The Call of the Weird (5 page)

“I don’t really want to be connected with that area. I’m trying to step away from that stuff. It loses me credibility. I can’t go in and talk to a biochemist if he says, ‘Oh, you’re the great alien hunter, ha ha ha!’”

“Right.”

“And I wasn’t in it to make money. We were a small operation. We were nobodies. If I’d wanted to get rich, I would have gone into the corporate world. But we had to make money to survive, and they were all products I believed in . . . ”

“Sure.”

“So I go by a different name now.”

Then he asked if I would keep his new name to myself.

In September I called back several times to see if Thor still wanted to get together for coffee. The calls all went to a machine. The message said: “Welcome! We’re unavailable at this time. Leave a name and number and we’ll get back to you when we can.” The startling thing was that the message, while recognizably Thor’s voice, was delivered in a fake English accent.

On the last night of the UFO Congress at Laughlin, still suffering with food poisoning or whatever it was, I made my way down to the closing banquet. The seating was at round tables, ten to a table. I spied Bob Short, in blue lamé shirt and matching shiny blue cummerbund, with a large pendant round his neck, obviously pleased because all the seats at his table were taken.

Seated across from me was Richard Boylan, a New Age educator from Sacramento, who looked a little like a jolly Irish priest, red-faced and white-haired. I recognized his name from the Congress’s program of speakers. Being ill, I’d missed his lecture that day on “star kids”—“hybrid children” with “advanced abilities.” But after we’d eaten, he began testing the auras of some of those at our table to see if they might be star kids.

“Normal people’s auras reach about a foot away from their bodies,” he said. “Starseed are about twelve feet.”

He offered to test me. I was a little nervous, fairly certain that my own skepticism meant I wasn’t starseed and fearful that my lack of belief would show through. I stood twenty or so feet from Richard. He walked toward me with a pair of L-shaped dowsing rods in his hands. Suddenly, they splayed out, as though butting up against an invisible force field. “Hombre! What’s that? Fifteen feet?” he said. “Yours is the biggest yet!”

When we sat down, he sketched out a vision of the society we star kids would one day create. Peaceful, just, egalitarian, environmentally sensitive. “Think of a society where everybody’s telepathic,” he said. “Imagine being a used-car salesman when everyone knows what you’re thinking.” I felt flattered to be a star kid. Though I had no doubt it was folderol (shortly afterwards Richard handed out business cards, explaining we could attend his seminars to develop our starseed potential: learn telekinesis and so on), my being included in the club inclined me to be charitable toward his unlikely vision. Later I thought how ironic it was that Richard should use the example of a used-car dealer, there amidst the mountebanks and latter-day snake-oil salesmen of the UFO world. But at the time, I didn’t think that. I was just happy to feel part of the team.

How odd, I thought, that even though I don’t believe, it still feels nice to be included. What does that prove? I wondered. That even something untrue can produce an effect; that sometimes a con is also an act of kindness.

T
he corridors outside Jim South’s World Modeling were clogged with porn performers. A closed casting call was in progress. For Jim’s stable of talent, it was a chance to schmooze with directors, producers, photographers.

The director Henri Pachard was there, supposedly the real-life model for the Burt Reynolds character in
Boogie Nights.
Oyster-eyed behind thick glasses, a tasteful diamond in his ear, his hair was still bouffant. Looking good for sixty-five, I thought. I’d interviewed him eight years before. “Sure, you did the bondage thing,” he said. “No,” I said, “that wasn’t me.” Max Hardcore was there, the legendarily vile maven of degradation and rough sex,
recognizable by his trademark cowboy hat. I’d interviewed him briefly, too. Real name Paul Little, he was sitting in his office with his cowboy boots on the desk, looking like the sheriff of Cock County. His door was open. No women were going in there, though. His reputation preceded him.

Twelve directors in all. All men, all looking creepy to various degrees. I spotted myself reflected in a dark window. Lank-haired, unshaven, I looked creepy too.

It was one of the pitfalls of being back in this world, I reflected, that you felt creepy. I’d had the same sensation—of being compromised and distracted by the images, of cutting a faintly ludicrous figure as a semi-serious journalist covering the porn industry—on my last visit seven years earlier.

On that occasion, I’d been making a documentary about JJ Michaels, a young performer who was then new to the game. JJ was out now, working a straight job in Missouri. While I was here in the San Fernando Valley, California (the capital of the U.S. porn industry), I was keen to find out what I could about the business and how it had changed.

Outside I’d been speaking to a farmboy from Georgia. His working name was Mac Turner. He was fresh-faced, twenty-one years old, brand new to porn. He looked like he’d walked off a production of
Oklahoma!
. “Sometimes I’ll work five days, sometimes I’ll work a couple. Which is why I’m here today, to meet some more people so I can try to work every day.” He used to manage a gym, but said it was “stressful and boring.” His grandparents raised him. They still didn’t know about his change of career.

