She signs on for a porno loop. Three black men fuck her in the arse in quick succession while she stands bent over a wooden table. The filmmaker only has a super-8 video camera and never turns to film her face. For days afterwards, the pain endures and she hurts when walking. They’ve actually torn her. To think she once shuddered at the thought of Caesarians. She heals. For another pervert, she accepts to be tied up in a cave where she is administered an enema by a pocked, butch dyke, while he noisily jerks off. She wallows in the expelled liquid, rubs her skin, bathes in the shit-infested waters surrounding her on the black rubber sheet. She allows a one-legged grizzled and bitter Vietnam veteran to fuck her with his stump. While he moves the bone inside her bowels, he loudly sings Born In The USA off-key. And then actually cries when she leaves his motel room.
The cycle of inevitable degradation continues.
Like a penance.
One night, in dire need of junk, she’s at the bar of this swank hotel, looking for passing custom when Steve Gregory walks in. Silk suit and all attitude.
“Christ, baby, you’ve let yourself go,” he says. “But, you see, it’s destiny, we meet again.”
She smiles feebly.
“I need cash, Steve,” Katherine says.
“You need a fix, more like. If you stay here, you’re not even going to get spare change, Eddie.”
He ponders one moment.
Her brown eyes beg.
“Come to the car,” he says. She follows.
He drives out of town. Parks in the darkness, near the Boeing fields. Slips his hand under her blouse. Feels her up.
“Still nice and firm,” Steve says. “That’s the nice thing about smallish tits, they seldom go flabby. That’s an asset you’ve got there, honey.”
He opens the glove compartment and hands her the junk. She shoots up. It’s good quality stuff. She listens to the stars out there, allows the river of ice to invade her whole body. It’s too strong, like a whack to the heart, she’s obliged to put her head on his shoulder.
“I’ll take care of you, Eddie,” Steve says.
He doesn’t even want to fuck her anymore. She’s beyond it.
“See, I know this very private club down in New Orleans,” he tells her, caressing her cheeks with genuine care and concern as she dozes on. “I think we’re going to make a great team, you and me, Eddie. A great team. You’ll like it there, the food is just too much and it’s never cold. You’ve never told me if you like sea food? Do you?”
She assents with a shake of her head, his fingers move through her hair, playing with the tired curls. “Goodbye Seattle,” she whispers. She likes it when men play with her hair. Yes, she does.
Katherine dreams.
Of New Orleans. A city she has repeatedly been told is wonderful. Fragrant. And deliciously evil.
Yet another place her lover insisted he would take her to and no, he hadn’t. They had not embraced in an assortment of fancy New Orleans hotel rooms which had once been slave quarters and where cockroaches roamed free. And never would. A city of cemeteries, storms and bewitching music.
Her pale skin shivers as a last ferry leaves the harbour for the journey across Puget Sound to the scattered isles.
New Orleans.
Katherine finally sleeps. The pain goes away.
GINCH
Michael Perkins
YEARS AGO YOU probably would have recognized Parker Coleman’s name. Parker Coleman – wasn’t he one of the movers and shakers who put together the Woodstock Festival? A record producer? One of four guys Bob Dylan slugged in 1968?
Parker popped up everywhere in the sixties; it was a decade he always claimed he invented. Certainly he exploited it better than almost anyone else I’ve heard of under thirty. Parker was a Zen hustler with a beard before the words “hippie” and “businessman” were joined together by Time magazine. While the rest of us floated lazily downstream on what we had been told was the current of history, smoking good weed and blithely awaiting the news that the revolution of consciousness had swept the board room of General Motors and the Pentagon, Parker made a few grand by swimming upstream – hawking psychedelic buttons, T-shirts, records, rock magazines and concerts, and once even a child guru from Ceylon named Bubba Sammy.
You might say that Parker saw us coming, because he was always paddling the other way. So he made money in the sixties, and he got a lot of ginch – his word for fuckable women.
