Hella Nation - Evan Wright [113]
I lasted at LFP for more than three years. Destiny may have played a part in this. My first pornographic experience was with a copy of Hustler that I discovered in a drainage ditch when I was eleven. The magazine, still in its flat brown paper bag but soaked through, had appeared like a gift from the gods of puberty. I painstakingly removed the binding staples and dried out the pages in the garage of a neighbor who was away on vacation. After careful and repeated examination of each of the pages in the privacy of my bedroom, I sold them to my friends at school for their lunch money. Telling this X-rated Horatio Alger story in an interview for a copyediting job at LFP helped get me hired. (Though not as a copy editor. There were too many typos on my résumé.) By the time I left, I had achieved rank on the list of the Top 50 most influential people in the adult industry. Granted, I had written that list myself, and it was published in Hustler, but deception and lies are the essence of pornography. It’s no different from any other branch of the entertainment industry. In porn, for example, we had the same thing that they call “magic” in Hollywood—except we called it “bullshit.” This is the power to create seductive illusions that move and entertain a mass audience, and perhaps give them that ineffable gift, hope.
But porn is a crude business. Even the fantasies it sells have the feel of cheap disillusionment. What seduced me was the reality.
LARRY FLYNT USED TO DEFEND Hustler by calling the nude photo layouts “art.” I would come to joke that the porn video is indigenous Southern California folk art. The cheesy aesthetic—shag-carpet backdrops, tanning-salon chic, bad music, worse hairdos—and the everyman approach to exhibitionism are honest expressions of life in the land of mini-malls, vanity plates and instant stardom.
In 1996, an unknown named Jasmin St. Claire set out to have sex with three hundred men in a triple-X video titled The World’s Biggest Gang Bang II, thereby breaking an alleged record of 251 men set a year earlier by Annabel Chong. By the mid-nineties, gang-bang films had become a hot product in the industry. They not only created overnight stars but added a new dimension to celebrity worship. Where once an autograph served as a hallowed connection with a famous person, now fans, invited to participate in these spectacles, could actually fuck a star.
Late one Sunday morning on the second floor of a decrepit Hollywood sound stage, Jasmin held a press conference before the shoot. Reporters and photographers from such esteemed publications as Club, Screw and, of course, Hustler packed the room. Champagne was served. Jasmin, twenty-three, entered in skintight red latex. She moved imperiously, with her head held high and her surgically augmented D-cups thrust forward. Jasmin’s ethnic origins were a mystery. Her skin was coppery brown, like a glass of tea in sunlight. She told people her dark complexion came from Sicilian blood, and there were rumors that she was the granddaughter of a New York mobster. She denied those, and claimed to have been raised by an international-financier father, to have been educated in continental boarding schools and to have an undergraduate degree from Columbia. (Years later, Jasmin’s first manager, Charlie Frey, told me he’d discovered her doing lap dances in an outer-borough New York strip club. “I don’t know about her dad,” Frey said. “Jasmin’s mom is a dot-head Indian.”) At the press conference, Jasmin responded in French, German and Spanish to questions from European porn-magazine stringers. As cameras flashed and the room filled with the staccato sound of twenty reporters calling her name, the scene took on the air of an old-fashioned Hollywood movie premiere. I asked Jasmin why she was having sex with three hundred men, and she answered, “To achieve my dreams.”
The event began on a set decorated with