An excerpt from Porno: A Literary Love Story, a novel
Copyright Patrick Dobson and
personally recommended press, 2003
1132 E. 65th St., Kansas
City, MO 64131, 816-333-7303
Josey closed the metal door to the Kingdom Come Motel room. After the bright lights inside that had illuminated Milford and Wilma, the dim yellow coachlamps near the doors made her feel as if she had walked into a movie set. From all appearances, it was. She turned and faced a world complete with garden gnomes and concrete Jesuses. Water bubbled lasciviously over rolls of cherubs in the fountain. Angels, arrested in flight, stared heavenward above along white lattice. Whirligigs nailed to the picket fence moved slowly in the night breeze: Moses twirled his staff like a majorette, Jesus rotated his arms like a Channel swimmer over the now-walking lame man whose legs churned in a circle like the neon delivery boy at Hop Sing's Kung Pao. She heard a rhythmic jangle and turned to meet the rotund woman who owned the Kingdom Come.
"So,
Miss Soden, did you have a good visit?"
Josey
was surprised by the squeak of the woman's voice. "Who?"
"You,
Elliot Soden's sister."
"Oh,
Elliot. A visit with Elliot. Sure. Only my name isn't Soden. It's...ah...Josey.
Vanessa Josey." She noticed the squeaky woman held a black insulated
lunchbox with WWJD in white letters on the side. What, exactly, would Jesus do
with a thermal lunchbox?
"Oh,
Missus Josey. You left the package with him?"
"Sure,
the package. He was glad to get it."
"But
you still have the bag you came with."
"The
package was only very tiny. A small thing."
"I
see. Yes. Well, did you find the room accommodating for your brother and his
wife."
"You
wouldn't believe how accommodating."
"Well,
that's good to hear. I hope the rest of your trip tonight goes well, that you
get where you're going in good shape."
"Well.
Thanks."
"Are
you sure you don't want to stay the night. We have a nice room for you, very comfortable.
All the finest Christian cable channels for free. And tomorrow morning, by the
pool, we have a little prayer service."
"I'm
sure it's very nice."
"Well,
you just keep us in mind the next time you're through. The Kingdom Come, where
Jesus is Lord."
Josey
looked around and spotted an Arc perched on a boulder in a small rock garden
under the neon Kingdom Come sign near the street. Spelled on the illuminated
white sign in block letters"
"A man's soul is never
free unless given
fully to the Lord"
AAA welcome
Mastercard Visa American
Express Diners Club
PAX Revelation cable"
"Oh,
I'll never forget it," Josey said and turned to walk toward her car.
"Say,
I hate bringing this up Missus Josey, but can I ask you something?"
"Sure."
"Are
you related to Elvis? I mean, you look a lot like him, you know. I bet people
say it all the time."
"Well,
people do say it all the time." People asked her more often than she
wanted to admit. She decided to lie. "I'm his first cousin."
"No
kidding. You go around with Priscilla and Lisa Marie?"
"Lisa
Marie and I are the same age, you know. I remember being at Graceland when I
was a little kid. All the cars, the furniture."
"Beautiful
wasn't it?"
"Just
like a dream."
She
walked on to get away from the woman before she started asking for autographs.
Before she closed the door, she thought she heard the jangling of the necklaces
and bracelets coming up behind her. She started the car quickly, put it in
gear, and drove off. When she looked into her rearview mirror as she drove out
of the driveway of the Kingdom Come, the rotund woman stood in the middle of
the parking lot, smiling and waving, one hand on the wad of pendants on her
bosom.
"Presley.
Elvis Presley," she ran her long fingers over the bust of the Kid on the
dashboard. "Poor bastard. Such bad taste in clothes and interior
design."
She
picked up the camera with one hand and laid it on the dashboard. Paying
attention to the road in between, she flipped through the pictures she had just
taken.. The pictures on the tiny screen on the back of the camera were
iridescent against the glow of the dash lights. They seemed almost lenticular,
as if she could tilt the camera and the picture would change into something
else and tilt it back and have the original picture return.
