“Right. Ready?”
Chad’s wearing a T-shirt that hugs every ridge of his torso, Levis so tight they make poetry of his ass and leave no doubt as to his religious convictions.
“Action.”
He mounts the front steps and knocks on the heavy oak door. Charity answers wearing red silk panties and a push-up bra on the verge of collapsing under its unfair burden.
“Are you the handyman?”
“I am,” Chad says, “and I hear you have a crack that needs to be…um, filled.”
“Why yes, I do. Come in.”
Charity leads Chad into the living room. It’s an ivory oasis: white shag carpet, bleached calfskin sofa and loveseat, walls painted eggshell white and hung with paintings of snow-covered vistas. I’m concerned that Charity—whose skin tone roughly approximates meringue—will be invisible.
“So where’s this crack?”
Charity doffs her panties with the practiced air of a magician performing an oft-repeated trick. Her pussy is outfitted with a racing stripe of downy blonde fuzz, the pornstar hairdo du jour.
“Can you plug it?”
“Lady, I’ve got just the right tool.”
Cue bass guitar riff: oom-chaka, oom-chaka, oom-chaka-lacka…
What’s that old wheeze about sons either becoming their fathers or the exact opposite of their fathers? Well, it holds true for me. My father was a Baptist minister who plied his faith in the remote reaches of Devil’s Lake, North Dakota. By the time I’m finished, they will change the name to Savior’s Lake, he’d say without a trace of irony. My father possessed a body naturally predisposed to fire and brimstone: tall and lean and angular, thin nose hooked like a raven’s beak, blue eyes like crosshairs and a disturbing solidity, a sense he could weather any storm, continue on while others fell and died.
Thank God perserverance is about the only trait to clear the generation gap.
The human body disgusted my father. The muscle and sinew and tissue so prone to desiccation, the blood and bile and semen and other dreadful liquids that eventually soured or coagulated, bones that warped, skin that yellowed and wrinkled and lost elasticity…these natural changes revolted him. I’d catch him looking into the bathroom mirror, stretching the skin of his jowls taut and grimacing at the way it slackened around his long, bird-like neck. Sometimes he’d just sat and stared silently at his hands, the fingers twitching slightly, the hairs on the back of his wrist grey and hoary. My mother and I knew to avoid him at those times. This delirium carried over into the bedroom. In many ways it’s a miracle I’m alive, since my father’s distaste for sex was all-encompassing. I imagine he viewed my mother’s privates with the same foreboding he’d accord a pagan ritual site: one wrong move and vengeful demons would swoop from the folds of her labia, roasting his eyes in their sockets.
One afternoon he’d returned early from a spiritual retreat to find my mother masturbating in her bedroom. He proceeded to lash her with an extension cord until her flesh was a roadmap of ugly purple and black welts that split open and bled onto the floorboards. When I came home after school she was huddled on the porch swing in a white sheet. The sheet was crisscrossed with bloodstains. I remember a gash running from her neck down beneath the sheet, the skin split open, puffed red at the edges. She stared at me—stared through me, it seemed—at the hilltop marking the perimeter of our property, as if she expected someone to come walking over the rise. When she spoke her voice was distant and toneless, like the automated telephone voice telling you you’ve dialed an out-of-service number.
“Go,” she said. “As soon as you can. As soon as you’re able. Just…go.”
I wanted to rescue her. But all I could hope was to save myself.
I enlisted on October 7th, 1966. I was seventeen.
At a training compound near Corpus Christi, I discovered an ability that had long lain dormant: I was good at blowing shit up. Dynamite, C-4, cordite, gunpowder: these substances fascinated me. Feeling it in my hands, the destructive power contained within a few slender red sticks or a fist-sized lump of gray, oily plastique…mesmerizing. I even loved the names: Toe-Poppers, Bouncing Betties, M-40s, Willie Peters, Claymores. I was the fuckin’ Albert Einstein of demolitions; an idiot savant. Top Brass transferred me to Camp Pendleton, where I underwent an intensive medic aide’s course, and then to Duc Phong, a training compound fifty miles north of Saigon. There I became a member of A-303 Blackjack, a seven-man Black Ops unit.
