Boyd hands over a typed statement—my statement. It’s written in a kind of cop-speak that makes it sound like I knew what I was doing all along. I didn’t, of course, but I can’t quibble with the facts.
The statement lays out meeting Johnny, Ron, and Mary Jane on the set of Fuck-Whores 8. It details my attempts to interview various members of the “adult entertainment community” about the murder of Johnny Toxic, eventually zeroing in on Toxic’s lawyer, Bobby Beauchamp. The statement recounts the shoot-out at the gangbang as well as Beauchamp’s ill-conceived getaway and attempt to have Ron kill off anyone who knew the truth, including yours truly. It takes me a few minutes to read the statement because the real names have replaced the aliases to identify the guilty.
“You cool with that?” Boyd asks.
I nod my head.
“Sign it.”
I nod to my shoulder.
“When are they going to put it back in place?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I’ve been waiting for a while.”
Boyd smiles and puts his hand on my shoulder.
“Take a deep breath,” he says. “I’m about to do some Mr. Miyagi shit.”
As I exhale Boyd jams my shoulder back into the socket. There’s a gut-churning crunch followed by a wild scream. My scream. The pain radiates through my shoulder and down my arm. It makes a U-turn at my fingertips, doubling back up the length of my arm, colliding with a fresh wave of pain that swallows me up, the way the ocean swallows a piece of garbage.
“Breathe,” Boyd says. “Breathe. It only feels like you want to die.”
I breathe. The pain is still there, but so am I. That’s something, I suppose, maybe everything.
Boyd hands me a pen.
“Use your real name,” Boyd says.
I sign the statement. Boyd checks my signature and smiles.
“Case closed, chucklehead. Good luck with your story. And remember, it’s B-o-y-d.”
Boyd tosses me a copy of the police report and leaves the room. I try to catch it, which in my condition, is both pathetic and stupid. The file falls to the floor, and I narrowly miss bumping my head on the opposite wall. Thankfully, Boyd isn’t there to see the show.
As I bend down to pick up the file, I see something that makes my skin crawl and my heart pound. It’s Oz’s name, right there next to Johnny’s. Both are listed as shareholders of BFD.
Chapter 54: Traffic
“Did you ever think how weird it is that traffic is a good thing on the internet, but bad in real life?”
Miles has been pondering this question, asking it over and over again, since he picked me up at the hospital, an hour earlier.
One of LA’s many cruelties is that it’s a ghost town at Christmas, but it becomes a zoo on New Year’s. Agitated motorists crowd the streets, hunting down the essential party supplies to cleanse last year’s sins, while the underclasses scramble to their party workstations.
So we’re stop and go. Fighting to get ahead, never getting anywhere.
I understand Boyd wanting to get ahead of this mess. At the direction of a cokehead greed-demon, a ’roid-raging psycho killed a pervert with help from a grifter porn star whose drug habit rivals that of a rock band. It’s not a bad story, but it’s no reason to stay late and fight LA traffic, especially on a holiday. From a cop’s perspective, there were no humans involved in this one, just a sampler platter of scumbags. Besides, the two conspirators are dead, and according to Boyd, Mary Jane’s lawyer will probably talk the DA into rehab and community service in exchange for dropping a conspiracy charge that was never going to stick. The case is closed.
The few clips I was able to track down on Boyd told me that he was a typical cop—a completionist, albeit one of the irritated, path-of-least-resistance variety. Boyd had sacrificed Christmas in the name of duty and justice for a slain fornicator; he wasn’t about to miss his chance to tell 2011 to kiss his black ass goodbye as he rode a champagne swell into what we all hoped would be a better year.
“Seriously, I’m going to shoot somebody,” Miles says. “I’m popping caps in asses for real.”
This is a perfectly natural reaction to traffic in LA, so I’m not alarmed. If it wasn’t for the Vicodin fucking my brain to oblivion, I’d be right there with Miles. We may not all be capable of putting a battle-ax through a pervert’s heart, but each and every one of us fantasizes about something just as vile when stuck in traffic. Such is the nature of driving in La-La-Land.
