Ryan turns his head, watching crew members and technicians scurry around the set: a circular wooden platform, three feet high and twenty feet in diameter, covered by a base of mossy carpeting. A spongy, asparagus-toned blanket lies on top of the carpet, itself partly concealed by a collection of frilly jade pillows. Various potted plants – all rather exotic-looking, by Ryan’s estimation – line the far curve of the base, their serrated fronds and leaves packed in a dense semicircle. Kinda like a swamp, he guesses.
‘So it’s nearing the end of the shoot. We give the cue for Helmsley to come, so he starts groaning and shit. But when he lifts his left leg to get some leverage, he slips and absolutely bails. On his way down he smacks his head against the faucet, and bang, motherfucker’s out cold.’
With the loud crackle of high voltage, quartz-halogen bulbs suddenly bathe the carpeted base with blinding expositional lighting. The surrounding floor and background of the set are immediately lost in shadow. Ryan blinks, squinting. And what materializes before him is a moonlit jungle clearing beneath cloud-covered, canopied night, without street lamp or tail light – a lack of illumination that seems subtly sinister and secretive, enlarging the dimensions of the warehouse so as to feel immense, continental. He picks up a sandwich from the platter and begins taking distracted nibbles from a piece of ham.
‘But here’s the thing,’ Michael says, his voice assuming a confidential tone. ‘Everyone assumes he’s still conscious. Nobody knows how he did it, but Helmsley keeps moaning like nothing happened. And get this – he’s still got wood!’
Despite the loud bustle of crew members lugging equipment (including two set assistants carrying an enormous plastic femur), Ryan listens to the playful echoes rebounding upon the room’s darker corners – echoes producing an indistinct, subterranean effect. Without really knowing why, he finds such noises extraordinarily unpleasant; the word spooky comes to mind. Turning away from Michael and the platter, he catches sight of David Yost, fifty-one-year-old production manager and almost entirely obsolete, switching on a smoke machine. The squat device begins to billow rich and greasy smoke, giving the interior set the gaseous murkiness of a marsh. Ryan turns back to Michael, wiping sweat from his forehead. The air in the warehouse is exceedingly humid. Almost tropical, he thinks.
‘So the chicks keep on sucking and jerking, yadda yadda, and Helmsley comes with this huge groan. The girls finish the scene, we yell cut, but then we all realize what’s happened – that Helmsley’s fucking bleeding from the back of his skull. That he’s out of commission. Get it? That he’s been unconscious since he fell. Isn’t that some crazy shit?’
Michael throws his head back and laughs, wrapping up a length of electrical cable. Still giggling, he glances toward the interior set. Ryan slowly follows his gaze to Don Debris, sitting in his telescopic director’s chair, hands folded in his lap, surrounded by tendrils of fog. They make eye contact. Don gives a firm nod and Michael turns back to Ryan.
‘I think Don wants to see you,’ he says.
Ryan licks his lips.
‘Break a leg, buddy,’ he says, striding away with short, piston-like paces. Ryan wonders, was there a note of mockery, of sarcasm, in Michael’s tone? He frowns, thinking. And what was that nod with Don all about? Remembering not to snack between meals, he drops the remains of his sandwich on the floor.
‘You’re beautiful,’ Don says, walking toward Ryan. They hug, Don’s hand slapping between Ryan’s massive shoulder blades. He kisses Ryan’s cheek, all aggressive camaraderie. Ryan stares, dazed (you’re beautiful – was that some sort of joke?), into Don’s face – a well-worn outcropping of cheekbone and jawline, curled, atavistic brow, ample forehead and dark chocolate eyes. Skin tone the average russet of L.A. and fine black hair kept short and side-parted. Staring into Don’s eyes, Ryan is once again reminded of the way Don can stare at distant objects for vast periods of time, exhibiting a watchful, primitive patience, a wariness of horizons. It made him recall a Neanderthal dummy he’d seen in a museum with his dad as a child; the waxy brow, the gaze, the hair – it was all so terrifying.
As a result, Ryan often finds himself sympathizing with the many B-girls who routinely assume that Don is a stunt cock or a gofer. Upon discovering that he is their director, they immediately act simple-minded and shy in his presence: fully committed to the role of bimbo, airhead or nihilist. After several months of working with Debris, they end up calling him Daddy, sitting in his lap and giggling whenever he tickles or bites their necks.
