Three years ago, in early 2005, for a variety of reasons that I will never totally understand, I became extremely depressed, had something approximating a nervous breakdown, and was acutely suicidal for approximately three months. Every day when I woke up, I wanted to die. I entertained various methods: turning on the gas, shooting myself in the head, ingesting a bottle of pills. For reasons that, again, I will never totally understand, I never did kill myself. I bottomed out around my birthday, in April '05. And then, I began writing an autobiographical essay about my personal experiences in Porn Valley. From 1998 to 2003, I had lived in Los Angeles and worked as a freelance journalist. As a culture writer, I covered many topics, but the subject that was of greatest interest to me was the adult movie industry. On a regular basis, I would make my way around the Hollywood Hills and head into the Other Hollywood. What I saw there stayed with me; it haunted me, really. Finally, in late 2003, I relocated all the way across the country to New Orleans, Louisiana. I wanted to get out of Los Angeles, and I dreamed I would leave the ghosts of what I had seen in the Valley behind me. In reality, what's inside is what remains. I wrote "A Porn Valley Story" to exorcise my demons. Whether or not that worked is a mystery. After all, my life would take a very different turn in late 2005, when Hurricane Katrina arrived in New Orleans. "A Porn Valley Story" can be found in Best Sex Writing 2006, which was edited by Felice Newman and Frédérique Delacoste at Cleis Press, who were kind and generous enough to publish it. This week, I'm publishing "A Porn Valley Story" online for the first time in five installments. This isn't the end of this story, but it is one way I saw this world at one point in my life. The essay mentions my father, who was a writer. Now that the New York Times has released its archives, you can read his obituary in full here.
A PORN VALLEY STORY: PART ONE
It's possible, I suppose, I was the first woman to set out to acquire Post-Traumatic Porn Disorder. It's possible, I suppose, I went to Porn Valley searching for something of which I was not altogether aware. Now, as I look back on it, I can see, undeniably, Porn Valley and I were two of a kind. When I first met the adult movie industry, it was changing. Faced with rising competition from the unbridled, uncensored, and uncharted world of Internet pornography, born captive but raised in recent years to run free without chastisement under a series of liberal political regimes, Porn Valley was becoming far, far more extreme. Starring stunt sex acts and unprecedented multiple penetrations, pushing the parameters of degradation, seeking to uncover how far humans could really go, Porn Valley was the new Wild, Wild West, a land beyond sex, where anything went.
Today, people want to know how it all happened, as if to test out, in their own minds, whether, with an accidental turn down a random street, with an inadvertent slip from their personal mythology, with an inexplicable shift in their neurological weather pattern, their lives could change as totally as mine did. I can only tell you that I was there, this this really happened, and that it happened to me.
You see, the first time I found myself driving into Porn Valley, I knew, for me, it wasn't about pornography. It was about whatever the opposite of death is, and it was everything that having seen my father reduced to a substance that could be snorted was not, and it was kind of like running my face into a fist just to feel something again. It was not at all similar to the night my stepmother called me to tell me that my father was dead, around eleven o'clock in the evening, on January 6th, 1996. What she said was, "Your father is dead," and what I told her, with a great deal of conviction, because I was at my apartment that night, sleeping, for God's sake, while my father lay dying, was, "No, he's not." It was as if, in the face of the worst thing I could possibly imagine, taken to the level of a caricature I simply could not comprehend, I had believed, in spite of it all, that with my words I could will my father out of death and back into living, that I could undo the impossible finality of what was already happening. But that was that, and he was gone, winked out like a light through a window, and in that moment, and only God knows which moment it was, I knew it would never get better, that it would, in the reality I was relegated to trudge through by myself, only get worse, worse than I could begin to imagine in that awful moment.
I have no idea what my stepmother said to me after that, maybe something, maybe nothing, I don't know anymore. At some point, though, she told me, "You better come and see him," and I thought, Are you fucking kidding me? I would rather stick the barrel of a shot gun into my mouth and splatter my brains across the wall behind me than see my father lying like a felled tree on some metal gurney, or some cement slab, or some God knows what, who knows where, with everything that had been inside him--everything that, without thinking, with some idly wandering sperm, had created me--sucked out of him, leaving behind a shell that looked like shit, that was a scrim beyond which I would never be able to see, that was the house of my father mortally imploded. And so, when I found myself heading into Porn Valley, I knew what I was after wasn't pornography, it was something else entirely, something that wasn't my father's dead body, or my stepmother's voice on the telephone, or me holding in for dear life to my own damn life. It was something else altogether.
Do you want to know what I've seen? I can tell you what I've seen. One hundred and twenty-five men having sex with one woman in one day in Van Nuys. Eighty-six men masturbating onto the face of a porn starlet kneeling on the floor of a soundstage across the street from a neighborhood park in North Hollywood. A three-foot-one-inch midget named Bridget climbing out of a suitcase to have sex with a fiftysomething British man with the nom de porn Dick Nasty in a San Fernando Valley mansion. A club in Amsterdam in which thousands and thousands of people had gathered, many of them in the dark upstairs, where they engaged in orgies with strangers as, downstairs, on the massive stages, an aqua-colored-rubber-clad dominatrix took both her fists and put them up the rear end of a heavily muscled bald man, as, across the room, on a gynecological table, a woman lay, with her feet in stirrups, so anyone in the audience could don a glove and penetrate her, as, in a backroom, a red-vinyl-clad mistress stuck a needle through the mouth of a dwarf dressed as Little Red Riding Hood upon whose breast her master had carved a heart in razor-blade-let blood. A blond-haired girl getting gangbanged on a chintz bedspread in Riverside--she said she did it for the fun of it--while the head of this all-male club discussed his divorce proceedings in the kitchen. Two male porn stars, their faces made up by a Hollywood special effects artists to look like zombies, double-treaming a girl in a schoolgirl uniform on the property of a junkyard in Sunland. A starlet by the name of Chloe with her arms tied behind her back in a purple V-shaped S/M sleeve explaining it didn't hurt because she was so flexible from her years of doing ballet. A man of mystery in his thirties, his body marked with artistically rendered tattoos, being tortured by a woman in a downtown LA loft before he would go on to attend a high-stakes poker tournament in Las Vegas. A Russian hanging in a cocoon from the ceiling of a dark dungeon. The African British coprophagic at a party in London. The lone sex coach in a hotel on the edge of the Pacific Ocean.
What did I do in Porn Valley? I was the one standing in the corner when the man in the middle leaned away from the girl upon whom he was performing, and he looked around the room, and he was holding himself in his hand, and I was watching him, and he was searching for something, and that was when he found me staring at him, and he smiled.
Tomorrow: Part Two
