Insatiable: Porn — A Love Story

by Asa Akira

  This wasn’t the case with Maury. I undressed, danced a little bit for him, and then we talked about random things while chain smoking, me naked, him fully clothed. I did come to find out he was an Orthodox Jew, unhappily married with two kids, and he owned a successful business in the city. For the most part, though, our conversation was that of two friends, just shooting the shit. Maury didn’t drink; I didn’t, either. I was on Oxys, but at the time he didn’t know that.

  We ended up exchanging numbers that night before we left the Champagne Room and went home separately, both feeling we had made a new friend.

  From that point on, any night Maury was at Hustler, which we jokingly referred to as “H,” I was there, too. I lived two blocks away from the club, and he would text me as soon as he arrived. I’d throw on some makeup, pop an Oxy, and head over to the club in my pajamas. Some nights I would head up to the locker room to change into my stripperwear; some nights I didn’t even bother. He always, always took me to the Champagne Room.

  More often than not, Maury would hire another girl to come into the room with us. There was a roster of ten or so girls that he liked. Sometimes, if it was a girl I was attracted to, he’d watch us fuck. The hottest girl was Jacqueline. She was a Puerto Rican Barbie doll. She got too drunk sometimes, but Maury didn’t mind. It was part of her charm. Many nights, Maury would take me out from the club, paying me my hourly Champagne Room fee, to go eat, hang out at his office, or even go to another stripclub. We’d pick up my two best girlfriends, Dee and Gianna, on the way to wherever we were going. Seven a.m. would roll around, and he would drop us off at our homes and head straight to work, or home for a nap. I never knew what he told his wife. Maury was truly my friend; only, he paid me.

  Eventually, Maury made a proposal. We would stop with the Champagne Room business and he would pay for all my bills and give me an allowance—for the exchange of my company a few times a week. It wasn’t much different from what I had already been doing; it just meant Maury wouldn’t have to pay the club their fee. I agreed.

  Shortly after the agreement, Maury took me and Jacqueline on a business trip to Florida.

  We stayed at the Ritz-Carlton, and Maury had gotten Jacqueline and me a room to share, and he had a suite next to us. Jacqueline and I had become close, so this was no problem. Our first full day there, Maury had to work, so Jacqueline and I went down to the pool. That night, we went out to a nice dinner and ended the night back at the hotel, Maury in his room, us in ours.

  The next day, Maury was free. We went on a shopping spree, where we got thousands of dollars’ worth of clothing. Maury was happy to see us happy.

  “By the way, I hired some girls for tonight if you guys wanna join.” We were eating lunch after our shopping spree when Maury dropped this on us.

  “Actually, my friend Toby lives here, and he’s been hitting me up. I was hoping we could meet up with him.”

  So it was settled. Maury would see the escorts that night, and Jacqueline and I would go out with Toby.

  The night with Toby is a blur, but I remember enough to know it was one of those perfect nights out that only happen when you’re twenty-one, old enough to be an adult but young enough to be free of responsibility. We were all fucked-up, but no one went accidentally overboard. I remember him and his three friends coming to get us. I remember popping a couple of Oxys before we left. I remember doing lines of coke throughout the night. We hit a few clubs, getting into each one for free because of our outfits. We definitely went skinny-dipping at the beach. I vaguely remember the boys dropping us off at the hotel, and making out with Toby before I got out of the car.

  Jacqueline and I woke up the next afternoon wearing the boys’ collared shirts. Maury was sitting at the edge of my bed.

  “I took the liberty of going through your camera,” he said sadly.

  I looked over at Jacqueline, who I could tell was trying to put the pieces of the night together.

  “Oh, cool,” I answered. It was weird he went through our stuff. For half a second I started to get offended, but then quickly decided I was too tired to try to care. “How was your night?” I asked.

  “It was good. You guys look like you had fun.” Maury’s voice made me feel guilty for having fun.

  “I don’t even remember what we did last night.” It wasn’t totally true, but somehow I thought it would make him feel less left out.

