Hella Nation - Evan Wright [117]
“Marc’s been calling me at seven in the morning and leaving harassing messages.” Brooke jabbed at the buttons on her answering machine. Marc Wallice’s flat, emotionless voice came from the speaker: “Pick up the phone, Brooke. You bitch, you whore. Pick up the phone.”
A few days earlier I had met Marc at his mother’s house, where he had been living since blowing his last dollar on a freebasing binge after news broke of his own HIV-positive status. “I used to be a big, famous star,” he told me. “Now, I’m a nobody.” Since quitting his job bagging groceries at Trader Joe’s when he was twenty-one, Marc had done little else but appear in porn videos. In the past nineteen years, he estimated, he’d had sex with two thousand women. “I’ve never dated,” he said. “I’ve never had to be desirable. How do I just walk up to a girl and say hi?” Then he had played me phone messages from Brooke: “You fucker. You don’t have any friends.”
She had called around seven in the morning too. Both of them were up at that hour—Brooke taking her meds, Marc at the end of a bumpy coke ride. In happier times, they had been “fuck buddies” off the set and had binged on drugs together. Now, in their respective messages, each sounded scared and desperate, like someone who really needed to talk to an old friend.
“Dude, he is so guilty,” Brooke said to me, gazing at the picture of herself on the cover of World’s Biggest Anal Gang Bang.
She claimed she was unable to operate her VCR, and asked me to do it. It was a matter of pressing the On button and sliding the tape in. I sat next to her on the couch. “I can’t watch this without smoking a bowl,” she said. She loaded her bong, then forgot to light it as the video began.
On the screen, Brooke appeared in a dressing room having her makeup done. She wore a gold silk suit jacket and thong panties.
“Oh, God!” Brooke shouted. “Look how wrinkled my suit is!”
On the screen, the makeup girl asked her in a stagy voice, “Do you think you’re going to be all right?”
“I’ll be okay.” Brooke giggled, making a wacky face.
Next to me on the couch, Brooke began to cry. “Oh, my God! This is so sad.”
The scene shifted to a familiar one, a gang bang, featuring Brooke on a gloomily lit stage surrounded by men, barely visible through the forest of hairy legs.
“Everyone can see what’s happening to me,” Brooke said, still weeping. “I’m so humiliated.”
A moment later, her tone changed from plaintive to angry. “I see it!” she said. “There’s Marc’s pale, white penis. It’s shaped like a banana.”
The penis in question penetrated Brooke’s rear, without a condom. Marc’s head ducked into the frame, confirming her suspicion—she could have ID’d his member in a police lineup. The camera pulled in for a close-up of the suspect ejaculate sliding down her bare skin.
Behind me, Brooke giggled. I turned. She was speaking into the phone, now sugary and playful. “Sweetie, will you bring me over some of that French Champagne in the bottle with the orange label?” Whining, “Please?”
When she hung up, Brooke explained that she had a cabdriver friend who did things for her. In addition to being a porn star, Brooke hustled men. Sometimes she did so professionally, as a call girl. She could do a wicked imitation of a local weatherman talking dirty to her, his distinctive voice breathless and excited. I believed her about the weatherman, because I had once met him on the set of a John Wayne Bobbitt porn shoot. He had told me he was there researching a potential news story, though I’d never seen his station run news stories reported by weathermen.
While her gang-bang video still played on the TV, Brooke ran into her bedroom. She ran out a few minutes later completely naked, holding a gold raw-silk suit on a hanger.
“This is what I wore in the video,” she said. She wiggled into the skirt and turned in profile, smoothing