Ginch. Think about it, because it will tell you everything you need to know about Parker’s attitude toward women. His Kansas accent, overlaid with the street black’s drawl he’d picked up, stretched the middle of the word like a rubber band.
Since his reputation as a cocksman was nearly as great as his reputation as a hustler, Parker had ample opportunity to select candidates for his private stable of ginch from among the finest examples of concupiscent American womanhood. There always seemed to be two or three twenty-two-year-old deep-breasted, deep-fried long-legged blondes dressed in eye-popping T-shirts trailing him as he moved from appointment to appointment, usually in a limousine. It was boom time.
Then one morning Parker woke up in a rented house in Topanga Canyon, and the sixties were over. National Guardsmen at Kent State shot the shit out of them. The seventies dawned gray and cold, and Parker’s tired Aquarian customers – a generation of big-eyed Keane children – went home to catch some Zs. When they woke up, they began looking around for jobs.
Parker had overextended himself financially. When his customers disappeared back into the middle class from whence they’d come, he was wiped out. An overnight has-been.
Decline is somehow more uncomfortable to bear in California than in colder places where people work for a living, so Parker returned to his native city of New York and took a loft on Varick Street in Soho where he could meditate and try to figure out his next move. It didn’t take him long to come up with the idea of making pornographic movies: low investment, high return, and ginch to boot.
In short order he had established himself as the boy wonder of porno films. Small distinction, perhaps, but his own. He cranked them out in his loft like home movies, which is what the loops you see in porno theatres basically are – good old American home movies full of fucking, sucking, golden showers, S/M, and come facials for the apple-cheeked girls Parker recruited from his stock of ginch.
The first time I talked with him on the telephone, he was getting ready to shoot his first feature film, a rip-off of Charlie’s Angels that – naturally – he called Parker’s Angels. He woke me out of a sound Tequila-induced sleep into one of the worst hangovers that ever sank its claws into man’s cerebellum.
“Yeah?”
“Nick, this is Parker Coleman. Grinning Bare Productions, you know.”
He sounded like Ralph Williams selling used cars on television. I moved the receiver a few inches from my ear and picked dirt from between my toenails while I listened. I used to meet him a lot at parties, but we’d never spent more than five minutes together. What he wanted was for me to write a script for him. He’d seen stuff I’d done in the underground papers and I guess he figured I was good enough to do the job for him, and poor enough to accept the postage stamps he wanted to pay me with.
He was right, of course. I was two months behind on the rent, and Con Edison had already turned off my electric typewriter, freeing me to spend more time in the air-conditioned comfort of my favorite saloon, a small establishment on Sheridan Square where I was running up a tab as long as my arm.
“I’m not talking peanuts, Nick. This is big time. Parker’s Angels is going to revolutionize the business. I know how to publicize a film, if you don’t know my reputation. Gerry Damiano is small potatoes, if you know what I mean.”
“I’ve heard of you,” I allowed. Grudgingly, because tiny golfers were using my brain for a driving range.
“Isn’t that title great? Parker’s Angels. Tell me it isn’t great. And we’re going to have the greatest collection of ginch – prime Califor
nia stuff – you ever saw.”
I put the phone closer to my ear, perking up at the thought of Marilyn Chambers doing her number while I looked on, script in one hand, my rod in the other. I’d never written a porno film before, but even through a hangover, the perquisites were tantalizing. I get horny when I’m hung over, and all I could see was a vision of Marilyn rehearsing song and dance numbers on my stiff prick. I agreed to visit Parker in his loft that afternoon.
Three hours later I was panting up the steep wooden stairs to Parker’s loft. On his metal door in gold lettering were the words:
Parker Coleman’s Grinning Bare Productions
I pushed open the heavy door and walked in, hoping to find Parker in the middle of shooting a scene for a film. I was disappointed. All was quiet. No naked ladies running about with semen on their thighs. I picked my way through a maze of boxes, stacked film cans and movie equipment and saw, at the end of a long hallway plastered with posters for porno films, a man and a woman sitting on a couch watching an old movie on color television.
