“Did you know him?” I ask. “Johnny Toxic.”
“I knew of him,” Ron Jeremy says, stressing the word of just enough to make sure I know he has no firsthand knowledge, but not so much that I bail on the interview, even though it’s pretty obvious any quotes I get will be useless.
“OK, go on.”
“I admired his work, which has had a huge, massive influence on the industry, including, and especially, such films as Ron Gets It in the End, which streets January 5.”
We talk for ten minutes. Ron Jeremy didn’t really know Johnny Toxic, but he sure as shit knows how to plug his next movie.
Chapter 28: Dress for success
The doorbell rings. I’d get it, except I’m in my room trying to figure out what to wear to watch the afternoon game at a house where the host promises that the other guests will be “cool people.”
I check the clock. It’s almost 10:00 a.m., and the usual crew of low-level Hollywood stoners is right on time to catch the early game at Casa de Miles, where mimosas in red plastic cups and bagels from Noah’s are standard fare. Such is the nature of watching football in Los Angeles, where the sporting world’s East Coast bias makes tailgating an occasion for an early brunch.
Guessing that the crowd at Bobby Beauchamp’s will either be wearing Ed Hardy or nothing at all, I opt for my formal jeans—dark and fitted—and a black T-shirt over a white long-sleeve thermal. I study myself in the mirror, convinced that my uniform offers credible camouflage for a myriad of social situations.
But when I get downstairs, a friend of Miles locks onto me, her eyes immediately appraising and, simultaneously, discounting me.
“Kurt Cobain called,” she says. “He told me to tell you that grunge just makes you look poor, and bitter.”
My mind goes to an interview I did with a producer who pays women like her a grand to strip naked and yell at dudes while they masturbate. Her resting bitch face would be perfect for the job, and briefly, I consider telling her about the opportunity. But then I figure, why help such a rude person? It takes me another beat to remember that offering someone a job in porn might not qualify as helpful, at least from a civilian vantage point. If I stopped to think about it, I should probably be concerned that I can no longer tell if that’s a decent thing to do or not. But when you’ve talked about the logistics of anal sex with Ron Jeremy before you’ve had your first cup of coffee, it’s only natural that you lose all perspective.
“And also confused,” Bitch Face adds. Her words knock me back into the present.
Except for Miles, the group is laughing about Bitch Face’s jab. He’s nervous because his football-brunch crew is the only “A-list” group he’ll let inside our shit-hole of an apartment, which he cleans for the occasion, presenting it as shabby chic to twentysomethings who live in studios too small to host their own football parties. Normally, this wouldn’t concern Miles, because the group usually ignores me. But today Miles has a plan, which is his favorite kind of idea.
“Everyone, this is Heywood, the guy I was telling you about,” Miles says. “Heywood, this is everyone.”
Miles looks to Bitch Face, but she’s engrossed in her iPhone.
Two guys who look like they were B-listed for a Tommy Hilfiger ad shoot me an inaudible wassup.
“So you like review porn?” a perma-tanned woman with Coke-bottle glasses asks.
“No,” Miles says. “He’s a reporter. Heywood is like the so-and-so and what’s-his-name of porn.”
Everyone immediately grasps Miles’ reference to what I presume is Woodward and Bernstein, even though it’s not at all clear how I could be porn’s answer to a mainstream journalism duo—math and integrity being the obvious impediments to that particular analogy.
“So what does a porn reporter do?” Tan Girl asks.
I give the broad strokes, explaining that I’m basically a trade journalist for an unusual industry. The trade reporter concept eludes them, and my reference to Kevin Spacey’s character in American Beauty doesn’t help. Although Miles and the Brothers Hilfiger agree that the apex of Mena Suvari’s sex appeal came when Sam Mendes showered her in roses.
“He’s like a reporter who works for the trades,” Miles says, finding an analogy that actually works.
“Dude, you’re like the Deadline Hollywood of porn,” the first Tommy Hilfiger reject says.
“More like The Hollywood Reporter,” I say. “We’re definitely number two in the industry.”
