Snuff

3. Mr. 137

You know those days at the gym when you're bench-pressing six plates or you're one-arming your body weight in preacher curls, and one rep you're pumped and stoked, split-setting cable rows with wide-grip pull-downs, you're knocking out reps and sets fast as you can rack the plates—but then, the next set, you're toast. Wasted. Every curl or press is just more effort. Instead of powering through, you're counting, sweating. Panting.

It's not a sugar crash. Wouldn't you know it? The big shift is because some meathead at the front desk has shut off the music. Maybe you weren't listening listening, but when that music stops, working out turns into just plain work.

That's the same doom you feel, that drop in blood pressure, when the music shuts off, three in the morning, closing time at the ManRod or the Eagle, and you're left standing still unfucked, all alone.

That's the big letdown you'll notice about filming a movie: No underline music. No mood music. Down the hallway, in that room with Cassie Wright, you're not even getting wah-wah electric-guitar porno jazz. No, only after the editing, after looping any dialogue, then they'll add a music track to improve the continuity.

And wouldn't you know it? Bringing Mr. Toto here was a terrible plan.

But scoring a full bottle of Viagra. that just might pull me through.

Across the waiting area, the real-life genuine Branch Bacardi is talking to Mr. 72, that kid holding a bouquet of wilted roses. The two of them could be Before and After pictures of the same actor. Bacardi stands in red satin boxer shorts, talking, while one of his hands rubs his own chest in slow circles. In his other hand, he holds a blue throwaway razor. When his rubbing hand stops, his razor hand moves to the same spot, scraping away invisible stubble, the plastic razor scratching in the short, quick strokes you'd use to hoe weeds in a garden. Branch Bacardi keeps talking, never looking down as his rubbing hand roves to another spot, feeling, then pulling the tanned skin tight as the razor hand shaves the skin from every angle.

Right here: Branch Bacardi, star of The Da Vinci Load and To Drill a Mockingbird, The Postman Always Cums Twice and the first all-singing, all-dancing adult feature, Chitty Chitty Gang Bang.

Even indoors like this, Bacardi, Cord Cuervo, Beamer Bushmills—all the male dinosaurs of the adult industry still wear their sunglasses. They pat and smooth their hair. They're the generation of genuine stage actors; they studied their craft at UCLA or NYU, but needed to pay the rent between legitimate roles. To them, doing porn was a lark. A radical political gesture. Playing the male lead in The Twilight Bone or A Tale of Two Titties was a joke to put on their resume. After they were bankable legitimate stars, those early jobs would become fodder for anecdotes they'd tell on late-night talk shows.

Actors like Branch Bacardi or Post Campari, they'd shrug their tanned, shaved shoulders and say, "Hell, even Sly Stallone did porn to pay his bills…"

Before becoming a world-famous architect, Rem Koolhaas did porn.

Across the waiting room, a young lady wearing a stopwatch on a black cord looped around her neck, she stops beside Bacardi and writes the number «600» on his arm, the six at the top, a zero below it, the second zero below that, the way triathletes are numbered with a thick black felt-tipped pen. Indelible ink. Even as this talent coordinator writes down the outside of each bicep, writing «600» on one arm then the other, Bacardi keeps talking to the roses kid, his fingers probing his own ab definition for stubble, and the plastic razor hovering, ready.

The men who aren't eating potato chips are scratching away with plastic razors. They squeeze pimples. Or they squeeze tubes of goo into their palms, rub their hands together, and smear their faces, their thighs and necks and feet with a coat of brown. Bronzer. Their palms, stained brown. The skin around their fingernails, dirty dark brown. These actors stand with gym bags at their feet, stooping to hunt for tubes of hair gel, bronzer, plastic razors, folding pocket mirrors. They do push-ups, their tidy whities streaked brown. Walk into the only John you get for six hundred actors, a one-holer with a sink and a mirror, and the parade of buttocks have smeared the white toilet seat with layers and layers of brown. The sink smudged with bronze handprints. The white doorway clutched with a haze of brown finger- and palm prints from porn dinosaurs stumbling, blind behind sunglasses.

It's hard not to picture Cassie Wright on the set, sunk into a bed of white satin, by now clutched and smeared and smudged, darker and darker with every performer. Minstrel porn.

I take a pill.

The talent coordinator stops next to me and she says, "Sure, go blind, but don't come to us for a settlement."

I ask her, What?

"Sildenafil," the young lady says, and taps her felt-tipped pen against my hand holding the bottle of blue pills. "Get it hard, but if you overdose, watch out for nonarteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy."

She steps away. And I swallow another blue pill.

