I think what she liked best about the adult film industry was the trade shows. They’d set her up at a table and she’d just sit there a-smiling and meeting her fans, signing posters for ’em, or the covers of her videos that they’d bring clutched in their fists. I didn’t want know where them hands’d been or what they’d been doing, but I could make me an educated guess.
They’d get their picture took with her, too. That was my job at them shows. I’d stand ’round behind of where she’s sitting at the table. I got me this old Polaroid and I’d snap away. We didn’t charge none—it was all promotion—but it got me thinking that there was money in there somewheres, you look hard enough. I just didn’t like the idea of it being Pinky’s ass we’d be exploiting, don’t matter she loved the work.
Or maybe it was just the attention she liked so much. Hell, we’d finish up at one of them shows and she’d be grinning from ear to ear like some old coon hound, treed himself a critter. I guess it was ’cause that was the closest she was ever gonna come to living her dream—being a movie star, I mean—and we both knowed it.
She was after me all the time to give it a shot my own self. I wouldn’t even have to do some guy, she’d tell me, we’d just do each other. But it weren’t anything I allowed I could do. I mean, we did it a time or two with each other, but it was only when we was drunk or bored and there weren’t no men around.
Don’t get me wrong, here. I ain’t no prude. I’d have me fellers whenever I wanted ’em afore my time in the county lockup. I just didn’t want no strings attached. Nothing complicated. If I was going to put out, it’d be for fun, not for profit. I can’t explain why. It’s all tied up in the business with Del, being told what to do and when and how and no never mind how you feel your own self.
Anywise, this depression of mine went on a couple of years, I guess, till finally I knew I had to do something or I might as well just lie in the bath, cut my damn wrists, and be done with it. Since I was no good at scamming no more, and I sure as hell wasn’t ready to peddle my ass, on film or on the street, I went and got me a job.
You shoulda seen the look on Pinky’s face when I told her.
“You’re doin’ what?” she says.
“I’m working in a print shop.”
“What do you know about printin’?”
“What’s to know?” I say. “They got these big ol’ machines do all the work. Only thing I gotta do is feed in the paper and collect the copies when they’re done.”
“You like this?” she asks.
“I dunno. I just got to be doing something.”
But I kinda did like it. Place I worked was open twenty-four hours and I was on the midnight shift, twelve to eight in the morning, Wednesday through Sunday. I wore me some baggy cargo pants and sneakers, big floppy Ts or sweatshirts. Didn’t have no makeup. Didn’t do nothing with my hair ’cept tie it back. I looked like some little ol’ mole gal, all small and dark and quiet. People didn’t pay me no never mind. Hell, in the City of Angels where there’s more pretty people per square inch, nobody saw me at all, and that suited me fine.
I was there maybe seven years when this guy named Hector Rivera come in and started in on a-working that late shift with me. He was like the boy version of me, all small and dark and baggy-clothed and all, ’cept he was smarter’n hell, especially when it come to computers. I liked to listen to him when he’d talk about these programs he was writing and what the future was gonna be like when everything had it a little machine brain giving it orders. Toasters, washing machines, TVs, hell, you name it. ’Spect they’ll come a time when they’ll just be sticking chips in the heads of the newborns, soon’s they pop out.
I hear people calling Hector a spic and shit like that and I’d get pissed, but never enough to do nothing. What was I gonna do? I was just going through the motions of being alive my own self, wasn’t like I could take on the trouble a someone else, too.
But we got along, him and me. He grew up dirt poor, too, ’cept it was in the barrios here. I asked him how he got to know so much about computers and he told me ’bout how it was in this school of his. The way he’d stay outta the way of the gangbangers and all was by hiding out in the computer labs. He spent him so many hours in there, wasn’t much he didn’t know about them machines in the end.
