CHAPTER TWO

The more Will thought about what had happened to him, the less real, the less plausible, it seemed. It was like a joke with no punch line. Two weeks earlier, he’d been the managing editor of Swinger, well-liked after three years with the company, sitting in a Japanese restaurant three blocks from the office with Martin the art director, his assistant Brendan, and Victor – the editor-in-chief, their boss, freshly back from California. Victor always took the staff to lunch when he returned from a shooting trip. So there they were, looking over the menus and waiting for the waitress while Victor asked what he’d missed the previous week, and told them all about his adventures.

“The first day, we only got to shoot two out of three pictorials, so we finished early,” he said. “The other girl, Dayton, didn’t show up. I told the photographer we’d never book her again.” Martin nodded. He liked Dayton, but rumor had it she was a junkie, and blowing off shoots wouldn’t help her overcome that image.

“So one of the girls, her agent was there on the set, and he invited us to a video shoot, just for the hell of it, just to watch,” Victor continued. “We drove over there, and they were shooting in this huge mansion – a beautiful place. Marble floors, giant staircases, picture windows in the living room looking out on a back lawn like a golf course. Fireplaces the size of death-camp ovens.” Victor was obsessed with Nazis. Nobody at the table was Jewish. “They’ve used the place in a million videos, you’ve seen it before. But when you really get inside, you can’t believe how beautiful it is. Whoever owns it sunk millions into it, and now they’re renting it to porn companies to make their money back.” He laughed. “By the time we got there, the crew and everybody was upstairs. The scene was between this brand-new girl, the agent’s girl, and Bobby Dean, on a white bearskin rug by the fire. They were already fucking when we got there – they’d finished the blowjob and missionary and whatever else, I guess, because they were into doggie style when we all walked in. After that, it was gonna be anal, then the load.”

The load was when the guy pulled his cock out of the girl and came all over her face, or her tits, or her ass. Nobody called it a money shot unless they were talking to a reporter, or somebody else from the straight world.

“I found a spot behind the director, where I wouldn’t be in anybody’s way,” Victor said, grinning like a cartoon shark. “They fucked doggie style for a couple of minutes, and then Bobby started putting his cock up her ass. He was going a little bit slow, working it in. You know,” he sidebarred, “when you’re just starting to ass-fuck a girl, you can’t wham it in there like you’re in prison. You gotta be nice.” He was looking at Will when he said this. Will nodded sagely in response. Good to know, Victor. Thanks.

“It didn’t matter to the girl whether he was nice or not,” he continued. “She wasn’t into the scene. She looked like she was sorry she took the job. But she was too nervous to refuse to do it. The director saw her face, and he gave her an out – he asked her if she was okay, if she wanted to keep going. She said yeah, she’d finish the scene. I was looking at her when she said it, and I could tell all she wanted in the world, right then, was for the whole thing to be over so she could shower off, get paid and go home. If it had been my shoot, I would have sent her home and started up the next day with a different girl. But they kept going.”

“When the scene really started to go south, it was as much Bobby’s fault as the girl’s,” Victor said. “I mean, you guys know he’s kinda rough, and he loves fucking girls in the ass. He’s really short, almost like a midget. He was pretty much the same height as the girl. So maybe he’s rough because he feels like he needs to be one up on the girls he fucks. I don’t know. Anyway, after a couple of minutes, he was really nailing this girl hard. She was scooting forward on the rug every time he slammed into her ass. He couldn’t see her face, because he was all the way up and behind her, doggie anal, but he wasn’t really looking at her face. He wasn’t all that interested in gauging how she felt about the scene, you know what I mean? Plus, it wasn’t an ultra-gonzo shoot. There wasn’t any ass-to-mouth or anything. So once he got up her ass, he was in there for good. He never saw her face again, really, until the last minute.” He laughed then. Will didn’t think there was anything particularly funny about what his boss was describing, but maybe there was a punch line coming.

