The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump

by Martin Amis

  If you’re going to be a porno star, what do you need? It’s pretty clear by now. You need to be an exhibitionist. You need to have a ferocious sex drive. You need to suffer from nostalgie de la boue (literally “mud nostalgia”: a childish, even babyish delight in bodily functions and wastes). And—probably—you need damage in your past. You also need to be humorless. Chloe is not humorless. When she talked to me she was like someone peeping over the wall that demarcates two different worlds, and telling me stories about the other side.

  “I like to be peed on. I like being spat on: it feels like come on your chest. I like to be choked. I like to be fisted. Here we have the ‘no-thumbs’ rule? A girl can have sixteen fingers up her. But no thumbs.” She laughs, and continues: “For vaginal I prefer a girthy kind of dick. And some of these guys”—Chloe seizes the broad base of a water glass on the table before us—“are like this. For anal I prefer a longer, thinner kind of dick.”

  “So when you do DP you get one thick one and one thin one.”

  “Right….No. Come to think of it,” she said happily, “I get two thick ones. I like to feel crammed. You know, I did my first anal for two hundred dollars. I still can’t believe that.”

  “And what are your rates now, Chloe?”

  “In Gonzo, you’re paid not by the picture but by the scene. So it’s girl-girl: seven hundred, plus one hundred for an anal toy. Boy-girl: nine hundred. Anal: eleven hundred. Solo [a rarity]: five hundred. DP: fifteen hundred. I won’t do anal fisting or double anal. People ask me how I can hang on to my title as Anal Queen of L.A. when I won’t do double anal. But I have hung on to it.”

  In common with about 10 percent of the porno girls (her estimate), Chloe retains the approval of her parents (and so does Temptress). In fact, Chloe’s guardians are Gonzo themselves. She recently shot a film out near their place, and her stepfather (while absenting himself from his stepdaughter’s scenes) “was like a towel boy.” And Chloe’s mother, for two years running now, has marched out of the AVN Awards brandishing Chloe’s Best Anal trophies above the heads of the crowd.

  * * *

  *

  After lunch we drove to Chloe’s residence: barred gates, the feel of a two-floor motel, a modest, comfortable, orderly apartment, featuring a cute black cat with a porno name: Siren. Chloe thinks that some porno girls get their names by looking out of the window at the road signs: Laurel Canyon, Chandler, Cherry Mirage.

  For a while Chloe talked about her love life. She is torn, at present, between the neglectful Chris, a rock musician (bass), and the attentive Artie, a fellow performer. She suspects that Chris just strings her along because it’s a status symbol for a rock star to have a porno-star girlfriend. Chris, I think, knows about Artie. But Artie doesn’t know about Chris.

  “And with Artie, he comes over and I’m horny as hell and he says, ‘I can’t. I have to do two scenes tomorrow.’ ”

  “With private sex, is there a crossover in your head?”

  “Oh, yeah. I find myself thinking, Fuck. I should be being paid for this. Or Fuck. I wish I had a camera.”

  “I’d better not write about Chris and Artie.”

  “Go ahead. They’ll both soon be over. Here, it doesn’t last.”

  Chloe was unforgettable. I won’t forget the way she said this (she said it with sorrowful resolve): “We’re prostitutes….There are differences. You can choose your partners, and they’re tested for AIDS—you won’t get your john to do that. But we’re prostitutes: we exchange sex for money.”

  “You’ve thought this through.”

  “I looked it up in the dictionary and that’s what it says.”

  In etymological terms pornography is what I’m doing: I’m writing about whores.

  I will see Chloe on set tomorrow morning. The scene they’ll be shooting? Gonzo girl-boy-girl anal.

  6. MR. MONSTER

  Toward the end of Rabbit at Rest, John Updike writes:

  Rabbit thinks of adding $5.50 to his bill to watch something called Horny Housewives….The trouble with these softcore porn movies on hotel circuits, in case some four-year-old with lawyers for parents happens to hit the right buttons they show tits and ass and even some pubic hair but no real cunt and no pricks, no pricks hard or soft at all. It’s very frustrating. It turns out pricks are what we care about, you have to see them. Maybe we’re all queer, and all his life he’s been in love with Ronnie Harrison.

  Or, as a friend would put it to me later that week: “It’s no good without Mr. Monster. You must have Mr. Monster.”

