by Tyler Knight
“—and the location owner, who charges me by the hour, doesn’t care why you struggled,” Jack says. “And neither do I. Time. Is. Money—”
“Yeah, but—”
“—and right now, you’re jeopardizing our business relationship by wasting more of it!”
Jim’s shoulders slump. He shuffles through the door. He never bothers to put his wad of cash in his pocket, so he drops a bill as he walks past us. Jack picks it up and pockets it.
“Ha-ha-ha…”
• • •
April sits on a schoolteacher’s desk, holding an eraser. Her legs dangle and swing over the edge. She looks like she dove into her mommy’s makeup box and then got bored with the game of dress-up and stopped somewhere in the lingerie drawer. The kid looks up at me with big Disney princess eyes and fairy tale blonde hair, smiles, and opens her legs. The bald folds of her pussy peek through the sheer fabric of the panties.
She says, “Hello, mister.”
A blackboard looms behind the desk. Columns of chalk-scribbled writing say:
“I will not say nigger in this classroom.”
She hops off the desk, and skips to the board. Her butt wiggles as she erases “nigger” from each sentence.
My jaw clenches. I look at Jack. Jack looks at me through the camera’s viewfinder. The camera’s greedy lens sucks my image through it and splashes my pixilated ghost across his face in pale blue light.
I open my mouth to speak, but her hand tugs my chin so that my face is square with hers. She wraps her arms around my waist and pulls herself into me. We kiss.
• • •
Melanie stops kissing me and the girls laugh and laugh… Eileen slides my backpack off my shoulders… All of us are in the house next door to Eileen’s house… Eileen had told me that she had something that she wants to show me so I followed her, Melanie, and Krista into the house… The house, still under construction, has open walls and I wish I wore my jacket and my hat because there’s no wall on one side… Just some wood… The floor is cement… I’m sitting on it now… It’s cold… Krista says, “It’s my turn!” but Eileen pushes Krista out her out of the way because Eileen is a lot bigger than Krista. She is bigger than I am, too.
Eileen says, “Now we’re gonna play ‘Show us yours and we’ll show you ours.’”
“What do I hafta show?”
The girls giggle and laugh and Eileen says, “Your penis.”
“What’s a ‘penis’?”
“Stand up.”
I stand up.
“This.” She unzips my pants and pulls them down and then she pulls my underwear down, too. She grabs my thing. “This is a penis.”
The other girls don’t giggle. The clouds hide the sun enough that I can look at it without hurting my eyes, and I can see everyone’s breath floating like clouds, but my face feels very hot.
Eileen tells the other girls to pull their pants down but Melanie doesn’t. She leaves. Krista doesn’t pull her pants down either so Eileen grabs her, but she runs away, too.
Eileen lifts up her skirt. No underwear.
I know I’m not supposed to look but I can’t help it… She has hair… A lot of hair.
“Have you ever seen a pussy before?”
I nod.
“Come here.”
My thing kinda hurts and I look down and I see that it’s standing straight up.
Eileen says, “Wanna touch mine?”
I look over at the front door of the house, nervous about getting in trouble. I shake my head no and Eileen gets mad and pulls her skirt down again…
Footsteps. Krista’s mom walks in the house and Eileen starts crying and runs away past her. My pants are still down at my ankles; I try to pull them up. My stomach drops.
She stops in front of me and I strain my neck to see her face… Krista’s mom looks kinda like Cinderella… She has yellow hair like Krista and all the daddies in the neighborhood talk real sweet to her. Her perfume smells nice.
SLAP!
My eyes fill with water and I see her all blurry.
She says, “You dirty pervert! I knew something like this would happen the moment you niggers moved in. I’m telling Krista’s father, then I’m going to the police so we can get rid of you!”
I still feel her hand on my cheek after they leave.
I hate living out in the country. I hate my new school and the kids. I walk past my house and hide behind a station wagon…The lights are off in the house and my dad’s car is gone. It starts to rain. My clothes stick to me and I shiver, so I keep going. I know where I can hide.
