Archive for January, 2010

The gym never closes. It’s pay-by-the-day and for a couple of bucks, I can lift weights, take a shower, read or nap in the sauna. I did this last night. Nobody fucks with me here.

Towel slung around my waist, I walk over to the locker, unlock the pad lock and pull out my cell phone. Time to get to business.

“Good morning, DVD Gang. How may I direct your call?”

My voice echoes off the tiled walls,“Wanda, please.”

“Oh, she walking in right now. This is Tyler…?” she asks.

Finally. Okay, get right to the point and don’t take no for an answer.

I sit on the lockeroom bench.

“Knight. Tyler Knight. Remind her that I was referred by Guido Cabron.”

“Hold please.”

The girl does not bother with placing her hand over the receiver. The intent is for me to hear everything.

“Wanda,” the receptionist says, “Tyler Knight is on the line for you. Again.”

There’s a sigh. A second woman’s voice says, “Tell him I’m in a meeting.”

Fuck this shit!

I hang up before the receptionist she can spin some bullshit lie and I reach inside the sea bag. I swap the towel for clothes, pull out a vhs cassette, dump the bag into the locker then slap my pad lock on it; I give the lock a couple sharp tugs head out of the men’s lockeroom into the gym proper.

The floor is covered in those black, interlocking mats that give underfoot with each spongy step in most places and beat-to-shit carpet in others. Dusty fluorescents flicker and hum. The equipment is old. Free-weights that don’t do the work for you. No yoga class or spinning.

The few people in the gym are here to work, not to be seen reading a strategically placed script while on the elliptical machine. The motion by the cardio machines gets my attention. That motion coming from the girl on the stairclimber.

Corn rows. Sports bra. No shirt overtop.

Rain-slicked asphalt for skin. Oily beads of sweat find themselves collateral damage in the billions of years long fight between gravity and friction. One drop caught in this tug of war, forms a velvety ball held together by surface tension until finally it’s ripped asunder by its own swelling weight. One half staying in place, the other now a quicksilver tear on a hellish tear, tumbling down the “v”-shaped swale of her lower-back, drawing a sparkling, jagged trail until the half-drop bumps into another, wresting this out of it’s place; the two beads form a large, rolling ball once again; its re-combined, juicy mass is heavy enough so that it streaks straight down and splashes into a salty stop at the waistband, darkening the fabric as it’s absorbed.

That saturated waistband stretches around a waist sculpted waist. The girl’s hips saunter wide, side-to-side, like a metronome ticking delicious tempo. Her tart, yellow shorts are stretched just below the tensile strength limit of where Lycra fibers snap apart.

Cheeks alternating; one swings inward and contracting with violence while the other swings out on the undulating hip–not relaxing–setting up for another great squeeze. Two terrier pups tussling in a pillowcase.
—

The ass draws me in. My arms want to reach out, one snaking around the girls waist, pulling her into me while the other hand squeezes her magnificent cheek. And they do.

I slap it, the smack chimes of a plucked tuning fork charging the air electric in my ear. Inside one beat of my hard-charging heart, the cheek gives two great jiggles that diminish into taught quivers then dissolve to rapid ripples of nothing. Sublime.

She squeals, and girl-voice ricochets inside my skull, flicks a switch in my brain that raises the gates, flooding my cock with blood. Time slams to a stop. Her giggles grabs my glands and my body teems with adrenaline and test.

I drop to my knees, plunge my nose into her crevasse, inhale and the heady bouquet sways me giddy.

My mouth is an overflowing trough of saliva but I do not swallow. The drool wants to run over onto my chin and it’s not a matter of me letting it as it is a case of me being rapt in the asses’s thrall. I’ve got a needing. It must be part of me. Now.

My teeth plunge into the succulent, yellow fruit. Her sex bursts crisp and sweet in my mou-
—
“What the hell are you doing?” she asks.

Oh shit!

I’m standing directly behind her, one hand in on the VHS cassette, the other outstretched–fingers curled inward–as if to pluck a succulent nectarine from a branch. She’s facing me now. Arms akimbo.

“Uh…you…I thought you were somebody else,” I say. I turn away and speed-walk to the door. She follows.

She says, “Hey come back! Lemme follow you around and see how you like it!”

She was cuter with her mouth shut.

Through the gym we go. I feel the heat of people’s eyes burning into my nape as she wails; I dash past the opposing-mirrored walls that reflect my hell in triplicate like a fun-house in purgatory. My pace increases to a trot and she matches me step-for-step. As we quicken she gets louder.

