Money Shot

15.

Tabitha Moore’s shoot was for Rawkus. They were set up in their dusty, cavernous studio on Stagg Ave. I never shot for Rawkus, since they don’t pay for shit and I don’t care for their creepy, misogynistic and insulting titles. Filthy Fuckpigs. Whores Can’t Say No. Or their most popular series, She Needs the Money. I was actually a little surprised that Tabby was shooting for them, but she had always been one of the most cheerfully rowdy girls I’d ever met. She loved doing things just for the shock value and was famous for enthusiastic dirty talk that would make Max Hardcore blush. With her triple D implants and her voracious sexual stamina, Tabby was the Gonzo Queen of Over-The-Top town and didn’t care who knew it.

Unsurprisingly, they were shooting a gang bang scene. The set was a half-assed mock-up of a locker room and a few of the guys had on random, contradictory pieces of athletic gear and various mismatched team uniforms. The parts of Tabby I could see between the seething tangle of male bodies seemed to be half dressed in a torn cheerleader outfit. I remembered Malloy’s comment the night before about Teenage Nympho Cheerleaders and statutory rape. Cheerleader costume notwithstanding, nobody was ever going to mistake Tabby for a teenager. She had been in the business for seven years. Years in porn are like a lot like dog years. They tend to age the girls much quicker than normal human years. Tabby was only twenty-four but she already had more surgical enhancement than a Beverly Hills divorcee twice her age. She was a legendary party girl too, with a pill habit the size of Nevada, and whenever she started to run low on painkillers she’d just pop in for another procedure. Still, underneath it all, she was a good kid. I don’t know if I would call her completely trustworthy, but she was all we had.

There were maybe five guys actively working the various stations of Tabby’s anatomy while another six or seven stood back on standby, keeping their pumps primed and waiting to be rotated in. One funny thing about working in porn is how quickly you get used to seeing guys jack off. When I first started out, I couldn’t stop staring. It gave me a nasty kind of thrill I can’t quite explain, seeing something that was supposed to be this shameful secret done in such a public, nonchalant sort of way. I was fascinated by the wide variety of techniques and the odd, individual quirks each guy seemed to have to get the job done. But that didn’t last. By my fifth or sixth film, I barely even noticed it anymore, unless the shoot was on standby, waiting for wood. Veteran cops and paramedics are unfazed by the sight of sucking chest wounds or decomposed babies. Porn pros don’t bat an eye at the sight of six guys standing around yanking their cranks.

Malloy only had two months in country and was clearly not quite used to it yet. As we stood on the sidelines, waiting for them to finish up and call lunch, I could see in his body language that all this wanking made him itchingly uncomfortable. A lot of guys imagine that it would be this big turn-on to visit a porn set. My advice is, unless you really love watching other men jack off, don’t bother.

Malloy turned away from the action and from me and walked quietly over to stand near the director. The director was young and morose with a large shaved head and a scruffy, chinless face like a strung-out fetus. He didn’t seem to be paying any attention to the action. He sat alone and hunched over by the monitor, picking at a large scab on the back of his hand.

The cameraman was the one running the show. He was older, fat and beery with a backwards baseball hat and an oily little ponytail. Sweating profusely as he hovered around the fleshy jumble like a woozy fly, he droned on and on in a wet, nasal voice about how great everything was.

“Tito,” the cameraman said. “Grab her hair. Great. Keep going. Now Tabby, can you raise your left leg up a little higher? Great. Keep going. Nick, trade places with Drew. Great. Keep going.”

I felt sorry for the editor who was going to have to replace all that audio. I also felt sorry for Tabby, who was giving it 110 percent and would probably wind up with dreary stock music over all her saucy, creative dialog because that asshole camera guy wouldn’t shut up.

A very deep man’s voice spoke softly to my left, startling me.

“Hey.”

I turned and saw that it was Dick Dallas. He had debuted just as I was getting out and we had never worked together, but we knew a lot of the same people. He was bigger than ever, shredded muscle on top of muscle and his formerly handsome face was becoming distorted and caveman-craggy from excessive use of steroids and Human Growth Hormone. He had a deep, leathery tan the color of barbeque sauce and had dyed his hair a dull, monochrome black. It kind of looked like he had gotten those hair implants, but I didn’t want to look closely enough to be sure. He was wearing nothing but sneakers and was very happy to see me. I didn’t take it personally. I knew it was just the Caverject. My breath caught as I waited for him to recognize me. Amazingly, he didn’t.

