“Now,” Janay said, removing her plastic penis from Dennis’s mouth (it made a small pop), giving his head a small shove with the back of her hand, “let’s see how you’re doing.” But his penis was still limp.
“What is your deal?” Janay yelled. “Do I not do it for you?”
“No, you’re perfect,” whispered Dennis. “I swear.”
“Then why is your dick soft? Get it hard, Dennis, or our game is over.”
“I will,” he promised. “Mistress. Let me . . . let me watch you some more.”
Janay sighed, frustrated, but she took off her leather chaps, revealing black g-string underwear and an ass so perfect it looked like it had been drawn by Marvel comics, I checked it out expectantly on my LCD screen. It photographed very nicely.
Lying on his back, Dennis massaged his knob, trying desperately to bring it back to life. Janay squatted next to him, running her riding crop delicately through Dennis’s graying chest hair.
“Dennis?” she said softly.
“Yes, mistress?”
“Do you know how much self-control it’s taking me not to use this on you?”
Dennis laughed nervously. He glanced toward me for support, but I only hovered silently behind my camera, recording all.
“Usually, sweetie,” Janay continued, “if a man insults me, the way that you’re insulting me right now, he pays for it. But not Dennis. No, he doesn’t like pain. But guess what? I like pain, Dennis. That’s what turns me on.”
She looked down at him for a reaction, but Dennis was speechless. His penis was as limp and shriveled as a dishrag.
“Fine!” she yelled. “Be that way! I’ll give you what you want. You pathetic little cocksucker! Here, doggy! Open your fucking mouth. Open your mouth, you little fucking dog bastard.”
She pulled off her g-string and squatted over Dennis’s face. For a wild moment, I was sure she was going to crap on his head.
But instead, she began to urinate in a drinking glass. It was a strong stream; a gusher. It felt like it would never end. She collected it all and then handed it to Dennis with a flourish.
He swallowed as much piss as he could handle. But some ran down his face, out the sides of his mouth, finding a home in his gray-streaked goatee. A cluster of droplets freckled Periwinkle’s couch.
“Lo-ok,” Janay sang, and both Dennis and I followed her index finger. “It’s wor-king.”
Dennis’s cock now stood at full attention.
“Now do it” Janay ordered. She stood up, completely naked save her stilettos, pointing the riding crop down at Dennis’s face with crazed gusto. “Come, Dennis. Come now.”
“I’m trying,” pleaded Dennis, jacking his penis miserably. He licked his mustache, in search of erstwhile drops, but already he had begun to wilt. He worked vainly for a while, but it was over, and we all knew it. He shortened his strokes, then abandoned the job altogether. Dennis lay back and closed his eyes, defeated. Janay knelt down next to his supine body; I followed suit. For a long moment, the three of us huddled there, exhausted, the slow, patient hum of my video camera the only audible sound.
FOUR
Periwinkle had his doubts about the whole thing.
“This is . . . very brave,” he said, reviewing the raw footage with me that night. “With a little effort, you might be able to edit this down to something halfway compelling. That Dennis is a freak.”
“You don’t know the half of it.”
“But really, Sam, let’s think rationally. Would anyone actually choose this to jerk off to?”
“Everybody likes something different,” I said defensively. “That’s the inherent beauty of sexual cinema.”
“Well, that’s very open-minded of you,” Periwinkle said. “I wish you the best of luck trying to sell it.”
In the end, he was right. I pruned the footage down to a compact twenty minutes, alternating action shots with interview snippets from both Janay and Dennis, and felt rather pleased with my efforts. But when I put it up for a “Dutch” auction on eBay (meaning that multiple buyers could bid successfully on the tape), priced to move at $6.99, only four people bit. I should have known. The true urine aficionado is notoriously difficult to please.
For the first time, I felt discouraged; more, I was confused. Was I a pornographer, or wasn’t I? My identity was in a terrible state of limbo.
I couldn’t stop fretting about my film. Nervously, I sent copies off to friends. One prompt reply, via email, told me all I needed to know.
“Bro,” it read, “I couldn’t beat off to that if my life depended on it”
I’d done even worse than I had imagined, then.
I decided to call my dad.
‘ Sam! Great to hear from you! How are you?”
“Really good, Dad. How’s Chapel Hill? How’s the house?”
“We can’t complain. Spring is in the air. The daffodils are out.
They look spectacular. What’s wrong? What do you need?”
“Just a little bit of money. Just a touch.”
“No problem. What do you need, a hundred bucks? How about a hundred and fifty? Tell you what: I’ll send off a check in the next couple of days. You get it back to me at your leisure.”
“I was thinking more like a thousand.”
“Sorry, I think the connection went out for a second. I must not have heard you correctly. What’d you say?”
“A thousand?”
“There it goes again. You see, I thought you said ‘a thousand.’ But you couldn’t have said that—right, Sam?”
“I’ll pay you back, Dad. I’m dead serious. And just so you know, this isn’t going towards the rent. I’ve got a whole business plan in the works here.”
“Which is what, may I ask?”
“Dad, Гт almost in the position to fill you in pn it. Be patient with me for just a short while longer. I want to be able to present this vision to you in its fullest flower.”
“That sounds highly suspicious. Why don’t you take a couple extra shifts at the juice bar? A little hard work never killed anyone. Or come out here for a month or two. We’ve got plenty to do, I promise you that. The kudzu is completely out of control, for example.”
“Dad, I live out here now. Come on, what do you say? It’s just a grand. I’ll pay it back in sixty days, promise. If not, you can start tacking on five percent interest.”
“Compounded daily. Listen, I’ll talk it over with your mother, and we’ll let you know. In the meantime, I’ll be waiting to hear about that ‘business plan’ of yours. It sounds extremely dubious.”
My dad was right, of course—it was a rather dubious plan. Clearly, I had only the most basic sense of what appealed to the contemporary porn connoisseur. And to make matters worse, I had no leads on actors. My future hinged, I realized suddenly, on my ability to procure some true porno headliners.
The next weekend, hoping to do some research, I hitched a ride up to San Francisco. There was one place that I especially wanted to check out: “The Lusty Lady.” From what I’d heard, it was a forwardthinking sort of joint, a workers’ cooperative owned by the women who danced there. Progressive strippers, I thought—what better candidates for New Millennium porn could there be?
But the place had a decidedly sad, fucked-up vibe to it. You cashed in $10 worth of quarters, then entered a tiny booth, where you fed the coins into arcade-like slots in order to open a small sliding window. The temporary peephole gave you a view of a dimly lit room that contained two or three semi-punk chicks—essentially Suicide Girls with a little more meat on their bones—who were walking around very, very slowly with “sexy” looks on their faces like masks. They had lit the viewing booths up, so the strippers could see you just as clearly as you could see them. If you beckoned to one, she’d saunter over, biting her lip provocatively, treating you to some profoundly aggressive eye contact. Either that, or she’d just bend over and put her ass up in the air. That was your cue to start beating off.