“Whas-a-matta, boo, you don’t like it when I creep up on you like this?”

I run. She runs.

“Yeah, I was looking at your ass!” I say, “What do you expect, dressed like that?”

Past the front desk with the dozing attendant that wakes up and asks “What the hell is going on?”, past the vending machine.

“Bull-shit!,” she says, “I heard you breathin like you was gonna grab me or somethin. Well, here I am and you runnin away! That’s all you got for me, boo?” she asks.

The front door. I push. It slaps open.

“Sorry, baby. I’m all stalk, no action.”

My feet devour steps two at a time.

Cars criss crossing in the street ahead. People all around. I stay on the sidewalk and dash up Labrea Avenue. When I hit Hollywood Blvd., I don’t hear her so I slow down and check to see if I’m being followed. I’m not.

Don’t wanna fuck around so I speed-walk to the Redline subway station, legs churning down two stories of stairs, double back to cram some coins and a wrinkled-to-hell dollar into the ticket machine and rip that motherfucker out of the metal mouth; I bound down the another set of stairs and thrust myself into a leg-scissoring leap through the open train door that takes a nip out of my ankle as it closes.

I snatch the pole out of the air and hook onto it–chest heaving, the passengers don’t look up– and find a seat then flop down into it, videotape clutched in hand. Just another guy who caught the train in time on the way to work.

The train burrows beneath the Cahuenga pass. I slouch.
—

DVD Gang’s warehouse is not the first time I’ve ever laid eyes a porn studio. Hell, I’ve lived two doors down from the mega-million dollar studio VELVET Video camouflaged as a quaint arts-and-crafts supply company. It was tucked deep in a residential neighborhood of single-family homes and I was never the wiser.

If you ever drive through LA’s Porn Valley passing all the buildings, you can play the game: Porn Studio, Not A Porn Studio. They range from the garish edifice wrapped in neon, taunting tourists from its perch right next to a family theme park; to the innocuous warehouses hidden away in business parks.

DVD Gang’s office building falls into the latter category. They are the studio in the high-end ethnic porn niche. Their quality rivals VELVET and as far as porn studios go they’re elite. One successful scene with them can ignite the rockets of my career.

I zig-zag across the parking lot, side-squeezing my way between the diagonally parked cars–soiling my khaki’s in the process as I rub past a near-dead Geo Metro–and close the distance to the warehouse’s front door; I wipe the schmutz with a sweat-slicked palm only to accomplish streaking a faint, “W”-on-a-stick shaped smear of chewy smog right-to-left across my crotch.

Teetering on the knife’s edge of restraint, I want to kick the shit out of that econo-box’s headlight. My body tenses but I calm myself, before I splinter-and-crush the videotape’s plastic casing in my hands, bursting it like crackling bubble wrap, strewing spools of magnetic ribbon to the wind; ribbons bouncing under cars and unraveling as I unravel. I cradle that fucking cassette like Prometheus with a Faberge fennel.

With the inside of my t-shirt, I manage to blend the Rorschach stain to being noticeable only if someone is staring right at my cock, but considering the nature of the business I’m about to enter this is of little solace.
—

“I’m sorry,” she says, “but Wanda doesn’t receive visits from male talent. Especially unannounced.”

By the way the receptionist is crossing her arms across her breasts throwing glances at the door to the inner office, I’m concerned that she pushed a silent alarm and goons will bust in any moment. A boy band is singing a tune of teen love on the radio behind her command station.

I say, “Calling on the phone to set up an appointment wasn’t very effective so here I am. Can you at least tell her I’m here?”

“I’m quite sure she won’t care.”

“Look, this is ridiculous. I didn’t walk past a burning bush that commanded me to come to DVD Gang. A good friend of Wanda’s referred me. Isn’t there someone here I can see.”

I watch her look at the tape in my hand, then I feel her eyes probing my crotch. She snickers.

“Sure,” she says, “why not?” She picks up the phone and presses a button. “Stan, come to the reception area please.” She replaces the phone back on its receiver.
“Stan is our contract director. He’s absolutely brilliant. A genius, really.”

I sit on the edge of a replica Barcelona chair. “Thank you.”

“Nothing personal, I’m doing my job,” she says.

“I understand.”

After a while the door bursts open. A white kid with a visor backwards and upside down on his head, t-shirt down to his knees, pants hanging off his ass, and bright blue sneakers on his feet limps out like he’s done number two in his pants.