Bitch Face rolls her eyes. Despite the fact that she chooses to get baked in the Valley, she obviously disdains second-tier operations.
“There are multiple trade publications covering porn?” Tan Girl asks.
“Do you guys do the porn Oscars?” the second Tommy Hilfiger reject asks.
“No, that’s our competitor.”
“But he gets to go to the porn Oscars,” Miles says.
“Awesome!” Tommy Hilfiger reject number one says as he high-fives Tommy Hilfiger reject number two.
“Actually, I don’t know if...”
Miles cuts me off, asking if I want a cinnamon raisin bagel. He’s never done that before and his Sunday football crew never talks to me, so I know something’s up.
“If it’s not an everything bagel, it’s bullshit,” I say.
The Brothers Hilfiger look at their blueberry bagels. For a moment, they look sad, but they get over it. Bitch Face says something about how gross garlic and onion breath is. But Tan Girl smiles and invites me to join them.
So I decide to load up on free carbs—fuckability be damned.
Chapter 29: Business bagels
The first half is a blowout.
The Brothers Hilfiger high-five so many times that their palms turn red and raw. They’re typical Giants fans, of the meathead variety. During commercials, they ask the basic questions that every civilian guy asks.
Question: Have I slept with any porn stars?
Answer: No.
Question: Can you introduce me to porn stars so that I can sleep with them?
Answer: No.
Question: Do you get free porn?
Answer: Does anyone pay for porn these days?
Bitch Face and Miles alternate bong hits, but the weed never makes her smile.
Tan Girl loses interest in the game. Sitting next to me, she makes herself the star of her very own version of Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Porn, But Were Afraid to Ask.
Question: How much does a porn star make?
Answer: It depends. Generally, the nastier the act, the higher the pay. But the best pay goes to a handful of contract girls who shoot one or two glossy, high-end porn scenes a month, exclusively for a big studio. They’re the real porn stars, and there are a lot fewer of them than you think.
Question: Who watches tranny porn?
Answer: Mostly straight men.
Question: Why isn’t there more porn for women?
Answer: Why aren’t there more female directors?
***
At halftime, I excuse myself.
“What?” Tan Girl asks. “Where are you going?”
“I have to work.”
“Huh?”
“Porn news never sleeps, but it does sleep around,” I say.
She laughs, but it’s one of those polite, forced laughs, the kind people use when the alternative—silence—would be awkward, and quite possibly insulting.
I break out my laptop to show Tan Girl The Daily Pornographer website, pointing out that we actually preload stories for the weekend, keeping it fresh for readers who don’t exist.
“If you want to call yourself The Daily Pornographer, you better publish daily,” I explain. And for the first time it occurs to me that our name might be the only honest thing about our publication.
“It’s like a real news site,” she says, before apologizing for sounding surprised.
“Don’t apologize,” I say. “It’s a pretty fucked-up office. And nobody reads the site. Well, nobody who works in porn anywa
y.”
“Then why do you work there?”
“Money,” I say, looking around at our shitty apartment. “I don’t have expensive taste, but my aunt Sallie Mae is real money-grubbing whore.”
Tan Girl chuckles. Then she asks if she can poke around on the site.
“Be my guest.”
“What’s your byline?”
“Heywood Jablowme.”
Despite her inebriated state, Bitch Face gets it first.
“As if,” she says.
“Cute,” Tan Girl says.
“It’s a living,” I say.
The Brothers Hilfiger are still processing the meaning of my name, when I reach the door. Miles jumps up and scurries across the room to catch me before I go.
“I’ll keep an eye on your laptop,” he says. “You did great.”
“Huh?”
“She works for CAA,” he says.
“I thought you were talking to WME.”
“I’m talking to everyone, that’s how you get a bidding war going. She’s into the story. This is big.”
Chapter 30: Margaritas & cocaine
Bobby Beauchamp lives in a ranch house in Northridge, not far from where Johnny Toxic shot his last scene. The house, like the neighborhood, isn’t flashy. The lawns are green and the cars are clean.
