by Charles Bock
Some things must be learned over and over, and with every tape, with almost every scene, Lincoln witnessed firsthand that nothing can live up to what a mind imagines, that the idea of porn is far more erotic than its reality. This wasn't the kind of realization that blows your mind; at the same time it wasn't necessarily easy to accept. Lincoln had participated in more than his share of freaky shit back during his skirt-chasing days. Absolutely he had. But as he sped through one mechanical plow after another, it became impossible to deny the hard kernel inside of him that held the act of sex to be intimate—even the sport fucks and hogging and beer-goggle bangs of his youth, even the most impersonal lays, the bootie calls where he'd gotten caught up in his own pleasure and the chick had become amorphous, yes, even the dead fish, the one-night stands that Lincoln had fantasized through and forgotten and been razzed over. The intimacy may have been limited, varied in intensity and degree. But for some scant shred of time, without a doubt, some form of intimacy had existed. And it seemed to Lincoln there was a definitive, canyon-size difference between the privacy that formed between two people as they engaged in the most intimate act in which two people can engage, and the reality of a woman having to constantly brush hair out of her face while she performs fellatio on a guy, between the act of sex, or the activity of making love, or even the physical process of fucking, between any of these and the sequence wherein a woman is getting pounded from behind, and she looks straight ahead at the camera and deliberately brushes the hair out of her eyes, and then makes a face—pretending not only that she is having the time of her life, but that the jackass watching the tape is providing it.
This was at odds with all that was truly sexual and erotic to Lincoln. This was the opposite of sexy, something of a totally separate phylum, and without looking away or reducing the pace with which he was stroking himself, he would use his free hand and press a button on the right side of his remote, sending the forms on his screen forward in double-time.
Watching made Lincoln a tacit participant, and so he did not watch.
Even if he did not stop.
A scene was boring. Did that mean he should give up his hard-on and go home?
He'd paid for this tape, right? This tape was his.
Because every once in a great while a sequence would arrive.
A threesome. The copy repairman and the starlet temp and the curvy redheaded programmer. The copy repair guy had the redhead on the table, and was working on her back door. He was covered with sweat, really pounding into the redhead, who had stopped eating out the blonde and was lying on her side. The redhead's face was toward the camera and her eyes were closed, and she was grunting with each stroke and her face was contorting. She was just lying there and taking it up the ass and keeping her eyes shut and her mouth open, simply waiting it out, waiting for it to be over and to have survived, and here, now, for the shortest of snippets, one and two and out, the camera captured the blond woman leaning over, gently stroking the side of the redhead's brow.
Lincoln would watch this and he would have to turn away. He'd have to turn off the videotape. He'd go back to his life and his wife, carrying on like normal, until the next time he needed to view such a spectacle.
At which juncture the tape was cued right up to where he'd left it.
Over and over he watched, until the genuine moment lost its freshness, until the accidentally captured seconds of humanity were devoid of their luster.
Then he purchased a new tape.
He also liked when the guy had the woman's panties hanging from his cock.
And the squishy sounds. A bed's rattle and thump. Balls smacking against a woman's ass.
All sorts of playful things, Lincoln appreciated: frilly G-strings and crotchless panties; a pink nipple at attention, peeking out from the cup of a cheesy bra. A woman driving her female partner crazy, teasing her lips with the humming vibrator. Do you want me? Beg for me. . . .
Or if she stared deeply into the guy's eyes while he was in her mouth, her attention entirely on him—yeah, Lincoln was totally into that.
What was it like for your partner when you pulled lightly on her clitoral stud with your teeth?
What would it be like to be blown by a woman with a steel barbell through her tongue?
Frank moments, that's what he wanted: fleshy boomers jiggling as they were squashed together, putting pressure on the penis head, turning its cover purple. . . .
The woman on top, lowering herself onto him, wiggling and shaking and grinding into him, her breasts full and bouncing up and down while he slapped her ass and spanked her and she screamed—Harder, yeah, fuck my pussy, oh yeah, right there, fuck my pussy right there, HARDER—and he began slapping her right tit and pulling and twisting the long and erect nipple, and the veins in her neck got tense and her eyes rolled back into her head . . .
There. That's what he was after. Not close-ups of methodical phone-it- in plodding. Not desensitized sex. Certainly not the politically correct wuss-outs where condoms were used—as if anyone wanted to see porn with wrappers, as if anyone watching a porno wanted to be reminded of all the real-world garbage that went with sex.
Not real sex.
Not fake sex.
The way sex should be.
There were carryovers, however. More than once he caught himself staring at how the lace pattern of his assistant's brassiere disrupted the flow of her blouse.
