Pornstar
by Louise Bak
[ fiction - october 02 ]
Please do not read this if you are likely to be offended.
Girls shook and squalled to hit-paradings on some video on Muchmusic. The lamp was not too strong. Besides giving little light to the room, it left a vaguely yellow color on the surface of the bed. I scanned unaging carpets, barely opened drapes, as I sat in the semidarkness of a hotel room at noon.
"Sorry, I'll be right with you sweetie," I heard from the washroom.
"That's okay," I said, while my feet in boots, compressed into a black parallelogram. There are different rooms, which can look virtually the same with their diminutive packages of tiny soaps and shampoos, I am used to completing with whips, bridles, and vibrating dolphins.
Hedge-hopping before me, his fat furry form, clipped the tops of my mental words. No, I don't know why I am visiting this traveling pornstar. I don't like sensing his belly and other voracious organ, swaying large in a sweatsuit. I don't want to touch his hairy back that abruptly liquefies, without the slightest exertion. I twitched as he approached me, as if he were spasmodically spreading who knows what pollutions or deliriums.
"C'mere" he said quietly.
"Well..." I began to capitulate to his easy manner, by sliding closer to him.
My mind was still lost in a train of hesitations, as he landed a kiss on my lips. I found my body loosening. Depending on where the timbre of his mustache landed on my upper lip, my pitches and clucks against him were sieved out for a matter of seconds.
"That's a good video," he said, "but I can't watch with you right beside me."
"Why not. It doesn't bother me," I said.
Turning to the TV, I noticed Shakira singing how lucky her breasts are so small and humble, they would not be mistaken for mountains. But catching him doing a fast skim of my body, I composed myself again on the chair.
"I am wondering if you would help me with my thesis, which deals with the collective erotic body. You have been in your share of gangbangs, and I know that you did the narration for Annabelle Chong's record-breaking gangbang. The one that started a whole pattern of gang bangs. What do you think of all of this?"
"I did a tape with fourteen women for seven hours. It was very tough to keep an erection for that length of time. I think it would be cool for you and Annabelle to get together. She has a lot to say, around Isis and the ancient roots of sex magic, and of course I will help a doll like you," he said. "How did you get involved with studying sexuality?"
He stopped still and touched my hand, but I drew it away. Not giving an unkind word, attentive, honest, loyal enough to this stranger seemed like the best way to proceed.
"I used to work in a dungeon," I said. "I liked the scenes that involved looners. You know, they watch people inflate balloons, they make out with them, bouncing on them."
"You mean they enjoy this?"
"Yeah, they like to put them between them and their partners during sex. They like the way they squeak, wiggle and smell. Like a lot of odd things, there are more men than women in to this, and they are sharply divided between the ones who pop and the one's who can't stand to see them burst."
"Ah," he said with raised eyebrows, "Let me show you something."
I went quiet at this.
He opened his travel bag, and whipped out his cock, a toy rooster. It was brightly colored, with a goofy expression to its overcurving beak.
"It's funny," I said, knowing this was probably a gift from one of his legions of porn fanatics. I had only recently done a scene with a furvert, who was obsessed with Meeko, the raccoon in Pocahontas.
He laughed. "That's much weirder than anything in porn."
"No, I think it has something to do with some kind of infantile recursion. Some of them even inject the toy with oil, so when their orifices up chuck, it looks like some sort of fuzzy, fluid-evacuating flesh."
"That's sick."
"Oh, I don't know. Its not any more odd than what goes on in porn. What is it with seeing two cocks in a woman's ass? The penises look like some kind of fat parasite, like some hybrid thing gorging on flesh. Are they going to up the number soon, when people get bored with that? Does it always have to be about erection potential?"
"Some people actually like it." Ruffling again in his bag, he pulled out a photograph of him, smiling alongside the right honorable Joe Clarke, and a menu from a steak house, that carried a gigantic meat item dedicated to him. I waited for something unexplained, but was amused to think of one of Canada's most conservative politicians, getting it on with one of the world's most notorious pornstars.
"Let me try this on you, I love doing this," he said.
"What do you mean?" I muttered a bit nervously.
He stood behind me and lifted my hair. I felt his belly receding a little in to the umbra of my back. With a steady intake of breath, he placed a long kiss on my neck, punctuated with what felt like a series of vampiric tacks. It ended with the same moderate applause I had felt earlier, a return to my hinge of reasonableness.
"Did that make you perk?" he asked.
I didn't answer, not wanting him to know he had succeeded for a second.
"I like doing that, and I never leave any nasty marks. Do you want to check?"
