It takes an average of two hours and twelve minutes to traverse the Adult CES expo, counting an average of four delays for getting lost after a chicane turn or some baroque ceiling-high cheval glass designed to double the visual exposure of Heatwave Video’s display for Texas Dildo Masquerade gets you all turned around. Your correspondents are accompanied by Harold Hecuba and Dick Filth, who have very generously offered to act as guides and docents, and here is a random spatter of the things we see the first time we come in:
A second-tier Arrow Video starlet in a G-string poses for a photo, forked dorsally over the knee of a morbidly obese cellphone retailer from suburban Philadelphia. The guy taking the picture, whose CES nametag says Hi and that his name is Sherm, addresses the starlet as “babe” and asks her to readjust so as to “give us a little more bush down there.” An Elegant Angel starlet with polyresin wings attached to her back is eating a Milky Way bar while she signs video boxes. Actor Steven St. Croix is standing near the Caballero Home Video booth, saying to no one in particular “Let me out of here, I can’t wait to get out of here.” 6 Adult-video stores all have a distinctive smell — a mix of cheap magnetic tape and disinfectant — and the Sands’ former parking garage is rank with it. Asian businessmen move through the aisles in dense graceful packs and are assiduously cheery and polite. A young guy in a full-color Frankenstein T-shirt is spraypainting cartoon flames on an actress’s breasts at the Sin City booth. The actress — an obscure one, not even Filth and Hecuba know her name — has normal-size breasts, and there’s not much of an audience. Producer/director Max Hardcore draws a way bigger crowd at the MAXWORLD booth, where one of his girls is squatting on the countertop masturbating with the butt of a riding crop. Max’s videos’ promotional posters have him carrying a girl in minishorts over his shoulder against the backdrop of various city skylines; the pitches at the bottom say “SEE PRETTY GIRLS SODOMIZED IN MANNERS MOST FOUL! SEE CUM-SPLATTERED GIRLS TOO STUPID TO KNOW BETTER!” Max is a story all to himself, according to Harold Hecuba. D. Filth and a porn executive dressed entirely in Campbell Nightwatch plaid are smoking cigars and keep holding their cigars up together and comparing the ash to see which one has the cleanest burn. A lot of the industry males and even some of the starlets are also smoking cigars. 1998 is definitely the Year of the Cigar. The starlets are all in either extremely formal cocktail dresses or else abbreviated latex/vinyl/ Lycra ensembles. Heels are uniformly sharp and ultrahigh. Some of the starlets are so heavily made up they look embalmed. They tend to have complexly coiffed hair that looks really good from 20 feet away but on closer inspection is dry and dead. Someone who is either sometime-performer Jeff Marton or “Bizarro-Sleaze” filmmaker Gregory Dark is doing sleight-of-hand tricks with his trademark fedora. 7 Whoever he is, he has a goatee. Harold Hecuba also has a goatee; Dick Filth has more like a soul patch. H.H. and D.F., longtime industry journalists, know everybody here and keep getting stopped and drawn into conversations. (These delays, during which yr. corresps. sort of stand there awkwardly at the edge of the conversation and try to look around as if they too know people here and are waiting only to spot them in the crowd before they go off and get into their own involved conversations, have not been included in the 132-minute Adult CES-traversal average.) This year, a good 75 percent of the males in and around the porn industry appear to be sporting variants of the goatee. 8
Next to the Outlaw Video booth, a starlet in a gold lamé spaghetti-strap gown, chewing gum and blowing large blue bubbles, is being videotaped by a disabled fan whose camera and parabolic mike are bolted to the arm of his wheelchair; the starlet is pointing to the tattoos on her left arm and appears to be explaining the origin and context of each one. At the Vivid Video multibooth complex, 9 Ms. Taylor Hayes has what is probably the longest autograph-and-flesh-press line in the entire Sands garage. Taylor is major-league pretty — she looks like a slightly debauched Cindy Crawford — and an oversize monitor suspended from the ceiling over the Vivid area plays clips of her scantily clad and dancing amid dry-ice fumes. There’s a berm of boxed videos on the floor by the counter and a huge man with a visor and handheld credit card machine on Taylor’s right flank as she greets each fan like a long-lost relative. According to Dick Filth, Taylor is both a genuinely nice person and a consummate pro.
The booth for XPlor Media — a company known for its “Southern Belles” video series and ORGY FOR WORLD PEACE Website — is arresting because all the execs at XPlor seem to be under 25 and the booth’s atmosphere is that of a fraternity party in its third straight day. One young bald guy is unconscious in a fetal position on the counter, and some wag has glued all sorts of feathers and flaccid plastic two-headed dildoish things to his skull. XPlor’s owner-auteurs are two brothers, trust-fund babies from a Connecticut suburb of NYC. Their names are Farrel and Moffitt Timlake. Farrel, who wears twelve-hole Doc Martens and cargo pants and what’s either a very light parka or very heavy sweatshirt with a hood that stays up at all times, is a particular cause célèbre at the ’98 CES because he’s apparently a friend of the two guys who do South Park, and these guys are rumored to be in Vegas and to possess tickets to Saturday’s Awards banquet. 10
Everyone without exception is sweating. At all but a few of the booths, contract starlets treat the fans with the same absent, rigid-faced courtesy that flight attendants and restaurant hostesses tend to use. You can tell how bored the performers are by the way their faces light up when they see someone they know. Well over half of the industry’s current superstars are in this huge room. 11 The infamous T.T. Boy is here, standing alone with his trademark glower, the Boy who is rumored to bring a semiautomatic pistol with him to the set and who was featured in a 1995 New Yorker article that was full of lines like “A porn shoot is an intricately delineated ecology.” Mr. Vince Vouyer (sic) is on hand, as are Seth Gecko, Jake Steed, Serenity, Missy, and Nick East. Here is the ageless Randy West, who looks just the way a surfer would look if that surfer were also a Mob enforcer, with his perennial tan and hair like frozen surf. Mr. Jon Dough — winner of AVN’s coveted Best Actor/Video statuette in both ’96 and ’97—alternates between various booths, wearing his customary expression of having psychologically evolved to the point where he’s so incredibly cool and detached that life is one long yawn. Here also is Mark Davis, far and away the most handsome of the current males, a near-double for Gregory Harrison of the old Trapper John series except for Davis’s ultrashort psych-patient haircut (plus goatee).
And 20-year veteran Joey Silvera is at this year’s CES, though mostly in his capacity as an auteur: Silvera now directs Evil Angel’s popular “Butt Row” video series. 12 Following the lead of pioneers like John Leslie and Paul Thomas, most of today’s top male stars now also direct (and, per the store boxes, “Present”) their own line of videos, e.g. “Tom Byron’s Cumback Pussy” series, “Jon Dough’s Dirty Stories,” the eye-popping Rocco Siffredi’s “[Various European Cities] By Night” line, etc. The So-and-So Presents series seems to be an industry trend, like cigars and goatees.