by Tyler Knight
I check my phone for returned texts or voice mails. None. I head for the kitchen, turn on the water, and occupy my mind with scrubbing dishes.
There’s the sound of the front door opening, then closing. Keys landing on the table. Footsteps.
She hugs me.
Then she leads me by the hand to the table, where she picks up her keys, and out the front door.
Amanda and I walk together along streets of our neighborhood in silence.
The sun is setting when we end up at our favorite bench in Ferndell. We sit. The stream flows. Squirrels go about their business. Amanda and I are alone. She takes my hand into hers and squeezes.
• • •
It’s night. My feet splash in ankle-deep water as I run in a swale behind an industrial complex. My socks and shoes are sodden, and the air is thick with the stench of burning flesh. Officer Madero gains ground on me. In his outstretched hand, a torch that glows bluish white that is so bright it hurts my eyes to behold. My lungs ache. Lactic acid building inside my quadriceps screams a chorus of pain, its volume rising with each step. I’m just outside of Madero’s grasp and I feel the heat of his torch as its light falls upon my back and shoulders, casting my shadow before me. The light sears my flesh and singes my hair away, and my shadow on the ground in front of me catches fire. Its ashes flake away, rising on convection currents and into the starless sky.
A phone rings.
I sit up in bed and reach over to my nightstand for my cell phone. The caller ID says, “Unavailable.”
I say, “Hello?”
“This is Trisha Marie.”
“Oh, uh…hi.”
She says, “I hear you have something to tell me.”
I say, “Yes. Thanks for calling me back. This isn’t easy to say…not that it will be easy for you to hear, but—”
“Get to the point. What do you want?”
I say, “You…you may have been exposed to HIV. By me.”
“You gave me AIDS! How could you do that to me? My life has just started and now I’m going to die!”
“Trisha—”
“And you’re the one that killed me!”
“Trish, I—”
“MURDERER!”
She doesn’t say anything else, and neither do I. I listen, phone pressed to my ear as she weeps. She lets out a wail which echoes inside my skull and a light shines through the phone’s earpiece.
I’m being nudged… My eyes open to Amanda shaking my shoulders. She hands me my ringing cell phone. It’s M.A.I.M.
“Erik Robinson?”
“Yeah, that’s me.”
“Your final test results came back. HIV ‘Not Detected.’”
I hang up and tell Amanda. She nods. Then she gets up and goes into the bathroom and the shower hisses. The door shuts.
When she returns she’s wrapped in a white towel and her hair is held up by her scrunchie. She sits on the bed and looks at me.
“So, now what, Erik? You planning on going back to work?”
“The quarantine list hasn’t cleared, and moratorium on shooting has not been lifted.”
“‘Moratorium’, my ass. I know people are still shooting, and some people who are quarantined are still trying to get work with forged HIV tests. I read it on the message boards. Regardless, that’s not what I asked you, and you know it. After.”
I say, “After the quarantine list clears and the moratorium is lifted? No…I think I’m done.”
“Good.”
She goes to the closet and lays out some clothes on the bed. She begins to dress.
I say, “Who knows, maybe the industry will be better for this experience.”
She turns to me and shakes her head.
“What?”
She says, “People don’t change. Adversity doesn’t build character. It reveals it.”
• • •
Amanda and I lay on our sofa. A warm breeze blows through the windows and the first movement of Beethoven’s Ninth plays in the background on auto repeat. She sleeps with her head resting on my chest and our fingers are interlaced. On her lips, the hint of a smile.
Everything I really know about Amanda is from the day we met and onward. Details of her life before she first entered the States are black. While going through her things one day, I discovered the name on her university degrees are slightly different from the name on her birth certificate, which is a bit off from the name she used to introduced herself to me. Some things are best left buried, so I left the issue alone. Without her, I’d be dead or wish I was. That’s all the clarification I need.
Once, while she thought I was sleeping she climbed out of bed, knelt beside it and began to pray in Spanish. Prayers of hope? Penance for past sins?
