by Tyler Knight
Burn My Shadow
This is a Genuine Barnacle Book
A Barnacle Book | Rare Bird Books
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Copyright © 2016 by Tyler Knight
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever, including but not limited to print, audio, and electronic. For more information, address: A Barnacle Book | Rare Bird Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 453 South Spring Street, Suite 302,
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Set in Minion Pro
Author photo by Robert Sebree
ePub ISBN: 978-1-942600-97-8
Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data
Names: Knight, Tyler, author.
Title: Burn my shadow, a selective memory of an X-rated life / Tyler Knight.
Description: First Trade Paperback Original Edition | A Genuine Barnacle Book | New York, NY; Los Angeles, CA: Rare Bird Books, 2016.
Identifiers: ISBN 978-1-942600-69-5
Subjects: LCSH Knight, Tyler | Motion picture actors and actresses—United States—Biography. | Pornography—United States—Case studies. | Pornographic films—History and criticism. BISAC BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Entertainment & Performing Arts
Classification: LCC ML420 .K655 2016 | DDC 782.1/4092—dc23
If, then, to meanest mariners, and renegades and castaways, I shall hereafter ascribe high qualities, though dark; weave round them tragic graces; if even the most mournful, perchance the most abased, among them all, shall at times lift himself to the exalted mounts; if I shall touch that workman’s arm with some ethereal light; if I shall spread a rainbow over his disastrous set of sun; then against all mortal critics bear me out in it, thou just Spirit of Equality, which hast spread one royal mantle of humanity over all my kind! Bear me out in it, thou great Democratic God! who didst not refuse to the swart convict Bunyan, the pale poetic pearl; Thou who didst clothe with doubly hammered leaves of finest gold, the stumped and paupered arm of old Cervantes; Thou who didst pick up Andrew Jackson from the pebbles; who didst hurl him upon a war horse; who didst thunder him higher than a throne! Thou who, in all thy mighty, earthly marchings, ever cullest Thy selectest champions from the kingly commons; bear me out in it, O God!
—Herman Melville
Moby Dick, Chapter xxvi “Knights and Squires”
Contents
Foreword
Bukkake
The Woodpile
Mettle
The Rise of the Mech-Peens
Orgy
Something’s Rotten in Chatsworth
Ruy Lopez
Attrition
Marquis Value
Most Unclean
Inside the Box
Street Cred
Happy Ending
From KBC News (Redacted):
Tiger by the Tail
Oneironaut at Wrest
Quietus
LA Pulse (Redacted):
Affliction
Los Angeles Post (Redacted):
Collapsar
Redline
Ne Plus Ultra
Acknowledgments
Foreword
This is a memoir. Anyone endeavoring to write their own narrative is, by definition, an unreliable narrator. Objectivity is impossible without the benefit of distance, and I’m no exception. When it was my intent to manipulate timelines, employ pseudonyms, and change details, it was in the interest of obscuring events and identities while still serving the story. When I did so unintentionally, well, shit happens. Anyone who takes issue with the veracity of this work is free to craft and publish their own account. (Good luck with that!)
My intent with this work is to show the human condition from a different point of view than most are accustomed to. Regardless of whether you’re an aboriginal New Guinean, a vascular surgeon, or a line cook, we all know of joy, disappointment, hope. The human condition is the through line which unites all of our narratives and proves that we’re all the same. This is the story of how the line runs through me.
—Tyler Knight
Bukkake
The line of mopes wraps around the warehouse. The line moves. I take a step. These men are not the chiseled studs with forearm-length penises of the porn A-list. They will never get the call to work in a scene for even a mid-tier studio. This is the bukkake line.
I’m in line just like these mopes are, but I used to be a model. Even my shirt, the sample I wore on the runway that the designer let me keep, is proof that I’m different. Mopes lie. One mope brags about getting to fuck the girl for a solid minute before another mope tapped him on the shoulder to swap out. Another man describes performing in a one-on-one scene with a woman trapped by her own porn fame since her first movie, shot on actual film. “We had a connection!”
Mopes lying to each other about porn party invitations at nightclubs whose doormen would never let them past the velvet rope. The line moves. I take a step.
Directors for other bukkake movies and gang bang scenes rove up and down the line handing out business cards. One director poaches talent for a gang bang scene with an overdue pregnant woman. His scenes resemble a school of swarming piranhas stripping a cow to its bones. The scene will shoot close enough to Northridge Hospital in case the woman goes into labor.
The man in line in front of me disappears into the building. I follow.
Inside the processing room, production assistants tag and pack the mopes like cattle. As my eyes adjust to the dark, one of the production assistants foists a ballpoint and a talent release form into my face. I unfold my HIV test print out from a pocket and offer it to the PA, but he has already moved onto the next mope without as much as a glance at it. Next, I hold up my IDs next to my face, flanking my head on either side like mouse ears, and another PA takes a snapshot with a digital camera.
The line moves. I take a step.
I come to a closed door at the far end of the processing room where next PA commands everyone to be quiet in raspy whispers. Filming has started. Through the door, I hear it. Panting…snorting…a kennel of dogs? The door opens. I enter.
