by Tyler Knight
Los Angeles Post (Redacted):
September, 2011
“HIV Scare That Led Porn Industry to Shut Down a False Alarm”
The weeklong moratorium on the porn industry has been lifted after an adult film performer whose HIV positive test prompted the shutdown was released with negative results, according to a porn industry trade group.
Collapsar
Col·lap·sar /kə’lap-sär/ noun [Astronomy Late 20th Century: from collapse, on the pattern of words such as pulsar]
1. An elder star that has collapsed under its own gravity.
2. A black hole from which there is no escape.
The waves of heat rising from the asphalt make the building on the other side of the boulevard flicker like a mirage. I toss glances left and right to time the traffic, then walk through exhaust fumes to the other side and through the building’s front doors. Somewhere, bass drones from a chic-this-week hip-hop anthem. A line of people snakes across the lobby and up some stairs. Without slowing down I jog alongside of the line where it leads to double doors. The bass, now a full-on assault, reverbs in my teeth. Head down, feet moving, I cut to the front and flash my neon-colored wristband to the guard, who, in turn, lifts a velvet rope. I push my way through and onto the convention center floor. Bodies and booths everywhere.
Porn company logos and pictures of porn starlets decorate the booths. Bikini-clad girls staff most of the booths. They perch on stools while signing autographs for lines of men. Nurses, schoolgirls, and women in hot shorts weave through the crowd selling panties and pictures and DVDs. Hordes of men wander adrift in circles like reanimated corpses, mouths agape at the circus of flesh gyrating on stripper poles or patrolling the floor.
I turn my shoulders sideways, then back the other way as I squeeze through the crowd. A group of elderly men gather around an inflatable SpongeBob kiddie pool filled with oil and girls. The girls wrestle and slither and undulate in the pool like a snake mating ball for spectators whose cheers and shouts are drowned out by the thwump-thwump-THWUMP of the music.
I’m staring at a poster of me with airbrushed six-pack abs, and a girl, probably retouched, too, pulling me into bed. A pack of business-casual cubicle serfs encircles me. Their alpha thrusts a Sharpie and some cocktail napkins into my face. The pack leans in close and shouts questions over the music. Their breaths smell like happy hour at Friday’s. The usual banal questions like, “What’s it like banging so-and-so?” and, “How do I get into the business?” and, “I got this problem getting hard/staying hard/coming too fast—what should I do?” Alpha Serf shouts, “My dick is bigger than yours. If I did porn, I’d totally crush it! How much money do you make?”
I could tell these guys truths, but I don’t. Nobody who asks about their fantasy ever wants to hear the truth. So I smile, sign, and tell them what they want to hear then push on. Flashes of light strobe like lightning above the crowd toward the far end of the floor. That’s where I head.
• • •
The red carpet runs between a wall plastered with event sponsor logos, and a bank of photographers, journalists, and videographers. The girls stop to pose as they strut along the shooting gallery. Reporters shout. Flashbulbs pop and sequins sparkle. Dan, the director for the Tyler’s Wood movie for Poison Apple Pictures, claps my shoulder. With Dan is a couple of contract starlets, one from VELVET, the other from Poison Apple. As we step onto the red carpet, Dan yells how glad he is that I agreed to present for tonight’s award show. I follow Dan and the girls onto the red carpet. We advance, pose, then walk some more. Flashes burst and pop. I want to squint. With no character or fourth wall to hide behind, I force myself to smile. A sweat drop tickles my forehead, but I resist the urge to use the hem of my T-shirt to wipe it. “What’s it like living every man’s fantasy life?” I smile, tell him to visit my blog and start with Bukkake.
An hour ago, I ate my dinner out of a laundromat vending machine. Later, I’ll feed some coins into another slot to pay for my bus ride home with swing-shift workers, the housekeepers, and the transients. When I emerge at the end of the perp walk, my cheek muscles burn from smiling and my lips quiver and the lights and flashes seared white spots into my retinas.
