The room is actually a large warehouse. The heat is off, but it’s warm under the production lights, so the guys are clustered together, which only makes their lack of pants more bizarre.
“First gangbang?” a guy in a purple Mexican-wrestler mask asks me.
“Yes,” I say.
“Lucky you,” he says eating a piece of Red Vine licorice. “Nothing is better than your first one.”
I’m not really sure how to respond. I could handle a strange man in his underwear, but the Red Vines and Mexican-wrestler mask are throwing me for a loop. Part of me wants to giggle, part of me wants to interview this strange masked man, and the rest of me wants to run. Such are the recurring dilemmas of a porn reporter.
“Do you go to a lot of these—gangbangs?” I ask.
I’m not at all comfortable with the concept of dozens of strange men having sex, tag-team style, with the same woman. A gangbang seems sleazy even by porn’s standards, and so I can’t help but think that my journalism career has hit a new low. Truth be told, I don’t think the stranger is all that comfortable either. He says gangbang with relative ease, but then again, he still feels the need to disguise himself with a Mexican-wrestler mask.
“I try to do as many gangbangs as I can,” he says. “It’s tough getting time off work.”
The idea that a man in a Mexican-wrestler mask would have a job seems bizarre to me. But maybe it shouldn’t. The mask looks pretty authentic, and the real-deal lucha libre gear isn’t cheap.
“What do you do?”
“I’m an accountant,” he says.
“Oh.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s cool.”
“Not really.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I spot Rachel. Since I haven’t formally met this masked man, I see no need to say goodbye. I wish him luck at the gangbang and simply walk away.
Rachel sits at a production table, texting on her phone. She wears jeans and a sweater, an outfit calculated to conceal her femininity. That seems like a smart move since we’re in a warehouse with dozens of dudes who have volunteered to penetrate any feminine orifice, no questions asked. But to be safe, Rachel also wears a perma-scowl designed to repel the crowd’s more gregarious members, dudes like Lucha Libre, who apparently think nothing of chatting up randos while sitting around in their underwear and snacking on candy their favorite sex symbols must avoid to remain fuckable. I don’t blame Rachel for this; I admire her for it.
“Hey,” I say.
“Hey is for horses,” she says.
“I didn’t know Hustler was a client of yours.”
“Why would you?”
“Are you always this standoffish, or do you and I have a special chemistry?”
Rachel smirks and stops her texting.
“So what’s the story here?” I ask.
“It’s the world’s biggest gangbang,” she says.
“Really? It looks like there are only about seventy guys here.”
Only is a troubling word choice to apply to a number like seventy, especially when you’re talking about a gangbang. But even a green porn journo like me knows that record-setting gangbangs are measured in the hundreds.
“Doesn’t matter,” she says. “This is The World’s Biggest Gangbang. That’s the title.”
“But it’s not the world’s biggest gangbang,” I say, recalling a story Booty wrote for the magazine about this genre.
In the story, Booty detailed two undeniable facts about gangbangs. First, the one-upmanship that’s defined the genre since the 1990s has spiraled into the absurd, with some producers claiming that their starlets have “sucked and fucked” as many as one thousand men in a single go. Second, documenting any of these claims was a fool’s errand because the counts always came from the producers, who had a vested interest in inflation. As Booty explained when he asked me to proof his copy, relying on pornographers for a count at a gangbang is a little like asking Jerry Bruckheimer and Michael Bay to report on the weekend box office.
“You sound like you’re going to blow the cover off this whole gangbang scandal,” Rachel says in a mocking tone. “Too bad there’s no reporter of the year award in porn.”
I know I’m going to lose this one because I know Sunny and Dean will fold at the first sign of trouble on a story about an advertiser. Besides, there’s really no point in taking a stand; there are easily a dozen other movies that lay claim to the world’s biggest gangbang title, and I’m pretty sure none of them were subjected to any kind of fact-checking. Such is the industry standard.
