Johnny knocked on their office door one day and explained that he wanted to have sex on camera. He left out the part where he also wanted to take his costar to a candlelit dinner and ask her about her hopes and dreams.
“They took one look at me and laughed in my face. I wasn’t hip. I wasn’t a flower child. I didn’t have long hair. I was probably wearing what I’m wearing now.”
He gestures down at high-waisted khaki pants, a belt and a short-sleeved button-down shirt. It’s true. This is an unfuckable outfit if ever there was one. But Johnny persisted, coming back week after week until the Mitchell brothers relented. Mystifyingly, Johnny did not have to try out in any capacity. In Boogie Nights, Rollergirl fellates Dirk Diggler in the back of a club before recommending him to the director. While I do not assume real porn casting is all blowjobs and roller skates, dropping one’s pants seems like it would be industry standard. But apparently all you had to do in this pre-AIDS, post-sexual-revolution flesh carnival was hop into the back of a VW bus and drive to a house in Walnut Creek.
When Johnny arrived, two men and a woman were already waiting, lounging naked on a circular sofa. Upon seeing this scene, he and his priapic penis became anxious about the straw they were about to draw.
“I told them I was heterosexual and they told me not to worry. They said, ‘You’re all just going to be relating to her at the same time.’”
“Relating,” I interject again, once more with the air quotes.
No response.
“I was so nervous,” Johnny says, “I had to pee every fifteen minutes while they were setting up. Then I couldn’t get an erection on camera. They had to shoot the whole thing around me.”
In the end, they gave him seventy-five dollars and, to Johnny’s surprise, a second chance. This time with just him and one woman. And that was all he needed. So strong was Johnny’s desire for a steady relationship, even his dick was in on the plan. And while a relationship never did manifest, a career did. Before long, Johnny was a regular in movies. Then he began managing productions. Then he became a line producer (this was when there were lines, before the dialogue had moved from “Nice shoes, wanna fuck?” to “Shoes”). Then he became a producer, coordinating with location scouts and catering people. (Prior to this moment, I had not imagined there would be catering on the set of adult films. Though it makes sense—sex requires more energy than a monologue unless you’re doing both wrong.) When Johnny started directing his own films, his parents flew out to San Francisco for his first premiere.
“What did your mother think of it?”
I had always imagined my great-aunt’s expression upon opening the dirty magazine, and it didn’t jibe with her flying out to California to support her son. She was one of those mannered ladies with flawless taste in clothing, husbands, and houses. After she died, her wine collection went to auction. And while the idea of some scandalized East Coast lady in a San Francisco porn theater is appealing in the abstract, I couldn’t picture this particular East Coast lady there.
“She had a one-word review,” Johnny says. “She found it ‘repetitious.’”
This is as fair an assessment of pornography as I’ve ever heard.
“But she was proud?”
“She was relieved. She liked me being on the other side of the camera.”
*
All Uncle Johnny wanted was to take his work home with him. Which, in a way, he did. Just not in the way he’d hoped. He got to know the industry so well, he made “a booklet of tips” for guys getting into porn for the first time. When I ask him if it was called “Just the Tips,” he stares at me blankly. It dawns on me that Johnny’s life has been so chock a block with sex jokes, he doesn’t have the capacity to let another one in. His innuendo days are over. Instead, he tells me about how he took these guys under his wing and taught them how to fuck on camera. He speaks with such fondness for his costars that I am momentarily transported, forgetting that knowing how to fuck on camera is not a life skill.
“We ate dinner on each other’s porches,” he says. “Everyone thought we were having orgies but never. We just … we just really liked each other.”
I tell him what I know to be true: He was adored by these people. I’ve read the interviews. I’ve been reading them for years.
“Yeah,” he whispers, “that was my world. We were outlaws together.”