I grasped I was feeling a properly improper apprehension. "No, I don't need to look at it," I said. All the while I thought of my keloids acting up. One of those mortifying things my mother had said about Asian skin was, "Any form of depreciating molars on virgin flesh leaves massive scarring."
He shuffled back to the bed, saying "I think you have a lot going for you honey-bunny, "You have the most adorable face, the sweetest little body and the sexiest voice ever conceived. And you're Asian - the industry is always looking for more Asian girls."
A bit irritated with the cataloguing of my body, I wanted to shred myself like a secret document. I wanted to leave, to be something more than an object. Yet I was surprised at how easily unprotesting much of me became, in the hararet (steam room) of his eyes. I knew he had not intended to irritate me. A presumably educative conversation was probably what I really wanted, but was he pre-auditioning me for something else?
"What is your passion in life?" he asked.
"I write. I have a new book of poetry coming out soon," I offered.
"That's great. What sort of poetry do you write?"
"It's complex, using different languages. It deals with bodies, but mostly from the violent ends of it. It engages with things like the perpetuation of shame, bodily margins, parasitical invasions, militarism, ecological and spiritual crisis," I said.
He listened intently. Pulling out a CD of his collaboration with Kid Rock, he claimed he's been involved with a much simpler poetics. I knew that he commanded the adulation of a lot of oily rockstars, but I also figured I never wanted to be a groupie to either grouping. Britney was doing her burlesque bray on the TV, in her around the mountain wear. "I'm seriously worried for people who think she's a virgin." He rolled in to a downward dog position, before sitting on his knees. The bed slid along with him, like fast tongues in unison to a rock/porn star's organ.
My hand hovered over my book. Carefully, as if trespassing, knowing my work is not about taking or giving it doublewide, or other epic rondos of porn.
He watched me with eyes unclouded by any indication of lust, before asking, "have you ever performed your poems nude or in partial states of nudity?
The phone rang. "Hi, yeah, I can do the interview now," I heard, "but it has to be short."
I felt spared for a moment. I rubbed my left hand in the palm of my right, slowly acclimating myself to this proposition. On and on, reduced right-hand fingers rubbing reduced left-hand fingers, no hurry.
Half-listening to his phone conversation, I heard, "With Butt-man and all of those tapes, I never did anal on a girl that didn't want it."
I looked at the palms of my hands. They seemed to have shrunk slightly. Powers of suggestion? Maybe the lighting was playing tricks on me? Was it some fear of his genital dimensions? Maybe my sense of perspective was being altered, my body a jammed intersection of curious and indifferent molecules.
Catching him toward the end of the interview, he said jokingly in to the receiver, "Thanks man... Yes...always... I have a beautiful Asian girl in my bed now."
As he held the phone to me lips, I felt compelled to complete his frieze, by purring "hi". It made me feel like some kind of conspirator.
"I'm sorry about that, sweetie," he said, as he hung up the phone. "How about it? You can leave your tights on."
A flash of heat coated my cheeks and breasts as I felt his eyes descend on my book. I answered, trying to be credible. "I have taken off some of my clothes in the context of feminist performance, trying to get at the idea of shame. It's like stripping vocabulary, trying to construct collective crises in understanding around fear and love."
"I think it takes a lot of courage to expose yourself in any way. Will you read a poem for me, in any state you feel comfortable with? I'd like it if you would take off some of your clothing. That will likely give me a rise, but you can ignore that, it will go away if you want."
"I don't know if I would feel safe doing that."
"I don't want to make you feel uncomfortable," he cooed, with a penetrable mildness to his voice.
"Silent and lotus-postured under the maple tree, Buddha's bodhi sprouting in my body..." I began in to the poem. I began to pull my shirt off, revealing my bra.
"Oh, beautiful," he sank in to his listening position, several feet away from me, his body controlled and reverent.
I continued to read, not noticing how the uncovering of words, had thrummed my fingers toward my skirt. Unzipping it, my tights slipped a hint of flesh in the merciless light. A scrabble of panic touched me.
He gasped, but the soupy verdigris of his eyes tapped empathetically about me, not transgressing any erogenous zone.
I reached the line, "My hypochondriaxles roll panicked, at feelings of isolation in a folded city,"
when I noticed my skirt had been tugged to my knees. I couldn't understand why my fingers where allowing these unintentional physical combinations, to overtake my reading body. I took my time with the poem, worried that I had ceased to be me. The icy refrigeration of my hands persisted, even as I gripped the cup of boiling water.
Reaching for my skirt, he extends his hand to stop me. "Don't. The reading was beautiful. Sad... It seems like your poetry is very layered and pained. Dealing with sex through violation and shame. Where does that come from?"
"From things that haunt me, or things that touch me."
