Table of Contents
DEDICATION
To Cathy S. and Grady S. III
Authors Note
There are drawings and paintings in this book, and there are words. The pictures and the words do not go together in any consistent relationship; although they feature many of the same places, ideas, and people, the order of the pictures has no particular meaning.
This is nonfictionboth parts record what things looked like from where I was standing. However, in the text, I consciously distort reality in three ways:
1. I have changed peoples names, along with the names of film companies and movies. This is not so much to disguise people (obsessives will be able to trace all the main characters back to their actual stage names) as to remind readersand myselfthat there is probably more to them than I managed to see or record.
2. In very rare cases involving physical danger, I have altered inessential details (names of birthplaces, et cetera) and divided people in half (for example, splitting characteristics and adventures of Diana from Austin between Lisa from Austin and Carla from Jersey City) in order to protect them from their enemies.
3. Since very famous people who arent in porn, or at least gossip about them, is essential to the texture of life in Los Angeles in general and the adult industry in particular, realism demands I include them. For legal, artistic, and humanitarian reasons, its important to disguise the very famous people while still making it clear to the reader that the people being referred to are very famous, all without interrupting the flow of the story. How famous? About as famous as Dwight Eisenhower. Therefore, unless there is some reason to be specific, whenever any very famous person comes up in this book, I refer to him or her as Dwight Eisenhower. Needless to say, the actual Dwight Eisenhower is not directly responsible for any of the events or behaviors discussed in this book.
Valentines Day
At first, the only noise is coming from trucks washing over a nearby road, and this sounds like it does at nightlike enormous things going on underwater. I feel small. Im in a car parked on a nowhere corner where no one lives and what light there is, from the gas station, wedges itself in around the air pockets where the tinting hasnt stuck to the windows, making shapes. My knuckles are cold. All of this is normal for people on Valentines Day. This is years agobefore I had done porn, or ever thought I would.
At eight oclock on every Valentines Day there are people who wait, and who dont know whats going to happen. In Europe theres a time difference, so its already happening, whatever it is. In Japan, its called a chocolate obligation and they are now sleeping off, or waking up next to, whatever its done for them. I hope it does something for themyou hear things can be hard, romantically speaking, for the Japanese. In Brooklyn, people are still waiting in the backseats of cars.
Some are tired, scared, or bored. Some think theyre going to ruin everythingsome are right. Some have flowers or headaches or both, some are going to cry, some are taking pills or rehearsing what theyll say, some have skin problems that have just gotten started, some dont care but are doing it anyway and dont think much about it, some are doing it but dont think itll work, some will never do it again but dont know that yet, some will go home on a train and swear into the reflection on the other side of the train car that they will spend every night from now on alone in front of a TV flipping to any show where anyone is talking about anything as long as it isnt them or maybe just watching static. And theyll eat whatever they want from a bowl and drink tea even after it gets cold and not care forever until everyone forgets that they ever lived. Some want to call ahead and ask the Japanese how itd gone.
Im in the backseat of a car. Punks are not supposed to have to do this kind of thing, and, maybe because I never have before, now that Im here I feel hyperaware of all the other lone people who must also be waiting in the dark all over the rest of the hemisphere. I never realized, I say to them in my head, at the beginning of my date. The conditions here are awful. You all should unionize or somethingcollectively bargain, like.
The hired driver of the hired car had stopped and gotten out without saying why. Is this what happens when you pay people to drive you around? Thinking how things sometimes are over faster if you dont ask questions, I didnt ask questions. For a while, there is just the noise of traffic and dead air from a road I cant see and the usual blinking in the black and in the distance, like were in the electronics deparment after hoursbut at some point something in the car begins breathing.
When youre strangely dressed and worrying, it feels like anythinganythingmight be a big cold night-snake ready to ambush and fuck you. So whats this breathing? Is it just a sound made by this kind of car? Did he go to get it fixed? Isnt the Rumblers garage just over... No, its breathing. Someones mouth is valving gas around this car for sure. This isnt a limo, there isnt room for some secret person. Is a person in the trunk? Why did the driver leave me alone on Valentines Day with a person in the trunk? That isnt normal. Will I have to solve this? Fuck this Day.
The driver comes back, opens a bag of chips, gives them to a totally unexpected Puerto Rican boy in the passenger seat in front of me, gets back behind his wheel, and pulls back onto the road. The driver says, Thank you. I say, No problem. Then no one says anything.
Brooklyn spins around us, windows reflecting intersections and storefronts and forty-year-old abandoned cars. We almost kill someone on a bicycle.
My instructions are, basically, to act stupid. My porno date wants to be taken someplace where she might see Puff Daddy. This is our first date, so I have to try to act like someone who someone who would want to go somewhere where she might see Puffy would want to be at that place withuntil I figure out how she really is and can act some other way. Im scared. Im also happy and lucky. I breathe and hear my own breathing and am glad to hear it still sounds like me. Trying not to overprepare, I watch the Brooklyn usual go by to the tune of Godflesh songs Im playing in my head: an ad for gum; capsized strollers; the grease-smeared hotbox of a shallow-fronted take-out place full of fizzing Chinese; tiny kids in coats alone outside delis; bikes chained with every kind of lock and missing every conceivable combination of parts like a forensic display on methods of bicycle decomposition; the tags of world-famous street-art geniuses and of people who never tagged again; the stoic, eaten globe of a broken subway-stop pole casually decapitated for the thousandth time; JMZ trestles casting piano-key shadows; Fat Alberts Warehouse; whole blocks that havent heard English in decades; a restaurant that used to be a hat shop; a church that used to be a furniture store; a nothing that used to be a theater; dogs tied to anything vertical; stained buses like rotten fridges shoving themselves up the lane from red light to red light; a pile of televisions and fans half covered in plasticexpecting rain; and pizza places painted the colorsred, yellow, greenof the pizza version of the Italian flag. These things feel good and familiar. Tonight, nothing else will be both. Im starting to think the kid in the front seat might somehow work against me on my date, so Im relieved when we get to the girls placeon a warehousily empty streetand she saysthrough the speakerto let the car go while she finishes getting ready.