  Must you? Gore Vidal once said that the only danger in watching pornography is that it might make you want to watch more pornography; it might make you want to do nothing else but watch pornography. There is, I contend, another danger. As I sampled some extreme productions on the VCR in my hotel room, I kept worrying about something. I kept worrying that I’d like it. Porno services the “polymorphous perverse”: the near-infinite chaos of human desire. If you harbor a perversity, then sooner or later porno will find it out. You’d better hope that this doesn’t happen while you’re watching a film about a coprophagic pig farmer—or about an undertaker. That week in Los Angeles I found out what I don’t like. I don’t like Mr. Monster.

  High up in higgledy-piggledy Hollywood Hills, I hobnobbed with Andrew Blake, the Truffaut of porno, and two incredibly beautiful girls in incredibly expensive underwear (and six-inch heels). Strictly speaking, Blake’s work is Gonzo: scriptless, storyless, with the performers interacting with the camera. But Blake is preeminently “high-end.” His actresses look like voluptuous fashion models, and he flatters and glorifies them on the screen, with oils, unguents, silks, cords, ribbons, textures.

  “I hired Monica because she has these beautiful breasts,” he told me, “and that’s what we’re going to be concentrating on. I’ve never worked with Adriana before but she seems to be…really something.”

  Laconic, gruff, direct, and, of course, humorless, Blake goes about his business.

  “Now put your hand into her panties….And maybe a nipple comes out, a nipple is revealed?…Squeeze them, caress them, do the whole nine yards with them….Try opening your legs. Kind of tease the panties….Don’t smile so much. Just kind of be into yourself….So is the bra ready to ride? Kiss the nip….Arch up your butt a little more….Cross and uncross your legs. Show a little pussy….Now this is the panties coming off…”

  Behold. A platonically perfect pubis, wearing nothing but the latest hairstyle, a minimal mohawk.

  “This must be a tough day’s work for you,” said the makeup girl amiably. “Someone’s got to do it. Right?”

  Her remark obliged me to examine my “affect,” or feeling tone. I admit to a strong sense of furtive beauty assimilation. But the instinct being aroused in me was not sexual so much as protective. Naked Adriana was twenty years old. And the very last thing I wanted to see, just then, was Mr. Monster.

  Outside, during an intermission, Blake said in his flat, declarative style, “I’m into looking at a woman. Not all this ‘pissing and fisting.’ I’ve never had any legal problems. We await the election. The SM bubble will burst.”

  7. WORK PERMIT

  A “tough” day’s work for me, then, and the same could be said for Adriana and Monica. They weren’t being slapped around by Khan Tusion or peed on by Max Hardcore. But were they being “used up”?

  If you’re a porno performer, your latest HIV test is your work permit. Two years ago the actor Marc Wallice started to become evasive about his documentation. He was using an out-of-town health center and seemed to be fudging his results. By the time he was found out, Wallice’s condition was fulminant. He infected six actresses.

  “The tests we take only test for AIDS,” says Chloe. “We’ve contained AIDS in the industry but what about all the others? You know we’re now up to hepatitis G?

  “You should be at least twenty-one before you work in this industry. You should know your body, understand your body. But that would wipe out
half of San Fernando Valley. There are whole lines on the eighteen-pluses.”

  And there are: Dirty Debutantes, Nasty Newcomers, Filthy First Timers. Actresses described as “barely legal” are barely eighteen.

  One of the actresses infected by Marc Wallice (his condition now is so pitiful that no one thinks him worth persecuting) is Mrs. John Stagliano. Stagliano himself, the pioneer of Gonzo, is HIV-positive (he contracted the virus recreationally, in a Rio bordello). A medium-size fortune has been made by Stagliano, in a business where, contrary to popular belief, very few fortunes are made. But I often think of the Staglianos out by the pool, gazing at an ocean to which they have no access.

  8. GONZO GIRL-BOY-GIRL

  Chloe’s shoot is in a rented property on Dolorosa Drive: Pain Street.

  The porno house, the porno fish in the porno tank (the fish are porno-colored: yellow, mauve, blood orange), the porno TV set (as big as a double refrigerator), the porno deck, the porno pool, with a plastic duck floating around in it. Beyond the fence stands the house of the much-hated neighbor who keeps climbing onto the roof, with a mouthful of nails, to get himself shocked enough to call the police.