I park across the street because the driveway is jammed with BMWs and beat-up compacts. Such is the state of the class struggle in porn.
An Asian woman answers the door. I introduce myself, but my eyes catch on her top, a transparent design that leaves room for only one question: Why bother wearing anything at all?
“I’m Heywood Jablowme.”
The woman doesn’t give me her name in return. Instead, she walks away, leaving the door wide open.
I step into the entry hall and quickly see that Beauchamp is one of those guys who work only to support a Peter Pan complex. Pinball machines, eighties arcade games, and Los Angeles sports memorabilia all compete for space and attention. Fedoras and ball caps hang from a hat rack made of hockey sticks. There’s a pile of rollerblades and flip-flops by the door.
“Heywood Jablowme, welcome to the man cave!” Beauchamp says, wrapping his arm around my shoulders, like he’s some kind of degenerate bear.
It looks more like a man-child cave, but this isn’t the time or place to split hairs.
“God, I love that name of yours,” Beauchamp says. “It’s like the perfect fucking question, dude! Apt. Totally, totally apt.”
Beauchamp is all smiles, and when he shows me into the living room I can see why. There’s enough cocaine spread out on a glass coffee table to turn Pablo Escobar’s mustache white and stop Charlie Sheen’s heart for good.
Normally I’d stare, because coke is out of my league. But a Christmas tree with little red and green dildo ornaments grabs hold of my attention and keeps it.
“Don’t be shy,” Beauchamp says. “Plenty for everyone. Have a bump, Heywood. Hey! Heywood ya bump me!”
The nameless Asian woman rolls her eyes. A guy in a backward baseball cap nods slightly in that SoCal sort of way, smirking just enough to angle the whiskers on his blonde soul patch.
Only Beauchamp laughs, but when he holds his fist up to mine for an obligatory pound, I smile because it feels like the decent thing to do.
A tanned woman with tribal tattoos around her biceps holds up a rolled hundred-dollar bill between two bony fingers with painted black nails.
“No thanks,” I say. “I’m trying to cut back.”
“Bullshit,” the woman with the tribal tattoos says before dipping her head down to the table and snorting another line. “Sweet candy mountain!”
A few people laugh.
The game comes back on, and Beauchamp tells me he’s got twenty grand on Oakland, which seems foolish because they suck this year, as usual.
“Margarita?” Beauchamp asks.
“Sure.”
“Salt?”
I look around the room, counting more salt-rimmed glasses than cokeheads.
“Always,” I say.
“All right!” Beauchamp says with a clap of his hands.
Fitting in with cocaine people isn’t all that hard. You can partake or pass, but as long as you don’t get in the way, you’ll be fine. Drinkers, on the other hand, are far more tribal. Abstain and you’ll catch a dirty look—and possibly a fist to the jaw later in the evening. But if you mirror the beverage of choice, you’re golden. It’s basic sociology, something you can pick up in college for a hundred grand, or at a bar for considerably less.
Beauchamp hands me a margarita, and I make a point of sipping the salt, feeling the sting on my lips.
“Amen, brother!” Beauchamp says.
He doesn’t strike me as a religious man, but it is Sunday, and we are worshipping at the church of football and Mexican liquor, so I do the red-blooded American thing and smile, returning his religiosity.
“Jesus, that’s a good margarita.”
“Patrón—top-shelf.”
The play-by-play guy on the TV asks a stupid question, and the color guy gives him a stupid answer. I take another sip and ask if there’s somewhere we can talk.
Chapter 31: Interview with a shyster
“The free speech guys get the headlines,” Bobby Beauchamp says. “I’m all about the talent.”
His tone is professional—neither Lionel Hutz nor Jack McCoy, just Men’s Warehouse mediocre. I’m beginning to think Bobby Beauchamp is a halfway competent lawyer, until he makes a joke involving the head and lines we left in the other room.
