I take another pill.
Across the room, Branch Bacardi leans forward a little and reaches both hands around to the small of his back. With one hand, he stretches out the elastic waistband of his boxer shorts. With the other, he sticks the plastic razor inside the red satin to start shaving his butt.
The talent coordinator walks away, still counting.". angina," she says, "irregular heartbeats, nasal congestion, headache, and diarrhea…"
That year, the one full year that Cassie Wright took off at the height of her movie career, industry insiders rumored that she had a child. A baby. She got knocked up doing a reverse cowgirl, when Benito Mussolini lost his load inside her. You hear how she put the baby up for adoption.
Wouldn't you know it? Mussolini was played by Branch Bacardi.
And I take another pill.
4. Sheila
Sweat collects.
Sweat pools as pale blisters inside my two layers of latex gloves. Borrowed an old precaution from gay porn: you wear a blue condom inside a regular pink condom, that way, if the dick turns blue in the middle of anal sex, you know the outside rubber's busted. A failsafe. True fact. Wearing pink gloves on top of blue gloves, my fingers feel hot, pulsing with my every single heartbeat; sweat collects in bubbles that rove just underneath my latex skin, merging with other blisters of sweat, melting together. Growing. Bulges of sweat swell in fat pads across my palm. Sweat squirts past my knuckles, inside the latex, to balloon my fingertips, swollen and soft. Numb.
I feel nothing. Just my own pulse, and the sweat crawling around inside my skin.
The latex, smudged with brown tanning crap. Orange with potato-chip flavor or dusted white with powdered sugar or cocaine. Smeared red from money stained with barbecue sauce or blood.
Feel the other blisters—could be my hand curls into a fist around a ballpoint pen, or my fingers pinch a dollar bill—and other blisters race backward to the wrist of the gloves, bursting hot and wet down my forearm. The trickle of sweat, cold by the time it drips from my elbows.
Some pud-puller holds a fifty-dollar bill, a hand gripping each end so he can snap it tight. His hands tug the bill tight a couple times, making a pop-pop sound. Another pop-pop sound. Standing so close the dripping head of the pud-puller's dick touches my hip. Soft as a kiss. A tiny battering ram.
A couple more pops, and I look at him. Step back. Look down at the shiny string drooping between my blue-jeans leg and his dick head.
The pud-puller slides his fifty onto my clipboard, saying, "Listen up, baby. I only get an hour for lunch." Saying, "My boss is already gonna kill me…"
I shrug my shoulders. Wipe my wet elbows against the sweat stains at the waist of my T-shirt.
All that today comes down to is free will.
Do you allow adult individuals to make their own legal choices?
These pud-pullers. These jerk jockeys. You only need to look at them to read their minds. Take, for example, the kid with the armful of roses. Sees himself as some Prince Charming. Shows up today to rescue Cassie Wright from her tragic lifetime of poor choices. Half her age. Thinks, one kiss and she's going to wake up and weep with gratitude.
Those are the losers you need to keep your eye on.
Gang-bang protocol, ever since Annabel Chong first called the shots, it says all the guys have to wait, shlong-out naked. Ms. Chong, her fear was some crazy with a gun or knife. Some Holy Roller, hearing direct orders from God, would answer the casting call and murder her. True fact. So—all six hundred pud-pullers have to stand around almost bare-assed.
All that today comes down to is free trade.
Do you restrict a person's ability to earn income and exercise personal power?
Do you restrict their behavior in order to prevent them from possibly being hurt? What about race-car drivers? Rodeo bull-riders?
These chicken chokers. Didn't bother to read any feminist theory beyond that outdated Andrea Dworkin tripe. Nothing sex-positive. Nothing along the lines of Naomi Wolf. I come, therefore I am. No, whether a woman is a concubine to fuck or a damsel to redeem, she's always just some passive object to fulfill a man's purpose.
These monkey-milkers. One waves me over, pointing his index and middle fingers at the ceiling and flicking them toward himself, the way he'd flag a waiter in a restaurant. My eyes lock onto his. I walk over. This loser lifts his other hand, opening the fingers to show me a folded fifty-dollar bill he's got palmed. The money, limp and translucent with popcorn butter. Damp from bottled water. Greasy with red lipstick at one end. The loser slips the fifty onto my clipboard, saying, "Check your list, honey, and I think you'll find I'm next…"
Bribe money.
Officially, word is we have a random-number generator. Whatever number pops up, that's who gets to go onto the set.
Pull the fluorescent pen from my seat pocket. Draw a line across the bill to test is it fake. Hold the fifty up to the light of a monitor to look if the magnetic metal strip runs through it. In the movie, Ms. Wright's ass squirms behind the money.
Tucking the fifty under my top sheet of names, I write down the loser's number. Meat-beater 573. Under that top sheet, flattened out, you can feel a thick layer of fifties and twenties. A couple hundreds. A fat mattress of cash.
Ask me, Ms. Chong's best skill was crowd management. It was her idea to bring the men onto the set in groups of five. Among those five, the first man got erect was the one got to screw her. Each group was on set for ten minutes, and whoever was able got to ejaculate. Even if some guys never got hard, never touched her, all five counted toward the 251-man total.
The real genius was to make it a competition. The erection race. Plus, studies show that when males are placed together in close proximity before a sex act, their sperm count will rise. These studies are based on dairy farms, where bulls will be staked in groups near a fertile cow. The resulting harvest will yield greater volumes of viable semen. Stronger convulsions of the pelvic floor, maximizing the height and distance of expelled seminal fluid.
The science behind a good money shot.
Increased affinity and surface tension. Higher viscosity. The physics of a good facial.
A biological imperative, only better. Basing porn films on modern dairy-farm procedures. Trade secrets that can destroy the romance of any good gang bang.
True fact.
Want to drag the bottom for every loser, every pervert with issues around intimacy, men completely unable to reveal themselves and terrified of rejection—you want a cross section of those bottom feeders—just run a couple newspaper ads seeking male performers for a gang-bang feature.
According to the British anthropologist Catherine Blackledge, the human fetus begins to masturbate in the womb a month before birth. At thirty-two weeks, that ripple, that twitching within the uterus, isn't the baby kicking. The nasty little thing starts jerking off in the third trimester and never, ever stops.
This crew of pud-pullers, these ham-whammers, it's they who killed the Sony Betamax. Decided VHS over Beta technology. Brought the expensive first generation of the Internet into their homes. Made the whole Web possible. It's their lonesome money, paid for the servers. Their online porn purchases generated the buying technology, all the firewall security that makes eBay and Amazon possible.
These lonely jerk jockeys, voting with their dicks, they decided HD versus Blu-ray for the world's dominant high-definition technology.
"Early adopters," the consumer electronics industry calls them. With their pathological loneliness. Their inability to form an emotional bond.