Nevertheless I decide to press my case because sparring with Rachel is fun. Even if I could break free from her dark tractor beam, I don’t think I’d want to.
“I could do a head count,” I say.
“That’s a terrible pun,” she says.
“Touché.”
Rachel points me in the direction of the star.
“If I were you, I’d do the interview first,” she says. “Just a tip.”
“That’s what he said,” I joke.
I walk away from Rachel, content that I got the last line and that it was a funny one at that. But I have bigger problems: I need to figure out what to ask the female star of this movie. Unfortunately, the only question that comes to mind is if she wants me to pull a fire alarm so she doesn’t have to fuck a bunch of strangers with wristbands. Even in my limited experience, it would seem that there are better ways to make a buck in the jizz biz.
Chapter 37: Stupid questions about fucking strange men
I don’t think the Romans had reporters, but I’m pretty sure that interviewing a porn star before a gangbang is a little like doing a Q&A with a gladiator before he enters the arena. Like gladiators, porn stars are grotesque, one-dimensional, and fascinating in a train wreck sort of way, even if they aren’t all that quotable.
In a culture obsessed with sex, porn stars are actually pretty credible icons. The extreme examples always get the press, and there’s nothing more extreme than a porn star, especially one who does a gangbang.
Naturally, “star” is a misnomer. This isn’t an original observation, of course. But it doesn’t stop civilians from pointing out that calling every porn actor a star is a little like calling movie extras famous. That analogy feels true, but I’m not sure it is. Johnny Toxic could have made one movie, but he’d still be a porn star in his obituary. If he had worked as an extra for five years in Hollywood, I’m pretty sure that experience would be a footnote that got cut at the editor’s desk, if anyone had bothered to write an obituary at all.
Porn stars are stars in a collective sense. They are the people who are famous for doing what civilians never would. The act consumes the person’s identity, at least as far as the opinions of others are concerned. It doesn’t matter if they did it once or a thousand times. It doesn’t matter if they gained any notoriety from working in porn, or if they were just another faceless cock or anonymous piece of ass. Crossing the line into porn is a smutty Rubicon, and there’s no going back.
My subject is Nina Wild. Almost immediately, I surmise that she has no interest in the more contemplative aspects of her job. When I ask Nina Wild how she got her name, she simply says, “Because I’m a wild child.”
I ask her if she’s nervous and she says, “A little, yeah.”
I ask her why she’s doing a gangbang, and she tells me, “I love to fuck.”
I write I love to fuck in my reporter’s pad and circle it because it’s probably the best pull quote I’ll get from her. But I’m wrong. After a friendly Mexican girl brings Nina a Jack and Coke in a red plastic cup, she loosens up.
Nina tells me that she’s been in the business for about three months. Remembering what Booty told me about why most women enter porn, I ask her if she’s here to make her ex-boyfriend jealous.
“Fuck yes, I am,” she says with a wicked whisky-soaked smile.
Behind Nina, I can see Lucha Libre raiding the craft services table. His fingers are orange with nach
o cheese powder. For Nina’s sake, I hope they hand out baby wipes before they start filming.
“What do you hope to accomplish with this gangbang?” I ask.
Nina thinks about that question for a moment, which gives me an eternity to ponder the stupidity of my query. Does a gangbang ever accomplish anything?
“I want to make fucking history,” she says loud enough to draw a cheer from the crowd.
A man with greasy hair and a black T-shirt gets on a bullhorn. He tells the crowd to gather around him so they can hear their instructions. Apparently, there are rules to a gangbang. There are things the men are not allowed to do, like slap Nina Wild or spit on her. A few men groan in disappointment, but most of their fellow fuckers take the rules in stride. One man even says something about being “respectful,” and I don’t know what’s more bizarre, the fact that he used the word respect at a gangbang, or the fact that nobody laughed.
