I.

ave you ever wondered if you're really alive? Like in that movie where the psychiatrist assumes the kid is crazy because he says, "I see dead people," and then it takes him awhile, the whole movie in fact, before he realizes he's actually dead and that's why the kid has been talking to him. Maybe it's like that. You assume you're alive, sure, but how do you know? Take my case, for instance.

Several years ago I tried to kill myself—with forty Phenobarbital and a bottle of cheap wine. I thought that would do it, but I woke up in my crummy motel-apartment and opened my blurry eyes and thought, oh shit, I'm gonna live. Ever since then my life—this experience I call my life—has been different. The same people, the same clocks, the same pornographers inhabit my world but something's changed, and I'm guessing it's me. I'm not the same person I was before I checked into my suicide motel.

This has started me thinking. What if that suicide wasn't an attempt? What if it was a completion and I'm really dead now and somewhere else, stuck in a parallel universe, in some limbo of lost souls. How would I know?

 

II.

You meet some pretty sleazy people in my line of work. Not the workers—we're just doing a job. It's the customers who get you dirty. It's all about market demand; if they didn't want it, we wouldn't put it out there.

What I do now is write for the erotic film industry. That's one way of saying it. What I used to do was write poetry, in college and even before that, as far back as I can remember. I guess it was my way of coping with my foster father, a scumbag who molested me until I had pubic hair. He was one of those creeps who's turned off by women but totally into little girls. So I'd write this crazy poetry about killing the bastard and by college my teachers were telling me I had talent.

Unfortunately, a talent for poetry is worth about nothing in the real world, which is how I ended up at Lusty Lady, dancing at hard cocks and drinking too much. After graduation I just stayed on; the money was pretty good and what else was I going to do? It took a long time before I got sick of that life, so sick I tried to o-d. And when that didn't work I quit LL and started A.A. But since there was still rent to pay and I had zero work experience outside the sex trade, I tried writing erotica. And I was pretty good at it and got published in Sluts, On Our Backs and some of the men's mags.

So I wasn't too surprised when I got a proposition from Climax Productions to write some lesbian s&m action on spec. Climax is one of those women-owned operations that was an ironic outcome of the feminist movement. Sure, I know there are critics out there who think women like me have betrayed our gender, but there are also people who believe we've created sex-positive art.

I gave the director an outline and she ate it up and since then it's been a steady stream. "Dykes on Bykes," "Skin Deep," "Afternoon Delight"—you may have seen my work The way I look at it is this: lesbian porno, it's a business.

I moved out of the roach motel to a one-bedroom with a nice view of Santa Monica Boulevard, where I can watch the hustlers from my window. Kids, most of them, babies—fifteen or sixteen-year old boys, runaways from Mississippi or Minnesota. Chicken, just what the married men want.

 

III.

I get a call one afternoon from someone named Harper Fox at Three X Studios. Three X, I know them; they do fetish. Harper says he's seen my films, would I be interested in trying something different.

"Maybe," I say.

We're sitting in the living room of his home in the Valley and it looks like a page out of Architectural Digest, all polished and clean in plum and silver and black. Harper is very G.Q. in an Armani shirt and slacks, sockless in Gucci loafers. I'm guessing he's gay but I've been wrong before. He's holding a glass of bourbon and I notice his hands are as clean as a surgeon's; they look as if they've been scrubbed ten times, as if he's been trying for too many years to wash the red dirt from under his nails.

"Where are you from?" I say. He's hasn't lost the accent.

"Tennessee," he answers. "A town you've never heard of."

He's already offered me a drink, and I've already declined—I got my four-year chip last Saturday. Now he's checking to see how I like working for Climax. When he hears what I'm making, he says he'll pay me more.

He gets up from the couch, a little middle-aged bulge at his waist.

"Watch this," he says, slipping a video into a vcr.

Now, I have to tell you something about this business. I've written poetry and I've written stories and writing porno is like nothing else. The average script is maybe twenty pages, which turns into ninety minutes or so of video or film. Out of that time, at best twenty minutes is devoted to plot; the rest is sex. As a writer, that doesn't give you much of a chance to tell the story. But what separates the professional from the amateur is that the professional at least tries to tell a story; the amateur doesn't even bother.