After the madness of the Green Hell, I had no desire to return to Cold Lake. I wasn’t sure I wanted to return stateside at all: there were rumors of vets being spat on by scraggly-haired, pot-smoking, guitar-strumming, flower-picking hippies—I was afraid I’d lose my cool, firebomb a Wavy Gravy concert. Instead I boozed myself from one Far-Eastern country to the next, crossing borders in a fogged-out haze, until I washed up, down and out, in a flophouse on Kho Phet road, Bangkok. One night, staggering back to my room drunk on Mekong, I found a pamphlet jammed under my door. BIZZARRE SEX ACTS, it promised. Intrigued, I went the very next night.
The venue’s entrance was a scarred black door at the end of an alley smelling of piss and rotting vegetables. Behind the door was a low-ceilinged room with a stage in its center. Chairs lined the walls on all sides. Seated on those chairs were a parade of button-down executive types, all male, who wouldn’t be caught dead in a place like this back home. But this was Thailand, a carnal candyland where any pleasure or depravity could be bought with cold, hard green. Thai women in sequined underwear circulated with trays of ice-cold Singha beer, lithe bodies weaving through a throng of desperate male flesh, contours molded lovingly in blacklight.
A young woman took the stage. Tall and slender and shockingly pale with crooked white teeth. A bullseye was painted on her pussy and thighs and lower abs and I was momentarily rocked by the memory of…
…Neil “Crosshairs” Paris, Blackjack’s sniper, drawing a bead on the thing we’d found snarling and gibbering amidst a hanging garden of skinless Vietnamese bodies. Silhouetted by the glare of burning huts, the bullet-riddled corpses—glistening red, tendons and ligaments running in long twisting ribbons, large bluish veins threaded like nightcrawlers through a bed of soft tissue—spun lazily on copper-wire garrotes. Their shed skins pooled in dusky yellow puddles beneath blood-glazed feet. Then the thing turned to face us and its eyes, oh Christ those eyes, and its head bluntly misshapen, snouted, with the features of a boar or a horse or…
…a donkey was led onstage by a dwarf wearing a white satin codpiece. The donkey’s head swayed side to side and its hooves clip-clopped the floor. The woman cooed as her bestial suitor approached, fingering her bullseyed cunt which was, somewhat surprisingly, very wet.
The dwarf yoked the animal to a ring bolted onstage. It brayed sonorously, nostrils flared, eyes focused on the woman caressing its flanks.
I scanned the crowd. A man in a thousand-dollar Armani suit stroked his cock, a stain already darkening his slacks. Another guy straddled his chair, thrusting his crotch against the molded plastic seatback. They had the powerbroker look of men who wheeled and dealed with sums of money vaster than most would ever earn in a lifetime. Yet here they were, united in their desire to see a beautiful woman shagged by a donkey.
The gears started to mesh.
Two days after the show, I bartered my Silver Star for an Edelweiss 8mm film camera. I returned to the club and asked the owner if I could film the night’s performance. He told me to fuck off. I offered him my Combat Infantry Badge. We had a deal.
The performance was a good one—the donkey blew a load that nearly tore the chick’s head off. I placed ads in Screw, Hustler, a couple European sex rags, advertising:
BESTIAL SEX FILM
FROM THE FORBIDDEN EAST!
The response was overwhelming. Money orders flooded my P.O. box. I shipped the film—titled, appropriately but apathetically, Woman Fucked by Donkey—in plain paper packaging—which, as far as I’m concerned, is every bit as conspicuous as
a package stamped “Deviant Pornography.”
Soon afterward, I received my first request. It was written in a jittery hand on business letterhead with the company name scratched out:
Dear Sir,
I am very much impressed with your film, “Woman Fucked by Donkey.” It has provided me many moments of pleasure. I understand Thailand has many transsexuals—I believe you call them ladyboys? Could you film a beautiful ladyboy—blonde, elegant, big-breasted—being sodomized by a dog? A collie, preferably?
