Kamikaze Lust (10 page)

But I couldn’t stand another minute of it now. Here. With Aunt Lorraine watching studiously, Mom pretending not to, and Rowdy talking back to the screen. It could have been the
Docudeath
or
Shoah
or any Hollywood action film for that matter. I got up to leave.

“Where do you think you’re going?” Mom said. “You still haven’t told us—”

“That woman, Alexis Calyx, I’m ghostwriting her autobiography.”

Mom frowned, disaffectedly. As if I’d somehow disappointed her by not claiming to be at least a consumer of porn if not a porn star myself. “What’s the matter, not scandalous enough for you?”

“Jeeze, you hit the big time,” Rowdy said.

Mom didn’t think so. “Can’t you find any nice people to write about?”

“Nice, who’s nice?”

“You used to be. We put you in little dresses.”

“Get over it, Ma. She ain’t your dress-up doll no more.”

Our words were stymied by a stereophonic boom rising from the TV speakers. Another window came crashing down on top of Alexis and Robbie Rod. They fucked obliviously, wholeheartedly, apocalyptically. My thoughts came in fragmented clichés. Goodbye cruel world. Out with a bang and not a whimper. For forty days and forty nights. He died with a smile on his face.

Robbie Rod stood, his back a mosaic of blood and broken glass. He took his penis in his hand and it was as if he were grabbing a thick pole. I couldn’t believe that thing had been up inside of Alexis without bruising her internal organs. But she showed no outward signs of damage. She looked up at her man, reverently, part damsel in distress, part lady in waiting. I bolted from the room before the final shot. Before the easy come moment had gone.

ONE IN THE HAND, TWO IN THE BUSH

“Hold it!” Alexis commanded. A click and the cameras stopped; all eyes turned to her. Bodies stilled off set as if she’d pressed a pause button. On set, a man relaxed his grip on a woman’s thighs, which had been posed missionary-style making her look somewhat like a roasted chicken. Her legs dropped to the bed. He took a few steps back, glaring at Alexis as he stroked his erect penis. But for the alacrity of his hand-cock motion, he looked like some kind of sex zombie.

Having arrived just a few minutes earlier, I took the opportunity to move in and claim a camouflaged spot behind a couple of leafy floor plants, going for my usual fly-on-the-wall routine. Alexis sighed, “Billie, you’ve got to get the light in closer.” Without a word, the woman standing behind a massive eyeball of a light dollied forward. I held out my microcassette recorder. “That’s it, on top of her, I want to see her pussy glow. And can we get some glitter makeup on her thighs?” A woman with enough unguents to paint the cast of
Cats
came running. As if she were a gynecologist, she sat down in front of the star’s legs and began her cosmetic doctoring. “Beautiful,” Alexis said. “We’re going for broke here, boys and girls, the fucking of the gods.” There were a few giggles. Alexis turned to the naked man. “Mark, don’t look at the camera so much. Use your tongue for a while, then pull back and pick up the crystal. Okay, heat ’em up and action!”

Mark, tongue jutting lizardlike from his mouth, moved along the woman’s thighs. Two video cameras hovered close to their bodies. The woman moaned, giving what seemed like a virtuoso “
oh, baby, oh!
” I tried to remember her name. It began with a T, Tessa something…Tessa Toupee or Tepee or Tempe. And he must be Mark Vladimir, the featured male lead on this latest Zipless Pictures project:
One in the Hand, Two in the Bush.
It was already being hailed by the Alexis acolytes as groundbreaking erotic cinema.

I took my reporter’s notebook from the pocket of my blazer, slipped the ball-point pen from behind my ear, and wrote down a few fragments: Cameras. Smoke machine. Attractive young people with props; clipboards, cell phones, beepers, headphones. Everyone watching. Me watching them watch. The sanctioned voyeur.

Indeed it was like watching the trials I’d covered before the strike, and just as I’d been conscious of researching every case to the last detail I’d come prepared for my virgin viewing of this sex shoot. I’d seen a few videos, skimmed through insider magazines with names like
Skin, Video X-tra,
and
The Bondage & Discipline Tour.
I read selections from the classic texts, everything from Freud and Krafft-Ebing to
The Filmmaker’s Guide to Pornography.
Going on-line, I logged into the appropriate newsgroups, gleaning information on new releases, industry feuds, HIV rumors, while familiarizing myself with the jargon. I could tell you the difference between meat and money shots, tout the industry’s preference for Astroglide over other lubricants, and delineate scenes by their reductive categories: the boy-girl, the girl-girl, the boy-girl-girl, and so forth and so on.