What I'm watching is amateurish, a homemade video shot by somebody in his bedroom. To start, there's no establishing shot; the first scene is an under-aged woman, blonde, chained spread-eagle to the posts of a bed. Then there's a jump cut to a skinny, white-assed man and he has sex with the girl; then he reaches off camera and brings back a scarf, ties the scarf around her throat and has sex with her again, only this time he keeps tying the scarf tighter; she struggles; he ties it tighter and tighter until he cums. She stops squirming; her tongue is hanging partway out of her mouth and her eyes are still open, all glassy and dead. And white-ass is looking at her with a really dumb expression like he's thinking about dessert. Stare number twelve, as the morticians say. Of course there are no credits.

"That's what you want?" I ask him when it's over.

"No, no," he says. "That's the point. This is what I don't want. I want to create a death fetish film that's erotic, that's beautiful. I want a film that brings the viewer into the hollow stare of death so he can face his own mortality. Ultimately I want my films to make the viewer feel more alive."

I'm thinking Harper has picked up a pretty erudite vocabulary since he was a boy in Tennessee. It's all crap, of course. Death is the last taboo and it sells. It's Benjamin Franklin's curse, that Masonic jinx on our national currency. And I'm just like everybody else; I'm living under it. I tell Harper I'll give him a script.

But later when I'm trying to rewrite a scene for the thirteenth time, I realize I can't do it; I just can't get it right. I tell Harper I'm sorry.

"You need to meet Linda," he says.

 

IV.

On the phone she sounds young. "Nineteen. But people tell me I look twenty-one. I usually pass, and I've got i.d."

We make arrangements to meet at The Palms.

"How will I know you?" I say.

"I'm tall and blonde and I'll be wearing black."

And she is, I know her the second she walks in. Standing in the doorway she looks like something out of film noir: black leather pants, a black v-neck t-shirt, black femme boots. Five ten at least, hair to her shoulders. Pretty isn't the word; every dyke in the place turns to look. I stand up from my table.

"Linda," I call out.

She picks me out of the crowd, smiles, with what I read as approval. And I can't stop myself; I glance at the girls at the bar to make sure they know: she's with me.

When she sits down I get a hint of perfume.

"You smell good," I say before I catch myself.

"I always wear a man's cologne. It sends mixed messages. Women love it."

"Uh-huh."

She's a student at UCLA, lives in a condo in Westwood, care of daddy. For spending cash, she works for Harper.

"You're an actress?"

"If you can call it that. It's money, that's all."

"What would you rather do?"

" I plan to go into marketing after I graduate. Or maybe I'll get my MBA. I haven't decided yet."

She flirts with the waitress and orders a Screaming Orgasm. I get a bottled water.

"Water?" Linda says.

"I'm in recovery."

It seems to me there are about thirty people in L.A. who don't drink and they're all in my AA meetings.

"So," I say after awhile. "How does this work?"

"What?" Playing naive, I guess.

"Erotic asphyxiation."

She considers. "I can tell you," she says. "But I'd rather show you."

 

V.

I am old enough to know better on at least two counts. One, no baby dykes—they're trouble. Two, no games with strangers—too dangerous. And so, several hours later in her bedroom, I'm asking myself how I got in this position, spread like a turkey for basting with a leather strap around my neck And she's good, she really is; Linda's mastered her trade.

"That's enough," I say when the leather gets a little too tight. She laughs.

"Really," I say.

"Not yet."

Women like Linda have a gift; they can make you do things against your better judgment and then convince you it was all your idea.

"I thought you wanted this," she whispers

I can't answer; the strap is cutting my neck.

She bends in closer and kisses me and her hair falls on my face; it's soft and smells like cherries.

"You know you want it."

I'm not getting enough air and I swear I'm watching a video of my life. There's my crib and little Bear Bear and sure enough there's old scumbag, looking as ugly and rotten-toothed as ever. And Brandy, my cocker spaniel, and my foster mother, a big green blob in her Troop Leader uniform. And there's Sandra, my best friend and first love…

"Stop," I try to say but my voice is choked off.

And it's only with my last conscious breath that I see it, there on the top row of her bookshelf between Marketing Principles and Best Lesbian Erotica: Harper's lens focused now on me.

 

VI.

Have you ever wondered if you're really alive?

Take my case, for instance. Awhile back I almost died, in a snuff film no less. But I woke up, at least I think I woke up and went on with my life, this experience I call my life.

 

[END]

© Priscilla Rhoades 2002