He means that literally. San Francisco was the hot spot for porn. In Los Angeles, police would drive around, following the actors, raiding sets. Tailing porn stars was a trickier business in a semi-walkable city. They could film where and when they wanted. For the most part. Once Johnny was part of a crew that borrowed a Rolls-Royce and drove up to Mill Valley to shoot a sex scene on a hill overlooking the city. Johnny was in the film, in the midst of “doing crazy sexual things” to Annette Haven, one of the industry’s more famous faces.
“We were on the trunk, on the roof, on the motor, inside the car, on the—”
“I got it.”
“The next thing you know, a police officer comes charging out of the woods and yells, ‘Nobody move!’ We were taken down to the station for public indecency, but when we got there, Annette just spent hours signing autographs for the cops.”
Johnny laughs. I laugh. Finally, I see my opening.
“So did you ever date Annette? After that?”
“She had a boyfriend,” he says. “And it wasn’t like that.”
“Right,” I say. “But did you ever want to date one of your costars?”
“You mean like was I in love with one of them?”
I put my fist to my mouth and clear my throat. “I was under the impression that you got into porn to find a girlfriend.”
“Ah,” he says. “It’s true. I was always scheming about how to make one of these women my girlfriend. I know it’s not the standard reason people do this. A lot of people I knew were aspiring actors or models. Mainstream Hollywood was getting more risqué and porn was getting longer scripts and so they thought eventually it would meet in the middle. They thought they were going to be needed. But they weren’t needed. And then it was just—over. But I was looking for a relationship.”
“Did you ever find one?”
“I haven’t dated a woman for more than three months my entire life,” he says, popping a blueberry into his mouth. “The last time I had sex was the night Mike Tyson bit Evander Holyfield’s ear off.”
“And you haven’t dated anyone for longer than three months since then?”
“Nope.”
The irony of this is not lost on Johnny. He runs a singles group at his local temple. He spends half his days helping other people find love.
“I hate to say this, but I think it’s the ultimate form of going after something you can’t have. If people become available to me in a real way, I think: How could they be interested? How could I have been interested in them? When I was working, I’d feel a connection with someone but then she’d start having sex with someone else who was taller and better-looking and I thought: I can’t compare to that guy.”
This is a familiar scenario for anyone living in the world, but Johnny subjected himself to the experience in real time. When he says “start having sex with someone else,” he means on the same piece of furniture.
Johnny made his last film in 1987. He was really attracted to the woman he was paired with and thought she might, at long last, make a good girlfriend. Then it turned out she already had a boyfriend and said boyfriend was a Hells Angel.
“I thought, well, that’s not going anyplace.”
“And that was the last straw? After a decade of this?”
“It would have been nice for it to come earlier,” Johnny agrees, “but I guess I’m a slow learner.”
He looks at me for the first time without blinking or smiling, just dead-on like he knows exactly why I’m here.
“You don’t just stop being who you are when you reach a certain age. You know that, right? You don’t magically outgrow yourself. The li
fe you’re living now is your actual life, the habits you have now are your actual habits. I hope I’ve evolved—but I’m not so sure. But I can tell you that if you’re setting things up so they never work out by picking the wrong partners and you know you’re doing it…”
Johnny trails off. He looks at the photos on the piano.
“Yes?” I ask.
“Just stop it,” he says.
*
Johnny has never watched himself on-screen. He doesn’t own a single copy of his films and the idea of going to some retro-themed website holds no appeal. He thinks the Internet is plenty masturbatory without having to watch himself have sex on it. He is happy enough knowing that his movies are out there, that there’s proof he was the best ever at something, which is more than most people get. He recently told his piano teacher. They were swapping stories about their younger selves and Johnny was growing uncomfortable with all those unaccounted-for years. So, wary as he was, he told her. But when he saw her again the following week, the first thing she did was advise him not to go around telling people about his “film career.”
