500 Men. 1 Woman. Get in Line.

Susannah Breslin

Detour, April 1999

It is an apocalyptic fuck. A Super Bowl-sized circle jerk for porno-illogical males who can’t get tail. The hole’s name is Houston. A sex star borne from the female libido in overdrive as the ultimate screw. We are gathered here today to witness the marriage of personal penetration and public ejaculation so the world will become a more orgy-like place. Like Mecca, the mystery is what makes Man come.

Pro-dick and amateur-dick stand side by side on Metro Global’s Houston 500 soundstage. Calls for the penis-havers by their allotted numbers are given via megaphone as boys waits in bleachers. You want to run amongst them with checkered flag in hand, yelling, “Go! Go! Go!” But they sit waiting for their pop shots. With fifteen minutes of fame trimmed to three minutes of humping, all are assured a chance at notching the belt of erotic history.

Oh, the humanity! “It’s human,” says #53 (Oliver). One pre-completed application form (to show true competitive interest), one pre-mailed snapshot of a penis next to a Coke can (to show true size ratio), one proof-negative HIV test (to show true personal unsulliedness) wins the right to show “her” you can really shake it down. Sloppy seconds are a necessary irrelevance. Wearing nada but a T-shirt only half-covering a cold, shy penis is de rigueur. At this game, everybody is a real winner.

With performance pressure at maximum decibel everyone thanks the lord for the fluffer advent. Milling men funnel into the line that leads to the place from whence one will get some. Ten girls stand planted at the narrowest point of gang-bang entry armed with open mouths, steeled in weeks of antibiotics, equipped by American workhorse ethics. You are not permitted to fuck fluffers, someone reminds. Three men chitchat as opening fluffings are administered. It is like homoeroticism without all the homo.

The lucky lass upon whom all simian yearnings are now foisted has entered the pit. Because The Houston 500 is like the Indy 500 in ways myriad—from more obvious rubber parallels to less frequent instances of lapping—the scene is fancy race car regalia. Due to her mighty racing spirit, Houston will be putting out on a stack of tires with a Lazy Susan spin top. The scary moment in the day’s lone instance of sticky awe is that the gang-bangee is actually nervous.

Houston is a nice porn star. She is blond, big-boobed, and smiley. She is a hard worker. The World’s Biggest Gang Bang 3 will make her famous. She will get money from the movie and more money as a stripper out on the road. The men assembled are not as pretty as Houston. One of them is like someone’s Dad, another a lonely guy from somewhere, a young man in black eyeliner is not right in the head. They are not bad; they are just men.

This is when the boning starts. Mostly there is a one-at-a-time rule. Mostly there is a condom rule. Mostly there is no way in hell there are 500 guys here, and the digitized penis-counter on the wall has an oddly accelerated way of keeping track. The Number of Times Penetrated, though, is nothing to turn one’s nose up at. It becomes clear the most important thing to be learned by a girl who is perhaps taking notes is that while it may feel good to have a man pound away on top of you—very good indeed, sometimes—it does not look all that good to watch a lot of men pound away on top of one woman. But mostly it just goes on and on and on anyway.

Two men explain it all: “There’s no reason to worry because you know you’re gonna get a piece.” “You don’t even have to buy her a drink.” “It’s like there’s a camaraderie.” “The momentary pleasure is secondary to being part of the event.” After two World Wars and all the upset over the NBA strike and then the gang bang to top it off, understanding men seems arduously complex.

A leg sticks up in the air over the crowd, a buzz is created by a rear entrance, Playboy TV pulls in to cover this epic of events, Ron Jeremy’s X-rated emcee stylings help the boys club along. Eleven hours of erotic droning. It is finally the man that rides mounted on all fours with head erect and eyes surveying as he thrusts mechanically away who best captures the Animal Kingdom nature. He gangbangs the crowd, not the woman, for his brethren. It is perhaps not homo erectus’s proudest moment.

At 620, Houston stops. She says to someone: “Thank you.” The men reenact the Close Encounters of the Third Kind scene in which the spaceship comes down and the aliens come out. Limp, flaccid fascination. Who has the guts, the glory, the money? All the guys have fucked each other and been fucked over by the girl. Houston’s got her trophy and her place in history. The men go home.