  We ordered breakfast to the room, and Maury was quiet. We went out to drive around Miami, and he was quiet all day. At one point his wife called. This was the first time he answered her call in front of me.

  “Hey . . . Nothing, just work. How are the kids? Good. I’ll call you tomorrow.” He almost hung up, when he blurted, “Wait—I miss you.” Pause. She didn’t say anything back. He hung up.

  We went back to the hotel, and I started to roll a joint.

  “Maury—you wanna smoke?” I knew his answer would be no.

  To my surprise, he answered, “Sure.”

  Jacqueline and I looked at each other. Maury had never done any type of drug before. Not that I consider weed a drug, but he had never been high.

  The best thing about getting someone high for the first time is that it takes you back to the time you got high for the first time. All the new surreal sensations, the silly ideas, the finding everything hilarious . . . It’s contagious. There’s a great deal of my early teen years that I don’t remember, but the first time I got high is one memory that plays as vividly as one that happened yesterday. I was in Central Park with my girlfriend Jenna and four boys. The first image I saw high was a man sitting on the park bench reading a newspaper. It was summertime, so he was wearing no shirt; his newspaper covered his shorts, and it made him look like a naked man reading the newspaper in Central Park. After laughing for what could have been five seconds or five hours, Jenna and I left the boys to go to FAO Schwarz. We played with the toys, lay among the stuffed animals, and walked around in a hysterical daze until we ultimately got thrown out for eating the candy out of the tubs in the candy store. We went back to Jenna’s house with one mission: Find more weed.

  As we passed our third joint around, Jacqueline and I decided to put makeup on Maury. I took out a skirt and draped it around his head like a turban. We all fell to the floor laughing. We ordered room service and the boy who brought our food joined us briefly, taking pictures of “the strippers” to send to his friends.

  From that day forward, Maury was hooked. He started smoking before he went to the office, and didn’t stop until it was time to go home at night. He went to H less and less, and eventually even stopped seeing me. He told me him and his wife had started smoking together, and even had sex for the first time in over a year.

  I still talk to Maury occasionally, and he’s always high. He sounds like a different person; I didn’t realize it at the time, but Maury was depressed when I met him. He doesn’t go to stripclubs anymore, doesn’t see girls anymore. He never asks me to hang out.

  That makes me happy.

  To the left of me, as the nearly naked men danced onstage, Anita was stuffing a dollar down the crotch of a waiter dressed in black slacks and a bow tie. No shirt.

  “C’mon, baby, you can reach further down than that!” he yelled over the noise of the music and women.

  She laughed.

  In an environment like this, women are much more aggressive than men. A good number of us extended our arms onto the stage to cop a feel. Any piece of flesh would do—a thigh, a bicep, upper left shoulder, whatever. Upon getting their cocks grabbed, the strippers only smiled and gave them the side-to-side finger wave, as if to say “nuh-uh-uh, silly.” If men acted this way at a female stripclub, they’d be thrown out immediately—possibly even arrested.

  Maybe because I had already been DP’d earlier that day, maybe because I was already used to seeing men naked on a daily basis; maybe because I myself was objectified so often, or maybe because I was just more reserved in general, I didn’t touch any of the men. How strange it felt
to be on this side of the stage, on this side of the gender dynamic.

  It reminded me of a documentary I saw about male escorts in Japan. Their clients, the women, would come back to their club night after night, patiently waiting as they serviced other women ahead of them. They would bring them extravagant gifts, buy expensive bottles of champagne, shower them with any amount of money they asked—all for nothing but their companionship.

  The twist was, these women were hookers.

  They would work all day, have sex with men for money, go to the club at night, and spend it all on their male escort of choice. The dirty side of the circle of life.

  A girl from our group, Angie, waved a dollar while jumping up and down.

  “Come here! Come over here!”

  It made me cringe. It made me hate her. I resented that, the whole Come over here, I have a WHOLE DOLLAR! Now show me what you’ll do to deserve it.

  It’s offensive. I hated when men had that attitude when I was dancing.

