Work in Progress

by Paul Thomas

  ‘That’s women for you.’

  ‘Ain’t that the truth? So what brings you here, Max? I don’t pick you for a journalist.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘Well, you’re talking to me, for a start.’

  ‘My wife’s the journalist,’ I said. ‘They’re fine one on one but I’ve got a low tolerance threshold for other people’s shop talk.’

  ‘Amen to that. Everyone does it, though. What do you talk shop about?’

  ‘Books, writing. I write novels.’

  Walter raised his eyebrows. ‘Is that so? I’ve come across a few novelists in my line of work.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘I’m on the product development side of the entertainment industry.’ He paused. ‘The X-rated part of it.’

  ‘You mean you’re in the pornography business?’

  ‘That term has negative connotations for some people — Lorraine, for example.’

  ‘That’s what killed the conversation?’

  He nodded. ‘I could’ve skated over it or pure and simple lied — sure as hell wouldn’t have been the first time — but every now and again I like to test my first impressions, just to make sure I’m not getting ahead of myself. I picked Lorraine as a witch-burner. And I was right.’

  ‘And me?’

  ‘I don’t see you as a witch-burner, Max. I see you as a witch-fucker.’

  ‘Well, that would depend on the witch.’

  ‘There’s a fine line between being particular and being picky. It’s a line you don’t want to cross.’

  I wanted to hear more about the novelists.

  ‘We’ve got a paperback division,’ said Walter. ‘Pretty old-fashioned but some people like that: easy to hide and you don’t need instructions. You’d probably recognise the names of some of the guys — and gals — who do stuff for us. These aren’t hacks we’re talking about; these are some well-respected folk in literary circles.’

  ‘Try me.’

  He shook his head. ‘Uh-uh. If they wanted the world to know they were writing porn, they wouldn’t be using pseudonyms, now would they?’

  ‘Why do they do it?’ I knew the answer but I was curious about the going rate.

  ‘Money. What else would it be?’

  ‘What sort of money?’

  Walter cocked his head. ‘Do I detect a spark of interest?’

  ‘Just plain old curiosity.’

  ‘Two, maybe two-and-a-half grand. Per book.’

  ‘Shit, is that all? Why would a serious writer want to waste their time doing smut for that kind of money?’

  Walter looked sceptical, as well he might have. ‘Well, I don’t know how many books you sell, buddy, but one thing I’ve learned about the writing game is that being the talk of Greenwich Village doesn’t necessarily translate into an income that’s going to have them sharpening their pencils down at the tax department. Something else I learned is that being able to look into the human soul and set it down in three or four hundred pages of flowery language ain’t the most marketable talent under the sun. I mean, what are the other options? There’s teaching and journalism, I guess, but the third thing I learned about writers is that some of you don’t function too well in the real world. You seem to have a problem with basic stuff like being at a given place at a given time and working with other people and dealing with the public. Let’s face it, all you really want to do is sit in a room by yourself and make shit up. So if someone’s prepared to pay you twenty-five hundred bucks a week to do that …’ — he shrugged — ‘… well, if you can afford to shine them on, good luck to you.’

  ‘When you put it like that …’

  ‘You know what’s kind of interesting? My boss had a hell of a job persuading the company that we should pay writers that kind of money. Their attitude was that any degenerate with a typewriter can crank out a dirty book; it’s not like the sick fucks who buy the goddamn things are looking for a zinger of a plot and a way with words. So what would happen was, we’d pay these creeps a few hundred and get pure skank, as you’d expect. Then we had a choice: either cut our losses and kiss off the few hundred, or publish the skank as is and more than likely kiss off the few hundred and the cost of publication, or pay another writer to rewrite the skank and give ourselves a shot at recovering our costs and maybe making some cream. My boss eventually managed to convince them that if we paid enough to get decent writers, it wouldn’t cost any more in the long run, plus we’d stand a better chance of having a product that the great jerk-off community — or at least the part that can read — would actually buy.’

  ‘How long do these books have to be?’

  ‘Thirty-five thousand words.’