• • •
The awards show is under way, and I’m backstage talking with the president of Poison Apple pictures. He holds the trophy that I’m about to present for the Studio of the Year award. He thanks me for all the work I’ve done over the years for the studio. This includes The A-Team XXX, where I played Mr. T; Tyler’s Wood; and The 8th Day, which was the post-apocalyptic epic I had the male lead in. That won the ATM award for Best Picture and is considered one of the finest adult films ever made. And among the most expensive. The director, Ren Savant, had the stones to cast me and Poison Apple gave him zero pushback over it. If you’ve been paying attention to what I’ve laid out about the race paradigm in porn, you can appreciate how special this was. Casting me as the male lead of their “A” film for the year (with a production budget larger than gonzo studios’ entire yearly budgets), in which it was not necessary for the character’s race to be black, is no small thing. I’m already a spokesmodel for Playgirl. I travel to conventions all over the country and sign autographs at Playgirl’s booth at the ATM show. Appeared in Playgirl magazine twice. I have sex toy deals and speaking engagements at universities. VELVET used me and Johnny Castle in their cable channel commercials alongside their contract girls. I’ve long escaped mopedom, but I’ve had a lot of help.
Before anyone can speak, the announcer on the other side of the curtain announces our names and the category we’re presenting for, and the girls each take me by an arm and we walk onto the stage and to the podium. My breathing comes quick and shallow, and there’s a buzzing in my teeth, and an escalating sense of panic fizzes over, screaming at me to RUN! People in the audience applaud and cheer. My hands shake as I read a scripted joke. It falls flat because of my delivery, but people laugh anyway. I announce the winner for Studio of the Year, VELVET, and there’s more applause. Some VELVET studio execs lumber down the aisle and climb onto the stage. Someone snatches the trophy from my hand, and the girls take my arms and lead me off stage.
• • •
It’s night and my sweat-soaked T-shirt clings to my skin like a greasy film, and the cars slog along the boulevard at a lethargic pace. I wick sweat from my face with the back of my hand, and when I lick my lips a taste of salt dissolves on my tongue. I’m walking to the bus stop when my cell vibrates in my pocket. I pray it’s not the mistress… It’s not. It’s Dan, the director. He wants to know if I want to head to the after-party with a bunch of people for drinks… Fuck it. I could use a drink.
• • •
When Dan and I arrive at the restaurant, the after-party is underway and the red carpet has already ended. A pair of cookie-cutter blondes whom I could have fucked last week and wouldn’t remember says hello to me and grabs Dan and pulls him inside. They melt into the crowd. I jostle my way into the restaurant, but I’ve lost Dan. A Latina who dyes her hair blonde saunters by. I do remember fucking her so I say hello. She sneers. I need some Dutch courage…I head for the bar and order a Stoli, kill it, and chase it down with another. And another. Some industry crew members come up to me and talk. Someone says he forwarded the Bukkake story to his civilian friends. More guys join the group and soon I’m surrounded by pornographers trying to guess who is who in some of the stories I’ve posted on my blog. Many of them can identify other pornographers by the behavior, idiosyncrasies, and character traits, but not one of these guys can recognize himself. Someone puts another Stoli in my hand. The conversation runs its length so I excuse myself and drift amongst the crowd.
Another male talent walks up to me. We’ve seen each other maybe three times in the past decade. Many of the studios that shoot him never shoot me because they never film black talent. He pulls out his iPhone and shows me a picture of my blow up doll.
