With my left arm in a sling, I write my stories one-handed. It should hurt, but it doesn’t. The Percocet makes me feel like I’m writing a slow dream stretched out on a puffy gray cloud. Or is it a nightmare trapped in a foggy abyss?
I don’t know, and I don’t care right now.
I type without the burden of thinking. The keys click with a satisfying magic. Black words glow back at me from a white screen. My mind is a soup of sex, food, and violence.
Botox Queen on the local news says something about the police returning fire only after the suspect shot at them. In my mind’s eye, I see a dozen cops firing big black dildos at Ron. They squeeze the plastic balls at the base of the dildos like they’re triggers, but no bullets come out.
Botox Queen’s coanchor, a swarthy gentleman, nods at the end of the brief story and adds that the suspect remains at large. Somewhere in darkness of my mind, I can see a naked ex-Marine hauling ass through the Valley’s quiet suburban streets.
Our couch wraps me in a bland cocoon. The fog rolls into our living room. My world narrows, and a woman’s face floats in front of me—a white pearl on an ethereal oyster. I recognize her, but I can’t place her disembodied mug. She’s as alluring as the Sirens who tempted Odysseus, and just as mysterious.
Her sweet voice sucks me into the big, black nothing.
***
Miles proofs my stories while I mash a Double Western Bacon Cheeseburger into my mouth, trying not to get it all over my face.
All I ask is that Miles fix any typos or spelling errors he sees, because that’s all that my job really requires. But given the chance to play porn journalist, Miles feels compelled to bring his A game.
“This could be my character’s big moment in the movie,” he says gleefully.
I doubt it. But that doesn’t stop Miles from adding three graphs to the story about Nina, recounting her short but nasty tenure in adult. He reworks my lede about the gangbang, insisting that his version sings, whereas mine “just laid there like a used dildo.” He even goes into The Daily Pornographer’s content management system to add some extra information to the shoot-out story.
“It’s OK to use the facts from the local news story?” Miles asks.
“Sure,” I say. “Just cite KCAL 9 and include a link to their website.”
Such is the nature of all journalism in the digital age. If there’s a link it, it must be true.
Miles bangs away on the keyboard, a citizen journalist, freshly deputized. Or maybe he’s as much of a porn journalist as I am. Who can really tell the difference?
“Wait,” I say.
“Heywood.”
“Yeah.”
“There’s an onion ring on your sling.”
I remove the onion ring and say, “I might have some art to add to the shoot-out story.”
“Really? Where is it?”
“It’s on my phone.”
For a second, Miles looks at me with disbelief, then admiration.
“If you got the shot, that would make this whole shoulder thing pretty epic.”
I agree that getting the shot would transform my injury from stupid to epic, but because my phone somehow ended up in my left pocket, I need Miles to retrieve it for me.
“This is exciting,” Miles says with his hand stuck in my pocket. Then he adds, “That’s what she said.”
I groan. For all his enthusiasm, Miles clearly lacks the jaded demeanor of a real porn journalist. Thankfully, Miles retrieves the phone before he can think of another lame joke.
We look at the phone as Miles thumbs through the pictures. I got off about ten shots while I tumbled through the air, which is impressive. But most of the pictures were either blurs of light or blotches of darkness, which negates my photographic feat. Mathew Brady with an iPhone, I’m not.
“Wait a minute,” Miles says.
He stops on a slightly blurry image. The picture is out of focus, but we’re able to make out three people clearly. The first two people are Nina Wild and her Mohawk man.
“You got the money shot, Heywood!”
Miles zooms in. It’s clear that Mohawk is finishing up on Nina’s ass despite—or perhaps because of—the chaos going on around them.
“Talk about a rush,” Miles says. “He is jacked up.”
I look at Miles and he quickly says, “It’s a Navy SEALs reference. Charlie Sheen after the raid. You’d get that, if you weren’t high on painkillers.”
