I heard that a friend was a porn star. I need to qualify a few things: by “heard,” I mean that I first saw him–ahem–perform years ago and my suspicions that this might be the same person were confirmed by listening to the conversations of others; by “friend,” I mean someone who runs in my circle, but not someone who I would–oh, I don’t know–call; by “porn star,” I mean that he shot multiple scenes over the course of a couple of weeks and the video company probably successfully stretched all that footage into a multi-year career.
So I ran into this guy and some of our mutual friends the other night. I don’t know if you have ever been in the same physical space as someone–anyone–who you have seen on film (”film.” tee hee.), but it is quite a strange experience. Dream-like. Other worldly.
After years of letting the rumors fester and the accusations linger, I had to force the moment to its crisis. Sigh and shrug. It’s a role I play perfectly. Sometimes, all too perfectly.
I do have some tact, so I didn’t go to the source and ask him about his years, er, three weeks, in the porn industry. So, I went to his friend.
Me: Is it true that Ryan* was in porn? (As I already mentioned, I already kind of knew. But, it could have been someone else.)
Friend of Ryan’s**: I don’t know why that’s so important to people. Yeah. He spent like three weeks shooting some scenes. Money was tight. It was a difficult period. The company keeps releasing shit. Just when he thinks it is over, another tape comes out. It’s something none of us talk about. It’s not a big deal. He wishes he didn’t do it, but he’s got to live with it the rest of his life.
Friend of Ryan abruptly turned and left me speechless. Previous to that night, I did not know that if a person gets naked, performs sexual acts on camera knowing that it will be broadcast in perpetuity, you merely shrug it off, denounce all knowledge–nay, all existence–of its reality.
Thank God, I am too pretty for porn***. Or that could very well have been me being talked about.
______________________________________
* Not his real name.
**Real name. Just kidding.
***If only that were true.
I heard that the world’s oldest profession is affected by the rise in gas prices. Really.
I heard the story on CNN yesterday and immediately ran to the website to see if it was online. There is a God in Heaven. You can read the article entitled “Brothels ‘double your stimulus’ plan fights fuel crisis.”
Reading it, I knew it was serious. But it was almost something that I would expect The Onion to come up with. But even then, they couldn’t come up with something this good. The highlights (read: points where I would have spit milk through my nose if I had been drinking milk and reading the article at the same time) of the article include:
- The fact that business is hurting from rising fuel costs
- The brothels are offering gas cards and other promotional incentives to drum up business (apparently sex is not the incentive it once was).
- Business has been down 25% in the last year (that struck me as funny).
- My favorite quotation from the article: “Times are tougher … and truckers have less money to spend. They’re not high-rollers anymore.” They’re. Not. High. Rollers. Anymore. Truckers. High Rollers. Wow.
- One brothel is offering the “double your stimulus” package: the first 100 customers who arrive with government stimulus checks receive twice the services for the same regular price. (Seriously. Think about this. Follow me here. How many of the male customers are really going to get their money’s worth here? Twice? Clearly, this works to the brothels advantage.)
One industry analyst predicts that the industry will weather this economic slowdown.
I’m speechless. Ain’t nothing more to say. Except, that it’s a damn shame that truckers aren’t the high rollers they used to be. It really is the end of an era…
I heard a commotion in the courtyard on Friday night. The same courtyard that served as (apparently) the most appropriate venue for my downstairs neighbors to engage in a late-night verbal battle.
But this was commotion. You know, that strange disturbance in the force; that split second before an earthquake hits when you can hear the air move and when you feel the atmosphere lunge forward. Commotion.
There was noise and a scuffle and activity that sprung from nothingness. Voices in fluent Russian and broken English trying to call for help. By the time I put my clothes on and opened the door, neighbors had crowded around the victim. A middle-aged Russian man tightly grasped his wrist to stop the blood that gushed and glistened from his hand. He had been mugged and stabbed.
I called the police and discovered that other neighbors already had. The sheriff deputies came and took statements. The chaos and commotion turned to silence and stillness.
I heard the perpetrators tried to rob and mug others that night. They were from Pomona, a city 30 miles away. Police finally pulled them over less than a half an hour later because they were driving a vehicle that a family member had reported as stolen.
Turns out, their own aunt turned them in.
Yesterday, I heard a woman call in to a radio show discussing yesterday’s Supreme Court decision related to gun rights. Conversation paraphased below.
Caller: I support today’s decision. And I remember that I read in Freakenomics that more people die in backyard swimming pools than from guns? So, therefore shouldn’t we legislate pools?
Lawyer that actually defended gun rights and won: (Remember, he’s on her side) Ma’am that’s an erroneous statistic because those writers were talking about accidental deaths. But intentional deaths at the hands of guns are actually much much higher. Not even a comparison.
