When Jay called, I let it ring for seven times before I picked up. These are my evenings now that I have given up porn as a career: I sit with my e-reader and a glass of wine on the porch, but instead of reading or drinking, I just stare out over the river and don't know what to do with my life. I've had the same bottle for a week, and the same page open for three days. Soon the battery will give out.
What do you do when all you know is how to take off your clothes, and make people feel good about themselves, and shake your booty, and shove your big cock up some rich kid's ass---and you cannot do that any longer? A career over at twenty-nine, a product, well-tended and sculptured, now unused, unwanted, passed its sell-by date. Last time I went to the studio, they told me to shape up or scrounge, and
---You may want spend a bit of money on your looks, here, take this card.
---Who's this?
---Plastic surgeon. Gives a discount if you fuck him good. At least for the crow's feet.
The life of a porn star is short and hopeless, and is only ever tempting and interesting from afar. For seven years, all I knew was the next shoot, the next encounter, the next party, the next weekend with a middle-aged man who could afford my time and bought me drink. But then so is life, in general: to be taken only in small bits, hit after hit, whatever, drugs, job, money, sex, TV, in small installments to keep the buzz, and never really ponder over as a senseless whole. I get brooding when the mosquitoes come out and the last boats return to harbor, when the smell of the river mingles with the stench of the power plant upstream.
The phone rang, and I said 'Hello,' heard it was Jay, still active, even though he is even older than I am, still handsome, his face still beaming from so many websites, his cock still dripping and his muscles bulging. The most handsome man in America, at least in my book said said hoarsely, as he always was,
---I need your help, fuck man, I need your help.
And I thought he was in trouble with drugs again. But it was nothing of the sort. He spoke for a minute but only that I had to come, now, and that he had a weird problem, serious, and.../logistical/. Since when did Jay use fancy words like that? The lumberjack from Montana---the quintessential American man, were it not for his love of other dudes. But who says that isn't quintessential too? He probably doesn't mean /logistical/I remember thinking. He often uses words wrongly. Like the time he suggested we split up /temporarily/and meant /forever./
I got in my car and drove the hundred seventy miles to his place in less than three hours, hoping to be picked up by a handsome cop who would recognize me. It has happened three times before in this city of lechery, and as my body has been the fantasy of countless men, and women I suppose, cops are my very own, very private fantasy. Maybe that is because I am in love with Jay, and Jay is a cop, was a cop, before he got caught with this pants down, in a toilet in Billings, and turned to porn in smart career move for a man with a nine-inch cock and guts of steel. Maybe it is also the latent homophobia, and the closeness of violence that attracts me to policemen. Maybe it's all the bad TV shows where /good man /equals /handsome cop. /But where is one when you need him! I drove over the speed limit all the way and not a single siren!
I once knew a kid in L.A. who played /The Cop who Stopped By//To Check for Intruders/in a TV celebrity's house twelve times! And every time he got fucked with didoes and couldn't walk for days. Maybe I was in love with that one too, or just because he looked like Jay a bit. He danced at a club smelled of soap, even after two hours in the spotlight. He had no hair on his back, and talked with a strange accent when he was drunk. I can't remember his name, but I held him tight one night, and told me he could love me, but not now.
At a certain age, just after nineteen, and before twenty-two, the longest three years of your life, when you have no sense of time and are always hard, all men are irresistible in their own way. After that they turn to puss. It's not true that men age more easily. Not gay men. Not men who live by their brawn.
Your clientele changes, and you change with it. From eighteen to twenty-two, all the johns are old men who want to hug you and buy you cowboy boots. Then they get younger as you get older. Somewhere at twenty-six to thirty, you get all kinds. After that, only the young hit on you, looking for daddy to show them the ropes. That's when you know you should have stopped/a long time ago/.
The lights were on upstairs and I heard music from the adjacent house. Jay lives well, but below his means. He has a TV he never watches and a lawn mower he can't operate. He is insured for everything, put lets payments slip, and his dentist is a transvestite. He has bought a plot on a cemetery for rich people, next to his mother, who died of ovarian cancer when he was twelve. I know everything there is to know about Jay.
His body and boyish looks have made him a lot of money. In the digital age there are porn stars and porn bodies. The bodies make a hundred bucks a shoot; the stars can buy houses and cars, but not from their movies and gigs, no: from the meetings with wealthy businessmen, the weekends on loan somewhere in Canada, the five-thousands dollar tip from the man with the cigar. The Utah twins were flown to London and Brussels and paid ten thousands pounds each to suck each other's cocks. And the guy from Belami went from Bratislava to L.A. to Helsinki, and traveled with a Nokia manager for a month at a thousand Euros a day. I don't even have to look up the exchange rates to know that's more than I ever made. Or Jay. We are from a different age. When we started, we were unique. Now everyone with an easy-to-remember first name is on x-tube and flies to Miami to suck cock at three-hundred dollars an hour.
