Scenes From My Life in Porn

“Treatie and I have nothing in common,” Greg lamented. “She doesn’t even want to fuck anymore. You give the girl a joint and a goth comic book, and that‘s all she needs to be happy. She doesn’t care about anything else, except my car. She hates my car. She says it‘s ’cheesy.‘ I tell her, ’Treatie, my choice of vehicle is severely limited. I‘m a pornographer. I’m supposed to drive a cheesy car.‘”

Then there was the heroin-addict prostitute he met on Hollywood Boulevard. Greg portrayed his first encounter with her as a conquest in which he had beaten the whore con. “She was on the street in a baby-doll T-shirt and velvet hip-huggers. I pulled over, and she gets in the car. She asks, ’Do you want to date me?‘ I say, ’Yeah, show me your pussy.‘ She says, ’That‘ll cost you $60.’ I say, ‘I ain’t paying for it, sweetheart. Get out of the car.‘” He laughed. “She pulled down her pants and showed me anyway. We went to a motel, and she fucked me for free.”

The most appealing aspect of this relationship to Greg was that the girl was a hooker. “As long as she stays a prostitute,” he reasoned, “there’s not a big danger of getting committed.” But one night, when we were supposed to be planning a five-day video shoot, Greg was unable to work. His mind was on his hooker girlfriend. “There are things about her I don‘t understand,” he said. “She does these feminine tricks, like she cried when I left her the other night.”

I suggested the possibility that her crying had not been a “trick” but an expression of authentic sadness.

“Maybe it’s not a trick, but it looks like one,” Greg answered. Then he added, worriedly, “The problem is, I have a feeling that if I angered her, I would never see her again. She told me she once packed up and left a guy while he was out playing with his dog.”

Not long after his affair with the hooker ended, Greg fell in love with a giant blond bondage performer. The master of the whore con capitulated and married his new love. The extent of his violation of his former principles was made clear to me when he confessed that he actually intended to be monogamous.

Six months after the honeymoon, Greg called to report that marriage was as bad as everyone he knew had told him it was: “I‘m depressed all the time, unless I’m working. I throw myself into my work, which is trivial and stupid.”

He had concluded that there was no happiness to be found anywhere.

“Girls bring happiness for a while. People think happiness is like a Band-Aid that fixes everything. A Band-Aid just goes over a wound -- it doesn‘t fix anything. You always have desire for other women, but you keep chasing them, and end up like Orobouros, the snake eating its own tail.”

The Burakumin are Japan’s untouchable class. Racially and religiously identical to the Japanese, they are separated from broader society because of their labor. Burakumin are meat and leather handlers, and when Japan converted to Buddhism, with its vegetarian code, in the eighth century, these workers became outcasts. Their profession was considered to be dirty, and they were deemed “polluted people.” Despite the fact that Japan shed its vegetarian strictures hundreds of years ago, their ostracism has been enforced to this day. Pornographers, creating a product that is widely consumed by society, face a similarly paradoxical ostracism.

On a personal level, when I dated women outside the industry, I had to overcome the perception that I was probably a creepy pervert because I worked at Hustler. Even if this could be overcome, women from the straight world labored under the misconception that I was surrounded in my job by beautiful, alluring babes offering free and easy sexual gratification. Those who believed this were buying into the illusion offered by porn, and it was not always easy to convince them that the hookers and porn stars I met in the course of my job were just as complicated and demanding as anyone else.

I attempted to get through all of this on a blind date with a 26-year-old I‘d been set up with by a mutual acquaintance. Her eyes were young and gray like a baby wolf’s and scrutinized me closely as she asked the standard questions: Have you ever dated a porn star? Does your job affect how you view women? Are you personally into porn? I answered no to all of the questions, lying to varying degrees each time.

She suggested a second date at a small Italian restaurant near an S&M-and-magick shop in Silver Lake. This time she did most of the talking, discussing her ex-boyfriend who was trying to be a rock star, her aspirations to quit her temp job and become a painter, or a photographer or a designer -- any creative field that would offer a measure of fame. She sounded like all the porn girls I knew who credited Madonna as the single biggest influence in their lives.