Hella Nation - Evan Wright [114]
I experienced a sense of numbness on Jasmin’s set—as I would on many others—that I can compare only to combat. It was the sense of being in a group of people deliberately and methodically engaged in acts of insanity. In contrast to combat, I was not numbed out by the horror of it, but by the grand-scale stupidity, which crystallized that day as I stood by the craft-services cart. Boiled hot dogs on cold white buns were being dispensed. A man next to me politely passed the mustard. The bottle was sticky with K-Y jelly. I never attempted to eat on a porn shoot again.
It was during Jasmin’s bid for the title of world’s biggest gangbang queen that she acquired her reputation as a bitch. One of the men I spoke to, fortyish, with the tan and physique of a lifelong desk worker, summed up his experience as a star-fucker. “Jasmin is cold,” he said, then compared her with Annabel Chong, whom he’d met a year earlier when he’d participated in her World’s Biggest Gang Bang. “She’s not friendly like Annabel was.”
I asked him what constituted “cold” or “friendly” in a five-minute encounter with a woman, shared with a half-dozen other men, all circling to pleasure themselves on tiny pieces of her body. His voice had a childlike plaintiveness when he answered. “Annabel said, ‘Hi.’ She looked at me in the eyes. Jasmin just said, ‘Don’t come in my hair.’ She wasn’t nice at all.”
HUSTLER’S BARELY LEGAL was a magazine I associate-edited under the name “Serena Dallwether.” It was subtitled A Celebration of Sexual Debu tantes , and the premise was that all the girls in the photographs were between the ages of eighteen and twenty, and that all their stories were true. In reality, the girls were porn models, and I supplied them with names and brief biographies, or “girl copy.” Though Barely Legal was sold almost exclusively in XXX shops and liquor stores, its monthly U.S. circulation pushed 250,000. The English-language edition also sold well internationally. On a trip through Italy, I saw it prominently displayed at a news kiosk near the Vatican beside photos of Pope John Paul II.
A reasonable person might assume that porn magazines serve but one lowly purpose: to provide “readers” with what we called, in the trade, jack-off fodder. But readers of Barely Legal were moved to send in dozens of letters each week. Predictably, many contained simple requests: “Please print photos of young girls having fun at the doctor’s office, spread out on an examination table.” At least half bore return addresses of corrections facilities. The most surprising were those that contained outpourings of emotion from lonely men seeking to connect with our nudie models. By the time I left LFP, I had collected nearly two thousand of the most desperate letters from lonely hearts.
Readers sent Christmas cards to the models. Photographs arrived: John, from NYC, sent a glamour shot of himself, replete with halo lighting effects on his puffy eighties metal-rocker hairdo. Kelly, a scruffy middle-aged man, grinned beside a pumpkin