Ryan used to think this was cute – even funny. But that was back when the whole enterprise was still some novel dream – when Ryan was still riding a late-nineties wave of high hopes and heady anticipation, days of Californian sunbathing and careless mornings under the beneficent rays of the internet industry boom. A time when Ryan was just overcoming his first few weeks of excruciating shyness and deference, when his dad, dead then for over a decade, wasn’t frowning over his decisions, or lack thereof. Back when Don was still the Don Debris – a man known for his unerringly accurate sense of what was good for business, despite his peculiar facial features (which, in the late nineties, merely made him more intriguing). At a hale twenty-three, with boyish looks and a flawless physique, Ryan had just completed the film that would usher in all the glowing industry attention: the Adult Video Network Award nomination for Best New Stud, the flurry of media interviews, the coveted invitation to Vegas for the ’98 awards ceremony. And with it all came Don: leaving him raspy messages on his answering machine, slipping him his glossy business card, talking over late-night drinks and lines of coke of Ryan’s earning potential, his own line of dvds, his contracts and his successes. A time when things could still be cute, or funny; when girls could sit in Don’s lap and Ryan would still laugh, not comprehending when one particular reporter said she found the scene ‘quietly heartbreaking.’
‘When are we filming?’ Ryan asks, still frowning, his eyes itchy and irritated, indifferent to whether Don can smell the pot on his T-shirt, oozing out of his pores and warm on his breath.
‘Whenever you’re ready,’ Don says.
Don grips Ryan’s barbed-wire-tattooed arms, and they take each other in: Don all happy bravado, Ryan still buzzing from the brass pipe he stores in his glove compartment, feeling anxious.
Don opens his mouth, revealing a row of even white teeth.
Then it happens. The sound. With relief, Ryan assumes he’s just dreaming; it would account for the smudge on the TV screen in his apartment. Maybe this means he’s never missed a dream at all; maybe the weight of two and a half years is just another one of the dream’s more troublesome figments. He’s about to wake up! But the sound rises and rips through the blur of pot, and Ryan grinds his teeth, clenches his fists. He knows, then, that it’s more or less real: a roar emanating from an unseen section of interior – a roar that can only come from something huge and vicious and prehistoric – the bone-trembling scream of blood and hunger and rage.
Cubicle dividers shake slightly. Something metallic rattles and then comes to a trebly stop. Laughter and applause rise thick and cynical.
And Ryan’s feeling of dread deepens with a cold depression in his chest.
‘We doing some caveman shit?’ he asks slowly.
Don smiles. ‘Let’s talk.’
III
Don and Ryan sit across from one another on plastic folding chairs near the west exit of the warehouse. Don sips from a plastic cup of iced tea and rubs a leather loafer against a fossilized hunk of gum beneath his chair. Ryan’s hands are in his lap, his expression purposely stony. David Yost stands near the entryway to the cubicle, absently pulling on his miniature ponytail. Half a dozen bulky garbage bags (Dust to Dust) lie at his feet, their ends sealed with green twist ties.
A faint, repetitive roaring comes statically from the interior set, muffled by digital imperfections, echo and distance. The sound clip is a recording of the Tyrannosaurus rex’s first sustained roar during the second major scare scene o
f Jurassic Park. Throughout the afternoon, the film is recalled fondly by several crew members, who separately and enthusiastically compliment David on his choice of sound bite. David is congratulated with particular warmth by Bianca Jane (BJ) Stephenson, one of Ryan’s scheduled co-stars, who mentions (in her squeaky, schoolgirl voice) that she was a ‘dinosaur nut’ in elementary school, impressing those interested (not Ryan) with her ability to name even obscure hadrosaurs, such as Parasaurolophus or Velafrons, with an offhanded, precocious and undeniably cute air (also relating, to those patient enough to listen, that Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park was the first real adult novel she read, in the fourth grade, finding it thrilling and even, at times, moving, calling it her ‘first’).
‘Yeah,’ Ryan says. ‘I’m upset.’
Don pumps his head up and down, cracks his knuckles. ‘It’s nothing,’ he says.
‘No, it’s not nothing,’ Ryan says. He rubs his palms over his face, scrunching the loose flesh of his cheeks, rubbing moisture from his eyes. ‘It’s definitely not nothing.’
