Burn My Shadow

by Tyler Knight

  I settle my gut and enter her asshole once again. This time I have to death-grip the base of my shaft like a carnival balloon to milk enough blood flow for penetration. Once again, fucking away with my flat-lined dick, not penetrating past the sphincter, and I’m so soft Stan does not have to tell me to pull out. She shits my pathetic nub of a cock out, and I concede defeat.

  I’m still behind the girl in the line of fire when it happens. The aperture of her asshole snaps open and convulses and puckers like a heaving cat struggling with a hairball and her hole is a water cannon. Well, fecal cannon to be accurate.

  She Gatling-guns feces, cabbage chunks, lo mien broccoli bits, sesame-sprinkled shit, and kung-pao crap (all held together by a matrix of translucent, Starbucks-steeped globs) onto me. Jackson uses me as a human shield.

  It’s The Running of the Bowels. Malik leaps off the bed and across the room as the girl scats on me. Nothing unshielded in her asshole’s line of fire will ever be the same. Starting from the nexus of her dripping sphincter and radiating outward is a wet, sloppy, Cone of Death.

  I hyperventilate, which, considering the circumstances, I may as well be huffing a colostomy bag. The fetid air is seasoned with intestinal spices; its taste coats thick and heavy on the back of my throat.

  “Okay, cut!” Jackson says. Not a drop on his white track suit. “You need a minute, my man?”

  I take a moment to control my breathing, but I can’t. I say, “No, I do not need a ‘minute’. It’s a wrap for me, I’m done for the day.”

  “But you gotta finish. This is only the first anal position for you, and you gotta fuck her ass to pop.”

  Fuck her ass to pop… Is he fucking insane?

  The mattress has dookie islands bobbing in a lake of molten shit. Fits of dry heaving overwhelm me, and I nearly blow chunks, adding to the geography with a puke archipelago. My penis curls up and out of the way for safe storage like a butterfly’s proboscis.

  “Jackson,” I say, “I can’t imagine anything that will get me hard again, let alone be able to fuck her ass to get off for a pop shot!”

  He inspects his camera lens for flyaway spew, peels off what looks like a corn flake glued in place by yogurt, then sets his camera down. “Don’t be a punk, man. You’re a professional, take a Viagra or something.”

  My heart is no longer beating. It’s vibrating so fast it glows in my chest like E-fucking-T.

  “If you don’t finish the scene,” he says, “it’s gonna jeopardize our business relationship.”

  Malik snatches the girl and throws her on the floor and fucks away.

  Many seasoned porn whores develop an ability to check out at will. The girl, on her back, has unlit vacancy signs where her eyes once were. She reminds me of the lizard I saw on the Discovery Channel that flips onto its back and plays dead until danger passes. Hard to tell if she’s even breathing. Apparently, this was as good for her as it was for me.

  I say to Jackson, “What are you insinuating?”

  Jackson says, “I think it’s clear. This studio is putting cash money on your black ass.”

  He looks at Malik, masturbating with the girl’s live body. I imagine a bit of her soul escaping from her slacked-open mouth with each savage thrust.

  “I don’t have to tell you it’s competitive out there. There’s a gang of niggas that want your slot, and they all got bigger dicks than you.”

  My pulse thrums in my eardrums and my mouth feels as though it’s full of hot sand. I want to say something but when I pass my tongue over my cracked lips it snags like a cotton ball dragged over sandpaper. My skin should be drenched with sweat but it’s dry. A clear sign for the onset of heat exhaustion. The ice chest by the door beckons to me. It has a lid, so its contents shouldn’t be contaminated. I grab my clothes and stumble to the ice chest and rip it open…no ice…a half-empty Snapple and a room temperature can of Colt 45.

  I make it down the hall to the bathroom and into the shower, and turn the knob to cold. You can almost hear the spray of water sizzle and pop off my skin. I lift my head and open my mouth.