I recorded my story into my phone while waiting for Miles to pick me up. I’ll spend about two thousand words chronicling the Toxic murder, complete with a firsthand account of a bizarre shoot-out. It’s the kind of story that brings heavy traffic. The good kind.
But the question I’ve been mulling is whether to add some fireworks at the end. Bobby Beauchamp murdered Toxic for his share of TubeWorks. This is an important fact in my story because it speaks to motive. But it’s also a juicy detail because Toxic had been so publicly critical of TubeWorks, and adding irony to a story about sex, money, and murder is the closest journalism comes to a sure thing.
Naturally, there will be more questions about TubeWorks. Questions about a payoff, and whether Beauchamp’s half-assed lawsuit was an attempt to enforce that payoff.
There will also be questions about whether Toxic was killed because of his public anti-TubeWorks stance. The implication being that Toxic had been co-opted by TubeWorks, and somehow the relationship had soured. I sincerely doubt this scenario because Toxic struck me as a pure opportunist, but I’m sure the conspiracy theorists on GFY will wax poetic about how the noble Toxic—King Arthur with a twelve-inch dong—was slain by a dragon named TubeWorks.
But the question I want answered is what my employer has to do with all of this. What was Oz’s connection to Toxic? Just as important, how was it that Oz came to be a silent beneficiary of the destruction of his own industry? And, most disconcerting to me anyway, what role did I play in furthering that duplicity?
As a trade reporter my duty is to cover the industry, good and bad. But no matter how much Vicodin I swallow, there’s just no getting around the gnawing pain in my gut that I was a pawn.
Of course, porn journalist is a sketchy title at best. When the name on your business card is Heywood Jablowme, it’s not even clear that there is a standard for professionalism. It’s a silly job, reporting on who has agreed to fuck on camera for money, but that doesn’t mean you’re not supposed to get it right. And that’s what really pisses me off. I can accept the joke and my role as jester—but knowing that my work was part of a deception? I can’t accept that and continue to call myself a journalist, even if the beat is porn.
Through the numbness of a thick opiate cloud, I feel a fire of outrage burning inside of me.
“If you can’t speak truth to power, fuck you,” I hear myself say.
Miles looks at me like I’m lost. Maybe he’s right. Because I’m not sure I want to know more about Oz. I’ve got my story, my ticket out. Three people are dead, and as I slip back into the numb mist I can see their naked bodies. They’ll haunt me in the space between dreams and reality. They will be my debt, blood money for my ticket back across the Rubicon. Three souls. I could get out now. Not clean, never clean. But I could leave more or less intact. Or, at least I could try.
“Pull over,” I say.
“What?”
“Pull over. Now.”
Miles stops the car by a fire hydrant. I get out and puke on the sidewalk. My stomach is empty, so it’s more of a dry heave. But the sight of me horrifies an old lady walking one of those bullshit dogs that can’t shit anything bigger than a Tootsie Roll.
“Are you OK?” Miles asks from inside the car. “You probably need to eat something, all the painkillers you’ve been taking.”
I get up off my knees and look back at Miles. The old lady picks up her dog and scurries away.
“Come on, there’s an In-N-Out just up the street,” he says. “My treat.”
***
The In-N-Out line is just another traffic jam.
“I love this place,” Miles says. “But they should call it In-N-Stay-A-While.”
To kill time waiting in line, I fill Miles in on my dilemma. He offers advice without me asking.
“Don’t shit where you eat,” he says.
“So you’d leave Oz out of it?”
“Absolutely.”
“Why?”
“You got your story, right?”
“Right.”
“So what’s in it for you if you take on Oz?”
It’s a good question, one I’m not sure I have an answer for.
“Nothing,” Miles says. “You’ll get nothing. Actually, nothing might be the best possible outcome. For sure you’ll lose your job.”
“That’s not a loss.”
“You might get the shit kicked out of you, or worse.”