A price was quoted. Either the nutjob was filthy rich or held his fetish dear enough to drop his life savings on the thrill! I found a broken-down ladyboy named Keith who agreed to be buggered by a stray pooch for five-hundred baht and a bowl of sharkfin soup. I cleared a cool five grand on the deal.
Business boomed. I changed my ad to read:
FREELANCE ADULT FILMMAKER
WORKING OUT OF THAILAND.
NO PERVERSION TOO PERVERSE!
ALL FETISHES EXPLORED!
The proposals poured in:
Dear Sir,
…could you film two pregnant woman rubbing themselves with spawning carp?…
…men dressed as SS stormtroopers shitting into diapers?…
…a women dressed as Shirley Temple getting reamed with a broomstick?…
…a chorusline of men in shower shoes and bathing caps buggering each other?…
My answer was invariably the same:
Yessir, I can do that.
No problem, bucko.
You got it, Pontiac.
The money was great and the work steady, but I was beginning to suffer the Far East jitters: an overload of yellow skin, jabberwocky dialect, flayed cocker spaniels hanging in restaurant windows, the irrational fear that the next pussy I saw would run horizontally instead of vertically. I had to get back to the States. But I needed to go someplace where a man in my line of work could operate free of restrictions, somewhere I could blend among a colorful parade of freaks and weirdos and sycophants, a place so self-absorbed that my own down-and-dirty ventures wouldn’t merit a second glance.
Only one city fit the bill: Tinseltown.
I returned in the Fall of 1975 and rented a bungalow off Encida Boulevard. I purchased time at a Burbank studio, adopted the director’s name of “Cyril St. Cyr,” and hung out my shingle as an adult film producer.
You reach a saturation point, of course. I’ve seen more cumshots than a veteran glory hole guzzler, heard more faked orgasms than an octogenarian billionaire with a trophy wife, smelled so much sex it’s permeated my nostrils the way smoke will permeate a wool sweater. About the only thing that gives me a boner anymore is a hot shower, good Szechuan takeout, and a Lakers game on NBC. My job has become just that, with all the tedium, self-doubt, and borderline loathing felt by any beancounter trapped in any dead-end occupation.
“Give us the money shot, big guy!” I shout now, moments before Chad blows his load on Charity’s jutting chest with a heifer-like grunt. I’m astonished—not pleasantly—when Chad’s cock burps out a weak, thin, dismal stream of jizz. Semen does not so much spurt as stagger out of his heroically-proportioned cock, as if the long march has left his little soldiers exhausted. An eighty-year-old eunuch could’ve done better.
“Poor guy’s a dribbler,” Frederico whispers to me.
“Uhhh…that’s a wrap, I guess.”
The crew starts taking down the klieg lights, tripods, and tinting screens. Charity’s pusher hands her a clean towel and she wipes Chad’s deposit off her tits with a brisk swipe. The pervy old producer had freed his cock from his robe—it resembled a baby mouse, or, charitably, a shaved vole—and had been flogging it desperately up until Chad’s less than stellar finale. Now he tucks the poor shriveled thing away and heads onto the balcony, shaking his head in dismay.
I congratulate everybody on a job well done, even Chad. Who am I to break his heart? As I’m climbing into my Jeep Cherokee, Charity sidles alongside and cadges a lift.
I drive down Mulhulland’s twisting slope, aiming for Sunset Boulevard. The sky is darkening, only a few blue ashes of light to the west, over the Pacific. Charity’s wired out of her mind, chirping on about the outrageous price of liposuction. Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time” lilts out of the speakers.