(He didn’t mention the fact that we do actually legislate backyard pool construction, either.)
I found these on a website that popped up in the search engine. I thought they were too funny to pass up. In keeping with the policy of this site, these are actual questions, written by actual internet teens from 2003. Kind of makes you wonder what kind of adult sexual beings they turned into.
I heard that if a guy pees before sex he won’t get a girl pregnant, is that true? Does pee kill the sperm?
–breean
It gets better.
I heard that if you have sex in a pool or hot tub, or any water, that it can damage a girl or even kill her because the water gets inside of her. Is this true? Or is it just a myth?
–seabreeze8
Because some of you might actually not know the answers, you can find them here:
The answer to Breean’s question.
The answer to Seabreeze8’s question.
I heard my neighbors arguing late last night. The fight started in the courtyard of my apartment complex and spilled into the driveway. There was silence. And then it started again. She yelled at him from their apartment door and he yelled at her from the middle of the courtyard. I tried to understand what they were fighting about. But it was clear that they were fighting about everything and nothing at the same time.
I wonder if anyone else was awake. I can’t imagine others could have slept through the argument.
There was a second bout of silence. And then I heard the screaming and the yelling, blunt and muffled, coming from inside their own unit.
It reminded me of when I was a kid and would will myself to sleep, praying that my parents would stop and praying that they wouldn’t get a divorce.
I heard the sirens bleed through the air five or six minutes after I first smelled the hint of a fire. I smelled the fire 30 seconds after my roommate asked me if I smelled something burning. Originally, I thought it was the overheated, burnt coffee that festered in the bottom of the pot for a couple minutes too long. I tend to leave my coffee pot on for a couple of hours when I am home.
You know that moment when the late night turns into the early morning? It is a moment taht has no “in between.” The transition is whole, complete, and instant. That was the same experience when I first had the sensation of smelling the smoke. All of a suddent, there was a heavy scent of smoke and fire, where the was only the nothing scent of normal urban air an instant before. The air now smelled electrical, of melting plastic, and of burnign wood.
I opened the front door to my apartment. A thin veil of brown smoke dominated the air but, at the same time, was barely distinguishable from it. I placed a call to 911, bot knowing where the fire was, only know that a fire was.
Others had already called.
Each moment of controlled chaos fell into the next. The momentum of each urgent moment propelled time forward into the next moment of quiet panic. We heard the sirens in the distance. By now, I discovered the fire. It was burning the far corner of the apartment complex next door. As I left the house, I did not grab anything–I did not think to. I thought we would be allowed to return to our own building. I remember being concerned that an ember could float from the burning roof to ours.
I remember thinking that this could be bad. I remember thinking, “Everything does not always end well.”
Fire trucks arrived. Five of them A news chopper circled overhead. Sheriffs evacuated our apartment and cordonered off an area. We, neighbors, stood from behind the yellow plastic tape, wondering what had happened, wondering what would happen.
And then, for us, for those who lived next door, the excitement and anxiety left as quickly as it arrived. Shrug. An unwritten law of nature, I guess.
Everything does not always end well. That’s true. But, most of the time and for most of the people, this is also true: everything usually ends well.
And so it did.
I heard my neighbor vomiting.
There’s a woman that lives in the complex across the alley. Multiple times a week, I hear her hurl into the toilet. Two or three times a week, she gets on her knees and prays to the Porcelain God.
Hearing a person vomit is an odd experience. At the very least, it is uncomfortable, and unpleasant. But usually–at the very least–its contextual. The inflicted is a friend or a family member and you know he is sick or she is hung over. Hell, you’re usually holding the hair, while you’re looking away. Hearing a neighbor vomit is just downright unpleasant and unexpected.
And that’s what happens to me, multiple times a week.
I admit, I thought nothing of it at first. I considered them isolated incidents, unfortunate bouts of botulism. The result of a long, crazy night that one must ultimately repent for via a long, hard hangover.
One day, as I heard her spew forth the contents of her gastric pouch, it dawned on me what could very likely be occurring across the alley. This woman, my neighbor (the one who fucks a lot), suffers from an eating disorder. She suffers from bulimia, hyperphagia, binge-and-purge syndrome, bulimia nervosa. Whatever you want to call it, I realized that she’s got it.
And then the story that I used to think changed. Instead of this woman–if it is the same woman–who spend her mornings, afternoons, and evenings having active, verbal sex became complex and injured. A nymphomaniac. A bulimic. I start thinking about her life and her world. Do her partners know the price she pays for having such a hot body? Do her partners know the price they are paying? I wonder if her partners are the ones who inflicted the initial damage, or if it was her parents or her brother or her boyfriend from an earlier age?