I give Miles a blank look, and we go back to the phone. The third person in the picture is Boyd. He’s on the left side of the frame, but because he’s closer than Nina and Mohawk, his image is sharper. I can see Boyd’s determined face frozen in time as he stares down the barrel of his pistol. Miles expands the image and zooms in.
“Holy fuck-balls that’s some cool-ass shit!” he says. “Unreal.”
We stare at the phone, realizing that I somehow snapped a photo of Boyd firing at Ron just as the bullet rocketed out of his gun with a fiery muzzle blast.
“This is some serious John Woo shit,” Miles says. “Muzzle blasts are like the cumshots of action films. I’m totally putting that in the movie.”
Miles swipes left and the final photo appears on the screen. It’s an upside-down shot of a butt-naked Ron running away, a gun in his hand.
“How do you know it’s him?” Miles asks.
“No shoes,” I say. “Only a psycho goes barefoot at a gangbang.”
“How do you know that?”
“When you spend the day at a butt-naked sausage party, you spend a lot of time looking at the floor.”
Chapter 48: Old-school newsman shit
December 31, 2011
The pain in my shoulder wakes me up a little before sunrise. I stare at the ceiling for a few minutes, but it’s futile. Pain always beats sleep.
I shower awkwardly and wash with one hand. It’s difficult, so I stand as long as I can under water that’s nearly hot enough to burn my skin. This seems like the best way to get clean after a shoot-out at a gangbang. But maybe I’ve just seen too many movies where the hero cleanses himself under a blistering downpour in the shower. Truth is, I don’t feel any cleaner, but my skin is warm and red.
Dressing is another matter. The challenge of hoisting a T-shirt over my banged-up shoulder is matched only by the impossibility of buttoning my jeans with one hand. Somehow I manage.
I stop at Yum Yum for an apple fritter. I pop four Advil with my coffee. The pain never really goes away. But it does fade into the background, like tinnitus after a concert.
By the time I reach the office, my head is more or less in the game.
With my good hand I place a yellow legal pad on the desk and write down a few questions.
1. Where is Ron now?
2. Was Johnny Toxic’s murder really just simple revenge? Ron seems psychotic, but semen in his ranch dressing is a curious motive for a marginal man who made his living as a fall guy in the exploitation business.
3. How is it that the industry consensus about Ron seems correct, but the killer remained at large and unmasked for more than a week?
4. How did Boyd and the cops get to the gangbang so fast?
A lot of things don’t add up with the Johnny Toxic story. I try to see the facts through Booty’s porn paradigm, but I get the feeling that I’m not all the way through the looking glass on this one. Or perhaps the looking glass is broken and I’m shit out of luck. Either way, pornification can’t really explain all the shit that’s gone down this week.
I’m lost in thought when I hear the office door.
Dean enters and asks me if I’m taking painkillers for my shoulder.
“Percocet,” I say.
“Great,” he says. “Got any extra? I’ll buy them off you.”
I tell Dean that I left the hard stuff at home because that junk clouds my mind. He seems disappointed, but invites me back to his office for a chat.
“Sunny isn’t coming in today,” he says as I take a seat. “She’s probably got a
job interview. She’s dying to get out of this place, you know.”
“A job interview, today? I thought we’d be the only office that’s open in LA.”
Dean smiles and takes a long gulp from a large Starbucks cup that has his name misspelled in black marker. Either that, or he took Dan’s coffee, whoever he is.
“Got any stories?”
“I think I have a feature,” I say.
Dean’s eyes light up. Or maybe it’s just the flicker of the fluorescent office lights catching the glassy surface of two eyeballs that spent the previous night staring down the barrel of a bong.
“Lay it on me, dude,” he says. “We need a cover story for next month. Sunny was supposed to have something, but we both know she checked out of the Hotel California, right amigo?”
Of course, Dean is an Eagles fan. I shouldn’t be surprised, but I reflect on that detail for a moment because, unlike everything else about this job, that fact actually makes perfect sense right now.
