Impossible Vacation (28 page)

Bernie didn’t ask me any embarrassing questions about cock size and stuff like that, or how long I could hold out without coming, things I had expected him to ask. He just told me to show up the following day at a penthouse on East Eighty-sixth Street, and we’d take it from there.

When I got back to the loft, Meg and Barney were amazed to see how focused and excited I was. At last I was going to be on camera. At last, for a moment at least, my life was going to mean something.

I slept the night through and woke up without groaning. Meg was so relieved. Now she could begin to sort out her rugs and try to get her business going. I was amazed that she didn’t seem to judge what I was doing. She seemed happy just to have me out of the house and off the streets, like I was a child she had finally been able to get into day care. I was so excited that I arrived early, before the crew had set up. I felt like a new man as I strolled out on that penthouse terrace and chatted with the camera crew.

After Bernie and everyone else arrived, the shot was set up, and all the actors were herded back into a small bedroom which served as a waiting room.

We were all piled up in this little side bedroom, a mixture of men and women, just waiting to be called in to do whatever we were asked, in whatever combinations. I don’t think anyone even knew what the film was about. It wasn’t as though anyone was reading scripts or studying lines in there. We were just hanging out. No one was even reading a book. There was a strange and somewhat perverse quality of privacy among us. The actors and actresses didn’t talk dirty, as you might imagine. They were all very discreet and proper, at least when it came to talking about what they did when they left the room and went on camera. In a regular, nonpornographic film you might expect an actor or actress to come off camera all bubbly, talking about how the scene went; but here, the actors and actresses just came back with discreet little smirks on their faces and then lay around in states of semidress, hanging out until they were called again. It was weird.

But they were not at all private in the way they displayed
themselves, particularly the women. There was this one actress who drove me to distraction. She’d come back into our waiting room after she did whatever she did and roll what she called a “spliff,” a little marijuana mixed in with cigarette tobacco rolled into a cigarette, and then she’d just lounge back in that peach-colored satin robe, cross her legs, and bounce one foot until the robe slowly fell away to reveal a fantastic thigh and a nicely pruned bush. Then she’d let her robe fall open at the chest while she talked about her boyfriend and how he was a total grump when he didn’t have his marijuana. “Just a big old grump,” she said. She talked about some trip they’d taken to Hawaii together and how she thought it was going to be so spectacular, but her boyfriend was a total grump because he couldn’t score any grass until their last day there. I just sat there like a dumbstruck ten-year-old in a candy store. The sight of that woman made me crazy. I wanted to touch her all over. I wanted to be her slave. I kept hoping that I’d somehow get paired up with her, but I figured that the chances were slim, real slim, because every time I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror, my face looked so sad, so mad. I looked like Antonin Artaud in his last days. But I couldn’t help making up my own porn film in my head about how this slinky lady would have me down on all fours with a dog collar around my neck, how she’d have me on a leash and command me to eat her all over. I was sure that to have her would be total satisfaction. But any attempt at conversation with her just fell between the beds, so I ended up talking to this guy named Gary.

Gary was about my age and was nice enough. He had a female partner. That’s the only reason, he said, that he was getting so much work in porn films. He was surprised to find that I had gotten work without a partner. Unless you’re a porn star, it was difficult to get work without a partner. Gary’s partner was named Janine, and she looked like the star-struck starlet type, only she was just slightly off. She didn’t have the pretty commercial look that makes it big in the movies. There was too much going on in her face. You could see the doubt and the anger. She couldn’t hide it well. She couldn’t plastic it over, and I figured that sort of turned off the casting people in legitimate films. Janine and Gary were old friends and they trusted each other enough to have functional sex on camera. Gary said they even had a good time
sometimes, but he didn’t want to dwell on the good times too much because he didn’t want to get too attached. He wanted to be able to leave the city when the time came.

