CHAPTER SIX

Standing in LAX, Will watched luggage pass slowly on the carousel. He’d tried to sleep on the plane, but that hadn’t worked out. All he wanted to do now was get to the hotel at which he and Nikita were staying, make a few phone calls to reassure himself that all the arrangements for the photo shoot were in place, and pass out.

His bag crawled into view. He nearly popped his shoulder pulling it off the carousel, and headed for the car rental counter. Nikita was on a later flight, so there was time to pick up the Toyota Camry the company’d reserved for him. With that done, he sat in a bank of chairs close to Nikita’s gate, and slipped his iPod headphones into his ears. He called up some roots dub, and was asleep within five minutes.

He lurched awake about an hour later. The music was over, and the announcement of the imminent arrival of Nikita’s flight had filtered into his brain, startling him into consciousness, or something like it. Pulling the iPod from his pocket, he punched up Slayer’s Reign In Blood, which gave him enough energy to rise and stagger toward the arrival area, to await his contest winner.

He watched the passengers trundle from the gate and down the hallway toward him, all in their faded T-shirts and baggy shorts, their sunglasses and baseball caps and sneakers. At first it was a rumbling herd, filling the space from one wall to the other – fat, food-smeared kids howling with joy or roaring with boredom and their fatter, sweatier but slightly less food-smeared parents trying and failing to clout and bellow their hideous offspring into some kind of momentary submission, at least long enough to get the luggage and hit the goddamn road.

There were some yuppies, too, and hipsters, each group trying to be less interested in the situation than the other. It was like a dance contest wherein the first person to actually respond to the music would be disqualified.

There were all sorts of people on the plane from Cleveland to L.A., in fact. As the flood slowed to a trickle, realization dawned in Will that the only personality type left unrepresented was the “Russian amateur photo contest winner.” He looked around, wondering if Nikita’d gotten off the plane without him noticing. Perhaps she was standing to one side, searching for him as frantically as he was searching for her. No such luck. She wasn’t there. It was possible her appearance had changed radically since the photos from which he’d memorized her face had been taken – like, maybe she’d grown a whole new head – but the fact that there were no single women passengers anywhere within his field of vision made the point kinda moot.

Will remained at LAX for an hour, watching the gate through which Nikita’s plane – or anyhow, the plane Nikita was supposed to have been on – had voided itself. Maybe she’d stopped at the bar for a few drinks, and would shortly stagger down the carpet to meet him, slightly debilitated but still definitely usable.

No such luck. Maybe she’d jettisoned herself through the airplane’s toilet mid-flight. Maybe she, and only she, had been taken by the Rapture. But the most likely possibility was the one Will was refusing most adamantly to entertain. She’d never gotten on the plane in the first place. Sometime between their last phone conversation and the present agonizing, endless wait, Will had lost his charge. She wasn’t coming...and he was utterly fucked.

Once he’d faced these connected facts, Will knew what he had to do. Feeling every eye in the place burning into his back like he’d just come out of a men’s room stained from waist to knee with shit, he walked to the airline ticket counter to find out when the next flight from Cleveland to L.A. was. It wouldn’t arrive until the next morning. There was nothing left to do but make the call.

Four rings got him an answering machine. “Nikita, this is Will Carrey from Swinger magazine. I’m here in L.A., and you’re not, and frankly, I’m a little disturbed by that. I’m hoping you’re on a later flight. Ron, if you get this, please call me right away and tell me where Nikita is. If you get this message, Nikita, it means you’re not on the way to California, which is gonna cause me major problems. In either case, I hope someone will call me and let me know what’s going on.” He left his cell number, which he’d given her days earlier, and hung up. Then he left the airport, got into the Camry, and began the drive to his hotel.

He wouldn’t call Victor until he was absolutely sure Nikita wasn’t coming. It was still possible she’d been delayed. Maybe something had happened with the baby. He didn’t know. Anyway, it was already after office hours in New York. That conversation, if he had to have it at all, wouldn’t happen until the morning.