“Are you okay?” he asked instead.

That was not at all what I had been expecting. The genuine concern in his face and voice seemed almost funny coming from a big hunky guy standing there naked with a hard-on.

“I’m fine,” I replied, trying to pitch my voice as low as possible.

“Did he do this to you?” Dick asked, frowning as he gestured with his chin toward Malloy.

“Oh,” I said. “Uh... no.” I dug around in my brain for my cover story. “Some guys beat me up in front of my apartment, so I’m staying with my uncle until they get caught. He used to be a cop, my uncle. I was, y’know, scared to be alone so...”

“Son of a bitch,” Dick said, shaking his blocky head. “Those spineless fucks don’t dare try shit like that with me. Instead they gang up on a little guy like you to prove they’re real men. Bastards.” He put a hand on my shoulder, leaving a greasy lube spot on my t-shirt. “What’s your name?”

“Daniel,” I said, looking at my feet and flinching away from the large, bobbing erection threatening to poke me in the kidney. Dick Dallas never was the sharpest tool in the shed, but I still couldn’t believe he didn’t recognize me.

“Well, I’ll tell you what, Daniel,” he replied. “If you ever feel like you need someone to talk to, a shoulder to cry on...”

“Dick!” the cameraman called. “We’re ready for you.”

“Right,” Dick called back over his shoulder. He turned to me with a wry, it’s a living sort of shrug and then made his finger and thumb into the shape of a gun and pointed at me. “Catch you later.”

The second his massive back was turned I burst out into silent stifled giggles behind my hand. My first day as a gay man and I’d already been cruised. Of course, Dick Dallas would pretty much fuck anything that didn’t pull a knife on him. Still, I had to admit that it felt good to be desired, to be thought of as attractive again. The last person who’d thought I was sexy was Jesse.

The shoot continued through a few more rotations. I was feeling itchy and uncomfortable under my binder and the disturbingly familiar smell of sex and sweat and fruity body spray and cheap lube all baking under hot lights in an old dusty warehouse was a powerful reminder of why I got out from in front of the camera in the first place.

“Okay kids,” the cameraman said. “Snap crackle pop. Who’s ready?”

Of course it was Dick Dallas who led the pack.

“Come on all of you hot fuckers!” Tabby cried in her unique, un-American syntax that never failed to make me smile. “I must taste all of the cums right now in my face!”

One by one, each guy came forward and earned his check. There were a few stragglers who held things up, taking longer than the rest to get to the point, but eventually the last guy did the job and the cameraman zoomed into Tabby’s wide open mouth.

“...and cut,” the camera guy said. “Great. That’s lunch.”

“But I am already full!” Tabby said, smacking her lips and patting her belly.

“You ain’t never full,” one of the guys I didn’t know said.

“Ah, you know me too well,” she replied.

I watched Malloy approach her, speaking in a low voice as she unselfconsciously scrubbed between her legs with a colorful beach towel. She nodded agreeably and then walked away, motioning for him to follow. Malloy gestured for me to join him. I had noticed Dick Dallas circling me like a hungry shark so I hustled quickly over to Malloy.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“She’ll do it,” Malloy replied. “She said she’ll translate the note.”

We followed Tabby over to the large bathroom and she waved us inside, locking the door behind us.

“Who is your little boy friend,” Tabby asked, looking me up and down as she stripped off the stained rags of her cheerleader outfit.

“My nephew,” Malloy said. “He got beat up by some punks, so he’s staying with me for a while. He’s okay.”

Again that heart pounding stretch of seconds while I waited to be recognized. Tabby’s electric blue eyes lingered on my face for a moment that felt like a century but then turned back to her own reflection in the mirror, pulling her fingers through her sticky red hair extensions.

“That’s terrible,” she said, peeling off her false eyelashes. “Well, let me see this note.”

Malloy handed her the note and to his obvious dismay, she sat down on the toilet and had at it right in front of us, brow furrowed and fat lips moving while she read. Malloy took a step back and shot me a look. I just smirked. You gotta love Tabby. That girl has no shame.

“Okay,” Tabby said, wincing with a pained grimace as she wiped. “You want I should write it down, what this says?”

“That’d be great,” Malloy said, tearing a sheet of paper from a notebook and handing her a pen. “Thanks.”