I was curious about Janine’s story, but before we could get to it, Bernie came in, still wearing those damned reflective sunglasses, and called me out to the living room. I was very nervous, not having any idea what I would be called upon to do; but both to my relief and to my disappointment, the task turned out to be absurdly simple. All I had to do was walk by a bare-breasted woman who was being whipped with a little leather cat-o’-nine-tails by a man dressed as a pirate. It wasn’t a violent scene. He was barely hitting her. I had to stand there and watch him whip her three times, look down at my watch, which Props had just put on my wrist, then look up at the camera and say, “Oh, shiver my timbers. I do declare, three o’clock. Right on the old nose,” then just stroll on through the room like some absentminded professor. By now they had me dressed in a very nice Palm Beach suit. Anyway, there was no discussion of character or plot or who I was supposed to be or anything like that. So I just decided to do my line reading as Woody Allen would have, and everyone laughed when I did it, and that made me feel real good. I felt like I’d accomplished something, like I was potent. I had brought a little more laughter into the world, and I liked the feeling of that.

After my scene, which was done in three quick takes, I got to hang out against the wall while they did a setup for the following shot, just long enough to find out a little of the movie plot before Bernie ordered me back into the bedroom.

One of the grips, who was real nice, told me that the film was about some sort of wrinkle-in-time situation in which a pirate ship comes out of the eighteenth century to land at Fulton Street in downtown Manhattan. These pirates have come to claim one of their crew, who is now a Wall Street stockbroker and has almost forgotten he was ever a pirate in the first place. All he knows is that he has a fascination with pirate ships and he gets an erection every time he sees a picture or a model of a pirate ship. In fact, this grip told me that the star of the film had to get a full engorged erection while the woman playing his secretary carried a clock shaped like a pirate ship through the room. They had just shot that scene, and he was able to get erect just at the
sight of that ship-shaped clock. The grip told me that the star was a very good porn actor and much in demand because he never required a fluffer, which was the name for a woman who was paid just to get the men up for their scenes.

Before I could get any more information, Bernie drove me back into the bedroom, where I fell into talking with Gary again until at last Gary, Janine, and I were called up for a scene together. I was a little surprised that the three of us were called together, but at this point not a whole lot was surprising me. Once we got undressed, we were led into another bedroom, where the camera crew was all set up and waiting.

Without explaining how the scene fit into the plot of the movie, as if he was shooting this for some other film, Bernie simply described the shot to us. He told us that this was a shot he’d been thinking about for a long time. It was to be of Gary and me, just lying on our backs, all limp and naked and relaxed, and then Janine was to appear in the doorway, where she would slowly slip off her robe as we gradually grew erect. Then there was to be a shot of us, or rather of our cocks becoming erect “like two giant red asparagus growing out of a field of pubic hair.” That’s the way Bernie described it, and his description surprised me because it was so unlike him, so poetic. After they got the shot of the two erections, Janine was to move in and we were to have this glorious ménage à trois, where Gary fucks Janine in the ass while she blows me at the same time. This was definitely not poetic, and I had no idea how we were going to accomplish this rather intimate and complicated act in front of all those sound- and cameramen, not to mention Bernie in his god-awful reflective sunglasses. I think both Gary and I were hoping that some workable fantasy would take over when the time came to get erect. But it didn’t. Nothing happened to either of our cocks when Janine came through the door. They just lay there limp. I felt like I was on an operating table rather than on a bed in what was supposed to be an erotic situation.

There were no fluffers available, so Janine was asked to please try to fluff us up first, then run to the door and make her grand entrance. So the work, and I mean
work
, began. Janine came over to the bed dressed only in her robe and, while Bernie paced on the side like a basketball coach and the cameramen adjusted their lenses and the boom
men fiddled with their booms, Janine began to fiddle and fluff with Gary and me. She started sucking on Gary’s cock while she stroked mine with her hand. Soon Gary was erect, but nothing was happening for me. I was numb. There was nothing and no one in that room that was turning me on.

