Scenes From My Life in Porn

After dinner, my date invited me to her apartment. Her roommate sat in the kitchen painting her nails in preparation for a redeye flight she was taking to New York later that night. She had dressed for the flight in 4-inch heels and a tight skirt and baby-tee. She wore her hair in long, white-blond braids, and with her thick white goth makeup resembled a depraved Pippi Longstockings. I‘d been told she, too, aspired to be a rock star.

She stood when we entered, and pushed her breasts forward. “Is my bra lumpy?” she asked my date. Then she turned to me and asked, “How do I look?”

Based on my experience studying thousands of slides and photosets of nude women her age in order to determine their suitability for use in Hustler and Barely Legal, I did a rapid thumbnail assessment. I pictured her with her clothes off. Her large breasts, combined with her slenderness, indicated that she’d probably had augmentation. She would not be suitable for a “natural” magazine such as Barely Legal if scars or saline-sack deformations were visible. Her face was pretty, but her eyes were too close together, and her butt was flat. She might have made the end of the first half of the book, where the so-so photosets ran.

“Isn‘t my roommate beautiful?” my date asked as she led me to her bedroom.

When she shut the door, she informed me that she had a deep interest in kinky, perverted sex. “I think it’s hot that you work at Hustler,” she said, dropping onto her wrought-iron bed.

“I want to suck your cock,” she said, making a slurping sound that caused her face to grimace. It was the sort of expression made by porn performers when simulating a “hot, nasty” sex scene.

I sat next to her. “Talk dirty to me,” she whispered.

I was speechless.

She offered specific directions. “I like stories about my daddy being bad.”

She reached into her skirt and began to masturbate. I gathered that my role was to stimulate the exercise by providing a pornographic narrative. I had spent the day writing girl copy about perverted stepfathers and nymphomaniac women driven to compulsively give oral sex. My mind reeled with all of the filthy words I had strung together that day for female body parts and sexual acts. But I couldn‘t speak them. I had writer’s block.

Writhing on the bed next to me, she picked up the slack. She launched into a scenario about a birthday party in which she and her friends relentlessly teased her father until he could stand it no more and began molesting them. “Stick your cock in me, Daddy,” she taunted him -- or me.

The eroticism of the moment seemed no more authentic than the lifelike torso beckoning in my office.

When my date stopped twisting on the bed, I went to the door.

She leveled her young, gray eyes at me. “I can tell you have issues with women,” she said.

A few months before I left LFP, a thief broke into my car and stole a half-dozen XXX videos. They had been shipped to the office in a box with my name on it. The police caught the hapless criminal walking down the street with the box, and I was called to testify about the crime in a Beverly Hills courtroom. I waited in the hall with the cop who was handling the case. He was a detective a few months shy of retirement who, with his New York accent, knowing blue eyes and rumpled brown suit, seemed more like a sympathetic TV character actor than a real cop. He talked about his 30-year marriage, his daughters, his involvement in a well-known case a decade earlier when he‘d killed a murder suspect during a foot chase and shootout. The detective brought up porn videos and confessed that he liked them. His tastes, he said, were specific. He liked the directors who focused on the women’s faces. “It‘s all bullshit,” he said. “But sometimes you’re looking at the girl in the video and she reveals herself. Maybe it‘s just a moment in her eyes, but it’s human, it‘s genuine.”

To me, what was real and unreal had ceased to be clear.

What was unreal was my final visit to a porn shoot. This was held at a luxury suite in a Las Vegas hotel filled with guests specially invited to watch a porn star named Montana Gunn have sex with a few fans. The party was to inaugurate her “Fuck the World” tour, a yearlong event for which she planned to repeat this evening’s performance with 2,000 fans in hotel rooms and on stages across North and South America and Europe.

What was real was Montana entering late, intoxicated and burnt to a crisp from a marathon session in a hotel tanning booth. What was unreal was Montana fleeing the expectant crowd in tears, because, she later said, she realized nobody in the whole room cared about her as a person. That was probably real. What was unreal was Montana emerging from the bathroom after her crying jag and going on with her job, fucking strangers on the hotel suite‘s coffee table while partygoers cheered and the cameras rolled. What was also unreal was standing in the bathroom with Montana later that night while she splashed in the bathtub, giggling, pointing to the freckles on her chest, saying, “My mother always called these kisses from the sun.”