“The tubes,” I say. “They’re a really big deal, and we haven’t written about them. I checked.”
Dean looks over his shoulder and leans in like a conspirator with a can’t-miss scheme.
“Tell me what you know,” he says.
“The tubes are collapsing porn’s ecosystem,” I say. “It’s palpable out there. Everyone I talk to is either losing money or making a fraction of what they did in the past. They all blame the tubes, and I think some of them will go on the record.”
Dean listens intently as I wax analytical about what I’ve learned during my brief tenure. In a nutshell, the tubes represent a paradigm shift in the distribution of porn. Slowly but surely, I explain, the tubes are consolidating the entire industry and turning porn production into a feudal enterprise.
“They’re basically cornering the market on smut,” I say. “But the weird thing is that nobody knows who the hell they are. It’s as if some anonymous company bought all the movie studios and then put the squeeze on producers, directors, and actors. But who owns the tubes? Who’s taking over? That’s the mystery.”
Dean stands up and walks over to the glass door like he’s looking for someone who isn’t there.
“I know who owns the tubes, dude,” Dean says, his SoCal drawl hanging in the dead air.
“You do?”
Dean returns to his desk and motions for me to slide Sunny’s seat next his. He flips on his monitor, and selects a file marked “Dick Pics.”
“Hey, that’s OK,” I say, “I don’t need to see...”
“The file name is for privacy,” Dean says. “You never know who’s watching around here. Would you open a folder called Dick Pics?”
“No,” I say.
“Exactly, dude. Exactly.”
As it turns out, there are no pictures in the file. Instead, it contains PDFs of court documents and corporate records. It’s a legal gumbo, but Dean gives me the bottom line.
“I’ve been pulling public documents on the tubes for a while now,” he says. “You’re right, whoever owns the tubes is a mystery, but you can’t hide from public records.”
“Public records?”
“Articles of incorporation and lawsuits, dude. Didn’t they teach you anything at the LA Times?”
“I covered high school sports,” I say. “And I got laid off the same morning I started.”
If the revelation that I may have embellished my resume registers with Dean, his face doesn’t show it. Instead, he explains that he got the documents by running searches on lawsuits filed against tube operators. None of the lawsuits went to trial because they all settled or were dismissed on technicalities, but not before a few plaintiffs’ lawyers had papered the tube operators with complaints and various legal motions.
“These suckers hide themselves in a web of DBAs and fictitious names,” Dean says as he opens a Word doc with a list of company names. “They’re like the Blackwater of porn.”
“Except they give away free porn, instead of renting out mercenaries,” I say. “Kind of a big difference.”
Dean looks at me like I’m an idiot, but I get that a lot working here, so I ask him what the Word doc is all about.
“This is where it all leads, dude. This is who own the tubes.”
Dean highlights a company called BFD, LLC.
“BFD?” I say.
“Yeah, it stands for Big Fucking Deal, dude.”
“OK. And BFD owns all these companies and DBAs?”
“Yup,” Dean says. “That’s what all these documents show.”
I look at Dean and wonder if I’ve underestimated him. Sure, he dresses like an aging beach bum, says dude way too much, and has the kind of drug habit you’d expect if Snoop Dogg and Lindsay Lohan had a love child, but the son of a bitch did do his homework on this one.
“So who owns BFD?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” he says. “That’s where the trail goes cold.”
According to Dean, only one plaintiff got as far as suing BFD proper. The rest of the lawsuits got hung up in a maze of various BFD subsidiaries and shell companies.
“Do you have the complaint?” I ask. “The one that got to BFD.”
“Of course I do, Heywood,” Dean says with a devilish grin. “I’m an old-school newsman.”
He opens a three-page PDF that has to be the shortest complaint in the history of lawsuits. But ambiguity is actually a bigger problem than brevity. The suit was filed about a year earlier on behalf of Gawain Films, but there’s no name associated with the company.
