At about 4,000 words, the following story will probably be the longest entry in The Moon-Haunted Heart, a collection of 50 stories that I hope to have finished very soon.
Sometimes, in spite of
our deepest longings for connection, in spite of our innate compulsion to
communicate—that quintessentially human need to make contact— the gulf that
divides us simply proves too vast.
This story was partly inspired
by my encounters with a bright, young hearing-impaired woman at the local
general store, someone I’d very much hoped to get to know better. I observed
that she was attractive and funny with a smile that lit up a room; intelligent,
strong, and determined—all characteristics I find virtually irresistible. She
could read my lips, but when she tried to point or indicate something visually,
I had to tap my glasses to let her know that I couldn’t see what she was indicating.
Intrigued, I considered striking up rudimentary
conversations in ASL, but ultimately had to abandon the idea due to my own
visual limitations. Basically, I could sign, however brokenly, but trying to
read her signing at speed would have proven impossible, and the whole endeavor
would quickly have devolved into the equivalent of her talking down to a child.
This is one of the
points I now understand I was trying to make in writing Where Nobody’s Dreams Come True: For a ‘disabled’ woman or man,
there is no greater insult than the perception of being pitied. If, as a
visually impaired person, I had the choice between being hated or pitied, I
would choose to be hated without hesitation. At least, then, I could fight back
and prove the haters wrong.
Information about the
porn industry and its many players is almost as easy to find on-line or on film
as porn itself. Centered largely in the San Fernando Valley of southern
California—sometimes referred to as ‘Porn Valley’ or simply ‘The Valley’, porn is
one of the most thoroughly and transparently documented of all human endeavors. From reality TV series to documentaries on individual actors (everyone
from Ron Jeremy and Anabelle Chong to Belle Knox and Traci Lords—who almost
single-handedly destroyed the industry by lying about her age), the foibles of
The Valley have never been a secret, whence they have been grist for fiction and mainstream cinema going back decades. That
is, at least prior to the 2011 ballot initiative in Los Angeles County,
requiring the use of condoms in adult films, an ordinance that put the industry
into an unprecedented state of turmoil and retrenchment.
Neither is a deaf porn
star something all that novel. The delightful Savannah Jane (who left the
industry to pursue an advanced degree in therapy) is probably the most
famous example of a hearing-impaired actress who forged a successful career.
Others have not fared quite so well. The highly-exploitative video
I describe in this story is based on seomething very real, which can still easily be found on-line
(though, considering how angry, empty, and sad it made me feel, I do not recommend it).
Enjoy!
TAS
Where Nobody’s Dreams Come True
Four years of film
school for this? Cooped up in a crummy editing booth that smells like something
between rotting pastrami and a chain-smoker’s armpit? On the up-side, in a
soundproof cubicle nobody can hear you lament the utter meaningless of your
existence.
I’d
come out to California with such high hopes—and who ever doesn’t?— dreaming of making
a name for myself, climbing onto the shoulders of geniuses like Houston and
Hitchcock, Coppola, Cocteau and Kurosawa. Instead, I’m working as a de-facto
wage slave for a soulless, visually-illiterate creep whose idea of high art is slo-mo
snowballing after twenty minutes of DP anal. I sit here, sometimes for thirteen
hours a day, editing these low-budget gonzo extravaganzas, cutting and splicing
and looping and looping and looping until it feels like my whole life is stuck
on a loop. Is this hell? Am I Sisyphus? No, it’s The Valley, and this is what
passes for normal around here.
Believe me, this stuff stopped turning me on a long time ago.
There are jaded gynecologists who would envy the clinical detachment I’ve
developed over the last year and a half. How many bald-facedly infantilized
miffies, photogenically epilated ball sacks and Caverject-enhanced
porno-perfect peen can one normal, reasonably well-adjusted guy stare at day in
day out before he starts stifling yawns? How many scenes of listless cunnilingus
and up-the-poop-chute POV before it’s just another day at the office
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Working here was only meant
to be temporary, a quick something to tide me over until I could land a ‘real’
job in the ‘legitimate’ industry—a gaffer’s gofer or an assistant grip— whatever
thanklessly menial thing I could find to start my way up the ladder. Never mind
that I’d excelled at editing in film school and had good, even glowing
references from all my profs. Nobody was willing to take me on, not even as an
intern. “Sorry,” they’d say if they said anything at all, “it’s a liability
issue. You understand, right?”
Oh, I got it. The message was hardly subtle, and after months of
having my nose rubbed in it, I wasn’t sure I’d take a chance on me either. As
far as the mainstream was concerned, I’d be lucky to end up as a member of the
craft-services cleanup crew, let alone some perpetually-uncredited
third-assistant butt monkey. Nonetheless, I had this nagging notion that a
guy’s gotta eat, so here I am.
