John E. Depth, a New York porn performer with dreadlocks and a wide-nostriled face with a deep chocolate complexion and a quiet demeanor and a legitimately huge ’80s porn dick that he could pick up with both hands and that would only get hard after about a half an hour of prodding. John E. Depth was six foot three and had no fat on his entire body. His butt was just thick, corded muscle.
We shot everybody, just everybody. Billy Banks was a grinning man with a bald bubble head who reminded me of an unctuous preacher, sermon in hand. Billy liked to clap me on the back good-naturedly, even though we’d just met, and say things like “We family}” We were most certainly not family. Billy rolled with a guy named Ned, a production assistant whose penis was basically terrible (which is to say, it was not in league with the Krylon spray-paint cans we had at our disposal) and who was kind of fat to boot, not to mention being far too light-skinned.
(“Keep the light-skinned guys to a minimum,” urged Pitts. “One per scene, max. Subscribers want to see dark skin.”)
Thus Ned got booted after two scenes. I fired him myself. I saw the hate in his eyes. But Billy’s other pal, Tony Eveready, hung on. He fit right into our game plan. Tony was thuggish, small, and compact, with cornrows and a southern accent. He’d been a player in the porn game forever, performing since the early ’90s, taking breaks only when incarcerated. He’d brought a gun to the set until we told him not to; and then, after leaving it at home for one day, he decided to bring it again. “I felt naked without that shit,” Tone said. “So now I’m wearing it, and what the fuck you gonna say about it?”
(“Tony is a good example of the kind of guy we need,” Pitts said. “He’s ghetto. We need to push that.”)
Eveready was a “pretty pimp.” Cuddly and teddy-bearish one moment, violent and frightening the next. He loved firearms with a good heft to them, skunky strippers, short money, fast cars, fistfighting, and drinking liquor directly from pint bottles wrapped in paper bags. He was an intelligent man, quite comfortable in prison, though according to him, everywhere was one.
Wesley Pipes was “ghetto,” too: a real-life gangster from South Central LA who’d served ten years for trafficking and conspiracy, so gifted in the art of talking shit that he’d been able to build an entire career out of it. His awesomely sincere and impeccably expressed horniness for white women tickled all of our fancies. The singular desperation of his movements, speaking of ten long years of enforced celibacy, informed every one of his scenes. If you let him, Pipes would use up the entire hour all by himself, just windmilling from every conceivable direction, sneering, mumbling nonsense— kick that leg up, can I kick that leg up? You might can win, baby, you might can win, but slow it down. Grind it on there real hard. Grind it on there real hard. Oh, shit. This white pussy got me. I ain’t going to be able to take this one! Girl, you got this mothafucka at the tip/ Wesley was so amusing to listen to that he quickly became a favorite of ours. Timberlake and I hired him as much as we possibly could.
Sledge Hammer was another favorite son, a power lifter with a dick as big as a submarine sandwich (bread included), zitty New Orleans skin, and a wonderful dorkish laugh. He was a beta male if you ever saw one, unpopular with the girls, a mama’s boy who collected Dark Knight action figures, yet he could lift a Hyundai with his left hand, and his penis was giant and inhuman, and always hard like a saber. “Hey Sam, huh huh”—he would grunt—“can you tell me when you’re getting ready to shoot? I gotta, um, go wash off my dick.” We all suspected he was injecting that Caverject shit, but what did we care? I wouldn’t have wanted to touch it, much less let it pierce me, but a perma-schlong made our scenes far easier to shoot. A limp dick was all of our undoing. Timberlake, in particular, went absolutely crazy when he encountered one. He took it personally.