A strange and traumatic experience which one of yr. corrs. will not even try to describe consists of standing at a men’s room urinal between professional woodmen Alex Sanders and Dave Hardman. Suffice it to say that the urge to look over/down at their penises is powerful and the motives behind this urge so complex as to cause anuresis (which in turn ups the trauma). Be informed that male porn stars create around themselves the exact same opaque affective privacy- bubble that all men at urinals everywhere create. The whole Caesars Forum’s men’s room’s urinal area is an angst festival; take it from us. The sink-and-mirror-and-towelette area, however, turns out to be a priceless mash of Insider jargon and shoptalk, all made extra-resonant by echolalic tile and a surfeit of six-dollar drinks. One performer-turned-auteur is telling a colleague about an exciting new project:
“Found this Russian, this chick like nineteen, can’t speak a word of English, which for this [= for the exciting project] is perfect.”
“You going to get in there? Just for maybe like one scene?”
“Nah. That’s the whole point. I’m the director. This is my package now.”
“Oh man though but you got to get in there. Just one scene. Nineteen, no English. Probably got a butthole about this big” [illustrative gesture unseen because auditor is still standing complexly traumatized at urinal].
“Well, we’ll see.” [Mutual laughter replete w/ warmth of genuine friendship, fellow-feeling; exeunt.]
The Awards Show’s planners have obviously studied at the Oscars’ feet. Not only are the high-profile AVNAs held to the end — though with occasional teasers like Best Supporting thrown into the first two-thirds to keep people attentive 52—but the endless lists of categories and nominees are interspersed with little entr’actes of musical entertainment. Ms. Dyanna Lauren, for instance, appears between Best-Selling Tape and Best Foreign Release to sing her original composition “Psycho Magnet,” a hard-rock ballad about being a porn star and getting constantly stalked and harassed by mentally ill mooks. The song’s argumentation strikes yr. corresps. as a bit uneven, but Ms. Lauren struts and contorts and punctuates her phrasing with uppercuts to the air like a genuine MTV diva. The downside is that vocally, even with heavy amplification and digital synthesis, Dyanna Lauren sounds like a scalded cat, although Dick Filth points out that so does Alanis Morissette, and H. Hecuba chimes in by shouting: “Say whatever you want about the song-and-dance numbers here, they sure beat what Wahlberg and Reilly were coming up with in Boogie Nights!”
Hecuba’s claim seems unassailable until right before the Best Boxcover Concept category, when suddenly a piano is wheeled out for a chinless middle-aged man in the same sort of undersize porkpie that Art Carney always wore in The Honeymooners. This entertainer, who is introduced as “Doctor Dirty — the Dirtiest Musician in the History of Music,” proceeds to belt out obscene parodies of popular ditties that put Table 189 in mind of Mad magazine if everyone at Mad somehow all lost their mind at the same time. “Just got home from prison./My asshole is fizzin’./Goo goo goo drippin’ out my back door” is the only snatch of actual lyrics that persists in memory, though titles like “Sit on a Happy Face” and “It’s a Small Dick After All” have proved maddeningly hard to forget. Nobody at or around our table has ever heard of Doctor Dirty before, but almost everyone agrees that he’s the ’98 gala’s low point and a credible rival for Scotty Schwartz’s 1997 seminude rendition of “Thank Heaven for Little Girls” as the most repellent AVNA interlude in modern memory. There’s also the ’98 ceremony’s climax, in which Midori 53 and two other starlets take the stage as “the Spicy Girls” and do a rappish 4/4 number that ends with pretty much every female porn performer in the crowd 54 up on stage dancing lasciviously and blowing kisses at the AVN cameras. This climactic distaff shindig apparently caps the Awards every year.
Something else happens every year. It’s never part of AVN’s videotape of the gala, but it’s a tradition that finally explains why the ballroom’s poor waiters are willing to spend five hours enduring beverage abuse and scuttling around to find change. After the Awards Show is over and the lights go up, some of the starlets always pose for obscene snapshots with the Forum’s waiters. A lot of this year’s picture-taking happens at the back, right near our table. One waiter stands with his arm around the shoulders of Leanna Hart, who pulls down the starboard side of her strapless taffeta and allows the waiter to cup her right breast while Table 189’s own personal waiter 55 snaps the photo. Another waiter goes around behind Ms. Ann Amoré—a very personable black lady with a 50-inch bust and gang tattoos all down both arms — and hunches over behind her as she bends forward and releases her breasts from confinement, and the waiter paws them and tries to look like he’s having intercourse with her from behind as his friend’s flash goes off. What the waiters are going to do with these photos is unguessable, but they’re visibly thrilled, and the starlets are patient and obliging with them in the same blank, distant way that they were with the mooks at the Adult CES.
Trying to leave after the AAVNAs gala is another slow process, because the broad hallway outside the ballroom is again filled with industry people with Caesar-cameo’d glasses they’ve somehow forgotten to leave at their tables, all standing in clumps and congratulating one another and making plans for various Insider parties later. But the slowest, scariest egressive part is traversing the long glass vestibule to the hotel’s side exit. A mass of fans and Caesars Palace custodians and assorted other civilians are there, and the crowd parts slightly to allow a narrow passage for the Awards’ attendees, who must run this gauntlet nearly single file. It’s late, and everyone’s tired, and this crowd has none of the awestruck reticence of the cabstand’s spectators earlier. Now it’s like every mook has his own special high-volume comment for the passing stars, and there’s a weird mix of adulation and derision:
“Love you, Brittany!”
“How’d you get that dress on, baby?”
“Look over here!”
“Does your mother know where you’re at right now?”
One florid 30ish man holding a plastic cup of beer now reaches out from the crowd and very deliberately pinches the breast of the B-girl walking just in front of us. She slaps his hand away without breaking stride. Because we cannot see her face, we don’t know whether there is any reaction there at all. We have an informed guess, though.
Mr. Dick Filth is behind us with one hand on each of yr. corresps.’ shoulders (we’re basically supporting him out). Everyone’s ears are still ringing, and Filth knows enough to almost shout:
“You know,” he says, “we’ve also got the XRCO Awards in February. X-Rated Critics Organization Awards — you get me? They’re not in Vegas, and they’re not rigged. And yet they manage to be just as ridiculous.”
1998
CERTAINLY THE END OF SOMETHING OR OTHER, ONE WOULD SORT OF HAVE TO THINK
(Re John Updike’s Toward the End of Time)