Talking to the roses kid, Branch Bacardi says, "They don't shoot the performers in order." Cupping a hand to lift one sagging pectoral muscle, he scrapes the razor across the skin hidden underneath, saying, "Officially, it's because they only got three Gestapo uniforms, a small, a medium, and a large, and they got to call dudes to fit the costumes." Still shaving, he looks up and off, watching a monitor mounted near the ceiling that's showing a porn movie. He says, "When it's your turn, don't expect that uniform to be dry, much less clean…"

In every corner of the ceiling, you have monitors hanging down, showing hard-core adult films. One is The Wizard of Ass. Another plays the classic Gropes of Wrath. All of them Cassie Wright's greatest hits. None of them any newer than twenty years old. The monitor Branch Bacardi's watching, it shows him a generation younger, riding Cassie Wright doggy style in World Whore One: Deep in the Trenches. That videotaped Branch Bacardi, his pecs don't sag and flap. His arms aren't red with razor burn and rashy with ingrown hairs. The hands gripping, the fingertips almost meeting around Cassie Wright's little waist, the cuticles aren't outlined with old bronzer.

The live Branch Bacardi, the roving hand and his razor hand stop as he stares at the monitor. With his razor hand, he slips the sunglasses off his face. He's still frozen; only his eyes move, snapping back and forth between the movie and the kid's face. Under his eyes hang crushed, crumpled folds of purple skin. Under his suntan, purple veins climb the sides of his nose. More purple veins climb his calves.

The young Branch Bacardi, who pulls out and blows his money shot all over those pink cunt lips, he looks exactly like the kid with the wilted roses. The kid the talent coordinator has marked number 72.

Number 72, cradling his roses, he stands with his back to the monitor, not seeing. This kid is watching the monitor behind Bacardi, the movie World Whore Two: Island Hopping, where Cassie Wright deep-throats the erection of a young Hirohito, intercut with shots of the Enola Gay approaching Hiroshima with its deadly cargo.

It was after World Whore Two won the Adult Video News award for best boy-girl-girl scene, where Cassie Wright teamed with Rosie the Riveter to suck off Winston Churchill, it's that year she took a long sabbatical from moviemaking. One full year.

After that, she went back to her regular schedule of two projects every month. She did the epic Moby Dicked. She racked up another AVN award for best anal scene in A Midsummer Night's Ream, which went on to sell a million units in its first year of release. Into her thirties, Cassie abandoned films in order to launch a brand of shampoo named "100 Strokes," a lilac shampoo packaged in a tall bottle that curved too much to one side. Stores hated to stock the tipsy bottles, and no one hit the Web site to place orders until she arranged product placements in two movies. In Much Adieu About Humping, the actress Casino Courvoisier slipped the bottle inside herself and demonstrated how the long, curved shape bashed the cervix for perfect deep-vaginal orgasms every time. The actress Gina Galliano did the same trick in The Twelfth Knight, and retail outlets couldn't keep 100 Strokes in stock.

But wouldn't you know it, Wal-Mart wasn't happy about being tricked into stocking sex toys in the same aisle as toothpaste and foot powder. There was a backlash. Then a boycott.

After that, Cassie Wright tried to stage a comeback, but the monitors here won't be showing any of those movies. Pony Girl films shot for the Japanese market, where women wear saddles and bridles and perform dressage routines for a man cracking a whip. Or fetish movies like Snack Attack, a genre called splosh films, where beautiful women are stripped naked and pelted with birthday cakes, whipped cream, and strawberry mousse, sprayed with honey and chocolate syrup. No, nobody here wants to see her last project, a specialty film called Lassie Cum, Now!

Among industry insiders, the rumor is that the movie we're shooting today will eventually be marketed as World Whore Three: The Whore to End All Whores.

The moment in World Whore One when the doggy scene shifts to three doughboys liberating a convent of French nuns in Alsace, as the new scene starts, Bacardi slips on his sunglasses. Without her habit and wimple, one of the nuns has a thong tan-line. None of the nuns have any pubic hair. Bacardi's fingers stroke the skin around one nipple, and the razor starts to scrape.

The talent coordinator with her stopwatch and black pen walks past me, saying, "Those are hundred-milligram pills, so look out for dizziness…" Counting on her fingers, she says, "… nausea, ankle and leg swelling.»

I take another pill.

Across the room, Branch Bacardi leans forward a little and reaches both hands around to the small of his back. With one hand, he stretches out the elastic waistband of his boxer shorts. With the other, he sticks the plastic razor inside the red satin to start shaving his butt.

The talent coordinator walks away, still counting.". angina," she says, "irregular heartbeats, nasal congestion, headache, and diarrhea…"

That year, the one full year that Cassie Wright took off at the height of her movie career, industry insiders rumored that she had a child. A baby. She got knocked up doing a reverse cowgirl, when Benito Mussolini lost his load inside her. You hear how she put the baby up for adoption.

Wouldn't you know it? Mussolini was played by Branch Bacardi.

And I take another pill.