“I am happy to help Didi,” Tabby said. She stood, taking the pen and flushing the toilet. “Because I don’t believe any of this bullshit. Angel Dare is not a murderer. She couldn’t do it, I know. Now, me. I could do it like that.” She snapped her sparkle-nailed fingers. “Somebody does wrong to me, I do double back to them. That is the way where I come from. But I know Angel Dare, she has good heart. Maybe she is bitch to producers who don’t respect her models or to the pushy jealous boyfriends that want to control the girls, but she is good person inside. And you, baby, you are good man to help her.”

I looked away and my eye snagged on my own reflection. That stranger in the mirror. Was I really a good person? I wanted to kill Jesse and his boss, but maybe Tabby was right. Maybe I didn’t have it in me.

Tabby bent down over the toilet, writing with her piece of notebook paper against the toilet tank. Her huge implants jiggled as she wrote, wrinkling like cheap plastic trash bags under her armpits. Malloy stood back beside me, eyes averted from Tabby’s high-mileage ass. I looked over at the scatter of cheap make-up on the counter by the sink. Without even really knowing why, I put my hand over a glossy red lipstick and then swiftly pocketed it when no one was looking.

“Okay,” Tabby announced, straightening up and handing the paper to Malloy. “I am finished.”

“Thanks,” Malloy said, scanning quickly over her translation.

“My pleasure, baby,” she replied. “But this note. It is very bad what this girl writes. Very bad, but not so surprising, I am sad to say. These terrible things happen too much often to foreign girls, but tell me, what does this note has to do with Angel.”

“That’s what I intend to find out,” Malloy said, folding the translation and the original together and stashing them in the pocket of his jacket. “One other thing. Do you know the girl who wrote this note? Romanian chick, goes by the name of Kimberly or maybe Lia? Did a series called Naughty Teens?”

“I had a aunt named Lia,” Tabby said. “But she was a fat, religious woman with eight kids and more hair on her chin than I have on my pussy.” She turned on the hot water in the shower. “I think maybe I heard of Naughty Teens. Amateur, right? Me, I don’t get hired for the amateur shoots anymore.” She grinned and hefted her implants. “Two big reasons.”

“Well,” Malloy said. “Thanks for your help. And keep this to yourself, okay. At least until I can find Angel and sort this whole mess out.”

“You have my word,” Tabby said. “I hope you find the motherfuckers that do this to Angel.”

About half an hour later, Malloy and I sat together in a booth at Bob’s Big Boy on Riverside Drive in Burbank. I was feeling tired and surly and I had to piss. It never used to be a big deal, pissing. Now it was this source of major angst. I couldn’t go in the ladies room and didn’t want to go in the men’s room, so I just sat there and held it. I was pretty damn sick of the whole business and from where I was sitting I didn’t see any end in sight.

Malloy ate a burger. I tried to concentrate on Tabby’s translation of Lia’s letter while pushing uneaten chunks of fruit around on my plate.

Dear Lenuta,

Remember me, Lia Albu from the Saint Agnes Home for Orphan Girls? I am in terrible trouble with bad men. They bring me here to have job as nanny and then take my passport. They make me be prostitute and do porno to pay back for ticket but they claim so many expenses and I cannot get any money. They never leave me alone. They beat me and put drugs in me, but I am smart. I make this man Vukasin like me like a girlfriend, then I steal money and run away. Now I need your help, please, not for me but for my sister Ana. Remember little Ana? Before I run with money, I find out these bad men bring her too, at the end of this month the 27th. I read her name on a list and I know they lie to her like they lie to me. Please meet me in the food court of the Sherman Oaks Fashion Square Mall at noon on Monday. I can do nothing myself but I will give you money to buy Ana and five other girls, to save them from this hell that I have lived. If I call police the bad men will run and take Ana with them. This is only way. Please, Lenuta. I can trust no one else.

Lia

I set the letter aside and speared an anemic-looking cube of watermelon with my fork. I looked it over then put it back down uneaten. I wondered briefly why I had ordered this crummy fruit salad anyway. Honestly, there wasn’t much point in sticking to my diet, what with everything that had happened and was still happening. Who’s got time to fret over the size of your ass when you’re busy trying to keep it out of jail?

“What do you know about Zandora’s background?” Malloy asked around a mouthful of burger.

“She got married to an older American man through one of those mail-order bride services when she was just eighteen,” I told him. “I know this’ll come as a big shock, but she didn’t really love the guy. She just wanted to get out of Bucharest and into sunny southern California.”

“Shocking,” Malloy agreed, sipping his coffee and shaking his head.

