Illustration by Susannah Breslin
Nearly 30 years ago, I had my first short story published in an anthology. The story was “Apartment,” and it appeared in Chick Lit 2. Now, I’ve published the story online for the first time. This work of fiction features boobs, a dog, and a man who may be losing his mind. If you’re upset by adult themes, don’t read it.
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This is part 17 of “Fuck You, Pay Me,” an ongoing series of posts on writing, editing, and publishing.
Recently, I wrote a short story. I’ve written short stories before; I even published a collection of short stories. Last year, I had a terrible time working with a big publisher on my memoir. In the wake of that negative experience—a bad editor, incompetent PR and marketing, the inability to control the outcome—I set out to reclaim my relationship to writing. When I wrote under contract with a big publisher, I lost my identity as a writer. What I wanted to do was reclaim who I was as a writer. I decided to start with a short story.
The Idea. Back in June, I visited the set of an adult movie for a story I was writing for Forbes.com. As I drove east to the location, I wondered how this time would be different from the last time. The first time I was on an adult movie set was 1997. Now it was 2024. I was a different person and exactly the same. As I stood on the porn set in a building where one would not expect to find an adult movie being filmed, I thought about how much older I was than I had been nearly 30 years ago on that first porn movie set I’d visited. In a way, I felt self-conscious about that; after all, porn is a business built on surfaces, how things look, the appearances of things. At the same time, I felt like with maturity, I could see what was in front of me more clearly: the players, the scene, the spoken and unspoken dynamics at play.
Sometime after that porn set visit this summer, I got an idea for a short story I wanted to write. While I’ve written a wide range of fiction, I thought this time I would try writing a short story that was about a subject of interest to me (the adult movie industry) and was stylistically something more traditional than, say, some of my other fiction writing. In other words, it would be a short story of the sort you might see published in The New Yorker—that just so happened to be concerned with the porn business.
My short story would about a man who was older, whose back hurt, and who discovered one day that an adult movie was being shot in the house behind his. (In the real San Fernando Valley, houses are occasionally rented for adult movie shoots.) And with that, I was off and running.
Stewart by Meta AI
The Details. The story would be called “Topical Matters.” Or “The Scopophiliac.” Or “Van Nuys.” Ultimately, I settled on “Topical Matters.” It would be around 5,000 words long, which was around how long some of the short stories published in The New Yorker in recent years were (although some were quite a bit longer). It would be inspired in part by “The Swimmer,” John Cheever’s 1964 short story classic in which a seemingly ordinary man attempts to swim home through backyard swimming pools in a seemingly ordinary suburb. The main character would be named Stewart, and his wife would be named Maureen. He would be retired, and he would be very interested in controlling his environment. The style of the story would be realism with a twist. The entire course of events would take place in a single day.
I estimated it would take me approximately two weeks to write this story. A week, maybe. Of course, it ended up taking longer than that (life got in the way, so it took about two months from start to finish to write). In a manner of speaking, the story itself would be irrelevant. The only thing that mattered when I was writing it was: Am I having fun? If I wasn’t, I wouldn’t do it. I hadn’t enjoyed writing a memoir under contract, working with a big five editor who did not seem to know how to edit, to attempt to tell the story of my life according to someone else’s idea of what that looked like. This story would be mine.
The Execution. Since I’d had such a shit time writing my memoir, I wasn’t sure if I could do the relatively simple task I’d assigned myself. I mean, it wouldn’t be easy, but I wasn’t even sure I could enjoy writing again. That said, I identified what I could do. I could write a 100-word paragraph. Couldn’t I? And what was a 5,000-word short story if not a series of, say, 100-word paragraphs? I would write one paragraph, and then I would write another paragraph, and that was how I would get there. The entire story would be comprised of five sections, each section some 1,000-words. That was doable, wasn’t it? Surely, it was.
And so it went. Some days I wrote a single 100-word paragraph. Some days I wrote several. At one point, I didn’t work on the story for several weeks. Eventually, though, I got back to it. I started falling in love with my main character, who I thought was hilarious. The premise amused me to no end, what this guy living this relatively normal life would do when he found himself encountering something rather remarkable. I envisioned the house. The yard. The wife. Her departure. How he came to discover that a porn movie was being shot in the house behind his. What his personal history in relationship to porn was. How he justified his curiosity, and what he found when he got there. I was Stewart, and Stewart was me.
The Shift. Somewhere along the way, things began to change. I started to feel more confident about my writing. I began to experience writing as play again (as opposed to work). I transformed into someone who wanted to write rather than someone who regretted what she had written. I was writing well, how I wanted to write, about what I wanted to write. Which seemed pretty ideal. The words kept coming, and when I didn’t get something, I waited for the insight to come. I talked to my shrink about the story. I woke up in the middle of the night and thought about my story. I wrote more and more, and as the end approached, I realized that writing for myself was where it’s at, not writing for someone else.
This process also enabled me to think more and in different ways about some of what I have experienced on adult movie sets over the years as a journalist. What was it like for the male porn star? How did the pornographer relate to his work? Why did the starlet say the things she said? Most centrally, I sought to capture what it was like to be on a porn set: curious, magical, dark, strange, disorienting, hilarious, perverse. As I neared the end, I felt I had captured that experience as best I could, not by nonfiction but by fiction.
The Product. A few weeks ago, on a Sunday, I finished editing my short story. Almost immediately, to my surprise, I was sad. Stewart wasn’t the most likable guy—he is stiff, uncompromising, judgemental—but I had liked him. For nearly two months, I had shared the intimacy of his inner-workings. I didn’t want to let that go. It would be the end of our relationship. I had my 5,000 words, give or take, but being done with the story meant letting it go, letting Stewart go, letting a world in which I was god go. But this wasn’t my first time at the short story rodeo, and I knew what I had to do next.
