by Tyler Knight
Pink shorts…meaty ass…tits…hands on her neck…heart slamming against my sternum like a vice cop kicking down a meth-lab door. My pants grow tight and uncomfortable, I reach inside to adjust.
I am trying not to thinking about the wet mouth with the hot breath and the soft tongue on my crotch.
And failing at it.
What am I?
Inside the Box
My eyes snap open and my first breath of the day draws like a steel rake on a sidewalk. A swallow to wet my throat pushes my heart back down to its proper place from where it was sitting between my ears. The thrumming fades. I notice the cell ringing. I paw the phone off the night stand and onto the bed as the dream blows away on a neighbor’s Reggaeton music. I missed two other calls. All from my agent, Cindy.
I start the day off with a lie (“Good morning,”) and reclose my eyes again, sifting through what my subconscious was trying to tell me. Futile, don’t have the tools. I catch and release a thought back into the stream and pick up her words buzzing those little bones in my ear.
“—next week, and she said she would really appreciate it.”
“Who’s the girl?” I shout over the music.
“Stevie Dicks. She’s on the agency’s website. If she wasn’t one of our girls I wouldn’t even bother to ask… Are you having a party?”
“No, it’s my neighbor. Look, Cindy, you guys know I don’t fuck with blowjob scenes, and I sure as hell don’t wanna commit myself to a full day for half rate when you’ll most likely get another call for me to do a regular scene at my full rate for the same day.”
Where’s that other slipper… I gotta take a piss.
“I know, honey. It’s her boyfriend’s directing gig and she especially wants to work with you in an interracial scene. She never does interracial scenes! Aren’t you excited?”
The cell is pinched in the crook of my neck. “It’s a blowjob scene—” I toe the toilet seat up and pee. “—and no, not really. Frankly I’m getting sick of this “I-don’t-do-black-guys-but-you-don’t-count, Tyler” policy these bimbos have. But what the hell, I’ll do it for you.”
The tooth-rattling bass from next door stops right as I pin the words, “for you,” to the back wall as they say in theater-speak.
“Thank yoouuu!”
I shuffle to the kitchen. “Yeah.”
“Okay, sweetie. I’ll email you the info!”
“Uh-huh.” Back in bed, laying down again with the cell clamped between my shoulder and cheek. I don’t bother to hang up.
I drift.
• • •
“Thanks, for coming. This will be…interesting.”
“Sure thing, what’s the set-up?”
We are inside Charlemagne’s (owner of porn empire, Rustler) studio deep in Porn Valley. Specifically, in an all-white room. The absence of delineation from floor to wall to ceiling robs the eye of sense of depth or focal point and is disorienting. In the center of the white room sits a toaster-sized black cube on a white stand. If I didn’t know the stand was there I’d think the black box is floating. A safe-sized cube sits on the floor next to the stand.
She says, “Think Kubrick’s 2001. The idea is for us to establish a master shot with this small box here and—”
Her words are severed mid-thought, she looks over my shoulder and smiles. Feeling the vibration of the foot falls, I turn.
He moves with the grace of Big Bird lumbering down the catwalk in Comme des Garçons swimwear. Heels punch the concrete with each step. He stops in front of us and drops the rape kit he is carrying onto the concrete with a tympanum-rupturing slap!
“Hey, Sexy,” Stevie says to the boyfriend, “why don’t you explain the shot to him.”
“Yeah,” he says, “So the idea is to shoot the small, black cube in this white room as if it’s floating—”
Stevie slinks up to the little box and traces a finger on its surface like a Price is Right model.
“—and the black box senses her beauty. And who wouldn’t, right? And the box, it gets an erection!”
The boyfriend dives into the rape kit and rummages around, tossing out bottles of douche, lube, and a packet of baby wipes. I got my usual wisecrack ready but it falls dead to the floor from my lips because—“And this is the box’s cock!” He yanks a flopping, rubber dong out of the crate and thrusts it into the air with the hyperventilating exhilaration of King Arthur freeing Excalibur from the stone. He’s waving my dick in the air above his head, face overcome with ecstasy as though overcome with the Rapture. Yes, my dick. Well, my signature sex toy, anyway. This is the first time I’ve seen the finished product. Their angle, why Stevie Dicks is making this racial exception is clear. I say nothing. Can’t. He may as well have taken my dildo and slapped the clever right out of my mouth.
