Hard Day at the Orifice

{Forward}

“So…”

The hesitation always lingers. A pregnant pause where everyone stands around wondering who the father might be

“… how did you end up in porn?”

If people actually still talk to me after they find out I did porn then that takes the lead as the first question to ask. However, usually the question drives the conversation more typically to an assertion.

“You don’t seem like somebody that would do porn.” I hear before I try getting a word in edgewise between strict condemnation and leering curiousity, “Well, that’s a story to tell”.

The thing is: Most people think porn is something people crash into at the end of a dead end, a crumpled heap of broken humans looking for the cheap insurance of a quick buck, making false claims of happiness for the ruin of their lives.

But me? I went into this with my eyes open, with direction and purpose. Marching to the beat of an unrecognizable drummer tapping a slick jazzy riff I went whooping and hollering over the hill and into the fray, looking for adventure, naked not only to the camera but also disrobed of the trappings of education or the cloth of experience that might equip me to the task. Instead, armed only with a keen sense of the absurd and a jagged smile on my face I charged in ready to confront my kinks and conquer my sexual insecurities.

I fought hard. And I fancy myself more a lover than a fighter so that wasn't easy.

To survive, I learned something new and useful every day kept in check and balance by what I didn’t have a clue about every other day. But making fantasies come true is not an easy business. You really have to put some foreplay into it.

So, to thrive, I learned how to perform and developed a wide range of important life skills.

I am not just talking about perfecting the perilous “Flying Anal” technique.

I grasped how to stay in a business where the product is free as rain. I managed to raise kids when everything around me bore the stamp “adults only” in red scarlet letters. I taught Princess Leia how to make porn in a galaxy far, far away. Dodged bullets both figuratively and literally. Like how to stay in business when the dude that owes a few hundred thousand decides to get a sex change, take all your cash, and live on a desert island. Of course, where would I be now if I never figured out guns and orgies never mix well?

I learned a few other things that might... ahem… come in handy…no porn pun double-entendre intended that is, when life gets weird. But weird is interesting and that was the best advice my mother ever gave, besides the bit about not letting girls tell me I have to marry if I got them pregnant, she advised “Make sure you live an interesting life.”

And doing porn has certainly been a matter of taking the scenic route, I mean, besides the obvious. Along the way, the spectacle was interesting enough that I enjoyed the great fortune of being written about by three best-selling authors. Evan Wright wrote about me before his “Generation Kill” ended up as a best seller turned HBO series; Eric Schlosser was doubling up on the success of “Fast Food Nation” when he included a bit about yours ever so truly in his “Reefer Madness” muckraker; and David Foster Wallace got a kick out my schtick in “Consider the Lobster”. But each only chipped off enough of the iceberg to make merely a sno-cone confection, sweet to the taste, but only one station in the magnificent Las Vegas epic buffet of my life.

So, rather than have the tale told through the eyes, from the squinting and judgmental, to the winking and knowing, even those staring blankly sometimes in disbelief, the time has come… again, no porn pun intended, to deliver the money shot. Shoot my wad. Tell the whole story, compete with the shootings, the groans, the sighs, the white socks, and the hot lights showing every little thing for better or worse.

Because the next thing I usually hear is “What do you tell your kids about what you do?”

So, this is what I would tell them.

“Lead an interesting life. Just remember the first step in an interesting life is the one that takes you right over a cliff. Let me tell you why from experience...”