Today, I've got the third installment of "A Porn Valley Story," an essay based on my experiences in Porn Valley. The entire series starts here.
A PORN VALLEY STORY: PART THREE
I've got a Porn Valley story for you.
Let's pretend I'm a porn star. Are you game? I know I am. My name is Annie Body. I'm from Barstow, or Fresno, or some other outlying city. I had a mother, or a father--one but not the other. I was happy, or somebody left me, or I don’t want to remember. I was a virgin who never dated, I was the girl everybody knew but nobody understood, I was the class slut who read her name on the bathroom wall at high school, thinking, That’s me, noting what the words on either side of my name said about me. I forged a plan to be a star, to change my name, to reinvent myself. The month I turned eighteen, the day I left my boyfriend, the minute I saved up enough money, so I could go somewhere, so I could leave that place, a U-Haul arrived, a pickup truck pulled up, I put everything I had into the trunk of my car. I made my way along a stretch of highway toward a city with a crown at the top of its tallest tower. I became a student, a waitress, an actress. I didn't get far.
That's when I come across an ad in the local paper. I sense there is something in it that can make me bigger than I am, that can change the smallness inside me into something smaller, that can flip everything in my life, in my head, in my heart into the emotional equivalent of a Sears portrait background, all innocuous blues and Lithium swirls. I drive over the Hollywood Hills. The San Fernando Valley suits me. I experience déjà vu, my mind stumbles over something, my memory skips like a broken record. There's the building, the second-floor office, the man who says “Hello.” I shake his hand. “Hi,” I say. The door closes behind me. He explains the situation. Photos. Movies. Naked. Sex. XXX. If I'm not interested, don't let the door hit me where the good Lord split me.
I go down a hall, I enter a back room, I stand nude in the blinding light of a Polaroid flash illuminating the wood paneling behind me but wiping out the finer details of my freckled features.
The next day, my telephone rings. It’s the man from the office. (His hair is slick, his teeth are enameled, and he wears one gold chain because he likes to keep it simple.) I go to a house, a soundstage, a movie studio. I meet a camera man, a director, a male performer. I am by no means a virgin--I did this once, but not professionally or anything. I recognize this is a surreality. I go through the motions. I am upside down, inside out, all around. The eye of the video camera does not falter in its unblinking stare. It makes no difference how far I open my legs or how deeply I bend over, how far I go outside myself or how deeply I fall inside myself--it is always there.
Afterward, I'm reminded of who I am when my new name comes out of other people’s mouths on the next movie shoot, at the drugstore near where I live, at the strip club where I dance to earn extra money. I get a brand-new car, a really big apartment, a boyfriend who supports what I do, who will leave me because of what I do, who carries my suitcase so I can do what I do. My old life seems very, very far away. I have no regrets, except when I visit my mother, get depressed, or get drunk. In interviews for the dirty magazines on the covers of which I now appear, I say I do it for the sex. Sometimes I mean it. Sometimes I don’t. Either way, that’s what I tell them. Of course, I do it for another reason altogether. It makes me gape. This is the manner in which I go inside myself, for I can find no other way to get inside that space hidden within myself. This is who I am.
Let's pretend you watch porn. Are you willing? I hope so. Your name is John Doe. You're the typical male porn consumer, or an average business man, or my number one fan. You see me during a business trip to Tokyo in a hotel room with pay-per-view porno, or when you push PLAY in the privacy of your home, or as you are cruising through the hundreds of channels available to you on your big-screen TV. There I am, writ large before you, my mouth totally open, as if I am trying to tell you something. You don’t know me, you think you know me, you know you could have me. You need release, you want to feel close to something, it’s like this idle curiosity thing you get sometimes. You have a beautiful wife, you have an ex-girlfriend who drunk-dials you, you're divorced but you don’t watch this kind of stuff, or at least not all that often.
You lie on the bed with your hands in your pants, you sit naked atop the sheets because it’s not like anybody’s going to walk in anything, you shift from lying in wait to slowly stirring. My promise is companionship, true love, nothing that is clear to you. I am illuminated. I look near but seem distant, like your wife, like your career, like your brain inside your skull. At this moment, it doesn’t matter, because you have something other than yourself when you see me. I am unquestioning, and that's the way you like it, because it means I am happy. I look to you from inside the boob tube, and even at this incredible remove I make you feel that you're the king of the world, the Top of the Mark, the master of your domain, because I have tits worth marrying, an ass worth saluting, a face that could make angels weep. Here I am. Miss America. The hottest chick in the universe. That girl. Any girl. The porn star next door.
