Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays Read online

  It takes an average of two hours and twelve minutes to traverse the Adult CES expo, counting an average of four delays for getting lost after a chicane turn or some baroque ceiling-high cheval glass designed to double the visual exposure of Heatwave Video’s display for Texas Dildo Masquerade gets you all turned around. Your correspondents are accompanied by Harold Hecuba and Dick Filth, who have very generously offered to act as guides and docents, and here is a random spatter of the things we see the first time we come in:

  A second-tier Arrow Video starlet in a G-string poses for a photo, forked dorsally over the knee of a morbidly obese cellphone retailer from suburban Philadelphia. The guy taking the picture, whose CES nametag says Hi and that his name is Sherm, addresses the starlet as “babe” and asks her to readjust so as to “give us a little more bush down there.” An Elegant Angel starlet with polyresin wings attached to her back is eating a Milky Way bar while she signs video boxes. Actor Steven St. Croix is standing near the Caballero Home Video booth, saying to no one in particular “Let me out of here, I can’t wait to get out of here.” 6 Adult-video stores all have a distinctive smell—a mix of cheap magnetic tape and disinfectant—and the Sands’ former parking garage is rank with it. Asian businessmen move through the aisles in dense graceful packs and are assiduously cheery and polite. A young guy in a full-color Frankenstein T-shirt is spraypainting cartoon flames on an actress’s breasts at the Sin City booth. The actress—an obscure one, not even Filth and Hecuba know her name—has normal-size breasts, and there’s not much of an audience. Producer/director Max Hardcore draws a way bigger crowd at the MAXWORLD booth, where one of his girls is squatting on the countertop masturbating with the butt of a riding crop. Max’s videos’ promotional posters have him carrying a girl in minishorts over his shoulder against the backdrop of various city skylines; the pitches at the bottom say “SEE PRETTY GIRLS SODOMIZED IN MANNERS MOST FOUL! SEE CUM-SPLATTERED GIRLS TOO STUPID TO KNOW BETTER!” Max is a story all to himself, according to Harold Hecuba. D. Filth and a porn executive dressed entirely in Campbell Nightwatch plaid are smoking cigars and keep holding their cigars up together and comparing the ash to see which one has the cleanest burn. A lot of the industry males and even some of the starlets are also smoking cigars. 1998 is definitely the Year of the Cigar. The starlets are all in either extremely formal cocktail dresses or else abbreviated latex/vinyl/ Lycra ensembles. Heels are uniformly sharp and ultrahigh. Some of the starlets are so heavily made up they look embalmed. They tend to have complexly coiffed hair that looks really good from 20 feet away but on closer inspection is dry and dead. Someone who is either sometime-performer Jeff Marton or “Bizarro-Sleaze” filmmaker Gregory Dark is doing sleight-of-hand tricks with his trademark fedora. 7 Whoever he is, he has a goatee. Harold Hecuba also has a goatee; Dick Filth has more like a soul patch. H.H. and D.F., longtime industry journalists, know everybody here and keep getting stopped and drawn into conversations. (These delays, during which yr. corresps. sort of stand there awkwardly at the edge of the conversation and try to look around as if they too know people here and are waiting only to spot them in the crowd before they go off and get into their own involved conversations, have not been included in the 132-minute Adult CES-traversal average.) This year, a good 75 percent of the males in and around the porn industry appear to be sporting variants of the goatee. 8

  Next to the Outlaw Video booth, a starlet in a gold lamé spaghetti-strap gown, chewing gum and blowing large blue bubbles, is being videotaped by a disabled fan whose camera and parabolic mike are bolted to the arm of his wheelchair; the starlet is pointing to the tattoos on her left arm and appears to be explaining the origin and context of each one. At the Vivid Video multibooth complex, 9 Ms. Taylor Hayes has what is probably the longest autograph-and-flesh-press line in the entire Sands garage. Taylor is major-league pretty—she looks like a slightly debauched Cindy Crawford—and an oversize monitor suspended from the ceiling over the Vivid area plays clips of her scantily clad and dancing amid dry-ice fumes. There’s a berm of boxed videos on the floor by the counter and a huge man with a visor and handheld credit card machine on Taylor’s right flank as she greets each fan like a long-lost relative. According to Dick Filth, Taylor is both a genuinely nice person and a consummate pro.