She
stopped on a picture of Wilma's face next to Milford's leg. "Wow,"
she said. "Sleeping with me." She laughed a little and shook her
head. She watched the road a while, absently pushing the button on the back of the
camera that scrolled the pictures. Her first naked photo shoot didn't happen
when she was a senior in college, but it nearly did-and she had nearly become
involved in the action. Everything in her life, it seemed, stemmed from that
misshapen event.
Just
after the beginning of her senior year at the University of Missouri in
Columbia, her father, Juan Emilio Presley, dropped dead in the middle of Summit
Street in the Campesino. He had just delivered a one-hundred-pound bag of
Jaramillo masa to the backdoor of Manuel's Burrito and Latin American Record
Shop. Taking payment in cash from Manuel Hernandez for the masa, Juan Emilio
put the money into his shirt pocket after writing a receipt. He shook Manuel's
hand, was whistling "La Cucaracha" and thinking it was a beautiful
day as he walked back to the truck with "Juan Emilios Comidas
Mexicanos" written on the side. He had just stepped into Summit street in
front of Manuel's shop when a clot, a feathery sheet of blood, came loose from
the wall of a vein in his leg. The sheet rolled into ball and bumped along the
ever widening vein toward his heart. About three seconds later, he stopped
whistling, grabbed his chest, and fell backwards into the middle of the street.
He was dead before the back of his skull cracked against the pavement.
Manuel
saw Juan Emilio-a man with whom he had done business with for some 35 years and
a trusted friend-fall backwards into the street. Manuel jumped up and ran out
of the store. He waved to stop cars coming both directions from now-green
traffic lights at the either end of the block. He knelt down to the body. His
old friend looked as if he had just seen something wonderful, his eyebrows were
raised high, his mouth open and smiling. Manuel felt for a pulse in Juan
Emilio's neck. He found none and leaned down to see if he could hear or feel a
breath. He felt nothing. A small crowd had now gathered along the sidewalk.
"Somebody, call a doctor. My friend...he's hurt." He turned back to
Juan Emilio and pulled his eyes closed, massaging the tightened muscles in his
forehead. He closed the dead man's mouth and pulled up the neck so the head
tilted back. Manuel put his hands on his friend's chest and slipped the two
twenty dollar bills he had just given Juan Emilio out of the shirt pocket.
"You won't be needing this anytime soon. I'll put it to good use." He
stayed next to his friend until the ambulance arrived.
Juan
Emilio's surprise ending left Josey without the means to get through the last
year of undergraduate work. He left nothing behind but the delivery truck, a
small warehouse, and some inventory. He paid for her tuition on monthly
installments, and she paid for the rest of her expenses with work after and
before school. Ultimately, Juan Emilio's Comidas Mexicanos was worth nothing without
its namesake-Juan Emilio had built a business dependent on his own personality
in a competitive market. As soon as he expired, competitors had lined up to get
his business.
Josey
had wanted to become a magazine photo editor and had been doing work/study at
the student newspaper, the Maneater as the night photographer and working at
the campus television station. She mostly took pictures of wrecks and reported
from police lines in Columbia after hearing reports on the police scanner. But
sometimes she was called in to fill in for the regular sports photographer at
Tiger's basketball games or the camera person for the daily news broadcast.
Other than that, she worked at the Bengal Banquet (whose logo was similar to
the school mascot), a diner and steakhouse near campus.
It
was a motel much like the Kingdom Come, only cheaper, more tawdry. She was
supposed to video an orgy, at least that's what the man on the phone said when
she responded to the ad for a "discrete camera person" in the back of
the Maneater. Only, the orgy wasn't happening because too few women had shown
up. When she walked in the door, she found a group of men, about eight, sitting
around on the beds trying not to touch each other. Six of the men were young,
barely eighteen, she thought. Two naked women sat on a settee near the window.
