Porn Star

by Laurelin Paige

  I had a great life. And I thought I had a great girlfriend to match it. For three years, I had this pale-skinned, dark-haired beauty at my side, and she was creative and smart and driven, and so goddamned sexy I couldn’t keep my hands off her, even after a long day spent on set fucking other women. We had a purebred Yorkshire terrier that we named Prior. (After the character in Angels in America. Raven’s idea.) We picked out towels and plates together. And she was so integral to the founding of O’Toole Films, helping me write business plans and apply for loans and shooting scenes with me that we knew we wouldn’t get paid for until the company got off the ground…

  And then I came home one night to an empty house.

  No warning.

  No goodbye.

  I left her to her quinoa and fair trade coffee one morning and came back and she was gone. Clothes, makeup, dildos—anything that was hers, she took. Along with Prior, the furry little guy with his sweet little face and the habit of licking my toes when I tried to edit scenes in my office.

  It didn’t make sense. We were happy, right? We were having fun. I won’t pretend that jealousy didn’t stab me in the ribs when I saw scenes that she filmed with other people, but that was part of our business. I didn’t stop fucking other girls and she didn’t stop fucking other guys; we agreed at the beginning that our relationship wouldn’t affect our jobs in any way, but for my own sanity, I set one simple ground rule: no off-screen fucking with anyone else.

  There. Easy.

  Except when she left, it became very clear that it was not that easy. Not only did she abruptly bow out of all of our upcoming projects—professionally embarrassing, since most of them were with outside studios that then had to scramble to find another performer to be with me. But the tall Italian guy that appeared in all of her Instagrams the following week indicated that I had probably missed a few key signs that Raven had checked out of our relationship long before she threw her dildos and our Yorkie into her purse and drove off.

  I wish I could say that I dealt with this gracefully. That I didn’t Google-stalk Italian Guy (some big shot producer over in Europe,) that I didn’t listen to Damien Rice songs on repeat, that I didn’t miss that dog so fucking much that I went to the pound every morning to pet the dogs there.

  That I didn’t drink my weight in scotch every week.

  That I didn’t withdraw from my family and my friends.

  That I didn’t fall asleep folded into a ball on my kitchen floor, because I couldn’t bear looking at the empty bed, much less sleeping in it.

  Those are not the kinds of things Logan O’Toole does. Logan is funny and friendly and worldly, too emotionally wise to feel heartbreak. Logan should have endured the departure (and probable infidelity) of his long-term girlfriend with a Zen-like equanimity, and wished her peace on her new journey or some bullshit.

  And so that’s who I am tonight. Worldly and Zen, flirty and aloof. My wounds have started to scar over, and I want to prove that I’ve moved on. And that is why I walk into Vida’s like I own the place, shoulders back, grin at the ready, with a steady, focused gaze that makes it clear I’m not scanning the room for any hint of Raven’s presence.

  Tanner is in the main room—a large open space studded with low couches and ottomans that I’d be hesitant to shine a black light on—and he comes toward me with a drink in his hand.

  “I got you some scotch,” he says.

  I sniff the glass. It’s something smoky, probably an Islay Scotch, and although I prefer Speyside, I’m still impressed that it’s single malt. Vida must have pulled out all the stops for this party.

  While I sip, I finally take the chance to assess the room. Like I thought, it’s mostly the feminists—tattooed, pierced, bespectacled. I do a lot of scenes with those types for O’Toole Films because we have a very similar ethos when it comes to consent and female pleasure.

  Also I think girls with tattoos are fucking hot.

  But there are other types here too—mainstream stars who frequently work with Vida’s company, the indie crowd, the underground BDSM people in their vinyl corsets and thigh-high boots. And Vida herself at the center of it all—mid-forties, deeply tanned, platinum blond hair coiffed short and stylish. She looks exactly how you’d imagine an aging porn star to look—sagging plastic surgery, careworn face, too much makeup—but if you discount her business acumen or intelligence because of the way she looks, you’re a fucking idiot. There’s a reason even the most insulated, conservative Americans have heard of Vida: because she gets marketing and she gets content and she gets platform saturation.

