Iglesia Evangelica Pentecostes
A faded church on Vanowen Street in Van Nuys, CA. For more of my photographs, follow me on Instagram.
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A Tour Of Graceland Reveals Elvis Presley Was The King Of A Curious Domain
This story was originally published on Forbes.com in September 2017.
If you find yourself in Memphis, Tennessee, you pretty much have to tour Graceland, the nearly 14-acre pastoral estate once inhabited by Elvis Presley, the King of Rock and Roll. The residence isn't far from downtown, and sits on a regular road. Across the street from the home, there's a massive complex devoted to all things Presley. But what's curious about taking a stroll around the grounds is that it's less like touring the opulent domain of a once glorified musician and more like taking a deep dive into the abode of a man obsessed with reflections and concealments. At a certain point, in Graceland itself, you might find yourself on a short flight of stairs descending to a basement, and you'll look around yourself to see mirrors have been mounted on the walls and the ceiling, and as you gaze at a vision of yourself reflected back at you, you'll wonder why a man who was adored by so many built a world of his own that was a literal funhouse hall of mirrors.
Before you make your way to Graceland proper and after you plunk down $57.50 (for $5 more, you can tour the airplanes—and how can you not tour the airplanes?), you enter Elvis Presley's Memphis, which is located across the street from Graceland. It is a sprawling complex of Stores That Sell Things Related to Elvis, Museums Devoted to Things Related to Elvis, and Restaurants That Sell Foods That Are Related to Elvis. But before you make your way through it, you are funneled into a room to watch a movie that celebrates The King. When that ends, you are shuttled into a shuttle that meanders and winds its way down and around and across the street to Graceland. There, you wait in line while groups of Elvis Fans and People Interested in Elvis line up to enter the Colonial Revival white and stone mansion. Finally, you enter The House Where Elvis Lived. At which point, you will likely turn to your right and see the peacocks.
This is the music room. Graceland consists of over 17,000 square feet of residence and contains 23 rooms, but the glowing gold of the peacock room is among the most impressive. Simply put, it is incredibly outrageous. Who would put massive stained glass peacocks in their front room? Elvis, that's who. From the start, it's clear that we're not in Kansas anymore, and Toto has left the room.
Being at Graceland makes one—or at least made this one—feel uneasy. Every room is decorated in some outrageous fashion. In the basement, there's a wall embedded with television sets. A retro surveillance camera lurks on a perch. Bizarrely, the billiards room is hung from walls to ceiling with a busily patterned pleated fabric. No one is allowed upstairs to the second floor, which purportedly remains untouched since Elvis died in an upstairs bathroom. In this stuck-in-time place, life is forever frozen, and it's unclear if you are the voyeur or under a microscope.
Arguably, the most outrageous room at Graceland is the den. It is known as "The Jungle Room." The green shag carpet is designed to resemble thick grass. The furniture is made of heavy wood and upholstered in what looks like fur. The red glowing wall where a fireplace would go in the average suburban home features a gently burbling waterfall. The effect is deeply 1970s Polynesian.
One doesn't typically associate Elvis with racquetball, yet if one stumbles from the disconcerting time capsule that is Graceland and strolls about behind the main house, one can peek inside a series of buildings, one of which contains the newly restored racquetball court. According to the Graceland website, one of Elvis's favorite past times was playing racquetball. The Memphis Flyer reveals that Elvis was part of a "racquetball mafia," and the King was no slouch at the game: "Elvis walloped the ball around the court like he was strumming a guitar for the fun of it."
Technically speaking, Elvis still resides at Graceland. He is buried, alongside several family members, in what's called the Meditation Garden. "He became a living legend in his own time, earning the respect and love of millions," his grave marker reads. "God saw that he needed some rest and called him home to be with Him." Tour takers stand nearby, taking pictures of the fallen king.
After touring Graceland, you will be shuttled back across the street. Behold Elvis's plane collection. It includes The Lisa Marie, a Convair 880 jet. "On April 17, 1975, Elvis bought a Convair 880 Jet, recently taken out of service by Delta Airlines, for the then-substantial sum of $250,000," Elvis Australia reports. "After refurbishing, the total exceeded $600,000."