"So,
good you've come," said one of the men, a pudgy, middle-aged man covered
with salt and pepper hair-literally head to toe like a geriatric bear. "We
kinda hava problem. The other models didn't show. I gotta distributor wants the
video next week. It's good money, great money. You get paid twice-once for
shooting and editing-and again if you take your clothes off now and get in
here. Capture the action, you know what I mean. Action, like of us at work here
and down your front."
"I'd
rather just make the video," she said. "I came to take video."
"Yeah,
come on," said the man next to him on the bed who was about his age but
much less gray. "Three girls, eight guys. That works. Sort've a gangbang
thing."
"That's
even better money," said hairy man. "Listen, we all got families, you
know. Kids and the like. We all gotta get home in a coupla hours. I don't have
time to get over to the dorms and find some girls. You get in here and I'll cut
you in on the profits, you know."
"So
why don't you hold the camcorder?"
"There's
amateur and there's professional. We need professional. The money's great for
that stuff. Amateur pays crap, and most of the time, people send their stuff in
for free. We don't stand a chance on the amateur market."
"How
much?" She couldn't believe she actually asked. But when it came out, she
was thinking of the three hundred fifty seven dollars Juan Emilio's inventory
netted. Then the debts. After the sale of everything, inventory, warehouse,
truck, and after debts were paid, she deposited a check from the auctioneer for
seven hundred forty three dollars. That barely covered two months rent.
Fortunately, she had Juan Emilio's house, which she was able to rent for what
it took to keep it up.
"I's
thinkin we could get you in, say, at five percent of the net."
"Twenty
five."
"Dammit
to hell. I can't pay you twenty five."
"Then
you'll have to reschedule and find a different photographer."
"Awright.
I give you, say, twenty. How's that? It's just a little bang bang. A coupla
hours. And then, you'll make something like a thousand."
"Hey,"
said on of the women on the settee. She was a mousy looking woman of about
eighteen. She swept her stringy red hair from her face. She still had acne.
"I want some of that, too. A thousand. You was tellin us we'd get a
hundred a piece, and then another twenty five for getting it top and bottom.
That's nothing."
"Me,
too," said the other woman. She had stared at the floor and chewed on her
fingernails since Josey walked in. "I don't think a hundred and twenty
five is enough."
"Hundred
and twenty five?" said one of the young men sitting crosslegged on a
pillow at the head of the bed. "You told me plenty of naked babes and
fifty with another twenty for a money shot. It's fuckin, sure. But now it's
looking too much like work."
"I
oughta slap the all of ya," said the hairy man. "We ain't getting
nothin here unless Lois Lane gets pictures of some action. So maybe that's what
we oughta get to. Some action. Whadya say, babe? We'll give you twenty on the
net."
"Gross."
"Goddammit.
You're killin me here."
"Hey,
what about uppin the fifty to a hundred?" said one of the other young men.
"Yeah,
a hundred," said another.
"I
ain't taken no dick until I get a guarantee on the profit," said the
red-ahired woman.
The
room deteriorated into grumbling and yelling. The hairy man walked to the
settee and shook his finger in the faces of the women. The fingernail biter stood
up and grabbed her jeans. The hairy man pushed her back into the settee.
Josey
bolted. She ran out into the parking lot relieved she didn't have to take off
her clothes or work with any of the men, particularly the bear-like one. She
frantically stirred the contents of her purse looking for the car keys until
she realized everyone in the room was naked and they would be falling over
themselves to get dressed.
Somehow,
she made it through her financial crisis with Maneater, the television gig, and
Bengal banquet money. After the orgy incident, she meticulously shot and
developed pictures of vineyards in the Missouri countryside near Hermann and
Jamesport. By accident, she met a photographer for the Smithsonian Magazine,
who encouraged her to send the shots to the magazine for an upcoming photo
spread and essay on winemaking regions of the country outside California. She
received about a half year's worth of rent for the shots and, more importantly,
began her career as a landscape photographer.
After
the Smithsonian Magazine, she began to really pursue photography as a living.
She knew she had no eye for art, but a keen one for photo illustration. It was
work. Long hours behind the lens, long hours in the darkroom, long hours
selling the material and lining up new jobs.
