The Call of the Weird Read online

  “What about Viagra?”

  “Since Viagra, everybody’s a stud,” he said. Then, citing two of the most dependable male performers, he said: “Let me tell you something. There’s no more Peter Norths or TT Boys out there who can do two, three scenes a day without assistance. And I mean without assistance.”

  Through the afternoon, female performers breezed in and out—Tiffany James, Barbii Buxxx, Desire Moore. They gossiped and traded war stories. I saw only one male performer, a young man in wraparound dark glasses and baseball cap who gave his name as Tommy X. He had an odd, overstimulated air. He walked in and out of the offices in a restless way, like a figurine going in and out of a mechanical clock. Each time he entered, the bill of his cap was pointing in a different direction. “Tommy Boy!” Jim would sing, with over-the-top bonhomie. There was something faintly offputting about his constant moving around and his dark glasses and his rotating cap. Nevertheless, I took his phone number, and a few days later I visited him at home.

  His house was beige, single-storied, in Reseda, another anonymous spread of tract homes and wide streets in the far west of the Valley. It was set back from the road, a little decrepit, but large—five bedrooms—with a decent-sized swimming pool in the back, strewn with twigs. It had smudged yellow walls and stained green sofas.

  Tommy is an all-American-looking kid, with blue eyes and a dyed blond mohawk. His forearms are tattooed with flowers. He was wearing a blue hooded top, baggy shorts, and a ball cap.

  I explained about my documentary. “I’m doing a kind of update,” I said. “Did you ever hear of a performer called JJ Michaels?”

  Tommy looked blank. “I’ve definitely heard the name before,” he said.

  “Well, thanks for making time for me.”

  “No problem. I’m taking today off anyway because I’m about to shoot three days straight.”

  He’d grown up Chris Thomas Essex in a suburb north of Los Angeles. He’d been a fan of porn since early adolescence. “I used to take pictures of my girlfriends. Then I had this freaky girlfriend. We were both between jobs and between places to live. She saw the newspaper ad for [Jim South’s] World Modeling. She went up there and shot her first scene the next day, and then she took me up to World, and that was in February 2002.” He’d been working bagging groceries at Gelson’s supermarket at the time.

  He’d done some high-end shoots, Hustler Young Girl Fantasies 4, Real College Girls 12. Plus a lot of Internet work. Bangboat.com., Backseatbangers.com.

  “How have you been doing ‘wood-wise’?” I said.

  “For me it all depends on my chemistry with the girl,” he said. “Any problem I’ve had is because I’ve been doing too much recreational partying, you know what I mean? It’s just how much confidence you have. Any second-guessing might affect my performance. But I don’t have that any more. Sometimes if I need to I’ll take Viagra. I’m not against that at all. Because it’s my job to have good wood to do a scene.”

  “It’s all about the wood, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, if you don’t have good wood, you’re not going to get another job. And you can get a bad reputation really fast,” Tommy said.

  I asked him whether the HIV scare and the moratorium had given him pause.

  “I was way freaked out,” he said. “I wasn’t on any of the lists but it was like dang!”

  “Why do you do it?”

  “I do it for the money, but also because I want to be a porn star. I want to be famous for what I do. The fast times. The meeting a lot of people every day. Like, every day you meet someone and you have sex with them and you don’t ever have to see them again after that if you don’t want to.”

  Most of Tommy’s friends were people he’d met during a stint at a fast-food restaurant called In-N-Out Burger. “But I’m the only one who’s in show business,” he said.

  The truth is, I was starting to regret my choice of hungry young male. He didn’t have the focus and drive that had made JJ unusual. Tommy seemed a little lost, and I got the impression he regarded my interview as confirmation of the status he was looking for, as though I was a sports writer profiling an athlete. “I’m ready to be the next big thing in porn,” he said.

  The following morning, I picked him up and we drove to a smart private house on a leafy street in the far west of the Valley. The film was being directed by a jovial, vaguely Hispanic-looking fellow who gave his name as “Andre Madness,” for a company called Kick-Ass Pictures. Andre Madness was thirty or so, a graduate of a Christian university in San Diego, so he said, with a B.A. in literature.