It’s in bed and looking satisfied while a famous and very naked girl counts a stack of money. The doll was also on a late-night TV talk show. My effigy is more successful than I’ll ever be. I ask him to forward the picture to my email. As he wanders off, a Czech-Russian model/actress/whatever in a white Lycra tube dress struts up to me, pulls herself in close, and drapes her arms over my shoulder…she smells like soap. She straddles my leg with hers, pressing her crotch against my thigh. The heat from her pussy seeps through my pant leg. Her breath blows in my ear as she speaks to me, and her accent is crisp and neat like my vodka. Most of her words are swept away into the background noise but the sentiment is clear. My eyes trace a line along the angles of her face…the planes of her cheek bones…the slope of her nose…those frosted glossy lips and her teeth as white as her dress. She grinds her pelvis into mine. I run a mental catalogue of every private nook in this place I can take this girl when someone yells, “Fight!” The restaurant empties into the parking lot. I take my time finishing the last of my drink. By the time I make it outside the fight is over and I’m left to sift through secondhand accounts. I ask a guy with a Justin Bieber haircut what happened. He says something about a fight between the only Asian male pornstar and another male talent. Then, he grumbles about that bottle-blonde Latina girl who is walking around sneering at everyone and “Acting like a cunt.” I’m trying to figure out if these events are related when I spot Dan waving at me from across the parking lot. There are some contract girls in his SUV. I hop in and we speed off. One of the girls blasts Heart’s “Crazy On You” and the girls all sing along as we enter the 101 freeway on-ramp.
• • •
Eighties rock blares and the bathroom overflows with water. Some porn starlets dump bottles of Mr. Bubble onto the floor and splash around, trying to make bubbles. Spilled vodka and champagne bottles, and room service trays with untouched food, litter every surface so I have to stand. Porn stars on the bed. Porn stars on the floor. Flesh For Fantasy begins to play and the irony is lost on everyone. A group of civilians whom somebody let in the suite huddles by the hotel room door, whispering amongst themselves and pointing. A couple of girls lead a male talent who keeps drifting in and out of consciousness to a chaise and dump him on it. One of them mentions some pills he took earlier. People gossip about other people who aren’t in the room. In another conversation, a man I don’t recognize says the words ‘my lamborghini’ louder than the rest of his sentence for the benefit of everyone else to hear. The civilians, having seen enough of their favorite contract starlets and male talent in situ, walk out as Billy Idol claims to sing for culture. I step over people and bottles until I find Dan sitting by the window with a VELVET girl, smoking cigarettes and looking out at the city lights. I tell him I’m going home. He gives me a somber nod, bumps elbows with me and says, “Thanks for hanging out.” Then he looks out the window again. As I’m turning to leave the girl says, “You better not write about tonight.”
I push my way through the crowd and out of the door and shut it behind me. Quiet. I walk along the stark white hallway trying to chew through my neon wristband but I give up. At the elevator, a couple my parent’s age glares at me with derision.
Outside the hotel, the streets are silent and the air is thick and wet. A bus approaches. I board it and feed some coins into the slot. Brown faces stare at me. There’s a sheen of perspiration on everybody’s skin. No empty seats, so I stand and hold onto a pole. The bus is full but nobody talks to anyone else. I shut my eyes and feel the bus sway.
• • •
I use the ID badge on the lanyard around my neck and tap it to the panel next to the double doors. There’s a beep and a click and when the doors open, a whoosh of cold air hits my face. I pass through the doors and enter the trading floor: a hermetically-sealed open space sprawling the length of a football field filled with rows of un-partitioned work benches laid end to end. All of this enveloped by floor-to-ceiling windows that distort the light entering in from the outside world, suggestive of bullet-resistant glass. Blond people chatter from scores of flat screens hanging from the ceiling every twenty feet tuned to Fox News. A commercial for our competitor begins to play, and in unison all of the TVs switch to CNBC. I pass row after row of workstations, each identical.
This is my second attempt at a real job since the economy tumbled into the Great Recession. I haven’t quit porn entirely, but HR has made it clear that I cannot continue to come and go as I please and still keep my job.
Most of my coworkers, in a rush to log in on time, ignore me as I walk along the aisles. Every morning I show up to work at my day job selling commodities, focusing on precious metals, there’s a risk that somebody will recognize me. There was already a close call with the FedEx guy last month. Thank God he caught himself. Hundreds of account executives and ancillary staff work on this floor. It’s just a matter of time.
The firm hires twice a year. The ad ran for months, and thousands of people applied for my position.
