Snuff

  Kid 72 goes, “Why’d a star like Cassie Wright ever want to kill herself?”

  Maybe for the same reason superstar Megan Leigh shot more than fifty-four films in three years and then bought her mom a half-million-dollar mansion. Only then did the star of Ali Boobie and the 40 D’s and Robofox shoot herself in the head.

  Isn’t a kid alive who doesn’t dream about rewarding her folks, or punishing them.

  It’s how come legendary woodsman Cal Jammer stood in the rain in his ex-wife’s driveway and shot himself in the mouth.

  It’s why pussy queen Shauna Grant died at the business end of her own .22-caliber rifle. And why one night, Shannon Wilsey, the blonde high goddess of porn known as ‘Savannah’, went out to her garage and put a bullet into her head. My money’s on the idea that Cassie Wright’s set out to cushion the future for some baby she had a long ways back. If Cassie kicks it today, after setting this record, the residuals from World Whore Three and her cross-marketed T–shirts, her lingerie and toys, not to mention her backlist of movie titles, that income stream will make her long-lost kid…filthy rich. So rich he can forgive old Cassie. For how she got knocked up. How she gave up the baby. That, and the entire fucked-up, screwed-up, sad, wasted way old Cassie lived and died.

  If she does the penance of six hundred dudes, Cassie Wright will be forgiven.

  Me, personally, I tell dude 137 how I’m adding an embossed slogan to my dildos. Cast in high-relief going around the base, it’s going to say, “The Dick That Killed Cassie Wright…” On the thickest part, so if you twist it the letters of the writing stimulate the clit.

  “You have a dildo?” dude 137 says. On his breath, the smell of flask hooch. The wax-candle smell of lipstick. Dude’s wearing tinted lip gloss.

  Damn straight, I tell him. A dildo in six different colors, one butt plug, and a double-headed whopper. Plus, I got a life-sized blow-up doll in development.

  Dude 137 goes, “You must feel very proud.”

  Used to be, I tell him, I’d move ten thousand units in a month. My cut on that was 10 percent of the list price. Other dudes, Cuervo for one, they add a few inches to their product. Could be Cuervo starts with a real casting, but what eventually hits the shelf is longer and thicker than he ever dreamed of getting it. Cuervo calls it ‘artistic license’, but it’s false advertising. No point calling a product true-to-life if it’s not.

  Kid 72 stands there, white petals dropping off his flowers. One hand, his fingers are rubbing the little silver cross hanging from the chain around his neck.

  Every breath, I feel the gold locket Cassie gave me bumping and pinched between my pecs. Inside that little gold heart rattles the pill. The gold, sticky with blood from my nipple.

  “Is that really Cord Cuervo?” says dude 137. Squinting to look through the fog of dope smoke and cologne, dude 137 goes, “The star of Lay Misty for Me and The Importance of Balling Ernest?”

  Nodding my head. And Lady Windermere’s Fanny, I tell him. All classy, high-brow projects. I wave at Cord, and he waves back.

  Number 49. Number 567. Number 278. The dudes that Sheila calls back, they each pick up their sack of clothes and follow her up some stairs. Nobody but Sheila comes out. My bet is, once you’re done, they exit you out some other way. No risking that some dude will backtrack and tell us what to expect. The legal standard for a gang bang is called “instances of sex,” meaning any hole – her cunt, ass, or mouth – and any instrument – your dick, finger, or tongue – but for only one minute. No, you follow Sheila through that door, and a minute later you’re gone. Whether or not you cum, you’ll find yourself undressed and shoved out some fire exit, pulling on your pants in the alley.

  Dude 137, still squinting across at Cord, says, “Now, that’s a pathetic sight.” He nods at Beamer Bushmills and Bark Bailey, going, “Imagine the person who could stay in that pubescent mind-set and devote his life to lifting weights and ejaculating on cue. To remain so aggressively retarded, arrested in such early-adolescent values, until he wakes up as a saggy, flabby, middle-aged train wreck.”

  Swear, the dude looks square at me when he says the ‘train wreck’ part, but maybe he was just looking at me. I say there’s worse that can happen. A dude could end up cast a couple seasons in a prime-time hit TV series, then lose the role because of some messy sex scandal, then find he’s so associated with the old series – maybe playing some dopey private detective – that he’ll never get another decent acting job the rest of his career. I say that would be genuine tragic.