Jim Jr. was standing by, guarding the entrance to World Modeling with a clipboard, making sure no unaccredited producers wandered in—no scavengers or pimps. Jim Jr. was in his early twenties,
the son of the boss and founder, Jim Sr. I’d met him before, too. The faces of the performers change, I thought, but the behind-thescenes people, they stayed the same.

I asked what he knew about JJ.

“Oh yeah, he was a nice guy,” Jim Jr. said. “He got married to an Australian girl named Astrid. Then they got divorced. Then he got married again. A girl from Russia, I think.”

“Was he working a lot?”

“Yeah, he was doing pretty good. He was working consistently.”

The women were all shapes and sizes. Tall, short, busty, flat-chested. Raven-haired pale goth girls, bottle-blonde girls. Generally the older the woman, the bigger the bust, almost as though they were compensating for their age by shooting for more volume. The male performers were fewer—buffed and groomed in tight sleeveless T-shirts.

The atmosphere was charged, a little giddy, like market day. I began chatting to the performers as they waited to be called into the offices of the producers. A Hispanic woman, mid-twenties, wearing bright red lipstick and a beige business suit, gave her name as Catalina. She’d been in the business four years, she said, and had done more than a hundred films with Max Hardcore. “I like his stuff because it’s very different and it stands out like a sore thumb in the industry. It’s my career. It’s not just fun and games.”

A twenty-three-year-old Asian woman, Paris Waters, from Southern California, whose T-shirt bore the legend “I make my own money,” said she’d seen an ad in a newspaper. That was how Jim got many of his walk-ins. Using the time-honored bait-and-switch, his sign and his ads decorously said: “Figure Models Wanted.” Then, when you arrived for your appointment, he told you how much you could make if you had sex in a movie. “I went ahead anyway,’cause I’ll try anything once.”

Holly Wellin, from Manchester, England. Eighteen years old. She was wearing white stiletto boots, a denim miniskirt, giggling. “I don’t know how many scenes, I’ve done loads,” she said. “I love it over’ere. The weather, the people, everything. It’s so different. It’s like a different culture.”

I asked her to be a little more specific.

“It’s like there’s loads of different fast-food places,” she said. “I actually had my butt torn a few weeks ago. But it’s like any job. You have good days and bad days.”

Still thinking about this piece of wisdom, I wandered into a dark little office where a curly-haired, walrus-mustached man in his late fifties was sitting with two female performers—one a veteran named Anita Cannibal, who was on his sofa, the other an aspirant named Donielle Dare. Donielle Dare was stark naked in a desk chair. “Because it’s easier than putting my clothes on and taking them off again,” she explained—meaning for photographers and directors, I assume. Thirty-two, she’d grown up in the Central African Republic, the daughter of missionaries.

The man was Bill Margold. An ex-performer and now the head of a support group for people who work in the industry, he describes himself as the “most knowledgeable person in the world about this business.” I’d interviewed him on my first visit, too, an encounter that stayed with me because, out of prankishness, and also to test his assertion that there was nothing intimate about the human genitals, I’d asked to see his and without much cajoling he’d taken out his penis and begun rubbing it. I’d thought the oddness of my request might have made an impression on him and that he might remember the incident and me, but no such luck.

“Has the business changed much?” I asked.

“I think there’s less creativity,” Margold said. “There’s more attempt to shock than to arouse. They can’t really put the time into creating eroticism because, hell, most of them don’t know how to spell eroticism.”

“We’re getting into circus tricks now,” Anita Cannibal said. “Who can stick what up their ass. It didn’t used to be like that.”

“There’s no suspense left in sex any more,” Margold said. “It’s all just right in the face. This industry has choked on its own freedom. We found ourselves so free that we thought we could get away with anything. It reminds me of Rome at the end of the Empire, the worst excesses at the Coliseum . . . If Bush gets re-elected, the next four years in this business will give us a chance to grow up.”

I told Bill about my book, that I was curious about JJ and what kind of dimple he had left on the waters of adult entertainment.

“Little short kid?” Margold said. “Don’t know . . . ”

“What happens to the performers? They just disappear and no one knows where they go to?”

“They eventually grow weary of doing this. They sometimes get some external pressure on them not to do it. And they disappear into the real world. There are some people who stay, because they’re accepted into it, and they don’t want to leave. There’s no reason to go looking for these people. You don’t really want to find them. there’s no reason to dig them out of the anonymity they’ve escaped into.”

“I’m surprised you don’t remember more about JJ. He made hundreds of films.”

“A minor note in the history of this business,” Margold said, in a lordly way. “I don’t even remember what his last name was. Didn’t it start with an M? Or an L?”

“Michaels.”

“There wasn’t much there. He wasn’t a great stud. He just did his job. Plus he was short. Short guys don’t get a whole lot of attention.” Out in the corridor, the ranks of the performers were thinning. I bumped into a director named Robert Herrera. A soft-spoken Hispanic man, he said that according to the trade magazine
Adult
Video News,
the porn business now produces four hundred films a week. “There’s too much product,” he said.

“People say it’s becoming more extreme,” I said.