  I asked what they were shooting.

  “It’s a series called Ten Man Cum Slam,” he said.

  “Sounds weird.”

  “It’s a niche. And it’s popular. It’s very popular. Believe it or not, this is very mainstream for the porn industry now. Everyone’s trying to do something more over the top than the others.”

  The female performer was eating a bagel in the kitchen, having just had her hair and make-up done. Her porn name was Summer Rain; she was from Cornwall. Short blonde hair, a friendly face, tanned freckled shoulders, she’d been in the States a little more than two weeks and had done seven movies. She was due back in England in another two weeks. Rather bizarrely, she’d worked in the security department of the BBC documentaries building in London where I used to have my office. She’d seen an ad in the Stage: “If you’d like to earn $25,000 a month . . .” She was getting a thousand dollars for this film.

  I asked why she was doing porn.

  “To get more of an impression of sex,” she said. “Because I’ve never really had an exciting sex life. The money’s a bonus, really.” But she didn’t seem to know what she’d signed on for. A little later, I found her sunbathing outside.

  “How are you feeling?” I asked.

  “Yeah, fine. I’ll take the lead. I take control.” She sounded as though she was trying to convince herself. “I don’t stand for any nonsense. What’s this project called?” she asked.

  Ten Man Cum Slam,” I said. “

  The filming started with Andre Madness interviewing Summer Rain on camera about herself and the shoot, to give the scene a quasi-documentary feel. He asked about her sex life, how old she was when she gave her first blowjob, how many men she’d given blowjobs to at one time. Summer tried to enter into the spirit of it, but she’d had a puff of a joint in the backyard and she was struggling to find the right tone between man-crazy porn chick and normal person. She said she’d only given a blowjob to one person at a time, then upped the number to two, seeming to think that was what was required of her. “After knowing what I’m about to do now, it’s a bit different from what I was expecting, but I’m sure I’ll cope with it,” she said.

  The guys got undressed and started playing with themselves. Summer gave a little speech. “I just wanted to say, I’m not into rough sex. I don’t mind you deep-throating me but treat me right.”

  “Guys, look for me when you’re about to come,” Andre Madness said. “Don’t come without a sign from me.”

  The scene commenced. There were so many male performers I scribbled notes: “Brad Boldman (slightly weird, big nose, beefy, late thirties); Tony Tedeschi (fifteen-year veteran, quietly intense); Johnny Fender (Hispanic dude?); Carlton Banks (black guy, braids, kept his woolly hat on); Rob Longshot (surly goth-geek, kept his boots on); Rod Fontana (older guy, jolly, manic, overweight); Jim Beam (Gen-X dude, tousled hair).” There was also, of course, Tommy X, who kept his baseball cap on sideways, and two others whose names I didn’t get.

  Summer did her best to be enthusiastic, issuing bawdy comeons and blandishments, but there was no disguising that her heart wasn’t really in it. I went outside and stood by the pool until it was over.

  One by one, after they finished, the men went outside and stood by the pool or chatted about the 2004 presidential election in a little huddle. “Two to four supreme court appointments are open,” someone said, mentioning the name of Chief Justice
Rehnquist. “Unemployment is out of control,” someone else said. Then, referring to Republican voters, a third said: “You get away from the coasts and this is just a very backward country. It’s scary.”

  The scene took maybe an hour. Afterward, Summer came outside looking dazed and bleary. “It was great,” she said, without much conviction. “I just got it in my eye a bit.” A little later she added: “It is hard work, though.” Her manager arrived, a bald, gnomish man in his fifties, Mark Spiegler. “You done?” he said, and whisked her away.

  The whole experience was profoundly depressing. I wondered if I’d been unlucky with my choice of sets to visit or people to follow. “I would like for you to see a scene that’s not so much work,” Andre Madness said, referring to Summer Rain’s lack of enthusiasm. “Honestly, I don’t know if I’d work with her again.” I asked Tommy how he’d found it. “It was excellent,” he said. “We had good chemistry.”