It wasn’t until he was on the freeway that he remembered to check his office voice mail. He’d been so pissed and frantic, it had completely slipped his mind. He dialed the number, punched in the password, and waited. There were no messages. He didn’t know where Nikita was, and she wasn’t trying to tell him. Fuck.

There was a pizza place next to the hotel. Will believed that the further you got from New York, the worse the pizza was bound to be, but they were open late, so he had three slices. They were terrible. The hotel room was nicer than his apartment, though. He threw his bag in its single chair and slowly burrowed into a fitful, unhappy sleep.

The next morning, he called Nikita again. Just like the night before, the phone rang four times before the machine picked up. But halfway through the message, her husband came on the line. “Hello?”

“Ron, this is Will from Swinger. Is Nikita there?”

“No...no, she’s, um, not.” A pitifully obvious lie.

“Ron, put Nikita on the line, please.”

“I don’t know if she wants to talk to you, Will.”

“I’d like to hear it from her.”

Long pause.

“All right, hold on.”

There was another long pause before she came to the phone. She didn’t speak, but Will could hear her breathing.

“Nikita, what’s going on? Why haven’t you come out here?”

“I am sorry, Will. I thought about it a lot. I wanted to do the shoot. But I don’t want that any more.”

He didn’t believe her. “Ron told you not to do it, didn’t he.” It wasn’t a question – he was sure that was exactly what had happened.

“No, he didn’t. It was my decision. I’m sorry, Will.”

“You know, this puts me in a bad position,” Will said, but she’d already hung up. “Fuck,” he said to the empty room.

He dialed her number again. It rang four times. The answering machine picked up. Nobody interrupted it.

Fuck.

Well, that was it. She wasn’t coming. Swinger had set up a shoot, bought the plane tickets, and booked the hotel, all for nothing.

Fucking fantastic.

The worst part was, she was lying. He could hear it in her voice. Okay, maybe she believed it was her decision, at least partly, but Will knew she’d been pressured. He knew because he’d spoken to Ron two days before she was supposed to get on the plane. Ron, that fucking bastard.

He’d been sitting at his desk, chewing on a bagel, when a voice mail had come in that turned it tasteless in his mouth. He’d swallowed hard, and dialed the phone.

“Hi, Ron, it’s Will,” he’d said, hiding his nervousness. “Sorry I missed your call. What seems to be the problem?”

“Hi, Will. Listen. I. Um. I don’t want to, you know, be any trouble, but...I was wondering about one thing.”

“What’s that?”

There was one of Ron’s patented pauses. “Well...”

“Listen, Ron, there’s absolutely nothing to worry about. Tell me what the problem is and we’ll figure out the solution. Does Nikita not want to do the shoot anymore?”

“No, no,” Ron had told him. “She’s really excited, and I’m fine with it. Except there’s one thing, and I’m not sure how to phrase it.”

Will’d forced himself to laugh, to reassure the other man. “Ron,” he said, “nothing you can say to me will come as a shock. Trust me on that. What’s up?”

There was another goddamned pause, even longer than the first. Finally, Ron had just said it. “I don’t want her performing with black guys.”

“Okay,” Will’d answered calmly.

“Really?”

“Well, I mean, it’s okay with us, but have you talked to Nikita about it? Because that’s what she specifically requested, you know.”

“I know,” Ron’d said. “It’s a big thing with her, to have sex with black guys, especially more than one at a time. And it’s something we do in our private lives. But...I’m not sure it’s the way I want her to make her debut on video.”

“And you haven’t discussed it with her?”

“Well, no. I wanted to come to you first.”

“I really think you should talk to your wife about it,” Will’d answered. “I mean, she’s the model, and you understand we’ve got to make her happy. Otherwise, we don’t get a good set, and then nobody’s happy. You see what I mean?”

“Yes, but...”

