Snuff, Page 2

  Actors like Branch Bacardi or Post Campari, they’d shrug their tanned, shaved shoulders and say, “Hell, even Sly Stallone did porn to pay his bills…”

  Before becoming a world-famous architect, Rem Koolhaas did porn.

  Across the waiting room, a young lady wearing a stopwatch on a black cord looped around her neck, she stops beside Bacardi and writes the number ‘600’ on his arm, the six at the top, a zero below it, the second zero below that, the way triathletes are numbered with a thick black felt-tipped pen. Indelible ink. Even as this talent coordinator writes down the outside of each bicep, writing ‘600’ on one arm then the other, Bacardi keeps talking to the roses kid, his fingers probing his own ab definition for stubble, and the plastic razor hovering, ready.

  The men who aren’t eating potato chips are scratching away with plastic razors. They squeeze pimples. Or they squeeze tubes of goo into their palms, rub their hands together, and smear their faces, their thighs and necks and feet with a coat of brown. Bronzer. Their palms, stained brown. The skin around their fingernails, dirty dark brown. These actors stand with gym bags at their feet, stooping to hunt for tubes of hair gel, bronzer, plastic razors, folding pocket mirrors. They do push-ups, their tidy whities streaked brown. Walk into the only John you get for six hundred actors, a one-holer with a sink and a mirror, and the parade of buttocks have smeared the white toilet seat with layers and layers of brown. The sink smudged with bronze handprints. The white doorway clutched with a haze of brown finger- and palm prints from porn dinosaurs stumbling, blind behind sunglasses.

  It’s hard not to picture Cassie Wright on the set, sunk into a bed of white satin, by now clutched and smeared and smudged, darker and darker with every performer. Minstrel porn.

  I take a pill.

  The talent coordinator stops next to me and she says, “Sure, go blind, but don’t come to us for a settlement.”

  I ask her, What?

  “Sildenafil,” the young lady says, and taps her felt-tipped pen against my hand holding the bottle of blue pills. “Get it hard, but if you overdose, watch out for nonarteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy.”

  She steps away. And I swallow another blue pill.

  Talking to the roses kid, Branch Bacardi says, “They don’t shoot the performers in order.” Cupping a hand to lift one sagging pectoral muscle, he scrapes the razor across the skin hidden underneath, saying, “Officially, it’s because they only got three Gestapo uniforms, a small, a medium, and a large, and they got to call dudes to fit the costumes.” Still shaving, he looks up and off, watching a monitor mounted near the ceiling that’s showing a porn movie. He says, “When it’s your turn, don’t expect that uniform to be dry, much less clean…”

  In every corner of the ceiling, you have monitors hanging down, showing hard-core adult films. One is The Wizard of Ass. Another plays the classic Gropes of Wrath. All of them Cassie Wright’s greatest hits. None of them any newer than twenty years old. The monitor Branch Bacardi’s watching, it shows him a generation younger, riding Cassie Wright doggy style in World Whore One: Deep in the Trenches. That videotaped Branch Bacardi, his pecs don’t sag and flap. His arms aren’t red with razor burn and rashy with ingrown hairs. The hands gripping, the fingertips almost meeting around Cassie Wright’s little waist, the cuticles aren’t outlined with old bronzer.

  The live Branch Bacardi, the roving hand and his razor hand stop as he stares at the monitor. With his razor hand, he slips the sunglasses off his face. He’s still frozen; only his eyes move, snapping back and forth between the movie and the kid’s face. Under his eyes hang crushed, crumpled folds of purple skin. Under his suntan, purple veins climb the sides of his nose. More purple veins climb his calves.

  The young Branch Bacardi, who pulls out and blows his money shot all over those pink cunt lips, he looks exactly like the kid with the wilted roses. The kid the talent coordinator has marked number 72.

  Number 72, cradling his roses, he stands with his back to the monitor, not seeing. This kid is watching the monitor behind Bacardi, the movie World Whore Two: Island Hopping, where Cassie Wright deep-throats the erection of a young Hirohito, intercut with shots of the Enola Gay approaching Hiroshima with its deadly cargo.

  It was after World Whore Two won the Adult Video News award for best boy-girl-girl scene, where Cassie Wright teamed with Rosie the Riveter to suck off Winston Churchill, it’s that year she took a long sabbatical from moviemaking. One full year.

  After that, she went back to her regular schedule of two projects every month. She did the epic Moby Dicked. She racked up another AVN award for best anal scene in A Midsummer Night’s Ream, which went on to sell a million units in its first year of release. Into her thirties, Cassie abandoned films in order to launch a brand of shampoo named ‘100 Strokes’, a lilac shampoo packaged in a tall bottle that curved too much to one side. Stores hated to stock the tipsy bottles, and no one hit the Web site to place orders until she arranged product placements in two movies. In Much Adieu About Humping, the actress Casino Courvoisier slipped the bottle inside herself and demonstrated how the long, curved shape bashed the cervix for perfect deep-vaginal orgasms every time. The actress Gina Galliano did the same trick in The Twelfth Knight, and retail outlets couldn’t keep 100 Strokes in stock.

