Sooner or later, your window would come down; when that happened, you put in more quarters. It was a weird place. I suppose that if you wanted to put in the time, and the money, the possibility for an erotic connection was there. Certainly, there was this odd sensation that the girls were casing you just as closely as you were casing them, and that produced a few moments of unexpected vulnerability, which I found interesting, if not exactly pleasurable. Overall, though, it wasn’t really what you’d call a “feel-good” environment. I still felt the familiar strip club sensations of loneliness and mutual disrespect. It made me feel like a john, and I wasn’t into it, so I beat off quickly into a wad of paper towels, and disgusted with myself, made for the door.
My next stop was in the Mission, a sex shop called Good Vibrations. The worker-owned store boasted a huge collection of silicon dildos and adjustable cock rings, but it also sported a “sex-positive” floor vibe that was decidedly nonsleazy, without being totally antiseptic. I skulked around for a little while, then finally got up the nerve to approach one of the store employees, a sexy fat Mexican woman in her mid-thirties whose name tag read Felice Amador— Happy Lover.
“Can I help you with anything?”
“Well, I don’t know,” I said. “That kind of depends.”
“On what?”
“On whether you know anybody who will fuck on film for me. See,” I said, smiling shyly, “I’m sort of a pornographer.”
Felice listened to my pitch patiently, then, surprisingly, voiced a concern quite resembling my own.
“There’s so much room for growth in the genre, it’s true. I’ve always felt that way.”
“Porn doesn’t have to be shitty!” I cried, desperately relieved to find somebody else who saw it my way.
“I know, right? But our culture is so ashamed of having non-retractable genitals that we punish ourselves for feeling horny by producing the worst sexual aids imaginable.”
“And that’s where Good Vibrations comes in?”
“Right. It’s like, we all want to do it. . . why not just admit it? Be proud of being carnal. It means you’re still alive.”
“Have you guys ever considered making movies?” I asked.
“It’s funny that you mention it, because we’ve actually just started to have some serious talks. We’re thinking about putting together a good bisexual movie. They’re in really short supply.”
“Sounds great,” I said. “But do you think anybody who works in the store—or even shops here—would be up to making some porn, now?”
“It’s definitely worth a try,” Felice said. “Why don’t you make up some sort of flier, and I’ll put it in the dressing room. That way, everybody’ll see it.”
I wandered around the city for the rest of the afternoon in an agitated state. My pavement pounding had paid off; I was making important connections. The dream was progressing, that much was undeniable.
I stripped naked, facing myself in the bathroom mirror.
“You serious about this?” I asked, roughly.
“As serious as I’ve ever been about anything in my life,” I answered.
“Are you willing to make sacrifices?” I demanded.
“Yes, I am,” I vowed. “I’ll do whatever it takes.”
“Are you willing to go that extra mile?”
“Yes, sir!” I barked. “I’ll bare it all. Someone’s got to do it.” “That’s the spirit. Bare it all. In the gay section of eBay.” "... Sir?”
“No need to hire a bunch of actors. Get oiled up, and masturbate yourself on camera. Make a jack-off film. The best that’s ever been made. Be a star.”
The idea wasn’t without its own rakish appeal. I could bring it back to basics. And I had to admit, jack-off tapes were really moving. Maybe I could even make enough money to pay my dad back. Make the guy proud.
I laid out a cursory shot list, stuff designed to get your contemporary gay hot. First I figured I’d go out to the local schoolyard and shoot some hoops in my underwear. There was a water fountain there—J could get wet, real wet. Then back to Chez Periwinkle for a quick erotic weight-lifting session and a brief rubdown. Then maybe some light stretching and shoving grapes up my ass.
I didn’t have to shoot it all by myself, either. I called up my friend Spinach Brown, who agreed to come over and help, even though she was weak from a month-long colon-cleansing fast where all she could eat was red berries and pickles.
“I once made a porn,” she remarked, absentmindedly.
“You did?” I frowned. “What are you talking about?”
“It was for a guy named Casey,” she explained. “'Casey’s Cum-shots.’ His thing was huge, fake cum shots. He had this big dildo that he’d hollowed out, with a turkey baster inside it. He’d just blast me with about a gallon of ріпа colada mix! It was gigantic'. Covered my whole face, my tits, got in my hair, everything.”
“And that’s supposed to be sexy?” I muttered, jealous.
“I’m sure whatever you have planned is far sexier.”
She filmed me digging in Periwinkle’s garden, zooming in, I could sense, on my strong biceps, my rock-hard calves. I flexed everything that I could, willingly abetting the fetishization process. I could see it on slo-mo already.
Everything was going great until I peeled an organic banana and used its browning skin to wank myself off. Spinach filmed in awkward silence for two or three minutes, then left without a word. Sighing, embarrassed, I fished around in my closet for my trusty tripod. I’d be finishing this mission alone. Halfheartedly, I lay upside down in my bathtub and came on my own face.
To my surprise, the tape sold like crazy. Its success convinced me that I was now a “performance artist.” I announced to myself, unable to hide the pride in my trembling voice, that I was going to keep on following this trail—that no matter how rough it got or how lonely I felt, I was going to keep on the path. The path of the righteous pornographer.
To extend the conceptual scope of the project, I began to include a bonus item along with the videotapes I was sending through the mail, for a small additional fee: used pairs of my own underwear that I’d jizzed into and then sealed in Ziploc bags. At last, I was a success.
FIVE
For inspiration, I returned to the flea market and picked up as many adult videos as I could. This time around, though, I made it my business to try to get my hands on some newer releases, so as to see what today’s pornographer was up to. Expensive features like The House on Chasey Lane were always good fun, if only to remind you of the competency gap that existed between Hollywood screenwriters and Hollywood pornwriters. But on the whole, I found that I preferred the gonzo videos.
Gonzo, a movement in porn that began in the late 1980s, is immediately recognizable by its informal attitudes, low production values, and improvised scripts. In gonzo, the director, who is almost always also the cameraman, enacts the role of a first-person narrator who is on a type of sexual “quest”—usually, to see as many attractive women naked as possible. The director, serving as a kind of sexual surrogate for the viewer, is always bold enough to peek up the skirts
and down the shirts of his pleased female victims. While John Buttman” Stagliano is generally considered the godfather and master of gonzo, scores of copycats have done it quite competently, and to the great enjoyment of their viewership. Joey Silvera is a gonzo genius. So is Jamie Gillis—his On the Prowl series, where he’d drive around and pick up “real” girls, was the basis for Burt Reynolds’s limousine scene in Boogie Nights.
Over the years, the genre evolved and broadened, to where gonzo now refers to almost any porno that’s shot handheld and lacks a plot. Though these videos don’t deliver much in terms of story, their slapdash, improvisational character, and perverted authorial signature often allow for an unintentional but pleasant fissure in cinema’s traditionally tight narrative weave. In gonzo, one knows the performer. Granted, the guys don’t usually get much screen time—sometimes they’re never even filmed above the waist—but the women are often treated to a brief (and usually lewd, but still) interview before the scene begins. After viewing three or four movies that the same actress has appeared in, it’s often possible to cobble together a basic sense of who she actually is.