It was weird. Maybe depressing. And when Pitts made his move on Ashley Moore, she of course quickly schlepped her belongings upstairs. My spirits fell further. Who knew where Autumn Haze had ended up, anyway? Maybe the Dumpster? Didn’t matter now. Moore and Pitts fucked guiltlessly in his expensive bed.
“You know, I’m not exactly sure why, but I just dig that freakin’ crazy guy!” Ashley related to me, crackling with laughter, fixing herself another delicious midnight Jim Beam and water. “Bald and proud!”
“What’s so darn special about him?” I grumbled. “And, hey, I thought you were getting sober.”
“My nose is getting sober,” she reminded me.
“Ah, hell, we’re all so full of bullshit,” I sighed.
Isaac was always around to give me my out. He was working for several high-profile artists that summer, making molds and doing drawings for them in his role as a fairly high-paid artist’s assistant. Like many young artists in Hollywood, he had to balance the work he did for established artists against the stuff he did on his own, as he tried to get his own career off the ground. The equation often left him exhausted, and seeing him was a healthy reminder that other life paths had their own stresses to them, too.
One night he met me for a drink in the Frolic Room. Puzzlingly, Isaac still loved bars, even though he had stopped touching alcohol. He held on tight to that club soda, and bartenders never charged him a cent.
The Frolic Room was mildly famous because Charles Bukowski supposedly used to wallow there, but it was sort of the worst bar I had ever been to. It wasn’t exactly dirty enough to be interesting, wasn’t lush enough to be glamorous, and the bartenders, male and female, all looked like red-faced fishermen. Pickpockets hung out in the Frolic, eyeing the drunks hungrily, feeling at home.
“So,” said Isaac. “How’s life in the porno lane?”
“You wouldn’t believe.”
“You still got that great girlfriend, right? She seemed right up your alley.”
“Liz’s good, yes,” I said, twirling a bit on my stool. “But she doesn’t understand me, I’m beginning to suspect.”
“How about giving her a break?” suggested Isaac, laughing.
“Why should I?”
“You might be a hard person to date,” said Isaac. “I’m just guessing.”
“Because of my profession?”
‘Yes,” he said patiently. “Hey, over there at the end of the bar, is that a tranny? Did this place turn into a tranny bar in the last two weeks without me noticing?”
I grimaced over at the end of the bar. “Er, no. Girl, I think.”
“So what is it you want Liz to understand, anyway?” said Isaac.
“I’m not sure, man. My overall personhood. My wry sense of humor. My daily need to see human beings gag on cock and fall over drooling. You know.”
“You know what I think?” said Isaac, pointing an index finger at me gently. “You spend a lot of time disliking most people in your industry, right? But my sense is that you’re jealous of them.”
I laughed. “Why would I be jealous of them?” I said. “Their lives are so fucked.”
“Well, for starters, you seem to envy performers for their sexual abandon, which you’d like to emulate, but won’t allow yourself to.”
“Tried that,” I explained. “No one wants to see me naked.”
Isaac tipped his chin down toward the end of the bar. “That’s one weak excuse for a tranny, don’t you think? A true tranny should have some star quality to her. Don’t you think? This one’s just totally boring.”
“That’s not a tranny,” I repeated. “It’s an actual girl. Go ahead?”
“Well, okay,” Isaac said. “To compensate for your jealousy, you make fun of performers for their willingness to perform the very acts you wish you could, using your wit to portray them as fools and laggards, though obviously, not all of them are.”
“Boy, you’re good,” I said, impressed.
“If you ask me,” Isaac continued, “Liz’s probably kind of weirded out by your inconsistency, more than anything else.”
'You think so?”
“Sure. You constantly malign the ‘lifers’ for accepting pornography as it is—sexist, hurtful, uncreative—but you yourself vacillate wildly from indicting the business on so-called moral grounds to slavishly following its every trend, all the while reaping a consequential weekly paycheck from it.”
I stared at him. “Huh.”
“How could she ever know what you’re thinking?” said Isaac, reasonably. “I barely know where you stand myself.”
We looked at each other and shared a shrug. My gaze sort of dribbled up to the electronic lotto game that played on a small television. I followed the bouncing ball.
“Everything smells like a cigarette here,” said Isaac, sniffing his club soda. “It’s so disgusting.”
I sighed and pushed myself off the seat, walked over to the bathroom. It was locked, so I knocked on the door. No response at all.
“It’s broken, genius.” A dart player sipped from his cup, then flipped his tiny javelin at the colorful board, hatefully.
“I’m confused,” I admitted, returning to Isaac and settling myself on the bar stool. “I had such high hopes.”
“Sure,” he said. “And the slumming thing is wearing thin, I know. But dude, you’re going to have to make some kind of choice sooner or later. If you refuse to commit to either camp, you’re robbing yourself of any sort of continuity.”
“I should quit, shouldn’t I?” I said hopefully.
“What kind of question is that?” said Isaac, laughing. “You do what you do. Only you can say what’s right.”
“Jeez, what a cop-out.” I sulked.
“Look, are you happy?” said Isaac. “Is this job making you happy?”
“Hell no,” I said emphatically.
“Are you sure?” said Isaac, crooking an eyebrow at me.
“Goddamn it,” I begged, “what kind of a cretin would actually like what I’m doing?”
Isaac laughed. He drank the last of his club soda, and pushed around the cubes of ice with his red straw. Carefully, he speared the chunk of lime, piercing its fibrous pulp with the straw.
“It’s complicated,” he said, finally.
“Thank you,” I nodded. “I just. . . don’t want to let go of it yet. I need a bit more time to see where it goes.”
“Look, don’t sell me,” said Isaac. “Sell Liz.”
“Well, maybe I will. I’ll try to put it down on paper for her.”
Isaac raised an eyebrow. “Seems like a complicated trick. You a good writer?”
“No,” I admitted.
Safe at home, fresh from a twilight swim in my million-dollar pool, hair dripping wetly, I poised a trembling pencil in front of a lined yellow pad, counting the ways I might explain my abiding love and continuing involvement with pornography to thee, my sweet and blameless girlfriend, White Liz.
“Hi Liz! It has been several days since you’ve been over at our house. Any particular reason for that? I know you were bit by a spider and fear further poisoning—but are you using that as like, a metaphor? Ha ha! But seriously: do you feel our house is ‘venomous’? I admit, Timberlake is a little hard to deal with, and ever since Rag Man constructed a cocksucking station in our garage, yeah, things have been weird. But are you implying I am the company I keep? If so, you must be racist...”
(Crumple)
“Now look, Liz, I gotta be honest with you. Because I really like you, and my complete honesty is what you deserve. So I’m just going to spit this out. I’ve become fascinated with a videotape called Slap Happy. I’ve been watching it regularly for more than two months, and for some reason, though I can’t necessarily figure out why, I can’t seem to get enough of the sight of little teenagers on their knees choking on gigantic cocks, their cheeks billowing out like ruddy sails, tears in their eyes, eyeliner raccooning, sputum spewing from their pursed lips towards the camera lens, bespattering it. . .”