That day, I submitted my short story to about a dozen publications, The New Yorker among them. So far, I’ve heard from one publication, which declined it. In January, if no one has expressed interest in publishing it, I’ll publish it myself and sell it online. Right now, “Topical Matters” is a story looking for a home, some place that will embrace its main character and not reject it for its prurient leanings.
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This fictional short story was written by me and published on Exquisite Corpse in Spring/Summer 2002.
Oh, he was a bad man. He had been terrible since the day he was born, before even then perhaps. He had cried constantly as a small baby, masturbated obsessively as a young teen, and become the kind of man as an adult who only truly enjoyed himself when he was hurting other people. Now, he wanted to know, what was so wrong with that?
This badness, after all, had taken him to where he was today, sitting in his car in an empty parking lot with the dog of his brain running in a circle on a chain in the yard of his mind. Because these days, he was King Shit of Turd Hill, a paid propagator of evil, a guy unabashedly enough in touch with his, well, bad, really, self, that he made a living off of it. He thought that perhaps everyone else would do well to go and fuck themselves.
He was a pornographer, and he was not ashamed. In fact, he was terrifically proud. He told those who stood around him while he worked that porn stars were like game pieces, and porn sets were like chessboards, and he was like the god who moved them around. He would add, after a pause, But in this game, somebody always gets fucked in the ass! And then he would laugh, and everyone else would laugh right along with him.
His life was hilarious, actually. Put that in your mouth, put this in your vagina, put the other thing up your butt. The variations were endless. It was their willingness that staggered his mind. The people in front of him were as malleable as freshly pulverized meat. Having been punched by their mothers, screwed by their fathers, and screamed at by their lovers, they stood limply before him and just did whatever he said.
What do you do when you have done it all? This was what he wanted to know today. Because living this life so pornographically, he had, of course, grown bored. He had started to lose that sense of doing something so wrong. He had found himself longing for that feeling of playing the roulette wheel. And that was the point at which he had begun to push at the things that were around him.
First, he had suggested that the men and women choke each other by the throat. Then, he had requested that they go to the bathroom on one another. After that, he had directed them to take more of each other inside of themselves than they were capable of taking. He added a midget, a plastic pig mask, and a shotgun. For a while, it had helped.
But eventually, the new bad would become as bad as the old bad, and that was never good enough for him. Being bad had always been a part of him, but somewhere along the way, it had overflowed the banks of his personality, and seeped throughout all of his private life, and taken over what he saw of mankind. He had got a little numb, really.
He had tried telling himself there were a finite numbers of holes in the human body, that there was a limited degree to which you could shove at someone before they zoned, that there was a maximum level of depravity to be reached where the playing field leveled out at the bottom of the pit. He tried telling a man who worked for him what was going on in his head, but the man only barked at him. Now, where would he go? He had no idea.
Because he had been raised on horror movies and practical jokes in the middle of a rotting house drowning in the racket of horrifyingly loud and overbearing women, and he did not want to go back to that way of life ever again. His mother and his sisters were the kind of morbidly overweight women who spat when they spoke, forever sweaty and smelling, upset in countless kinds of ways, and he still disliked all of them deeply for it.
Growing up in the midst of those females caterwauling around him, he had distracted himself with the newspaper photographs of fatal car accidents and the stories of famous serial killers. He had dreamed longingly of what it felt like when a man's head was torn from his body at 60 miles an hour. He had fantasized fervently about what a stalker saw while snuffing out another expertly bondaged woman beneath him. That was his escape.
He hadn't known his father, didn't care to. He hadn't talked much to his mother or sisters, didn't care to. But drunk in a bar one night at 23, he had overheard someone declare that pornography was the last, true frontier left in the modern world. And when he heard that, for the first time, he had felt a sense of motivation. So, he had moved to Hollywood.
He was married twice, during his decade-long tenure in the world of sex and smut. Both his ex-wives were also ex-porn stars, formerly beautiful women who had crawled out of the garbage bin of pornography and right into his wide-open arms, as if from their point-of-view that appeared to be some type of refuge. Neither marriage had lasted more than a year. He had a son he didn't see, didn't care to. He was alone. He liked that. He did.
Because what people did not understand was that his life had been like a fucking war. His whole long life, he had acted like a fucking general in a fucking war, and now, he thought, he wanted a fucking medal. What the fuck? he thought, slapping at his thigh in the car. Because there was no difference between what he had done and what the guys in 'Nam had done, really. His question: What happens when people do whatever they want? The answer: They kill each other. And the truth of pornography: Porn is hell.
Hadn't he dodged those flying shots, slid in the slime of other people's fluids, gotten close enough to the human body to see into the pink fleshiness of its gaping insides? Hadn't he carried a lucky charm for his own protection, hadn't he seen what most people wouldn't, hadn't it changed him forever and all that crap? I have Post Traumatic Porn Disorder, he said to himself in his car and laughed. Then, he thought, I want to go home.
He wondered if he was turning into the Lord of the Flies, if he should be muttering, The horror, the horror!, if he resembled John Holmes during the Wonderland murders. He felt like the driver in a car accident between a cock and a pussy, sporting a necklace made of human ears, his only award a double-kill. Those things lived in him, care of Porn Valley, USA. Welcome home, Fucker!
The funny part of it was that everything had started out so innocently. He had found a cheap apartment in Hollywood and bought himself a stack of porn magazines. He had made a friend—got to talking to the drug-dealer down the hall, actually, while getting high one day—and that guy had a friend who wrote porn scripts. He had never heard of such a thing before, but he had believed that he could write the greatest porn movie ever made.