“Do you know Gawain Films?” I ask. “They don’t sound like an adult company.”
Dean shakes his head no, and points to the bigger mystery.
“The real question here is who owns BFD,” he says. “The plaintiff obviously didn’t know, so they refer to the owners as various John Does.”
John Does, Dean explains, is legalese for an unknown party to a lawsuit.
“What was this lawsuit about?”
“That’s the other weird thing, dude. It was a copyright suit, but it doesn’t say what material the defendant infringed on. Also, it was filed in state court.”
“So?”
“So copyright is a federal thing,” Dean says. “A first-year law student should know that.”
I’m not a law student, but I see no reasons to remind Dean of that fact.
“It says adult films there,” I say pointing to the complaint.
“Yes it does, dude. But it also says that the plaintiff has attached an exhibit that lists all of the titles the defendant allegedly infringed upon.”
“So?”
“So, there’s no document attached, and the case settled for an undisclosed sum three days after the complaint was filed.”
“What do you think that means?”
“Either the lawsuit was a total clusterfuck, which is plausible because the janitor at an unaccredited law school that operates out of a strip mall could do a better job of drafting.”
“Or?”
“Or it was a pretty effective shakedown.”
“Huh?”
“The plaintiff found the last company in this tubes mess, the deep pocket, if you will, and they went looking for a quick settlement. A little payola. Probably, BFD paid just to keep it quiet. Kind of like blackmail, except it’s legal.”
“Did you call the lawyers involved?”
“Of course I did, dude.”
“But?”
“I’ve never heard of them, although it’s not like I get out from behind this desk very often,” he says. “At any rate, they wouldn’t talk because of confidentiality. Total dead end. But I’m thinking one of your sources might know BFD.”
“You think they’d tell me if they did? That kind of information would be pretty valuable, if your theory is correct.”
“That’s true,” Dean says as he finishes his coffee and tosses the cup in the trash. “But we’re out of options on this one. So what you do is you ask your sources and you look for a reaction.”
/> “What will that do?”
“Dude! Come on, Heywood,” Dean says, shaking his head. “Seriously, I weep for the future of this profession.”
Dean twists his head around to make sure we’re alone. Then he opens his desk drawer and pulls out a lighter. He quickly packs a one-hitter and takes a puff.
“Wake and bake,” I say.
“Midmorning snack,” he answers as he exhales. “Heywood, it’s all in the reflexes.”
“Excuse me?”
“Your intuition. Your instinct. A good reporter follows his gut. That’s all you have.”
“OK.”
“If you can find someone who recognizes BFD, even if it’s slight, we can blow this thing wide open.”
“Can you print me out a copy of the complaint?”
Dean taps a keyboard shortcut and the printer spins to life. I get up and grab the warm paper off the tray.
“Dean,” I say, half-distracted by the top page, “I know the lawyers involved in this case.”
Stan Fishback, the shady lawyer who bought the assets of Legit Productions out of bankruptcy, is listed as counsel for BFD. That’s not all that surprising considering the likelihood that the life’s work of Angelo “Big Juggs” Picati probably did weave its way through the confusing web of ownership detailed in Dean’s research.
What is surprising is the name of the plaintiff’s lawyer.
Chapter 49: Killer assignment
Stiff winds make freeway driving more hazardous than usual. A winter storm is blowing in from the Pacific, and with my busted shoulder I have to fight just to stay in my lane. I also struggle to endure the Eagles. I don’t have a peaceful easy feeling, but changing the channel on the radio is out of the question, if I want to keep from wrecking.
The first drops of rain—big, wet, and cold—are already beginning to fall when I reach my destination.
I ring the bell twice and knock hard with my good hand. There’s a black BMW seven series in the driveway, so I know my guy is home. But it’s half past ten in the morning, so I’m pretty sure he’s asleep. Such are the business hours of LA douchebags.
I look up behind me at the big, gray sky. It’s a nasty brew that looks like it will swallow us all.
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