"Do you know how moving that was? I don't like to think that you've ever suffered."
"No, I don't think my writing is all about pain," I said. "I haven't had the easiest erotic life, but I don't think any one has. I find I can get exposed for the sake of poetry and performance, sometimes maybe because there is an element of trust-building in it, trust in your own body, untrapped from social authority or estrangement. It doesn't have to be about sex. What I just did, doesn't have to be about sex."
"I know."
"Do you want me to go?" I asked.
"No," he said. "C'mon sweetie. Let me look at you. You make me want to feed you." He pulled out some bread and fruit from a well-stocked fridge, while continuing to observe me.
I reached for my clothes, feeling a bit uncomfortable after my performance. I couldn't imagine sitting out a meal, in my underwear with a stranger, though he seemed increasingly nice. That home-stretched look of bra strap dangling a bit too low, and tights hanging a little too loose, projected an oddly naked look, when I was becoming suddenly shy.
"No, I want you to stay like that. We can just hang," he said.
I sank down at the corner of the bed. I watched his languid neighborly smile, emerging from atop jittery shoulders, while I gradually pictured the situation to myself. He picked up a water bottle from the fridge, before answering the ringing phone again. Half-gazing at me, he said, "Seeing the CN tower? Um, I don't know if I want to step out. I'm feeling kinda tired."
He continued to chat a bit with his promoter and I indulged in my customary reflection: what would be the most unpleasant thing you could do right now? Except this wasn't really a s/m scene, nor love or lust at first sight. Perhaps I was laboring under an embellished secret, when my desires were compressed in to one abstract limitation, freedom - there was energy, impudence and destruction in it. The smoke banked and thickened round me, and I began to cough.
"I want my tombstone to read how this was a humble guy, who lived and loved on his own terms, and kept the bills paid," he said before setting the phone down. "Are you okay?" he said. "I'm sorry about the phone. It keeps ringing. You know when you do interviews, they often become works of fiction, and you wonder about yourself."
"I think most people think you have a considerable ego."
"I've been called a lot of things, like ugly, revolting, goofy, reluctantly vain, but I think I'm really just a guy. I don't think much of most porn. Do you?
"Not really. It seems so hard, repetitive and clinical."
I watched as his face paused, relaxed, and he softened his voice. "I would say I have a big need to succeed, if I could..." the spaces between his fingers had begun to shiver on my hand. The pressure on my forearms was unerotically exact. I knew that he was thinking of me as possible material I can get. I thought for a moment, and realized I was agreeing myself in to a hard kiss. I unsteadied my feet in a kind of private confusion that seemed peculiarly young, and he backed away. I'd made him puzzled. I'd made him stop.
"Have you had a lot of lovers?" he asked.
"That's hard to answer. You've had sex with thousands of women. I don't think most people have done that. I've had a mixed group of partners, but I've only really loved a few. I don't think I would want to be in a position, where I have to just go for every available person or opportunity. I want some semblance of love, even if it is momentary."
"C'mere. I'm here for you sweetie." He took off his shirt.
Oh God, I thought silently. I couldn't stand his hair. It didn't stop. From the back of his skull and right down his neck it stayed thick, curling in to black wool. I imagined he was clammy and dirty. The sweat on him seemed to comb the hair out in punky misdirections. He began to approach steadily. I remained silent. After a few seconds of mismatched movements, I snuggled against the fur of his shoulder. I realized without intending to that I was breathing in the scent of his skin, which seemed unexpectedly like faint candy cigarettes. He lifted his arm with a final jingling brush at my spine.
When we parted, he smiled, in that odd, tight way that people do when they are nervous or embarrassed by someone's discomfort. "You don't look fine," he said.
"I'm okay." I didn't think I stood with a displeased countenance after the embrace, but I was flattered by his concern.
"Oh, that. Don't worry about it. I can make it go away if you want, but..." his body pressing against me again, drew me in to clear consciousness of his protruding panel. His hands caressed it upward, through his sweatpants, and I felt the gasping blur of his erection against my abdomen.
I glanced nervously at him, after flitting from his body. "Do you want something?"
"I don't want to hurt you. Do you like large dicks?"
"I don't really care about size, I don't like the thought of being stretched out," I said.
"I bet you have the most perfect, permanently virginal pussy, if you don't like size."
"I don't know about that. I suppose I haven't conditioned it enough for fisting."
"Don't you ever worry about getting pregnant one day? It's much easier to have a baby, when you get in to some really large, regular fucking."
"I don't doubt that. I can always use prosthetics though. I'm sure the father would comply with my need by then, or some other kind of stranger or fuck-buddy would come along."