The deaf girl wandered into my editing suite one Monday morning,
lost. She was there for what was supposed to be a quick half-day shoot, but
nobody’d been at the front desk to tell her what was what, or, more
importantly, what was where. I didn’t notice her come in at first. She made a couple
grunting noises that might have passed for extreme throat-clearing to someone
who didn’t know any better.
“May I help you?” I asked without looking away from my work.
She made the same noise again and tapped me on the shoulder.
“What do you want?” I swiveled to face her, “Oh—”
“Heh,” she howled from the back of her throat, wagging a hand at
me in greeting. Her voice was like twisted metal on a ruined violin.
“Hi,” I said, getting up from the chair, “Can you read lips?”
“Can you eat shit?” she spoke slowly as if addressing a child,
and I was close enough to see the extreme frustration in her face.
“Just asking,” I signed awkwardly.
“Sorry,” her expression brightened as she signed back, “That was
mean.”
“It’s OK,” I reassured her.
“I’m not like that.”
“I didn’t think you were.”
She smiled, and the dim room seemed to light up around her.
“You sign funny,” she said.
“Like I speak with a foreign accent? Yeah. I get that a lot.”
“Where did you learn?”
“My baby sister was born with a hearing impairment.”
“You don’t see so good either, do you?”
“Not without these,” I tapped my glasses, “It’s why my signing
sucks. It’s also why I have such a hard time finding work in the regular
industry.”
“Tell me about it,” she smiled again, and this time the light
was aimed straight at me.
“So, what was your name—”
“There you are!” Brenda from reception burst in all out of
breath. “Where the hell have you
been? Scott’s going apeshit! You were supposed to be on set fifteen minutes
ago.”
“Brenda,” I tried to be helpful, “You’re talking at her back,
and she’s—”
“I wasn’t talking to you,
Zak,” Brenda snapped, “And you’re not supposed to talk to the actors, either—or
don’t you remember?” She grabbed the startled girl by the arm and hustled her back
towards make-up at the far end of the building.
Technically, Brenda was right. I wasn’t supposed to talk to
anybody in the cast unless it specifically involved my aspect of the production,
and, even then, I was expected to run it past my boss or one of his three
vice-cretins. Scott was the scumbag-in-chief, the guy with his name on the
letterhead, executive producer, casting director, and ever-hopefully self-styled
auteur. His coke-snorting brother Brian passed himself off as a sound director,
producer, and company accountant, though it’s a pretty safe bet most of the
studio’s profits went straight up his nose. Brian also stood in as the
occasional stunt cock—at least on those rare occasions when he could actually still
get it up. Their cousin Jason had long ago called dibs on the director of
photography and chief production coordinator’s chairs, while his best buddy
Rick handled the gaffer work, lighting, electrical, and anything involving the
acquisition of gray-market prescription drugs
or exotic venereal disease.
It was not a fun place to work. If people already equate a
pornographer with somebody who doesn’t wash his hands after going to the
bathroom, my boss was more than happy to double down on the stereotype, proud
that he never bothered to put the seat down or ‘aim’ either. Scott was a firm
believer in volume over substance, and there would be at least three different
productions on the go at any given time. The man fancied himself a brilliant
editor, but mostly left the tedious stuff to me. The only things I didn’t have
some hand in were Scott’s so-called ‘special artistic projects’, charitably
referred to around the office—and always discreetly under people’s breath— as
his ‘special autistic throwups’.
Her scenes landed on my monitor the following Wednesday morning.
But for our earlier encounter I might never have given them a second look, and,
honestly, I don’t know why I should have been surprised at what I saw. Take
away the sound and there was nothing extraordinary about the footage. It was the
kind of drearily unimaginative stuff that plays on cheap-motel pay-per-view or
appears with pop-up ads on tacky internet portal sites all the time.
She was sitting on a white couch, facing the camera in a blue
gingham-patterened halter top that I guess was supposed to make her look like a
helpless little hillbilly girl recently arrived in the big bad city. She wasn’t
what I’d refer to as strikingly beautiful. Pretty enough, though, and
definitely a cut above a lot of the other girls I’d seen in the business. A
nice body with tits more than adequate for the camera. Perhaps a little too
much baby fat—but that jailbait look never goes out of style. She had big blue
eyes and flowing black hair, her pleasing, femininely fleshy features charmingly
parenthesized by long, soft-edged bangs.
All
fine and good.
