She is Cher Lucke when going wall-to-wall with Jamie Gillis in Hollywood Video’s Ultrafoxes. She is Cheri in Naughty Night and Creampuffs 2. In a video from B&D Pleasures, she is title material: Sherri Bound. Her costars are Kiri Kelly, a docile, bleachmaned submissive, and a whipmaster by the name of Jay Dee, a potbellied greybeard with a taste for riding boots and those bygone clichés of the S/M underworld. When he calls her “slave” you nearly laugh, for there is no doubt just who is master here; she owns the camera, and everything that it sees.
It is your local video store that announces her to you as Charli Prince. There, in rental offerings hidden between the covers of a three-ring binder, awaits the erotic elite, and in Air Force Brat she took her rightful place among them. The next night you selected her tryst with Tracy Adams and Tyffany Minx in Flirtysomething, a video by Insatiable Gold. You watched her mouth, her eyes, for a clue, some knowing smile, a nod and a wink that would tell you she is acting, that she knows you are watching, wishing, wanting as her voice called to you in her trademark “Yeah, yeah . . . yes” and she pulled herself, and you, to orgasm.
With each new tape, some of them purchased, others rented and copied, but all of them made part of your collection, there is a revelation: the seductive debut on Active Video with the bombshell blonde known, like so many of her sisters, by a single name, in this case, Savannah; the intensity of her inter-racial licking at the lips of Heather Hunter; and the desperation of her cries in the closing moments of Deep Into Charli, in what Adult Video News describes as “her first anal encounter”.
You find yourself thinking about her at the least likely moments, and this, of course, means that you are in love. You are taking the deposition of a grimfaced young mother, her child the slobbering, braindead victim of a pharmaceutical cartel’s multimillion-dollar mistake, and just as you ask again about this woman’s history of venereal disease, you flash on the notorious set-piece from Ultimate, the video that gave your secret love her first fifteen minutes of fame, that took her from the furtive shadows and into the public eye, and the look of absolute abandon that shone from her face as the five thick-muscled, over-endowed men closed in on her, forming the points of a star. Two of them penetrate her, front and back. A third dips his cock into her wide and waiting mouth. Her hands grasp the risen gristle of the fourth and fifth, pulling at them in a frantic rhythm that seems, like her body, to pulse, to move slowly from pattern to passion to pageantry as she brings them simultaneously to climax.
It is this scene, impossible to imagine, that replays again on the night that you bedded Alice, the sister of your tennis buddy’s assistant at the Ex-Im Bank, and during the following nine months of life together you found no moment as fulfilling. Later you wondered why it took that long to find Alice’s flaw, to understand that subtle imperfection. Perhaps you were distracted. There was so much work to be done as the mergers and acquisitions tumbled into bankruptcies and dissolutions; and there was so much yet to be seen.
For here in booth 7, she is yours, and you are hers. She looks out at you from the pulsing screen, licks her willing lips, and smiles her neverending smile. “Yeah, yeah . . . yes.” Smiling on the bed, the sofa, the divan, the lounge chair, the carpet, the hardwood tile, the pool table, the kitchen table, the lawn, the leaves, the desert, even the blacktop of an outdoor basketball court. In the car, front seat and back. In the flatbed of a pickup truck; in the cab of an eighteen-wheeler; in the trough of a concrete mixer. In the swimming pool, in the jacuzzi, the tub, the current, the tide. Under a shower of water and, yes, once, of urine. “Yeah, yeah . . . yes.” Smiling as the deeds are done by her and to her, smiling as the nipples and the pussies and the cocks are pushed into her mouth, taken by her hand; smiling as the handcuffs are secured, the cloth gag thrust between her lips, the lashes laid across her buttocks and her back; smiling as the kisses descend, ascend, linger, the wet red tongues lick and lap; as the come shots are replayed in slow motion, the favorite target her face, though of course her breasts and so many times her stomach are bathed in the essence of her worshippers.
Smiling. Always smiling.
“Yeah, yeah . . . yes.”