  I want to be her when I grow up.

  “I like these parties,” Tanner says, taking a sip of his gin, “because I’m not the only black guy here.”

  He’s right about this crowd being more progressive than most, although this party is still mostly white people. “We’re going to make it so all the parties are like this, but better,” I tell him. When I hired Tanner two years ago, he was frank about all of the problems he saw within the industry—including the inherent racism embedded in the very foundations of mainstream porn. So I told him that if he came and worked for me, we’d fix it; we’d cultivate diversity without all the weird taboos and fetishes normally present in interracial sex work. And so I managed to snag an incredibly talented filmmaker right out of art school, and he managed to make a believer out of me.

  He shrugs, giving me the don’t-make-your-white-guilt-my-problem look I see on his face at least once a week. “It’s L.A.” His tone is off-handed. “I knew what I was getting into when I came here.”

  I am going to say something else—probably something stupid and not at all adequate or helpful—when I see her.

  She’s here.

  My fingers tighten around my glass, and my stomach starts flipping over like a gymnast on the uneven bars, swoop, swoop, toss, spin—

  “Breathe,” Tanner coaches. “Everyone has to run into their ex-girlfriend for the first time since a breakup. You’re just getting it out of the way now.”

  But it isn’t Raven that I see laughing out by the pool. It’s not Raven with the glass of scotch and the long caramel hair and the smile that could power the whole goddamn Valley if she wanted it to.

  It’s Devi Dare.

  The balcony is lit up against the night, and the pool sends blue-white glimmers dancing across her face. She wears some sort of shimmery gold halter top that drapes low, exposing the smooth bronze skin of her sternum and teasing me with the hidden curvature of her tits, and leaving almost her entire back bare.

  With her short black shorts and ankle-high gladiator heels, she doesn’t just look fuckable, she looks beautiful, and I wish I had a camera right now. I want to film her here, laughing and golden with the sparkling grid of the city behind her, and then I want to take her to a beach and see what she looks like against a backdrop of inky sea. Maybe we could drive up north, find an empty stretch of highway, and I could film her walking on the dark asphalt. With that shining gold top and those fuck-me heels, the contrast of her with a desert highway would be so stark and so gorgeous and thought-provoking. The kind of shit you see gif-ed on Tumblr.

  And then she turns and sees me through the floor-to-ceiling window. There’s a moment where her eyes narrow, as if trying to make out my face in the dim interior of Vida’s living room, and then her face blossoms into the kind of smile that makes me want to give her everything in my wallet. If my stomach was swooping before, it’s a tornado now, whipping up emotional debris and lust and all the fantasies I’ve ever had about this woman, and I only barely remember that I’m supposed to be Worldly and Zen Logan in time to give her a flirty grin in return.

  As she turns back to her friends, I realize my highway film would be all wrong. Devi is the living antithesis of asphalt. Devi is energy and health and vibrancy. She’s sunshine and butter-yellow flower petals and the sweetly earthy smell of cinnamon and cloves. I was right before, with the ocean idea, or maybe the desert in the dark, when the night flowers
are in bloom—

  “Thinking about who you’re going to fuck?”

  A sharp voice jolts me out of my directorial reverie, and I blink to find Tanner gone and Vida Gines standing next to me, a bright pink drink in her hand. She arches an eyebrow at me as she cants her head toward the massive windows, indicating the balcony outside. “I saw you making eyes at Devi.”

  Worldly and Zen, I remind myself. Vida doesn’t need to know that I’m mentally comparing Devi to the flowering night desert. Be casual.

  “Devi’s fucking hot,” I say, taking care to keep my voice casual. “Lots of hot girls here.” And then for good measure, I take a drink and look casually around the room. Casual Logan, that’s me.

  Vida takes a drink of her own, but that eyebrow stays arched and I know I’m not fooling her one bit.

  “Great party,” I volunteer, trying to deflect attention away from me and my overt ogling of Devi. The last thing I need after my insanely public breakup with Raven is rumors of a new fling. “Congratulations on acquiring Lelie, by the way.”

  Vida nods. “Lelie is an amazing studio. Great vision, great philosophy. Tons of potential for profit. Which is why we should talk.”