  Ruy Lopez

  It’s after the scene and the director left and the pimp took his girl home. I’m wandering through the halls of the building, The Entertanium, in search of the bathroom so I can take a shower. When I enter the bathroom, a realization hits me… This building was the location where my porn career started, even before the bukkake. This is the bathroom where I almost fucked it up. And this is the story of how I met the woman without whom’s love you’d be piecing my story together through an oculus sliding across a Ouija board.

  The tech bubble had burst and company failures have reached critical mass as threats of Y2K loom. I’m in the cafeteria of my part-time day job picking over a sandwich I can’t afford from the in-house Subway, contemplating job prospects because the firm announced phased layoffs. This job, in the telecommunications industry for one of the Baby Bells, was supposed to supplement my income between seasons while modeling was slow.

  My first booker when I started modeling, Nick, at LA Models (who at the time represented a stable of supermodels), dropped me for not booking enough gigs. I visited Hero Men’s Model Management/Fontaine through an open call. None of the other bookers sitting around the giant round booking desk showed interest in me, but Miguel stood up, stepped forward, and took me in.

  Over the next decade Miguel took me with him from blue-chip agency to agency, so when the day came that he asked me to follow him to a nascent boutique shop, I didn’t hesitate. When I stopped in to say my goodbyes, one of the other bookers at the agency warned me that Kurt, the guy whom Miguel was going to work for, was a notorious coke whore who couldn’t be trusted. I thanked her for her concern and reminded her that the only reason the agency represented me was because Miguel brought me in. She sighed, pulled my Zed cards from the wall, and handed them to me.

  At the smaller agency, I was no longer the third black male model in the depth chart so I booked more gigs: A local designer’s fashion week show, a black hair care product, department stores, and Women’s Forum, an Australian magazine that I was assured nobody would ever see. That first month things were going well. Another month came and went without checks in my mailbox for any of the work, and my rent was almost a month overdue. I called Miguel to ask about my checks, and he told me to come into the office to pick them up whenever I wanted. The next day I went to the agency, and pushed the door open to a cleaned-out office with impressions in the carpet from where the booking desk used to be. It turned out that right after my phone call with Miguel, Kurt fired him then absconded with all of the models’ money earned from bookings over the previous month.

  So, after my modeling career died, this part-time day job became my only source of income. One day, when exiting the library, this guy runs up to me, introduces himself as Gino Colbert, and hands me a business card.

  “Have you ever considered making films?” he asked.

  “What kind of films?”

  “I think you know.”

  “Ha-ha, no thanks, dude. I’m straight.”

  “It’s cool. I’ve got connections on the straight side. You’re a handsome guy, but you’re not going to look like that forever. Why not earn decent money while you can?”

  After a week of burning a hole through his card with my eyes, I called. Then I was on my first set for VCA, failing through a sex scene with Chloe, their contract starlet. The set was dressed like a restaurant and filled with background extras staring at my limp penis. All I had to do was get hard, but with two dozen people in the room it was impossible. At that point in my life I’d only been naked before my mom, a handful of girls, and God, and this magical blue pill was just a rumor. So I stroked my nub of a penis buried so deep into my pelvis it could have been mistaken for a retractable claw. The silence was broken only when men balancing twenty-pound Betamax cameras slung over their shoulders sighed
in contempt.

  The director, Veronica Hart, called “Cut!”—handed me a stack of nude magazines and told me to step off set to get myself hard. “Come back when you’re ready,” she said.

  I took a magazine, JUGGS, with me to the bathroom, sat in the shower stall, stroked myself up to an erection…but came in my hand! Now I just wanted to escape rather than return to set and face the wrath of the crew. I considered getting a running start and diving through the second-story window, but my pants were still on set, and it’s only cute running around downtown LA in a shirt with no pants if you’re Winnie-the-Pooh.

  The other contact Gino gave me was at DVD Gangstas, but they weren’t returning my calls. Word of new talent failure spreads fast in Porn Valley.

