Not Safe for Work

by Michael Estrin

  I don’t really know how those dealers are, but Miles exhales and says, “unreliable.”

  “How are your nuts, boys?”

  We both say we’re fine, but really we’re waiting for the weed to numb the pain between our legs.

  I puff, but before I can pass I see Mary hit a pipe that has a bowl shaped like President Obama’s head.

  I hold the joint for a second too long.

  “Fucking pass it, you amateur,” Mary Jane says in a teasing, playful tone.

  I pass, Mary puffs, then she hands the joint off to Miles. But when Miles inhales, I notice that Mary is once again pulling hard and deep on Obama. Miles notices too. We’ve both seen chain-smokers, but Mary Jane is our first chain-stoner.

  ***

  The thing about porn stars is that they can be difficult to talk to if the conversation goes beyond the usual “I love your movies.”

  Civilians like Miles think they have it all planned out, but when they’re face-to-face with a woman they’ve seen fuck on screen for money, they tend to clam up. Maybe they can’t get the image out of their head, or maybe they just don’t want to say anything that will ruin their chances of bedding a porn star, even though the odds of that are never as good as they assume.

  If Booty were here, we’d be fine. Booty has that casual “what up” way about him that puts porn stars at ease. After watching Booty work his magic all week, it’s pretty clear that he makes most porn stars feel like normal women, which is a rare, if unremarkable, talent. But right now I’m pretty sure Booty Blunt is curled up with one of B Money’s ladies, watching college football and thinking about ordering a pizza.

  It’s not that Mary Jane isn’t chatty. She’s a talker, but she’s a little all over the place. Two joints in and Mary Jane has hopscotched her way through the following topics:

  · A hypothetical threesome with the Obamas

  · Why Papa John’s pizza tastes like dirty ass

  · The diagnostic power of WebMD

  · The proliferation of dick pics on social media, especially Twitter

  · Why valet parking is a must

  · Rosacea

  · The perpetually poor play of the Oakland Raiders

  · Cocaine

  · That asshole George W. Bush and how he wrecked the fucking economy

  · Bush, the band

  · Manscaping

  · Capri Sun

  · That strange van covered in fake gold and jewels that you sometimes see on residential streets in the Valley

  · Netflix

  · Why Coffee Bean is better than Starbucks

  But there are also long pauses in the conversation, pauses that would be awkward if we were sober. We’re sitting through one of those long pauses now.

  Miles looks catatonic through the haze. Mary Jane is rolling her third joint, but she’s taking a very long time. My balls are feeling better, which is to say I’m not feeling any pain at all.

  The three of us are stuck—swimming in stasis.

  I think back to my days reporting sports for my college paper. The teams I wrote about lost a lot. The story was always the same—poor defense and an anemic offense combined to do in the home team. The hard part was getting the quote. When you lose a game, most people don’t want to talk about it.

  Porn is a lot like losing at life. No matter how much money they make or how famous they get, porn stars are still losers because we’ve all seen them fuck. There’s no getting around that. Even if you win an Oscar, cure cancer, and save the world from an alien attack, your obituary will still reference your porn past in the first paragraph.

  Some sports reporters are hard-chargers. They’re the kinds of guys—they’re almost always guys, unless they’re hot women—you see jamming a mic into some gladiator’s face after the big game. Those types of reporters would go right at Mary Jane, either because they have the guts to ask blunt questions, or because they lack the social graces that keep most people from being so direct. I’ve never been able to come on that strong. I favor a more empathetic approach. During school, I always told myself this was a craft choice, a harmonizing of my disposition with the requirements of the job. But looking at Mary Jane, I’m just not sure I’m cut out for anything more than puff pieces.

  “Some life,” I say, catching Mary’s glassy blue eyes in the first honest moment I’ve shared all week.

  Mary doesn’t look away from me, but she doesn’t say anything either. For a moment, we’re just two strangers on the same strange trip.

  Miles burps and a little pot smoke escapes from his mouth.

  Mary smiles a little.

  “How well did you know Johnny?” I ask.