Delacorte slips another quarter from his pocket. The television monitor, inches from his face, hums with white noise that dampens the sound from the booth next door, a riot of muted moans and then a tinny voice that declares “I’m coming . . . I’m coming” as the screen blinks its message, red on blue, summoning Delacorte to insert another coin. Once, wondering just what his quarters might buy, he timed the tape loop, the gift of twenty-five cents. It was a meaningless gesture. Inside the booths there is no inflationary spiral; his coins buy ecstasy just as cheaply now as then. It is the ecstasy itself that has spiraled, crossing over from the darkness, out of the grainy loops of film, out of the thing called pornography into something new and different, something called adult entertainment. From this journey came a new ecstasy, a strangely cleansed and sanitized ecstasy, bright and shining moments of orgasmic glory in videotapes of startling clarity made by cameras that peered and probed from every angle. A world where lovers, should he say fuckers, practiced safe sex and portrayed no violence. A world where friends, lovers, even husband and wife, might watch. A world where a vision might rise from the shadows and walk into the light.
In the year before the accident, the name, the face and, of course, the perfect body, of Charli Prince sped across the pages of the magazines, the covers of videos, the screens of televisions. Suddenly she was everywhere: not a week went by without another sight of Charli Prince. Aerosmith’s new music video. The cover of Penthouse. Lingerie modeling for Elle, swimsuits for Inside Sports. A brief feature in Entertainment Weekly. A cameo on Letterman. Brian De Palma was quoted in Daily Variety: He would cast Charli Prince in his next movie.
She was no longer seen, but shown. She was being covered with clothes. Her lips and tongue were open, but forming words – words and sentences.
Whether she fled or was forced from the light of this nude dawn, Charli Prince stole quickly back into the darkness, making of all things some tawdry horror film, an erotic thriller for the mad Italian Gualtiere. Why she should have settled for this role is as mysterious as her fate. In the footnote focus of Hard Copy and Inside Edition, there was only the somber suggestion that making an R-rated film could somehow give her a new life, something that was lacking in an X-rated world. The smirking irony, the undertone of vicious glee, burned at your heart. De Palma never had his chance to work with Charli Prince, to stalk her with his steadicam, to make her his victim. Giacomo Gualtiere, for whatever reason – an agent’s instinct, the Tallis script, a favor owed – was there first and last and forever.
In an instant, she was a goddess.
In another instant, she was dead.
But love never dies. Love fills the little closet, the one with the lock, in the guest bedroom of your riverfront Victorian in McLean; and this is no ordinary love, not the love of gestures, of flowers and sentimental greeting cards. This is a love that is hard fact, love that can be sorted and counted: fifty-four videos, seventy reels of film, magazines in the hundreds. Two calendars, a sheath of promotional stills, the cover of that Pearl Jam CD. A poster of her, the famous wet bikini in the boardroom that inflamed feminists and, no doubt, the passions of ten thousand college boys, looks down upon this testament of your love.
Everything is here, from that first loop of film to the final performance. Delacorte found that video at his local Blockbuster, not hidden behind a ring binder, but displayed openly on the shelf for all to rent and see: Death American Style. The laconic narrator, who once sang beachboy ballads and starred in an NBC made-for-TV movie, offers homilies about gun control and capital punishment to a cavalcade of atrocities, many of them real, some of them staged. There, following George Holliday’s amateur video of the beating of Rodney King – 56 times in 81 seconds – is the in-store camera recording of a Korean convenience store owner as she shoots a fifteen-year-old girl in the back of the h
ead. Hotel balconies collapse amidst New Year revelry; religious communes are set afire by the FBI. United Airlines Flight 232 cartwheels into flames in a crash landing at Sioux City, Iowa. Pennsylvania State Treasurer R. Budd Dwyer, facing a prison sentence for bribery, calls a press conference, thrusts a .357 Magnum into his mouth and blows out the back of his head. On the set of Twilight Zone: The Movie, Vic Morrow is decapitated by a crashing helicopter, the two refugee children torn from him, and from us, forever. Suffering and pain, fire and blood, images without context, killings without cause or effect, killings without meaning but for their moment, the moment that they are recorded, the moment that they are seen.
