‘… Porno was self-policing until the second term of the last administration, when, as you know, all of a sudden we had a porno president. Porno, under this porno presidency, stopped policing itself and entered its Salo period.’
‘Sorry, Karla. Salo?’
Karla considered her interlocutor, and wondered if there’d be any point in telling him about Mussolini and the Republic of Filth. She was enough of an American to grant interviews more or less automatically, but she had run a light check on Clint; she knew about his recent stay at John Working’s joint in the San Sebastiano Valley; she knew the circulation figures of the Morning Lark, and had some idea of its contents.
‘An embrace of dirt,’ she said. ‘Immediately there was an overwhelming emphasis on male-female sodomy. The rallying cry was Pussies Are Bullshit. They’d sign off with it on the phone: “Pussies Are Bullshit!” One director said, “With anal, the actress’s personality comes out.” Oh sure: her personality. They talked about female virility, female testosterone. Which is strange considering the next phase, post-Pussies Are Bullshit.’
Clint steadied his dark glasses and resumed his attempt to stare out Karla’s breasts. They stared back, irreproachably innocent and unblinking; and they awakened humility in him. He thought it was beautifully generous of her not to hide them, to allow them to be warmly present. It also occurred to him that at any moment they might count down from three and he’d do exactly as they said.
‘The essential self-policing had to do with two areas, male-female violence and paedophilia. Male-female violence was called Black Eye, and began with the notorious “line”, Male Dawn. They’d tell the girls: Don’t be too proud to cry while we do this. Basically they roughed them up, and roughed them up for real. The paedophiliac tendency was unofficially known as Short Eye, where the girls wore kiddie clothes and talked in squeaky voices and played with dolls while granddads peed in their mouths. And worse. I’m serious. The nymphets weren’t nymphets, of course. Along with your HIV-clearance, your birth certificate is your work permit. You have to produce it, even in geronto-porno, or White Hair. Even eighty-five-year-olds have always had to prove that they’re over seventeen. That’s porno.’
Clint thought: codger-todger. Good riff.
‘All this came to an end when the new administration started their holy war on porno. Black Eye and Short Eye disappeared right away. Pussies Are Bullshit staggered on for a while, because male-female sodomy is not illegal in every state. But then some busybody – some spoilsport or killjoy, Clint – would buy a sodomy tape in Arkansas, where it isn’t illegal, and take it to Alabama, where it is, and you’d be indicted in Montgomery. And so on. But porno people are believers too. It’s the contrarian nature of the form. And they wouldn’t give it up. Dozens of production companies were wiped out and some of the very top guys went to jail. And in an Alabaman correctional facility, I can assure you, they don’t need to be told that pussies are bullshit. Then the zoning loophole, and the founding of Lovetown. And the dominant genre, these days, is unquestionably Hatefuck.’
They talked on – about Hatefuck, about Cockout, about Boxback, about Red Face, about Yellow Tongue … After an hour with Karla, Clint was becoming vaguely aware of his surroundings – glass, mirrors, tubular furniture. It might have been any old ad-firm except for the posters: porno girls, in porno colours, with porno pouts … Throne Together, Royal Flesh, Pump and Circumstance, Anne of a Thousand Lays, Mary Queen of Sluts, Falstiff, King Rear, and Princess Lolita 2, Princess Lolita 3, Princess Lolita 4 …
Feeling something lift from her, Karla followed Clint’s gaze. She said,
‘They go together, don’t they – porno and puns? It couldn’t be otherwise. Because humourlessness is the lifeblood of porno. One genuine smile, and everything would disappear.’
‘It’s finished, though, this, isn’t it: video. Now it’s the Web.’
‘Rentals are dying. Despite Princess Lolita. See the girls. They have a flared-pants look. A beehive look. The future’s in interactive. What they call “self-tailoring”. And the viewer will direct.’
Clint slid off his sunglasses, and smiled, deciding to exercise his new confidence: the confidence he enjoyed as a Laureate of the San Sebastiano Academy for Men of Compact Intromission. He said,
‘Do you miss it? Performing?’
‘No,’ said Karla, who had answered this question, and all others, many times before.
‘You were an abused child, weren’t you. Were they all that, the actresses?’