“So anyway,” Victor continued, “Bobby called for the pop, and the director said yeah, go. So he pulled out really fast, one smooth yank, and kinda run-jumped around to the front of the girl, so he could blow his load on her face. And as he was doing that, and she was kinda half-squatting, half-kneeling on the white bearskin rug, right before he was gonna come, there was this horrible noise. It was unbelievable – it was like nothing I’d ever heard before. It was a kind of rippling, bubbling sound, like a mudhole in a swamp. This girl shit right on the rug. Not a little bit, either. This was like a shit you’d take the morning after three bowls of chili and a six-pack of beer. She was shaking, blasting about a half gallon of black liquid shit out in one giant rush. And the second it stopped coming, she more or less had a nervous breakdown right there. She was crying and shivering and pretty much totally devastated. The director came over and put a robe on her, took her to the shower. But in the meantime, Bobby was standing there, still hard! He was still ready to blow a load!” Victor took a long swallow of his Asahi beer. “I’ve never smelled anything so bad in my life. Under those hot lights, it was just incredible. I thought everybody in the room was going to puke. I don’t think that girl’s ever going to do another video. Bobby was about doubled over, like someone grabbed his nuts and tried to yank them off, because, I mean, he was right on the brink when she shit the place. I just kept thinking, fuck, I should have just gone back to the hotel.”

Will tried to have a drink, but he was laughing too hard to swallow without choking. Across the table, Martin and Brendan were slumped all the way back in their chairs, eyes filled with tears. None of them could believe the tale. It was so nightmarish, they cackled in spite of themselves, more fascinated by the perversity than anything else. About a second later, though, Will started to register all the disgusted sounds from other, nearby tables, and he realized that at least three other groups of businessmen, eating their own lunches, must have heard the story, too. He stopped laughing.

Will liked his co-workers. He liked his job, a lot. There were times when he was thrown off his stride by the way Victor and Martin talked about girls, and videos they’d seen, and other aspects of the business, out where just anybody could hear them, was all. He didn’t do that himself. He was a little more skittish about being a pornographer in public, about embodying society’s sleazy image of people who did what he did. But he never said anything to Victor or Martin when they acted this way. So maybe it didn’t bother him as much as he told himself it did.

The waitress arrived, and everyone ordered. Will had two large bottles of Asahi, and most of a third, with his meal. When it was time to leave, an hour or so later, he was stuffed, and his legs were unsteady. He could barely rise from the table.

On the three-block walk back to the office, the quartet were swallowed by a herd of Arabs protesting outside their building. It wasn’t about them – Will doubted most people even knew Swinger was a presence in the neighborhood. But the magazine was across the street from the Israeli embassy, so just about every day, there were people out there representing one aggrieved faction or another. Some days it was an army, with flatbed trucks and barricades, cops and megaphones, and leaving for the evening meant shoving past them, dodging proffered leaflets and ranters’ errant saliva and little kids who played at knee-level while their parents howled for justice. Other days it was just one guy, a lonely old Jew holding a placard that read, “Sharon Has No Mandate.”

Will bumped into a woman in a black burqa. They both almost fell over, but didn’t. She said nothing. Behind her veil, she glared at him, and he froze to the spot.

Her eyes were beautiful. Dark, impossibly deep pools, fringed by long black lashes he could almost feel whispering against his cheek. He knew instantly what the rest of her face would look like. Strong nose, full lips, olive skin that tasted of spices. He pictured the burqa in a heap at her feet, her naked body glowing under hot studio lights as she took his cock in her mouth, her cunt, her asshole. He saw her on her knees, delicately teasing his balls with her tongue as he stroked himself, until he pulled her back by the hair and splattered those lush features with hot white cum. This little movie ran from beginning to end in about one second. When he refocused on the reality of her in front of him, she was still pissed. Will exhaled a hot waft of beer breath in her face and lurched into the shelter of his building.