“Don’t get me wrong, Ron. I don’t blame you for having a problem with it. If it was my wife, I’d probably feel the same way. But she’s already expressed this interest, and she told me, on the phone, that you’d be okay with it. So I think this is definitely a conversation that you two need to have, before she’s in L.A. on her own, with nobody there to offer a second opinion. You know what I mean?”

“Yeah,” said a subdued and unhappy Ron. “Yeah, I guess you’re probably right.”

“I know I’m right, Ron.” Recalling it, Will couldn’t believe he’d been able to sound so much like a used car salesman. Jesus fuck. “So here’s what we’re gonna do. I’m gonna proceed from the assumption that you’re gonna talk to Nikita about this, and that together, the two of you are gonna reach some kind of compromise that makes you both happy. Because as long as she’s doing a hardcore pictorial, it doesn’t matter all that much to anybody here at Swinger what color the guys are. After all, Nikita’s the whole point of the thing, right? Therefore, the most important factor is her happiness. Right?”

“Right.” Ron had sounded a little better. Anyway, that was what Will had told himself. Last-minute panic was the one thing he didn’t need, from Ron or Nikita.

“Okay,” Will had said then, desperate to wrap this nightmare conversation up and take some time to think, alone. “I’ll tell you what, Ron. You talk to Nikita, and I’ll call you back tomorrow to make sure everything’s been settled. In the meantime, I won’t do anything. I won’t book the photographer, the plane flight, or the hotel, and I won’t tell the accounting department to cut Nikita’s check. I’ll wait until I know you two are 100 percent on board. Okay?”

This was his final gambit. If Ron thought the whole thing, including the awarding of the prize money, was being held up while he got over his fear of a black penis, he’d cave in a lot faster, had been Will’s logic. Besides applying economic pressure, all he had to do was convey the false impression that he gave a flying fuck who Nikita wound up screwing. He didn’t, of course. He cared about getting her to L.A., and on camera, and getting somebody’s dick inside her. Whose it is, honestly, was the least of his problems.

There were dozens of guys who could have been booked, or canceled, on a day’s notice. Ron wouldn’t be accompanying his wife to L.A., either. Once she’d gotten her ass down there, Will and the photographer could have let her gang-bang black guys all day, filming and photographing every second of it, and as long as Nikita signed the model release, and cashed the check, that would have been that. But Will had felt, and still felt, that it was always better to do things in a non-confrontational way.

“Okay,” Ron’d said, finally. “I’ll talk to her, and call you back in the morning.”

“Great,” Will’d replied. “Listen, thanks for calling me. I don’t want either of you to be uncomfortable with any aspect of this situation.” Thinking back to a telemarketing job he’d had in high school, he’d drenched his voice in sincerity. Then hung up.

Ron wasn’t a racist. He let his wife fuck black men as part of their swinging lifestyle. But he didn’t want her doing it on camera, at least not in her debut video. And Will understood his feelings.

There was so much baggage attached to race in American culture that it was difficult to conceive any way things could get worse. But porn really went the extra mile.

Interracial porn (for the purposes of this discussion, porn featuring blacks and whites – Latinas were more assimilated, and Asian girls had their own well-documented fetish niche) boiled every stereotype down to its vilest essence. Blacks were always caricatured sexual animals, the men dressed in gang-banger costumes or prison jumpsuits, the women wearing standard slut/hooker gear, but in a context wildly divergent from that of “white” porn.

Where all-black porn videos were concerned, the titles told the story. Ghetto Booty. Black Street Hookers. Bangin’ In Da Hood. Ghetto Cheerleader Tryouts. Sometimes, like in the latter example, there was a tinge of surreal hilarity. But mostly, they were just bleak and vaguely depressing.

Will had never watched an all-black video, so he didn’t actually know how much of this repugnant attitude bubbled to the surface in the sex scenes. But even if it was only a small percentage of the total package, he didn’t understand how black people could stand to watch black porn. How could they get off on their own degradation? It wasn’t like this was a small chunk of the overall industry, the way rough-sex tapes were a niche market, shelved right next to soft couples’ porn. This was all he saw. So it made him wonder how they must feel, looking at it all. Maybe it was like what living in a time when blackface was popular might have been, or felt like. Or maybe they weren’t even surprised by it, in the context of gangsta rap culture.