I take a step.
Bright and disorienting set lights scream across the room from every direction except the floor and everyone’s breath hangs before them in the meat-locker crisp air, and the hairs on hirsute men’s legs and forearms spring erect. In this main room, the line has collapsed into a gathering of man asses. They sag. Some cheeks pinch together, wide at the top and pointed at the bottom like inverted triangles. Others hang down, flapping against the backs of legs. Hair covers some. Sores dot another. I strip, find an unoccupied spot on the floor for my clothes and then join the crowd.
The other men also stand naked except for one distinction. They all wear shoes.
The mob packs in deep. Even standing on toes, and then hopping up and down in place, it’s impossible to discern its center. The sounds echoing from the center of the crowd resemble a stadium of open-mouthed teens smacking chewing gum. Squishy penises slathered in lubricant and spittle are jerked off in unison. The sound echoes off the walls, punctuated by the moaning of the men at the center of the mob. The sound of…gargling, then coughing and gagging.
I take a step.
The current moves me closer to the front. Still, nothing visible except the other men who have now filled in close around me. The mob squeezes the mopes through its mass. Sentence fragments… A narcoleptic female voice slurring phone-sex platitudes: “…all over my tits…oh, yeah…”
/> Another woman’s voice says, “I’m sooo horny, papi!”
I take a step.
The forest of mopes ahead thins, and the men in this rank try to stroke their penises up to an erection, spitting in hands for lube. The sour air—which has exited the lungs of strangers many times over—coats the back of my throat like secondhand smoke. I take a step.
The mob spits me out to its front. There they are. Two girls built like pagan fertility dolls, resting on their haunches, caked from head-to-toe in the multi-shaded come of every man who gave his offering before me. Drenched baby bibs tied around necks with large, cheerful loops. Faces covered. Hair pasted flat against their skulls. I can distinguish them only by their breast size. The studio lights above them heat the jizz on their foreheads, exciting convection currents of swirling globs of spunk. Both womens’ breasts have space on the undersides where the semen has dried to a crust, crackling and flaking when skin expands or contracts.
Now, just a pair of mopes stand between me and the women. An amplified voice screeches through a megaphone, “You two! Snowball! Go! Go! Go!”
The two men take their steps.
A dripping slot parts just above the chin of the woman with the larger breasts. A mouth. She sucks the man in front of her while the woman with the smaller breasts sucks off another. Gooey hands grasp at the men’s doughy asses for leverage as the girls shove their respective mope penises into their faces. The first man pumps into the face of the larger-breasted woman and, after moment, convulses, howls, and slathers his load into her mouth and onto her face. She swishes spooze around her mouth and teeth like Listerine. The second man shoots his load into the smaller breasted woman’s mouth. Both women gargle their ejaculate in unison as the men step away and into the crowd, which reabsorbs them. The smaller breasted woman leans over and places her head in larger breasted woman’s lap, and then opens her mouth like a hungry baby bird. Large Breasts then purses her lips. Come mixed with spittle, phlegm, and more come drips from Large Breasts’ mouth in long strings and into Small Breasts’ mouth. Small Breasts sits up and kisses Large Breasts. The women pass the gob back and forth into each others’ mouths—the mixture growing like a snowball with each pass—all the while fingering themselves. The opaque liquid drizzles down their chins and onto their breasts and the floor.
Eyes, bloodshot and buried in slime, open and lock in on me. The ejaculate queens beckon me over.
The megaphone shrieks, “Go!”
I take a step.
When my foot lands it squishes deep into what feels like warm hair conditioner. My foot sinks and the gelatinous goo oozes hot between my toes. When I lift my foot the sticky floor doesn’t want to let it go. Now I understand why the other mopes kept their shoes on.
I stand in front of the girls, penis in hand. Bereft of an erection. Large Breasts scoops spilled seed from the abattoir’s kill floor and feeds it to Small Breasts, who sucks her friend’s fingers dry. She smiles at me, blowing come bubbles. My stomach flips inside out. My breathing recedes to shallow gasps. My bones feel as though they’re sucked out of my legs. I sway.
The megaphone shrieks, “Stop! Half-time show!”
The director’s minions—dressed in what appear to be rain coats and fly-fishing boots?—cattle prod their way through the crowd carrying an industrial strength blow dryer. The appliance roars to life and the minions glaze the women’s faces with the come like pottery. Fresh-broiled spunk wafts into my nasal cavity. I look around the crowd at the other mopes and see their eyes with nothing behind them. Heavy breathing. Moaning, and the smack-smack-smack sound of wet penises flogged in unison.
Hyperventilating, I turn around to leave and push through the crowd. Greasy penises brush against me as I pass.
With my pants in hand, the realization hits that I don’t have enough for the bus fare to get myself out of the San Fernando Valley. I take a step. Back into the crowd.
The moaning mass of flesh wraps itself around me once again. I step, wait, and step again until the single-celled organism that is the crowd excretes me out to the front once more.
There is only one woman now. Small Breasts. She rests upside down on the back of her neck and shoulders. Legs apart, speculum prying her vagina open. The mope ahead of me drops his load down the chasm.