  “Well enough,” Mary Jane says. “He was a real fucker.”

  I wonder if that’s a compliment or a statement of fact. Mary Jane rolls a crooked joint, lights it, puffs, and hands me a burning canoe.

  “Thank god I don’t have to work for him anymore,” she says.

  “You didn’t like working for Johnny?”

  “Are you kidding?”

  I offer Miles the burning canoe, but he’s like a zombie, so I pass it back to Mary Jane.

  “Total fucking scumbag,” she says.

  “Aren’t they all?” I say.

  Mary considers that question for a second. It’s the first time I’ve seen genuine reflection in her eyes.

  “No, Johnny was a special case,” she says. “There’s not a single chick in the biz who didn’t want to cut his dick off.”

  “Any idea who’d put a battle-ax through his heart?”

  “Yeah,” she says.

  I lean forward, wondering if I heard her correctly.

  “Who?”

  “Everyone,” she says with a laugh.

  I laugh too.

  “Did you kill him?”

  “I wish,” she says. “But if I had done it, I would’ve made sure I got paid first. He still owes me a grand for that day.”

  “A grand?”

  “How do you like them apples?”

  Mary Jane takes another puff, but doesn’t offer to pass.

  “I only took the gig because I’m underwater on this place. Thank you very much, Dubya.”

  “What are you going to do about your money?”

  “It’s gone,” she says. “Johnny was the company.”

  “Why don’t you work for a studio?”

  “I’m not contract-girl material,” she says. “Not anymore.”

  As Booty explained one day over Double-Doubles, girls like Mary Jane have limited options. They’ve shot too many scenes to be contract performers because the big studios don’t want to invest in a star who has oversaturated her own market. That leaves women like Mary Jane three options: work for the Johnny Toxics of the world, get their shit together and start their own site, or quit and see if Red Lobster is hiring.

  Mary Jane is sort of working toward option number two, which is a polite way of saying that she’s frittering away her time pursuing option one.

  “How’s your site going?” I ask. “Booty says you’ve really got something, a quality.”

  Mary Jane smiles.

  “Booty is very sweet,” she says. “The site is going great. A couple more months, you know.”

  I’m about to ask what’s taking so long, when she explains.

  “My dealer also does Web design, so we’re trading services.”

  Mary Jane sounds like a sad story, but she’s not the sad story I’m looking for.

  “Do you know who I should talk to if I want to find out more about Johnny?” I ask.

  “What’s there to know? He’s dead.”

  “Did he have any friends or associates?”

  Mary Jane looks at me like I’m an idiot, which is kind of true. This whole time she’s been telling me two things. First, she kept her distance from Johnny. Second, Johnny was a real scumbag, and scumbags don’t really have friends and associates. But like I told Miles, being a reporter means asking a lot of stupid question.

&nb
sp; “I’m working on an obituary,” I say.

  It’s a lie, but Mary Jane understands as well as anyone that we all do things for money that we don’t necessarily like doing.

  “What about the other guy in the scene?”

  “Ron,” she says softly.

  “Does Ron have a last name?”

  “I don’t know,” she says as she takes a deep hit. Her glassy eyes stare right through me. I get the sense that she doesn’t want to talk about Ron, so I press.

  “You’ve worked with Ron before?”

  “Someone told me his name was Ron,” she says.

  It’s an answer, but not to the question I asked.

  “I don’t know everyone I work with,” she says. “You understand that, right? I asked to see his fingernails—you can tell a lot about a man by looking at his fingernails.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like if they’re long and dirty, he’s on my do-not-fuck list,” she says.

  “And Ron?”

  She tilts her head and says, “We shot the scene, didn’t we?”

  The doorbell rings and a skinny rocker dude with long black hair and tight leather pants walks in without waiting for Mary Jane to answer.

  “Hey Roscoe, baby!” she says.

  Roscoe, I’m pretty sure, is her dealer/Web designer. He looks at Miles and then at me like we’re a pair of cockroaches crawling on his piece of pie.

  “I only brought enough party for you and me, babe.”