Robert answers the door and we walk to his backyard and he opens the woodshed. I sit down on a pile of firewood. It smells like Christmas. Sometimes Robert sits next to me at lunchtime when nobody else will.
I tell him what happened, and what Krista’s mom called me and he tells me what a pervert is. We eat some cake.
He asks if sometimes don’t I wish was white like everybody else. Like in a cartoon, I feel a safe, tied to my heart and falling off of a cliff… I say, “Yeah.”
Somebody bangs on the shed’s door.
My dad yells, “Get your ass out here, boy!”
• • •
I open the bathroom door. Jack is there.
“Great job,” he says. “April had to go but she wanted to tell you she had fun. We’re going to add you to our male talent rotation. What are you doing next Thursday?”
I grab my towel from the shower door and pick up my shaving kit. The money earned from today is already earmarked for bills and it’s not going to be enough, but, as Sun Tsu says: “When dealing from a position of weakness, feign strength.”
I say, “I’d have to look at my schedule.”
We don’t speak as we walk through the warehouse. When we get to the front door, Jack hands me my money. Unlike Jim’s crumpled wad, he hands me my cash in crisp, neat bills. I count it. It’s all there.
I push the door open, pause, and turn to Jack. I say, “How many guys let you call them a nigger?”
He looks down at me and laughs. “All of them.”
Mettle
The bag slides heavy off my shoulder so I heft it back to its place and continue walking through the dark. A dot ahead of me burns red, the night wraps around it. The next time it flares, it’s closer; the sweet scent of the kush reaches me a full pace before the man’s features fill in around the blunt between his lips.
I recognize him from the smut rags. For years, he’s been famous for keeping his spotless shoes on while fucking porn starlets. He wears chains that rattle and slap against his chest with pride as we approach each other on the driveway. I remind myself to pause and chat so I can maintain the subterfuge.
He smiles, but in Los Angeles a smile amongst competitors is never what it means. That’s how it works in this business. As a new guy I take what foothold I can get. When someone can’t get his dick hard, I get the call that starts with, “How soon can you get here?” He leaves, I take over. A pile of cash gets pushed my way and my fuck you stack grows a little bit bigger. I nearly have enough to pay the move-in cost for that apartment—two more scenes will get me there. I could use some of the cash stuffed in my pocket for a room tonight, but I save every cent. Discipline. If my old man taught me one thing it’s discipline. Still ringing in my eardrums.
Note to all the other male talent out there: I’m not your friend and if you see me walking up the driveway, you’ve fucked up. Sure, I joke around with you and laugh at the appropriate moments, confide my throwaway secrets and pretend to listen to yours, but I don’t give a damn about you. I want you to fail. I pray to God you blow a scene because, at this early stage in my career, your failure is food filling my gut. I’m sick of not having money, of being homeless. I have zero problems elbowing you out of the way so I can have cash for a place to stay a
nother night.
I see how the upper echelon guys live. They roll up in their flashy cars, brag about the civilian girls that send X-rated Myspace messages or pictures with their pussies spread open. The most famous male talents gets stopped in airports by guys who would offer their girlfriends to be like them. And some do. The top male talent live like gangsta rappers and rock stars. They get piles of cash, upwards of twenty thou a month. For fucking.
A grungy, pretty-boy porn star, who thinks Linkin Park’s “Crawling” is an anthem, not a warning, took me aside on a set last week to spin tales of Bacchanal parties in Vegas during the ATM awards; signing autographs during the day, then diving into a mountain of coke and cunt while the vacationers were long asleep. He told me how he stood with his pants at his ankles while clutching his award, back against the floor-to-ceiling glass window at a height that will kill a man long before he hits the ground, while twins played spit-and-swap on his cock; the lights of the Vegas Strip bursting thermite-neon at his back below.
He says, “If anybody hasta replace me, I’m glad it’s you.”