  ‘And they write them in a week?’

  ‘Five thousand words a day for seven days. It’s porn, okay? We’re not talking about the great American novel, half-a-dozen drafts and changing some fucking adjective twenty times to get the only word in the entire language that says it exactly right and doesn’t fuck up the rhythm of the sentence. Besides, there are some, let’s say, conventions of the genre that the porn novelist ignores at his peril.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Well, first and foremost the action should come thick and fast and get progressively juicier.’ He narrowed his eyes theatrically. ‘You know, Max, if I didn’t know better, I’d be getting the impression that you mightn’t be averse to doing a little moonlighting down in Fucktown.’

  Well, I was between projects.

  Kate had seen me buddying up to Walter and was impressed by this show of compassion. I didn’t tell her what we’d talked about and I didn’t show her the sample material Walter sent me. If your partner trusts you, it’s not that hard to hide something in a two-bedroom flat.

  I kept it from her because she wouldn’t have understood why I’d even contemplate writing pornography. My income wasn’t an issue. Like many people, Kate had an exaggerated respect for writers based on a highly romanticised conception of the creative process. In her eyes I was every bit as much an artist as some olden-day tubercular poet wasting for his art in picturesque poverty. Like the poet, I had no choice but to follow my dream, and the little I had to show for it was society’s fault, not mine.

  I wasn’t sure I understood it myself, although money did come into it. I hadn’t absorbed many of my parents’ petit-bourgeois anxieties and cautionary tales but a side of me — which I kept well-hidden and which comprised equal parts cynicism, pessimism and solitariness — foresaw me ending up on my own and could therefore see some merit in establishing a contingency fund.

  I also rationalised that there were writers more self-consciously serious and better off than I who happily and lucratively demeaned themselves by spinning candyfloss for glossy magazines and weekend supplements. Leaving aside the mass-market junk merchants, the weavers of Walter Mitty fantasies for an unheroic generation or love-conquers-all melodramas for women on the domestic treadmill, how many writers earned a decent living solely from fiction? Most did something on the side — like teaching creative writing to people who, in the main, were born to read — or else had their gums clamped to the public tit. If those were the alternatives, why not write porn? Compared with soliciting for government patronage or putting one’s name to calculatedly cosy profiles of other writers or destination pieces for the travel pages, the spiritual home of advertorial, it was a radical, even subversive, thing to do. Fuck it, it was bohemian.

  Reading the sample material with what was now an alert apprentice’s eye, I saw pornography’s arc more clearly and firmed up my hazy take on its raison d’etre.

  Pornography, I realised, was militantly anti-love. Where love intruded, it caused terrible suffering, in the form of sexual frustration, through its monstrous insistence that you must give your loved one exclusive access to your body. And given that in Fucktown sex with one person at a time is the equivalent of driving with an L-plate, sex with the same person day in, day out (not for long: you’re already on the slippery slope to separat
e bedrooms) is a form of living death, like zombiism.

  The porno novel’s basic narrative is a woman’s journey of sexual self-discovery. When we meet our heroine she may be alone — widowed, divorced or spinsterish out of conviction or a broken heart — or trapped in marital fidelity. She may think she’s happy and fulfilled but that’s just the socio-religious brainwashing.

  Our heroine doesn’t realise or won’t acknowledge that she’s brought this on herself by denying her true nature: she wasn’t put on this earth to be celibate or monogamous. So now she’s a ticking sex bomb; it just needs someone to get their finger on the button. The detonation may be foreshadowed by a guilty bout of masturbation which, for plot purposes, may be covertly witnessed by an admirer — or, for that matter, a passing able-bodied male — who’s thus encouraged not to take no for an answer.

  He doesn’t. Neither does her bisexual best friend or her bisexual best friend’s husband or the muscular lads who clean her pool or their friends who decide they’d like a piece of the action or the basketball team whose bus is the first vehicle on the scene when her car breaks down on a lonely stretch of road … And of course they’re right not to take no for an answer because once our heroine gets over her socio-religiously programmed resistance to being simultaneously vaginally, anally and orally penetrated by brusque if not abusive strangers, she discovers that SHE LOVES IT. JESUS FUCKING CHRIST, DOES SHE LOVE IT!!!! (Her various epiphanies are often accompanied by orgasmic vocalising that has more impact — a little trick of the trade here — when rendered in capital letters.)