He drove to the offices of a man who made adult movies, somewhere out in the San Fernando Valley. The guy looked like a loser, with his comb-over and saying he had been in the porn industry since before it was born. That was a turn-off. But behind the guy's desk, a locker door had hung open, vomiting out old porn scripts. And the guy had said, Hey, you wanna try making one of these fuckers? That was how it had happened.
He was scared shitless, the first day. An actress whose name he couldn't remember showed up two hours late, drunk. A guy sitting on a crate turned out to be the male talent. They started taking their clothes off as soon as he picked up the video-camera. He barely spoke a word. Forgot to focus. Most of the footage was awful. He loved it, regardless.
Because there was nobody telling him what to do—nobody, even, who knew what he couldn't do. And as long as there were two people, or three people—or better yet, four or more people—fucking in front of him, he couldn't hear the past banging around inside of his head at all. It was amazing how distracting real life could be when you were looking at what was in his face every day. This life, he thought at the time, It is very hypnotic.
But somehow, somewhere along the way, he had been dulled. Blunted by his own process, today, he feared, the thrill was gone. Two weeks ago, this great likelihood of this very possibility had sent him crawling back home to his mother's house, the only place where he knew things would be exactly the same as the day that he had left them. The first night there, he slept in his mother's bed with her, lay there listening to her breathing for four nights running. It wasn't sexual, but it had helped him comfort himself.
Sex, by then, held no meaning for him, anyway. Sex, he thought, down under the covers next to his sleeping mother, was the missionary position and doggie-style, and douches and enemas, and reverse-cowgirl and double-penetration, and anal and double-anal, and gangbangs and bukkakes, and take your clothes off, please, and bend over there, dear, and I need a little bit more of that, honey, and can you pop for me now, man?
There was nothing left for him, anyhow. For him, he thought, there was alcoholism, and the shooting gallery, and stuffing everything up his nose, and popping everything else in his mouth, and getting clean only to wind up fat around the gills, and realizing that if a man's first creation was his feces, then it made sense what he created was shit, so this was his manifest destiny, and his self-fulfilling prophecy, and it was, rightly, obscene.
You gotta love me!, he had thought, lying next to his sleeping mother, but he had wanted to cry. His mother always smelled to him of what he, himself, had smelled of for as far back as he could remember, but it was only when he was with her that he knew whatever bad thing he was, or would ever become, it began and ended with her. He had left the very next morning, before his mother woke up, for the first and last time missing her.
A long time ago, for him pornography had been like what he thought falling in love would be like. Girls with tiny ankles honorably armed in monster breasts. Guys with tan muscles bravely wielding huge cocks. They weren't just having sex, either. They were executing acts on his behalf. And it was as if he was right there between them when they did it, pulling them apart as they struggled to give him his shot. He had found it touching that they would let you get in there with them like that while they sweated.
Sometimes, it turned out, a girl would cry. She would be hopped up on meth, her suitcase-pimp would have bitched her out, she would be upset because everybody laughed when she did something embarrassing. (Farting, crapping, quiffing—the accidents of the female body were never-ending.) He would put his arm around her and say something about being sorry, or proud, or tell her everything would be fine in the end.
The guys, it turned out, were just as screwed up. They spent all of their time obsessing about the scars on their bodies, showing off the latest tattoo they had gotten that referred to the latest heartbreaker they had survived, so vain that it made them almost charismatic. (Those guys were ruled by their own penises, left to sit trimming at their own pubic hair.) He steered clear of them, but his heart went out to them over the distance, nevertheless.
For almost a decade, it had been just the three of them, no matter how many people were actually involved. A man, a woman, and him. The location had moved from warehouse, to townhouse, to apartment, but the triangle they formed was always there, in its constant and complete formation. And when the triangle stood up, he was on top. When it fell down, he sat in the corner. Now he couldn't stand in the middle to save his goddamn life.
Yoou've looost thaat loooving feeeling! That was what the radio had been screaming at him one week ago. On that morning, by 11AM, things had been going wrong already. His male porn star was AWOL. His female porn star, meanwhile, was piling on layers of lipstick on her mouth in the mirror, the radio wailing away at him from behind her.
He had gone into the back room, and he had tried to figure out what to do. That was when the P.A. had walked up to him and said, I can do it, his thumb hooked back over his shoulder toward the set. This particular P.A. wasn't one he had worked with before, but it wasn't unheard of that a production guy could turn porn guy in a pinch. The kid was young enough, if not that good-looking enough—a non-descript, longhaired, pocked-face, skinny white guy of the type that populated the Valley's houses around them.
Do you have a test? he said to the P.A. The kid took a piece of paper out of his back pocket and handed it to him. And when he had looked down at the piece of paper in the kid's hand, he had started to say something, but right as he did, the words fell away out of his mouth, and something had shifted, and he had looked back up at the kid and all of a sudden, not like some kind of a flash, but like some kind of something, he just knew, and the kid looked at him, and he looked at the kid, and there was something connecting what was between them, and whatever it was, it made his old bad look good in comparison.
What he had wanted to do was to lean into the kid's ear and whisper, Do it, because he got very dizzy in that moment that the two of them were making to go POW!, and he was scared that if he kept on looking at the kid, the kid's face would start turning around and around like a roulette wheel, and the red and the black numbers there would spin into a blur, and where the ball would stop, he did not yet know. For the first time in a long time, he had thought, This is living. And what he had said to the kid was, Yes.
He damn well knew, sitting in his car, the story that everybody wanted him to tell. And it went, My mother put me in a dress, while my father molested me, right after I had my first seizure, directly before I gutted my first pet, those many years prior to my first crime/torture/kill, which is longhand for saying, the bodies are under the house, I think/in the crawl space, from what I recall/out by the edges of the aqueduct, I do believe, but please!/God!/Lord!, Officer/Sir/Dad, don't send me to the gas chamber, nevertheless!