He takes a deep gulp of air before continuing, “This beautiful black cock will just materialize from the box and Stevie will suck it off! We then fade out, and when we fade back in, it’s you inside this big box—”
He tosses the dong into the crate, trots over to the larger of the black cubes and hoists it over his head. He looks like a caveman poised to smash a rabbit.
In his excitement, he practically sings his next words, “—with-your-real-dick-sticking-out-of-it! Forced perspective! See the hole here? Anyway,” he drops the box. It thwaps on the floor. “Stevie Dicks sucks you off, and then the cock—your cock—retracts into the cube!”
I stand there. My eyes dart from the little box on the pedestal to the “Tyler Knight Vibrating Dildo” then to the big cube and back to the phallus. Stevie walks up to me and drapes her arms around my shoulders. Our pelvises touch.
She coos into my ear, “Just think about your pulsing dick between my lips. My tongue is so soft.”
It’s as though a flashbang grenade has gone off at my feet. My mind is a virus-riddled PC stuck in infinite loop struggling to reset. All kinds of shit swirls in my head. The supa-fly Tyler inside me wants to tell both of them to kiss my ass, but the warmth from her muff transfers through her pants into mine. She plants a kiss on my cheek, and Stevie and her boyfriend leave me alone with the props.
In the end, I’m no less doomed than any other man beguiled by a femme fatale. I get in that fucking box.
• • •
The last pass of tongue sends flashes of crimson rippling across the synapses of my god-rod.
I’m wearing that cube around my torso like a barrel as if I’m a busted banker from 1929. Dick sticking out of the hole.
Stevie jaws my wood like a beaver on speed. The sound of slurping drifting up in cherry-flavored waves from below.
Her tongue is a pink chamois soaked in hot bathwater but it’s my dick she wrings with her two-fisted squeeze-and-twist action, slippery with saliva.
My knees buckle and I moan.
The whited-out room tumbling on to infinity before my eyes does not help with the onset of vertigo.
Needing a focal point, I choose my signature dildo-toy peeking out of the crate behind the director. Like I said, this is the first good look I’ve ever had on the finished product. This one flawed because on its side where the dye didn’t quite take looks to be a case of space herpes. I don’t know what’s worse. This mutant replicock or the time I saw my grandfather’s member doing the swing-along—Coral!—when I walked into the bathroom without knocking.
Awesome, now I have both images fucking with my head, chopping down my wood. A master class of self cock-blockery, my penis goes insta-Nerf. I’ve got an impossible choice. Look away and give her the satisfaction of popping me like I’m an amateur before the scene is done, or focus on Pop Pop’s jingle-balls and get an incomplete for the day… I split the difference. I look away and when I get close to coming I let visions of grandpa-beef whistle dance in my head… The gambit is working. I alternate from pink tongue, to Rudolph The Choad-Nosed Reindee
r.
Then it happens.
The dildo hops out of the crate, falls on its side and does a lopsided roll toward me… It stops at my feet directly underneath Stevie, just within my line of sight if I strain my neck to look over the edge of the box I’m wearing. It stands itself erect.
The replicock says, “Greetings Erik Robinson!”
I look down at Stevie who is still sucking away, then to the director crouched to the side filming it at eye level, then back to Stevie. Both oblivious.
“Only you can see me, Erik,” it says.
“Who are you?”
“I am number seventeen thousand three hundred and ninety-one off the line. I was manufactured in the year two thousand thirteen.”
I say, “That’s nine years in the future… You’re telling me you…came back in time?”
“Correct.”
“Bullshit.”
“You are having a conversation with a model of your penis, and you find the fact that I came back in time implausible?”