  I hear her, but for a moment, I zero in on the way her nails are painted the exact shade of her drink. Pink nails, pink drink, pink lips--the kind of thing a director would deliberately orchestrate. I make a mental note to toy around with this kind of visual sometime in my scenes. Surely, the girls wouldn’t mind me choosing their lipstick color? If it was for art?

  “Logan?”

  I snap back to her. “Sorry, what?”

  That eyebrow is practically touching her hairline now. “I said we should talk.”

  “I’m always happy to hear what such a smart lady has to say.” And then I find the small of her back with my palm, leaning in to whisper, “Do you want to find someplace a little less noisy?”

  Despite our age difference, and despite the fact that I know she only wants to talk business, my proximity affects her. She shivers and then laughs, pushing me playfully away. “You know how to make a woman feel young, Logan. This way.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I say in a mock-submissive voice, and she rolls her eyes, but a suppressed smile tugs at her lips as she walks past me. I drain the last of my scotch, set the glass down on a nearby table, and follow.

  We go down an open flight of steps, all roughly welded metal and dark wood planks, and then we’re in the heart of Vida’s filming operations. As we walk down a darkened hallway to her office, I see rooms filled with St. Andrew’s crosses, rooms furnished like high-school classrooms, rooms filled with nothing more than bare white walls and beds. And not all of these rooms are vacant; as we pass the last one on the right, I see that a small group of people have availed themselves of one of the beds. They’re all skin and mouths and sloshing drinks, and without thinking, I reach for the doorknob and tug their door slowly shut before I walk into Vida’s office. When I first got into this business, I would have been right there with them, but maybe it was the threesome I had this morning or the fact that I actually wanted to hear what Vida had to say, but the whole scenario failed to interest me.

  Now, if Devi had been in there…

  I drop into a chair by Vida’s desk, crossing my long legs as she sits. She appraises me, and I find myself shifting a little. Her gaze is too perceptive...too kind. There’s understanding in her faded blue eyes, and I remember that she’s been divorced twice, that she’s been in this business for twenty-five years. I remember that Vida’s studio was one of those involved in the Great Logan-Raven Break-Up.

  “It’s okay to need time,” she says, glancing past me to the door I just shut in the hallway. “We’ve all been there.”

  “I’m fine,” I lie, maybe a little too convincingly, because she shrugs like she’s ready to move on, and then a tiny, silly part of me wishes that she would keep asking me about it. I’ve kept this heartbreak under wraps for so long, held it inside me, and suddenly I wonder if it would hurt less if I simply talked about it. Instead, I’ve trapped the pain inside me, a hungry wolf that’s long since devoured my heart and is now gnawing on my ribs, snarling and howling in the empty space where my heart used to be.

  But the moment is gone, and Vida is all business once again. “Sinfully Vida has weathered the last year as best as can be expected,” she says, referring to her production company. “But we took a hit with the rape stuff. I won’t lie. It was a pretty big hit, and it left a huge gap in our content.”

  The rape stuff. It hit everyone pretty hard here on the west coast, the accusations that one of porn’s biggest stars was a rapist, and then of course, the follow-up allegations that porn had fostered a rape-friendly culture. Studios had hurriedly re-drafted performer agreements, pulled down content featuring the accused, and splashed disclaimers all over their websites. Even I was affected, receiving fucktons of hate mail from people all over the world, even though I barely knew the guy who’d been accused, and I made consent a huge part of my work.

  It sucked. It still sucks.

  “Sinfully Vida had more content with him than any other studio,” Vida says, and there’s a note of betrayal in her voice. “And so we not only have a content gap, we have some image rehabilitation to do.”

  “Thus the Lelie purchase,” I fill in for her.

  She nods, tapping her fake nails on her desk. “Yes. Buying them is good for business. We need more ‘feminist’ porn, and we need it yesterday.” She says feminist with air-quotes, as if it’s some ridiculous, imaginary concept, and if Tanner were here, he’d lose his social justice warrior shit. I bite back a smile as I imagine it, and Vida mistakes my expression. “So you’re onboard?”

  Uh, what?