  What this means, in stuffy legal terms, is that our heroine gets raped rather a lot.

  (Things have changed a little since those days, if my casual research is any guide. What’s coyly referred to as the ‘non-consent’ motif was one area where the feminist critics had an obvious point. Aware that their sine qua non is unbridled female lust, some pornographers have toned down the coercion or simply cut to the chase: when we meet our heroine in this thoroughly modern manifestation, she’s already ready for anything.

  Technology has also played a part. If the paperback was low-tech back then, it’s positively primitive in the internet age. An old-time Hollywood mogul was fond of saying that there’s really only one story: the delayed fuck. Well, delayed gratification is a hard sell these days. Hunched over his laptop or sprawled in front of TV with his trousers around his ankles, the contemporary consumer may feel, for various reasons, that there’s a limit to how long he can and should drag this exercise out. Character development and context, therefore, take a back seat to action. Furthermore, the marquee stars of the adult film industry are the leading ladies, and stars must always be seen to be in control. These tawny lionesses with their state-of-the-art tits don’t need their buttons pushed by some meat-sack pumped up on steroids and Viagra. They are huntresses like Tania’s Louise, but without the pseudo-intellectual song-and-dance.)

  When Walter rang to see if I was coming on board, I expressed reservations about the ‘non-consent’ motif.

  There was a long silence. ‘Is that a yes or a no?’

  ‘Well, that’s up to you, Walt. I’m prepared to have a crack but not if the women have to be forced into it.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I just told you: I have a problem with that stuff.’

  ‘You do realise it’s not rape,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, really?’

  ‘How the fuck can it be rape if they enjoy it?’

  ‘It’s rape if it’s against their will. And the fact they end up enjoying it implies — make that asserts — that there’s no such thing as rape. There’s just a lot of screwed-up women who haven’t caught up with the fact that happiness is eighteen hard yards of cock.’

  ‘Max …’

  ‘And we know that’s bullshit, don’t we, Walt, we know that’s vile and dangerous crap. We know that, in real life, pathologically promiscuous women who allow themselves to be used and abused need help. Don’t we, Walt?’

  ‘Max …’

  ‘How would you feel if your sister carried on like that, Walt?’

  ‘Max, shut the fuck up. It’s pornography, it’s for guys to jerk off over, it’s a way to make a buck.’ There was another bemused silence. ‘So if you won’t do non-consent, what’s it going to be?’

  ‘I haven’t given it much thought but I guess, you know, one thing leads to another.’

  He grunted unenthusiastically. ‘You could do a slut wife.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘Slut wives; it’s a real growth area. Basic storyline: a guy sees his prim and proper — so he thinks — wife being porked by another guy and finds it a colossal turn-on. He spies on her, hoping for a replay, and guess what? Mrs Homemaker turns out to be a screaming slut: getting nailed by the TV repairman is just the tip of the iceberg. Cue the usual menu: oral, anal, lezzies, threesomes, big-buck negroes with unfeasibly big …’

  ‘There’s a market for that?’

  ‘There’s a market for anything and everything; some markets are just a little more niche than others. You know what’s the hottest ticket in books right now? Incest.’

  ‘Incest?’

  ‘Check.’

  ‘Well, frankly, Walt, I wouldn’t know where to start …’

  ‘I wasn’t suggesting it, Max; you’ve got to walk before you can run. Maybe down the track.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Well, you know, the thing about incest, there’s less need for non-consent.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘It’s contrary to the laws of God and man, Max. It’s dirty enough as it is so why gild the lily?’

  I didn’t have strong views on pornography, one way or the other. I’d consumed a certain amount of it without becoming a misogynist or an abuser of women. On the other hand, I could see there would be men who’d take porn’s core anti-women message to heart. Banning porn was pointless and probably counter-productive — as Walter’s company was in the process of demonstrating to the Australian authorities — but it didn’t leave a hole in my life.

