Hella Nation - Evan Wright [118]
She stood, bare-chested, in front of the TV. “I don’t believe in God. But I pray. I pray to goodness. I believe in something good. I’m not going to let this illness stop me. I’m going to dance, I’m going to have my own website. And dude, you know what?” She sounded determined, inspired. “I am going to make porn movies again. Fuck. I’m all about the word fuck.”
She let the skirt fall to the carpet and sat naked on the couch. She picked up her bong. “Dude, I’m not saying I’m not scared. I’ve got HIV. How can I ever be a normal twenty-five-year-old girl again?”
WHENEVER HE WAS KICKING HEROIN, a friend in the business used to dream of Asians. A typical dream: He is living in an El Monte trailer park and has a twin sister who is Chinese. She is beautiful, and he must fight her to the death in an unusual form of combat involving shish-kebab skewers. Their left wrists are bound together with straps, and they begin stabbing each other.
Most of the relations I had with women before becoming a pornographer were along the lines of my coworker’s dream life. A wife or girlfriend functioned as a narcotic, fixing whatever emotional or spiritual maladies I was suffering from, but we would inevitably end up psychically bound at the wrists and engaged in mortal combat.
The girlfriend I was living with when I was hired at LFP was a professional in a field far from pornography. She had no issues with my new job; her concerns were that I was controlling, emotionally distant and psychologically abusive. My concerns were that she had an explosive temper and had once carved “Pig Motherfucker” on my front door with a knife. In our sessions with a couples therapist in Century City, we quietly discussed the need to listen to each other and develop mutual respect.
After these morning sessions, I would drive to the Flynt building in Beverly Hills to review XXX videos. In the Erotic Entertainment section of Hustler, which I wrote for and edited, I probably never used the word “woman.” Women dominated every description and image that ran in my section of the magazine, but I referred to them using a pornographic lexicon handed down through time and enshrined in the copyediting department. They were sluts, bitches, pixies, nymphs, cunts, twists, slatterns, tramps, ginches, chicks, gashes, honeys, babes, squacks, pies, hootchies, snatches, trollops, tarts, dolls, quims, skanks, trims, split-tails and holes. For legal reasons, the terms “whore” and “prostitute” could not be used as nouns in reviews, but “whore” was acceptable as an adjective—as in describing a performer as, for example, a “whore-face blonde.”
I wrote reviews under the pseudonym “Mack Assarian.” This helped reinforce the notion I maintained to my girlfriend, my therapist or anyone who asked that my life was separate from my job. The words I wrote in Flynt publications in no way reflected my own thoughts or feelings. Mack Assarian had the voice of an unrepentant misogynist, wise to the games played by manipulative bitches. But he was not me.
The day after my girlfriend dumped me, I reviewed a video titled Piece of Ass. As it played on the TV in my office—with the sound down and in fast-forward, standard review mode—I wrote: “Anyone who has had his life repeatedly wrecked by living, breathing cunts finds increasing solace in snatches that are safely contained in videocassette boxes. . . . If fuck bitches in real life were half as nasty as the cushiony degenerates in Piece of Ass, the defenseless male dupe would jump at the chance to have one wreck his life even quicker than the last cunt did.”
In this review, Mack Assarian had expressed my own anger and self-pity. He had said what I had never been able to say in a $175-per-hour therapy session. The persona had merged with the person, and I had found truth in my own mean-spirited Hustler copy. This