  And I tell dude 137, in case he wants to cover his bald spot, I got a spray in my bag that might work. Pointing with my toe – I always wear flip-flops on a shoot – with my big toe I show him the trail of hair that follows him. Rose petals or bronzer or hair, we all leave our tracks.

  Looking from his hair on the concrete, then to me, then to Sheila checking her clipboard across the room, dude 137 yells, “Chop-chop.” He yells, “You want to goose it a little, honey?”

  I ask him, does he got some better place to be? Some audition, maybe? Not me, I tell him. I can wait. I say, because of what we do today, to that woman back there, some kid she’s never met will never have to work another day in his life. The way today works is, I have to be Mr. Last.

  Looking at kid 72, the dude goes, “One has to wonder how many children have been sired by those men, making the films they do.” Looking at me, dude 137 goes, “If indeed we all leave our tracks.”

  It’s never happened, I say.

  And dude 137 goes, “Nice locket.” He reaches a hand toward Cassie’s necklace, the little gold heart pasted with blood between my pecs, his fingernails shining, buffed bright and clear-coated.

  ∨ Snuff ∧

  10

  Mr. 72

  I tell those guys, “Porn babies.” Shaking my roses at the 137 guy and Branch Bacardi, I say, “They exist.” Petals fluttering everywhere, I say, “There are kids who get conceived during adult movies. I mean, when those movies get made.”

  Mr. Bacardi shakes his head, saying, “Urban legend.”

  Guy 137 says, “Love child.”

  “That’s a stretch,” Mr. Bacardi says, “to call anything conceived during an all-leather backdoor dog-pile gang-bang video a ‘love child’.”

  And I tell them that’s not funny.

  The 137 guy says, “No, wait.” He says, “Rumor is, there was a kid conceived during The Blow Jobs of Madison County.”

  Mr. Bacardi says, “No.” Shaking his head, he says, “She terminated.”

  And guy 137 says, “That’s what the industry calls an ‘outtake’.”

  I tell them that’s really not funny. My hands shake so hard the petals pile up around my feet.

  And Branch Bacardi asks me, “Who, then? Can you name even one performer who had a porn baby?”

  I point up at a video monitor, where Cassie Wright’s wearing rice powder on her cheeks and ink-black geisha eye makeup, playing a lovely demure Japanese-American heroine in Snow Falling on Peters. Cassie Wright, I tell them. She had a child.

  Her folks live in Montana, I say, where her mom still works for the local school district and her dad does dry cleaning. Twenty years ago, they say, Cassie came home and told them she was pregnant. Cassie didn’t look pregnant. She’d bleached her hair and dieted away half herself. She was driving a Camaro so new it still had dealer plates, painted midnight black. Their little girl told them she’d just shot her first masterpiece, World Whore One, and she tried to explain to them about an internal pop shot. The way, sometimes, it doesn’t work perfectly. Cassie said she’d been late for three weeks and pissed hot on a pregnancy stick. She’d asked to stay with them until she’d had the baby, and they’d told her no. World Whore had made Cassie an instant star, and her hometown was too small for people not to recognize their prodigal daughter.

  In secret, her mom mailed her money every week. So did her dad. To an address here in the city. But they never saw the baby.

  Guy 137 and Branch Bacardi j
ust look at me. Guy 137 holding and petting his stuffed dog. Mr. Bacardi fiddling with the gold locket around his neck, rolling it between his thumb and gun finger.

  “Parents,” Mr. Bacardi says, “they’ll screw you up every time.”

  This isn’t a joke, I say. Porn babies, they’re more than just the by-products of the sex industry. The leftover veal calves of adult entertainment. A spin-off product like new strains of hepatitis and herpes.

  Guy 137 lifts his hand, wiggling the fingers in the air, until I stop talking.

  “Hold on,” he says. “I have to ask: what’s an internal pop shot?”

  I stare at him a beat.

  Mr. Bacardi says, “I can take that one.”

  I nod my head for him to take over.

  Branch Bacardi looks up and clears his throat. His voice flat and even, as if he were reading from a book, he says, “The male performer achieves orgasm inside the female performer, without wearing a condom. After he withdraws, the female performer contracts her pelvic floor with enough force to forcefully expel the ejaculate from her vaginal orifice.”

  Any color drains down from the 137 guy’s face. Pale and wide-eyed, he says, “Hardly the best form of birth control…”

  My point exactly.

