A Porn Valley Story

I've posted the full text of "A Porn Valley Story" today. You can read the introduction here, and you can buy Best Sex Writing 2006 here.

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.

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.


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.


This is the story, the true story, the real story. I went to Porn Valley because I could. I'd have to say that's why I did it. Because it was there, because there was nowhere else that wasn't everywhere, because it was everything I wasn't. I grew up in a house wallpapered in books, under the tutelage of two parents who spent their lives inside heads filled with words but could never say what they really meant, in a city of freaks, Berkeley, California, the birthplace of the feminist movement. Ironic, isn't it? I was born a girl, the problem with No Name having found its way inside me, dictating I would be its progeny. My father was a god, my mother was a monster, and I was their daughter. I grew up tall, like a skyscraper, six-foot-two on the outside, fifty feet tall on the inside. They told me I could do whatever I wanted. So, I did.

When my father left my childhood home, my heart shattered. When he left me a second time, it was his heart that exploded. When I went to Porn Valley, I was going into the heart of what I had never been able to understand, to find out what had stood between my father and me, to see what had stopped me from feeling alive after he died, to unearth what had been kept me from my damned heart beating somewhere in Porn Valley. I said it wasn't about sex, I said it wasn't about pornography, I said it was about something else entirely. I lied. It was a car crash from which I could not look away, it was the Super Bowl-sized circle jerk that blew my mind, it was this thing no words can describe. Jesus Christ, they were amazing. My God, they were fascinating. Dear Lord, they were breathtaking. All those bodies, all those positions, all those scenes. All that moaning, all that groaning, all that caterwauling. All the lovemaking, all the making babies, all the making no sense. This was living, this was dying, this was trying. I was its witness, I was its testimony, I was its evidence. I came alive there, I became a woman there, I turned into a writer there.

I was the child of a man who wrote a book about a dead man in a failed attempt to resuscitate him, I was the child of a woman who failed to write a book about a woman who was already dead and didn't know it, I was the child born with writer's block who, for years and years, failed to write to save her own damn life. Porn Valley was Babylon, the mother of whores and the earth's abominations, and there they all were, living inside it, telling me their stories, telling me this story, telling me my story. The story I saw there was the truth, and, no lie, it was a story that was alive. I was a girl, a woman, a human being, who knew what they were doing--fucking, screwing, X-rated movies is what they were making--who sought of her own volition the most extreme things they were creating, who did the last thing her father would ever do so she could do the one thing her father could no longer do: stay alive, keep on breathing, forever writing.

So, I sit, in this front row seat at the same table where I once sat as a child across from my father, in a pink shotgun near a bend in the train tracks where, at night, I can hear the steel wheels grinding against the rails, less than a block from a river bigger than any I'd seen before. In 2003, I left Porn Valley. Today I live all the way across the country, as far away as I could think of from that land, in a city where there is no valley.

Someday, I'd like to say, I want to take my father to this river, gather his massive bulk in my arms, carry him to the banks, and walk into the water, humming a song about a half-crazy woman by the name of Suzanne. I'd lay my father in this bed, and I'd tell him a new story, the story of all the things I never said, the story of what I did and why I did it, the story of my life that will come after, the one I have yet to tell myself. Under the stars, in the middle of the night, at the center of my world, I'd look at my father. I'd see, one last time, his great hands, his proud brow, his towering height, and I'd see, for once, what it was I could not see the night I turned away from him, what it was that led me to see what I could not turn away from. I'd lay my hand on his broken heart, and I'd mend it. I'd lay a kiss on his cheek, and I'd tell him I love him. I'd let my father go, and I'd watch him sink below the surface. I hope I'd see the stars reflected in it, I hope I'd come out of that river, I hope I'd keep on trying to tell the story of my life the only way I know how.

You see, the thing I learned in Porn Valley is that it's not about sex, it's not about pornography, it's about all that's supposed to be. It's the opposite of death, it's what I fled from, it's what was between my father and me all those years. It's about what sex is, it's about that of which pornography is a pornography, it's about what we are always searching for. Maybe it had to be a woman who would tell this kind of story, maybe it had to be me, maybe if I tell this story one more time I'll be able to say it's about love.

This is the end of my Porn Valley story. This is the part where I tell you that mourning is terminable. Where I reveal that that's all over for me. Where I let you know that I've left that world behind me. Only I can't do that. What I'd like to do, if I might, is take your hand in mine and stand together on the front line of Porn Valley. In the middle of this chaos, at the very edge of my personal apocalypse, I would turn to you and ask you why I did this. Could you tell me? It would be the answer to my problems, the ending to this story, the theory that would make sense of everything that came before. If we could stand there, hand in hand, what you might tell me is this.

It was the only thing that made everything better, that made everything else fade, that let me to forget what had happened to me. But we can't do that, can we? If a story is its author's child, as my parents taught me, what I can tell you of this story is this: I am this monster's mother, and this story's monster is me. It may well be that nothing about this story is terminable, that there is no way I can write an ending to it, that I will never be delivered from it.

Or, I could make up an ending for you, where I'm sitting on my back porch in the darkness, and it's as if something has left me, moving away from me in the tall grass, cutting diagonally across the yard, heading for a train in the distance, going somewhere else, and the only thing I could think is, Asperges me.

So, let this story be my testimony, let what I saw be what finally releases me, let all the things I've done that were no one's fault but my own be what delivers me from this. I've got another story I want to tell, a story that's about this story, and inside this story there is something else. If you listen closely, you'll can hear its heart beating.