After Janine got Gary hard, she began to suck on me, which seemed to help, but while she was doing that, Gary went soft, so for a while there it was back and forth and up and down, like a sexual seesaw, one cock getting hard while the other went soft. Bernie continued to pace impatiently on the sidelines. I just lay there like a little kid with my mouth tight, trying not to scream. I just lay there getting done and watching this once-important part of me inflate and deflate again and again.

At last Bernie had the good sense to clear the room so Janine could work on us in private. So, leaving the cameras and booms set up, the whole; crew left. Gary was to call them back when the task of dual erections was accomplished.

Janine began to work on us again, and somehow she was able to get both cocks up at the same time. By now it all seemed like something going on far away, something I hardly felt a part of. Gary called for Bernie and the crew and they all came running back in. But by the time they got set up again, Gary and I had begun to wither, and all they got were two rather wilted dicks that were mostly held up by our own hands. They looked more like display specimens in some medical journal than like erotic male members.

The next shot was not an unusual shot. If you’ve seen any porn films or any porn magazines, you’d recognize the shot immediately. It was an old demeaning classic—demeaning, that is, for the woman who was getting used at both ends. Janine was instructed to get on all fours, Gary was instructed to kneel behind her and fuck her in the ass while she sucked my cock. I was glad that I was the passive one in all of this.

As soon as Janine heard that there was to be anal intercourse in the shot, she called for her contract. Bernie’s assistant came running with it and held it steady on the bed while Janine, naked, on all fours, signed the anal intercourse clause, which provided exactly for a thirty-seven-dollar bonus.

Once again the room was cleared for us to work in private. Janine, Gary, and I got this whole interconnected machine and all its parts working away, and then Gary yelled “Okay!” and the crew came running. Bernie was running up and down the sidelines like a coach for the winning team, crying out, “Oh, that’s good!” Then to me: “Move around more, North. Make it look like you’re enjoying it. Make some sounds, North—make some sounds, boy!” and I could feel myself going limp as soon as he used that word “boy.” In order to counteract it, I went into my memory bank to try to come up with some useful fantasy. I went somewhere else in my head. I went back to the Dam Square in Amsterdam and found that young Italian girl and brought her back to Hans’s house and at last did it there in the attic room, and that’s where I was when Bernie called for the cum shot. Because there was only one camera, Gary came first, shooting his warm wad onto Janine’s back, rubbing it in with his hand for the close-up, a standard porn film technique he’d learned in the past. Then it was my turn. Bernie yelled “Cum shot!” and Janine pulled her mouth away and I shot into the air. This left me with a very sad, empty feeling. Then it was over. Just like that, it was over. We were done for the day. In fact, we were done with that film altogether. I was handed two crisp fifty-dollar bills in an envelope and sent home.

That day I was certain of one thing, which was the first sense of certainty I’d had in some time. I was certain my career in porn films was over. I hadn’t earned enough money to take a trip across the country, but I had earned enough to go to Provincetown at last. Maybe that would be enough of a trip to make me feel like I had left Meg, and allow me to return to her, at last a triumphant man. To make that short odyssey might be enough for now. I had to learn how to hang out on my own and spend my money without being self-destructive. I needed a vacation. I needed to relax and learn how to laugh alone. I needed to learn how to enjoy without needing a witness. I had no trouble crying. My tears came out at random like gushing streams in the spring. Had the film been about a man crying at the slightest cue instead of getting erect, I would have become an overnight star.

I could cry, but I couldn’t laugh. My laughter was always short-circuited by an instant report on the event. It was as though I saw all the things that could make me laugh coming at me in slow motion,
so that I had plenty of time to analyze them before they got to me. Then by the time they hit, by the time they got there, it was always, yes, yes, I see, I see, that’s funny, yes, I understand, oh yes, I see why you’re laughing now. Although that old loneliness was still there, I wanted to be laughing at it as well as crying.