Today, I am starting a new series of reviews, Your Filthy Mind, in which I will review books, but I will only bother reading the filthy parts. Actually, I have no idea if I will ever do this again. So, there's that. A few weeks ago, I read something somewhere that said you could download a copy of Beautiful Children online for free. (Too late for you! You can't download it for free anymore. Oh, well.) Generally, I don't even bother reading books anymore because I have read too many already. For this one, I made an exception, minorly because everyone said it was totally great, and majorly because I read one of the characters was a porn star. This year will see a bevy of porn stars in starring literary roles, from Beautiful Children to Money Shot to Snuff. Why? Who the hell knows. Maybe "A widespread taste for pornography means that nature is alerting us to some threat of extinction." Perhaps "pornography could be a superstitious offering to the gods of a dying race." Or because "Porno is the unconsciousness of culture, the libido of humanity." Increasingly as of late, I am starting to feel that porn is the defining medium of our culture, but, hey, that's just me, and what the hell do I know? At the same time, I'm also interested in how people read online versus in print, and I was vaguely curious to know if reading a book in PDF form would be different from reading a book in... book form. Apparently, it was; this time around, at least. It made me have less respect for the book, which I felt guilty about for about two seconds, seeing as I'd read that Bock had spent, like, a decade writing the book, and, well, I respect that for reasons some of you who read this blog on a regular basis may understand. Anyhoo, back to the book. Or the PDF. Or the thing that was on my computer. While I had read both the profile of Bock in the New York Times Magazine and the review in the New York Times, I got bored with the book about halfway down the first page, literally. I idly wondered how many pages the book was, something I would have been able to intuit immediately if I'd had the thing in my sticky hands, but I couldn't instantaneously tell how long the book was from my PDF file because I'm slow like that. Also, "Wedding Crashers" was playing in the background and I hadn't really seen it before and I was vaguely curious as to what all the hullabaloo was about and what kind of chick had gotten knocked up by Borat. So, I started skimming by the time I got to the bottom of the first page. Sorry, Chuck! Then I realized pretty quick that I was only interested in how the author had depicted a porn star. Because I have known some porn stars. And I mean that in the purely non-Biblical sense. (Sorry, lesbian enthusiasts!) I wasn't sure how much porn stuff would be in the book because the stuff I'd read about the book hadn't really said. I figured it wouldn't be a lot. Just enough to make you want to buy the book. You know, for the porn. The first mention of Cheri Blossom was found on page 110. At this point, she's a stripper with a special trick. She's got fake boobs that make it so she can light her nipples like candles. (One time, I saw a really awesome stripper at Jumbo's Clown Room do a fire routine. It was awesome. No, it was not Courtney Love.) I frowned somewhat on Bock's idea of a porn star name, as Cheri Blossom is kinda corny, and I thought the name he picked for the strip club where she works, the Slinky Fox, was kinda corny too, but whatever. Anyway, Bock's depiction of Cheri is OK. The part of her he gets right is how she sees herself in her mind's eye as starring in a movie of her own making. This is the way she dissociates from her less than glamorous reality. At the same time, Bock can't really get over the, um, hump of being a man writing about a woman, falling into sort of viewing her as an object, a thing, a sex machine. I do believe, though, that Bock had some lap dances as part of his "research." Kudos on that part, Bock. The other grosser half of Cheri's character is her loser, wannabe suitcase pimp, punk, gross, nasty boyfriend Ponyboy. Again, I thought Ponyboy was kind of a weird name choice, as for me there will only be one Ponyboy. (Stay gold, people!) Anyway, there's a lot of pages about Cheri writhing around and taking off her clothes and dry humping guys and setting her tits on fire. If you like that sort of thing, you will enjoy Beautiful Children. (Do you think that quote will appear on the back of the paperback edition? I hope so.) So, nothing else much interesting that I can remember happens with Cheri until Ponyboy gets this idea to put her in a porn movie. Because porn movies are like the area of my expertise, I thought, wow, this is my chance to really see what Bock has got to offer. The producer porn guy was named Jabba, as in the Hutt, who I saw on TV earlier today, as I was watching some A&E special on "Star Wars" for reasons I will