“When she got here, she stayed married just long enough to become a citizen and then decided the best way to ditch the boring old hubby was to get into porn. Amazingly, the guy hung in there for way longer than any of us expected. I guess he figured she’d get over it. She didn’t and eventually he got over her. She got her divorce and he went back and got a new wife from a different country. Anyway she never mentioned that she was an orphan but she never talked about her family.” I shrugged. “Hey, I’m not an orphan and I never talk about my family either.”

“Why not?” Malloy asked. “You don’t get along?”

“That’s putting it mildly,” I said.

“Because of the videos?” Malloy asked. I shrugged.

“Nah,” I said. “I mean, that too, but it started way before that. I figured if I was going to be branded as the Whore of Babylon anyway...” I sipped my weak, awful coffee. “I might as well get paid for it.”

Malloy waited to see if I would say anything else. I didn’t. I wasn’t ready to open up that can of worms for him or for anybody. It was all ancient history and besides, there just wasn’t any point in trying to explain to a man what it feels like to be the neighborhood slut, the girl with the bad reputation who lets boys do things to her and doesn’t even try to get a ring.

Girls back home never could stand the fact that I was different. Before I had tits, I was just a misfit. An outcast troublemaker who liked to read and watch horror movies and thought Mary and Jesus and all the saints were just made up to make us behave in school. They teased me and made fun of me, but they didn’t really give me much thought. Once the hormones kicked in, that’s when I became a genuine threat. I wasn’t just that I loved sex, it was the fact that I didn’t use it as a bargaining chip. I didn’t want to trade it for a house and a mess of kids, I actually enjoyed it for its own sake, because it felt good. For that, the girls all hated me. Boys on the other hand, they loved me. That is until reality kicked in and they traded me in for a more sensible, wife-worthy model.

Me, I didn’t want to be anybody’s wife. I saw my own mother, drowning her regrets in gallon-bottle red wine and watching herself fade away to nothing, alone in the empty kitchen every single night, and I didn’t want to be like her. I saw my older sister Denise go from a vibrant, intelligent young woman who wanted to travel and dreamed of becoming an opera singer to an exhausted, fat and shrewish mother whose entire world was about diapers and dishes and laundry while her husband stayed out all night screwing girls like me. My brothers’ wives, my few friends and many enemies from high school, one after the other, the females around me sank into the tar of motherhood and debt and responsibility. The boys settled into dead end, blue-collar jobs and the girls raised their babies and waited for them to come home from the bars. Like victims in a slasher film, they all went down, one after another, until the only ones left standing were me and my best friend Stacy Cooney.

Stacy and I were the two biggest sluts in school. As fellow pariahs often do, we formed an immediate alliance. She was a redhead, a tiny freckled thing with mosquito-bite tits and a big mouth. Unlike me, she was a hard drinker from a long line of Irish drinkers and could put away more straight liquor in one night than most guys twice her size. If you measured her from the crown of her teased up mane of red Irish curls to the bottom of her spike-heeled boots, she was my height, around five seven. Fresh out of the shower with bare feet, she was more like four eleven. Maybe 100 pounds, tops. She was my partner in crime. The first girl I ever kissed. She used to call me her getaway driver. We were like Siamese twins for the last year of high school and the two years that followed. We had some wild times, me and Stacy. Stacy loved guys in bands and there wasn’t a venue in the state of Illinois where she couldn’t get backstage. It had been her idea to hook up with an L.A. band and go to Hollywood to make dirty movies. Party with rock stars on the Sunset Strip, buy matching convertibles and never have to wear winter coats over our sexy outfits ever again. We had everything all planned out. A band from Los Angeles was coming through that June. We would take only one bag each, whatever money we had saved, and our best high-heeled boots. It was going to be a grand adventure. Then Stacy got knocked up.

She had no idea who the father was, but as cheerfully sinful as she had always been, she was genuinely terrified of going to hell if she had an abortion. Within a week of the failed pregnancy test, she had some sap all set to marry her and take care of the kid. All our foolish dreams meant nothing now that there was a baby to think about. Something about the resigned look on her face when she told me it was best if we didn’t hang out anymore hurt worse than any guy who’d ever dumped me.

I packed my things. I had to get out, before having a baby and settling down into the tar started sounding like a good idea to me, too.