But the truth of the matter was that, whether you were a porn-maker, or a serial killer, or a gambler, your deepest desire was to control that which could not be controlled, and so other folks could chalk it up to the X-factor, or the XXX-factor, or the XY-factor, but what you were chasing after was all the same, and therefore whether you were looking through the lens of a camera, or down the double-barrels of a shotgun, or across a roulette wheel, you had to be vewy, vewy quiet while you were hunting humans, because the best thing about people was that they weren't easy, and that was what made them great game.
It had just so happened for him that along his life's path, he had discovered the world of pornography. And as it had turned out, this world was a total one, with its own language, population, commerce, and laws. And that made it the ideal playing field for extreme sportsmanship. Because when you work a system, the structures do their best not to fall down.
When he had looked down at the piece of paper that the kid had handed to him, he had thought he had recognized the kid's name. And that had set off a domino-like chain of thoughts inside his brain, and he had thought he had remembered someone leaning into him, months previous, and pointing a finger right at this kid in front of him, in some other place at some other time, and telling him, There is something very bad inside of that kid. And he had thought he remembered exactly what that bad thing was. But in porn, it had always seemed to him like there were a great many things that were better left unsaid.
That was what made it so easy, really, for him to pick up the camera when the girl walked on the set and stood next to the bed. That was what made it so simple, in fact, for the kid to come in behind her and stand waiting in the middle of the room. That was what made it so not hard, actually, for him to ignore whatever written plot-line had supposedly led them there. Because this, for once, was going to be his story now, and no one else's.
He had looked through the viewfinder, and he had found the girl. She was a C-level porn-starlet at best—blonde, and thin, and pale. She would have come into the business only recently, and she would make something like a dozen movies, and then she would be going right back to Fresno or Barstow or whatever dusty, outlying town she had emerged from. And she would never do better than this anyway. And she probably thought this would haunt her only if her stepfather saw her on one of his porno channels one day.
And maybe, he had thought as he turned the camera on her, she will be wrong about that.
Then, the boy and the girl had got it on. And that was how he had set his own ball of chance running through the world of porno. And where it would stop, nobody knew.
And yet, and yet, from that day to this one, he had started to feel, well, bad, really. But it wasn't like he felt guilty, or as if he had done something so wrong, or that all of it was all of his fault, or if he had done this, well, then maybe that, or like he had committed some kind of a crime. And it wasn't like he thought he was sexually strange, or erotically perverse, or romantically sadistic, or utterly without a heart. It was more like how he felt when he smelled garbage while he was driving down the freeway, or was caught masturbating by his mother, or spent too much time looking at himself in the mirror.
What do you do when you have done it all? He held his hands in front of himself, and he thought, If only these hands could talk, maybe they would have something to say. He looked out the windshield to the train tracks in the distance. God, what have I done to me?
Once upon a time, a male porn star had spent all of his time in the adult movie industry with a handmade, falsified HIV-negative test in hand, spreading himself willy-nilly across the eyes, and mouths, and vaginas, and anuses of the girls he had sex with on-camera. Today, who cared? Anybody could rent the video and watch while it happened.
The only thing left in its wake had been the endless, ceaseless roar of supply and demand, more names and titles rattling on into infinity, new guys and gals coming in through the OUT-door, nobody ever stopping to ask anyone else too loudly, Aw, now why'd you wanna go do a thing like that? Nothing, in the end, had proven more profitable than the human brain's ruthlessly industry. And these days, the population's immune-system was wearing down so fast that you slipped in the run-off every time you stepped in the street.
It was this smotheration of other people's desire that he had spent his whole life bearing. It was this arresting compulsion to meet everyone else's most graphic needs that he had found that he could not stop. Had it been so wrong to hope that he would become a better man along the way? It had turned out, though, that being perfectly bad did not bring a man's life full circle around to being perfectly good. Luck, it seemed, eluded him again.
In the car, for the first time, he closed his eyes, and he laid back his head.
All anybody will ever see of me are the flickering scenes of porn videos screening across my eyeballs, and all anybody will ever hear from me is an audio-loop of moans and groans coming out my mouth, and all anybody will ever say to me is, More, as they smack their hand into the windshield of my car as they crawl across the hood right towards me.
Inside his head, it felt like the dog of his brain was breaking off its chain, and now he could feel the dog climbing out of his head, and he could even hear it climbing onto the steering wheel before him, and he could already taste the clickity-clack of its toenails digging into the red and black squared numbers, and he saw when he opened his eyes that the dog was stepping up its pace because the dog was hungry, and what he realized right then and there was that, with or without him, the dog would run on forever, and it would never be sated.
So today, he had to ask himself, finally, You were a bad man, weren't you?, with the dog of his brain running on the wheel of his car, and he had to answer, in all honesty, Why yes, I was.
And then he stepped out of his car, and then he walked down to the train tracks in the distance, and then he stood there waiting for the next train to take him crisscrossing out across America. And he told himself, I will touch every good person I ever meet with my hands. And he wondered, as the rails began to vibrate at his feet, if he was contagious.
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If you’re interested in hiring me as a consultant, buying a signed copy of my memoir, or ordering my digital short story “The Tumor,” you can do so in my Gumroad store. Questions? You can contact me here.