Up close, Parker looked like a disheveled teddy bear. So this was the cocksman, I thought: he wore a full black beard, a dirty T-shirt featuring Paul Newman’s baby blues studded with rhinestones and a pair of wool pants – it was a hot day in July when I saw him – over which a belly the size of a watermelon loomed. He was a teddy bear whose stuffings were coming out, but he sat on that ratty couch like a goddamned emperor, while the blonde sitting next to him rubbed his bare feet.
He started talking – Parker talked more than any man I’ve ever known, in the same obsessive way other people chain smoke – but I wasn’t listening. I was staring at the blonde, and trying my best not to look like I was staring.
So this was ginch: clear California features you see a lot of in porno films, a tan so deep it looked built in, lush red mouth and sparkling whiter-than-white teeth genetically engineered to fit around the head of a cock, and a body that relegated Raquel Welch to the pin-ups-of-the-past department. It was all big and firm and fresh and caramel and it made me want to shake my fist at the destiny that hadn’t dropped one just like it on my doorstep. I nodded at her in the direction of the nipples I saw poking through the thin material of her halter top, and she smiled back so quickly I almost missed the glory of it, the corners of her mouth turned up like wings.
The only thing that bothered me about the blonde were her eyes. There was no one home behind her eyelids, which drooped like paper blinds over the windows of an empty furnished room.
Parker was talking, but I interrupted him. Much as I needed the small fee he was offering me, I had to find out about her.
“Can she talk?”
“I don’t encourage it, Nick. Let a woman talk, and pretty soon you’re in trouble. She sure can move her lips, though. I’m trying to teach her how to suck cock and sing ‘Yankee Doodle’ at the same time, but she’s a slow learner. College dropout. About the film, do you think you could get right on it? I gotta have something on paper, man. This film is going to be a biggie. I’ve got backers begging me to take their money.”
Parker must have noticed that he wasn’t getting my undivided attention, because all of a sudden he started talking about the blonde, with the possessive pride of a homeowner talking about a new lawnmower.
“Bliss is going to be in the film, you know, Nick. But the real star – now there’s prime ginch, nothing cut-rate. A ringer for Farrah Fawcett-Majors. Great idea, huh? Every guy in the country crazy about that dizzy ginch, and we’re going to cash in on it.”
I looked at Bliss. She was off in a world of her own, a dreamy look in her eyes that I couldn’t identify. Watching her was like having a wet dream while awake. If she was high on something, I hoped it was the smell of semen. She reminded me of a robot, one of those rubber sex dolls you buy for $19.95 from an ad in a men’s magazine and blow up like a balloon. Bliss was an appropriate name for her: she was blissed-out.
Like most American men of my age and background (32, midwest, Berkeley, divorced, blah, blah, blah), I’d paid lip-service all my life to the idea of female equality simply because I wanted to fuck, and the ladies available for fucking were feminists, at least in the living room. But I was weary of having to deal with women as if they had brains; I was ready for some unradical, unpretentious sex doll who would perform whenever and however I wanted. I was ready for ginch, in other words.
Or was I? I think the truth is that I was torn like any Catholic schoolboy between the brainlessly pornographic vision of ginch before me and a life-time’s indoctrination – by women, of course, from my mother to my unlamented ex-wife – in the notion that women have souls as well as cunts, feelings as well as nice tits.
Fortunately for me, Parker’s mother back in Kansas had not raised any such dummies. When he wanted something, he was absolutely tuned in on the price he would have to pay. Seeing that I was so hypnotized by Bliss that no business was going to get done until my attention was distracted, he put his hand on her shoulder and gave her a gentle push in my direction. It was as if he’d pushed a button located somewhere between her shoulder blades.
Bliss drifted toward me like Linda Lovelace stepping from the screen, red tongue moistening her wet lips. Her hand went straight to my crotch and lightly brushed the painful erection that beat like a trapped Gooney bird behind my zipper. I reached out a tentative hand to stroke her golden hair, looking up briefly to see Parker smiling like a man who’s just made a deal that’s not going to cost him anything.
