Gangbang

I'm going to be reviewing Chuck Palahniuk's new novel, Snuff, for Radar Online, and I'm really looking forward to it. I've been interested in the book since word of it broke--oh, I don't know when, a year or so ago, maybe. For those of you who are not aware, it takes place on the set of a World's Biggest Gangbang movie of which an adult actress named Cassie Wright is the porn star looking to set a sexual world record. Apparently, and I can't imagine this is a spoiler given the title, she dies in the end. In any case, the publicist at Doubleday, the publisher, sent it to me in the mail yesterday, and I eagerly await it. I'm interested in Snuff because I was on the set of a World's Biggest Gangbang movie years ago. To be exact, it was "The World's Biggest Gang Bang III: The Houston 620." I'd moved to LA and started writing about the porn industry only about a year or so before, and this was the first time I'd experienced an event that I would refer to in my write up of it for Detour magazine as an "apocalyptic fuck." (That article also included the line: "The hole's name is Houston.") To say the experience was impactful would be a catastrophic understatement. In addition to writing about it, I was also covering it for a Playboy TV show that I was on at the time. Highlights of that experience included me saying to camera: "It smells like a sperm bank in here." Classy it wasn't. We, the crew and I, that is, were nervous going into it, but I'll never forget when we rounded the corner to the giant soundstage where it was taking place, and the line of men waiting to get inside snaked through the parking lot, and my jaw fell open, literally. We spent the next eleven hours in there, and I don't know that I emerged from that building the same. There were the ringers at the beginning. There was the Lazy Susan upon which Houston lay while the men descended upon her. There was the dorky Asian guy in glasses and a T-shirt and nothing else who freaked out because he wasn't getting his turn. There were the two middle-aged guys who looked like they were somebody's dad who double-teamed Houston and high-fived each other over her body. There was the plain and simple, undeniable fact that when Houston emerged for more after a break midway through, she had clearly been crying, but she did the rest of the guys anyway. There was the way the digital counter on the wall climbed higher and higher, even though there was no way there were 600 guys in there, although the number of men she had sex with that day was nothing to sneeze at. There was how it changed at a certain point, and it was like being in the jungle only the people were the animals. There was the guy with the Frankenpenis from the botched penile enlargement surgery. There was the moment I opened the bathroom door, hoping, I suppose, to get away from it all for a minute, and there was a guy in there filming two girls on the toilet. Today I would have to say that I can't say that I've been the same since. Only, that was a long time ago. And in the scope of everything that happened in terms of me and Porn Valley, that was only the beginning, really. So, I'm very interested to see how Palahniuk represents it. And find out what got Doubleday behind a gangbang snuff porn movie and compelled them to give its dead porn star her own Myspace page to promote it.