‘There’s something in it. It’s the … creation myth of porno. But porno’s just an industry now. Times change, Clint. I know a girl who goes to the Mature Video Awards with her parents. Her father came out brandishing her statuette for Best Anal.’
‘Is there anything you wouldn’t do? As an actress. Fisting and pissing and that?’
‘… I stopped before it went that way. I stopped before Pussies Are Bullshit.’
‘Uh, fancy a drink later?’
‘With a view to what?’
‘You tell me. You’re the pro. Another day, another cock. You tell me.’
He noticed that she was staring at him with unchecked fascination – with entirely undissimulated fascination. Clint started to feel twenty-seven thousand dollars poorer – and Karla hadn’t yet said what Karla said next.
‘That’s right. And the men I’m used to’, she said, and suddenly seized the tumbler of water on her desk, ‘are like this.’
Clint followed instructions: faced with noncompliance, construct the counterfactual. ‘Well. Wouldn’t have worked out anyway. Off to Hawaii in an hour or two.’
‘I thought you were seeing Dork Bogarde.’
‘He’s uh, he’s out of town himself.’
‘No he’s not,’ said Karla, standing. ‘I’m expecting him at Dolorosa Drive tomorrow morning. He’s doing a scene with Charisma Trixxx. Day one of Crown Sugar.’
‘Hold up. Got me days confused.’ Clint added ruefully, ‘Kate, she’s always going on at me about it. So maybe I uh, I’ll look in. Fly on the wall.’
With an illegible shudder she said, ‘This set will most definitely be closed.’
That evening, after three hours of Black Eye and Cockout in his hotel, Clint attained a sense of belonging: a sense of belonging, in Lovetown.
Sir Dork Bogarde lived in a porno pad with a porno pal, Hick Johnsonson, in Lovetown’s Fulgencio Falls. When Clint arrived, and was made welcome, they were out on the porno patio … In the small garden enchained porno parrots swore and shat around the porno pool. Dork lolled on a porno pouffe, his head supported by additional porno pillows; Hick poured the porno wine. It seemed that Dork had only one thing he wanted to talk about, however: porno pay.
‘I mean there am I,’ he said, with a certain finicky jauntiness embedded in his indignation, ‘naked as I am. I’m out there, with sweat pouring off my person, cocking out … some little rube who’s just climbed off the Dog – and I get three hundred dollars? Excuse me. Excuse me. While the guy watching, in an easy chair, some … asshole from Ye Olde England, gets ten grand? They do me that indignithy? I don’t think so. I don’t think so.’
Sincerely puzzled, and yet with the rosiness of genuine admiration (indignithy: he made other slips like that – but you had to hand it to the guy, with his porno pectorals, his porno ponytail, his monstrous porno penis, familiar to all Dork’s fans), Clint said,
‘Yeah but you’re the one getting it wet, aren’t you mate.’
Sir Dork implored Clint to consider something: porno pressure.
‘Did it get here yet?’ Dork asked Hick. ‘It’, Dork had told Clint earlier, was ‘the tape of the test-fuck of Charisma Trixxx’, to whom Dork was to be introduced the following day, on the set of Crown Sugar. ‘Clint? Could you perform with three breaks for coffee and one for lunch? The lights? The people?’
‘Yeah but there’s a way round that now, isn’t there.’ Clint thought resentfully of Karla White, and what she had told him about
porno and Potentium: ‘They all use it and they all say they don’t.’
‘I never use it,’ said Dork.
Clint recalled her words. Potentium, said Karla, had turned out to be a Midas curse for the porno male. Pre-Potentium, a flop meant a skipped day and a net loss. Post-Potentium, it meant that the man was ready fifteen minutes late, and had splotchy cheeks (hence Red Face) and a porno headache. But there were fewer suicides and crackups, and they all started using it. ‘The change sparked controversy,’ as Clint would later write; and we must remember, along with Dork Bogarde, that ‘this was at the heighth of Pussies Are Bullshit’ … Some said that Potentium was bullshit too: it affronted the market forces having to do with the reality of arousal. People who argued that way turned out to be purists – because the customer didn’t care. ‘Being able, or likely, to perform in public’, Karla said, ‘was once a marketable skill. Now anyone can do it. The men – the grunts, the stiffs – never were a draw. And now they’re just life-support systems for a tab of Potentium.’ Karla said she was surprised. She said she had always thought that the customer was a lot gayer than that …
Dork now confronted Clint with a porno paradox. ‘See, Clint,’ he said, ‘we get pressure coming the other way: Cockout. How can a man fulfil his fanthasy when, hanging over him at all times, he faces the spectre of Cockout?’