Part of his job at the copy shop was working at the computer, making people’s newsletters and resumes and the like look like they was made of gold. But whenever he had the time—and let me tell you, we had us a lotta free time most nights, ’specially on the weekends—he’d work on his own stuff. He had him this little computer no bigger’n a hardcover book when you folded it closed. He’d have that sucker plugged in and running first thing he did when he come in and every spare chance he’d be doing his own work on it. He had everything on there, all his files and the programs he was working on.
I thought it was like magic at first, but then he started in on showing me a thing or two and I got me pretty good with it, too, though for a long time I was like some old hen on the keyboard, hunt and pecking the letters with two fingers. But I got better and I liked the logic of the machines. They do what you told ’em to, and that’s all they do. Sure them machines is smart and fast and all, but they’re dumber’n fenceposts, too, ’cause you forget you just one little period or letter, and that program you’re writing don’t come out right. Weren’t like people. People, you never know what they’re gonna do, one moment to the next. Machines don’t take advantage of you like Del done, and they don’t go all to pieces like I done, neither. They just do what they’re told. And when I learned me about going on-line, well, a whole new world of possibilities opened up for me and I started to get some of that old Raylene Carter confidence back again.
It was Hector helped me set up Pinky’s Web site, a year or so after we started working together. We was cutting edge, let me tell you. Took a few years afore the rest of the world caught on. But porn’s always driven technology—that’s what Hector told me. Weren’t for porn, there wouldn’t be a VCR in most every house. Was gonna be the same thing with the Internet.
When we started, that site of Pinky’s was pretty primitive compared to what you can get you now. Weren’t much to see there, just teasers, but they did the job. We’d print up glossy eight-by-tens on the color photocopier, using quality paper, and mail ’em out to all these losers thought they was getting a piece of Pinky for their five or ten bucks. They could get ’em signed, too, ’cept it was usually me or Hector putting her name on ’em. We tried doing T-shirts, but they didn’t pan out the same. Most of them customers of ours just liked something they could hold in one hand while they kept busy with the other. We was gonna sell videos, too, but them sleazebag companies Pinky was working for wouldn’t give us a break on the wholesale price. The plan was we’d make some of our own—fake outtakes and bloopers and crap like that—and we was also setting up distribution for these programs Hector was writing, but then reality up and kicked me in the face again.
After my sister run off, I promised I’d never get that close to no one again—’cept for Pinky, I guess, but we was more joined at the hip than anything else. I mean, Pinky was always there, right from when we was knee high to a minute, and I figured she always would be. I just wasn’t letting nobody new into my life again.
Wrong on both counts.
I don’t know how it happened with Hector. He weren’t nothing like them cowboys I’m usually attracted to, and in those days, it’s hard to believe anybody’d be liking me none. I remember thinking I’d have to gussy myself up—to get him to like me enough to teach me stuff on the computers, I mean. I figured computer nerds just didn’t get none at all, and he’d be grateful enough for some flirting, but I wasn’t looking forward none to the cleavage and short skirts. Don’t ask me why. I still felt I was white trash, pure and simple—inside, like—but I couldn’t look the part no more. Didn’t know if I could act the part.
Turned out I didn’t have to.
Hector he liked me
just like I was, go figure. And the damnedest thing was, I took to liking him back. No, the damnedest thing was, I was all shy and holding back with him. Not on purpose, mind. It’s just how it happened. But we got along fine. Talked lots, something I never did with no man afore.
We talked about every fool thing you can imagine, I guess, but mostly we talked about computers, seeing’s how he plumb loved them machines. I was interested anyways, so I didn’t mind. He showed me stuff on that computer, taught me the inner workings so that I’d find myself understanding these programs he was writing. Hell, it come to that, I even started in on writing a few my own self.
Mostly it was just these little utilities, ways of making things work a little quicker, a little smoother, fixing bugs in programs that already existed. We’d work on that, late at night when only the odd damn fool’d be coming in for any photocopying. After a time of this, we took to necking in the back. We’d be kissing and stuff for hours. I can’t remember ever being with a guy afore that where we wasn’t having sex of some kind within an hour or two of meeting. But with Hector it was a good year and a half afore we got down to it, right there behind the counter, the door not even locked or nothing.
