Scenes From My Life in Porn

”I’ll be okay,“ Brooke giggled, making a wacky face.

Next to me on the couch, Brooke began to cry. ”Oh, my God! This is so sad.“

The scene shifted to a familiar one, a gangbang, featuring Brooke on a gloomily lit stage surrounded by men, barely visible through the forest of hairy legs.

”Everyone can see what‘s happening to me,“ Brooke said, still weeping. ”I’m so humiliated.“

A moment later, her tone changed from plaintive to angry. ”I see it!“ she said. ”There‘s Marc’s pale, white penis. It‘s shaped like a banana.“

The penis in question penetrated Brooke’s rear, without a condom. Marc‘s head ducked into the frame, confirming her suspicion -- she could have ID’d his member in a police lineup. The camera pulled in for a close-up of the suspect ejaculate sliding down her bare skin.

Behind me, Brooke giggled. I turned. She was speaking into the phone, now sugary and playful. ”Sweetie, will you bring me over some of that French champagne in the bottle with the orange label?“ Whining, ”Please?“

When she hung up, Brooke explained that she had a cab-driver friend who did things for her. In addition to being a porn star, Brooke hustled men. Sometimes she did so professionally, as a call girl. She could do a wicked imitation of a local weatherman talking dirty to her, his distinctive voice breathless and excited. I believed her about the weatherman, because I had once met him on the set of a John Wayne Bobbitt porn shoot. He had told me he was there researching a potential news story, though I‘d never seen his station run news stories reported by weathermen.

While her gangbang video still played on the TV, Brooke ran into her bedroom. She ran out a few minutes later completely naked, holding a gold raw-silk suit on a hanger.

”This is what I wore in the video,“ she said. She wiggled into the skirt and turned in profile, smoothing it with her hands. ”I used to hate my body when I was younger. Producers were always trying to talk me into getting implants.“ She pressed her hands to her breasts. ”See how nice they are? I’m glad I‘m still natural. I like my body now.“

She stood, bare-chested, in front of the TV. ”I don’t believe in God. But I pray. I pray to goodness. I believe in something good. I‘m not going to let this illness stop me. I’m going to dance, I‘m going to have my own Web site. And, dude, you know what?“ She sounded determined, inspired. ”I am going to make porn movies again. Fuck. I’m all about the word fuck.“

She let the skirt fall to the carpet and sat naked on the couch. She picked up her bong. ”Dude, I‘m not saying I’m not scared. I‘ve got HIV. How can I ever be a normal 25-year-old girl again?“

Whenever he was kicking heroin, a friend in the business used to dream of Asians. A typical dream: He is living in an El Monte trailer park and has a twin sister who is Chinese. She is beautiful, and he must fight her to the death in an unusual form of combat involving shish-kebab skewers. Their left wrists are bound together with straps, and they begin stabbing each other.

Most of the relations I had with women prior to becoming a pornographer were along the lines of my co-worker’s dream life. A wife or girlfriend functioned as a narcotic, fixing whatever emotional or spiritual maladies I was suffering from, but we would inevitably end up psychically bound at the wrists and engaged in mortal combat.

The girlfriend I was living with when I was hired at LFP was a professional in a field far from pornography. She had no issues with my new job; her concerns were that I was controlling, emotionally distant and psychologically abusive. My concerns were that she had an explosive temper and had once carved ”Pig Motherfucker“ on my front door with a knife. In our sessions with a couples therapist in Century City, we quietly discussed the need to listen to each other and develop mutual respect.

Following these morning sessions, I would drive to the Flynt building in Beverly Hills to review XXX videos. In the Erotic Entertainment section of Hustler, which I wrote for and edited, I probably never used the word ”woman.“ Women dominated every description and image that ran in my section of the magazine, but I referred to them using a pornographic lexicon handed down through time and enshrined in the copyediting department. They were sluts, bitches, pixies, nymphs, cunts, twists, slatterns, tramps, ginches, chicks, gashes, honeys, babes, squacks, pies, hootchies, snatches, trollops, tarts, dolls, quims, skanks, trims, split-tails and holes. For legal reasons, the terms ”whore“ and ”prostitute“ could not be used as nouns in reviews, but whore was acceptable as an adjective -- as in describing a performer as, for example, a ”whore-face blonde.“

I wrote reviews under the pseudonym ”Mack Assarian.“ This helped reinforce the notion I maintained to my girlfriend, my therapist or anyone who asked that my life was separate from my job. The words I wrote in Flynt publications in no way reflected my own thoughts or feelings. Mack Assarian had the voice of an unrepentant misogynist, wise to the games played by manipulative bitches. But he was not me.