This guy, like everyone else, sees me as harmless. A bumbling Colombo type. This allows me to operate with impunity. Sun Tsu would be proud. Gangsta crosses his arms. I mirror him by crossing my arms.
“And when you get to be my level,” he says, “soma these bitches gonna fuck wit you. Normally I regulate on a ho, but this was my third scene today an that’s why I struggled—”
Right. Whatever makes you feel better.
Gangsta offers me a hit of his blunt. A police cruiser passes nearby so I slink into a shadow, and crush the red embers between my toe and the driveway. Gangsta slows his speech to a drawl and his posture to a slouch. So do I.
He talks and talks. The kush seeps its thick, sticky fingers into my skull, massaging my brain.
He looks down at his fresh-from-the-box shoes that cost more than the average American worker’s wages for a week. Fucking shoes.
I look down at my shoes. Their uppers look okay but there’s cardboard between the inserts and the soles.
“Hey, Travis—”
“Tyler.”
“Taylor, come down to the street. Lemme show you the DVD player I put in my car—”
I don’t believe this! Motherfucker is stalling. He’s trying to cock block me from succeeding even though it’s too late for him.
“Some other time,” I say. “If I don’t get inside and let them know I’m here, they’ll just call somebody else.” I excuse myself and continue up the driveway.
“Did you see my car is sittin’ on DUBs?” he hollers at my back.
I don’t slow down.
Shit, a phone call and a taxi ride ago I was sitting at a twenty-four-hour Internet cafe where I was going to spend the night, stealing shut-eye by the minutes. Now I’m walking up the driveway to a single-level ranch style house in Panorama City.
I enter the house without knocking. There’s talking going on in the back of the house. When I reach for my cell phone to turn the ringer off I see that I missed a call from the director of tomorrow’s scene. Assuming today’s and tomorrow’s scenes go well, I’ll have the money I need to get a place of my own. I’ll call him back later.
The voices lead me to the kitchen. Food-caked dishes that clog the sink look like they’ve been there since man first learned to cook with fire. Red cups of stale malt liquor litter the table.
Everybody smokes. The director, the assistant, and the girl, a naked goth chick: all elbows and knees, lips painted red, matching lipstick smudge around the filter of a cigarette on slow burn, dangling between her bony fingers. She sneers, revealing the teeth of a medieval Englishwoman. Meth. The other male talent, I’m told, is on set in the living room. The director’s assistant hands me paperwork, takes my IDs, and photographs them.
The director explains the scene.
“Ever done a double penetration before?” he asks.
Nope.
“Once.”
The assistant hands my IDs back to me.
“How did it go?”
A cockroach scurries across the wall behind the director’s shoulder. I answer the human roach who is going to pay me.
“Okay, I guess…” I say, “the proximity of another dude’s balls as he digs in a girl’s ass while I’m fucking her pussy isn’t my favorite thing to do, but fuck it, it’s money, so whatever… As long as there’s no sword fighting involved, I’m cool.”
The director walks away. Conversation over.
The girl and I play I’ll-show-you-mine-if-you-show-me-yours with our STD tests. The other male talent’s test sits on the table.
After we show each other our homework, I shoulder my bag and excuse myself to the bathroom so I can freshen up and return the missed call.
• • •
There is a single, bare light bulb above, layered with dust, radiating my skin jaundice yellow in its sickly light. Dark and fuzzy spores of mold speckle the walls.
A Smurf-patterned shower curtain hangs outside the tub, sagging on two rings, caked-on soap scum at its tattered bottom.
The tub itself is a primordial tide pool. A corpse could be dissolving in the bottom of the murk for all I know. Calcium deposits on the shower head probably focus the flow into an industrial water-jet beam that can cut steel.
Not going to wash my balls in that thing. May as well return the call.
He answers on the first ring. “Yeah, look man, I’m sorry but I can’t use you tomorrow.”
I take a breath before speaking. I don’t say the first four things to come to mind. “Why?”
There is a pause. “You know I like you and I think you’re gonna do well in the business—”
“Get to the point.”