  JJ now lives in the outer suburbs, in a town outside St. Louis, Missouri, called Florissant. Like his old apartment, his house, a singlestorey building in a new subdivision, remains a temple consecrated to his fan-boy enthusiasms: John Carpenter, Heavy Metal, comic books, all still neatly stowed on shelves. On his coffee table is a row of six remote controls. He has massive free-standing stereo speakers in the front room and a TV screen that is five or six feet across. His work has something to do with computers at Boeing. “I could explain exactly but it probably wouldn’t make any sense,” he said.

  I arrived at his house late one day in August, having driven across country. His door was answered by Viktoriya, the Ukrainian girl he married two years earlier. Blonde, pretty, twenty-two years old, she works at Walgreens. She dreams of being an actress. She was wearing tiny white hot pants, which looked all the more incongruous while she was cooking, preparing a Ukrainian dish of chicken broth followed by chicken cutlets and a potato salad with ham and peas in it. European dance music was playing. JJ looked much the same, hair parted and gelled, big mouth and lips; animated, demonstrative. He’s about five-feet-five and muscular, a little bundle of personal passions and weird bugbears—that online comics fans are petty or “negative”; that certain movies are overrated; that people are “flaky.”

  I’d brought some wine, a couple of bottles, and some beer.

  “I don’t drink anything except water,” JJ said. “And coffee in the mornings. That way I can save on calories for food.” He uncorked the wine and very gingerly filled my glass. “This is the first time I’ve ever poured wine,” he said.

  “You’d never know,” I said.

  We talked a little about how he and Viktoriya had met, through an online dating agency. “They’ve got about twenty different URLs, but I think I went through getmarriednow.com,” JJ said. At first they corresponded by email. JJ had learned a little Russian. Viktoriya knew no English so she used a translator program. “It translate word, not sentence, so meaning is not always correct,” she said. Then they’d telephone, using an interpreter whom they conferenced in. JJ visited Viktoriya in her hometown of Kherson, three hours from Odessa. JJ said she was a little less tall than he expected. Viktoriya said he was “much shorter” than she expected.

  In May 2002, Viktoriya moved to the U.S. They married three months later.

  “What do you think of St. Louis?” I asked Viktoriya.

  “There’s nothing. Like it’s supposed to be at night city is booming. But it’s empty. It’s so boring here. Two horses running. That’s it. I was shocked. When I first arrived, I was like, ‘OK, show me the city.’ He said, ‘Let me call my friend and ask how we get there.’”

  “I don’t need to go out, I got my DVDs,” JJ said.

  “Would you like to go back to porn?”

  “I would like to direct again,” JJ said. “I would quit my job if I could get a solid enough career.”

  “How would you feel?” I asked Viktoriya.

  “I want to make him happy, you know? Because it’s not cool when you come home and you see your husband depressed. It’s like he want it but he don’t want it.”

  “It’s a risk,” I said.

  “But you don’t risk, you don’t drink champagne,” Viktoriya said. I was happy to see JJ again, and pleased that he seemed happy to see me. Our relationship was friendly and straightforward. He was putting me up while I was in St. Louis, and this simple act of hospitality touched me. This was how I’d hoped my journey among my old subjects would be.

  The next day, after JJ got back from work, he took me into his utility room in the basement. There, next to the boiler, was a cardboard box containing JJ’s films. These movies represent three-and- a-half years of his life.

  “I made a movie in November 1996. The next one was in February 1997, and that’s when I got in full-time. I always watched porn, of course. I guess I wanted to be like those guys I watched: Marc Wallice, Joey Silvera, Tom Byron. What a great job! Be a porn star! The idea of saying: ‘I’m a porn star.’ But the reaction I got is something else. Internet dorks despise you.

  “So I called Jim South and for some reason they let me come in. And while I was there they told me about a casting call. I met Todd and Terri Diver. They hired me to do an orgy thing. I got paid $100.”

  JJ started pulling out videotapes in battered covers. Ho in the Haystack. “It was an Amish movie.” Austin Prowler. Chamber of Whores. White Trash Whores 12.

  He showed me some of the films he made at the end of his career with Jim Lane. He played a leprechaun in Perverted Stories 20. A gorilla in Perverted Stories 23. For Perverted Stories 25, he covered himself in butter and sang a song about being “the butter boy” while masturbating.