Just as important, to the director at least, are the rules about moving things along in an orderly process. The men will be called to action in groups of five. They will take their positions on a “first cum, first served” basis. A few men laugh at the pun. But the man with the bullhorn is serious. There will be “no arguing over who gets what hole,” he says. He wants to keep things moving, like an assembly line, as if Henry Ford himself were producing this gangbang.
“So you think this will make you famous?” I ask Nina.
“I’m a porn star, baby. I’m already famous. Do you know how many men have jacked off to me?”
I’m not sure if that’s a rhetorical question. But silence can be deadly in my profession, so I ask, “How many?”
As it turns out, Nina doesn’t really know how many men have pleasured themselves to the videos she’s made. She ventures a guess, but I’m certain she’s wrong because the number she picks is greater than the world’s total population. Revenge may have motivated Nina to get into porn, but I’m pretty sure stupidity had a lot to do with it too.
“Hey, do you like sushi?” she asks.
“Huh?”
“Sushi. You know—raw fish, rice, and seaweed. It’s Japanese.”
“Yeah, I know what sushi is.”
“Well, do you like it?”
“Sure.”
“Cool.”
We stare at each other blankly for a moment before she breaks the silence.
“Do you want to get sushi after this?”
I jerk my head up abruptly in a double take. Did Nina just ask me out?
“I go to Sushi Dan on Ventura,” she says. “Do you know it? They put my headshot on the wall. I autographed it for them and they give me free sake. Those guys are totally awesome.”
Apparently my reporter’s face has switched from incredulity to confusion, because Nina feels compelled to clarify.
“It would be a date,” she says. “You know like dinner and...whatever else you do on a date.”
She’s giving me fuck-me eyes, which I find more baffling than arousing. Putting aside the fact that I really don’t want to date a woman who just had sex with seventy men, I’m more than a little stunned because I hadn’t sensed any chemistry between us at all.
“You want to go out on a date?” I ask. “With me?”
“Yeah, why not? I’d fuck you.”
“That’s sweet, but...”
“You’re not one of those fags who doesn’t date porn stars, are you?”
I’m not sure why, but Nina’s use of the word fag feels like the most shocking thing I’ve heard all day. For all the press releases I get about porn being “sex positive,” the industry is actually weirdly conservative on some topics. The films may challenge taboos, but a lot the practitioners reinforce the sexual stereotypes that permeate throughout America. For example, a woman who goes down on another woman for money can claim that she’s straight, and her fans and colleagues will go along with that no matter how many girl-girl scenes she shoots. But a man who has sex with another man for money is gay. Period. End of story.
In a room of half-naked men who are all about to fuck, sodomize, and jack off onto the same woman at the same time, I find it odd that the woman who is the object of their doggedly straight fantasy is questioning my sexuality.
“Are you a fag?”
“No,” I say.
“Then it’s on,” she says.
“The thing is...”
“The thing is I need a hit,” she says. “So let me buy you sushi and suck your cock, OK?”
Nina grabs my balls and kisses me on the cheek. She smells like Tic Tacs and whisky.
“I’ll be thinking about you when they’re fucking me,” she whispers into my ear.
Nina leaves to get into makeup, which seems about as pointless as promising a porn journalist that you’d fuck him for favorable coverage.
Chapter 38: An MBA in suitcase pimpin’
Wandering around a gangbang set feels a little like lunch in a high school cafeteria. A few people are eating, sex is on everyone’s mind, and I’m just looking for a group where I can fit in long enough to ride out the day’s trauma.
Thankfully, I see a familiar face.
B Money, the suitcase pimp Booty introduced me to at Mary Jane’s party, waves me over to his corner of the room.
“Hey wood,” B Money says, splitting my name into two parts as a greeting that may, or may not, be interpreted as a double entendre.
“B Money,” I say. “What’s up?”
We shake hands with one of those elaborate handshakes that test just how down you are with hip-hop culture. I’d rate my street cred at better than average, which means I know most of the words to Jay-Z’s “99 Problems,” but need Google to interpret the lyrics. Apparently, that’s good enough for B Money, who offers me a seat.