  But, Mr. Bacardi says, you can’t wear condoms and expect your product to sell in Europe. His head still tilted back, he’s looking at Snow Falling on Peters, where Cassie Wright is being marched at bayonet point and shipped off to a Japanese-American internment camp.

  Still fingering the locket, Mr. Bacardi says, “She was so pretty…”

  Guy 137 sighs, saying, “The face that caught a thousand facials.”

  My point is, these kids aren’t a joke. Or an urban legend.

  Another sprinkle of rose petals spiral to the floor.

  Branch Bacardi says, “But can you name one?”

  On the monitors, Cassie’s embroidered silk kimono slides to the dusty floor of her barracks in the Nevada desert. In the background bubbles a hot tub overflowing with giggling women, their faces powdered white with rice flour. Pouring sake on each other’s bare breasts. The internment-camp commandant walks into the barracks, carrying a coiled whip.

  My roses are almost nothing left but stems and thorns.

  The girl with the clipboard and stopwatch is walked all the way across the room, over next to the food. With my free hand, I wave for Mr. Bacardi and guy 137 to lean in closer. Keeping my voice lower than the noise of the whip cracking, I whisper.

  Tapping the tip of my gun finger to my chest I mouth the word ‘Me’.

  I’m not a joke or a legend.

  I am that porn baby.

  ∨ Snuff ∧

  11

  Mr. 137

  Wouldn’t you know it? It’s the damned shampoo. That ‘100 Strokes’ crap Cassie Wright launched. So what if the bottle’s the perfect shape for…But wash, rinse, and repeat for a couple days, and you’ll go bald. All this damage just so maybe Miss Wright will smell it in my hair and consider it a compliment.

  Not that she could smell anything. The place reeks like a stockyard.

  Shaking his head, Branch Bacardi looks through the shifting herd of naked men. Pointing at actor 72, where he stands in a pool of white rose petals across the room, Bacardi says, “Dude there?” Bacardi says, “Little dude’s a total boner-kill.” The finger he’s pointing, he turns that hand, cupped palm up, and Branch says, “Dude, spare me some wood?” Cupping his brown hand, the palm stained the same bronzer as the fingers, Bacardi shoves his hand at me. His brown eyes look at me. They look at his open hand. Look at me. Bacardi says, “A pill, dude?”

  I tell him to take his own.

  Shaking his head, Bacardi says, “Didn’t bring none.”

  Shaking my head, I say I need my stash. The pill inside his pretty little heart-shaped girly-girl locket, I tell him. Bacardi should swallow that.

  Touching the gold locket, where it rests between his shaved pecs, Branch lets his mouth crack open. His Adam’s apple jumps with a swallow. Tapping the locket, Branch says, “Ain’t that kind of pill.” He says, “Dude.”

  Standing across the room, as far as he could walk without leaving the building, actor 72 stands, one hand rubbing the little silver cross that hangs from his neck chain. Rubbing the cross between his thumb and index finger. His green eyes looking everywhere but at Bacardi and me. The actor’s other arm still cradles the bouquet of roses.

  “Besides,” Bacardi says, tapping the locket so hard his chest echoes with a deep, hollow thump, “this here’s for a friend.” He says, “I’m just safekeeping it.”

  He’s Branch Bacardi, I tell him. He won’t need some crutch to perform.

  “You’re Dan Banyan, dude,” Bacardi says.

  Was Dan Banyan, I tell him.

  Actor 72, he drops his top-secret maternity bomb, then hangdogs it away from us, fast, his bare feet slapping the concrete floor. Stomping hard as anybody can against cold concrete, sprinkling rose petals every step.

  “Banyan dude don’t need pills,” Bacardi says, his bronzer arm bent to keep that hand out, the bicep and triceps jumping inside his skin. Flexing and relaxing, his number ‘600’ expanding and shrinking, his arm has a life of its own. Breathing. “Dude like Dan Banyan, private-detective dude, wasn’t you, like, banging ten walk-ons every episode? Every babe client and witness and, like, lawyer,” Bacardi says. “Dude’s a babe meat grinder…”

  Nodding after number 72, I say, “You have to admit, he does look like her.”

  Above the young man, the television hanging over his head shows Miss Wright’s groundbreaking civil-rights statement about racism, the sexy comedy where a fresh-faced college sophomore comes home for Christmas and tells her doting parents that she’s dating a chapter of the Black Panthers. It’s called Guess Who’s Coming at Dinner. Later re-released as Black Cock Down.