When whites and blacks were paired on video, there was a chance for things to be a little better. Usually, though, they were worse. Each volume of a long-running, popular series called The Gang-Bang Girl featured white girls fucking a dozen or so guys, black and white united in lust, in situations like “platoon of soldiers and hooker” or “prison nurse giving physicals to the convicts.” Another company put out the White Trash Whore series, which again featured white girls fucking both black and white guys, though in smaller groups – two or three at a time, rather than ten or twelve. One of the White Trash Whore tapes had a photo on the back of the box, showing four black guys gathered around a wide-eyed white girl, having their cocks sucked. The caption read, “Daddy was right – never trust black men.”

Very few upmarket companies were willing to feature black-on-white sex scenes in their videos. Most of the biggest porn stars, like Jenna Jameson or Asia Carrera, refused go near a black dick on camera. So it was hard to fault Ron for not wanting his wife to make her hardcore debut in an interracial scene. It was all too easy for Will to imagine Nikita attempting to have a future with one of the bigger companies, only to wind up doing White Trash Whore tapes for two years, and having even that trickle of work dry up once every buck stud in the San Fernando Valley had emptied his nuts on her face. If Ron was looking for his wife to have a long-term career – five, maybe even ten years – and Will had to assume he was, starting out interracial wasn’t the wisest strategy, not by a long shot.

Thinking about all this didn’t make Will hate Ron any less. In fact, he very much felt like driving his rented Camry to the shitty part of Ohio and beating the bastard to death with a table leg.

It was about noon in New York. Halfway hoping Victor’d already left for lunch, thus permitting communication through an exchange of voice-mail messages, Will called the Swinger offices. Luck was not on his side.

“Hey, Will. What’s going on? How’s everything out there?”

“Not good.” He told the whole story, from his arrival at LAX to Nikita hanging up on him.

“Hold on a minute,” Victor said, when Will was finished. When the line opened up again, they were on speakerphone and Carlo had joined the conversation. This was not good.

“What the fuck happened, Will?”

“I don’t know, Carlo. When I talked to her yesterday morning, everything was fine. She was looking forward to the shoot. She was talking to me about setting her up to make videos out here.”

“Well, nobody talked to her but you, Will. So nobody knows what went on between you two. If you said something to fuck this deal up, you’re the only one who knows about it.”

“Come on, Carlo. There’s no way I could have known she was going to flip out like this. I don’t even know if it was her – it might have been her husband.”

“Well, you know what? I don’t care who it was. All I know right now is, you fucked up. This whole thing fell apart on your watch. I’m not happy about this shit, Will. Not at all.”

“I know. I’m not happy about it either, Carlo, believe me. The question is, what should I do now? Should I call the photographer back and set something up with some other model?”

“It’s too late for that, Will. There’s no way we’re gonna be able to book a new model on this short notice. Also, I don’t know whether you remember or not, but the whole fucking point was to shoot a fucking amateur.”

“I know, but...”

“Will, I don’t think I want you handling anything at all. I think I want you to come back to New York and clear out your office.”

“What?”

“You’re fired, Will. This was the test, and you failed it.”

“What?”

“Look, Will. You just proved to me that you can’t handle this kind of major responsibility. It’s real fuckin’ easy to sit in the office and buy sets from photographers by mail. But when you had to do something big, carry it all the way to the finish by yourself, you dropped the fuckin’ ball, and you’ve cost this company a lot of time, a lot of trouble and a lot of fuckin’ money.”

“I know. And I’m sorry about that. But...I don’t think I deserve to be fired over it.”

“Well, I do, and it’s my decision to make, not yours. You can clear out your office when you get back. I’m putting Victor back in charge of the book until we replace you.” With that, Carlo became the second person to hang up on Will in less than an hour.