  Girl-boy-girl: the girls are Chloe and Lola (a friendly Amerindian-style beauty); the boy is Artie (Chloe’s offscreen lover: tattooed, muscular, balding). Artie seems to be a nice guy, but he keeps talking with a jokey French accent. Porno performers are great ones for funny voices, funny faces. German scientists, Russian spies, French connoisseurs; in Features they can keep it up all movie long.

  There is a crew: the DP (for the time being this means director of photography) and his sound recordist, who go about their business like middle-aged handymen; a plump youth who seems to be there for general work experience; and Chloe’s sister, Shannon, caterer and towel girl. Chloe will soon be calling out to Shannon, “Stop that phone!” Shannon: “It’s the home phone! There’s like nine of them!”

  Artie is giving us more French accent, then more French accent, while Chloe and Lola strip for the “pretty girl” shots that will go on the box cover. Chloe, with whom I spent five hours the previous day, walks past me, naked. It doesn’t bother her that she’s naked. She doesn’t know she’s naked.

  The porno stills by the porno pool. “See pink? Want lots of pink?” “Let’s have some booty.” “Open it? You want it all?”

  It is barely ten o’clock in the morning, and I am, I realize, experiencing the kind of anxiety that usually precedes a mild ordeal. A line is about to be crossed. I shouldn’t be here. None of us should be here. But we all have work to do.

  * * *

  *

  Fifteen minutes later, referring to the recent achievement of Lola, Chloe stabbed a hand through the air at me, and shouted with joy and triumph (Chloe is the director, remember, and she was thrilled to have secured such footage): “That’s the kind of blow job I was telling you about yesterday!”

  I reeled out into the yard with my notebook, laughing and shaking my head. There are plenty of jests and japes on a porno set, and there is much raucous mirth. But only a Chloe, only an exception, could inject real humor. She sounded like Mel Brooks in The Producers saying, “That’s our Hitler!”

  The kind of blow job Chloe was telling me about yesterday was this kind of blow job. It is as if the girl’s passionate—indeed desperate—intention is to reach and then actually consume the boy’s lower viscera. But she faces an obstacle. She can’t go around it. She has to go through it. “I mean,” Chloe had said admiringly, “some of these girls go down. Drooling and slobbering, saliva everywhere, choking, dry-heaving. I’ve tried my hardest but I just can’t do it.”

  A pause, a rest, and now the troilism scene is about to begin. Understandably anxious, Artie asks Lola if she wouldn’t mind topping up his erection (by applying “some head”), and Lola, with a soft grunt of collegial amenability, briskly obliges. The three of them get under way—and with every appearance of feral and escalating passion.

  “Choke her!” “Spit inside me!” “Break me! You can’t break me! Try!”

  “…COMING!!!”

  Chloe screamed this last word like a mother answering a child’s despairing cry from the other end of the house. Then, to Lola, “Choke me!” And then Chloe’s entire upper body flushed with pink, and she seemed to swoon…

  Another turn around the yard, another cigarette. “I mean, pleasure and pain,” propounded John Stagliano at the outset, “are the same thing, right?” And I thought: No they’re not. The distinction between them has always been perfectly clear, whatever “the market” might choose to claim. I satisfied myself that porno, naturally male-chauvinist in origin and essence, is now so baldly misogynistic that the only desire it arouses is a desire to be elsewhere. I would indeed soon be elsewhere; but not quite yet.

  * * *

  *

  Back in the bedroom the postcoital breather is winding up. “I want to piss,” said Artie.

  For a moment the DP’s eyes widened in alarm. He thought, wrongly, that Artie wanted to piss midscene—on Lola, on Chloe. Artie disappeared. “Pissing is as bad as coming,” the DP wearily confided. “They’re supposed to piss and they can’t. They go off to the shower, then they say they can. And they still can’t. It’s as bad as coming.”

  Artie trudged back from the toilet. “God I’m old,” he muttered as he returned to the workspace.

  Well, I’m old too, and so I blew a kiss at Chloe and took my leave—before the anal and the money shot. Shannon kindly drove me to the hotel. Poor Shannon: she was having one of those days. First, shopping in a health-food store, she dropped an enormous jar of wheat germ on her foot (she limped all day and now in the car had difficulties with the pedals). Next she discovered that her boyfriend was cheating on her—and she finished it. Contemplating the suspension of her love life, Shannon said sadly, “And when you compare it to that”—meaning Chloe’s threesome—“the sex doesn’t seem much anyway.”