But I admire her, too. You see, I have spent a few nights sprawled on my bathroom floor, comforted by the smooth coolness of the tiles, with my arms half-wrapped around the toilet waiting for the next bout of gastrointestinal distress to take hold. And when I vomit, I am loud. In that bathroom, in that apartment, I can hear my own abdominal contractions and guttural gags echo off the white, narrow space between the two apartment buildings. I have oftened wondered if my neighbors have worried about me in the way that I have worried about them.
She threw up again today.
I heard a racial slur. It was directed at me.
There’s this taco restaurant that my partner and I frequent in Los Angeles. Some nights, when we walk to a bar and walk home, we’ll stop in and have a late night snack. (Of course, this “snack” involves burritos the size of a grown man’s forearms, with a side of rice and refried beans.) A couple weeks ago, we stopped in and sitting there was Carlos Mencia. After losing David Chappelle to his apparent mental illness and subsequent internal collapse, Comedy Central hired Carlos Mencia to be the “new” equal-opportunity comedic offender of all races. Great. So, he was there, slumped in a chair, his eyes glazed over from a late Saturday night. His wife or girlfriend or friend–I don’t know who she was–was with him.
We walk in, I see him, and–in the style of a season Angeleno–I take a mental note, but do not betray my knowledge of his celebrity status with any outward signs of overenthusiastic recognition. My partner and I order our food and directly proceed to inhale it.
Upon leaving, Latino fans of the show have stumbled into the restaurant or have noticed that that is–in fact–Carlos Mencia. They’re fawning over him and taking pictures of him on their cell phone. He is politely posing, but his eyes told a different story. It looked like he wanted to be saved.
We walk towards the door. The moment I pass in front of the fan, the flash goes off. I walked in front of the camera. A mistake. No big deal.
The fan says, “Sigh. White people.”
I immediately turn, “Why do you have to be racist?” I ask.
The fan doesn’t respond.
I take two steps and turn towards the door. I turn to Carlos and look directly at him. Referencing the racial slur, I say, “I’m not a racist. Why do you put up with it? See that African American? My partner of over five years. This fan? This must be a great legacy to have. This is what you produce.”
I know it’s not his fault that a fan of his is an asshole.
I heard my neighbor having sex yesterday. It was during the middle of the day in the middle of the week. And I heard her moan and groan and ‘ooh’ and ‘aah.’ I live in an apartment complex and my exterior wall faces an alley of sorts (in fact is just the driveway to the rear parking lot of the apartment complex next to mine). A whole slab of windows spills the noises from that apartment complex into my kitchen, my office, and my bathroom.
This was the second day in a row that I had heard this woman having sex.
She’s nothing if not persistent–and noisy. Over the five years that I have lived in this apartment, I have heard her have sex often. Always the same woman, with the same sex-induced breathing and sexual pitch of ecstasy articulated. She’s commanding and gives her partner directions. And he, dutifully and silent, takes her directions like an eager temp the first day on the job. Always responding to her demands to increase the rate (”faster,” she pants) and intensity (”harder”). She punctuates her satisfaction with a long, drawn out “Yes!”
“Good man,” I think.
They have these trysts during the night time, too. Friends have been over when she was getting down and dirty and nasty and slutty, when she was pleasing her man as best she could. We were watching TV or listening to music or telling stories and laughing and joking–and drinking. And then it began, as it always does. The sounds are quiet. Subtle. Almost inaudible. Like a summer lightning storm approaching from the distance. A friend first heard it and punctuated this auditory discovery with a simple, terse “Shh.” He held up his index finger. No one moved a muscles. Eyes darted from friend to friend.
“Is someone having sex?” he asked.
And, before any of us could answer, she did. From across the alley. In the privacy of her own bedroom. So the friends turned off the lights and sauntered quietly to my open windows trying to figure out–in vain–where the sounds were coming from.
I make up stories about this woman. None of them are true. I think she’s a devoted girlfriend to her long-time boyfriend. I think she is a woman of questionable morals who lives fast and plays hard and loves her sex the same way. Some days, I imagine she’s both, and invites these men into the bedroom that she shares with her boyfriend or husband and makes a little extra money on the side (or, worse, she does it for free and just for the thrill).
But I don’t know who they are. I don’t know who she is. I don’t know what apartment they live in, nor do I know what they look like. My entire relationship with her is intertwined with the most intimate aspect of her existence–her sex life. And, one day, one of us will move out and move on. And–just like every sexual encounter she’s ever had in her apartment across the alley–in an instant our time together will be over.
I’ll get the kleenex.