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At a certain point in the last year or so I bought a copy of The Stories of John Cheever. I believe I purchased it at one of my favorite used bookstores: The Iliad. I’m a Cheever fan; “The Swimmer” is one of my favorite short stories. Since I’m wrapping up writing a short story, and because recently a post on Threads asking about the last longest books followers had read got me thinking about the longest books I’ve ever read, I decided to read the Cheever book between now and the end of the year. It’s nearly 700 pages long, and it contains in the neighborhood of 60 short stories. In any case, I’ll share my thoughts about the book with my Books I Read series when I’m finished with it. (Some of the longest books I’ve ever read are The Tunnel by William Gass at 652 pages and The Stand by Stephen King at 1,472 pages.) The story I’m finishing writing is currently titled “Supernova” and is looking to be around 5,000 words or so when it’s done.
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Machines in the Head: Selected Stories by Anna Kavan is weird as hell. If you’re extremely dumb, allergic to unconventional modes of storytelling, or enjoy Colleen Hoover, this book is not for you. These stories are very dark, concerned with insanity, and unrelenting in their refusal to deliver the happy endings so many readers are obsessed with getting from books these days. If you’re awesome and smart, you’ll love it.
Books I Read in 2024: Victory Parade, I Hate Men, My Friend Dahmer, The Crying of Lot 49, Machines in the Head, Big Magic, The Valley, End of Active Service, An Honest Woman, The Money Shot, Atomic Habits, Finding Your Own North Star, Crazy Cock, Sigrid Rides, Your Money Or Your Life, The Big Sleep, Eventually Everything Connects, Smutcutter, Shine Shine Shine, A Serial Killer’s Daughter, Confessions of a Serial Killer
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Mannequin with bow tie | Photo credit: Susannah Breslin
This fictional short story was written by me, published by Nerve in 2002, and republished in You’re a Bad Man, Aren’t You? in 2003.
She wondered if it was a good idea to date someone of whom there was a doll version. What if one of her girlfriends mailed the doll of him to her as a gag gift for her birthday? Maybe at some later point she would get mad and rip his head off and yank his clothes away and humiliate him in some obscene act of desperation. Then what?
She watched him on television. She watched him so much the show's theme song turned her on. When he came onscreen, she would smile at him and think, Oh, he is really funny, or, Wow, that is such a burden. She thought if she had the doll of him, he could sit on the couch right next to her, and by the end of the show his little plastic hand would be climbing up her shirt, headed straight for her boobs.
She told her girlfriend, who went to a bar he frequented, to invite her along one night. As it turned out, he must have liked her because he walked right up to her, and he said, Hey, do you want to go out with me sometime? She couldn't see his small eyes back behind his thick glasses, but she told him, Sure. Other men had told her, You are terribly intriguing, or, You are terrifically fascinating, but then couldn't think of anything else to say. This time, she thought, it would be different. With this one, the script had already been written.
For their first date, she went over to his house. He went off to the kitchen to get them a couple of beers, and she went to wait in the living room. There, she found four female sex dolls, sitting around on his furniture. She wasn't sure what to do, so she sat down next to one of them. She pulled at its rubber tongue, and it popped out in her hand. Luckily, she got the tongue back in before he came back in the room. Then, they drank the beer, and watched TV, and made out while the dolls sat around on the furniture, watching them.
Their relationship, such as it was, went on like that for a while. That was pretty much all they ever did. Once, they went bowling. After about a month like this, he broke down and told her what he really enjoyed was being beaten during sex. In his home-office, he showed her several oversized books filled with page after page of drawings of tall, angry women standing on top of men, beating them.
All of a sudden, before she knew it, he was naked down on the floor, and the bottom of her boot was across the back of his neck, and his tongue was on the top of her other boot, licking it, and she was shouting at him, You're licking my boot because that's the only thing that you're good enough to do! With one hand, she twisted his balls, hard. With the other hand, she smacked violently at his penis.
As she did it, it didn't turn her on, exactly. But the thought of someday standing next to his large swimming pool, holding the hand of his fat and round baby as it doddered around like a small and tiny version of him in its own pair of miniature glasses, while she staggered around half-drunk in high heels and a string-bikini with her lipstick smeared all over her frozen-on smile face, did turn her on. To her, that was a fantastic idea and everything she had ever wanted and a dream come true, all rolled into one.
Their relationship, such as it was, would involve him talking into his cellphone while they drove around, and him chatting with his agent as they dined out, and him laughing loudly with his friends across the back of the limousine they were riding in as, the whole entire time, she sat there right beside him, at his side. Living her life as if there was a camera broadcasting everything she did out to the world's peoples sitting bored in their homes metaphorically masturbating to her life would, surely, make her happy. Everything that had already taken place in her life before him would become like the blinding snow of a silent TV screen. It would be amazing what she could do when she lived on the other side of the fourth wall with him.
After things had been going along in this manner for about a month, they took a trip together to Las Vegas. At the airport, she watched as the crowds of people stood around staring at them like the people in Close Encounters of the Third Kind watching the aliens shuffle down off the spaceship. When they walked through the casino surrounded by the fleet of bodyguards, she knew that the people playing the slot-machines were jerking off their levers just for them.
But, late that night, in the privacy of their hotel room, when she looked up into the round mirror over the king-size bed in the Greco-Roman penthouse suite, the only thing she knew for sure was that he had just said to her, I do not like having intercourse, per se, all that very much, and within 4.6 seconds, she had thought, I can live with that, because that, she knew, was what the script had called for. There was, after all, no going back to auditions once you had won the part. It was hard, though, to know what to do when you found yourself hanging off the edge of the very page that you thought you had written.
The next morning, when she had finished hitting him for the umpteenth time, he looked up at her, and he said, Isn't this great? Behind him, The Mask of Zorro was playing on the TV, and Antonio Banderas was running back and forth in his black mask, waving his whip around wildly, raising his arched eyebrow up and down at her, as if in an erotic challenge. It was getting harder for her to upright her brain from the place it fell over when his bad edits in the reel of their life together knocked her over like a car that had gone off the road.