‘It’s gonna be two hours’ work,’ Don says. ‘Three, tops.’
‘But a remake?’ Ryan asks.
‘Vivid remade Debbie Does Dallas. They knew it was a classic.’ Don glances quickly at David. ‘It’ll sell itself. Updates the themes. Chicks look different. It’s for a modern audience. People lap that shit up.’
‘We’re not talking about the same thing.’ There – did he catch Don and David share a look? Were they laughing at him? This is all because of my body, my gut, he thinks. They’ll want to cover it up, make me wear a stupid T-shirt or something …
‘Sure we are. The internet’s the future. We could do all sorts of internet remakes and make a lot of money. Hard-edged fringe shit, even.’
Ryan screws his face into a mask of concentration. ‘Listen, I’m kinda, um, dealing with something … right now …’ He trails off, faced with the uncomfortable realization that he’s never told another person about the dread or the whimpering, that he’s never told anyone about the dreamless nights. But then again, what did Don or David really know about him? Even if he did want to unburden, who would care?
‘Okay, Ryan, yeah, we’re here for you, man, and we’ve all got problems, and we’re all going through something or other but –’
Ryan stops listening. He finds himself thinking back to the night of the 1998 AVNAs. The way he got drunk and stoned after the ceremony, alone and lonely, staring into the spinning ceiling fan of his Ramada suite, listening to the dull throb of his extremities dancing in the warm embrace of booze and pot. It would be his first and last invitation to the awards, his last trip across Nevada. He fell asleep dreaming of enormous floodlights, sweat trickling from tight, tanned skin, the burn of cocaine dripping down his throat, his dad’s lifelike face hovering in his irradiated memory. And when he awoke, there was no dread, no whimpering, just the beginning of a burnout that would one day lead him here, to this warehouse in L.A., staring at Don sip a cup of iced tea and beg him to jump through one more pointless hoop. The dreamless nights and the ensuing dread would come later, after the kink and fringe features of the 2000s, the sixth installments in dead series, the drugs and pills and the collapse of his body. His body – what they were staring at, mocking, now saying it wasn’t good enough to headline features or even appear onscreen –
‘I can’t believe you aren’t pumped for this,’ Don says. ‘This is the easiest gig you’ve ever had, and you know it.’
‘You should have told me.’
‘You never asked.’
Ryan sighs.
David holds his palms out to Ryan in a pleading gesture. ‘Really, man, you’re totally gonna get into this. I mean, the set alone – we checked out the botany books, read up on all the terms, you know, like, gymnosperm, angiosperm, all that science shit from the late Cretaceous. We got fig leaves, sycamore maples, big-ass magnolia petals – I mean, this shit is totally fucking accurate.’ David drops his hands.
‘Show him the suit,’ Don says, smiling.
David squats and tears into a garbage bag. Ryan shuts his eyes.
‘This is really something, man,’ David says. ‘I mean, top-of-the-line. Close, anyway.’
Ryan doesn’t look.
‘The plants, the fog, the detail in the gloves and around the mouth. You’ve got individual scales all over the surface. It’s full body. It’ll feel like a second skin, and it’s lightweight. You’re not gonna be able to see too well, but you’ve got great manoeuvrability.’
‘Get a load of this, Ryan,’ David says. Ryan opens his eyes.
David holds a thirteen-inch rubber penis, about two and a half inches thick. The head is a rich shade of green. Two scaly, grapefruit-sized testicles hang beneath the shaft, also green. David squeezes the left ball, his tongue lying heavy on his bottom lip. A spurt of foamy purple liquid explodes from the tip, sailing in a heavy arch, landing with a satisfying splat on the concrete.
IV
Ryan stares at his reflection. He stands in the tiny washroom of the warehouse, his gloved hands clutching the wet edge of a porcelain sink, his face pressed against a circular mirror to compensate for the room’s feeble glow. The lingering scent of shit prickles his nostrils. He spits down the drain.
Ryan’s bowels feel enflamed, as if his intestinal lining were coated in a thick layer of Tabasco sauce. His recent evacuations have been passionate and prolonged, repeatedly tricking him into composure before blowing him down with another cruel gurgle of tightening muscles. Each time Ryan feels as though he has nothing left to give, he rises from the cheek-warmed seat and again attempts to don the zippered T. rex costume, one foot at a time, making room for the buoyant tail in the tiny stall, before unzipping it all again and collapsing back onto the bowl.