At the panty outlined beneath the skirts and slacks of passing teenage girls.
At belly shirts and exposed navels; the diagonal strings of thong underwear tucking into the low-cut waistline of hipster jeans.
Shorts that bunched up too tightly around some tourist's thighs.
The crease of fabric stuck in a cocktail waitress's ass crack.
The holidays looming. The static cling of cat hair still a reminder of the rescue shelter debacle. Lorraine had moved on to some other sort of volunteer binge. Lincoln arrived home with a few cartons of Chinese, and found a black videocassette waiting for him on the dinner table. The sight knocked the wind from him. Immediately he thought of the video he and his wife had separately watched over and over, only that was impossible. That tape had been eaten by the spools of the machine. The possibility still froze him. A duplicate? A new videotape that captured Newell and provided clues to his whereabouts? He got close enough to read the label and immediately called out his wife's name. Lincoln marched upstairs and the knob on the bedroom door did not give and he repeated Lorraine's name, in a rational voice this time, and tried to explain through the door and almost started pounding. He turned around and walked back downstairs and sat down on the couch and turned the videotape over and over in his hands. He cursed himself for bringing the damn thing home and doubly cursed himself for forgetting it in the machine. The next morning when Lorraine came down she looked as perfect and delectable as she had in Lincoln did not know how long. She moved right to him and put a finger in his chest. It was bad enough he had to go and destroy that video of their son, she said, but if this was what he'd sunk to, he should at least have the good sense to do his dirty business in private. That or the balls not to skulk around and hide like some sort of pervert. Either way he was disgusting. He was weak. The blood drained from Lincoln's face. His jaw clenched and the veins in his neck pulsed. The kitchen was gleamingly clean, the day's promise shining brightly through the bay window. Lincoln answered sincerely and somberly and his words carried the weight of the world. He was at the end of his rope. He was sorry. She locked the door, every night she locked it, and he hadn't known what to do. A man has needs. Lorraine was an icy exterior in response. She was a wall. What had happened, Lincoln continued, what was happening, what they were going through, it was awful, Lor, there was no sense, no reason. But Newell was coming back. They had to believe. And when he came back, Lincoln wanted him to come back to parents who were united and together. They had to stay together, Lor, they had to stay strong. Lincoln put his hands on her upper arms and held her. He talked softly. M
aybe it wasn't a bad idea to think about a fresh start, he said. Another kid, maybe? They had to do something. They couldn't let themselves be ruined. Couldn't give up on everything, could they?
How the garbage on that tape represented any kind of act of faith, Lorraine wanted to know.
“Jesus Fucking Christ—”
“Explain that one to me.”
“I'm talking about our lives here and you're fixated on masturbation?”
“Explain that to me, Link.”
“Isn't watching the same goddamn sequence from that pizza party just as pornographic?”
“You fucking bastard.”
“Isn't going and beating yourself over the head with all the missing kids on this earth—”
“You slashed it. I KNOW YOU DID.”
“—isn't that just as obscene?”
“GODDAMN BASTARD.”
“ISN’T THAT JUST AS OBSCENE, LOR?”
Temperatures did not cool down, not exactly. Rather, the heat was channeled in specific, separate directions. Neither party wanted to address what had happened, nor were they willing to apologize, or let it go. They kept their respectful distances and at the same time made sure to keep from making things worse. The Nevada Child Search was trying to raise funds to buy a property, which would become its headquarters. A support center. Beds and laundry facilities and computers for job training. They didn't have a property in mind, nor did they have money, but Lorraine was devoting her energies toward these things. For his part Lincoln found more reasons to stay at work. And then out of nowhere, he came home with news of a few overtures he'd made to get the Khan's banquet room, if Lorraine ever needed it for anything. She was speechless. Hadn't even known he was aware of her activities. She thanked him and the next day when he got home, a roast was in the oven, a plate of veggies and potatoes were in the microwave, and instructions for reheating were on the table.
It wasn't the easiest truce, it was awkward, and more than a little forced, but their ship was momentarily righted. They were in this together, more or less, and so Lorraine did not tell Lincoln that it had been the third videotape he'd forgotten in the machine. Nor did she tell Lincoln that she'd been a little curious about these tapes, that the thought of them had turned her on more than a little. She did not tell him that she had watched his smut, or that some of the rough stuff had awakened certain urges. Nor was there any need for Lincoln to know that, sometimes, in the middle of the afternoon, when everybody else was in organizational meetings, and stuffing envelopes had her bored out of her skull, just every once in a while, she cruised dirty chat rooms.
But everyone in those things was a boy. What she needed was a man.