Back in the city, she found herself at the very last moment softening her blows to his erect penis. She discovered increasingly she could barely muster up enough energy to tighten his ball-gag as tight as he liked. She could hardly bring herself to raise the crop high enough above him to bring out the best welts on his pale bottom waiting below.
By the time her birthday came, he had stopped calling. Instead, a UPS man showed up at her front door with a brown box containing the doll version of him as a gag gift from her girlfriend. That night, she could hear the live-in studio audience in her head murmuring its displeasure, shuffling out the stage door, as she climbed in bed alone yet again.
When the phone had quit ringing entirely, she called her girlfriend, who had taken her to the bar that first night, and asked her to come over. Together, they made a collage out of pictures of him that they had cut from The National Enquirer. When it was done, he looked like a big, fat, crying baby. The next morning, when she looked at it again, she burst into tears, and then cancelled her cable TV service. The doll version of him, for its part, was already sitting headless in the back of one of her bathroom cupboards, the dust bunnies gathered all around it.
In the revised version of the story of her life, that she finally ended up writing, she never completely forgot that boyfriend or what he had meant to her or how hard she had been able to slap him across the face just to make him smile. But, eventually, she fell in love with another man, who was balding and who had never been on TV. With him, she learned how to pantomime true love to the degree that, sometimes, she thought she could hear a laugh-track playing in the background like applause while they had sex. And in the end, it turned out, that turned her on.
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This short story was originally published as part of the Significant Objects project in 2009/2010.
I reached my hand into the drawer, withdrew it, and looked at what lay in my palm. “ALL AMERICAN OFFICIAL NECKING TEAM,” the pin read. It was hard to reconcile the words with my father. At this point, he had been dead for nearly 15 years. After he had passed away, my mother and I had stood over the dining room table upon which sat a large box that contained what was left of him. Cremains, the man had called them. My father, I had longed to correct him. Thankfully, my mother had been willing to share what remained of him with me, his only son. My father was a skyscraper of a man — six-foot-five, Ozymandias hands, a brooding forehead — a great man, really — and so, he had left a great deal of himself behind. I dipped a teaspoon into the mound of his ashes and placed three or so tiny shovelfuls into a plastic bag. I fastened the bag with a twist-tie. I put the bag in a small wooden box that smelled faintly of the peach tea it had once held. Later, my mother handed me a bag of his things, which, to be perfectly honest, I had forgotten about — until today, when I spotted it in the back of the drawer, behind my wife’s underwear, and reached into the leather case and pulled the pin from it.
I imagined my father had won his place on the All-American Necking Team sometime during 1953, his senior year at Brooklyn Preparatory. I knew what he looked like back then from photographs: a young man with deep-set eyes undershadowed by dark circles, his long form gangly with the awkwardness of his youth, a thin tie knotted at the base of his bird-like neck. Once, my mother had told me about his penchant for drinking Zombies, about the time in the middle of a party, he had proclaimed, “I’m a tree,” and then fallen flat to the floor, how she had stolen him from another woman older than her, who had a child — and in the remembering, my mother had smiled. But that summer, his father, my grandfather, a frustrated CPA with a roaring temper fueled by an abiding love of Four Roses and the failures of the Brooklyn Dodgers, had fallen dead of a heart attack while taking the IRT subway to work one day, and my father’s life had changed forever. Instead of trundling off to some Ivy League college, he had stayed in Flatbush, enrolled at Brooklyn College, and dutifully taken care of his mother, a woman I’d never met, whose name was Rose.
Looking down at the pin staring up at me like a Cyclops, looking through this portal into a time wherein I was nothing but a flickering flash in one of my father’s constellation of neurons, I wondered who this all-star necker was: my father, a young man not unlike myself, or something else altogether — a man beyond my understanding now relegated to a past that lay on the other side of a bridge where the land was so dark that I could no longer see him.
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This short story was originally published by A Shaded View on Fashion Fiction in May 2010.
She had been waiting forever, it seemed, for a boy like this one, who wore his heart on his sleeve. Now, here he was, sitting across from her in this dimly lit restaurant, his arm on the table. The exposed, bloody organ was attached to his sleeve with what appeared to be a safety pin. Across the table, he was looking at her expectantly, his head cocked slightly to the left, like a dog listening for a sound only he could hear, the right side of his mouth pulling up slightly, as if he was unsure what she was thinking. Judging by the tangle of threads unraveling around the gaping hole in his blue sweater where his heart should have been, he had carved himself open to retrieve it. On his sleeve, the heart was shaking and shuddering, straining against the pin’s grasp. They had found each other on an online dating site three days previous and met for the first time 17 minutes ago. Now, here he was, looking eager and hopeful, and it was up to her to figure out what was she supposed to do next. She looked at the boy uncertainly and tried to hurry up and decide what she was going to do about this boy and his still-beating heart before the angry waitress returned and demanded to take their order. Is it too late? she said. The boy’s face dropped. Late? he said. Too late to put it back? She nodded her head at the heart. Oh, the boy said, looking down at it. Slowly, the blood was seeping into his napkin. Soon, it would spill off the table and pool on the floor, making a mess. I don’t know, he said. The boy had no idea if he could singlehandedly un-pin his heart, stuff it back into his chest, and darn up the sweater in such a way that no one would ever know that he had stood in his kitchen in the fading light and removed his heart from his chest with a serrated steak knife, all for a woman whom he had yet to meet, a glowing collection of pixels that was her smiling out at him from the computer screen. It was too late to pull his arm off the table and put it in his lap. She would know what he was doing, and he would bleed all over his trousers. From somewhere behind him, he could hear the hard clanging of pots in the kitchen, the frantic barking of the chef, the buzz of other couples in love cooing at one another in the candlelight. Shit, he said, under his breath but loud enough that the girl would hear it. All of a sudden, he decided he had had enough. He reached over with his left hand and unfastened the safety pin holding his heart to his sleeve. Here, he said, taking his heart in his right hand. Standing up slightly, he leaned across the table and deposited the heart on the plate in front of the girl sitting across from him. The girl poked at the heart with her fork. Interesting, she said, sounding like a forensic pathologist. He had no idea what she meant by that, but he knew at that moment that if she would continue saying things like this while stabbing at his heart with the tiny tines of the silver fork in her hand, he could be with her and stay happy forever. In that moment, it seemed anything was possible.