He inspects the ripple of the scales, the rigid bones of the spine. The costume is a combination of an old black-and-white 1950s terrible lizard and of Godzilla, including rigid spinal protuberances coloured a myrtle green, punctuated by speckled flourishes of garish canary. The fingers taper into black, elongated nails. The tail is stubby and soft. Individual scales link together in a poor emulation of medieval armour. And between his legs hangs the strap-on cock-and-ball mechanism, butting impassively against the porcelain. Second skin my ass, he thinks.
Ryan automatically compares the artificial member to his own penis. When erect, the tendons beneath the flesh of his real shaft stand like hardened, rocky muscles, veins rising in a tangled relief map. Ryan owns a large, meaty penis – an appendage that was once called pretty, and regularly toasted by directors. What a cock, Don would say, sweating through another frenzied cocaine crisis of the early 2000s. What a beautiful monster. Ten years after his first film, Ryan now has to suck in his stomach to see the full length of his dick. And all it takes is the sucking in of flesh, the curious glance down, and suddenly his eyes begin to fill with fiery tears that enlarge his sense of dread to a gibbering sadness.
Ryan focuses on his reflection. He rubs a scaly nail along his jawline. The glove is wet from the sink, causing him to shudder. He thinks, helplessly, of his mornings, waking from paralysis and oblivion and the dull anesthesia of hangover. In the haze of awakening, he imagines his penis as a tube of white, waterlogged flesh, caressed on churning waves that are insane and immense. He squeezes his new green shaft and sighs, attempting to divert the course of his thoughts, only to find himself missing those early days when his penis was celebrated as some sort of surefire investment.
Surefire. Investments. All hopes amounting to money, that constant waking dream. He’d once thought of his debut in the industry (only those outside the industry called it porn) in the same way he considered his dick: as entirely unique. But soon the shots became more belaboured, the disappointments more acute, even as he stopped thinking about what his dad would have thought, if he’d lived. He watched the same story unfold, year after year, for almost every new stud: the beginning weeks of insufferable excitement, the flabbergasted exp
ressions pasted on the faces of the newly paid, realizing how much they received for what seemed like so little work. How the too-mature girls and the cocaine and the West Hollywood parties spun the boyish faces of the young men into haggard and sallow veterans, all sneer and superiority, still smiling despite the lack of surprise or novelty, despite the fortieth or fiftieth anal scene, the litres of come.
Every new actor’s debut scene reminded Ryan of his own first shoot: the buzz of cameras and intolerably bright lights and boom mics and weirdly creepy directors, the way the noise and pressure could instantaneously impede the natural flow of blood, causing limitless chaos and anxiety as mutters of wood trouble or no wood! reduced the chance of recapturing an erection to a grim impossibility. Ryan prides himself on his consistency in the erectile department, never once losing his composure, never once requiring the emasculating assistance of a stunt cock to cover his mandatory money shot. But there are times when it’s close – when the sexual act is so far removed from anything approaching arousing that he has to focus very hard, forget his name, regress to something so basic and primitive that after ejaculating he is unable to remember what carried him over the precipice of orgasm, what shadowy ancestral nudge tuned out the lights and the flicker of cameras and filled his ears with the pounding, implacable rush of blood. Whatever it is, Ryan thinks, it makes for great cinema – scary, though, to think that the secret, buried nudge will one day be gone for good.
And what if it has, finally? What if no one wants to see it, at least not from him? Ryan swallows. It’s all so easy today, what with the handheld cams and the three-person teams. Studs no longer having to pass through the fire of a full film crew, a tight schedule, a director catapulted to insanity by hard drugs. Hell, they aren’t even called studs anymore – instead lumped together with the girls under the insulting label of ‘talent.’ Closing his eyes, he tries to shove these thoughts away, into some dark cranny of his psyche. He tries to remember his last dream – the last dream before the onset of the dread, the forgetting, whatever it might have been. It doesn’t matter, he tells himself – any dream, even a nightmare, would mean happier times. He imagines it grandly capitalized: The Last Dream. But instead of The Last Dream, he finds himself remembering something entirely different.
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