  I knew what she meant, in a sense. Chloe-Artie-Lola made me feel like a shrinking violet, like a virgin who had never been kissed.

  9. PUSSIES ARE BULLSHIT

  Later that afternoon I journeyed from San Fernando to Pasadena. I was expected at a five-day symposium titled “The Novel in Britain, 1950–2000” at the Huntington Library. After some prompting, I told a gathering of delegates about my recent experiences. And “Pussies are bullshit” duly became the running joke of the conference.

  To exchange one philosopher for another, to exchange Buttman for Friedrich Nietzsche, a joke is “an epigram on the death of a feeling.” In other words, the best jokes are always new lows. It is utterly characteristic that the coiner of “pussies are bullshit” had no idea he was being funny. In any case, porno is littered—porno is heaped—with the deaths of feelings.

  Every time a porno megastar opens a megastore—or advertises a line of perfume, or does a walk-on in a TV show—porno people start saying that porno is “mainstream,” that porno is hip, that porno is cool. Is masturbation hip? It doesn’t feel hip. And it doesn’t look hip either, which is why you never see anyone doing it. Porno cannot possibly be mainstream, partly because of the contrarian nature of the form. For porno to become mainstream, humankind would have to change, abjuring forever their grasp of the ridiculous.

  Porno people: they’ve changed. In the yard of the house on Dolorosa Drive, during one of the many breaks in filming (typically the shooting of a single scene expends at least three hours), Chloe, Artie, and Lola stood there naked by the pool, discussing a new roller-coaster ride called Desperado. They were all smoking. I came across many a good little smoker in pornoland. What with the risks they run already, who cares that much about smoking? Then it was cigarettes out and back to work. And I do mean work. Porno is also a proletarian form. And porno people are a hard-grafting, ill-paid, gradually unionizing contingent who, by and large, look out for each other and help each other through. They pay their rent with the deaths of feelings.

  No, Chloe, you are not a prostit
ute, not quite. Prostitution is the oldest profession; and market-driven porno is, perhaps, the newest profession. You are more like a gladiator: a contemporary gladiator. Of course, the gladiators were slaves—but some of them won their freedom. And you, I think, will win yours.

  Talk 2000

  Literature 2

  Don DeLillo: Laureate of Terror

  Don DeLillo The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories

  When we say that we love a writer’s work—yes, even when we say it hand on heart—we are always stretching the truth. What we really mean is that we love about half of it. Sometimes rather more than half, sometimes rather less: but about half.

  The gigantic presence of Joyce relies pretty well entirely on Ulysses, with a little help from Dubliners. You could jettison Kafka’s three attempts at full-length fiction (unfinished by him, and unfinished by us) without muffling the impact of his seismic originality. George Eliot gave us one readable book, which turned out to be the central anglophone novel. Every page of Dickens contains a paragraph to warm to and a paragraph to veer back from. Coleridge wrote a total of two major poems (and collaborated on a third). Milton consists of Paradise Lost. Even my favorite writer, William Shakespeare, who usually eludes all generalizations, succumbs to this law. Run your eye down the contents page and feel the slackness of your urge to reread the comedies (As You Like It is not as we like it); and who would voluntarily curl up with King John or Henry VI, Part III?

  Proustians will claim that In Search of Lost Time is unimprovable throughout, despite all the agonizing longueurs. And Janeites will never admit that three of the six novels are comparative weaklings (I mean Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park, and Persuasion). Perhaps the only true exceptions to the fifty-fifty model are Homer and Harper Lee. Our subject, here, is literary evaluation, so of course everything I say is mere opinion, unverifiable and also unfalsifiable, which makes the ground shakier still. But I stubbornly suspect that only the cultist, or the academic, is capable of swallowing an author whole. Writers are peculiar, readers are particular: it is just the way we are. One helplessly reaches for Kant’s dictum about the crooked timber of humanity, or for John Updike’s suggestion to the effect that we are all of us “mixed blessings.” Unlike the heroes and heroines of Northanger Abbey, Pride and Prejudice, and Emma, readers and writers are not expressly designed to be perfect for each other.