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This short story was originally published in Construction Literary Magazine in June 2018.
Dolores didn’t expect to spend the last year sewing pubic hair into a disembodied silicone vagina, but that’s the way it happened. One day, you’re working at the 7-11 on the corner of Tujunga and Magnolia, and the next day, you’re submitting your job application at a place your mother will refer to from this day forward as “the dildo factory.” In fact, it’s not a dildo factory. They make many things here. In the three and a half years that she’s worked at this place, she’s spent six months stringing anal beads, fourteen months assembling penis pumps, and two months boxing vibrators. A year ago, she found her niche: masturbators. The name sounded like something for which you should spend your Sunday mornings confessing, but in fact it was just her and four other girls in the far corner of the warehouse bent over a never-ending supply of thermoplastic rubber that had been molded to resemble the vaginas and assholes and entire rear ends of famous porn stars. At this point in her career, Dolores didn’t really think about what she was doing anymore: her head bent inches from the factory sculpted labia of a woman she’d never met as she poked the thick needle into the rubber surface and threaded another plastic pubic hair through the fake flesh. Sometimes she wondered what the real women were like. Somewhere in the Valley, they were famous actresses. On the internet, their images were beamed to places Dolores had never been in order to make men that Dolores would never meet happy, if only for a few fleeting moments. The demand was so great that Dolores and the other girls could hardly keep up with the pace. And right now, it wasn’t even the busy season. Come fall, the boss would hire another half dozen girls to work a second shift. The trucks would pull up to the back of the loading bay with increasing frequency, carting the boxed vaginas off to parts unknown. It made Dolores sad to see them leave, like watching your children head off for their first day of school. How would you defend them from the world? A week ago, Dolores was the last one leaving, and without thinking, she walked over to the table, picked up one of the boxes with a vagina in it, and dropped it into her bag. It was heavy—remarkably so—and she wondered briefly if the camera mounted in the corner where the wall met the ceiling had seen what she had done, even though she had turned her back to its prying eye. At home, she removed the vagina from her bag, set it on her dining room table, and considered it. On the cover of the box, the woman whose vagina it was had been dressed up like a waitress and was holding up her fake vagina like she was serving it for dinner. Dolores supposed that’s what men wanted: some piece of you offered up like a slice of pie for their consumption. To be honest, the thought didn’t make her mad. It made her lonely. As the sun set outside, and the room glowed with the golden hour, she had to believe that there was someone out there who would want the person Dolores really was, served on a platter, whole and ready to be eaten. Perhaps there was one man for whom she—meat and bone, organs and innards, blood and matter—would be enough to sate.
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Back in April, I decided I was going to write 30 flash fictions that had something to do with sex for a new project I named 30 Days of Smut. Pretty quickly, I realized I wasn’t going to complete those pieces in that time frame, so I renamed it Days of Smut and kept at it. Now I have 20 flash fictions with 10 more to go, and I’ve found this exercise to be beneficial. It’s great for silencing your critical mind and letting yourself be creative, you start doing weird things when you work within a rigid framework, and the things you can make up in your mind are pretty endless when you just keep producing. I’ll update again here when I’ve completed all 30.
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Just a reminder that you can buy various things in my Gumroad shop: signed books, consulting, a short story.
Awhile back, I started this mini-project called 30 Days of Smut. The idea was that I would write a short piece of smut-themed flash fiction every day for 30 days and post it on my website. That specific goal didn’t work out because I got busy, so I crossed out the 30 and the project is now Days of Smut. I’ll probably keep going until I have 30 stories and then stop. Basically, the purpose of the project is just to exercise my creative muscle. So far, I’ve introduced a dominatrix, a porn addict, an auto-cannibalist, a woodsman, and a mannequin.
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This is part 2 of “Fuck You, Pay Me,” an ongoing series of posts on writing, editing, and publishing.
INTRODUCTION
Twenty years ago, in 2003, I published a short story collection (fiction), You’re a Bad Man, Aren’t You?, through an independent small press book publisher. This year, in 2023, I published a memoir (nonfiction), Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment, through one of the Big Five traditional book publishers. What was the difference? Here I explore the pros and cons of each. (Note: For the sake of this post, I’m considering indie publishing to include small presses and traditional publishing to include the Big Five; these days, some people define indie publishing as only self-publishing, but that is not the case in this post.)
1. CONTROL
Indie: As I recall it, some time in 2003, I believe, I reached out to the founder of a small publisher of quirky books. By that point, I had been publishing weird short stories in print and online literary outlets, and I had amassed a decent sized pile of such over time. Enough for a collection. I reached out to the small press publisher, sent him my stories, and after awhile he responded, yes, he wanted to publish them as a small collection. In my memory, there was not a lot of editing, which was something that made me happy. A manuscript was created. I guess I reviewed it? I can’t really remember. The title of the book is the title of one of the stories. I seem to recall there was an earlier version of the cover I didn’t like, but then I think the same cover artist came up with the one you see in the photo above, which I liked. Eventually, the book was published. I was happy with how it turned out. I was proud. The book represented who I was.