Bliss fell gently to her knees and tugged my tool from a pair of blue French briefs I was particularly proud of, stared until she was almost cross-eyed at my humble staff, and darted out her tongue to lick the tip. Both of her hands encircled the shaft as she introduced the throbbing head into her mouth, her tongue swirling around the length as if she were eating a double-dip Baskin-Robbins cone.
“Jesus Christ!” I shuddered, bent double over the heated pleasure at my groin. I couldn’t help myself. I had not exchanged one word with Bliss, and in one or two minutes I was going to erupt like a geyser into her throat. I saw Parker smiling impatiently from the couch, as if to say, Come on, get it over with, and the next thing I knew I was coming, while Bliss’s head bobbed back and forth in a receptive rhythm as steady as a sewing machine’s.
Her mouth came off my cock with a sweet pop, and she stood up, a vague, satisfied smile on her face.
“Thank you . . .” I blurted, but she went back to sit on the couch next to Parker without answering me.
I was zippering my fly, feeling considerably shaken up by the blowjob, when Parker started talking again.
“Okay, Nick, now that we’ve got that out of the way, maybe we can get down to business, huh? You think you can put together something on paper I can show the money guys? I got a lot of notes.”
“How soon do you need it?”
“Yesterday, man. Everything in this business is yesterday.”
“How about by Monday?” It was Friday afternoon, fading into evening. I thought I’d give myself the weekend, and sit at the typewriter until the damned thing was finished. Considering the money he was offering, it was a lousy deal, but I knew I had to see Bliss again. If I did the script, I could invent a thousand reasons why I had to drop by the loft. So we talked money, I accepted a very small check as advance payment, and Parker explained what he wanted me to write. He was an idea man, he said; it was up to me to fill in the details. While he talked, I watched Bliss. She listened to him like she was hearing her Master’s voice.
Like most survivors of the sixties, I’m wary of sentiment, but even if I didn’t know that what was happening to me when I looked at Bliss used to be called love by movie heroes in the forties, I knew something unusual was going on in my head: I felt protective toward her. Parker obviously didn’t give a shit for her – why else would he have let her blow me? – but my motives were pure. They would allow me to take her away from Parker without a second thought.
It didn’t occur to me th
at she might not want to leave Parker. The Lone Ranger, savior of beautiful ginch, had made up his mind, and to hell with reality.
I went to work on the script for Parker’s Angels that evening, after borrowing the air-conditioned apartment of a friend who was off to the country for the weekend and hauling my electric typewriter to his living-room outlet. I cashed Parker’s check at the bar, paid off part of the tab, bought two six-packs of beer, and hallucinated about Bliss while I filled in the salacious details of the script outline Parker had given me.
I worked late and slept till noon the next day. Sunday in New York in the summer: when I left the borrowed air conditioning and stepped onto the sidewalk, two scenes under my arm and a desire to see Bliss so strong I only paused for coffee and a donut on my way to Parker’s loft, the city seemed as hot and dry as the Sahara.
I had to see her alone – to find out what made her tick, I told myself – when all along I knew that what I really wanted was to find the button in her back that made her Parker’s possession. I lusted after that button.
Luck was with me; I found Bliss washing her hair when I entered the loft. She was wearing blue nylon panties and her long blonde hair was full of soap. She told me that Parker had gone out with some friends to get an egg cream and the Sunday papers, seeming neither surprised nor interested that I was standing six feet away from her, my eyes glued to her amazingly firm breasts. Shampoo ran in a thin trickle of liquid gold across one erect roseate nipple.
“I brought part of the script,” I explained while she wrapped a red towel around her wet hair and cleaned out the big double sink. “I made your part a little bigger than Parker asked for.”
In order to appreciate her response, you have to consider that I had never heard her talk. As Parker said, he didn’t encourage it.
Her tones were warm and chocolaty, but the words she spoke were delivered with all the sincerity of a long distance operator placing a call.
“I just love the men Parker finds for his films. They’re so friendly. You know what I mean?”
The Mammoth Book of International Erotica Page 46