  The day before, I came home from work to a Three-Day Notice to Pay Rent or Quit tapped to my apartment door. The only job listing in LA Weekly which I could get hired right away was a call for men to perform with their favorite porn starlets in a bukkake…whatever a bukkake is. After looking up “bukkake” on the Internet, I allowed myself a moment to melt the fuck down. Then I wiped my eyes, tore the ad out of the paper, and started packing essentials into a sea bag.

  A girl enters the cafeteria. A sheen of perspiration on her skin. Glossy like a fashion magazine. High heels click. White linen shorts thin enough to almost see through as she walks past my table. She sits down with some other girls. The woman is Helen of Troy. When she walks past my table again, I look down into my mutilated turkey and Swiss… The clicking of heels on linoleum stops.

  “Infermo mental, pervertido sexual!”

  “Hi…I, uh…sorry, I don’t speak Spanish.”

  “You understood what I said.”

  “Who the hell starts a conversation with someone they’ve never met by calling them a…a pervert?”

  “A girl sick of you staring at her ass every day for months. This is the last week before the company shuts down. Were you ever going to say something, or just creep on me?”

  “I uh. I…”

  “Good. I’m giving you a do over. Get up, come back, and introduce yourself properly.”

  “L’esprit de l’escalier?”

  “This is America. English, please?”

  We laugh together.

  “We’re already talking.”

  “I’m a traditional girl. Now come back and introduce yourself like a man. Come on, get up!”

  “But, people are watching—”

  “Let’s go, pervert. Stalk is cheap, baby!”

  “Sorry. I guess I’m all stalk no action… Besides, you’ve heard it all before.”

  “I have. You choked. I already left. You let me go, so there’s no pressure. This is so you don’t beat yourself up on the long bus ride home.”

  “Alright. Fine.”

  Get up and return.

  “Hi, I—”

  “Fuck off, creep.”

  Laughter.

  “Aww, Pobrecito. I’m Amanda. Sit.”

  “Erik.”

  “Erik, nice to meet you.”

  Smiles.

  “You speak English well. Where are you from?”

  “A dangerous place. I got away with words.”

  “‘A dangerous place?’”

  “Subject closed.”

  “But—”

  “Respect my wishes, Erik.”

  “Sorry… No boyfriend?”

  “Nope.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m saving myself for a man who doesn’t need saving.”

  “Hah! Good luck with that in LA.”

  “What about you?”

  “Me? Grew up back east. Came out here for college. Dropped out. Stayed in LA. Nothing exciting.”

  “I’ll give you some advice, Erik.”

  “What’s that?”

  “This is the part where you’re supposed to sell yourself. How is telling a girl you dropped out of college, drifted around, and there’s nothing exciting about you supposed to get me excited about you?”

  “I guess you’re right… What are you going to do when this gig is over?”

  “There’s this company, Inglés Sin Barreras…they help Latino Americans speak better English. Maybe I’ll work for them. And you?”

  I think of the ad for the bukkake folded in my wallet next to my few remaining dollars.

  “Honestly, the company closing down isn’t a surprise…but I’m not really sure yet.”

  We sit in silence. She frowns and stares at my Nirvana T-shirt with a crooked smile printed on it while I stare at her upturned nose which crinkles when she frowns. I want to kiss her.

  “Bailamos!”

  “Huh”

  “Let’s dance. You’re taking me dancing!”

  “I don’t dance well…at all.”

  “Do you always talk yourself out of getting laid?”

  “Yes.”

  “Pick me up tonight.”

  “I don’t have a car.”

  “We’ll meet there. After, you can walk home. Safer than driving drunk anyway.”

  “It’s never safe for me to walk drunk in public.”

  “What, are you in AA or something?”

  “Yeah, African American.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Never mind, it wasn’t funny anyway. I have something planned.”

  “Mentiroso!”

  “What?”

  “Liar!”

  A girl from another table walks up to ours.

  “Hi, Erik.”

  “Hi, Patricia.”

