A boa slithered down a chairback. Edison’s inlaw, an awardwinning screenwriter with an intellectual reputation, entirely intolerant of the career of his wife’s kitschmacher brother, weekly invited the owner of a prominent Animal Handling company to play because the man, who worked only for topflight productions — dogs only for the best children’s dogmovies, his lizards and apes regularly preferred over computer effects no matter how perfected — brought the snakes. A month before, and he could’ve lost his license for this, he’d brought a baby lion. “Leo” prowled around the balmy house, was soon forgotten and lost, only later did they find it stuck in the dryer.
The Animal Handler said this Sunday:
Them women from over there are gorgeous. But I don’t know they worth the trouble.
He proceeded to tell the story of a friend and onetime employee (a janitor, a hoser) who had, he said, Ordered one of them from one of them services online — they sent her off and she ruined him, took every fucking follicle.
(The boa was coiled safely in a donut box.)
No fault divorce, he said, no shit, wasn’t no time for fault. Four years in this country and the cunt was entitled to half.
Edison, shockhaired, sensitively chinned — before he produced he’d inherited his father’s storage facilities throughout LA, he’d joke on first dates that he’d inherited emptiness—told Neo to tell Toyta to come by the studio next Friday and — Hotty #3 was born. A minuscule part, a negligible role (Neo’s bluff was called by a rash of queens, he’d left down $2K to Edison).
The film was the fifth in a series, a franchise — the fifth sequel, the pentaquel perhaps — but who recalled what the first four had been about, what’d happened in them when and where, who’d lived or died while making adolescent love on a rope bridge restive above a torrid ravine in Ventura steep enough to roll the credits down, there was no sense before there was no continuity …
… The old man, lupine, spry, and hairy, wiped down the bar and continued his story:
Unfortunately our Hotty’s only line was cut, for being unintelligible. A tragedy — her words.
He paused, drank some sort of murky plumwater, took puffs on a short handrolled stub.
But then somebody uploaded that scene to the internet, he said, where to this day you can find it.
He turned behind the bar to wind the clock.
Business was changing, he said.
Movies where you sat in the dark with a hundred people groping one another gave way to television where you sat in the dark by yourself. Then the internet came around, cords became cordless, wires became wireless, suddenly entertainment was free and everyone’s an amateur — amateurs at being themselves — because only celebrities are lucky enough to get paid just for being. Buy a camera, convince your bestlooking kinsfolk, upload, and Play — no more packaging, no more distribution where the smut’s hauled out to the far bazaars among the bahns. This was democracy, this was enfranchisement, all that other sluttery you sold us — CocafuckingCola, shiny motorcycles parked between the legs of our mothers.
The bartender’s eyes were elder, rheumy, his mouth disfigured, raggedly burnt and rimmed with moles like a castellated ashtray, like the hoops and arches of a crown. He snuffed his rollie, cleared the ashtray behind the bar.
His nose was a sharply tuned muzzle, was a hatchet. He was wolfish, vicious.
He said, Toyta returned to doing porn after her serious stint — she was savvy. She founded her own singlefee, multipass network — a dozen sites, a dozen girls, independents under her personal curation. An entrepreneura — that and not any implanted measurements is why her story is still told.
(I’m certainly polishing his English. Through the flit of whiskers he was facile but incorrect and interspersed locutions in French, in German, Italian — I’ve also filled in details and — no, you’ll decide.)
It’s said that the neighbor of her Grozny aunt had a daughter who was sold via Ukrainians to an au pairship in the West. My own—Grossnichte, Grossnichte—grandnieces, yes, grandnieces ended as Gulf commodities, whored to the oily emirates, the sheikh sex dens of Dubai—
XXX
_________________
He — I—sat listening to this story, to the script of this tale and to others. Dizzied by the dates and locales, the vertiginous names — what linguæ!
He sat on a stool at the bar and let this wizened bartender give him an education — this tender who’d taught himself the idiom by studying a UK travelguide “to Swiss.” He had a cigarette and a drink, unidentifiable, he was learning how to smoke and how to drink, he’d been abroad for a month already but was not going back, he felt as if he’d graduated from even himself, that he was a new person now waiting only to receive the new skin to prove it — signed by no one, signifying nothing.
In the vid, behind Moc’s head, a calendar had hung. The image on the page for the month of May showed a bouquet of blossoming trees — birch?/dogwood?/willow? — in front of the castle he’d stood in front of that morning (apparently, it was a renowned castle, though arduous to find — tired afterward he’d wandered into this bar at random, it had about it the rogue air of foreignness, of youth).
He’d had reprinted — at a kiosk in a webcafé huddled between a shashlik stand and a kvassarium — a stack of that screengrab, which froze mild May above Moc chastely clothed, or in that interim declothing phase (it was the only frame that satisfied all criteria): just her face and, regrettably, perhaps the top cleave of her breasts. He’d been asking around for weeks: Is this setting in any way familiar? do you recognize the girl or just last month? He’d handed one to this proprietor’s hispid paw not an hour before — this proprietor who called himself Publicov and was closer to being an upright verbose lupus than anything human.
How do I know you’re not another filmmaker? Publicov asked. Or maybe this Moc owes you money and you want to do worse things to her than what is done for the pleasuring of cameras?
He said to Publicov, You have to believe me — I was sent by her family in America.
Now she has family in America? The barwolf sucked his lips, fanged stiff the hair around them.
Cousins — I’m Moc’s cousin from Jersey.
Roland Jersey — what did you say you were called?
Orlando, he said, Orlando Kirsch (first name the city his mother was born in, last name that of his father’s orthodontist).
Publicov said, I don’t know what I’m looking at, and lit another rollie.
Izvinitye, turning away from the smoke to busy with the bottles — containments undusted, displayed like women tall and smooth and without protuberance, ranks of uncomplicated women, easier to uncork, easier to pour.
But Publicov hadn’t returned the printout, it lay like a rag sopping up the bar — the same printout posted that morning all over the ornate ironwork gates surrounding the calendared castle, on grave crucifixes in the dim midden yards of ruined churches, across the graffitied walls of gnomish humpy bunkers and imperious towers — glued and taped and stickered and tacked and nailed.
He asked Publicov, Please keep an eye out for her, telling him he was staying at a certain “Hotel Romantical,” where he’d also left the desk clerk, an obliging pink boy of approximately his age, with a sheaf.
There was no text on this primitive poster save an address for an email account he’d opened the night of his arrivaclass="underline" meetingmoc@moc.com — the new address of his newest domain, $5/month in perpetuity it cost, and his bank, his parents’ account at the bank, was scheduled to make the payment on the first of the month, the first of every month, and to do so indefinitely or until his parents’ funds were depleted, which meant this empty website—We’re Under Construction, We’re Still Under Construction—and its full inbox of tipsters’ emails might outlive him.