Maybe I’m her albatross… Maybe she’s mine.
My phone rings. The caller ID says it’s a director. I thumb the volume down before it wakes Amanda, and let the call go to voice mail. I listen to his message: “I have some scenes coming up for you. Call me.”
Delete.
I turn the phone off and let sleep come.
A knock on our open front door by the mailman wakes me but not Amanda. I extricate myself from Amanda’s grasp, ease her head onto a pillow, and greet the mailman at the door.
Past-due bills I could swear I’ve already paid, asking for their money plus late fee charge…and returned check fee charges tacked onto the original sums.
Then there are a couple of letters from my bank. Enclosed with the first bank letter are two checks from The Wad Fathers: the original check I redeposited, and a second check The Wad Fathers sent to cover the bounced check fee for the first check. They both bounced. The letter says my bank charged me returned check fees for both.
I rip open the second bank envelope. The letter says some checks I wrote (to pay the now past-due bills) have been returned due to insufficient funds. They’re charging me fees for those, too. The sum of all fees and charges I’m slapped with nearly equals the amount of the original Wad Fathers check.
I grab my car keys.
• • •
I’m waiting for the light to change at an intersection. School just let out for the day, and a group of kids cross in front of my car. The girls wear knee-high boots, caked-on makeup, and carry fake designer bags. They walk to a Carl’s Jr. parking lot where a much larger group of girls, most dressed like their favorite Hollywood celebutants, are hanging out. If these girls knew what adulthood has in store for them would they still be in such a rush to look grown up? The light changes and I cross and pull into The Wad Fathers parking lot, across the street from the Carl’s Jr.
A procession of official-looking men streams in and out of The Wad Fathers office. The ones leaving the office carry boxes of files which they load into the back of an SUV. One of them holds the door open for me.
In the reception area, a man in a vintage “STYX WORLD TOUR” T-shirt plays grab-ass with a woman wearing pigtails, knee socks, and a backpack.
I say to the man, “Are you Charon?”
He says, “Yeah, and who are you?”
“Tyler Knight. Scowl Pacino passed me some bad checks. I want my money.”
“You need to learn how to read.” He points to a sign on the wall: “Talent checks may be picked up only on Tuesdays between the hours of 2:15-2:20 p.m. Failure to follow the rules may result in permanent ban from The Wad Fathers Studios.”
I glance at my watch: 2:28 p.m.
“Fuck that, get me Pacino. Now!”
He says, “I’m sorry, but you just missed him. He left for Europe this morn—”
I take the bad checks from my wallet and hold them up. “I’m not here to fuck around with you. These checks bounced enough times and for enough money to be a felony. Either you pay me right now, or not only will I see you in court, I’ll make it impossible for yo
u to book talent from several agencies. The grief will cost you more than the value of the checks.”
Charon says, “Hold on.” He leads the girl by the hand into the inner office.
More men walk in and leave with boxes.
He returns with a three-to-a-page checkbook.
I say, “I don’t think so. Cash.”
He leaves again. When he returns, he’s got a brick of hundred-dollar bills in his hand. He tears off the paper band and counts out my money. “Don’t spend it all in one place. Scowl says you’re not worth your rate, and you’re not worth having to book two weeks in advance.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I say, “‘The food is terrible and the portions are too small…’”
I take a counterfeit money marker out of my pocket and draw on a bill. The line turns yellow and fades.
I say, “If you really want to impress me, deposit that money in your bank account and pay your goddamn bills.”
On the way to the car, I roll calls to the directors who sometimes shoot me for this studio, including Dana Divine, and I tell them all to beware of bad checks.
While driving home from The Wad Fathers, I decide to swing by Eris’s motel room. I couldn’t tell you why, and I’ve no idea what I’m going to say to her. As soon as I knock on her door, I find myself hoping she doesn’t answer. She doesn’t. The clerk at the front desk says she’s moved out and does not know where she went. There’s a feeling of relief.