“Nadia decided she doesn’t want to do interracial.”
I suppress a laugh though nothing is funny. I’ve never heard the term before. Even though it’s self-explanatory, I still want him to come out and say it. “What the fuck is ‘interracial’?”
“Look, you’re black—”
“Really?”
“—so she won’t work with you.”
I want to set the bag down, but a glance at the mildew-infested floor makes me think the better of it.
I say, “This is ridiculous. Nadia is Asian and there are exactly zero Asian male porn stars… Zero. Every scene she does is interracial, ipso facto.”
“That’s not the point.”
“I’ve fucked models from all over the world. My race was never an issue with women until I got into this business—”
He says, “Photographic evidence.”
“‘Photographic evidence’? What am I, a fucking yeti?” I reach into the bag, still on my shoulder, and pull out my toiletry kit. “That’s the problem, you people believe everybody outside the porn bubble thinks like you do, and you assume that most—”
“Look, I don’t make the rules, man—it’s whatever the girls and the studio want.”
This month’s ATM magazine has a full-page, one-sheet advertisement of Nadia doing some apocalyptic shit on camera.
I say, “So the act of getting chain ass-fucked by ten guys—all of them coming inside her while dunking her head in a toilet, then blowing shit-and-come bubbles out of her asshole on camera—is okay with the parents at home, as long as it’s not nigger cock. Is this correct?”
“Hey man,—”
“Did it ever cross you mind to—gee, I dunno—cast a black girl for a change? Or perhaps one of the four trillion other girls, most of them way hotter than her, who have no ‘moral dilemma’ doing an interracial porn scene?”
“Well, heh, her morality has a price… She will do the scene, but I’d have to pay her extra money to work with you. It’s not in my budget, but if you agree, we can pay her the extra money out of your chec—”
I click the
cell shut.
Tyler, the mope.
I take my time brushing my teeth. The routine of grooming before a scene relaxes me. A little. I picture my new girlfriend, Amanda. Then I focus on my objective: money. With tomorrow’s scene now canceled I can’t afford to fuck up today’s scene so I reach into my toiletry kit for my in-case-of-emergency Viagra and put it in my mouth.
I chew the pill. It powders between my molars, tart and citrusy in my mouth, with a twinge like licking a nine-volt battery that fires up my salivary glands. My tongue pries loose the caked-on deposit from my molars. No water. I swallow.
• • •
It’s been a long time since I’ve had a good night’s sleep, and it’s catching up with me. I should be okay once the scene starts, though. I stand off-camera.
Goth Girl and Lance, the other male talent, screw on a sofa with a matted surface that would jump to life under a black light. The sofa looks like you could get pregnant by sitting on it. Lance looks like he just came from a Motel 6 coke binge with Gary Busey.
The scheme is to restart the scene from where they stopped filming with the gangsta-porn star I’m replacing. The footage of him will be edited out as if he never existed. The director is filming three minutes of run-time of the other two before I enter the scene so the editor’s job will be easier. I sit on the carpet.
A silent, over-the-shoulder wave from the director is my sixty-second warning: Get ready.
I sit on the carpet and slide off my slacks. I’m halfway through the second leg when I’m on the verge of nodding off, and I lose my sense of time. The motion of the director’s hand waving me onto the set pulls me back. I stifle a yawn and kick the pants away, stand, and stumble into the sex with the deftness of a reanimated corpse.
Lance and Goth Girl clear my spot on the sofa. I collapse on the couch. The Viagra has kicked in and Pfizer’s finest sloshes through my system. Goth Girl straddles me, spits on her hand, and drips strings of sparkling saliva onto my cock. She rubs my head on her slit and slides herself down on me.
Insertion.
Goth Girl exhales, spraying an aerosol of hot spittle on my cheek. Sour meth-breath. One of my hands grabs her hip, the other coils a fist-full of drenched hair. She coos. I grip. My fingernails find their purchase into her scalp and I yank her head back with a snap and hammer up into her.