Having finally gotten to know the real Johnny, I am livid on his behalf. Who was this woman to go around passing out scarlet letters? Stick with “Chopsticks,” sweetheart, and leave the moral shaming to the religious right. But Johnny took it in stride. He knew the risks of sharing in advance. In fact, he knows how lucky he is—Johnny’s particular brand of fame means he can deploy his history at will, pluck it out of obscurity or keep it buried.
“It will always be mine,” he explains. “It may be a red flag but it’s my red flag. Like I said, this is my actual life. This is the one I chose.”
It’s getting dark out. Johnny walks me into the hall, where a halogen light flickers above our heads. He presses the elevator button for me. Nothing is revolutionary about Johnny’s advice. It feels as if I’ve always known it. Which is the flawed nature of all advice—you can have all the wisdom in the world laid out for you but it takes a lifetime to apply it. But just because Johnny’s plan didn’t work doesn’t mean it was ill-advised. His costars weren’t undatable by virtue of their profession. He just kept relating to them in a way that made them impossible to date.
“Hey,” Johnny says, moving in front of the elevator doors as they open, “you want to hear a dirty joke?”
“Sure,” I say, stunned that he knows any.
“How many porn stars does it take to change a lightbulb?”
“How many?”
“One,” he says, and grins. “So long as he screws it in himself.”
Brace Yourself
I go to France. I go because I am researching a novel that takes place in a château in the middle of nowhere in Normandy. I chose my topic wisely but not conveniently. It’s tough to locate “the middle of nowhere” in a country the size of France, but I managed to do it.
My friend Charlotte, a photographer interested in unmarked WWII graves, accompanies me. Charlotte is the kind of magnetically stunning, deeply chill person who lives on Earth, true, but on a parallel Earth. Hers is a planet where people stock your phone with adoring text messages at all hours and pump your gas for you even when you’re not in New Jersey. This would be infuriating if it weren’t for the fact that Charlotte so thoroughly inhabits her version of Earth that her mind will not allow for a lesser version. Of course you live here, too, she thinks, slipping on special jeans meant for people with stilts for legs. Why wouldn’t you easily finagle a free trip to Japan? Why wouldn’t the coffee shop accept your credit card even though there’s a 10 DOLLAR MINIMUM CHARGE sign? Why wouldn’t every member of the opposite sex realize that they had never known beauty before they laid eyes on you?
The family who owns the château agrees to let us stay in their guest quarters at a discount. I tell Charlotte the good news.
“Did you mention the novel?” she asks.
This is Charlotte math. Free is the favor. The discount is what comes with existing.
Twenty-four hours into our stay, Charlotte decides the place has bad juju. She’s not wrong. The château’s been around since the 1300s—someone definitely got the rack here—but her spiritual awareness has a way of appearing at convenient times. Such as when she would like to take the car for a week to go to Deauville, an artists’ resort by the sea, to have impossibly hot sex with an impossibly good-looking sculptor. In the world I inhabit, the words artist, resort, and good-looking have never met before. In Charlotte’s, they’re old friends. I make her feel bad about this for a full minute before confessing that being alone is actually more conducive to writing. But it’s too late—the seeds of guilt have been sown. She is abandoning me. She feels compelled to stock up on provisions so I don’t have to Les Miz scraps of bread from the kitchen.
We go supermarket shopping and split up. I return to the parking lot to discover my friend is a Jewish mother trapped in a model’s body. She has purchased a gallon of peanut butter, a wheel of cheese, crackers, frozen shrimp, chocolate bars, several bunches of root vegetables, dried apricots, three baguettes the size of pool noodles, and a 24-pack of bottled water. I tell her that the war is over. She, of all people, should know this.
“But what if you get hungry?” she asks.
She worries about this condition I have that requires me to eat food. I encourage her to take a baguette for the road.
“It’s okay,” she says. “They only charged me for one.”