This past March, Graceland opened Elvis Presley's Memphis at Graceland, a $45 million, 200,000-square-foot entertainment complex that includes the Elvis the Entertainer Career Museum, the Presley Motors Automobile Museum, and Elvis Discovery Exhibits. There are white bedazzled jumpsuits. There is a 1955 pink Cadillac Fleetwood. Down the street, Elvis Presley Enterprises spent $90 million to build The Guest House at Graceland to host a few of the 600,000 annual guests Graceland, including those who can afford up to $1,500 a night for a room.
At Gladys' Diner, I ordered the peanut butter and banana sandwich, which was, the sign said, fried in "bacon grease." Frankly, while I had been optimistic about the sandwich, it didn't look like much. I don't know if I spent too much time photographing the sandwich for Instagram, but by the time I bit into it, it wasn't very appetizing. This sandwich was a favorite of the King. It is known as "an Elvis sandwich" or "The Elvis."
By the time I left Graceland, the parking lot was filling, and the fans were funneling in for their turn at the Elvis experience. Personally, my Elvis experience left me feeling uneasy. What was the point of becoming so famous and so beloved if it prompted you to build a house in which most surfaces were reflective? In the end, the king stood alone, surrounded by his mirror image.
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Casa de Cadillac
A shot of the iconic Casa de Cadillac in Sherman Oaks. For more of my photographs, follow me on Instagram.
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Fuck You, Pay Me #17: How to Write a Short Story
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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The Reverse Cowgirl Diaries #9
In this week’s edition of my sex-in-the-news newsletter, The Reverse Cowgirl Diaries: Pamela Anderson is The Last Showgirl, a sex doll factory tour, new erotic books, FUCK|KILL, and more. Hit the button at the bottom of the newsletter to subscribe and get all the sex news that’s fit to print in your email inbox every week.
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Pirelli Calendar 2025
The Pirelli Calendar 2025 is out and bringing back the sexy. Check out a video sneak peak on YouTube here.
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The Reverse Cowgirl Diaries #8
In this week’s edition of my newsletter, The Reverse Cowgirl Diaries, I’ve got a pole dancing mom, a substance that makes you hotter, a male porn star monologue, and more! Hit the button at the bottom of the newsletter to subscribe and get all the sex news that’s fit to print in your email inbox every week.
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Working With Me
I’m tired of hearing from CEOs/founders wanting to discuss opportunities for working together. You can book me for an hour here, and my monthly retainer packages start in the low five figures. I don’t have time to talk with you for free. If I said yes to everyone, I’d be talking all the time to non-clients, instead of my clients.
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Dead Flag Blues
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You're a Bad Man, Aren't You?
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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Life in L.A.
Life in L.A.: breakfast, burgers, and vote blue no matter who. For more of my photos, follow me on Instagram.
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The Reverse Cowgirl Diaries #7
The latest issue of my newsletter is available. Hit the button at the bottom to subscribe and get it every week.
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Queer
Cannot wait to see Queer, based on the 1985 William S. Burroughs novel, and directed by Luca Guadagnino.
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Finished
Yesterday, I finished writing a 5,000-word short story I ended up titling “Topical Matters.” It’s about a man who discovers an adult movie is being made in the house behind his house. When I was done editing it, I submitted it to a dozen publications. If that doesn’t work, I’ll publish it myself. Check back here for future updates.
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My Online Store
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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Reverse Cowgirling
I’m continuing to experiment with the format of my newsletter, The Reverse Cowgirl. The last format I had was too complicated. The new format is basically like if I was a coolhunter but for sex and culture. Read it here.
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What I'm (Re)Watching: True Romance
I’m re-watching True Romance, one of my all-time favorite movies.