Her
livelihood paid the bills, that was sure, but she was always on the edge, it
seemed. She was fortunate to have Juan Emilio's house in the Campesino, a three
story Victorian she was able to keep up after a while without the need of a renter.
She forged close and friendly relationships with men who remained loyal to her
as friends long after they had gone on to date and marry other women. But few
were ready to let her live as she wanted, to come and go as she pleased, to
build or destroy her career as she saw fit. One thing the hairy man had taught
her in their brief but intense relationship-personal independence was worth
more than all the money in the world. She had been lucky that the situation
fell apart. She had to walk away. Having been redeemed by anything but her own
choice, she learned just what she was capable of and that she didn't ever want
to be faced with that again.
But
the hairy man introduced her to the concept of money for nothing. Sex paid well
for the right people. She had learned that no one was going to get rich taking
it from the top or the bottom or both. A money shot was worth twenty for the
actor but a hell of a lot more for the person, people, or corporations that
controlled the bank accounts for the productions. Money and sex and sex and
money. The two seemed inextricably bound. The hairy man, who had said he had a
wife and kids, wanted to pay everyone in the room but his partner for pictures
of their expressions, genitals, and secretions-and then make a lot of money for
those pictures. The people in the room, who she supposed had responded to
another ad the hairy man had placed somewhere, were willing to have sex for
money. After he brought it up, she had been willing to have sex for money-out
of a mix desperation, curiosity, and outright adventure. Later, the men she
dated and had sex with had wanted to bind her with money, or at least use
theirs to limit how she felt the need to make hers. And all around here, men
and women, it seemed, wanted to make money to buy things that would attract
people to them, a sort of display of breeding plumage. Power was money and sex.
Money was power and sex. Sex was money and power.
Several
years after she had established herself with several national magazines and had
begun to show her best work in Waldorf art galleries, an old boyfriend came to
her and confided in her that his wife liked to be tied up and whipped. She
liked leather. He was afraid to buy the material he thought he needed and was
willing to pay Josey to buy it for him. She assured him that she would buy what
he needed and he could pay her back that money plus whatever he thought was
fair. She went to Buddy's, a sex shop in downtown Waldorf not far from the
Campesino, to buy leather thongs and plastic handcuffs. It was her first trip
into any sex shop. The closest she had ever been before was the curtain to the
adult movie section at the video store.
Being
a person whose entire career depended on knowing light, she thought the entire
place was yellow. It puzzled her. The video and DVD boxes were of bright colors
and flesh tones. The lights were bright and white. The carpet was blue. But it
was something. Maybe the way the mirrors recycled the light, or all the flesh
toned "marital aids" in boxes. the combination of it all, somehow,
came out yellow, like the patina of smoke on the whitewashed walls of a bar or
a diner.
The
man behind the counter was reading a copy of Better Homes and Gardens. He
looked sallow and bored. He didn't look at Josey when she walked up to the
counter.
"Say,
can you tell me if you sell S&M stuff?" she said.
He
didn't move his head but looked out over his glasses. "Stuff. Yes, we have
stuff. It's in the stuff room right over there through that door behind that
other stuff."
Josey
laughed. She went into the room and found a number of devises, cheap leather
goods, and more of what was labeled in big block letters, "marital
aids." She picked out some leather bikini thongs for men and women, some
leather straps, and plastic handcuff with a silver coating, and gathered them
all up under her arm.
She
when walked back up to the counter, the man again stared over his glasses.
"Can you tell me why this place is so...yellow?" she said.
"It's
the color of depravity," he said and punched numbers on the cash register.
Her
old boyfriend paid her handsomely for fetching the items, which she thought
frightfully overpriced. He made another call to her a few months later, and
then another just a few weeks after that. Then, he called and asked if she
couldn't pick up some things for a friend of his. The circle expanded until she
was buying S&M goods from Buddy's at a rate that made even the tired
cashier friendly.