But hearing what the
guys on that set were saying right there virtually to her face—going out of their
way to humiliate the deaf chick— it was like a gang of sadistic little boys
gleefully torturing a wounded animal. Scott was doing a rambling commentary
about how cool it was that she couldn’t hear what they were saying about
her—“Hey bitch! Can you hear me? What’s your name? HEY! I’m talking to you! Can
you say slut? Can you say WHORE? Come on! SAY WHORE!” The other guys were
laughing and sneering as she took a dildo up the ass. Constantly referring to
her in the third person as if she wasn’t there at all, they took turns shouting
at her, testing to see just how profound her deafness really was, snapping
their fingers next to her ears, clapping their hands and whistling, trying to
elicit a reaction—trying to get her to make some noise they could make fun of
as she chowed down on an anonymous actor’s cock . . .
Somebody touched me on the shoulder and I nearly jumped out of
my seat, like a guilty kid caught sneaking one of his dad’s skin mags. It was
her again.
“Those mine?” she signed slowly for me.
“Yes. Just started working on them.”
“What do you think?”
“Not bad.”
“Is that all?”
“I see a lot of this stuff. Believe me, not bad is good.”
“My name’s Bo, by the way.”
“I’m Zak.”
“They’re calling me Satin Sheetz,” she pointed to herself on the
screen and spelled out the words.
“That’s original,” I laughed.
“Savannah Jane was taken.” she gave me a playful wink. “Would
you like to go out with me sometime, Zak?”
“You’re asking me on a date?”
“Yes. Why not? Do you have a problem with girls asking guys out?”
“Not at all. It sounds great. When and where?”
“I’ll pick you up here Friday night. Don’t forget!” she gave me
a playful poke in the chest to underscore what she’d been signing, “Out in
front around 7. That OK?”
“Can’t wait! See you then.”
It might have been the best thing that had happened to me since
I started working in Porn Valley. Finally! Something I could actually look
forward to.
Of
course. I endured another lecture about not getting friendly with the cast—this
one from Brian. “We don’t need people getting distracted,” he pontificated,
“you or them. Besides, they’re way
out of your league.”
Maybe he was right about that. But Bo had asked me out, and it was nobody else’s
business. Besides, with all the extra hours I’d been putting in for the company,
I was way overdue for some R&R. Brian said what he had to say while I
pretended to listen. Then I headed back to the editing room as it all went out
the other ear.
She greeted me punctually at 7 that Friday evening. We tooled
into the city with the top down on her little pink PT Cruiser convertible,
ending up in front of a place somewhere in the nightclub district. The weekend
crowd was already queueing up for a good time, and we had a fair amount of our
own to kill as we waited in line.
“Hey,” I signed, “Sorry about those guys at the shoot the other
day. They were jerks.”
“Ass. Holes,” she said, the sounds coming out something like
“Aaaahhth. Hothz” before she switched back to signing. “Stupid as fuck, too!
None of them had a clue I could understand every word they were saying.”
“It wasn’t right.”
“No, it wasn’t,” she agreed, “but I don’t need you to protect
me, and I don’t need you to feel sorry for me, either.”
“I don’t feel sorry for you,” I said the words aloud as I signed
them. “I see you.”
The music was loud inside the club. Bo could feel the vibrations
of the bass and drums, and her body moved in perfect sync with the sound. She
really was beautiful out on that dance floor, so blithe and free and full of
life. Her joy was infectious. I could have watched her for weeks—months, years—
and never grown weary of the vision. But, of course, she grabbed my hand and
pulled me onto the floor with her in spite of my protests—“I’m a terrible
dancer. Not like you. You’re amazing—”
“Just feel it,” she said, “Feel it and let go! Nothing else
matters!”
The evening ended with Bo putting the brakes on what had, up to then,
been an extremely promising make-out session.
“I
think we should wait,” she said.
“How
come?” I was in a blue-balled daze of nerdish need and wanted more. But Bo was
adamant.
“In
the real world it has to be with somebody I love—” she signed, “—somebody I’m
committed to. Otherwise it’s too much like work.
“What
happened to just feeling it?” I asked. “Besides, I think I’m in love—”
“I
like you, Zak,” she stood on tiptoe to kiss me one last time, “but I’m serious.
Don’t worry. It’s not you. I like sex. I like it a lot. Maybe too much. That’s
why I’ll put up with assholes like those guys on the set the other day. But for
the rest of my life—the part that isn’t a performance— I want something better.
I want something deeper. I want something real and lasting and solid.”