After a while Dork returned to the subject of porno pay, and porno percentages, until Hick confirmed the arrival of the tape of the test-fuck of Charisma Trixxx.
‘Look at that,’ said Dork, gesturing at the screen. ‘Suave ass. Sincere bush. I don’t just mean the mohawk. I mean the presentation. I’m talking the whole box.’
‘She chugs good,’ allowed Hick.
‘Good neck-work on the back-take.’
‘And I like the tongue-slide on the feed-draw.’
Fifteen minutes later Hick said, ‘Here we go. Gracious address for the facial.’
‘… Wow,’ said Dork. ‘See that? Right in the eye.’ Dork turned to Hick (it was established earlier that Hick had been known to do Gay). ‘Does that hurt? I mean, does it kind of burn?’
‘Burn? It’s like fucking fire. And she didn’t even flinch.’
‘I won’t have any kind of problem tomorrow. Flinch? She didn’t even blink. Clint, hadn’t you …?’
‘Yeah well thanks, lads,’ said Clint. ‘Dork mate. I happen to know one of your uh, conquests.’ And he felt luxury as he pronounced her name: ‘Donna Strange …’
‘Excuse me?’
‘Donna Strange …’
‘Excuse me?’
‘Uh – big English brunette with a silver streak in her hair and a crinkly mouth … She sucked you off underneath a pyramid and then you had her up the arse in a helium balloon. Then you landed on Everest and shot all over her tits.’
‘… I spent on her breatsts? That’s so—passé. You’d think I’d remember that.’
On his way back to the hotel Clint pulled in at another video store. And there it all was, yet again, laid out in categories, like a dramatisation of the words of Karla White. Not Hatefuck, because everything was Hatefuck unless labelled otherwise. But Cockout, and Bullshit Cockout, and Boxback, and Red Face, and White Hair, and Yellow Tongue (‘Yellow Tongue’, she said, ‘is for those who miss the motel room, the handheld video cam, the ghoulish lighting, and the plain cast ill on drugs’), and, of course, the category called Princess Lolita.
He worked into the small hours on his starry-eyed profile of Dork Bogarde. Then, to release tension, he pounded out some Yellow Dog. At about noon, London time, he received the following message:
my only 1: thank u so much 4 your e of consol8ion. i don’t no y, but things r clearer now. it feels as if a gr8 w8 has been lifted from me. Even as my father lies in st &rew’s, f8ally unwell … u no what i’m thinking? i think i’m 4lling in love with u, clint. yes u, and no 1 else. u, clint! u, u, u! r u o fait with the poetry of ezra £? as i transmitted this, i thought of the lines: ‘& now i bring the boy in, on his knees, & send this 1,000 miles, thinking.’ i’m mad 4 u, clint. come 2 me on your return. only when u & i r 1 will i feel truly @ peace. 10derly, k8.
ps: i vener8 yellow dog. i lite c&les to yellow dog. i make a god of yellow dog.
Yellow Dog wiped away his tears and settled down to an hour or two of Yellow Tongue.
5. Cur moment
The third (and final) message from their mole, their enemy’s enemy, took the form of a no-fingerprints communication directed at Brendan’s laptop. Earlier that day a similarly anondot service-provider released six new stills of the Princess, one of which, sensationally, showed her daunted face half-dimmed by the shadow of the intruder … The message Brendan received ran as follows: ‘Ultimatum will be presented on February 10. Strongly advise immediate compliance. Please to reemphasise: the material on the Princess is all light and magic. All light and magic.’ Feeling sick to his stomach, but also wonderfully lightheaded, Brendan issued a contemptuous press-release from Ewelme. Then he had his worst talk ever with the King.
‘Here’s a turn-up, sir,’ he began. ‘Captain Mate has resigned. Effective immediately.’
‘I’m very pleased to hear it, Bugger.’
‘It’s a bit rum, though, sir. We can—’
‘I’ve been meaning to chuck him for years.’
‘Sir?’