Traditional: One thing about traditional book publishing that stands out in marked contrast to my previous experience with an independent publisher was that a large number of people were involved in the former. This time, there was an agent and the shopping of a book proposal to editors and meetings with people. There was a contract, an attorney, a team. I sold the book on proposal, and then I had to write it. I am not a team player; I do best creating on my own. The weight of being under contract to write a book that a publisher wanted me to write was considerable. This pressure caused a log-jam in the creative process in my head. Time dragged on. Finally, I hired a freelance editor who helped me finish the book. Did I write the book I wanted to write? That’s hard to say. Did I feel like I was in control of the creative process? Not all the time. Did I feel happy that I was done with the book? Yes, but I wasn’t so sure the book was me. A friend called it “Susannah light.”
2. MARKETING
Indie: Maybe my short story collection came out in September or thereabouts of 2003. Right around that time, I moved from Los Angeles to New Orleans, which in terms of the book was probably a stupid thing to do. I seem to remember having a profile written about me in the New Orleans weekly and I think there were some positive reviews and some guy who lived in Portland or something reviewed it and said reading my book was like being trapped next to an old woman drunk in a dive bar who would not shut up and the fact that I still remember that is a real testament to the negativity bias. I’d had a popular blog, but I think I had torn it down at that point, as I like to think of a life well lived as a let the bridges I burn light my way kind of a performance piece, and social media wasn’t a thing yet. The book came out, and I was pleased with it. By that point, I was working on a novel set in the porn industry, and I had, you know, as writers do, kind of moved on.
Traditional: Depending on who you ask, you may be told that either the big publishers no longer have the money to market every book or the big publishers are no longer interested in marketing books unless you are Stephen King or James Patterson or Colleen Hoover. I understood that for my memoir, I would be doing a fair amount of self-promotion. This was to be done mostly on social media or on a platform owned by someone else or in some other public forum. The idea was to flog the book by any means necessary. So I did. A long time ago I was a publicist, so I did all the things I could do to promote the book. The publisher did what they did, and I did what I did, and some good things came out of it, which are all here, but include a New York Post profile and a Slate essay I wrote and a starred review in Publishers Weekly and being a celebrity book club pick and I think there’s something else I’m forgetting. It was like being a busker: It was exhausting.
3. BUSINESS
Indie: I have no idea how the money worked with my short story collection, which is exactly as it should have been because I didn’t really care. The fictional short stories I wrote were strange and filthy and twisted. They featured pornographers gone wild and a woman who pretended be a lamp to sate the sexual desire of her partner and one guy who wanted to eat a woman. That’s all I cared about: the writing, the literary-iness, the creative expression. I don’t think I particularly cared who read it or why or what they thought about it. I do know that at a certain point the book sold out, and if you want to buy a copy today you’ll have to pay $1,085.62. As an enterprise, this was an exercise in privileging art over commerce. I did not regret it.
Traditional: When I signed the contract with my publisher, I got an advance. That advance was chopped up into multiple smaller amount payments. I also spent money during the course of working on the book: on the freelance editor, on messing around with boosting some posts about the book on Instagram, and on sending copies to various people. The book itself as a product is very pretty; of this, I am very sure. It has a lovely cover, and it feels nice to the touch. This book is very much an object; that’s how I see it. This object was created by a capitalist machine that spits out books the way a tuna canning factory spits out cans of tuna. Is my memoir a book or a can of tuna? Am I book or a can of tuna? Some days, I am not entirely sure of the answers.
CONCLUSION
I guess what I have found is that distinctions between different types of book publishing are by and large arbitrary and mostly wrong and generally manufactured. I have come to believe that independent book publishing and traditional book publishing and self-publishing are mostly all the same. I am of the mind that a book is not a book or a can of tuna but a mirror, that people do not write books for no one but to be read, and that the person who the author writes the book for is the author. Comparing and contrasting distribution models and marketing budgets and jacket design is mostly irrelevant. Because in the end the only thing that matters is when you hold up your book, do you see yourself—or do you see someone else?
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“In 2017, I wrote a fictional short story about a male porn star.” Read the rest of my latest Reverse Cowgirl newsletter HERE. Don’t forget to hit it the pink button at the bottom of the newsletter to subscribe.
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Image via WOBH
After 14 rejections and years of submissions, “Spike,” a short story I wrote about a male porn star with a penis problem, found a home with Bending Genres. You can read it online here. The moral of the story — my story, that is, not the fiction story — is never quit.
Tripp Towers, male porn star, sat on the bench, his penis in his hand. It was late afternoon, and his dick had been hard since that morning, when he’d injected it with the drug so he could get it up and get through the performance that he was about to do in the next room.
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Porn stars at the AVN Awards Show in Las Vegas, Nevada (Photo credit: Susannah Breslin)
I'm happy to report that Ghost Town Literary Magazine has published two short stories from my PORN VALLEY STORIES collection: "God Hates Porn/Porn Hates God" and "Praying for Kali." In the former, a porn fan seeks redemption. In the latter, a porn star prays for reincarnation. Finding homes for these stories isn't easy. They're often rejected, due to their content, despite the fact that they're literary, not salacious. Thanks to Chad Sweeney for having the balls to publish them.
"GOD HATES PORN, the sign read. A late Nineties Toyota Corolla sped past, honking its horn, and Mortimer Wisconsin spun his sign around, hoping the driver would see the other side. PORN HATES GOD, the other side of the sign read. Mortimer pumped his sign up and down in the air. "
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"A new piece of fiction by me in the latest issue of Pank Magazine."