I stare at the man who stares back at me in the rearview mirror. The man is thirty-nine years old, teetering on the verge of true middle age, buttery from years of liquid lunches. His hair is pinned back in a gray-streaked ponytail that he knows looks faggy but is a necessary evil in the industry. This man has spent so many years just happy to be alive, passed two decades trying to forget what he has seen in the dark jungles of Vietnam, spent half a lifetime struggling with the concrete knowledge that, no matter what filth fills his camera lens, he can always say, with terrifying sincerity: I have seen worse.
No family. No children. No ties. The man wonders how his life might have unfolded had he not enlisted. Would he have saved his mother from his father’s tyranny? Enrolled in college? Earned a degree? Met a pretty young freshman, married her, house in the suburbs, two-and-a-half children, the prototypical American family? Was there ever a chance, however remote, that he might not be haunted by dreams in which the skinned limbs of faceless Vietnamese children burst through the black jungle soil, a million legs and fingers and toes swaying like wheat in a wind-whipped field?
Did that possibility even exist?
Charity’s condo is off Sepulveda. By the time I drop her off she’s gone through one vial of coke and is itching for another.
“Call me,” she says, leaning over for a cheek-peck and crotch-squeeze, the traditional porn biz adieu. “I love fucking for you, Cyril.”
It strikes me that, despite working on-and-off for nearly five years, we don’t know each other’s real names. Ten feet from her door, she pukes. Illuminated under the glare of arc-sodium security lights, she appears to have vomited white-flecked blood.
I drive up Mulholland into the Hollywood foothills, stopping near the summit of Mount Lee, a stone’s throw from the Hollywood sign that Peg Entwhistle, a fading starlet, made infamous by jumping to her death off the fifty-foot high “H.” This city will do that to you. Chew you up, spit you out. It’s nothing personal. The town was here before you arrived and will remain long after you’ve gone. Its highways and byways, thoroughfares and side-streets, mansions and flophouses are all part of a great, glittering illusion, an illusion that always promises but seldom delivers. The town does not care about you, whether you live or die. It is a dream factory.
And dreams—like nightmares—never die.
A Smith and Wesson .38 rests in my glove compartment, loaded with hollowpoint slugs. If anyone ever asked, I would tell them it is a precaution against the road-ragers plaguing the freeways.
Of course, that would be a lie.
The truth?
It’s my fifty-foot high “H.”
By the time I arrive home, early morning sunlight is throwing long embers over the horizon. I empty my mailbox and leaf through the envelopes.
Bill. Bill. Invoice.
Now what the hell’s this?
— | — | —
War Zone D, South Vietnam
July 15th, 1967. 18:30 hours.
A-303 Blackjack had been on the hump for six hours. They carved a zigzagging path through the jungle, Oddy walking point. The landscape was post-apocalyptic: copses of trees shattered by Stinger missiles, hilltops blackened with napalm scars, the sickly-ripe smell of corpses left to rot on the jungle floor.
They waded across a fast-moving stream, firearms held at port arms. On the far shore, Tripwire shook a canister of chili powder along the banks to throw off the dogs. Zippo pulled a bottle of bug juice and squirted it on a plump leech stuck to the side of Crosshairs’s throat. When he showed it to the sniper, Crosshairs recoiled in disgust. Zippo pulped the blood-fattened leech between his fingers and grinned.
About a klick past the stream, the unit came across a tin
y hamlet. Most of it had burned down, the bamboo huts reduced to smoldering ash and char. The smoke from the burning hootches smelled like straw; it moved in patches across the village square, not thick, just a light, foggy rippling. The ground was stitched with bullet holes, small deep craters where the Cobra gunships had laid down long lines of fire.
An old man lay dead in the middle of the square. It looked as if he’d been carrying water: a length of bamboo with large pails on either side still hung around his shoulders. He lay on his back in the square, a ragged hole in his chest where the gunship’s .50-caliber bullet ripped through. Flaming straw fell on his face, igniting his hair, scorching his face beyond recognition. The only noise came from the pig pen, where three or four piglets ran in mad, squealing circles. Slash went over and opened the pen’s gate. The piglets tore off into the jungle.
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