  The booth for XPlor Media—a company known for its “Southern Belles” video series and ORGY FOR WORLD PEACE Website—is arresting because all the execs at XPlor seem to be under 25 and the booth’s atmosphere is that of a fraternity party in its third straight day. One young bald guy is unconscious in a fetal position on the counter, and some wag has glued all sorts of feathers and flaccid plastic two-headed dildoish things to his skull. XPlor’s owner-auteurs are two brothers, trust-fund babies from a Connecticut suburb of NYC. Their names are Farrel and Moffitt Timlake. Farrel, who wears twelve-hole Doc Martens and cargo pants and what’s either a very light parka or very heavy sweatshirt with a hood that stays up at all times, is a particular cause célèbre at the ’98 CES because he’s apparently a friend of the two guys who do South Park, and these guys are rumored to be in Vegas and to possess tickets to Saturday’s Awards banquet. 10

  Everyone without exception is sweating. At all but a few of the booths, contract starlets treat the fans with the same absent, rigid-faced courtesy that flight attendants and restaurant hostesses tend to use. You can tell how bored the performers are by the way their faces light up when they see someone they know. Well over half of the industry’s current superstars are in this huge room. 11 The infamous T.T. Boy is here, standing alone with his trademark glower, the Boy who is rumored to bring a semiautomatic pistol with him to the set and who was featured in a 1995 New Yorker article that was full of lines like “A porn shoot is an intricately delineated ecology.” Mr. Vince Vouyer (sic) is on hand, as are Seth Gecko, Jake Steed, Serenity, Missy, and Nick East. Here is the ageless Randy West, who looks just the way a surfer would look if that surfer were also a Mob enforcer, with his perennial tan and hair like frozen surf. Mr. Jon Dough—winner of AVN’s coveted Best Actor/Video statuette in both ’96 and ’97—alternates between various booths, wearing his customary expression of having psychologically evolved to the point where he’s so incredibly cool and detached that life is one long yawn. Here also is Mark Davis, far and away the most handsome of the current males, a near-double for Gregory Harrison of the old Trapper John series except for Davis’s ultrashort psych-patient haircut (plus goatee).

  And 20-year veteran Joey Silvera is at this year’s CES, though mostly in his capacity as an auteur: Silvera now directs Evil Angel’s popular “Butt Row” video series. 12 Following the lead of pioneers like John Leslie and Paul Thomas, most of today’s top male stars now also direct (and, per the store boxes, “Present”) their own line of videos, e.g. “Tom Byron’s Cumback Pussy” series, “Jon Dough’s Dirty Stories,” the eye-popping Rocco Siffredi’s “[Various European Cities] By Night” line, etc. The So-and-So Presents series seems to be an industry trend, like cigars and goatees.

  It is difficult to describe how it feels to gaze at living human beings whom you’ve seen perform in hard-core porn. To shake the hand of a man whose precise erectile size, angle, and vasculature are known to you. That strange I-think-we’ve-met-before sensation one feels upon seeing any celebrity in the flesh is here both intensified and twisted. It feels intensely twisted to see reigning industry queen Jenna Jameson chilling out at the Vivid booth in Jordaches and a latex bustier and to know already that she has a tattoo of a sundered valentine with the tagline HEART BREAKER on her right buttock and a tiny hairless mole just left of her anus. To watch Peter North try to get a cigar lit and to have that sight backlit by memories of his artilleryesque ejaculations. 13 To have seen these strangers’ faces in orgasm—that most unguarded and purely neural of expressions, the one so vulnerable that for centuries you basically had to marry a person to get to see it. 14 This weirdness may account for some of the complex emotional intercourse taking place between the performers and
fans at the Adult CES. The patrons may leer and elbow one another at a distance, but by the time the men get to the front of the line and face the living incarnation of their VCR’s fantasy-babe, most of them turn into quivering goggle-eyed schoolboys, sheepish and salivaless and damp. The same thing evidently happens at the hundreds of strip clubs all over the country where porn starlets appear as Featured Dancers (for five figures a week, according to Filth) and do photos and autographs after the show:

  “Most of these guys become incredibly nervous when I come up to them,” veteran starlet Shane has explained. “I’ll put my arms around a guy and his whole body will be trembling. They pretty much do whatever I tell them to do.” The whole industry, now, has this oddly reversed equation—the consumers are the ones who seem ashamed or shy, while the performers are cocky and smooth and 100 percent pro.