That first time he pretty much come as soon as I got his dick outta his pants, but he learned quick how to make me happy, too. I swear I never knowed it could be so … guess tender’s the word I’m looking for here. We had us maybe eight months of that, best times of my life, bar none, so I guess I shoulda knowed something bad was on its way, but it took me by surprise all the same.
No, I just never seen it coming, his leaving me like he did.
Happened one Sunday night, the hour hand creeping up on 4:00 A.M. I wasn’t gone more’n three, four minutes. Just long enough to slip ’round the corner to the 7-Eleven and get us some coffee. Just long enough for some strung-out junkie to come into the copy shop with a pistol in his fist.
I didn’t know that when I run into him in the doorway. He banged right into me on the way out, knocking the coffee outta my hands. Them foam cups exploded when they hit the pavement and I was already yelling at the guy. But then I seen the mitt full of money in the one hand, the gun in the other.
He was set to give me a whipping with that pistol of his. I could see that plain, no doubt in my mind. Everything slowed down and sped up, like I was drowning in molasses, but sliding down this steep slope at the same time. I saw the hand with the gun go up, setting to hit me, and was already backpedaling outta the way when I hear Hector cry out from inside.
“No!” he yells and comes clean over the counter like some old coon hound jumping a stump.
The gun in the junkie’s hand stops coming at my head. It points at Hector. It goes off.
The bullet hits Hector square in the chest and he goes flying back over the counter. It seems to take forever for him to land. The junkie’s halfway down the block while I’m just staring at Hector. Watching him fall. He hits the counter, slides off. There’s this look of surprise on his face that woulda been funny any other time. He disappears behind the counter and then there’s just this big red smear left on the top.
I can’t hear a damn thing as I go tearing into the copy shop. My ears are ringing fit to bust from that gunshot, fired so close to my head. I come skidding around the side of the counter, but I’m way too late. Hector’s already up and gone and all I got left of him is this limp, bloody body that looks like him, but don’t feel like much of nothing. Nothing that’s alive, leastways.
I’m still holding his head on my lap when the cops arrive.
I don’t go to that funeral neither.
Everybody at work don’t know what to make of me when I show up the next night for my shift, but what am I supposed to do? It ain’t me done nothing wrong. And I sure wasn’t gonna lose my job just because Hector took off on me. And ’sides, with him gone, there was no one else to do the work on the computer like he did. ’Cept me, of course.
Look, I know I’m sounding like some psycho, but I ain’t stupid. Some junkie shot my boyfriend, I’m not pretending any different. But Hector, he didn’t have to go and die on me, now did he? He didn’t have to leave me behind, all on my own, ’cept for Pinky.
All that kindness of his was just setting me up for this deep dark fall.
And then Pinky left me, too.
I don’t know how many hundreds of films Pinky made, but it were a lot. Not like she starred in ’em all or nothing. In the beginning she just got the bit parts, but then she started getting what she called the ingenue roles. She’d be the innocent little cornpone gal who’d get pulled into all that debauchery, which was kinda funny to me, knowing her like I did. If they wasn’t already using the term “sex bomb,” somebody woulda had to invent it for her.
But the thing is, she surprised me. She was pretty good at the acting part of it, so maybe, if she’d got her a decent break of some kind, she coulda been a real actress. Hard to tell, though, seeing’s how she let herself be seduced by all the attention she was getting on the porn scene and all. I guess in the end she was happy enough being a big fish in a little pond.
’Cept after a whiles they just wasn’t calling so much no more. Now when she got offered a part, it was playing the mama—once it was even a grandma—or in some scene where they got them a dozen or more folks going at it and she’d just be one more face in the crowd. And it just kept going on downhill from there.