From Wikipedia:
True Romance is a 1993 American romantic crime film directed by Tony Scott and written by Quentin Tarantino. It features an ensemble cast led by Christian Slater and Patricia Arquette, with Dennis Hopper, Val Kilmer, Gary Oldman, Brad Pitt, and Christopher Walken in supporting roles. Slater and Arquette portray newlyweds on the run from the Mafia after stealing a shipment of drugs.
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All My Friends Hate AI But I Think It's Fun
All my friends hate AI, but I enjoy it. It allows me to live alternate lives. Like this one, where I’m a cat painter.
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Things in New Orleans That I Should Be Writing About Since I've Been Living Here for Six Weeks But Haven't Done So Yet
This story was written by me when I was living in New Orleans and published on Pindeldyboz in March 2004.
1. The Cat Riding on the Back of the Dog. Actually, I did not see this. A man I know who I talked to before I moved here saw this. I want to see it. I want to see a cat riding on the back of a dog, for no reason.
2. The Cab Driver Who Crossed Herself Every Time We Drove by a Church. What the hell? I grew up in Berkeley. I was born and raised to be an atheist. Who is this woman driving my cab and what is she doing? It is sort of romantic, I suppose. What it is designed to prevent or conjure, I have no idea whatsoever. There are churches everywhere in this city. Doesn't her hand ever get tired? I want to know this.
3. The Person Sleeping on My Doorstep. I felt no sympathy for this person, at the time of our encounter. I was drunk. I assumed the Sleeper was, too. I stepped angrily over the Sleeper's head to get in my door. I was not very careful. Every day, I try to find the time to feel bad about what happened. I have not been able to make the time yet.
4. The Mississippi River. This seems a necessary subject. Today, I may ride my bike out towards it. Maybe then, the muse will crawl up my ass as I bounce along the pavement running next to it. Or, I might get hit by a train on the way there. I can't make any promises. Last weekend, some anarchists with no deodorant gave me a sticker for my bike. It reads, "This Bike is a Pipe Bomb." Ol' Miss is not a pipe bomb.
5. The Things Men Call Me. Baby. Darling. Doll. Sweetie. Honey. Precious. Other names. Sometimes all these words in the course of one or two or three sentences. My favorite is Sweet Girl. I am, after all, not a Sweet Girl. I have a sour expression and a rotten attitude. They don't seem to care.
6. The Train. I love the fucking train. The wail of it. What do you call that? Its whistle. The sound is different here, I swear. More bleating, almost. The other day, I saw a big white bird with a giant wingspan and a long beak flying out across the train tracks. It hung out in the grass next to the train. I was on my bike. For a moment, I felt sad, looking at it.
7. The Mardi Gras Beads Hanging From the Trees. They are like a cliché wrapped inside the metaphor in which I now find myself living. They're like this city's answer to the outlying plantations' Spanish Moss. When I first moved to this place, I thought about living in what they call Slave Quarters. But, it didn't seem like a good idea. You know?
8. Ernie K-Doe Mother-in-Law Lounge. Writing about this bar would be pointless. No matter how many rocks I overturned in the corners of my head, I would never be able to find the right words. I could never come up with the correct number for all the paper stars hanging from the ceiling, or the proper adjective for the wooden figure of Poor Dead Ernie propped up in the corner, or the best phrase to guess at what the hell his widow is thinking when she hands me my fucking drink. To say it is an immortal shrine to a no-longer living legend would be like calling Bugs Bunny a rabbit. Or something.
9. The Paint. It's everywhere, chipping and flaking and peeling. If I were to become smaller, and eat some of it, maybe I would die. That has not happened at this time.
10. The Smell of Funk in My Bed in the Morning. God knows what the hell I dream about in this place. When I wake up, I feel so bad, I'm glad I don't remember. I get shitty coffee around the corner. When I come back, it reeks in my bedroom. My pillows are covered with whatever black primordial crap has oozed out of my ears while my brain was allowed to run off its leash. I don't know what it means. I don't want to.
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NoHo in Yellow
Some yellow art in a parking lot in North Hollywood. For more of my photographs, follow me on Instagram.
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