So after lunch the rest of them went up to the apartment while I ran over to the Pleasure Chest.
There are two Pleasure Chests, one in the Village and the other in the East Fifties, but they both amount to the same thing. They are sex stores. They sell creams to heighten excitement, ointments to delay orgasm, dildoes and French ticklers and masturbatory aids and God knows what else. A lot of the sexual arcana we used to establish Alan’s apartment as Sophie’s apartment came from there. Vibrators, sex toys, all sorts of silly dreck.
But what these stores sell the most of is sadomasochistic paraphernalia. This isn’t because such a high percentage of their customers are into torture and bondage, but because other forms of sexual activity don’t really require very much in the way of gadgetry.
S-and-M aficionados, however, are very prop oriented. They are also likely to have a special affinity for leather. As a result, perhaps two-thirds of the store’s inventory was given over to whips and chains and anklets and wristlets and cock rings and God knows what else.
One thing I had never realized before was how expensive all of this gear was. I have been in the shop before but never paid all that much attention to the S-and-M displays.
(Not that I’m putting it down. A friend and I have discovered that light restraint is a pleasant enough way to pass a lazy Sunday afternoon, offering as it does an interesting change of pace and an opportunity to act out a lot of one’s subliminal impulses. But we’ve always made do with dog collars and binder’s twine, and it was somewhat jarring to see wristlets going for ten dollars a copy and whips for similarly exorbitant prices. I just can’t appreciate the intrinsic superiority of a ten-dollar wristlet to a forty-nine cent dog collar. The fault is probably mine. That, no doubt, is the difference between a dabbler and a devotee.)
In any event, I saw right off that I could easily squander a couple hundred dollars of the production company’s money on props. I stood there picking and choosing, trying to economize, and realizing that they were all waiting for me and that I was wasting time as well as money. Then I asked myself what Alan would do, and that was the right move. By thinking like a producer I managed to save us a nice piece of change.
I got hold of the manager and explained I wanted the props for just a couple of days. Just as he was starting to say they didn’t do rentals, I sidestepped him and suggested that he loan us the gear free of charge, in return for which we would give him a credit in the titles. “Properties and special consideration courtesy of the Pleasure Chest.”
It got him where he lived, by God. He took time to insist that the credit line specify the Pleasure Chest of New York, as there were other stores similarly named elsewhere, with whom he had no connection.
No problem there, I assured him. Then it occurred to him that he was perhaps being hustled. How did he know who I was? How did he know I would bring the shit back when I was done with it?
I told him to write it all up as a sale and I would give him a check, but that I wanted him to note on the receipt his willingness to take back for full refund any merchandise returned in good order within seven days of purchase. I figured we would probably shoot all the scenes in Madge’s office within two days at the outside, but I wanted to give us room if we needed retakes.
And I had an ulterior motive on top of that. I figured my little friend and I could determine whether there is in fact any intrinsic difference between a ten-dollar wristlet and a forty-nine cent dog collar.
Once we came to agreement, which did not take long, the manager went out of his way to be helpful. He brought out special stuff from the back room, torture devices far too hideous to describe. Since they were costing us nothing, and since they would turn Madge’s office into a veritable chamber of horrors, I saw no reason to turn anything down. Then he wrote up the bill of sale and it came to $539.73, tax included.
Swear to God.
He agreed to hold my check for the week, which was just as well, because that’s more than I’ve got in my account. Then he had one of his assistants drive me to our location in the store’s half-ton panel truck. I could never have shlepped all that crap in and out of a cab. As a matter of fact, it took two people to carry the Iron Maiden around.
Alan started to throw a fit, talking about costs. “Why, you must have spent two hundred dollars on all this shit!” Which shows what he knows about the current market price of sadomasochistic paraphernalia.
I told him the bottom line figure and watched the color leave his face. It was an alarming sight, so I cut it short by explaining that it was costing us nothing.
“That’s my boy,” he kept saying. I thought he was going to kiss me.
Madge and Pluto played together just the way we had all thought they would. Which is to say that they were perfect. They both had all morning to get to know each other and to establish the characterizations they would bring to their roles. They were both on hand during the entire chessboard fiasco, with nothing to do outside of that one framing shot, and they evidently hit it off fairly well.
I have a sort of hunch that Madge and Pluto may share a mattress together before this film is over and done with. I can’t say whether this notion generates from the rapport they seem to have or from the poetic beauty of a romance blooming between the film’s two leading nonsexual performers. She’s maybe ten years older than he is, but her body has certainly borne the years well. One of the bits filmed today, where she shrugs off her shapeless bathrobe and gears up in studded leather belts and such, should warm the cockles (among other things) of any devout masochist, and if that masochist has a healthy Oedipal fixation blooming in his soul, he may well go through the ceiling.
I mentioned my notion to Vinnie just to have something to say. Vinnie and I don’t have that much to say to each other. He said he thought Pluto was married.
I admitted this was so.
“Well, he wouldn’t cheat on his wife,” said Vinnie the Director. “I mean, be serious, will you?”
“Just a little joke,” I said, and walked quickly away.
Here we are making this film, arranging people who’ve never met before in weird sexual postures and taking pictures of them, and Vinnie can’t believe that one of our number would be physically unfaithful to his wife.
Would you mind being eaten by a sheepdog, my dear? Does it matter to you if it’s a male or female sheepdog?
Christ.
I just got a very nervous telephone call from a very nervous Alan the Producer. It seems he just got a call from a comparably nervous backer who read him a review from, I think, Variety. It seems somebody just released our film.
It is called something like Mrs. Jones Meets The Devil. It concerns some woman who dies without losing her virginity, and protests the injustice of this, and the Devil agrees and lets her return to earth to sample sexual pleasure before spending eternity in Hell.
According to Alan, this means we’re dead. I told him that, while the news does not exactly thrill me, neither does it make me puke. We will be sued, says Alan, for plagiarism. To this I replied that I found it highly unlikely that one producer of porno films would sue another producer of porno films for plagiarism. Also, from what he’s told me of the plot (which may be garbled, having gone through so many repetitions) we are less likely to be sued by these people than, say, by Goethe. We’re spinning off the Faust legend.
Anyway, who cares?
Alan does, I’m afraid. He asked me if I thought it would be possible to rewrite the script and remove all of the Devil aspects. I told him that would leave us with the Rasputin scene and a few hundred feet of footage showing Sophie walking around various exteriors. He laughed apologetically and said he was just kidding, which I’ll reserve judgment on, thanks just the same.