Being
an entrepreneur, she saw the demand for a product. Respected men of the
community didn't want to go into Buddy's or any place like it. They didn't want
things delivered to their homes from mail-order catalogs. They wanted the
ability to have the things they saw in videos for themselves without fear of
having anyone knowing about this aspect of themselves but the people they
engaged in the activity with.
She
bought some books on carpentry, cabinet building, and electrical wiring, and
then the tools and materials to build a room in the basement. Since
confidentiality was going to be the basis of her business, she didn't want
anyone to know what she was up to. Without help from anyone but a few how-to
books, she made the shop, built the case, and even added a very 1970s-Charlotte
Rampling-looking manikin she found at a thrift store going-out-of-business
sale.
At
first, she ordered from a few adult stock houses, but soon found that the
quality of the material was as poor as anything in Buddy's. She contacted
leather workers in other cities and had them make items she hung ready-to-wear
on the walls of her shop. The clientele she built came from wealthy parts of
Waldorf and the surrounding suburbs, mostly men and women referred to her by
the small base of steady customers and screened to make sure they would never,
ever let anyone in her neighborhood or at city offices know that she was
running a cash-only business out of her basement. She stayed far away from the
garden-variety prostitute-dominatrix-stripper-escort service trade, both
because they were a neurotic and unpredictable bunch and because they wouldn't
pay the exorbitant prices she charged for custom and handcrafted material.
Next,
she dealt with the problem of traffic through her front door by limiting
appointments to several each week. No phone contact. No showing up without an
appointment. No hanging notes on her door. She limited contact strictly to the
United States Postal Service. Customers had to keep appointments and be on
time.
Soon,
her commercial photography business was paying the bills, and she was
laundering the money from the S&M enterprise through into bank accounts of
different enterprises she set up related to the photography business. The one
time she was audited by the IRS, the auditor, a small, scruffy man from the
agency's Waldorf office, looked at her after going over her accounts.
"Miss Presley, I think you come out of this clean. Be very careful. I have
my eye on you."
She
never heard from the IRS again, but she always kept her accounts clean. She
used her photography income, or the equivalent of it after the profit and loss
statements, to pay bills, provide her with modest spending money, and to be
able to keep her house and pursue a few outside hobbies, like rock polishing
and baroque jewelry making. She was able to travel, keeping to modest, if
sometimes primitive, accommodations in the United States, Canada, Europe, and
the East-sometimes for pleasure, sometimes for magazine work.
The
stage was set, then, for her to ask special clients, such as Milford, if they
wanted her to take photographs for their pleasure. The camera lens made her
powerful. Behind it, she controlled not merely the scene, but the action.
People moved when she told them to move. She said a word and they plunged and
poked and licked and prodded. They balanced when she wanted a better angle or
better light. They posed with various looks on their faces when she asked them
to. But what she most enjoyed was watching them become comfortable enough with
her in the room (and once outside in a park) to engage in the acts without
thinking of her, or being completely conscious of her. They lost their
nervousness and performed, either for each other or for her.
She
gained little sexual feeling from the photography. If she felt anything besides
creating technically good photographs, it was power. She had the ability to
create and recreate, to manipulate not merely people and situations, but how
those situations would be remembered. And she made money. That money, along
with the money from her S&M shop, went into accounts in Luxembourg and the
Cayman Islands. She enlisted the help of some of her most powerful clients for
investments for portions of the money in the foreign accounts, including
currency and heavy industrial equipment import/export markets and some
commodities trading. In short, sex formed the wealth she would draw from for
the rest of her life.
She
now arrived in Waldorf and took the interstate exit that led to Avenida
Porfirio and then up Pancho Villa Boulevard past a park. She turned onto the
street that led up a steep hill and pulled up to the curb before her house (few
houses in the Campesino had driveways). She opened the car door and the next
door neighbor's dog, a huge but friendly setter, woofed and howled until she
walked up to the chain link fence and put her hand to the dog's snout.
"That
you, Josey?" said a woman inside the small house.
"Yes,
Missus Jackson," said Josey.
Shortly,
a short black woman appeared at the door. "Ol' Flash thinks he's a hell of
a dog," she said, her small body framed in the door. "Les hope when
somthin really happens, he's as brave. "You out photographin
tanight?"
