The Dan Banyan guy, he says the only trick to starring in an all-male backdoor gang-bang movie is you have to really relax. Keep breathing, deep. You need to forget all your decades and decades of toilet training. Picture puppies and kitties. He says you kneel on the edge of a bed and five other guys come in and dork your ass a couple strokes each. Those five blow their loads across your back. Then another five come in. He really wasn't counting. Then he lost count. Taking a strong dose of Special K helped.
My mom, up those stairs, behind that locked door, under all those bright lights.
The Dan Banyan guy looks at the ceiling again and laughs, saying, "It's a lot less romantic than it might sound."
To this day, he says, you put anything up his ass and he can tell you Trojan or Sheik. Rubber versus latex versus lambskin. Without looking, just only from the feel, he says he can even name the color of the condom.
"I should do product endorsements," the Dan Banyan guy says. "I could tour as the 'Psychic Asshole'.»
A fluffer, he says, is somebody whose job is to blow guys or give hand jobs to make sure they're ready to act on cue.
I don't know.
"The biggest irony is that most of the men," the Dan Banyan guy says, "in the movie with me, most of them were straight. Doing it just for the cash."
When he found that out, he says, he didn't feel half as flattered by the attention.
On the TVs, my mom is putting big fake diamonds inside her mouth. Licking them. Her lips and her snatch she has in this movie, they look nothing like what I have at home. The stuff I sent for over the Internet.
Mr. Bacardi looks at the floor, shaking his head and saying, "Who am I fooling?" Looking at his feet, only with his eyes closed, he says, "I wasted the precious gift of my life." Cupping his closed eyes with the palm of one hand, he says, "I threw away my whole precious life, trashed my life like it was nothing but a money shot."
And the Dan Banyan guy turns his head, fast, only long enough to look at Mr. Bacardi and says, "Christ! Snap out of it. Would you quit Elisabeth Kübler-Ross—ing on us!"
When he was my age, the Dan Banyan guy says, he watched Cassie Wright in World Whore One, he maybe even saw me get conceived, but as she took on French soldier after German soldier after doughboy, he said to himself, "Damn, I'd like to be that popular…" But, every casting call, he was just another young guy in a sea of young guys. TV commercials. Feature films. He never got any callbacks. Before he turned twenty-one years old, casting agents were already going on how he was too old. The only last thing left for him to do was buy a bus ticket back to Oklahoma.
The Dan Banyan guy tips his bottle of pills until one rolls into the palm of his other hand. Just looking at it, he says, "My agent thinks that if I'm seen in this project it will 'out' me as being secretly straight. He's banking on at least bisexual." The Dan Banyan guy just looks at the blue pill sitting in his palm. His skin on his face, the blood veins swell across his dark-red forehead. His face turning the purple color of pounded meat, those blood veins twitch and squirm just inside his skin.
His agent's already got a press release printed, ready to issue. The headline across the top says "Dan Banyan Comes Out on Top!" Under that, the press release talks about the recent tragic death of one of America's topmost adult-movie stars. Most of the rest is him officially denying rumors how his massive rock-hard wiener and relentless animal ram-job is responsible for my mom being dead.
The Dan Banyan guy holds out his hand, shoving the pill at me. He says, if I want it, take it. Free of charge. I don't have to blow him or anything.
Mr. Bacardi's fingering the necklace around his neck, popping the pendant deal open and looking inside.
The pendant deal, it's a locket I've seen before. Hanging from around my mom's neck in Blow Jobs of Madison County. It's Cassie Wright's necklace he's wearing.
"It only takes one mistake," the Dan Banyan guy says, "and nothing else you ever do will matter." With his empty hand, he takes one of my hands. His fingers feel hot, fever-hot, and pounding with his heartbeats.
He turns my hand palm-up, saying, "No matter how hard you work or how smart you become, you'll always be known for that one poor choice." He sets the blue pill on my palm, saying, "Do that one wrong thing— and you'll be dead for the rest of your life."
Mr. Bacardi's looking at a pill inside my mom's locket.
"Someone had better die today," the Dan Banyan guy says, "or I'll be headed back to Oklahoma."
And he folds my fingers shut with the little blue pill inside.
19. Mr. 137
The last time I saw Oklahoma is the last time I ever want to see Oklahoma. Picture that big circle of blue sky meeting dirt, wrapped all the way around you. Dirt and rocks stretched from you to the horizon. Dirt and rocks, and that sun always up high, the noon whistle blasting at the volunteer fire department. Dirt and rocks, and my dear, simple, good-hearted father waiting to see me off on the Greyhound bus bound for the temptations of the big, wicked city.
Talking to the talent wrangler, I say that if Oklahoma the state was anything like the musical I'd still reside there. Cowboys tap-dancing on train platforms. Gloria Grahame. Gypsy peddlers. Elaborate dream sequences choreographed by Martha Graham.
I lean forward and pinch, with just my fingertips, an especially gruesome flake of dandruff off the shoulder of the wrangler's black sweater. From the feel, a 50-acrylic, 50-cotton blend, raglan sleeves, faux cowl neck.
Ribbed knit. Looped with snags. Awful. And I flick away the waxy flake.
On Mr. Toto, next to Gloria Grahame's fake autograph, it says, "What girl could ever say 'No' to you?!"
Watching the white flake arc and disappear in the fluttering light from the monitors, the talent wrangler says, "I use her shampoo…" and she tosses her head toward the movie on the screen above us, where Cassie Wright's trapped in a dystopian science-fiction future. According to the premise, war and toxic waste have killed off every other hot sex goddess except her. As the last surviving hottie, she has to wear crippling thong underwear, a push-up bra, and high heels, then fuck or suck off every guy in the evil fascist, quasi-religious, theocratic, Old Testament—inspired government. The movie's called The Handmaid's Tail.
A classic of social-commentary porn.
"It's how I got this job," the wrangler says. "During my pitch meeting, Ms. Wright smelled my hair."
Me, too, I say, and touch the hairs combed across my own scalp.
"I kind of guessed," she says, frowning. "Either that or you're having chemotherapy or you have some terrible, fatal disease."
No, I tell her. Just the shampoo.
"You're wrong," she says.
Okay, I tell her, maybe I bottomed for an army of strangers in some forgettable gang-bang flick, but I do not have some terrible disease. Buried somewhere in the papers on her clipboard, she can dig out my STD report.
"No," she says. Reading over the names and inscriptions scribbled on Mr. Toto's white canvas skin, the wrangler says, "It wasn't Martha Graham. It was Agnes de Mille."
On Mr. Toto, I spelled her autograph with only one "L." "Agnes de Mile." A dead giveaway.
That's okay, I tell her. In my life, I've been wrong about almost everything.
You'd better believe I didn't give them the full story about me, my beloved father, and all of that lovely, lovely Oklahoma lying flat, as far as the eye could see. No, you can ask, but I'm saving myself for Charlie Rose. Barbara Walters. Larry King. Or Oprah Winfrey. No one except a certified talk-show god is going to dissect my private parts.