never be able to explain, especially because I don't really like "Star Wars" or any of the sequels, although Jabba was an awesome kind of guy. If you want to forget the whole rest of the book but the porn part, I recommend skipping to page 304 because that's when it starts. Yeah, I left out 200 pages of this book. But can I be all things to all people? I think not. The porn movie that Cheri's love sets her up to do takes place in some skank motel near the airport in Vegas. The whole novel takes place in Vegas. Bock grew up there. All the critics make a big deal about this. Duly noted here. The porn scene is interesting and, well, true because it's pretty gross and generally uncomfortable. There's another ill-named individual in this scene: Rod Erectile. I would like to say that male porn star names may be of the penis (take, for example, Arnold Schwartzenpecker), but they are not about erections. Read Susan Faludi's "Waiting for Wood" if you want to know how anxiety producing erection discussions are on porn sets. Anyway, Rod has what is referred to as "five-pound cock," which is, well, a lot of cock. (By the way, for the last several weeks, one of the most common search engine phrases that brings readers to this site is "ron jeremy penis." Can someone explain this? What are you people looking for? I do not have Ron Jeremy's penis, if that helps illuminate the situation for you. Although, I did see him perform once. Live. And in person. In Mexico. On a porn star vacation. People paid to hang out with porn stars. There were a lot of hookers there, too. And some guy who won Howard Stern's smallest penis competition. Ron's chest hair had been waxed into the shape of a heart. He was not a five-pounder. To that I can attest.) Then, there's, like 40 pages of other stuff, so you have to skip ahead to page 344 to get to the porn scene itself. Like I said, it's all kind of weird, and gross, but, hey, that's behind the scenes on a porn set for you. Basically, Cheri said she'd do the scene as long as she got to do it with her boyfriend, Ponyboy. In the moment, it turned out she's supposed to do Ron. So, everyone gets all nervous and freaked out. Here are a few moments when Bock gets it right. As the camera turns on her, Cheri is described as "A woman taking in exactly what had been said to her, precisely what was happening, not only the ridiculousness, but how scary the vibe was, how predatory." (This is not what it's like on all porn sets, but it is what it's like on some porn sets. This is what it was like when I was on the set of "The World's Biggest Gang Bang III." There were a lot of guys there, and there was a moment after it started that is hard to describe, when the tone in the room shifted, and the men got a little primitive, and the whole thing got a little dangerous. Of course, by that point, for the girl, it's in for a penny, in for a pound. There is no turning back, no matter how daunting the task.) After that, !spoilers!, Rod goes limp, shoves Cheri, and injects his penis with some Insta-Erect. Around page 362, Cheri kind of gives up spiritually, and balks at the entire porn affair. Ponyboy observes: "...Jabba was talking to Cheri, explaining the way the porn business works. And at first glance Cheri looked like she was following every word; but, really, Ponyboy could tell she was somewhere else. In fact, ever so slowly, Cheri was, like, inching down the wall, her skin making this sick sound against the wallpaper." I liked that part. At which point Ponyboy, a total scumbag, jumps in and saves her. Which is pretty ridiculous. Because life in porn is like life in the jungle, and nobody saves you. After that, Ponyboy has lost his girl. What a dumb ass. "Every one of those sinners, out here in the night, standing in Ponyboy's way, talking, watching the band, tripping out, zoning, whatever the fuck, all of them looking for something that might sustain them, that might keep them going the way that a cold hard motherfucker was sustained by the voice of the girl he loves, by the feeling that he was the most special and important person in the world to her. This is what any strong relationship provides, allowing a human being to survive in this miserable and fucked-up world. You fuck that up, all bets are off." Porn is love's Grim Reaper. In the end, we don't know what happens to Cheri. I guess it's hard to say. Generally, I would say Bock gets an A for effort in terms of trying to get the porn right--in the acknowledgments, he thanks "Certain people in the world of adult entertainment [who] were kind enough to take me into their clubs and onto their sets"--but I would say it's hard for a guy to get inside the mind of a porn starlet. He can see the fissures, but what he can't really get is the break. In the end, Beautiful Children declares Ponyboy too far gone to save, but what about the porn starlet? Maybe some of us spend the rest of our lives recovering.