  I scanned the back of the box of Perverted Stories 20 for a still of JJ’s scene, as though nothing could be more normal than to scrutinize a photo of a friend in the throes of a bizarre sex act. There he was, all in green, dressed as a leprechaun, receiving a blowjob. “This looks like a good one,” I heard myself saying. Then I asked, “Did you get sick of the sex?”

  “Oh yeah,” JJ said. “It’s just work. I mean, think about it. Doing it all the time, it becomes work.”

  He said he got around $300 a scene from Jim Lane. “I had fun working with him so I’d take a little below standard. At the time, full rate was $500. I was always happy with the money. If I didn’t want to stay married I would probably have never quit,’cause I was making fine money. I make less cash-wise now, but I have a pension plan, I have insurance.

  “I just really want to make movies. Working at Boeing is fine, it’s a great paycheck. I could do it till retirement. But it’s not fulfilling. I’m sure it’s the same with a lot of people, they have those frustrations. But with me it’s slightly worse, because I’ve had a taste of it.”

  JJ offered to show me the movies he directed.

  “Are you sure it won’t be weird for Viktoriya?”

  “She doesn’t mind.”

  Viktoriya was watching a documentary about Jennifer Lopez on the E! Channel. She went into the bathroom and spoke in Russian on the phone to a friend in Boston.

  We watched Pornworld first, fast-forwarding through the sex. The plot was hard to follow. It had something to do with a magic crystal that could transport its holder to a realm where his every sexual fantasy was fulfilled. For some reason—maybe, as JJ claimed, because the sound recordist was on cocaine—you could hear the pssshht! of the smoke machine with perfect clarity but none of the words. “Hustler gave it a four out of five,” JJ said.

  In Search of Awesome Pussy was a James Bond spoof starring JJ as Jimmy Bone, a secret agent who bonked his way across the Czech Republic. Most of the Czech women couldn’t speak English, so JJ had to teach them their lines phonetically. “You thowt you could fule us, Mr. Bone” was one of the few lines I could make out.

  Viktoriya wandered back in and sat down on the sofa. JJ kept fast-forwarding through the sex, then rewinding to the end of the sex scene, so we wouldn’t miss any of the dialogue. As a result, we got to see virtually al
l his pop shots. I was trying to read Vik-toriya’s expression—whether it was strange for her to be watching her husband have anal sex with Czech porn stars in fast-forward.

  “You don’t like us making fun of accents; I know what you’re thinking,” JJ said.

  “No, you don’t,” Viktoriya said.

  “It’s an industry of lonely people in a crowd,” Bill Margold was saying. “They’re scared to get close to each other. You’re far better off having someone to sleep next to than having someone to sleep with, because you have to trust someone you sleep next to. I don’t think these people can maintain relationships. They don’t want to let their guards down long enough to get to know the people they’re having sex with, so they keep avoiding getting to know them by fucking them.”

  It was late afternoon, a few months later, and his room was dark.

  I thought about JJ. For most of us, sex brings with it some kind of intimacy, a kind of mutual ownership that we share as couples. If you have sex for a living on camera, that intimacy is lost. The glue that binds person to person dissolves. This was something almost everyone I’d spoken to in porn agreed on, that it was impossible to have a long-term relationship and be a performer. For some performers—the most sturdy, the most driven, the most detached— that loss of intimacy was worth it, for the fame or the money it brought. But not for most.

  JJ had no regrets about his porn career. His only ruefulness seemed to be that it had ended, and that now he had to face the normal suburban challenges of keeping down a boring job and making a relationship work. His most difficult adjustment was anonymity. And I suspected that it was because he felt so positive about porn that my own journalistic relationship with him was so uncomplicated. He was happy about the documentary I made, happy to update it for the book, too—both of them were testaments to the modest celebrity he had once enjoyed.

  I was running out of questions for Margold, and so, for old time’s sake, I asked to see his penis. He stood up, pulled down his trousers and boxer shorts, and out it came, like a pork sausage. Hanging several inches lower than the end of his penis were two of the biggest, dangliest balls I’d ever seen.