  “That’s cool,” I say. “We were just leaving.”

  I look at Miles, but he’s too stoned to hear his cue.

  “Why does this idiot have a bottle of vodka between his legs?” Roscoe asks.

  “I kicked him in the balls,” Mary Jane says matter-of-factly.

  “You guys are into some weird shit,” Roscoe says.

  Chapter 26: Cheesecake leads

  Despite the fact that our food arrived ten minutes earlier, Miles is lost in the Cheesecake Factory’s menu, which has so many pages they actually sell ads for local businesses. Apparently, the pressure to monetize all content has even hit restaurant menus, which is where any sensible consumer would look for a real estate agent, jeweler, or rug cleaning service.

  I’ve got my reporter’s pad out and I’m making notes. Mary Jane’s hypothesis—everyone wanted Johnny Toxic dead—might be total bullshit, but it’s all I have to go on, and it isn’t exactly incompatible with the lifestyle angle, which is vague as hell, but rich with sexy status details.

  So here we are, a wannabe and a hack, hunkered down at a West Valley chain restaurant, trying to solve a murder over passion fruit iced teas and an appetizer combo platter.

  I make a list of people who might have information. With the exception of Bobby Beauchamp, the list names everyone who was on set the day Johnny shot his last movie. The trouble is, my list is mostly first names. Such is the nature of keeping tabs on people in a casual, transient business where having an alias is practically a requirement.

  ***

  I’m studying a Tex-Mex egg roll, wondering if fusion cooking has gone too far, when Miles breaks his stoned silence.

  “Wouldn’t it be great if Rachel did it?”

  “What?”

  “You know—like a femme fatale,” he says. “If she killed Johnny, that would be awesome.”

  “Why would that be awesome?”

  “Are you kidding? Do you know how many A-list actresses would kill to be the killer? That’s a meaty part.”

  The way Miles says meaty is a little creepy, like he’s salivating over a hypothetical casting session that, he hopes, might just segue into a pornographic scenario.

  “How many?” I ask.

  Miles thinks for a few seconds, examines a piece of fried calamari that looks like a spider, and pulls off the legs before popping the body into his mouth.

  “Well, a lot of them would,” Miles says between chews. “And if this doesn’t land at a studio, we always have the option of selling it to Lifetime for a movie of the week. They love stories of women in danger, women killers, women victims.”

  “I get it, the network for women hearts female-exploitation movies.”

  “I wouldn’t put it that way in the pitch,” Miles says.

  “Do you watch Lifetime?”

  “Sometimes,” Miles says. “It helps me decompress. I eat a brownie or two and just veg out on a Lifetime marathon. Plus, a lot of the chicks from the original 90210 have done Lifetime movies—that blonde who played Kelly, and Tiffani-Amber Thiessen.”

  Miles yammers on about how he sometimes sees Tiffani-Amber Thiessen at the Coffee Bean on Ventura, how he talked to her once about his OtterBox iPhone case, and how he thinks this connection gives him a good shot of getting her attached to play Rachel.

  “What do you think?” Miles asks. “Tiffani-Amber Thiessen for Rachel.”

  I go back to my list, tapping my pen on the pad, giving myself—and possibly Miles—the illusion that the wheels are turning. Miles dips a Tex-Mex egg roll into a pink chipotle cream sauce.

  “All I’m saying is it would be great if the killer is Rachel,” Miles says. “She’s sexy and mysterious, plus you’ve got a strange chemistry with her, so that’s a great—no, no!—a killer hook.”

  “Thanks, but I think I’m going to follow the facts on this one.”

  “Sure, sure. I don’t want to guide your pen.”

  Chapter 27: Wrong Ron

  December 29, 2011

  It’s Sunday.

  I’m up early.

  The office is closed.

  But I’m not without resources. Bobby Beauchamp gave me his card, so I give him a call. For some reason he answers the phone yelling. It’s not aggressive, just amplified.

  I tell him I have some questions about Johnny, careful not to use words like murder or death because I suspect they may put this balcony-pissing lawyer on the defensive, and something tells me he’s the unpredictable, combustible sort.