I told her that I understood. She sped away into the balmy
So-Cal night and it was six months before I saw her again. A buddy of mine from
film school and I were out stag for the evening, waiting in line at that same
club just as Bo and a girlfriend were coming out. We exchanged a nod and a
smile, she moved on and I thought that was that. But a second later, Bo turned
around and came running back. She threw herself into my arms, practically
knocking me over as she buried her tongue in the back of my throat. We set our
friends up with each other, and, less than an hour later, Bo and I were in bed
together, all lofty principles cast aside along with our clothes.
People are always wondering what it’s like to have sex with a
porn star, and all I can say is that it’s like having sex with anybody else.
They tend to keep it simple in private; basic missionary, face to face with a
lot of wonderfully intense kissing and deliciously deep touch. Not having to
assume an uncomfortable position for the sake of a good camera angle allows for
closeness and the kind of spontaneously unhurried love-making that ordinary mortals
often only dream about. In Bo, I could see a deep hunger for connection, a
longing for something far beyond the physical—though she was very skilled in
that department, no doubt about it. So many people get into porn because they
honestly enjoy having sex, and yet, ironically, it is the last place on earth
to find intimacy.
I left her place about 5 the next morning and went directly to
work. It felt as if I never stopped working after that. The projects kept
coming and coming, and it was all I could do to keep up. I’d wonder about Bo
from time to time, but mostly I was just too busy trying to keep my head above
water to think about anything beyond the job.
Then, late one afternoon, Jason poked his head in the door.“Hey
Brainiac! Get your ass over to Scott’s office, pronto.”
“What’s up?” A trip to the office usually meant that I was in
for at least a half-hour of my frustrated-genius boss berating me for not being
able to read his mind.
“We’re throwing a surprise party for you,” Jason said sarcastically,
“All you need to know is that it’s urgent, and get your butt in gear.”
I got to the office and thought I’d walked into an
intervention. Scott and the three
vice-cretins were all there.
“Drop
your drawers,” Scott said as I came through the door, “Show us your dick.”
“Excuse
me?”
“We need a stunt cock. Like right now. Joey bailed on us, and
we’ve still got twenty minutes left to fill.”
“What about—” I nodded in Brian’s direction.
“Coke limp as usual,” Jason said matter-of-factly, “Drop your fucking
pants—”
“I haven’t exactly been tested—”
“Give
you two-hundred bucks,” Scott said, “cash. Just for a close-up of your little
friend.”
“Who’d I be with?”
“Who gives a shit? Let’s see what you got.”
“What if I say no?”
“Then I’ll fire your ass, after which you can explain to the
other actors why they’re not gonna get paid.”
“Fine,” I said, undoing my belt buckle, “when you put it that
way . . .”
My penis was apparently good enough to stand in for the missing
star’s, though there was some debate about whether I would need an injection to
keep it up long enough for them to get the footage they needed. In the end, they
decided to shoot me with a dose of Bimix before virtually shoving me onto the
set.
I came around the corner, past the temporary backdrops
surrounding the bed. I was nervous as hell—though it wasn’t the roaring
drug-induced hard-on I had that gave me away. I’d worked in post production so
long that being on the actual set seemed unreal and somehow wrong. It wasn’t
stage fright I was feeling so much as a particularly vertiginous form of déjà
vu. I also realized with a sudden butterfly-inducing clarity that I would be
responsible for editing the material from this scene, a prospect that terrified
me even more than what was about to happen . . .
Then I saw her.
Bo
looked older than I remembered, harder somehow, no longer glowing quite so
radiantly. She was lying on the bed as the make-up lady did a final touch-up on
her face and pussy.
“Let’s get this done,” Scott shouted, “Everybody wants to go
home.”
“You OK?” I signed as surreptitiously as possible.
“What
do you think?” she asked.
“I’m really sorry about
this—"
“Just get it over with,” she signed curtly.
“You two love birds gotten to know each other, yet?” Scott
snapped impatiently,
“Everybody cut the crap and concentrate . . .”
I felt nothing. It wasn’t just that the cocktail of hard-on
drugs they’d pumped into my pecker had done their thing and desensitized it. I
was emotionally numb through the whole ordeal—and it’s not exaggerating to say
that an ordeal is precisely what it was. What happened during that interminable
half hour comprised a microcosm of everything that sucks to high heaven about
porn. It was awkward and contrived, repetitively mechanical, virtually robotic
in its utter lack of passion, clinical and cold. The only thing good or
extraordinary about it was that I might have had an actual feeling or two for
the girl I was being paid to fuck.
I tried to lean forward and reassure Bo with a kiss.
“What the hell are you doing?” Scott screamed, “Make-up’s gone
for the night. Whose gonna re-do her face? You?”
“Sorry,” I said.
