This week, I'm publishing an autobiographical essay based on my experiences in Porn Valley, "A Porn Valley Story," online for the first time. The introduction and first installment can be found here. If you prefer paper, "A Porn Valley Story" appears in Best Sex Writing 2006.
A PORN VALLEY STORY: PART TWO
It all started--this is how it always starts, isn't it? This is how your story goes when you try to tell it. It was late 1997. I was a writer. I was on assignment. I was interviewing a porn star at a strip club in San Francisco. You may have heard of her--her name is Jenna Jameson. Her publicist had invited me to visit the set of one of her movies if I was ever in Los Angeles. Then, not long afterward, there I was. It was me, you can see, standing in the middle of a Little Tokyo parking lot on a swelteringly hot day. In front of me, one of the city’s fire trucks was parked. On the fire truck, seven people were having an orgy. I was holding a pen and paper. One of the male porn stars called out “Lube!,” raised his hand into the air, and into his palm sailed what he needed. I looked to my left. I saw a line of other writers standing there to report on the day's events for magazines with names like Cheri. They were all men, they were all older than me, and they were all not me. I wondered what I was doing. Later, as I watched what happened when they put Jenna over a barrel while flames shot up around her, I got it. I was one of them now.
I moved to Los Angeles shortly thereafter. Today I would have to say the question is, since I have seen all these things: Who am I now? I'm not that person anymore. Or am I? I don’t know. Does it matter? I think so. I remember who I was. I think of who I am. I consider how far I've come. Or so I let myself imagine. It’s hard to know, when you've seen what I have seen. When you know what I know. It’s hard to say when it all started. It’s hard to know when it began. It’s hard to tell the story of why I did what I did in Porn Valley. Let me try again.
It was like an XXX-version of the story about the Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong, told by a man named Tim O’Brien. When he was in Vietnam he heard about a girl who wore culottes and a pink sweater. Her man flew her into enemy territory. She was young. She was innocent. She was fresh. Thing is, she fell in with the Green Berets. That’s what she did. Sneaked out on patrol with them. Wasn’t the same after that. She talked about it as if she wanted to eat that place. To have it there inside her. She had this appetite for destruction. It made her feel as if she was glowing in the dark. She didn’t feel that way anywhere else. It’s not bad--that’s what she told them. In the end, she disappeared. Or so they said. Sometimes the soldiers thought they saw her in the jungle. Sliding through the shadows. She had crossed over to the other side. She wore a necklace made of human tongues. That’s how she told her story, I suspect. She was dangerous. That’s what they said. She was ready for the kill. That’s how they described her. I know, I would like to tell her. I know how it is when you have to die to live.
Porn Valley is a place. Have you ever been there? It’s in the San Fernando Valley but on no map, stretching all the way from Hidden Hills to The Narrows. From the top of the Santa Susana Mountains, you can see it spreading out underneath you like a girl. This is where 80 percent of the world’s adult filmography is born, on its barren soundstages, in its rented mansions, on the manicured lawns of its suburban homes. This is the Other Hollywood, a business begetting over ten thousand X-rated videos a year, where thousands work every single day. They come to this territory, climbing over the Hollywood Hills, heading for Van Nuys, marching up those steps to central casting. They are sexual missionaries, hard-core dogs, oversexed starlets, madman directors, producers gone totally wild. It is from Porn Valley that this product is funneled, to spread itself out across this country, to play itself out behind our closed doors, hidden away in our desk drawers, dancing across our glowing T.V. screens.
Not long ago, a man came to the town where I live. He wanted to meet me for a drink. I met him at a bar that's like an old-fashioned carousel. As you sit at this circular bar, it rotates around and around in a slow-moving circle. When this man began to speak, I crossed my legs. I can tell you what he wanted. He wanted me to go back to Porn Valley, this place whence I had come. And then he wanted me to write a book about it. He was a nice young man, with fine red hair, a good education, and a schoolteacher wife (sitting, I assumed, in a hotel not far from us known for its baroque grandeur). He discussed deals. He mentioned hundreds of thousands of dollars.
There you are, drinking your sidecar, listening to this man, trying to figure out what he wants. All the while, you are traveling in a circle, staring into your drink, noting the pair of African-American gentlemen serving you around whom you are circling. It does seem the bar is picking up speed, as if it is spinning and spinning, faster and faster. What do you do? You nod your head, you grin, you flip your hair, you are charmed. What you are bound to consider is running pell-mell right back to Porn Valley. This is how it happens, standing on the threshold. To save yourself, you turn to this man, and you ask him a question. You ask him of his relationship to pornography. What does he do? He shucks and jives. He will never tell you. That's it. You're gone.
Tomorrow: Part Three