  It is no longer the 1980s, and the Meese Commission mentality that led to a major crackdown on video porn is long gone. Federal task forces and PTA outrage are now focused on the Internet and kiddie porn. But today’s adult industry is still hypersensitive about what it perceives as fascist attacks on its First Amendment freedoms. A specially prepared trailer now runs before many higher-end adult videos, right between the legal disclaimer on the product’s compliance with or exemption from 18 U.S.C §2257 and ads for phone services like 900-666-FUCK. Against shots of flowing flags and the Lincoln Memorial, a voiceover says stuff like:

  Censorship goes against our Bill of Rights and the founding principles of this country. It is an attempt on the part of the government to legislate morality and to stifle free expression. 15 This new, “legal” morality is dangerous to all Americans. Vote for those who believe in limiting government intrusion into your personal affairs. Vote against government control of your life and home. Vote against censorship. Only you, the People, can keep the American ideal intact.

  These trailers always say they’re sponsored by either the Adult Video Association or something called the Free Speech Coalition. Both organizations (and the extent to which the two are separate is unclear) are basically industry PACs. Porn, in other words, has taken the political lessons of the ’80s to heart; it is now a hard-lobbying political force no less than GM or RJR Nabisco.

  Feminists of all different stripe oppose the adult industry for reasons having to do with pornography’s putative effects on women. Their arguments are well-known and in some respects persuasive. But certain antiporn arguments in the 1990s are now centered on adult entertainment’s alleged effects on the men who consume it. Some “masculists” believe that a lot of men get addicted to video porn in a way that causes grievous psychic harm. Example: An essayist named David Mura has a little book called A Male Grief: Notes on Pornography and Addiction, which is a bit New Agey but interesting in places, e.g.:

  At the essence of pornography is the image of flesh used as a drug, a way of numbing psychic pain. But this drug lasts only as long as the man stares at the image… . In pornographic perception, each gesture, each word, each image, is read first and foremost through sexuality. Love or tenderness, pity or compassion, become subsumed by, and are made subservient to, a “greater” deity, a more powerful force… . The addict to pornography desires to be blinded, to live in a dream. Those in the thrall of pornography try to eliminate from their consciousness the world outside pornography, and this includes everything from their family and friends or last Sunday’s sermon to the political situation in the Middle East. In engaging in such elimination the viewer reduces himself. He becomes stupid.

  This kind of stuff might sound a little out-there, maybe, until one observes the eerie similarity between the eyes of males in strip clubs or stroke parlors and the eyes of people in their fifth hour of pumping silver dollars into the slot machines of the Sands’ casino, or maybe until one’s seen firsthand the odd kind of shock on the faces of CES patrons seeing performers now “in the flesh,” complete with chewing gum and chin-pimples and all the human stuff you never see—never want to see—in films.

  Maybe just a little bit more here on the whole scene at the Adult CES, which is a lot more of a rub-elbows-type venue than the stylized Awards ceremony is going to end up being… . Mr. Harold Hecuba is deep in conversation with a marginal porn producer about one of his performers’ being sidelined with something called a “prolapsed sphincter,” which condition yr. corresps. decline to follow up on in any way. We are standing just west of a staff writer for Digital Horizons who’s dropped by to scope out the legendary scene in here again this year and is telling two presumed other tech writers that being around porn people always makes him feel like he’s been somehow astrally projected onto a cocktail napkin. It is also roughly now that Ms. Jasmin St. Claire is making an appearance at the Impressive Media booth in order to spell the starlet behind the counter, who is limping to the booth’s rear area; she (i.e., the limping starlet) has (reportedly) had to be sprayed with silicon to fit into her pants. The crowd at the Impressive Media venue immediately starts to enlarge. Jasmin St. Claire is wearing a red vinyl jacket-and-miniskirt ensemble. A porn starlet entering any kind of room or area has a distinctive energy about her—you turn your head to look even if you don’t seem to want to. It’s like watching a figure from a pinball machine illustration or high-concept comic book step out into 3-D and head your way. It turns out really to be possible to feel as though your eyeballs are protruding slightly from their sockets. What makes the whole thing so weird is that Jasmin St. Claire isn’t even all that pretty, at least not today. Her hair is dyed black in that cheap unreal Goth way, and she is so incredibly heavily made up that she looks like a crow. (She is also somewhat knock-kneed, plus of course has the requisite Howitzer-grade bust.) Ms. St. Claire is being escorted to the Impressive booth by two large men whose expressions are describable only as mug-shottish. This is another thing about porn starlets—they’re never alone. They’re always accompanied by at least one and sometimes as many as four flinty-eyed males. The impression is that of a very expensive thoroughbred being led onto the track under a silk blanket.