I'm talking, the volume is on mute, you aren't listening. I'm half-clothed, totally naked, doing something fascinating. My head is thrown all the way back, my spine is curved like a boomerang, I make it possible for you to see my pink flesh. You think, not of the channel where wild animals run back and forth across distant tundras, eating and sexing, but of the medical channel where the bodies of people whose faces are covered with blue paper are cracked open with buzz saws and silver ice picks and into whose holes men in masks stick their arms up to their elbows. You watch me fucking, sucking, coming. You hold yourself in your hand, we grab each other, we hit a shared rhythm, galloping towards this conclusion of our long-distance relationship. You try to make it last. Alas, you cannot. As you go, you search me for a place to find purchase, for you feel, you fear, you find you are falling--through your life, between the cracks, beyond the point where you know yourself in this reenactment of intimacy you've undertaken in order to get in better touch with yourself. It lasts for a split second, a quick groan, a brief lifetime. Then it’s over. Later, you forget about it. Maybe it never even happened.
The next day, you go to work with a different tie around your neck, your ex-girlfriend bangs on your door in the middle of the night, you keep to yourself. Months later, at a trade convention in Vegas, your friend informs you that while Elvis may have left the building, there are porn stars in the house. Cracking jokes, the two of you walk the adult convention floor. You see me at a booth. I am pretty, hot, unbelievable. You wait in line, sidestepping your humiliation. Finally you stand before me. I sit with an oversized poster of myself on the table between us. I smile at you. You smile at me. I am, you realize, looking right through you.
Of course, if I were a man, I'd tell you a different story altogether about Porn Valley. I'd lean into you, I'd put my arm around you, and I'd whisper in your ear about this man I met in Porn Valley by the name of Jim Powers. What a man, I'd say, what a guy, I'd tell you, no one else quite like him, I'd explain. Then I'd lean all the way back, I'd open my eyes real wide, and I'd ask you, You wanna hear something really scary? After that, I'd tell you the story of my pal, my buddy, my best fucking friend Mr. Powers. That's the heart of darkness right there, I'd say as my lead into it, taking a shot of my whiskey.
It was the year 2000, I'd start, and I'd been around for awhile. He was known for making the most obscene movies the world had ever seen, I'd say. He was a man who knew no bounds, I'd proclaim, staring into the distance as if it could tell me something, a man with no moral ground, I'd pronounce, looking at you with one raised eyebrow to see what you were thinking, a man who took no prisoners, I'd shout, getting the bartender to bring me another drink so I could stand to tell you the rest. Let me be clear, I'd announce, raising a finger into the air. This is not a war story, this is not a love story, this is a porn story. This man's mission was to find the farthest reaches of this business. He raised the bar, he had to have more, he had to know how far he could take it.
At this point, I'd get myself together and ask you, You ever read that story "The Most Dangerous Game," about a big-game hunter, General Zaroff, who discovered the only game worth pursuing is human? I can tell you, I'd tell you, that's what this guy was doing. He was hunting humans. He had to be vewy, vewy quiet as he did it, I'd say, making my hands into tip-toeing bunny rabbits to show you how he did it. What did I do? I was the one who got on this man's back, who clung to this man's sides, who galloped into the great beyond with this man as my ride. His sport was bukkake, born in ancient Japan as punishment for women who strayed from the flock. What is meted out is a surplus of male stock designated to land squarely upon her. They may approach her, but they may not touch her.
I was the invisible man, lost in a forest of men, thinking I'd be but a stranger in their midst. Instead, it was as if I didn't exist. I was walking between them, I was headed to the center of the world, I was going to the middle of the universe. I sneaked up behind Powers, I saw he was wearing a T-shirt that proclaimed him BEYOND THE GRAVE. I looked over his shoulder to see what he was filming. At his feet was a girl, kneeling on the floor, naked, nude, gleaming. She had a funnel around her neck and she was covered in semen. She was the one he wanted to see if he could break. What did I see? She was fighting, and the troops were all coming, and the onslaught was ongoing. She was the last man standing, the lone private stuck in the trench, the solitary vet screwed into the foxhole.
What did I think? She was trying to figure out if she was a soldier or a coward, she wanted to know if she was strong-willed or weak of heart, she had to see if she could do what she had to do or if in the face of the Other she would fall. And let me tell you, I'd cry out, grabbing you by your lapels and pulling you in as close to me as possible, it was really something, because when I finally let myself get inside her, after all the others had her, it was as clear as a bell, it was as bright as the day, and I was in her, and I was out of her, and I was her. She was right. She was the human condition, the situation in which we are all eternally embattled, trying to decide who we are while the whole world hides from us. I was there, I'd bellow, I had a weapon in my hand, I'd bellow, I raised it to my eye, I found my target. And then, I'd scream, You know what I did? I shot her.
That's what I did in Porn Valley, I'd tell you, having finished my entertainment for the evening. Then I'd get up and leave. You would think I was out of my mind. Of course, I could never tell you that story. I'm just some girl telling you the story about what happened when I went to Porn Valley.
Tomorrow: Part Four