"No."
Josey patted the camera bag at her side. "I was just talking with a few
friends, comparing equipment."
"Them's
damn nice pitures ya took of my family picnic las' week. I'm still amazed ya do
that without the film."
"It's
nice." Flash began to lick Josey's hand as if it were a bone.
"But
I supposed it'd be easier, being able ta get 'em on your computer."
"It's
easy and it's fun."
"Ever
take pitures a things ya don' like."
"Sometimes
you have to take pictures to pay the bills."
"Don'
I know it." Mrs. Jackson turned and walked back through the door.
"Mind ya don' do nuthin ya don' wanna. That's important."
Josey
left Flash panting at the fence and went inside her house. She didn't bother to
turn on the lights. She walked upstairs to a room in which a computer screen
glowed blue against the curtains framing a large window and a wall. She pulled
the computer from its self-induced sleep-fish swimming in dark blue disappeared
into picture of a park in a European town. She clicked on an icon that opened a
window, and then another. She clicked a wire into the back of the camera and
downloaded the images into her computer. One by one, she began, with the eye of
a professional and an artist, to enhance parts of images and mute others. She
adjusted color and cropped, framed, and sized each one.
The
night passed quickly and Josey found herself squinting her eyes at the glare
off the computer screen when the sun rose and beamed through the window behind
her. She stood and looked out at the sun rising over downtown Waldorf, the
roofs of the Campesino spreading out under her into the valley. She rubbed her
eyes, "I can't even remember what life was before Milford. Before Milford
and After Milford."
She
opened the window and listened for a moment to Waldorf coming alive-the whine
of tires on the interstate that ran through the middle of the Campesino, the
hoot of locomotive whistles, the clang and boom of warehouses and trucks being
loaded. A breeze cool and heavy with humidity fluttered the curtains. She
turned and took a coffee pot from a maker by the window. She fetched water for
coffee from the bathroom sink, placed a new filter in the maker, and poured
beans from a bag into a grinder that screeched and filled the room with the
smell of roasted coffee.
Pulling
the curtains shut, she sat down again at the computer to finish her work. Now,
she noticed the picture of Juan Emilio in a stand up frame on the desk. She
stopped and picked up the photo, looking into the little, squints that were
Juan Emilio's eyes. "Worked every day of your life and loved it," she
said. "I work and make money and don't love anything but watching the
accounts grow."
She
put the picture down and moved the mouse around. Clicking on the last of the
images to be manipulated, she now noticed that the way that Wilma addressed the
camera. Though she was sinfully plain in clothes, Wilma became attractive,
almost seductive in the leather bra and panties, fishnet stockings and high
heels she wore for Milford. Her eyes were grass green, and she almost seemed to
be coming on to Josey.
Josey
took a deep breath and fetched herself a cup of coffee. She unplugged the
camera and put it into the box she bought it in. She downloaded all 135 images
she had taken at the Kingdom Come to a disc, and then the 20 she really thought
were the best and had doctored herself, and put the disc in with the camera.
Before she deleted the files, she started printing the 20 on stiff, laminated
paper that looked and felt like photographic paper. After she started that, she
started to delete the files, opening each picture of the 20 best and taking one
last look to see if she had missed anything.
The
seventeenth picture was a shot of Wilma with her cheek against Milford's hip.
The black leather contrasted sharply with Wilma's pink skin. Josey looked into
Wilma's eyes. The color was somewhere between ocean and sapphire. She saved the
picture and moved on, deleting the rest of the pictures. Then she opened up the
one she'd saved. The eyes belonged to someone who was independent and mature,
someone who, in another time and place, wouldn't need a man like Milford.
"I
envy that," she said and put the camera and disc into a mailer to take to
the post office later, after she'd had a good, long rest. She left Wilma
staring at the curtains that were leaking light out the bottom. All she could
think about was the money order she would receive in two days. All
fifteen-hundred dollars of it. Plus three hundred twenty five for the camera.
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