It was her own damn fault. She lived too hard and all them drugs and the booze took their toll on her good looks. She got this hardness to her and I swear she started in looking twice her age. She could still perform, but the porn industry’s just like the rest of the world. They want their sweet young things. Want ’em pretty and built like only surgery can build ’em. ’Specially in this damn town.
Get to looking like Pinky and the work just dries up on you.
She still had her die-hard fans, but let me tell you, after seeing some of them at them trade shows, they weren’t nothing to be proud of. I seen hounds drag home better’n them, gophers and squirrels and crap, two, three days dead.
Even the Web site was a-floundering and eventually I just shut her down. To make any money she was gonna have to start doing animals or kids or something, and there was no way I was gonna let her do that. And to give Pinky her due, she drew the line her own self.
But I knew she was hurting. She missed the sex some, but mostly she missed the attention. She always was the kinda gal who liked to drop her panties in public, just for a laugh, but where that’s maybe kinda cute and sexy on a younger gal, it don’t seem near so endearing when you’re looking as haggard and burned-out as poor ’ol Pinky come to be.
The day she got offered the job of a fluffer—you know, the gal who gets the men hard for their scenes with the women on camera—well, she just lost it. I think the casting director was feeling sorry for her—being nice, you know, giving her some work—but Pinky didn’t see it that away. She went after that woman with a knife and cut her bad. Cut her and a couple of others on the set till somebody brought her down and then the cops come and took her away.
That was in ’95 and after we got done with the courts and all, she pulled six years in the pen.
We couldn’t afford no decent lawyer so we had to go with the one the court appointed for us, but I can’t even really blame him. See, we couldn’t post Pinky’s bail so she had to stay in jail all through the trial. That had its good and bad points. Being in there was like going through detox, and it weaned her off the dope and booze, but she ended up looking so rough and haggard I’m surprised she didn’t get more time just on account of looking the way she did, this being L.A. and all.
I thought the time I done in county was the worst point of my life, but the years Pinky spent in the penitentiary put a lie to that. And the curious thing is, I finally come to understand my mama moving close to the prison to be near Del like she did back when, ’cause I done the same thing now with Pinky.
‘Stead of walking to work, I had to commute n
ow. It was ’bout an hour on the bus. They say nobody walks in L.A., well, yeah, maybe, but there’s a lotta us can’t afford no car, not even some old piece a crap held together with tape and baling wire. And you know who we are. The blacks and the Mexicans, the immigrants and the white trash like me. Man, you get you a car and already you’re living high. Can’t afford an apartment? Hell, you can live in your car.
But I didn’t mind the long ride. I had me Hector’s notebook computer—it was in the copy shop when he died and nobody was paying any attention when I just kinda acquired it for my own. Tell you the truth, I think that’s pretty much the way he got it, “found” it somewheres. I’d bring it back and forth on the bus with me, sit in my seat and work on the programs, do my E-mail and stuff like that. Made the time fly by.
Occasionally some asshole’d try to rip me off—I mean, think about it. I’m just this little-bitty thing, riding public transport with a computer on my lap. You can hock one of them suckers for a week’s worth of fixes. But the first bunch tried to rob me, that switchblade of mine was in my fist and they knowed from the look in my eyes I wasn’t above cutting however many’s it took. After that I took to carrying a gun. A few times of waving it in their faces and word got out, I guess, ’cause I didn’t get bothered no more.
I kept working at the copy shop, but I didn’t make no more friends and nobody much liked working with me on that late shift. Maybe they was scared, on account of what happened to Hector, but mostly I think they just didn’t take a liking to me. I wasn’t making no effort to be sociable no more. What was the point? Look where it got me the last time.
Lotsa times they’d blow me off and I’d be in there all on my own-some, but it didn’t trouble me none. I had the shareware programs to keep me busy. I kept it up so I wouldn’t get bored, but all them little five- and ten-dollar checks from my satisfied customers that come trickling in let me save up for some new equipment, too. It let me go out and pay honest money for my upgrades and the like.