He agreed, and cited the influence of reality TV shows where members of the public ate live grubs and pig rectums and dangled from helicopters. “The majority of people who buy our product, our DVDs and tapes, and take them home and watch them—I call them raincoaters—I believe they’re lonely people. They don’t like women, so they want to see them degraded. I love women and I will quit the industry before I shoot them the way they’re being shot today.”

Though I’d only been in the Valley a few days, I already felt light years away from the UFO believers. I remembered my conversation at the Congress about “star kids.” In this world, star kids meant eighteen-year-olds from Manchester willing to risk tissue damage for a few thousand dollars and a moment in the spotlight.

And yet, looking beyond the strange rummage sale of sex and occasional injury, there was at least an openness and honesty about the business. No euphemisms or flim-flam here. No claims to be changing the world. Porn was porn. Herrera had mentioned reality TV, meaning it disparagingly, but porn also shared some of the democratic ethos of that genre. And it spoke of a touching kind of humility in the industry that, despite its huge profits and the global reach
of its images, a thinly credentialed reporter like myself could still wander with impunity at a casting call for the leading talent agent.

I’d driven west from Las Vegas and, after the desert, the landscape of the San Fernando Valley was like crashing back to Earth—an anonymous sprawl of chain stores and strip malls and low-rise housing, where dusty banners advertised special offers on rent. Though there are, allegedly, separate cities with names—Van Nuys, Sherman Oaks, Chatsworth—you get no sense of them as distinct places, no recognizable high streets and downtowns, no squares or parks.

I thought back to my first visit. It was only the second episode of my series, and, because I was sensitive to the creep factor, I’d sought out a male performer who was as unsleazy as possible. In the production office, we referred to him as our “hungry young male”—someone just starting out, dewy-eyed and unjaded, with a good attitude and a nice personality. Jim South had put us onto JJ.

He was twenty-three at that time. He’d done four years in the Air Force—they’d taught him Chinese and computing—but he’d dropped out to work in porn. He’d been in the business five weeks and done thirteen movies, including
Anal Witness 4
and
Bottom
Dweller.
He’d proven himself in one of his first scenes, pulling off a tricky “double penetration,” or “DP,” which is, as it sounds, two men inside one woman, one by the back door and one by the front. (Surprisingly, I’d heard that some women preferred this to straight anal, the front entry being the “spoonful of sugar” that helped the medicine go down.) JJ was aiming to make “a nice career” out of porn, as he put it.

His apartment, in a two-storey building round a swimming pool, was unusually tidy for a young bachelor, with racks of Heavy Metal CDs, John Carpenter movies, and Godzilla toys, all neatly organized. His fridge was stocked with low-fat yogurt and cans of tuna and not much else. He took me down to the gym, where we worked out together. “Can you get wood? That’s the most important thing right there,” he said. “Can you keep a hard-on the entire time? And believe it or not, it’s not easy like it seems it should be. I don’t care how beautiful she is, how turned on you are. Sometimes it’s not happening.”

The next day I followed him to the set of a movie called
Twisted
. Shot on film, on a soundstage,
Twisted
was the kind of movie that became a rarity soon afterward, when “gonzo,” the unscripted quasi-documentary style of porn-making, took over. It had lines for the actors to learn, dramatic situations, proper sets. The scenario was based on the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe. JJ’s scene was adapted from “The Masque of the Red Death”: The world had been overtaken by plague. Left with nothing better to do, four workers in a laboratory, played by JJ and the male veteran Peter North, and the female performers Johnni Black and Kaitlyn Ashley, dropped their white lab coats and had romping sex.

In hindsight, I think JJ probably didn’t want me on set with him. And whether because of my presence, or because my questions about “wood problems” at the gym had jinxed him, or for some other reason, he struggled to stay hard for the scene. I loitered in the background, chatting to Johnni Black’s boyfriend who, bizarrely, was on hand to watch his partner in action. As the shoot overran, I could see the crew becoming impatient. “Woodless wonders,” the soundman grumbled. “Whatever drives people to do this for a living, perhaps some people shouldn’t.”

JJ was a little downcast after it was over. “Well, I didn’t do as good as I’d like,” he said. “It’s just so many people. And I was nervous, kinda, working for Shanahan’cause he’s a big director. You get nervous, it’s hard to work. But yeah. Near the end, it was fine.”
As I walked him to his car in the dark parking lot, I asked his thoughts on a recent HIV scare—an industry stalwart, John Stagliano, better known as Buttman, had tested HIV positive.

“I’ve got a death wish,” JJ said. “So I don’t really care.”

After that the plan had been to visit JJ on the set of a film called
Forced Entry,
a rape-themed film that was being shot by Rob Black, a young director who was carving out a niche as a maker of “horror porn.” In the end, JJ didn’t appear in the movie because his paperwork from the clinic vouching that he was free of HIV or venereal disease, which performers in porn have to keep updated on a monthly basis, hadn’t been processed in time. Still, I went along to the shoot. Though not exactly shocking, the artless, willed offensiveness of the action seemed out of key with the lighthearted documentary we were trying to make. My director filmed me leaving the set.