And your smart motherfucker, he thought it was hilarious.
The glorious awfulness of it all. Pounds of pancake and yards of fake lashes. Times where the carpet didn't come close to matching the drapes. Dumb fuckers who had no discernible involvement in a plot, but just sort of magically showed up and started fucking. Five-second close-ups of a single pelvic thrust that got looped so they played for like two minutes straight. The gonzo stuff, shot with shaky, handheld retail cameras, so it looked like home-movie footage: two hours of coeds in the shower, as taken from the partially blocked perspective of an air duct; four hours of skirted women being followed up stairwells and escalators; scene after scene where some overtanned asshole went through the motions of pretending to pick up a college student, and you the viewer were supposed to believe that this hard-looking chick with Russian satellites for breasts, heavy metal hair, and a Computers for Dummies manual (which she held upside down), you were supposed to believe she actually was in college, and truly didn't have a problem with a camera filming her being picked up, and was completely cool with a camera taping her having sex with some graceless, charmless asshole, who, oh yeah by the way, she'd just met. Right. Totally. Absolutely. Excellent. Ponyboy watched the same supposed amateur chicks get nailed in like eight or nine different gonzo amateur series. Regular as clockwork, he watched sequences when all of a sudden the director's hand reached into the shot and he grabbed himself some ass. Moans from closed throats. Dubbed squeals that made kung fu voice-overs sound authentic. How almost anytime you wanted to see a woman's face, the camera was on her body. How anytime you wanted to see her body, it was on her face. How when the unthinkable happened and a chick had a climax that wasn't faked, guess how many of those the camera missed? Fucking classic! All the cutaways they made to the guy's reaction instead! Like that wasn't the least important thing in the world?
To Ponyboy, it was funnier than that soap opera hag who got nominated for best actress for like nineteen years in a row and kept getting dressed up and going to the awards show—nineteen straight years they announce someone else's name and she's sitting there knowing she's a schmuck and a laughingstock and just ate shit yet again. Ponyboy watched. He duplicated those videotapes. His pile of bootlegged stock increased and the bloopers and discrepancies swelled toward infinity. And as he became more and more accustomed to the possibility, this festering new idea, simultaneously, Ponyboy began to appreciate how the soap opera bitch and the people making those pornos, how they were alike in one other important area, too—because that soap opera hag had gotten more famous for losing than she ever would have for a win. And as for the porno biz . . . um . . . well, maybe they hadn't gotten famous off them discrepancies or nothing, but . . . okay maybe the comparison didn't technically work. But fuck it. Yeah. That's what he was getting at. What your smart motherfucker found so wonderful. So long as they had the desks and chairs to fuck on, who cared if the office didn't have computers? Why worry about a plot when the mook's just gonna fast-forward through the talking anyway? Fuck it. They're fucking fuck films.
You look at this shit right, it's liberation.
So Ponyboy sat tight on his girlfriend's carpet and he made his duplicates and he passed the point where he knew the names of the major actors and minor actresses, where he not only had favorite porn stars, but also favorite parts of those stars. Your smart motherfucker got used to damaged dental work. Smiles whose imperfections had been accentuated by the business's necessarily oral nature. He became accustomed to skin that hung wearily around gravity-defying silicon. To soft and scarred and loose buttocks, needle marks and bruises. Your smart motherfucker, he watched so much porn that straight up normal fucks no longer cranked his motor.
Two months ago he had not been able to understand how the guys could be staying flaccid while going down on the women. A month ago he had mocked how much effort some of those jackasses put into erection maintenance, calling them retards for the way they choked up on their bats. Now Ponyboy made sure Cheri was asleep and he loaded the machines and watched hot scorching anal scenes, he watched double penetrations and gang bangs, he watched bukkakae and fat chicks in bondage and sexy seniors delivering golden showers. Ponyboy watched truly obscene shit. Still it was a chore to prompt life from his woebegone, scabrous dick.
He couldn't say when he'd started concentrating on the male bodies. The camera's priority always had to be the act of penetration, Ponyboy knew, so the rest of the male body had to stay out of the shot. This resulted in the guys performing calisthenic routines, doing the deed in positions that seemed like stunt work as much as anything. Guys in porn were in unbelievable shape, yet to a man they were so plastic, so empty of personality, that it was difficult to envision any of them being able to get laid on their own—yet another tidbit that Ponyboy found hilarious, perfect as an egg, right up to the moment he worried that paying so much attention to the men meant he was a fag.
His dreams became twisted, sexual mutations, until he stopped dreaming, began waking up flaccid, his morning hard-ons—once mammoth and regular as tax time—now gone like the fucking wind.