‘An embrace of dirt,’ she said. ‘Immediately there was an overwhelming emphasis on male-female sodomy. The rallying cry was Pussies Are Bullshit. They’d sign off with it on the phone: “Pussies Are Bullshit!” One director said, “With anal, the actress’s personality comes out.” Oh sure: her personality. They talked about female virility, female testosterone. Which is strange considering the next phase, post-Pussies Are Bullshit.’
Clint steadied his dark glasses and resumed his attempt to stare out Karla’s breasts. They stared back, irreproachably innocent and unblinking; and they awakened humility in him. He thought it was beautifully generous of her not to hide them, to allow them to be warmly present. It also occurred to him that at any moment they might count down from three and he’d do exactly as they said.
‘The essential self-policing had to do with two areas, male-female violence and paedophilia. Male-female violence was called Black Eye, and began with the notorious “line”, Male Dawn. They’d tell the girls: Don’t be too proud to cry while we do this. Basically they roughed them up, and roughed them up for real. The paedophiliac tendency was unofficially known as Short Eye, where the girls wore kiddie clothes and talked in squeaky voices and played with dolls while granddads peed in their mouths. And worse. I’m serious. The nymphets weren’t nymphets, of course. Along with your HIV-clearance, your birth certificate is your work permit. You have to produce it, even in geronto-porno, or White Hair. Even eighty-five-year-olds have always had to prove that they’re over seventeen. That’s porno.’
Clint thought: codger-todger. Good riff.
‘All this came to an end when the new administration started their holy war on porno. Black Eye and Short Eye disappeared right away. Pussies Are Bullshit staggered on for a while, because male-female sodomy is not illegal in every state. But then some busybody — some spoilsport or killjoy, Clint — would buy a sodomy tape in Arkansas, where it isn’t illegal, and take it to Alabama, where it is, and you’d be indicted in Montgomery. And so on. But porno people are believers too. It’s the contrarian nature of the form. And they wouldn’t give it up. Dozens of production companies were wiped out and some of the very top guys went to jail. And in an Alabaman correctional facility, I can assure you, they don’t need to be told that pussies are bullshit. Then the zoning loophole, and the founding of Lovetown. And the dominant genre, these days, is unquestionably Hatefuck.’
They talked on — about Hatefuck, about Cockout, about Boxback, about Red Face, about Yellow Tongue … After an hour with Karla, Clint was becoming vaguely aware of his surroundings — glass, mirrors, tubular furniture. It might have been any old ad-firm except for the posters: porno girls, in porno colours, with porno pouts … Throne Together, Royal Flesh, Pump and Circumstance, Anne of a Thousand Lays, Mary Queen of Sluts, Falstiff, King Rear, and Princess Lolita 2, Princess Lolita 3, Princess Lolita 4 …
Feeling something lift from her, Karla followed Clint’s gaze. She said,
‘They go together, don’t they — porno and puns? It couldn’t be otherwise. Because humourlessness is the lifeblood of porno. One genuine smile, and everything would disappear.’
‘It’s finished, though, this, isn’t it: video. Now it’s the Web.’
‘Rentals are dying. Despite Princess Lolita. See the girls. They have a flared-pants look. A beehive look. The future’s in interactive. What they call “self-tailoring”. And the viewer will direct.’
Clint slid off his sunglasses, and smiled, deciding to exercise his new confidence: the confidence he enjoyed as a Laureate of the San Sebastiano Academy for Men of Compact Intromission. He said,
‘Do you miss it? Performing?’
‘No,’ said Karla, who had answered this question, and all others, many times before.
‘You were an abused child, weren’t you. Were they all that, the actresses?’
‘There’s something in it. It’s the … creation myth of porno. But porno’s just an industry now. Times change, Clint. I know a girl who goes to the Mature Video Awards with her parents. Her father came out brandishing her statuette for Best Anal.’
‘Is there anything you wouldn’t do? As an actress. Fisting and pissing and that?’
‘… I stopped before it went that way. I stopped before Pussies Are Bullshit.’
‘Uh, fancy a drink later?’
‘With a view to what?’
‘You tell me. You’re the pro. Another day, another cock. You tell me.’
He noticed that she was staring at him with unchecked fascination — with entirely undissimulated fascination. Clint started to feel twenty-seven thousand dollars poorer — and Karla hadn’t yet said what Karla said next.
‘That’s right. And the men I’m used to’, she said, and suddenly seized the tumbler of water on her desk, ‘are like this.’
Clint followed instructions: faced with noncompliance, construct the counterfactual. ‘Well. Wouldn’t have worked out anyway. Off to Hawaii in an hour or two.’
‘I thought you were seeing Dork Bogarde.’
‘He’s uh, he’s out of town himself.’
‘No he’s not,’ said Karla, standing. ‘I’m expecting him at Dolorosa Drive tomorrow morning. He’s doing a scene with Charisma Trixxx. Day one of Crown Sugar.’
‘Hold up. Got me days confused.’ Clint added ruefully, ‘Kate, she’s always going on at me about it. So maybe I uh, I’ll look in. Fly on the wall.’
With an illegible shudder she said, ‘This set will most definitely be closed.’
That evening, after three hours of Black Eye and Cockout in his hotel, Clint attained a sense of belonging: a sense of belonging, in Lovetown.
Sir Dork Bogarde lived in a porno pad with a porno pal, Hick Johnsonson, in Lovetown’s Fulgencio Falls. When Clint arrived, and was made welcome, they were out on the porno patio … In the small garden enchained porno parrots swore and shat around the porno pool. Dork lolled on a porno pouffe, his head supported by additional porno pillows; Hick poured the porno wine. It seemed that Dork had only one thing he wanted to talk about, however: porno pay.
‘I mean there am I,’ he said, with a certain finicky jauntiness embedded in his indignation, ‘naked as I am. I’m out there, with sweat pouring off my person, cocking out … some little rube who’s just climbed off the Dog — and I get three hundred dollars? Excuse me. Excuse me. While the guy watching, in an easy chair, some … asshole from Ye Olde England, gets ten grand? They do me that indignithy? I don’t think so. I don’t think so.’
Sincerely puzzled, and yet with the rosiness of genuine admiration (indignithy: he made other slips like that — but you had to hand it to the guy, with his porno pectorals, his porno ponytail, his monstrous porno penis, familiar to all Dork’s fans), Clint said,
‘Yeah but you’re the one getting it wet, aren’t you mate.’
Sir Dork implored Clint to consider something: porno pressure.
‘Did it get here yet?’ Dork asked Hick. ‘It’, Dork had told Clint earlier, was ‘the tape of the test-fuck of Charisma Trixxx’, to whom Dork was to be introduced the following day, on the set of Crown Sugar. ‘Clint? Could you perform with three breaks for coffee and one for lunch? The lights? The people?’
‘Yeah but there’s a way round that now, isn’t there.’ Clint thought resentfully of Karla White, and what she had told him about porno and Potentium: ‘They all use it and they all say they don’t.’