  “This layoff thing really sucks, doesn’t it? You’re not gonna leave without giving me your—”

  I follow Patty’s eye line to Amanda who’s shooting a soul-burning stare that I follow back to Patty who has turned and walked away.

  When I look back at Amanda, her eyes are closed as she gyrates her hips, dancing in her seat to music in her head. “Que fue? You’re scared. I know.”

  “What?”

  As she moves to music only she can hear, I steal a glimpse of the curve of her butt as it wiggles on the bench, and that sight takes my breath away.

  “What?”

  She watches me, watching her. A smile. I look away, down into my glass where the cubes have melted and merged into a mini iceberg.

  “Shhhh. It’s okay, Negrito.” She nods at my shirt. “Where would Cobain be if he never found Love?”

  I smile. “Alive.”

  Attrition

  *attrition ə-tri-shən [Middle English attricioun, from Medieval Latin attrition-, attritio, from Latin]

  1: a gradual reduction in numbers as a result of resignation, retirement, or death.

  2: the act of weakening or exhausting by constant harassment, abuse, or attack.

  3: repentance for sin motivated by fear of punishment rather than by love of God.

  Julio St. Lox and I put two MILFs through the paces on a pet-stained sofa when an effeminate pimp and an androgynous pixie enter the set. They stand off camera in silence, watching Julio and me work. Pixie girl hikes up her skirt, pulls her panties to the side, and fingers herself.

  Flea, the director, acknowledges the pimp and his girl’s entrance with a silent nod and continues filming. He pushes the camera in for a close-up with one hand, and mimes a motion that resembles shaking dice with the other: pop at will. Julio looks at me and we exchange nods. We’re ready. We dismount from our women and stand shoulder to shoulder, stroking our dicks. The MILFs sink to their knees in front of us and angle their faces upward. Julio and I pop together.

  Flea says, “Cut. Hold for stills.”

  Flea has swapped his video camera for a digital stills camera. The camera flashes as he snaps pics. When he’s done with the stills, I pick some dog hairs, glued in place by lub
ricant, off my dick. The MILFs leave and the girl that came with the pimp replaces them, kneeling before us. She wraps her lips around my penis and works on me until I’m erect again.

  Flash!

  Flea checks the shot he just took on his camera’s screen. “Who’s the girl?”

  Femme Pimp says, “Eris. She’s street legal: her test is good through the end of the month.”

  Eris switches to Julio. She sucks him to get him going while she strokes me.

  Flash!

  Flea says, “Who’s she shot for?”

  “Alpha Man, Red Assholes Films…just a handful of scenes. It’s slow for her, so I’m taking her around on sets for some go-sees to help her out.”

  I sit on the sofa and pull Eris on top of me, cowgirl. She’s not the best piece of ass I’ve had but whatever, she’s there. Julio sits next to me and pushes her head into his lap. Flea orbits us, pointing his camera.

  Flash! Flash!

  “I’m finishing up this MILF Chocolate movie,” Flea says, “and then I’ve got Brothas Love Phat White Ass. She doesn’t fit into the lines I’m shooting right now. What about Gideon Roads? Maybe he’ll throw her into a bukkake.”

  Femme Pimp says, “Already tried. He’s not interested. Don’t you have a blow bang coming up?”

  Flea sighs. “I guess. What’s her rate per scene?”

  The pimp quotes a sum that would be insulting for a mope.

  “Cut that in half, and maybe…”

  The pimp points to Eris, bounding on my dick. “Come on, look at her fuck! Hey, you wanna try her out yourself?”

  Flash!

  “I’ll pass.”

  Julio gets up from the sofa and leads Eris by the hand down a hall. I follow them to a bedroom door, and when Julio opens the door a team of dogs and cats escape and run past our feet. When the last beast has exited I pull the door by the handle and it creaks shut behind me. Eris climbs onto the bed and gets on her hands and knees. Julio mounts her. After a while we switch off and I mount her.