I turn to look at Miles, staring until he turns to face me. I must look like hammered dog shit, so really how much worse could it get?
“Three people are dead,” Miles says. “Oz’s whole operation turns on hiding a fact that you want to publish on a website that he owns.”
We inch forward in line, closer to the sweet sizzle wafting out of the In-N-Out.
“I’m saying let sleeping dogs lie. It’s not like anyone’s going to throw you a parade for uncovering some deep, dark truth about the porn industry. So what if the people who make the fuck films get fucked by a handful of tech-savvy thieves? You think that’s a new story? Gutenberg didn’t own the copyright to the Bible, he was just the first guy to figure out how to make a buck printing it. So what if he screwed God out of the royalties in the process?”
I look out the window. The gray day is turning into a black night. Around us, only the In-N-Out stands as a gleaming white beacon, an island of purity in a sea of filth.
“It’s the nature of the beast,” Miles says. “If God wanted a better deal, he should’ve had a better agent.”
***
I scan the story one last time. It’s solid work, and all I have to do is click Publish.
“It’s your funeral,” Miles says between bong hits.
I’ve decided to present the Oz connection in the form of a disclosure. Whatever journalistic integrity I still have demands that I disclose that my employer was the victim’s business partner. In truth, that’s all I really know for sure, so I decide not to elaborate further. But if it fucks Oz, if it pisses him off, if it forces him to face some tough questions, I’ve got no problem with that.
Still, if I’m being honest, I know that I should call Oz for comment. Anything less is yellow journalism. But as Dean has so consistently pointed out, we aren’t the Times.
Calling Oz, I know, will result in him ordering me not to run the story with that paragraph. He won’t comment on the truth, he’ll just kill it because he can. Such are the perks of media ownership, which is why only the most ambitious psychopaths become moguls.
Naturally, I’m assuming what Oz will do. The truth is I don’t know the truth. I only know that I seek the truth out like a moth to a flame, even if it burns me, even if it destroys me. I’m a sucker that way, wide-eyed for facts, blind to the consequences.
“I have to talk to Oz,” I say.
Miles coughs and drops his bong on the floor. Putrid bong water spills onto the stained carpet. I stand up to get his keys.
“You want to go interview a guy who, best-case scenario, will have you fired,” Miles says. “And worst-case scenario...well, I don’t know what the worst case scenario is, but...”
Miles doesn’t want to say the rest, and I can understand that. There’s already been quite a body count this holiday season.
Miles shakes his head and cleans up the bong water, careful to save a juicy nugget of LA Confidential. He’s clearly in for the night and the rest of 2011. But in my condition I need a driver, so I make Miles an offer he can’t refuse.
“There will be porn stars there,” I say. “Lots of them.”
Chapter 55: The red carpet
Rachel works the red carpet like a ghost, carefully orchestrating porn stars for the cameras, but slipping out of the frame before the moment can be recorded for posterity.
“I thought she’d be hotter,” Miles says. “The way you talk about her, I don’t know...I expected hotter.”
For Miles, hotness increases with every inch added to a woman’s bust and subtracted from her skirt. That’s the porn star ideal—tits for days and accessible holes. Such is the nature of your average American male’s relationship with his internet fantasies, which are as widespread as they are unrealistic.
“In the movie, she’ll be hotter, bigger tits, shorter dress,” Miles says. “Also, this scene will have a way cooler location, because this place is a demilitarized zone.”
Usually, I’d be smiling at Miles, meeting his movie references measure for measure, but my eyes are on Rachel. She’s my best shot at finding Oz, which is exactly what worries me. I haven’t quite had time to reconcile the loopy logic of a publicist who promotes my employer and simultaneously warns me off of stories she’s decided to give to my rival. I know she has an angle, but I still can’t quite figure it.