He says, “What’s crack-a-lack-in, my nigga?” He bends his arm like a chicken wing and extends his elbow.

I walk over to him. “Uh, hi?”

His elbow is still pointed at me and I figure it out. I bump elbows with him.

I say, “I’m Tyler Knight. I’m looking to get on your roster of male talent.

“Yeah, that’s cool and all but most guys can’t fuck on camera under pressure.”

“I knew you’d say that. That’s why I brought this.” I hold up the tape.

“What’s this?”

“A recording.”

“Of?”

“Me, fucking?”

He says, “Who’s the girl in the scene?”

Who cares?

“I forget.”

Stan snatches the tape from my hand. “This is a professional scene? Not some bullshit with you setting a camera on a tripod and fucking a chickenhead ho from around the way?”

“Of course.”

“Aight. Let me check this out. I’ma be right back.” He goes back through the door he came from.

I pace, sit, and pace some more. Stan comes back, waving the tape.

He says, “That was some bullshit with you setting a camera on a tripod and fucking a chickenhead ho from around the way.”

“Yeah, how ‘bout that?”

He looks at the VHS tape and laughs. “It’s the 21st century, nigga.”

“Look,” I say. “Just give me a shot, man. I can fuck a goddamn cobra.”

“Get a talent info sheet from the receptionist and fill it out.” He turns for the door, opens it, and I get a glimpse of a cubicle bullpen filled buzzing with workers.

“So I’ll call you to see if you have anything going on?”

“Nah, man,” Stan says, “I’ll holler if I need you.”

The door closes behind him cutting off the noise of worker activity. I stand there a moment, looking at the door. When I turn around to the receptionist’s podium, there is a clipboard and pen. I fill the form out and leave the building.

I fucking blew it.
—

When I get back to the gym the management tells me I’m no longer welcome so I take a final shower, grab the bag and leave.

Sitting on the Hollywood Library steps, I call porn studios that advertise in the trade magazines. After three phone calls of grief and loathing hurled at me I stop calling.

It’s hard to understand why people in porn have such disdain for male talent when the male pornstar profession is essential to the product porn people’s livelihoods depend on.
—

Tonight I’ll sleep on the train. The Blue Line is cool if it’s raining or if there’s nowhere else to go. The chairs are metal sheets folded at 90°, covered with low-pile fabric designed to resist wear and stains rather than comfort and are absolutely not designed to be used longer than the 40 minute ride from Downtown Los Angeles to Long Beach. Because I have a monthly pass, I have unlimited rides. The plan is to stay on it all night as it makes its loop back and forth.

I don’t really sleep on the train in the truest sense because it goes right through the kill zone of South LA; what I do resembles torpor. With several stops in the belly of the beast, the train cars are patrolled by recently-weaned wolves on perpetual hunt for the weak, the alone and the unaware, and the stupid. God help you if you are caught unable to defend yourself because nobody else will.

I’m alone in this car. Today bleeds into tomorrow as the train rumbles onto a towering overpass. Outside my window, South Central sprawls below. The day’s events replay in my mind until it relaxes; my eyes shift focus from my profile reflected in the glass to the rows of sickly ecru street lights beyond. The ghetto is peaceful from this high up. Occasional greens and reds regulate the non existent traffic.
—

The horizon is aglow with pockets of orange stretching to infinity; fluffy black columns of death put a smoky lid on the boiling pot and choke out the stars. The homes and the businesses blaze once again with hope as kindling. I can’t hear the wailing–human or siren–this high up and from behind the train’s glass but I don’t need to. Pain is universal.

The minstrel show is playing itself out for me in my rolling balcony seat; the blacks and the latinos, and the Koreans with the rifles on rooftops play their parts to the critical acclaim of the media that gets close but not too close. Cops as ushers keep everything in contained and in play.

Emotions within that have been suppressed growing up in suburbia are stoked to a smolder. What I have inside is being articulated by others. Growing up in both worlds yet fitting in none, it is at once familiar and foreign, like sex with an ex girlfriend after a decade has passed. I want to get off at the next stop and go down there but if I did, what would I do? Would my hands choose to rend or mend?

When the city is razed and there is nothing left to burn, nothing will be changed except another layer of soot on top of singed dreams.
—
The train doors snap open and a fucked-up phoenix from the ashes pokes his head through. The youngster evaluates his odds and stalks off to the next car.

The cellie rings.

“Yeah.”

“Yo, TK, this is Stan at DVD Gang. Somebody just canceled on me. You wanna work tomorrow?”

Continued...