  But wouldn’t you know it, Wal-Mart wasn’t happy about being tricked into stocking sex toys in the same aisle as toothpaste and foot powder. There was a backlash. Then a boycott.

  After that, Cassie Wright tried to stage a comeback, but the monitors here won’t be showing any of those movies. Pony Girl films shot for the Japanese market, where women wear saddles and bridles and perform dressage routines for a man cracking a whip. Or fetish movies like Snack Attack, a genre called splosh films, where beautiful women are stripped naked and pelted with birthday cakes, whipped cream, and strawberry mousse, sprayed with honey and chocolate syrup. No, nobody here wants to see her last project, a specialty film called Lassie Cum, Now!

  Among industry insiders, the rumor is that the movie we’re shooting today will eventually be marketed as World Whore Three: The Whore to End All Whores.

  The moment in World Whore One when the doggy scene shifts to three doughboys liberating a convent of French nuns in Alsace, as the new scene starts, Bacardi slips on his sunglasses. Without her habit and wimple, one of the nuns has a thong tan-line. None of the nuns have any pubic hair. Bacardi’s fingers stroke the skin around one nipple, and the razor starts to scrape.

  The talent coordinator with her stopwatch and black pen walks past me, saying, “Those are hundred-milligram pills, so look out for dizziness…” Counting on her fingers, she says, “…nausea, ankle and leg swelling…”

  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.

  ∨ Snuff ∧

  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; s
weat 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.

  True fact.

  These pud-pullers, these jerk-offs, it’s them leading the rest of us. It’s what gets them off that decides what your million kids will want for Christmas next year.

  Across the room, another loser catches my eye, his arm raised, flicking the air with a folded fifty pinched between two fingers.

  Want to talk third-wave feminism, you could cite Ariel Levy and the idea that women have internalized male oppression. Going to spring break at Fort Lauderdale, getting drunk, and flashing your breasts isn’t an act of personal empowerment. It’s you, so fashioned and programmed by the construct of patriarchal society that you no longer know what’s best for yourself.

  A damsel too dumb to even know she’s in distress.

  You could cite Annabel Chong – real name: Grace Quek – who fucked that first world’s record of 251 losers because, for once, she wanted a woman to be ‘the stud’. Because she loved sex and was sick of feminist theory portraying female porn performers as either idiots or victims. In the early 1970s, Linda Lovelace was delivering exactly the same philosophical reasons behind her work in Deep Throat.

  The last thing today comes down to is personal growth.

  Do you respect someone’s right to seek challenges and discover their true potential? How is a gang bang any different than risking your life to climb Mount Everest? And do you accept sex as a form of viable emotional therapy?

  It only came out later, about Linda Lovelace being held hostage and brutalized. Or how, before becoming a porn star, Grace Quek had been raped in London by four men and a twelve-year-old boy.

  Early adopters love Annabel Cho
ng. The damaged love the damaged.

  True fact.

  Counting the money padding my list of names, my latex fingertips turn black from touching the bills. Another loser steps up, almost close enough his dick touches me. Asks about the T–shirts, where are the T–shirts? Matches my stride as I cross the concrete floor, step by step, staying at my elbow.

  I tell him, “Thirty dollars, cash.” He’ll get the chance to buy a T–shirt as he leaves the building. The souvenir caps, they’re another twenty bucks. To reserve an autographed copy of the feature, we’re talking $150.

  Ms. Wright’s already signed the covers, the slip sheets for inside the boxes. Just in case God sends meat-beater 573 the divine order to strangulate her. Or God sends Ms. Wright a stroke. Sends an earthquake or a tidal wave.

  Another last thing today comes down to is reality.

  What do you do when your entire identity is destroyed in an instant? How do you cope when your whole life story turns out to be wrong?

  Sweat balloons inside my gloves – still pink, so both layers of latex are still intact. My fingers pruned, wrinkled, from swimming so long. The skin pickled and old. My defenses still intact. Safe and clean, but feeling nothing, too old for the twenty-year-old rest of me.

  Across the room, in the light of a dozen porn movies, another two fingers flicker. Wave hairy knuckles. Hooked for me to come over. Holding more bribe money, folded to hide inside a fist.

  ∨ Snuff ∧

  5

  Mr. 600

  No shit, I told kid 72 a lie about the uniforms, how they was shooting us out of order since they only rented the three Gestapo getups. The kid’s watching the movies we got playing overhead. For the movie, we’re talking On Golden Blonde. His eyes squirming with twin reflections of Cassie Wright, same as two tiny video monitors, his jaw hung wide open, the kid don’t give a rat’s ass what I got to say.