Before I sit in my car, I notice something on the floorboard glinting in the sunlight. A dog hair. I remove it from my car and shut the door.
I’m cruising along the freeway, windows down, radio off, listening to the 350 V8 rumble when, in typical LA fashion, the traffic ahead of me slows to a crawl for no reason. I step on the brakes.
Nothing!
Red tail lights come up on me fast; pumping the brakes doesn’t slow me. I thread the needle through slower traffic while stomping the brake pedal onto the floorboard. I don’t bother with the horn because it doesn’t work. Heart pounding, I pull the emergency brake, glide to the right side of the freeway and down the exit ramp. Coordinating driving, sobbing to Christ, and slowing with the hand brake, I pull off into a side street and kill the engine before the car kills me.
I sit still. Cars drive past me. People walk along the sidewalk. I wipe my face on my sleeve and then reach for the crucifix where it should be hanging from my rearview mirror, but it’s not there because I ripped Jesus down. He’s neither under the front seats nor on the back seats. He’s not in the glove box, but the pink slip is there. I write a note on the back of a traffic ticket explaining that the foot brakes do not work, and I toss the note and the pink slip on the front seat. Leaving the windows rolled down and key in the ignition, I get out of the rolling sarcophagus and walk.
• • •
Amanda and I are napping on the sofa when the mailman knocks on the door. Amanda gets up from the sofa to greet him. She hands me the mail: bills, junk mail, and more bills. No checks.
Even though the last of the exposed people haven’t been cleared from the quarantine list, the moratorium has been lifted and my phone hasn’t stopped ringing, I’ve yet to step foot on a set. Among the work I’ve turned down is a director who wanted to shoot me in a premeditated sex tape with a celebutant. I hung up without even asking who.
Amanda and I haven’t put much thought into what I’m going to do for money going forward. We’ve got money saved to last for a little while, but then what? The mailman will keep bringing bills. At least we have each other…things will work out.
We put our shoes on and take a walk to the ice cream parlor down the street. We finish them on the way back home, and when we return home we sit on our steps and watch the kids play.
My phone rings. Work. I let the call go to voice mail.
Amanda says, “Go ahead and call back. When you’re done, we need to talk about how it’s going to be from this point forward.”
Marquis Value
In the dining room, an all-white backdrop hangs from the ceiling. Techno-pop blares as a Euro girl straight out of a James Bond movie gyrates to the beat and poses for the pretty-girl stills for the video’s box cover. She flings her black hair and undulates her hips to the bass. Crew members who have nothing to do with the still photography stand around to chat her up as she bumps and grinds. Since she’s not the girl I’m working with, I don’t know her name, nor do I care.
Gil, the director, tells me the movie’s theme is barely legal teens, and the plan is for two crews to simultaneously shoot two scenes. A crew will shoot softcore (in which the genitalia is hidden) on one set, while another crew shoots hardcore on the other. Then they flip crews to finish up what the other crew did not get.
I see Joe, a veteran performer. He walks over to me.
Joe says, “This fucking business, man… I haven’t worked in a month. I have to get a real job if things don’t turn around fast.”
Going into the summer, I was booked up two weeks in advance. Exiting the summer, it’s two or three days a week. This is the effect of piracy on the porn business. People don’t want to pay for porn so they download it for free off of some Internet bit torrent site. Studios aren’t seeing the same return on investment for their movies, so they’re cutting talents rates and shooting less. I live well below my means, so I’ll be okay as long as things don’t get too much worse. But I know they will. Not wanting to leave things to chance or accelerate the decrease in my workload because I start failing scenes, I’ve been doubling up on my Viagra. I say, “It’s slowed down a bit for me, too.”
“Yeah, but you do a lot of features and big-budget shit, you’re lucky. The rest of us are scraping for what we can get.”
This is fucking depressing. I say, “Hey, I’m going to meet the girl I’m working with. See you around.”