The category of the moment was boy-girl, the action, post-insertion with sex toy, as Mark moved a thick, conelike crystal in and out of Tessa’s vagina, stopping every few minutes to roll his tongue along the clear, wet stick. As they spoke I jotted down their dialogue.

Tessa says: Move me, fuck me with the light of God.

Mark says: Baby, I’m here. I am God.

Tessa says: Oh, I want you inside me now!

Mark took a step back and ripped open a condom wrapper. It was a Zipless rule that couples practice safe sex, HIV test or not, yet there were exceptions: the married couple, the long-term lovers, or women with women who outright refused to work with those silly dental dams. But Mark and Tessa were a nonexception couple. That even I noticed this couldn’t be good. No wonder Alexis looked dyspeptic, as if she were on the verge of bursting into bitter song; if this were indeed a musical and not a sex film shoot. The rest of the crew seemed constipated, watching nervously as Mark, a hirsute figure with a penis about the length and width of the average-size banana, fixed an airhole at the end of his condom, smiling perfunctorily at Tessa, whose face, though done up like a side-show gypsy, conveyed a fuck-me-yes-but-I-don’t-have-to-like-it quality. Was it me or did she appear sorrowful beneath her rough and tumble exterior? I couldn’t stop staring at the bottoms of her feet. Black from stomping back and forth on the dusty wood, they would need a touch of air brushing in the edit suite. The condom wrapper fell to the floor, sounding a light slap. Then came a collective sigh of relief as Mark, penis erect and snugly encased, put his palms on Tessa’s thighs and pushed them upward. One camera clung to their torsos, the other moved to Tessa’s face. Mark took his penis in his right hand and guided it inside of her.

“Okay,” Alexis said, “pickup with the other camera, keep going, on their faces. Good, good…shit! Tessa, be a goddamn martyr if you have to, but don’t look like one. Cut!”

As from the sudden burst of a water balloon, frustration splattered in every direction. “We’re going to be here forever,” a guy in faded jeans, with headphones and a boom mike mumbled to nobody in particular.

“Shut up,” Tessa snapped at him. “He smells like onions. I mean once or twice, but this is too much, and he’s all soft again. You try smiling about fucking a slinky.”

“You think you smell so great with all that flowery crap you rub on,” Mark said. “She wonders why I lose my concentration.”

“I thought the onions were supposed to help,” Tessa whined, as if she were a Class A tattle-tale. I wondered if she had older brothers.

“What is with the onions?” Alexis asked.

“He says they make him more vee-rile,” Tessa sneered at him.

“That’s not what I said, you little…uh!” Mark jerked his head back in disgust, ran his right hand through his hair, and then glowered back at Tessa. His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down as he started to speak. “I said they make my cum more milky.”

Alexis quickly moved between them, taking Mark by the elbow. “Look, we’re wrapping today, and I absolutely refuse to be here all night. So go brush your teeth and no more onions. What do you do, eat them raw?”

“Like an apple,” he said.

Alexis shook her head. “Honey, next time you’re worried about the plumbing try zinc capsules like everyone else. Now, you want to clear the set?”

“That’s not the problem.”

“Yeah right,” someone murmured.

“Okay, enough from the peanut gallery. If you want to help, do a private little rain dance for Mark, and you,” Alexis turned to Tessa, “go use your vibrator a few minutes. You’re being paid to fuck a slinky if you have to.”

Alexis sighed, leaned back in her director’s chair. She caught my eye and motioned for me to join her. I did as instructed, like everyone else. For as plagued by perfectionism as Alexis was, when she said cut, no matter how long they’d been shooting, everyone stayed with her vision. I got the feeling they all believed they were doing important work, trekking beyond the traditional porno métier…where no
man
had gone before. Women worked cameras, carried cell phones, and swung mikes. Yet even for these millennial years, it veered toward parody. A vision of Lesbos within the drab fascism of California porn.

And where on the Left Coast would you find a director who treated her actors and crew as if they were her own children? The other day I heard her on the phone asking Mark if he’d taken his Cs—he had a cold coming on; now she was pained by Tessa’s phallophobia.

