More people pull into the room—Knuth, Swan, Shashi, Simon, Bug, a severe-looking Frenchwoman who works on documentaries for the Discovery Channel—and I catch the buzz of conversation in the room, mixing with the familiar sounds of modern-day yoga practice. The fibers of a spandex legging being snapped; a boy’s beard rubbing against the stone floor; a middle-aged woman wondering aloud about cucumber water. Seriously, is that good? I pull myself deeper into my stretch, angling my neck slowly from side to side, letting my head go heavy and full.
Eventually the volume drops and a palpable silence fills the room, a sure sign that our teacher’s here. I raise my head rather awkwardly to get a look. She’s fairly young, serious-looking, and not anyone I’ve seen before.
“Alison,” a woman greets her.
“Hi,” she says pleasantly, walking to the front of the room, where she places a large cloth bag on the ground. She surveys the class for a moment, then lowers her head, opening the bag, beginning to rummage in it.
I rise up and down on my toes a few times, trying to warm up my ankles. It’s a little painful. I’ve grown weak over the past few days. There’s something to that, though: to feeling weak, to feeling vulnerable. I try to explore it. I press my palms together in front of my chest, forming an upside-down V, and take some larger breaths tentatively, my rib cage expanding as full as it can go. The boils, for now, at least, aren’t plaguing me.
As I hold my posture, Alison sets up her yoga mat, begins a few preliminary stretches herself. She sits down, folds her legs in front of her, and hugs one to her chest. She’s very pretty. Dark hair, sinewy arms, a mystical angel-wing tattoo covering each shoulder blade. As I’m checking her out furtively, she raises her head and looks directly at me. She catches my eye.
It’s like everything else stops. Rushes. Freezes. My body gets cold.
Alison is sitting there with her leg pressed to her breasts, her knee in one hand, and I am standing, with my palms pressed against each other, trying to breathe, wondering about the night’s next ridiculous colonic . . . but we are gazing directly into each other’s face for a very long moment, making the kind of eye contact that human beings who don’t know one another can almost never sustain. My lip trembles, suddenly.
I wonder for a second just what the hell she’s doing. She’s looking deeply at me, not smiling. And, in a terrible rush, it comes to me. She knows who I am. Alison must have had some connection to the Los Angeles porn scene: maybe she had a boyfriend who watched a lot of movies. Maybe she’d even had a friend in the business, one who did her six scenes, before moving on.
Or maybe, God help me, she’d worked herself. It wasn’t likely, but it was damn well possible that she knew what it was like to do the deed on camera, feel the heady rush of a big paycheck for a quick, cheap debauch. Maybe she’d posed in front of an Internet camera, took Web chats from grinning, horny guys she secretly wanted to punch in the stomach; maybe she’d met Brandon Iron or Byron Long, knew what Slap Happy was, had someone else waste the money she’d earned with her pound of flesh.
I just stand there, gulping, without moving, continuing to stare at Alison’s face for what seems like a very long time. There’s no way, I think. She’s no porno girl. I’m making way too much out of this—chalk it up to temporary fast-induced psychosis. Then again . . . maybe she was just one of these healers who knew stuff. I can’t get the thought out of my head: maybe she could see inside of me, she could see what was draining out of me during this week of intense purging, see the blackness, the stuff I’d done wrong, all the guilt I’d been holding inside. I know it doesn’t make sense, it can’t make sense—she can’t know this, she can’t know what I’ve done—but I fear it nonetheless. I tremble, shaking. Tears rush into my eyes, blurring my vision. I want to move on .. . get out of here ...
Finally, Alison stops looking at me. She lets go of her leg and breaks her gaze. She stands, bending her knees, and breathes in a long, cleansing breath. She smiles, addresses the class. “Everyone ready to begin?” she asks. We all nod, say yes. And then, as if nothing at all had passed between us, Alison walks to the front of the room and begins to teach.
It’s evening. In the room where I receive my colonics, it’s dark and cool. I lie back on the wooden board, looking up at the ceiling. A speaker coming from the upper left corner of the room is softly leaking sounds of Sade. A pyramid of green incense is burning. The tube is inside me. Inhaling deeply, I steady myself, then release the catch. Water flows swiftly down from the large container hanging from the ceiling, passing through the piping, and ripples into me. A half gallon of water slowly tumbles its way into my rectum, swirling gradually up into my large intestine. My stomach swells unexpectedly as I massage the water through me.
I was twenty-three years old when I found porno. I was a child.
I won’t sit here and pretend I never loved it. I4 did. I won’t pretend I never exulted in the excitement, never died of laughter or shivered in the giddy light of degeneracy. But neither will I hold on to porn forever.
I lived inside of porno, day in and day out. I picked out the high heels in the bathroom, smelled the perfume. I fingered the g-strings, stared at the soft downy arm hair of teenage women who were working for the attention, for spurious fame. I huddled in a clutch with my strong actors, clung to the majesty of their cocks like they were my own. And despite what I might have said at various moments, it was never just about the money. I thought you could disappear into porn, climb a ladder into the act of it and the heat of it, watch, wide-eyed, and stick yourself in for a quick taste. But it was so hard to climb out without blood on your hands. In the end, I didn’t leave because porn was simple, or stupid. I left because my own actions while inside it presented me with a vision of myself that I didn’t much like or respect.
Porn aged me. It aged me in dog years. My eyes have seen the gloryholes, far too many to forget. But I try not to let it define me. The real story is now. The real story is always now.
Outside, there’s the friendly murmur of indistinct chatter. I gaze down, observe my swollen stomach. It’s distended, crying out for release. I hear a gurgle deep within—a thoroughly humble and humorous sound. With a gasp, unable to hold my ground any longer, I release the water, let go of my bowels, and it all flows out from within me. I laugh, a desperate, relieved, dying sort of sound. I stare up at the ceiling, breathing, smelling the pungent reek of what’s come out of me.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
If this addendum appears rather too expansive at first glance, well, I apologize. But the truth is, writing this book took awhile, and in order to complete the job, I greatly needed the help of many friends, family members, and colleagues. It’s my sincere hope that the number of salutes included here doesn’t in any way diminish the specific gratitude I feel toward each one of you.
Mom and Dad, I love you guys deeply. It might not have been your most cherished dream to have your son become a pornographer, but you stepped up and dealt with the shock admirably. Thank you for engaging with me honestly every step of the way. I cannot express how much it meant that you accepted me, trusted my judgment, and let me know that you were on my side.
My early readers were cruciaclass="underline" Ruby May, Jen Collins, Mark Allen, Bryan Bell, Ben Holt, Kevin Murphy, Rebecca Stern, Raafi Rivero, and Anna Welch got pages flung at them along the way, and their enthusiasm got me through dark spots. Josh Lefkowitz (Whuts-iznaim), David Gueringer, Sam Cooper, Stephani Norwood, Warren Frazier, Grace Krilanovich, Ben Westhoff, Andy Isaacson, Amir Flesher, Adi Flesher, and Jean-Paul Travers swooped down and read the whole goddamn thing. These charitable friends gently helped me understand which chapters I was meant to salvage, and which I’d need to axe violently, then walk away ...