  FYI, Ms. Jasmin St. Claire’s cult-celebrity status at the ’98 CES stems from her having broken the “World Gang Bang Record” 16 by taking on 300 men in a row in Amazing Pictures’ 1996 World’s Biggest Gang Bang 2. Since most of these 300 men were amateur porn-fans who’d had only to fill out an application and produce an HIV all-clear from the DPH, she now enjoys an almost legendary populist appeal—“the People’s Porn Star”—and an enormous serpentine line of fans with cameras and autographable memorabilia has formed at the Impressive booth, which line Ms. St. Claire appears for the moment to be ignoring, because she and H. Hecuba, having exchanged double-cheek kisses, are now deep into some kind of tête-à-tête above the sockless Docksiders of the unconscious bald kid, who’s (the kid has) evidently been carried or trundled by pranksters unknown from the XPlor counter (right next door) to this one. Dick Filth—after your correspondents have remarked on how it’s kind of heartwarming that everyone in the porn industry all seem to be friends, even critics and performers—dishes an involved anecdote about how Jasmin St. Claire apparently once actually tried to strangle Harold Hecuba at an industry soirée a couple years ago, an anecdote which, if you’re interested, appears as FN 17 just below. Twenty feet away, over at XPlor, Mr. Farrel Timlake has meanwhile produced what is alleged to be the prototype and world’s only authorized Kenny® Action Figure from the upcoming South Park merchandising line—fourteen inches tall, kind of heavy for a doll, w/ hood up and face obscured (not unlike F. Timlake’s own hood and face)—and is entertaining some of the IM crowd’s spillover by manipulating the doll’s limbs to simulate its “tok[ing] a bone.”

  Not unlike urban gangs, police, carnival workers, and certain other culturally marginalized guilds, the US porn industry is occluded and insular in a way that makes it seem like high school. There are cliques, anticliques, alliances, betrayals, conflagratory rumors, legendary enmities, and public bloodlettings, plus involved hierarchies of popular
ity and influence. You’re either In or you’re not. Performers, being the industry’s fissile core, are of course In. Despite their financial power, studio execs and producers are not very In, and directors (especially those who’ve never undergone the initiation of having on-camera sex themselves) are less In than the performers. Film reviewers and industry journalists are even less In than execs; and nonindustry journalists are way, way non-In, almost as low-caste as the great mass of porn fans themselves (for which fans the Insider term is: mook18).

  The foregoing is meant to help explain how exactly your correspondents ended up in porn titan Max Hardcore’s personal suite at the Sahara and got to hang out in the suite’s living room with Max, certain of his crew, porn starlets Alex Dane and Caressa Savage, and two B-girls—which is to say that it was actually Harold Hecuba and Dick Filth who were invited to hang out in the suite on Friday afternoon, but yr. corresps. clung almost like papooses to their backs, and the burly MAXWORLD Production Assistant wasn’t quick enough about slamming the door.

  So yr. corresps. were, for a couple hours, at least logistically speaking, In.

  For a regular civilian male, hanging out in a hotel suite with porn starlets is a tense and emotionally convolved affair. There is, first, the matter of having seen the various intimate activities and anatomical parts of these starlets in videos heretofore and thus (weirdly) feeling shy about meeting them. But there is also a complex erotic tension. Because porn films’ worlds are so sexualized, with everybody seemingly teetering right on the edge of coitus all the time and it taking only the slightest nudge or excuse—a stalled elevator, an unlocked door, a cocked eyebrow, a firm handshake—to send everyone tumbling into a tangled mass of limbs and orifices, there’s a bizarre unconscious expectation/dread/ hope that this is what might happen in Max Hardcore’s hotel room. Yr. corresps. here find it impossible to overemphasize the fact that this is a delusion. In fact, of course, the unconscious expectation/dread/hope makes no more sense than it would make to be hanging out with doctors at a medical convention and to expect that at the slightest provocation everyone in the room would tumble into a frenzy of MRIs and epidurals. Nevertheless the tension persists, despite the fact that the actresses are obviously tired and disassociated from the day’s CES, 19 plus, it emerges, somewhat sore—it turns out that Max Hardcore is shooting one of his “Gonzo” porn spectaculars right here at the 1998 Consumer Electronics Show, using the CES as a hook and backdrop, and the girls have been alternating CES booth-duty and riding-crop shenanigans with a tight and SS-intensive filming schedule. (Max, being a firm believer in the fait accompli method of filmmaking, has not yet gotten around to chatting with the CES’s administration about his featuring the world’s biggest consumer-tech tradeshow by name in a “SEE PRETTY GIRLS SODOMIZED IN MANNERS MOST FOUL” video.)