  Dancing around the obvious works. Beauchamp is loud, polite, and brief, warning me that he might not have very many answers. I tell him I need to ask anyway.

  “It’s my job,” I say.

  That explanation is good enough for Beauchamp. I get paid to write stories nobody reads, he gets paid to...well, rock out with his cock out, I suppose.

  I make a note to ask him about his practice and what exactly a porn lawyer does.

  As the conversation winds down, he invites me over to watch football with some “cool people” at his house this afternoon.

  “Sure,” I say.

  I also have Rachel’s number. I give her a call, but get voicemail. I should probably hang up, but her voice numbs me momentarily, like Novocain on a rotten tooth.

  The phone beeps.

  Only teenagers and stalkers hang up after the beep, so I leave a message about wanting to interview Ron for the Johnny Toxic obituary.

  An hour later, I’m spooning Cheerios into my mouth while watching Bad Santa on cable when my phone rings. I press pause—freezing Billy Bob’s sadistic Santa on our screen.

  I don’t recognize the number, but it’s an 818 area code, so I pick up.

  “Heywood?” a man’s voice asks. “This is Ron Jeremy.”

  Maybe it’s the New York accent or the confidence that comes from having a nine-inch penis, but for some reason I believe the voice on the line to be the genuine article, even though I’ve never met porn’s most famous male star.

  Everyone has heard of Ron Jeremy. He personifies porn. And as I process the voice on the line, it occurs to me that for all the “stars” I’ve met so far, Ron is the only one I’ve actually ever heard of, which makes me oddly nervous.

  “Hi...Ron...”

  There’s a long pause. While I’m thinking of something to say, I hear Ron Jeremy tell someone on his end that they have tits that look like little cupcakes with maraschino cherries for nipples. Then he asks if they remembered the enema bag.

  “Sorry about that, Heywood,” Ron Jer
emy says. “I’m on set, filming Ron Gets It in the End, which streets January 5. Anyway, you know how it is when you get poop on your schlong.”

  “Yeah, it’s the worst,” I say.

  “You don’t know what that’s like,” Ron Jeremy says. “I can tell by the sound of your voice that you’ve never entered through the back door.”

  “Sorry, I was trying to empathize,” I say.

  “Empathize—terrible idea,” Ron Jeremy says. “Let me give you some advice.”

  “Sure.”

  “Try to be natural,” Ron Jeremy tells me. “All you can do is be yourself. Look at me: I’m Ron Jeremy, sex icon, porn legend, king of fuck-city. They call me the hedgehog. That’s who I am. But who are you, man?”

  That’s a good question, one I don’t really have an answer to. All week, I’ve introduced myself as Heywood Jablowme, a half-truth at best. I’m a porn journo, but does the job define my identity? I’d like to think that I am more than the totality of my station in life. I’d like to think that, but I suspect such a thought would be wrong.

  My mind drifts to the obituary I wrote for Big Juggs. Porn defined him as much as he defined the genre he made famous. Once he started making porn, he was a pornographer. That title stuck with him no matter what. Big Juggs went all in. He made it his life. He put his son into the business. Like Little Juggs said, “Pops left his mark...on a lot of chests.”

  Then it hits me—you either leave your mark on porn, or it leaves its mark on you.

  “You don’t need the yearbook answer,” Ron Jeremy says. “It’s a hypothetical, food for thought, something to say to chicks if you want them to think you’re a deep dude. I’m assuming that’s your game. You don’t sound like a when-in-doubt-whip-it-out sort of guy.”

  “No, I’m...”

  “Listen, I don’t want to be rude, but let’s move this along, I’ve got to get to work. These chicks aren’t going to fuck themselves. Well, actually...”

  Ron Jeremy’s voice drifts off, and I get the distinct feeling that he’s watching at least one woman masturbate.

  “You had some questions about Johnny Toxic, right?”

  Suddenly, I get it. Rachel gave Ron my number because, apparently, when you ask for Ron in porn, you get the hedgehog, no questions asked.