I try to pinch myself but with the cube around me it’s impossible. I settle for closing my eyes and digging my fingernails into my palms. When I open my eyes it’s still there.
“Fine,” I say, “what do you want?”
“In the year two thousand nine, you will be encouraged by many people to start a blog—”
“What the fuck is a ‘blog’?”
It says, “Web-log. Blog. It’s an online journal. You will write stories to help you deal with your pent-up angst as you try to make sense of your place in the world, then you will write a book—”
“HAH! Me, a writer? Some douche that spends all day at Starbucks with a laptop and a chai latte? Like hell, I’m not gonna be that guy!”
“Please do not interrupt me, Erik Robinson, I do not have much time.”
“Okay,” I say. “Continue.”
“Remember this. You can get away with entertaining with superficial anecdotes and lowbrow humor that appeals to the lowest common denominator to get a cheap laugh. Or, you can choose to challenge how people view things by opening up and showing what’s inside of you. To humanize a people seen as expendable, voiceless cast-offs.” The latex penis falls on its side and rolls back toward the milk crate. “It will not be easy, but your biggest breakthroughs as a writer will be the direct result of how willing to be naked, stripped, and raw with who you really are. As Erik, not Tyler. Do not shy away from showing your flaws. You will grow from this.”
It hops back into the crate. “Finally, in two thousand nine you will write a story called “Bukkake” where you will sit in bed with writer’s block for two full days, working on a single sentence. You will want to smash your keyboard on your front steps. Don’t. The answer is, ‘Take a step.’”
“‘Take a step.’ Got it,” I say.
“Farewell. Remember. Read widely, and keep fucking!”
It falls silent.
What the fuck kind of send-off was that?
“—because we have enough footage.” The director says, “It’s up to you to pop whenev—”
Floating.
A bio-luminescent jellyfish, my ghostly glow blasts fuchsia and cuts the thick darkness of Challenger Deep.
I drift.
“We got it, that’s a wrap,” the boyfriend says, “Let me help you out of this box.”
The dildo’s in its box…inert. I’m losing my Goddamn mind!
After he helps to free me he walks away leaving me alone with Stevie.
I say, “Man, that was only the second time in my entire life I was able to pop on camera from a BJ.”
She snatches a baby wipe from a packet in the rape kit and wipes her face. She says, “You should feel honored that I chose you. I never work with black guys.”
She leaves. I sit and stare at the cube I was just inside of.
Street Cred
The shackles restrict me to baby steps. I’m being moved into a holding tank in Downtown LA’s Twin Towers. County jail. The chain gang holds a dozen of us, linked waist-to-waist, handcuff-to-handcuff.
My charge is Failure to Appear. I forgot about the pile of unpaid tickets I left in the glove box of my old car. The act of not showing up for court, even for a civil infraction ticket, is itself a misdemeanor. Eventually I was stopped while walking down the street; the police ran my name and came up with a bench warrant for my arrest.
Everyone in the chain gang wears county blue jumpsuits with “LA COUNTY JAIL” stenciled on the back. On the feet of some of the men are county-issued slippers. I’m the only one in street clothes: white linen slacks and sweater, and some sandals. You may as well have put a “my asshole is snug” sign on my fucking chest.
We shuffle to the holding tank. A group of Sheriff’s Deputies bark commands on top of each other, including “Face the wall” and “Spread your legs.” When we comply, they take off our waist chains. A female deputy frisks me, hands roving up my inner thighs. She commands me to open my mouth, lift my tongue, then move it side to side. She removes my handcuffs.
Another deputy asks the racially-ambiguous looking prisoners, “Who do you hang with?” LA county jail segregates the races into separate areas for safety. Race riots are not uncommon inside. There are only four non Blacks or Latinos among us. Three white guys and a Filipino kid. In the Twin Towers, you may be grouped in with guys on the way to prison for God knows what and for how long, so what the hell is another few months added for stomping on a new guy? The lone Asian kid hyperventilates.