My turn.
A minion squirts watery lube into my hand from an industrial-sized drum. Eyes clinched shut, I think of that bank teller with the low-cut blouse who took my six-dollar deposit in loose change with a smile.
My eyes open. Her clamped-open vagina teems with mottled and bubbling spunk, occluded and overflowing. Penis clutched in hand, my eyes roll back and both knees give. I come to in time to break the fall by placing a hand on the floor and into the tide pool of semen.
A wall next to the pile of clothes supports my weight. Semen stuck between the webbing of my fingers tightens into a crust as it dries.
After kicking away a pair of skid-marked underwear to find my socks, I decide to leave them where they lay. I’ve got one pant leg on before stopping to look at the dried sperm crusting on my feet. I can’t find my shirt. Scanning the back of the room, I finally spot it. A mope is using it as a jizz rag. I struggle to keep from weeping, managing just long enough to put on shoes.
As I’m leaving, a minion stops me.
“Don’t forget your cash.”
He hands me two twenties and a ten, and asks if I can come back next week.
The Woodpile
I shake the bottle. A Viagra tumbles into my fist. I pop the pill and crush it between my molars. Works faster that way. Viagra, Valtrex, Valium…you fuck enough strangers, you’re taking a blue pill with a “V” on it. For some performers, it’s the trifecta.
Jack, the director, looks like a Hollywood screenwriter who hasn’t sold a script since Terms of Endearment. We stand knee-to-knee in a makeup room the size of a parking space. This close, I taste the menthols on his breath. The fluorescent lights from the bank of vanity mirrors settle on our skin like a layer of soot.
He says, “You strike me as a man who understands the value of money.”
He laughs and flops down onto the futon. A head taller than me when standing, he sinks between the fold of the mattress like a forgotten nickel. Jack stops laughing, looks at me and says, “We’re going to have April call you a ‘nigger’ during the scene!”
“What?… No!”
Jack says, “I know what you’re thinking, but it’s not racist. It’s porn!”
I hear a muffled woman’s voice from the other side of the closed door: “Do what you’re told, you purple-lipped beast! Obey me!” There is a loud smack and a man wails.
“Goodbye, Jack.” I grab my shaving kit from the counter and turn for the door.
“Wait!” He springs to his feet. “Where are you going? I’m paying cash!”
“There is no way I’m letting anyone call me a nigger on camera.”
He says, “There’s a dozen guys I can call right now that’ll do it for half what I’m paying you.”
“So call them.”
He sighs. “Okay, fine. We won’t say ‘nigger’ in your scene, but how about—”
He pulls out a piece of paper from his shirt pocket and reads:
“—darkie…jigaboo…coon…uh, spade…spook?…jigaboo, ha-ha, I said that already—”
I take the doorknob and twist it.
“Wait!” He pulls a fold of one-hundred-dollar bills from his pocket, peels one off and holds out in the space between us. “I’m sorry.”
I snatch the cash from his hand and shove it in my pocket.
The woman on the other side of the door says, “Oh my God! The stereotype is true—you don’t eat pussy!”
Jack holds up a fist to give me a pound. “It’s all good, playa!”
“Fuck off.”
“Sure, sure, ha-ha…” he says.
“Go ahead and fill out the paperwork, and I’ll have a talk with her. There’s only one scene up before yours—April with Jim Crowe, which shouldn’t take long.”
Jack takes my IDs and my HIV test, then opens door a to leave—
“GET BACK HERE AND FUCK MY WHITE PUSSY!”
Jack steps back in the room and slams the door shut behind him.
I hear her yelling from the set, “NIGGER!”
• • •
I follow Jack through the warehouse. He has long strides and I have to trot to keep up with him. He tosses sentences back to me over his shoulder as we talk.
We pass several set build-outs. A doctor’s office with an examination table…a college dorm… He says, “I already spoke to her, and she promised not to say anything offensive—”
We pass an executive’s office…a graffiti-covered wall with a waist-high glory hole… We stop at a jail set, where a wild-eyed and disheveled man who could be my cousin sits on the floor. He stands when he sees us.
A rape kit—the ubiquitous plastic box on porn sets that has lube, douche, enemas, condoms that never see the outside of a wrapper, and baby-wipes—sits on the floor. Jack picks it up and hands it to me. He pulls his fold of cash out and shoves some money into Jim’s hands and says, “Okay, here you go.”
Jim counts the money. He speaks. The rumbling timbre of his voice sends my adrenal screaming. He says, “It’s a hundred dollars short.”
Jack says, “Do you think you gave a performance worthy of your full rate? Because—”
“Yeah, man, I did my job! I mean…it was kinda hard to concentrate on the pop shot with her beatin’ on me and all, but—”
“Immaterial. If a bukkake-line mope can come at will—”
Jim says, “My clothes are torn…ruined!”
“The budget for this movie is inflexible! Every extra dollar has to come from somewhere—”
I slide my hand into my pocket, where the C-note Jack gave me rests. I run my fingers over the paper’s crisp texture and caress its folds. Then I stuff it down deeper.