The Daily Pornographer’s New Year’s Eve party is at The Three of Clubs, a Hollywood institution of the down-and-out shit-hole variety. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Miles and I have been here before. It’s a local bar where Hollywood assistants party when they just want to get fucked up. And although it’s about as far from the idea of Hollywood as you can get, The Three of Clubs is actually located in Hollywood. Except it’s the part of Hollywood the tourists don’t see because the sidewalks are paved with dirt and desperation, instead of stars and glitter.
We parked around the corner, passing a Yoshinoya where the city’s sad and lonely suck down bowls of MSG and low-grade beef. The club is across from an Army surplus store where senior citizen ’Nam vets huddle against the night. And there’s a gas station, the only place in the city where the lights shine bright on the poor and rich alike.
As I stare at Rachel working the red carpet—an oasis of glamour in a sea of filth—I have to hand it to my employer. Oz excels at polishing turds. It’s nothing but doom and decay outside the camera’s frame. But inside that tiny window is the fantasy, and that’s all that matters.
“What’s with the red carpet?” Miles asks.
“Every porn event has one,” I say.
Despite the fact that this is my first official industry event, I know this to be true because each day I edit a dozen press releases announcing one event after another. The particular details of each party differ, but two facts are always the same. First, there’s always a red carpet. Second, it’s always a cash bar. The red carpet is there because all any of these women really want is to be a star, Booty Blunt told me. But it’s always a cash bar because nobody wants to pay for their booze when the stars realize how many cocks they had to suck and fuck to get on that red carpet.
I walk toward Rachel. Miles follows behind me.
“You look like shit,” Rachel says.
“You look wonderful tonight.”
For a second I think I see her smile. It’s subtle, a slight curl of the lip, her dark eyes getting just a little wider, just a little softer.
“You want to see Oz,” she says.
“Yeah, I want to ask him why our publicist gives stories to the competition.”
Rachel points her assistant toward a porn star who has already had a little too much to drink. The woman is yelling at the other porn stars, calling them cunts. On a real red carpet, it’d be a serious scandal. But here, on this red carpet, the name-calling is a mild distraction, like elevator music. The assistant, a woman who holds her cell phone like a knife, maneuvers the unruly porn star inside, presumably straight for the bar.
“I like you, Heywood. You make me laugh.”
“If he makes you laugh, why don’t you just laugh?” Miles asks.
Rachel
looks at Miles sideways—an interloper.
“You want a plus-one, right?”
“I don’t, he does,” I say.
Rachel nods at the doorman, who I recognize from porn star karaoke. Tony I think his name was.
“Heywood,” the doorman says. “Heywood Jablowme, right this way.”
“He’s going to be disappointed,” Rachel says as I pass her.
“Yeah, well that’s the price you pay when you’re the Wizard of Oz,” I say.
“No, I meant your friend,” she says. “These civilians, all they want is to talk to a porn star and the minute they do, the blood rushes from their heads to their pricks and they can’t put two sentences together.”
“That’s the trouble with fantasies,” I say. “They don’t work in reality.”
“I do like you, Heywood. But if you go inside, it’s all business.”
I smile and say, “I know.”
For a second I feel like a badass. Then Rachel levels me.
“Oz is in the back,” she says. “He’s waiting for you, says he wants to talk about the Johnny Toxic story.”
Chapter 56: The Wizard of Oz
As soon as we step inside, I know Rachel was right. About Miles anyway. His eyes are wide, his jaw open.
“It’s like I walked into my spank bank,” Miles says.
I’m trying to decide if I should warn Miles against making a deposit, when I realize that he’s no longer standing next to me. A consummate fan, he’s asking a porn star if she’ll autograph a cocktail napkin that’s about the size of the spandex patch covering her moneymaker.
I see Oz out of the corner of my eye. He motions me over to him. The party is in full swing, so it takes me a few minutes to cross the room.
“Have a drink with me,” Oz says, pointing to a secluded booth.
We sit. Oz hands me a whisky.
“Johnny Walker Black Label.”
I take a sip, letting the whisky warm my chest.
“I read the Johnny Toxic story,” he says. “Pretty good.”
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