Back at the château, the impossibly good-looking sculptor calls. Charlotte takes the call, languidly leaning on a stone wall as I unload the trunk. A young tour guide emerges from the gatehouse and offers to help me with the groceries. My head in the trunk, I accept, but when I look up, I see she is sporting a neck brace from chin to chest. There was no neck brace this time yesterday.
“Qu’est-ce qui s’est passé?” I ask her.
Between my bad French and her bad English, I gather that last night she was backing her car out of a barn, moved to avoid a horse—or possibly a pile of hair—and rammed straight into a tree.
“It’s okay,” she concludes, reaching for a bag. “It doesn’t hurt.”
“No, please.” I shoo her away.
“It’s okay, really,” she insists.
I shoo, she lunges, and we go back and forth like this—shoo, lunge, shoo, lunge—for whole minutes. Imagine trying to hold open a door for someone who refuses to take you up on the offer but now replay that exchange for the duration of a presidential debate. I don’t know if it’s the language barrier or stubbornness or what, but the conversation morphs from charming joust to forceful assertion to performance art. Meanwhile, Charlotte is pacing around a topiary, giggling and saying something enthusiastic about green tea.
I let the guide win. If carrying a 24-pack of water makes her feel empowered against trees, so be it. With a big grunt, she lifts several bags from the trunk. Just then, the owner of the château comes charging out of some French doors. Or, as they say in France, doors.
“Non, non.” She waves. “She is injured! Can’t you see?”
We freeze. There’s really no arguing with this. Of course she is injured. I am American, not Martian—I know what a neck brace looks like. Muscles pumping with anger, the woman yanks the bags out of the girl’s hands and speed-walks toward the house without so much as looking me in the eye. I want the girl to explain how I refused her help and the conversational tug-of-war that followed. But the phone starts ringing in the gatehouse and so she turns around to attend to it as if nothing happened. I am left standing in the driveway at the center of a triangle of women, all walking away from me at different paces. I lift the remaining bag from the trunk and shuffle toward the main house, where I will live for the next seven days, the Ugly American sitting in her room, her wheel of cheese taking up an entire shelf in the refrigerator.
Immediate Family
You get to know all the old people. This is what no one tells you when you decide to work from home, but it’s true. One generation’s “off-peak hour
s” is another’s “hours.” There they are, walking their rickety dogs at ten, doing their laundry at noon, checking their mail at three, asking you if you know how to operate a VCR machine at six.
You can be ill at ease with this, seeing it as a premature separation from your rightful generation, or you can embrace it. Marilyn helped me embrace it. She complained about the slow elevator and taught me how to trick the dryer into running an extra load, free. She was always late for the opera. She was feisty—a word my peers employ when describing people who curse after the age of eighty. And then one day, according to an index card taped to the lobby wall, she was dead.
Blue ink announced that the family would be sitting shiva in her apartment. It listed the hours, the days, and finally, in block letters: ALL FRIENDS AND NEIGHBORS WELCOME. I did a double take. Was Marilyn not selling me on the wonders of dryer sheets a mere two days ago?
My first thought: I should go. For one thing, I am Jewish and have been to plenty of shivas before, so that would take some of the awkwardness out of it. My second thought: I should definitely not go. I had lived in the building for only seven months. I barely knew this person.
Part of what’s interesting about living in New York is how much business you can choose to have with people who are absolutely none of your business. There’s something incongruous about how careful we are to set up boundaries, how ardent we are about maintaining them, and how quick we are to take a wrecking ball to them when it suits us. We train one another to disengage at the daily level, to greet with silent nods, to ignore music coming through the walls or tearful phone calls on the street. Yet when we want to feel we’re doing the right thing, we come swooping in with eye contact and directions.
It’s not that I had ignored Marilyn. I liked Marilyn. But I wasn’t about to invite her to dinner or ask her if she had grandkids or engage her a moment longer than I had to. I work from home, after all. I need my space. Now tragedy had struck and I was going to, what—buy a fruit plate and go sit down with a stranger’s family?
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