  Right then, “Christian” came on the stage. Upon his reveal, several woman got up from their seats and rushed the stage. Rightfully so—this mixed boy, he was beautiful. Probably half black and half white, he had light brown skin and what looked, from below the stage, like hazel green eyes. His body was ripped. Big lips, and a face that seemed boyish and manly all at once. Anita and I looked at each other with matching expressions.

  “Whoa.”

  We pushed and shoved our way to the front of the stage, where other women had just pushed and shoved their way ahead of us a moment ago. Anita grabbed my hand.

  “That boy is fucking beautiful.”

  I nodded my head yes without taking my eyes off him.

  He was obviously the crowd favorite. When he finally took his clothes off, I swear the room shook from the noise.

  He came toward us, and when he bent down onto his knees and rolled his abs with a smile, Anita slipped a dollar into his G-string. He smiled, in a way that made me rethink everything I was feeling a second ago. If he could smile like this, so genuinely, so convincingly, maybe I could, too.

  I brushed his leg as he crawled away.

  Haiku

  Penis in my throat!

  If I had a gag reflex

  . . . I could eat way more.

  11

  Glory

  Whenever I fly, I try to get to the airport at the very last minute that I can. The longer I’m there, the more crap food I eat. Raised by health nuts, I can count on one hand the times I was “treated” to dinner at McDonald’s as a child. Junk food was never a part of my palette, let alone on the list of things I allow myself to eat now that I have a job that requires me to be naked most of the time. Yet, somehow, when I’m in an airport, all bets are off. It might be the chemical scents the food chains release into the air; or possibly just the sheer boredom of being stuck in an airport with an iPod full of music I don’t feel like hearing, and an iPad full of eBooks I don’t feel like reading. Whatever the reason, a delayed flight is my diet’s worst enemy.

  This was the case that morning. After roaming the airport, passing the Cinnabon stand for the fifth time, I finally sat down at the gate.

  Day after Thanksgiving, and I was on my way to New Hampshire for a store signing.

  Winter holidays are always the worst time to travel, and it’s a cliché in itself to even complain about it. JFK was particularly crowded that day, even for this time of year, and I took the first open seat I saw. I heard an overhead announcement saying we wouldn’t be boarding for another two hours, but the Pizza Hut Express and Häagen-Dazs ice cream cone I just ate, along with the leftovers my mom fed me before I left, had me too full to scavenge any further.

  The seat I chose was next to a ponytailed man-boy dressed in a Metallica T-shirt and some dirty black jeans. I guessed he was about twenty.

  “You going to Rochester?” I turned to see who was talking to me. Strangers make me nervous, but this kid seemed innocent enough.

  “No.” I answered. “. . . New Hampshire. Flight’s delayed.”

  “Our flight was d-delayed too. W-w-w-we’re supposed to be boarding in ten minutes, but they’ve been telling us that for the p-past three hours. What can I say? That’s JFK.” He was stuttering, like his mouth was moving too fast for his brain. This probably meant he knew who I was, which was good. Immediately, I felt like we had something in common, a dirty secret. Like in a “Pervs unite” kind of way. It put me at ease.

  “I’m Rob.” He stuck his hand out for me to shake it. I took it.

  “I’m Asa. Nice to meet you.”

  We continued a bit more of the delayed-flight-talk before I took out my iPad and he went back to playing his Nintendo DS. His boarding zone was called not much later. He took a second to gather his things and I told him to “have a nice flight.”

  The next ten seconds happened in slow motion.

  Rob stood up and crossed in front of me. As he walked around behind my seat, he reached down, past my face, over my shoulder, down my chest, and grabbed my tit. Then he gave it a firm squeeze.

  And then he ran away.