I went to that concert alone and I got myself backstage. I threw everything in my arsenal at the handsome singer and he took the bait even though I knew he could see the hook. He was a good lover and he was gracious enough to let me hitch a ride with the band back to Los Angeles. I won’t kiss and tell, but that band went on to become hugely famous, then widely reviled and ridiculed, and then famous again. The singer and I stayed in touch; we’re still good friends. Not Stacy. I haven’t heard from her since the day she told me we couldn’t hang out anymore. Come to think of it, her failed pregnancy test would now be old enough to do porn.

“You done?” Malloy asked, pulling me gently back into the present.

I looked down at the remains of my fruit salad.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Right,” Malloy said, pulling out his wallet and signaling the waitress.

That reminded me of something I’d meant to do since I woke up in Ulka’s dungeon. Something that would make me feel just a tiny bit less dependent on Malloy. Something that would make me feel a little more like me again.

I’d kept a storage locker on Haskell and Roscoe by the Budweiser plant ever since the Northridge earthquake back in ’94. I had just bought my house the year before and luckily it didn’t suffer any major damage, but that quake scared the piss out of me. Hence, this storage locker. A secret stash of just-in-case that no one knew about but me. Even though I’d had no idea anything like this could ever happen, I’d still had it in my head that I needed the place to be a secret, so I’d rented it under a fake name. That was back when it was still easy to do that kind of thing, before the whole 9 /11 business. I paid yearly in cash and never caused any trouble. Kept a fat combination lock on it so there was no key to lose. Just in case.

Inside the storage locker was exactly the sort of junk you expect to find in storage lockers. A few boxes. Some books. An old lamp. A trio of vintage hats. A blocky toy robot that used to light up but didn’t anymore. An ugly, floral-print easy chair. Nothing to make a casual observer look twice. Nothing boost-worthy. But the boxes, marked with red Sharpie letters that read things like “Hot Rollers,” “Kitchen” and “Photos,” actually contained bottled water, military MRE rations, a Swiss army knife, a flashlight, extra batteries, a first aid kit and several rolls of toilet paper.

If you actually sat in that ugly chair, you’d find it extremely uncomfortable. The chair’s lumpy seat cushion had a zippered cover that could be removed for cleaning. The zipper was rusty and cantankerous but when you unzipped it, you would find several items stuffed in with the crumbling yellow foam rubber. First, a Saran-wrapped stack of cash adding up to two grand. Enough to smooth things out in a emergency where bank access was impossible, but not more than I could afford to lose if anything should happen to compromise this place. Then, if you reached in deeper, you’d encounter a more recent, post-9 /11 addition: a scruffy old Smith and Wesson .40 caliber pistol that wasn’t nearly as nice as my stolen Sig and about which I knew very little other than a disreputable acquaintance’s assurance that it was untraceable. I had never fired it. I cleaned and oiled it when I came to rotate out the water, batteries or food but in my mind it was really nothing but another piece of my just-in-case juju. I had been thinking earthquake, riots, terrorists. Never in a million years did I imagine that I would be planning on using that gun to commit premeditated murder.

Because when you get right down to it, that’s what this was all about, wasn’t it? I mean, sure, I was going along with Malloy on this whole Nancy Drew song and dance, snooping around and trying to put the pieces together to figure out what the hell was going on, but what I was really doing was biding my time until the time came to even the score. I didn’t want to find myself face to face with Jesse or his boss without a way to make them pay for what they did to me.

I pulled out the box of bullets I had also stuffed into the chair cushion and carefully loaded the unfamiliar clip. I didn’t feel comfortable with the loaded gun in any of my pockets or down the waistband of my pants like some TV gangster, so I dug out a nylon duffel bag from the clutter and put the pistol, the bullets and the cash into one of its interior zippered pockets.

As I turned to go, I found my gaze traveling over the assortment of dusty items around me. It was just a bunch of useless junk, bought at thrift stores as set dressing to cover up the real purpose of the locker, but I realized in that moment that those things were the only personal things I owned that I still had free access to. I picked up the little robot with a hollow kind of feeling in my stomach. It was old, but not old enough to be collectable. Just some cheap plastic Korean thing with a squat boxy body and stubby square arms and legs. The colored lights in its chest were dark and useless and the shiny silver coating on the gray plastic was starting to peel around the joints. I remembered buying that robot at the Salvation Army store for a dollar. Now this cheap broken robot some kid didn’t want anymore was pretty much all I had left. Before I could think too much about it, I stuck the little robot in my duffel bag and got the hell out of there. I didn’t tell Malloy about the robot. Or the gun.