The deputies leave and shut the steel door. The dread of being buried alive and forgotten washes over my brain and soaks my amygdala. A few of the black guys stare at me and talk amongst themselves. I do my best not to stare back, choosing to focus on a point on the wall across from me. The Asian kid stands in the center of the holding cell, alone and weeping.
After a while (with the absence of clocks or windows, it’s impossible to track the passage of time) guards open the door and snatch both me and the Asian kid away. I’m moved into the black men’s tank. The guards crammed enough people to fill a high school gymnasium into a room the size of a classroom. One steel door…steel benches bolted to the floor…open-faced toilet with a drunkard passed out on it. Again, no windows, no clock. There’s unoccupied space on the steel bench but I do not sit. When my legs get tired of standing, I pace about to get the circulation going. More people look at me. They talk amongst themselves.
One kid, tired of standing, takes a seat on the bench without asking. The “owner” of the open space walks over to the kid, and with a crisp right hand to the abdomen, he folds the kid over his fist. Other men are fucked with and punched on by alphas for various, if not unknown transgressions.
A man shits himself and walks around mumbling to his personal god. Nobody bothers him.
People who are not high up enough in the pecking order to secure bench space resort to sleeping wherever they can on the floor. My eyes feel dry and scratchy. There’s unclaimed floor space next to the open-faced toilet but I’m not so tired that I would risk getting pissed on, let alone shut my eyes for an instant.
A pack of men, who have been staring at me and whispering amongst themselves since I entered, stands up. As they cross the holding tank towards me, other prisoners part like a school of fish compelled by swarm theory. The pack advances closer. I fold my arms across my chest, resting my chin on my fist so I can raise my guard in an instant without looking like I’m preparing a defense. They stop just outside arm’s reach of me. My eyes mist over. My perception of time slows. To control my emotions, I focus on inhaling to the count of four, and exhaling to the count of four.
The group’s alpha speaks. He says, “Hey, me and the boys was wondering—”
My voice creaks out of my mouth, sounding like two bricks scrapped together. I say, “Yeah?”
I can feel the eyes from all over t
he holding tank. Feel them as opposed to seeing them, because tunnel vision has set in, making me myopic to only what is right in front of me.
Alpha male continues, “Are you Tyler-mothu-fuckin’-Knight?”
My nom de guerre never sounded more beautiful!
“Yes. Yes I am!”
One of the guys in the pack says, “See? I told you, motha-fucka!! I knew he was that porn nigga!”
Another one says, “Yeah, I seen your black ass on Showtime last week! You was trimmin’ the pussy of this light-skinned curly-haired bitch! What’s the name of that show?”
I say, “Uh… Zane’s Sex Chroni—”
“Yeah that’s it! Zane’s Sex Chronicles!”
A crowd gathers. Even Shitty Pants Man takes an interest and shuffles over.
Alpha Male turns to face the gathering crowd of prisoners and says, “Hey Y’all, check out my nigga! We got’s us a celebah-tee in tha house—”
This can’t be happening.
“—he makes da POOOOOOR-NOS!!”
Shitty Pants Man says, “Hey nigga, whachoo doin’ in here?”
Okay, just go with this. Do not fuck this up!
“It’s those racist mothu-fuckin cops, man!” I say. “I was just driving, and they just pulled a nigga over!” (If you’ve ever heard me speak, you’d laugh at the thought of me sound trying to sound ghetto.)
The members of crowd retort like the chorus of a Greek play:
“That’s some booool-shit right there man!”
“Shut up, nigga! Let a nigga speak! Damn!”
“You better act like you know, fool!”
Alpha Male takes control, “QUIET! Let the Tyler Knight speak!”
“Thanks, dog,” I say, “so as I was sayin’—”
And I tell my story to the guys, holding court on a metal bench. The story of the LAPD then turns into the stories of my career in porn. They stand in silence as I tell the Bukkake story, laughing at the right places. Shitty Pants Man looks as though he’s going to puke, but all things considered this could be his normal state of being. One inmate calls bullshit on the veracity of the Bukkake story, saying bukkakes can’t really exist. I remind him it’s on DVD.