  A second later, I began to register what had happened. I looked around me to see if anyone had noticed. Was this really happening? Is this real life? Am I being punished for all those rape jokes I made on Twitter? After freezing for ten seconds or so, I picked up my coat and purse and ran after him. Just like in a nightmare, I felt like I was watching all of this happen to myself, and my reaction to everything was always two seconds delayed. The airport was crowded, and by the time I was up and running, he was nowhere to be seen. I went up to the gate and told the flight attendant. “Some idiot just grabbed my breast. He’s going to be boarding this plane.” Tears were starting to form in my eyes, and my voice was shaking. I wanted to control myself so badly, but I physically couldn’t. I felt violated, like in that dream where someone opens the door to the public bathroom just as I’m crouched over, one leg up on the toilet seat, phone clenched between my teeth, changing my tampon.

  The most fucked-up part about someone grabbing my tit like that was that I didn’t react how I wanted to. Instead of punching him, slapping him, or at least telling him off in an intellectual manner, I froze, cried, and tattled.

  I ended up missing my flight and taking the next one so that I could give a statement to the police. When I did finally land in New Hampshire, I barely had time to take a nap before a car came to pick me up for my signing. “The craziest thing just happened to me,” I explained to the store employee on the drive over.

  We got to the store and it turned out it was a family-owned business. Running it was a mother-son team, Abigail and Mike. I had an hour before the store officially opened, so I had Mike give me a tour. Upstairs was where all the videos, lingerie, stripper shoes, and sex toys were sold.

  “I don’t know if you want to see the downstairs,” Mike laughed.

  “Why wouldn’t I?” Whatever was downstairs, it sounded promising already. If anything, the boy had challenged me.

  Mike looked up at his mom. “Can I?” he asked, seeming boyish all of a sudden, despite his actual late-twenties age.

  Mom said okay and we headed down the uneven wooden steps. The farther down we went, the colder it got. I felt like the kids from the Narnia series, walking through a dark closet to unveil a secret. A security guard let us through a black curtain at the bottom of the stairs.

  What it opened to was a row of booths, some with curtains open, some closed. Each of them was playing a porno on a small TV screen. They were all empty.

  “Come, look.” Mike led the way into a booth. A gay movie that couldn’t have been filmed later than the eighties was playing in this one. I followed Mike’s gaze under the TV screen, and to my amazement, there it was: a single, perfectly round gloryhole, all alone in the middle of the wall.

  “Do they all have it?” My voice was projecting about four notches too loud and a whole pitch higher than usual.

  “Yup.”

  I ran into the
next one. And the next one. And the next one. They were all connected by the same-sized holes, with swinging sheets of wood to cover them for when they weren’t desired.

  “Is this legal?” My voice was still too loud. Mike laughed.

  “Nah, but we say it’s for ventilation.” He made the air quotes with his hands.

  I took out my phone and handed it to Mike. “Quick, take a picture of me through the gloryhole.”

  When we finally went back upstairs, it was time for the store to open. Less than twenty-four hours ago I had been molested for the first time in my adult life, but all I could think about was the gloryholes. Maybe it was true what they said, before light comes darkness. I had never seen one in real life before; I had never even seen one on TV. It was something I had been hearing about. I didn’t want to sign autographs. I wanted to go look at the gloryholes again.

  I tried to incorporate the mystical holes into every conversation I had. “Nice to meet you. Oh I loved making this movie. Have you ever seen a real-life gloryhole??”

  While signing movies, posters, and Fleshlights, I kept a constant side-eye watch on the staircase. A few guys went down and came back up. It thrilled me to know their secret.

  A couple of hours went by and it was time to take a lunch break.

  “So what kind of people use them? Like, mostly?” I didn’t have to specify what I was asking about. Mike knew.

  “Gay guys. It’s always gay guys. I’ve never seen a girl go down there.”

  “Is it always blowjobs?”

  “Pretty much.”

  It always struck me as strange that people are quicker to give a blowjob, rather than just have sex. A blowjob is much more intimate . . . it’s having someone’s genitals in your face. Your face! Not to mention, sex is something both parties enjoy. Giving a blowjob is hardly stimulating unless there’s a reward after. How much I love a guy is in direct correlation with how often I unsolicitedly blow him to completion.