“Worst. Stunt cock. Ever,” Jason added, “One simple stinking
job! Just stand there and fuck, and you can’t even do that!”
I tried to apologize again, but Scott cut me off.
“Just shut up and stop moving around. Don’t touch her. Don’t try
to kiss her. Don’t get in the way of the shot. Do you understand? Don’t.
Fucking. Move.”
When it was all over, I got cleaned up as quickly as I could and
tried to catch Bo before she left the building. I caught up to her just before
she hit the exit.
“Hey! Hey!” I tapped her on the shoulder.
She wheeled around, startled at first, then angry when she
recognized me.
“You!” she made the sign like a stabbing motion, aimed
accusingly at my heart.
“Look, I’m—”
“Fuck you! I don’t want to talk to you!”
“Please!” I begged. “Please, I—”
Bo
was signing furiously, repeatedly slapping her hands together, clearly pissed
off.
“Slow down! Slow down!” I signed, “It’s too much! I can’t keep
up!”
“You’re an asshole!” she said it aloud before reverting back to
signing, “I thought you were different, but you’re just like everybody else
around here!”
“It wasn’t my idea,” I signed as precisely as I could, “I didn’t
know it was going to be you, and they told me you—or whoever it was— wouldn’t
get paid if I said no.”
“You’re lying!”
“No. I’m telling you the truth. Scott said he’d can me, and you
wouldn’t get a paycheck because the shoot wasn’t going to get finished. I swear,
I didn’t know who I’d be with.”
“How come you never called me?”
“What?”
“After the night we were together. How come?”
“I was so busy—”
“No texts. No e-mails. No nothing. What am I? Dog poop?”
“I’m sorry, Bo.”
“Why?” she asked aloud.
“I’m chickenshit, alright? I’m a coward. My life is going nowhere
because all I do is sit in that narrow little cutting room, and it’s the only
world I know. Sometimes I get so busy with it that I forget about everything
else. But I also feel safe in there. I know what’s what when I’m working. There
are no real surprises. It’s stupid, and it’s boring, and it kills my spirit a
little more every day, but there’s nothing I don’t know how to handle. I’ve
gotten comfortable and lazy because, the truth is, I’m afraid to stick my neck
out into the real world."
“That’s
too bad,” she signed, “It’s sort of sad, too—”
“Please—”
“—and
I really do feel sorry for you, Zak.”
“Please,
Bo!” I grabbed her hand, looking pleadingly into her face, too upset to sign
the words, “Please, don’t leave things like this!”
“I.
Can’t. Hear. You.” She spoke the words in that horrible rusty voice of hers that
I would have traded everything to live with for the rest of my life.
But
it was too late.
She
put a period on the sentence with an upraised middle finger, turned her back, and
left me alone. I never saw her again.
You
don’t get into porn if you don’t seriously like sex. You don’t stay in porn if
you can’t handle the shit. Still, I don’t know anybody who’s been in this
business for a long time who doesn’t secretly hate it. I’ve seen a lot of
starlets come and go. Most of them do one or two films with us before moving on
to classier operations or getting out altogether, having earned just enough to
give their dreams a decent burial before catching a bus back to wherever it was
they came from. A very few go on to become stars or, at least, highly prolific
artists. But even the so-called legends get lost in this notoriously voracious
industry’s perpetual high-volume shuffle.
They
seem like such sweet kids at the start, so bright-eyed and eager to please, so
full of hope and wonder before the cynicism sets in; before this brutal,
male-dominated system chews them up and casts them aside; before the pressure
to perform inevitably grinds them down, or the need to maintain endurance lands
them in the emergency room; before disappointment leaves them old before their
time. They arrive in all shapes and sizes, colors, creeds and kinks, claiming
to seek thrills and the glamour of fantasy. But few ever find what they’re
truly looking for. The one thing they all seem to have in common is hunger. Not
for food, but for belonging, for caring and connection.
Soon
enough the wise ones learn that sex is not a substitute for intimacy. It makes
a pretty lousy cure for loneliness as well—a weak palliative at best. As
alcohol can help one forget for a time, sex can calm the mind and bring some
needed rest to the body. It can be memorable—sometimes profoundly so— but its
immediate effects are fading. And the nasty hangover of shame and regret that
sometimes lingers for a lifetime hardly seems worth it all in retrospect.
I
see it clearly now. Still, here I sit, endlessly editing these banal regurgitations
of half-baked adolescent fuckery, cutting and splicing and looping until it
feels like my whole life is a series of disjointed episodes, crudely cut
together, the same scenes playing over and over— the same regrets repeated
again and again. Am I Sisyphus? Is this hell? Yes. It’s the Valley, and I have
nowhere else to go.