"I could help you out, when you want some stretching," he said.
"By the time I do want a child, I might consider it," I said.
We both sank back across the sheets. He pulled his clothes off. His cock was still hard. The dark curls around the first inch around the base twitched, as the rest of it wheeled to a rest. His thigh balanced over mine, his arms needling around my torso, he pressed down on the head, trying to keep his cock from growing again. "You feel so soothing," he said.
"Thanks." I said. "You must be very tired, traveling and doing all this press."
"Yeah.
"Would you mind if I asked you something?" I said.
"Go ahead," he said, while shutting his eyes. He yawned.
"Do you have any fantasies that you haven't been able to achieve?"
"Yes, but it's kinda embarrassing. How about you?"
"I think some of my fantasies are very puzzling to me. I can generally admit that I like sex in spaces like streetcars, parks and schools -But there are these other things, I really don't know is healthy."
He had relaxed so much with his torso against me, I began to watch and listen to his snoring. His breathing seemed like the old fashioned vacuum flask for making hot thick soups. An oxtail was a wispy thing compared to what he rested against my belly. His breathing would shift repeatedly, embalming my nose with double diminutives -puh or peh.
"About that secret fantasy. I think I have a soft spot for people that are a bit ordinary and weak -even kinda geeky, hobbit-like or retarded people seem to interest me. I don't even like the word retard, but I feel myself drawn to an eroticism that is, I don't know, unconvincing, indeterminate, soft -oh, I don't think it's fair to romanticize people like this." I lay in bed, knowing if I fell forward, I would feel excitedly catched by his plush flesh. I watched his eyes slowly opening, ashine to the queasy halting of my own. Had he heard what I was saying?
He watched the silence that played over my features, before saying, "You feel so comforting. I won't forget this trip." He wound a strand of hair away from my face. "That was great."
"What?"
"What happened just now."
"You mean when you were sleeping?"
I have always wanted to know what it feels like to not get an erection, even though you're really turned on -just to stay soft for a long time, and have a girl like you, well, it was you, taking it in to your mouth. When you do porn or whatever, or when people think of you as a pornstar, you have to be ready all the time. Ready meaning hard, but it's a totally different feeling when you can just allow your body to relax. It's another kind of skill that you are never supposed to do.
"That happened?" I mused, curiously. "So, it's like enjoying a kind of pleasurable impotency."
"Yes, you can't possibly show some guy with a limp cock in a porn film, willing it to stay that way. It feels so amazing. Porn lies about pleasure sometimes. Usually when the girl is shown giving head, they show the image of the cock poking through her cheek. They think that looks good, like it's some sort of obvious filling act. But this isn't the most comfortable thing, when you have a really sensitive organ, thrusting between two rows of teeth."
"I guess because of the size of most porn actors, it would be nice on a purely pleasurable level to keep it soft sometimes, because the woman can conceivably get most of it in her mouth at the same time."
"It really is the way everything happens on the inside, that porn never gets," he said, stroking my hand gently. His neck folded sideways in to the pillow, he breathed sweetly in to my ear, "Do you feel comfortable with me? I'm big on cuddling."
"Yes," I said, feeling the mid-movement of his thigh, weighing over my hips.
"Do you have a boyfriend" he asked.
"Yes, and I try to be monogamous. I'm happy with him."
"That's very disappointing. But I think you can be more satisfied, if you allow yourself to be shared with others who care about you."
"Why? It's not like you don't have a girlfriend. How would she feel?"
"I don't like to call her that - I believe in emotional monogamy - but I don't think it's natural to not desire others, or care about them. I don't try to control her. No one can expect me to not feel something when I have a little cutie like you beside me."
"Oh yeah, you probably say things like that to all the girls you meet. You will probably forget me tomorrow."
"I won't forget. You have the most intriguing energy. This is not all about wanting."
I thought for a moment. A well-practiced line? It didn't matter. "I wouldn't want to be here, if I thought that about you."
"I am a softie, you know? I think it's interesting that you have some sort of interest in porn. Do you want me to set up a gang bang for you? How many men would you want?" he said, with a mawkish wisp of a smile.
"Oh, don't you think that if I had you, it would be surely enough?" I said playfully, though I was the one dozing off by then.
"Can't you just be my bear?" I said. "I don't want to..."
"To what? I want you to be my cuddlebunny."
Before I could finish that thought, I was nodding off. I heard tiny disturbances of cloth, where my tights were being pulled down. I felt him breathing and slightly warm along my instep. He pressed his abdomen forward against the resistance of my feet. His hands were conscientious. He was inquiring of my comfort all along my dream, before he whispered something I didn't have to hear.