“What are you doing here?” I ask.
“Those are my females,” he says, nodding to a crew of topless women doling out hand jobs a few yards away from Nina Wild.
People don’t really use the word fluffers anymore, but B Money explains that’s pretty much what his “females” are doing, except that they’re fluffing on camera, which is why B Money insisted that they be paid a performer rate.
“But there ain’t much money in hand jobs,” B Money says. “So I book them as a team.”
“How much to book them?”
“Three large,” he says.
“What’s your cut?”
“Damn, Heywood! That’s some straight-up nosy shit to be asking,” B Money says with a Cheshire Cat smile that lets me know I haven’t really offended him.
“I’m a reporter.”
“No doubt.”
B Money explains that he takes a third of the action. His fee covers booking, transportation, and collection.
“Collection?”
“Nobody stiffs B Money, Heywood. That’s why I be money.”
It’s a hammy joke, but porn is a ham-on-rye kind of business. At least, that’s what a director by the name of Charles Bukakke told me. So I smile and laugh along with B Money to let him know that I’m picking up what he’s putting down.
In my head, I run some quick math, and it looks like B Money has a pretty good deal going. He brought six women to the gangbang. At any given time, four are working and two are on break because nobody wants to get carpal tunnel giving out hand jobs, I guess. For his services, which mostly seem to consist of sitting around drinking Dr Pepper, B Money will collect a cool grand.
“So the girls get three hundred and thirty-three dollars apiece?” I ask.
Perhaps there’s a touch of indignation in my voice. After all, it hardly seems fair that the girls get less than B Money, who doesn’t have to stroke anyone off. But B Money reminds me about porn’s division of labor, making it clear that talent is always on the bottom, even if they’re riding cowgirl.
“It ain’t called a hand job for nothing,” B Money says.
Apparently, it’s good to be a suitcase pimp.
“Looks like business is solid,” I say.
> “Business is shit, Wood.”
“Seriously?”
“Who works between Christmas and New Year’s?”
“Us,” I say.
“The working poor, Heywood. That’s who. Ask me what I did for Christmas three years ago.”
“OK. What’d you do for Christmas three years ago?”
“I saw my family back in Atlanta,” he says. “Two years ago I drove the girls out to Morongo near Palm Springs.”
“The casino?”
“It was all right. Dara, the chick with the rose tattoo on her ass, she found one of them Groupon deals. Driving is cheaper than flying, you know?”
I look over at Dara. She’s stroking Lucha Libra’s dick with the enthusiasm of a Salvation Army bell-ringer on Christmas Eve. She’s a plain woman and a little rough-looking, but apparently she’s quite the frugal traveler.
The man with a bullhorn commands the four guys surrounding Nina Wild to remove their dicks from whatever orifice or hands they’ve found and return to the back of the line. Dara points Lucha Libra in Nina’s direction, and announces that she’s going for a cigarette break.
Lucha Libre waddles toward his prize. He’s a fat white mass of flesh wrapped around a screaming four-inch erection.
A new group of guys enter the fluffing zone. But with Dara gone, one of guys is left to take care of himself. This is a problem, and B Money is quick to put his manager’s hat on.
“Crystal! Crystal!”
B Money shouts at a tired-looking porn star drinking coffee near the craft services table.
“Crystal! You need to cover for Dara.”
Crystal looks indifferent. But B Money doesn’t strike me as the kind of guy you ignore. He points to a pale white guy wearing only Nike high-tops. He’s the odd man out, and with a cock as limp as warm string cheese, it’s pretty clear that he needs Crystal’s help.
“My knees, B Money,” she pleads. “We were supposed to have kneepads.”
“They don’t want to see the kneepads on camera,” B Money says to me as if his hands are tied by the aesthetic whims of gangbang connoisseurs.
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