  I understand now what the attraction was then. The discrepancy between expectations and recognition/reward (the jury was still out on actual achievement) had sapped my self-belief and appetite for lonely toil. Seeing my work on bookshop shelves was no longer a buzz. There I was, me and a thousand others: all those titles, all those authors, all that choice. Why should anyone choose Max Napier? I wasn’t that good or that different and certainly not that lucky.

  This was where it really began — the loss of momentum, the running out of steam that Shelley talked about and that has brought me to where I am tonight: contemplating life as a failure.

  ten

  A book a week, said Walter: five thousand words a day for seven days.

  We’re not talking about the Great American Novel, said Walter. Or, for that matter, the Great New Zealand Novel. In fact, we were hardly talking about a Novel. We were talking about writing Crap for Money. Do it once, do it quick, bank the cheque. That’s how it works. That’s the only way it makes sense.

  The first one took me seven months. It was respectfully derivative of the Terry Southern/Mason Hoffenburg romp Candy, a seminal text among my little circle at university. My pal Chas Harley, who went on to a career in English lit, reckoned Candy was the ultimate novel because it made you laugh out loud and gave you a hard-on. Simultaneously. Eventually he conceded that this made Candy unusual if not unique, but not necessarily the last word.

  Chas and I bought all the copies of Candy that the university bookshop had in stock with a view to using them to grease the social wheels. Working on the theory that any girl who enjoyed the book — or, even better, ‘related’ to it — would be a prize catch on several grounds, we forced it on every likely lass we came across. Sadly, for all their loose talk and liberated attitudes, they generally failed to get the joke and dismissed it as smut, pure and simple. The passage in which the eponymous heroine is aroused by a hunchback (‘Give
me your hump!’) was deemed particularly repellent.

  Candy was itself a parody of Voltaire’s Candide. I reverted to a male protagonist: Randy is a naïve sixteen-year-old, the only child of suffocatingly protective parents. When they’re wiped out in that ever-reliable deus ex machina the car crash, he goes to live with his depraved Aunt Claudia, becoming a plaything for her and her like-minded friends. Torn between shame and guilty pleasure he runs away, taking refuge in a nunnery. But beneath its ascetic façade the Order of Saint Lavinia the Chaste is — you guessed it — the proverbial seething hotbed of debauchery. And so it went.

  I made every mistake you can think of: I created characters rather than lavishly endowed ciphers; I constructed a story with a beginning, a middle and a conclusion; I introduced humour, bawdy and satiric; I inserted the odd moment of tenderness among all the heaving and writhing; I had Randy fall in love. I forgot I was writing Crap for Money.

  I also wasted many hours dithering over a suitable pseudonym. At first I favoured something suavely man-about-townish, suggestive of the sort of swinger who would hang out at the Playboy Mansion and wake up in his rotating circular bed with a sumptuous breast in each ear: Brad Lance, Nero Blake, Drew Cheyney, Felix de Mille.

  But that wasn’t really me or what this was about. What was needed, I decided, was a name that distanced the writer from the material and infused the whole enterprise with postmodern irony: Rod Gripper, Aldo Tripod, Augie Nadir, Dirk Firkin, Strobe Riggle, Humbert Kinkade, Benny Pagan, Jolyon Slot, Chester Swill, Lex Raby, Lew Goatman. I even toyed with the idea of a sex change: Greeba Bint, Kitty Hornhardt, Patsy Frothmader, Juanita Dank, Poppy Clamm, Pandora Boxx. In the end I settled on Woody Bleek, which I felt had a foot in both camps.

  I sent the manuscript off. A week or so later Walter called from LA.

  ‘Max, I’d pretty much given up on you.’

  ‘I don’t blame you.’

  ‘It’s good, Max, damn good. In fact, if I’m ever tempted to read porn in a non-professional capacity, this’ll be my benchmark. Shit, it’s almost respectable.’