  “Pardon?” I ask politely.

  “Logan, you are the obvious frontrunner to fill...his...shoes for Sinfully Vida.” I notice how she doesn’t say the other guy’s name, like he’s Voldemort or Rumpelstiltskin or something. “You’re hot, you’re insanely popular, and you’ve got the whole pro-women thing going on.”

  “So you want me to film a scene for Lelie?”

  She leans forward. “More than a scene. I want you. We can partner with O’Toole Films of course, find a mutually profitable agreement, but I want you long-term. And I want it to be something big, something no one else is doing right now, something that engages a lot of the subscribing viewers we lost last year.”

  I like big and new and different, I like engaging, but I don’t know about long-term. The last long-term thing I did ended with me crying naked in the shower while my ex-girlfriend fucked an Italian half a world away.

  On the other hand, didn’t I just promise myself this morning that I won’t let Raven dictate any more of my life? That it’s time for Logan O’Toole to start kicking asses and taking names?

  “What did you have in mind?” I ask.

  Vida sighs, turning her chair to stare out of the office window. Outside, the sky glows purple above the city, and lights sprawl for miles and miles. I suddenly feel lonely again, although I can’t pinpoint exactly why—whether it’s the city so massive and crowded and self-absorbed, or the sight of Vida Gines, Her Royal Majesty of Porn, looking so lonely herself.

  Is this going to be me in fifteen years? Alone? With only my business for company?

  “I’m not sure,” she admits, and I can tell the admission pains her. “Porn is changing. And I’m used to adapting to how people watch it, how they pay, and how they steal, but adapting to these bigger things…”

  She drifts off, her eyes pinned to the cityscape outside.

  “We need something new,” she finally says, and she turns back to me. “Something fresh. I don’t know what that it is, and that’s why I need you. You’re young, you’re sexy, and most importantly, both men and women connect to your scenes. They don’t just skip to the fucking and jerk off, they watch the whole thing, and then they come back and watch it again. They have favorites. Your subscription rates are through the roof and yo
u’re a social media darling. Logan, Lelie needs you if it’s going to become more than art-house porn. I need you.”

  I think for a minute. Lelie has vision. Partnering with them would put me closer to my goal of creating unique and artistically driven films. And it sounds like Vida is basically giving me carte blanche to do whatever I want, so long as it bolsters Sinfully Vida’s female-friendly reputation and ultimately makes money. There’s no reason to say no, except…

  “Vida, I’d love to work with Lelie.”

  She smiles.

  “But I have no idea what to do.”

  She waves a hand, those nails like streaks of pink light through the air. “You don’t need to know now. Just promise me you’ll think about it. And when you’re ready,” she reaches for her smartphone and taps at the screen a few times, “contact Marieke de Vries. She’s the head of Lelie, and she will get you whatever you need.”

  My phone lights up with Vida’s text.

  “Thanks, Vida.”

  “I’m looking forward to it,” she says. “Now get upstairs and drink my liquor.”

  * * *

  In that way that certain parties will, the mood has shifted and only half of the people here know it. When I make it upstairs, the unknowing half still laughs and drinks and dances, but the crowd in the common area of the house has noticeably thinned. I see the cluster of people in the upstairs hallway—crowding around the orgy that’s undoubtedly happening in one of Vida’s many bedrooms—I take in the unmistakable smell of pot and sex, and I know it’s time for me to go home.

  And that’s okay, because all I want to do is think about Vida’s offer. I’m excited about it, I’m nervous about it, I’m obsessed with it already, and so there’s no room for an impersonal and drug-fueled orgy in my mind.

  But then I hear her voice.

  Not Vida’s voice. Not Devi’s voice.

  Hers. My own personal Voldemort.

  You know when you have a bruise and you can’t stop pressing on it? Or a cut on your lip that you lick over and over again, even though you know it simply makes it worse? It’s this impulse, this sick fascination, like you want to feel the ache, you want to hurt yourself, you want to be both the recipient and the giver of the pain all at the same time. And that is the only explanation I can find right now for why I’m walking toward the hallway, pushing through the crowd and standing in the doorway of one of Vida’s bedrooms.