I walk away and take Viagra out of my pocket.
• • •
Sitting on a sofa is Rita Blue, my bubble-butt blonde for the day. We take stills for the box cover of the movie, standing on the all-white backdrop. We strip down to various stages of undress, caressing and kissing for the camera. When the stills photographer leaves we plop down on a nearby sofa and wait for the softcore crew to set up in the room. Joe and the Euro girl are already underway shooting hardcore on the their set on the other side of the mansion. While we wait, Rita unleashes my cock and sucks away. It’s good to be Tyler Knight. Sometimes.
• • •
A few minutes later, the sex-stills photographer is ready, and Rita stops slobbering on my dick off-camera so she can go back to slobbering on my dick on-camera. The hardcore sex-still photos fly by fast. When they’re done, I step out of frame so the crew can film Rita buzzing a vibrator on her clit.
Afterward, the crew sets up for the next shot. Rita rolls over, face down, ass up, and wiggles her ass cheeks. I mount her. I’m fucking away when Gil busts into the room. His normally unflappable countenance is grim as he explains the situation.
He says, “Joe is struggling. He asked the girl to help him out, and she told him ‘You are a man. Just looking at me should get you hard.’ We may have to switch girls, but I’ll give him five minutes more.”
“Gil, if there is no chemistry, don’t fuck around. Switch us now. You don’t want Joe to go into a mental death spiral because some girl is fucking with his head. I’ve been there.”
Am I losing my goddamn mind, you ask? Why leave a perfectly good piece of ass to deal with some unknown quantity? Because I know how this will play itself out, and I can use this for leverage later. Both with Gil and Joe.
Gil says, “Can you do two scenes?”
When you’re not working often like Joe, and you’ve no idea when your next meal ticket will come, the pressure to do well each and every scene can be crippling to the point of making you choke. Porn is a zero-sum business if you are male talent. I like
Joe, but I’d like his money in my pocket more. If I say no, Gil will simply call another guy to take Joe’s place. Remember when I said earlier, “If you’re male talent, I’m not your friend?” Still, I play it cool.
I say, “If I have to, but I say switch girls first.”
Gil contemplates this. While he thinks, I close my eyes to zone him out and pound away on Rita faster.
He says, “Okay… Start the softcore with Rita, I’ll give Joe another shot, and let’s see what happens.”
“Okay, Gil.”
Gil leaves. I stop fucking and Rita and I get dressed, only so we can undress again to restart for the softcore. We get three minutes into the softcore when Gil runs back into the room.
He says, “Yeah, we’re switching. She asked him if he is a faggot because he can’t get hard for her!”
“Roger that.”
“Tyler, this girl is a piece of work…”
I grab a baby wipe from the rape kit and wipe Rita’s fluids from my cock.
I say, “Don’t worry, Gil. I can handle it.”
Rita looks crestfallen.
• • •
I walk over to the dining room table that’s been repurposed into an ad-hoc office to inspect this other girl’s test and IDs. (You never, never abdicate the responsibility of vetting whom you’re having sex with for both age and disease to the PA nor the director.) Satisfied that she’s clean and eighteen, I grab a bottled water from an ice chest (I have two pop shots today, gotta be hydrated), and walk toward the other set. I take my time as I stroll past the scurrying crew. Joe shuffles up to me.
Joe says, “Fucking bitch!”
“Bro, clear your head. You have to focus on the task at hand.”
“Yeah…yeah, you’re right. You always know what to do, Tyler.”
I take a swig of water.
“You owe me. Rita is a great girl, you’ll have fun.”
We bump elbows. He smiles and goes his way, and I go mine. I could have given him one of the Viagras in my pocket. I have plenty. But I don’t.
• • •
This scene is in the den. I steal a glance at the clapper which is resting on a table. It says, “Euro girl stage name is Aisha Mar.” Below her name is “Tyler” written in on masking tape.