“I just don’t get it,” she was telling me. “I love using her because she doesn’t have implants and her tits aren’t that big, it’s a different kind of aesthetic. It says something. You’re recording this?”

I nodded.

“Don’t,” she said, rubbing two fingers on each of her temples. “I’m too riled, I have to think it through.”

“Why are you so upset?”

“Why? I have a feature star who flips out when a man gets near her and you ask, why? Girl-girl scenes she’s the best, but this isn’t a lesbian company, that’s not all we do. I’ve been telling her she doesn’t have to feature, which would be a shame because every time she’s on screen, it breaks ranks. She’s not what a porn star should look like, blah, blah, semiotic bullshit maybe…but it’s true.”

“Because she’s flat-chested?”

“Yes, of course. But if she won’t do men, it’s less powerful. Women don’t have the tit fetish, most of them anyway. And that’s not the point here. She made such a big deal about not wanting to be pigeonholed, not wanting to be an industry dyke. A lot of women are like that, they’ll only do girl-girl scenes. It’s safer, they feel less pressured with women.”

“Less pressured, that’s a laugh,” I said.

Alexis looked at me, her brow furrowing inquisitively. “Are you a lesbian?”

“No.”

She eyed me suspiciously and within seconds I was ten years old again, running to confession for a crime I didn’t commit.

“Really, I’m not,” I said.

“I’m sensing something, a sort of karmic sound bite. Are you in therapy?”

“Been out a few years, thank you very much.” That question was easily answered. As far as I was concerned I’d fulfilled my quota on shrink time with Sam in Miami.

“Then you must have hit on this?” Alexis said, eyebrows raised as if she were waiting for a salacious disclosure. I became conscious of my tight-fitting blazer, the double-breasted wool jacket that wasn’t exactly power suit material, but had been conservative enough to get me through the courts. Here it felt constricting, and heated up the back of my neck as if I were hiking the Stair Master. Besides, all the lights and cameras and action had made the set extremely hot.

Think journalism, I told myself. I am a journalist. My job is asking questions. Ask a question. I squeezed into my reporter’s face, the one where my brow caverned in between my eyes and my lips pursed downward. “So what happens if Tessa won’t do it?” I ventured.

“Oh, she’ll do it, she just needs a little tender loving care. Anyway, forget her for the moment. I want to know what’s got you so flustered.”

“I’m not flustered.”

“You are too. The second I asked if you were a lesbian your entire face changed.”

“It did not.”

“You should see yourself, your cheeks are all red.”

“It’s hot in here, aren’t you hot?” A bead of sweat dripped down the side of my face.

“Heat is an emotion.”

I laughed out loud. “That’s ridiculous. Heat is a physical condition.”

“Brought on by emotion.”

“Or temperature.”

“The temperature in and of itself is irrelevant. Unless you’re moving through it or self-combusting, you don’t feel the heat. This is basic physics. So what’s got you all worked up? What’s making you feel the heat, so to speak?”

“I don’t know, maybe the goddamn klieg lights.”

“And why?”

“Because they’re hot.”

“What if I told you the lights were shut off ten minutes ago?”

“Were they really?”

“Immaterial.”

“Of course it’s material, you just said what if. I have the right to know whether we’re speaking hypothetically or not.”

“That is exactly my point. We’re not talking about the lights, we’re not talking about the heat, we’re not talking about any physical characteristic of the set. We are talking about why when I asked if you were a lesbian you got flustered.”

“I am not flustered!” I shouted, heat brimming beneath my skin, a mockery of my argument. Whatever argument that was. Confused, and embarrassed by the force of my words, I turned my head the other way. Across the set, a group of young women sat laughing and smoking cigarettes. Their easy communication made me angry. So free and libertine they were, working on a radical porno film. I felt even more isolated, more protective of my own world.

Alexis put her hand on my shoulder. “I didn’t mean to upset you. I have too many freaked-out people around here already.”

“I’m not freaked out.” I turned to face her. “It’s just that this ghostwriter thing won’t work if you keep asking the questions.”

“But it’s only fair. Yesterday I talked for three hours about my adolescent masturbation to
Playboy.
All I’m asking for is a little reciprocity.”

“The more you know about me, the less you’ll trust me. I lose my authority.”

“You have no authority, Rachel, you work for me.”