I’d be laughing my ass off, if I were fourteen. Two weeks ago, I’d cringe a little on the inside, trying to hold back the puke through a forced grin. But today I am numb. After a week, these jokes are like wallpaper—obvious and pointless.
We’re in a small bedroom that doubles as Beauchamp’s office. A large desk occupies most of the room’s square footage—a bulwark of professionalism in a space that’s anything but.
I take notice of the framed magazines—Hustler, Penthouse, and pretty much every publication that comes wrapped in a black plastic bag at the few newsstands still in business. The magazine covers blanket the wall behind his desk, forming a pornographic collage—a glossy-lipped, big-hair tribute to the last days of printed smut.
“My clients,” he says, answering a question I didn’t ask.
Unlike most porn lawyers, Bobby Beauchamp works from home. This, he casually tells me, is because he likes to screw his clients.
“Don’t get me wrong,” he says. “This industry has some top-notch legal eagles, and if your ass is on the line with an obscenity charge, they’re the guys you want, no doubt. But I deal in pussy. Hot, wet pussy and cold, hard cash.”
“So...your...practice...” I say, trying to string together a question without much luck. “What area of law...?”
Beauchamp cuts a fresh line of coke on his desk and takes a bump without offering me any. I guess house rules dictate that once you decline blow you won’t be offered more.
“Contracts,” he says through a big, numb smile. “Susie Big Tits agrees to fuck X guys for Y dollars.”
“Why?”
“What do you mean—why? The dollars. The dinero. The cash, brother.”
He mutters something about taking the edge off as he lights a joint and says, “That’s why they call it the money shot. Don’t you know anything?”
“No, I mean, why do they need a lawyer?”
“So they don’t get fucked,” he says, before adding, “off camera.”
His tone is somehow equal parts blunt and opaque. I understand why a porn star would want a lawyer to negotiate top dollar for every scene, but what I’ll probably never understand is why they’d go with a guy like Bobby Beauchamp.
He inhales and holds in his hit as he says, “Anyway, that’s my line—pretty good, huh?”
Up until recently, my experience with pimps has been limited to Ice T and Three 6 Mafia songs, as well as the two scenes
from Risky Business I always seem to catch whenever it’s on TNT. But despite my naïveté vis-à-vis pimpin’, I’m certain Bobby Beauchamp is the only whoremonger licensed by the California State Bar.
“I’m just like those entertainment lawyers on the other side of the hill,” he says. “Except my clients are total fucking perverts.”
I’m not certain a Hollywood career precludes perversion, and I’m pretty sure the Hollywood trades I applied to—but didn’t hear back from—would say otherwise. Still, perversity on the other side of the hill isn’t on my agenda, so I make my move.
“Like Johnny,” I prompt, wanting to pat myself on the back for shifting gears in the conversation. It’s basic reporting, but damn it feels good, grabbing hold of a fluid conversation and—if only for a moment—extracting what you want to know like a miner panning for gold, or a dentist drilling a cavity.
“He was a legendary pervert,” Beauchamp says. “He made porn because he had a filthy, depraved mind, a once-in-a-generation mind. I mean he was dirty as fuck.”
Beauchamp’s back straightens as he adds, “The money didn’t matter to Johnny Toxic.”
I find that remark puzzling, and it freezes me. If the money didn’t matter, why was there a “gun to his head” to produce another installment of the Fuck-Whores franchise? If the money didn’t matter, why did he stiff Mary Jane on her fee? If the money didn’t matter, why did Johnny Toxic need a lawyer with a cocaine habit that clearly precludes pro bono work?
Reporters are supposed to have some kind of finely tuned internal bullshit detector. At least, that’s what people say. But as I lock eyes with my subject, trying to decipher fact from fiction, I am convinced that the idea of a bullshit detector is total bullshit. It could be that he’s lying, or it could that I really don’t understand Booty’s pornification concept. Either way, I don’t have a question at the moment, and so we’re stuck in limbo.
He tilts his head forty-five degrees to the right, looking at me with piercing, quizzical eyes.
Another Mexican standoff, this time without the burgers.
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