Then, saving the best for last, is the outtake from Bloody Roses, as a clapboard introduces scene and take, and in an instant Charli Prince is there, she is alive and she is moving in high-heeled wonder toward the camera, toward you, on a soundstage somewhere in Salt Lake City, and it is the final week of shooting, you know that from your file of news clippings and obituaries, and Giuseppe Tinelli is at the camera and he frames her in medium closeup, struggling from the arms of a tall brutish Italian whose stage name is George Eastman, and from somewhere off camera the culprit comes, igniting from the cartridge of the rigged stage pistol, as her left hand circles Eastman’s forearm, then pushes away, spinning her back toward the camera, toward the superheated discharge that erupts in the darkness, even as she takes a single step, moving into the overloaded blank that rockets from the barrel of the gun and spits its dull fragments of metal into her suddenly heaving chest, that tunnels through her too quickly for even the unblinking eye of the lens to record, that sprays the air with blood and flesh, that spins her around and sends her falling down even as the cameraman moves miraculously to closeup and that is when her lips move, and although there is only silence, there is no sound, you can hear her voice, you can hear her calling “Yeah, yeah . . . yes” before her mouth fills with blood, before all is red, hemorrhaging from her nostrils in a flood as she sprawls, kicking, on the floor, and the camera holds the shot, never letting it go as her lungs seek air and her chest heaves once, then again, and then and then and then is still.
Delacorte could not help himself; he stood, pants tenting as his hard-on rose in triumph. Then he took the remote control, stabbed at its buttons, rewound the scene to its beginning.
He unzipped his pants and pressed the slow-motion.
You knew then that your love could never die. You kept the rental tape until the copy you ordered arrived, and you paid the late fee with a gold card and a smile. You asked after a laserdisc of Death American Style and the clerk expressed doubt, though he had heard about the possibility of a CD-ROM. He would check and let you know.
For weeks you watched the tape, fastforwarding through the mayhem until you reached the ninety-minute mark, and you studied this fifty-five-second smear of colors, you ran it back and forth, you ran it in slow-motion, frame-by-frame, at double speed, in reverse, until you knew its every brilliance and blemish, the odd streak of light that flares into the upper left-hand corner of the frame at the 17 second mark; the black spot of the entry wound that appears at 24 seconds, preceding her first jerking response by almost two heartbeats; each frame has its own story to tell, and you sit and you watch until there is nothing left to know.
Then you put the tape into your closet and you wait and you wait but you know too well what has happened, and you need no sullen peepshow counterman to tell you: “Gone”. It is the end, it is over, and at night, as you fight for sleep, you imagine how the next night will end, and the night after that, how a parade of tautbodied, longlegged goddesses will serve your every need and be gone when you awaken, ready for another day of work. But the next night is spent with Sally, and in the morning, eyeshadow smeared and body smelling of sweat, she talks with Delacorte about commitment, and the night after that he spends alone.
After Sally there is Kate, who likes to play Harry Connick CDs and wants you to wear a condom; and after Kate there is the new paralegal, Alyson, and after Alyson is a brief meeting with your managing partner, who reviews the firm policy on sexual harassment. You are thinking about Alyson, about the clipped fingernails, the mole on her left shoulder, why she never wore lipstick, when you hear about the videotape. It is idle conversation, overheard in a bar, a half-whisper at your shoulder, a laugh, somewhere in the shallow background of pennies for thoughts and pickup lines, but you sat in a circle of suits, talking about tax codes, unable to turn and ask, unable to say even a word. Later you doubted what you had heard. You tried not to think about it, but the thoughts were unrelenting, the thoughts would not stop promising that it was real. It was not long afterward that you saw the words, or something very much like them, in print. The city’s underground newspaper spoke them, loud and clear, in a derisive rant on the missing links of Americana: aliens in Hangar 18, Dillinger’s penis, JFK’s brain, mimed moonlandings, dead drugaddled crooners and, yes, of course, a certain video.
True lies, all of them, the stuff of tabloids and talk shows and too many cocktails. Still: You had money, and you had time. You rented the post office box and you placed the classified ads here and there and you waited and you waited, but you didn’t have to wait long.
The letter was postmarked ROCHESTER NY but the telephone number was from a suburb of Pittsburgh. You did not believe, you knew it was a hoax, a con; but you made the call, and the call made you wonder, and the wonder brought on the hunger, and the hunger was for love. It wasn’t long before you said yes.