I had to take a battery of personality, aptitude, and ethics of tests, as well as pass comprehensive background and criminal checks to get hired on. During the interview, I caught an upside down glimpse of the aptitude test results. High ninetieth percentile on ambition, adaptability, leadership, sales knowledge, self-confidence. There was a red ink circle around my “Team player” score: bottom sixtieth percent. They took their time evaluating me, and waited until the day before training to hire me on.
Fifty-six other trainees started the three-month training program with me. I’m the only trainee who was selected to attend training who did not get in through a referral from somebody employed by the firm.
It’s the first day of training, and the spot gold price hovers around $1,400 an ounce. When I arrive at the firm, I’m sequestered with fifty-six other trainees from the main trading area on a separate floor of the building. We walk through a gauntlet of corporate security and stand in a line. A man who introduces himself as Chuck chats with me. He tells me that he tried to get into the training program for three hiring cycles. Almost two years.
As the line progresses, I notice a quarter which looks fresh from the mint shining from the carpet. I step over it. Chuck bends down and picks it up.
“Look, Erik. My hiring bonus!”
I laugh. He pockets the coin.
After the last trainee is processed through the line, a procession of executives of various ranks of the firm’s org chart introduce themselves to us. The last executive is man a resembling Fred Flintstone. He gives a well-rehearsed motivational speech ripped from an Ayn Rand novel about his humble beginnings in business without a college degree, how he grew the firm to ten figures in sales, and how the firm is a microcosm of America: the ultimate meritocracy.
Chuck is not sitting at his station when everyone returns from break. His name tag is missing from the top of his monitor. I remember Flintstones words, and the quarter Chuck pocketed from the floor this morning as we passed through the gauntlet of security personnel. It may be unrelated, but if that’s the reason he was pulled from training, then the message was clear: We are watching you.
• • •
During the third week, I return from lunch to discover the trainees gathering around an empty terminal. Name tag atop the monitor gone. The seat’s former owner returned early from lunch complaining of chest pains. Then he clutched his chest and dropped to the deck. EMTs came and wheeled him out on a stretcher. All this before I returned from getting my venti Americano down the block. Not one person, trainee, security, nor HR personnel, deployed the defibrillators.
• • •
Whenever a selection of senior AEs and team leaders visit to speak about how they became successful, trainees lean forward in their chairs.
Today we are visited by Gideon Sachs. He relates how two years ago he was telemarketing newspaper subscriptions during the day and counting change for new guitar strings to play gigs at night. How he alm
ost didn’t make it out of training. Now he’s deciding if he should spend part of his 1.2 million in earnings from the trailing twelve months on a Maserati to park in the driveway of his compound. Gideon walks us through a recent trade which netted him six figures, and how he uses the Socratic method to close deals. He recommends The Secrets of Question-Based Selling, and how his favorite technique is using third-party credibility from experts by referring to current events articles he culls from newspapers every morning. A compliance lady interrupts him and stresses that we must first vet any article through the proper channels for approval before using them as a sales tool. Failure to do so would be in violation of compliance.
Gideon says, “Don’t be mistaken, the strong eat and the weak get culled from the pack.” He leaves the training floor to training an eruption of applause.
• • •
The trainee ranks are cut down to eighteen. Half of us who are left are at this point are expected to survive to the main trading floor. The tests now pit trainee against trainee in heads up competitions, like who can raise the most assets under control (money) from cold calls, and which one of us will be the first to get a hat trick—three trades in one day. Now, even if you pass the weekly test and hit your performance numbers, if your scores fall at the bottom of the bell curve relative to your peers, you get disappeared.
• • •
“So, I take my wife to a disco. There’s a guy on the dance floor, really getting down. Break dancing, moonwalking, back flips…the man is grooving.
My wife turns to me and says, “See that guy? Twenty-five years ago, before I met you, he proposed to me and I turned him down.”
So I say, ‘Looks like he’s still celebrating!’”
Laughter.
“Welcome to the firm, and congratulations for making it this far into training. My name is Tiberius Trần. I’m a team leader on the trading floor. I used to be a vice president of Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith. Before that, I flew planes stuffed with nukes. Now I’m here. Questions?”