  “Dude,” Bacardi says, “I’ll pay you, after.” His hand out, he says, “Promise.”

  I put another pill between my lips, leaving one fewer in the bottle.

  “Fifty bucks,” Bacardi says. “Cash.”

  And I swallow. Nodding at number 72, I tell Bacardi, “That troubled young man looks a great deal like you also.”

  Bacardi looks. At the actor with his roses. Then at Miss Wright stretching her lips around a fat black erection. And he says, “Didn’t happen.”

  Looking at the locket on his chest, the gold shining pink through a dried layer of his nipple blood, I say, “Just take your own pill.”

  “That’s how come I’m in the business so long, dude,” Bacardi says. “My whole life, I never shot nothing but blanks.” Snapping his fingers at me, Bacardi says, “One pill and I’ll sign your teddy bear you got.”

  Mr. Toto. The pen’s still hooked behind one dog ear. I shrug, Sure. And I hand him over to Bacardi. The brown fingers take the canvas dog, and I wait.

  Bacardi’s eyes fixed on his writing, scratching the pen down the dog’s canvas leg, Bacardi says, “You met Ivana Trump?” He looks up at me. “And Tina Louise? Like in Gilligan’s Island?” He says, “What’s she like?”

  His teeth, those kind of too-white caps. The white of subway tiles and police cars. Public-bathroom white. The man by whom all other men have measured themselves for a generation. The biggest woodsman in porn.

  I ask, Are you really sterile?

  Bacardi holds Mr. Toto, turning the dog and looking from name to name. “Lizbeth Taylor,” he reads. “Deborah Harry…Natalie Wood…” He hands the dog back, saying, “I’m impressed.” Mr. Toto’s canvas is smudged with bronzer, brown fingerprints. Bacardi’s signature is a huge ‘B’, a second huge ‘B’, both letters trailing off into illegible black-ink scrawls.

  I take Mr. Toto from him, telling him, “And now the fifty dollars.”

  Bacardi snorts, his shoulders slumping, rounded, and his mouth hanging so slack that his heavy, square chin hides the locket, almost resting on his shaved pecs. “Dude…” Bacardi says, “how come?”

/>   Now, me with my hand out, cupped palm up, I say, “Because Dan Banyan was a lot of house payments and car payments and credit-card interest ago. Because right now you need a pill and I need the funds.”

  From across the room, number 72’s walking this way. Not all at once. He takes a couple steps to the buffet, where he eats a potato chip. He takes another step to stand next to the talent wrangler, says something in her ear, and she flips through the sheets on her clipboard. All this time, he’s working a big circle back toward Bacardi and me.

  The talent wrangler shouts, “Gentlemen, may I have your attention?” Looking at her clipboard, she shouts, “May I have the following three performers…”

  Men at the buffet stop chewing. The veterans freeze, the plastic razors hovering over the leather of their calf muscles and glutes. The men holding mobile phones to one ear, or wearing cordless headsets, they stop talking, silent, and lift their heads to listen.

  “Number 21…” the wrangler shouts. “Number 283…and number 544.” She smooths the papers on her clipboard and lifts one arm straight overhead to wave her hand in the air. “Right this way, gentlemen,” she says.

  I shake the pill bottle, half empty now, so the remainder of the pills rattle, and I say, “That was a close call.” I say, “Now, fifty dollars, or take that pill you’re safeguarding.”

  Branch Bacardi breathes in, the pecs and lats and obliques of him ballooning huge, and he breathes out one long, breath-minted sigh. “So,” he says, “you really hung out with Dolly Parton?”

  My pulse pounding in my ears, I close one eye. Open it. Close my other eye. Open it. I’m not going blind, not yet.

  And a voice says, “Can I talk to you?” A man’s voice.

  Wouldn’t you know it? Here’s number 72, standing close by, only a couple steps behind Bacardi and me.

  One of his brown fingers tapping the gold locket, the fingernail outlined in darker brown, Bacardi says, “This pill, one of them miracle drugs.” Tapping the locket, he says, “Don’t matter what’s wrong, dude, this here will cure you.” His smile flat-lines, those fake teeth disappeared behind his tanned lips, and Branch Bacardi says, “This baby will cure anything.”