‘Yes, Bugger. On account of his physical appearance. But I could never be fagged. Now never mind him, and get on with it. You’ve got that glint in your eye, Bugger. Yes you have. You’re preparing me for something horrid, I can tell.’
Henry looked out of the window of the Royal Train; but there was nothing to see. To be heading north, north from Ewelme with its mists and brown spume, and at the very worst time of year … He thought: the cur moment. I shall have to revisit it, relive it. The cur moment.
‘That’ll be all, Love.’ Henry waited. He said, ‘Do you believe in life after death?’
‘You’re changing the subject.’
‘I’m not changing the subject. It’s practically the only subject there is. With you. These days, darling.’
‘Well yes I do. Do you?’
‘… No.’
‘See? What you have, it isn’t faith. It’s just habit.’
‘Faith … faith is a power. It gets weaker as you age. Like all powers.’
‘You have changed the subject. And the subject,’ said the Princess, ‘the subject is this. To distract attention from my uh, imbroglio in the Yellow House—’
‘Whatever that was.’
‘Whatever that was. To distract attention, and to win some sympathy from the media and the million,’ she said, ‘we’re going to Scotland to kill Mummy.’
‘Don’t. Be. Silly … Darling.’
After a while he said, ‘Bugger told me that you told him that there was something I could do. Uh, Brendan, rather. He took you to mean that there was something I could do – that would make it all right.’
‘One thing I will tell you is that this isn’t it. Murdering Mummy isn’t it. Oh I’m not going to spring to your rescue. You’ll have to get there on your own.’
Dusk was coming nearer. They rushed to meet it. He sat back, and looked for what comfort he could find in thoughts of He Zizhen.
In his bedroom at Tongue he was woken by the draughts at half past five. He kicked Love out of his army cot and then drank the tea with great gouts of brandy in it until his teeth stopped chattering. A bath of blood heat; a cold-water shave. He put on his black suit, and his hardiest overcoat – inherited from his father, Richard IV, and still a sober tribute to the protective power of cashmere and silk. He stepped out into the morning twilight and the cockcrow.
Unlike his numerical predecessor, who would habitually exhaust a dozen stallions in the space of an afternoon, Henry IX loathed anything that involved horses (with the single exception of Royal Ascot); but Pamela, of course, had been a lifelong equestrienne. Times beyond number he had shaken his head, from a seated position, and wa
tched her trot off, seemingly about thirty feet from the ground … That September, at Tongue, the Queen Consort did not return from her second ride of the afternoon. Her mare, Godiva, returned; but Pamela did not return. The King seized a bicycle in the courtyard and, with much wobbling and wiggling … But now, on foot, in his overcoat, Henry moved from gravel to lawn, beginning to retrace these steps.
He remembered the way the colour of the day changed. At first he was merely very frightened, mostly for himself (the bicycle), and also rather bored (he could already hear the exasperating halloos of normality regained). On the cinder path he pedalled to the shoulder of the slope, and turned: Godiva, riderless in the stableyard. And then the colour of the day changed.
It was he who found her … Pamela had told him about the softened thump of the horse’s hooves as you approached the chalk quarry, and thither he rode – until, with a horrified lurch, he skidded to a halt and assessed the obscenity in his path. A fat snake, already dead, already putrescent: fat, moist, yellow, like the voided boil of some tutelary troll or Friar Rush … Yes, he thought: Godiva could be forgiven for rearing at such a sight. And there, down the brambly slope, Pamela lay, in her boots, her jodhpurs, her tweed jacket, her velvet helmet, arched backwards over a boulder with her eyes wide open. The bike fell with a clatter and a brief purr of spokes. He moved through the snow-scape, the moonscape, of the winter chalk.
‘Oh no, Pemmy.’ But he stressed it on the second and fourth syllables: he said it as he had said it many times before, when being reminded of some recurrent social chore, when interdicting a loud headscarf, or when she brought off a forceful roll at ludo or backgammon.
Then, rhythmically gathering air for his moment, his cur moment, Henry said, ‘At least, at least, at least – at least there won’t be any more bally …’; and it was then that his shoulders began to shudder: ‘… any more bally three-a-clockers.’ And the words enveloped him like an unrecognisable fart, saying: yes, oh yes, this is you, this is you.