It was the most expensive video you have ever seen: $200 for the viewing and then the plane fare to Chicago, nearly 2,000 quarters. What it bought you was a darkened motel room near O’Hare, a half circle of seats facing into a television screen and a squat Hitachi videodeck whose clock blinked out 12.00; it was the first time you watched her when you were not alone. You paid your money to a shadow and you sat down in the closest of the chairs. An older man, someone’s grandfather, arrived five minutes late and nervous; he coughed, too loudly, and shrugged inside his frayed corduroy jacket. The other two men were friends, acquaintances, huddling like conspirators in the corner to your right; they looked pretty much like you, and would not meet your eyes.
“Gentlemen,” said the voice of the shadow. “Please be seated.” And seated you were, with an uneasy atmosphere of embarrassed expectancy that divided you from the others more convincingly than the wooden walls of booth 7 could have done. You leaned toward the television and its veil of grey haze as the shadow reached the cassette into the videodeck. Then there was nothing left for you to do but what you do best: watch.
On the videotape there is no sound, though from somewhere in the room comes a sharp intake of breath, whether of shock or sudden desire you do not know, as the picture rolls, steadies, blurs, then steadies again and finds focus. It is grainy, fourth or perhaps even fifth generation, like the signal of some distant television station, transmissions from the end of the world, and it is a view in black and white, from a fixed position, high above, no doubt mounted on the ceiling, peering down from an angle slightly to her left.
For she is there. She lies before you, eyes closed, palms upward, legs spread ever so invitingly; and nude. You squint but cannot quite make out her expression, though you are certain that it is a smile. The video jumps, its only edit, and you now look upon a closeup of a single sheet of paper, an official-looking document, a form marked in ink with circles and checks, the outline of a human form, and handwriting and a signature. You ignore its codes and comments, searching for the box with her name: Charlotte Pressman. A cold and anonymous name, as cold and anonymous as her corpse.
You let the words find your lips as the picture jumps again and the fixed camera angle returns and now you know her, every inch of her, you know her grey and mottled skin, her deflated breasts, her matted tangle of hair, as the deputy medical examiner closes in, scalpel in hand, to dance this last dance.
The striptease of flesh begins. From the left shoulder cutting down
ward, then the right, and then a single stroke of the blade along her stomach, a ragged letter Y. The folds of skin are taken in his hands, and the layers of her outer flesh are peeled back, revealing the glories within: strips of muscle, yellow pouches of fat, wet bone.
In a frozen forever, man and metal probe the shattered breastbone, forceps dip and pull at her broken heart. A silvery rotary saw descends and, when its work is done the glistening organs are pulled out one by one, examined and weighed and catalogued as you hear the voice, the voice that has been speaking for minutes but only now is heard: pancreas, unremarkable; adrenals, unremarkable; spleen, unremarkable. The flat voice, the drone of a dial tone – unremarkable, unremarkable – as he reaches deep inside her, to the places that tongues and pricks could not venture, and with each touch takes more and more until at last she is a gutted husk. But there is, of course, more: The swift pass of the scalpel from ear to jaw to ear, and her face is peeled back, flimsy and forgotten, before the saw spins again and shears the top of her head. The grey mass is lifted, weighed – unremarkable, unremarkable – and the drama is done. At last you have seen all of her.
You stand and you walk away, out of the room, out of the hotel, out of Chicago, and you hear the voice of one of the men behind you, wondering aloud about the price of a second showing. But there is no price, not one that you can afford; you only have your quarters, and you will always have her:
She is faceless; she is nameless; she is meat.
Each week you returned to Peepland; each week for the first month, once or twice or three times a week and now it is every day, every afternoon, that you leave your desk and you walk the few short blocks to this tiny outpost, the last of its kind in this city, and you trade your dollar bills for quarters and you find your way to a booth, more often than not this booth, lucky 7, and you sit in the darkness and you look through the window of the video screen and you see the naked, the women and the men, you see them rage and rut, and you see nothing there for you, nothing at all, nothing but the lean face of Delacorte reflected in the glass, looking back at you.
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