I slammed the car door to make sure he heard me arrive, and the lights went on in another room, the door buzzed and made me dart to catch it in time, get in and shout his name. My heart jumped when I saw him, and my toes tingled.
He was standing on the stairs, wearing nothing but his leather pants. His torso glistened with sweat. My Jay, my secret love, the man I would never have, because he was as much a top and a taker as I was and would never submit to my love. It is the greatest injustice in the world when two men, already equipped for the most equitable form of sexual intercourse, for the most equal of relationships, where everyone fucks everything, find that they are on the same end of the scale that makes relationships work: there is always one on top and the other below, one top one bottom. Even where love overcomes such preposterous notions, there is always one who relents and gives in, and the other who wins.
Jay would never give in. All his sexuality was about taking the submissive, the bottom, the boy, the weak, and being the man, the top, the penetrator and the guy in charge---just like I. On the few occasions he and I tried to have sex, we ended up fighting and beating each other up. Not bad either, but not something you look for in a lover. We were both about aggression. About feeling guilty.
And while we learned to fuck, we unlearned to love.
Not that you necessarily need to spend your life with a lover. There is a type of gay novel out, male on male romance books written by women, which give me the creeps. They are fake and full of soppy emotional shit only chicks dig. They feature tender men, who understand their lover's feelings, and hold them close after ejaculation, stroking their hair. What gives?
Gay men are no more in touch with their feelings than straight men! And women know fuck-all about fags and their /passionate hearts/. Why else would Jay stand there and look at me, then break out in laughter?
---I am so sorry I had to get you over here. This is so fucking embarrassing!
My mind raced for a moment. What could possibly be embarrassing to Jay? The man who in his latest video had tied up, fucked, and pissed on ten blond college dudes from Wisconsin---only three were in the successful live show of the same name which now toured America; I mean, you have to stop somewhere.
He had received the /Golden Buttplug/ for his efforts with dildos of various sizes on the ass of a prize-winning body builder. He had been Mr. Leather and Mr. Bondage for three years running. He did all the things normal folks can't even begin to fantasize about. They wouldn't know where to start. The best they can do is look at you over steak at the /Outback/ restaurant and ask sheepishly 'isn't it all a bit...degrading?'
What would you know about degrading? What do you know about gay sex? Do you think it happens in the porn industry only? You think it's just internet porn? Think again! From age twenty-two to age twenty-eight, I loaned myself to over six-hundred wealthy men: some for an hour, some for a weekend, one for a five-week vacation on a yacht. Men as varied as the roses in my garden, men from well-to-do families in New England, rich Asian men who run multibillion dollar companies, French aristocrats and German politicians, Hollywood actors and Mexican gang bosses. I have fucked the top honchos from Adelaide to Zurich as they passed through New York and L.A. and Miami, and of six-hundred, maybe twenty, thirty, if it comes high, had boring vanilla sex with me; not/one /stroked my hair!
The rest fulfilled their fantasies on my body, or rather, in my case, I fulfilled their fantasies on their bodies, and those fantasies were all of one kind, the 'isn't it all a bit ... degrading?' kind. Even if afterwards they cuddled and told me about their wives. Or worse: their boyfriends. There is nothing more desperate than gay men playing straight family. Posing with the dog for the family picture on the lawn. Imitating the grotesque desires of middle-class America. That and women writers. Barf with me, now!
And Jay had done much the same, was still in the business, sought after. Hadn't tired of all the weirdness, the sadness that follows each meaningless sex act. Jay was still the man, who'd done all, seen all, fucked all, had called for my help. What on earth could be embarrassing to Jay?
I have been in one-hundred and eighty-four sex scenes, all freely downloadable on illegal websites now. Don't have to shell out to see /me /come. I have had more screen names than pieces of underwear, and that means something if you work in the adult industry. I have made less money than a bank clerk from it, but every queer from here to Melbourne knows my face, my cock size, and what the tattoo on my shoulder blades says.
I was in Australia once, and fisted a man who worked for TELSTRA on boat with a green sail. There were sharks in the water, around us, looking at my arm inside the fat man. I thought of grabbing his guts, ripping them out, and feeding them to the sharks.
Jay smirked, and cocked his thumbs in his Jeans pockets. I smiled at him standing on the stairs. In the instant I saw his chiseled features, his five o'clock shadow, his boyish good looks still at thirty, the blond hair falling into his forehead, the eyes, my god, those eyes, you could lose yourself in such a man: just the eyes can make you do anything. I would have changed, had I not been so young and stubborn, I would change now if he would have me: I would be his toy, I would love anything he'd do to me, just so I wouldn't have to be lonely any longer.
What? Did you think all porn stars have boyfriends and live happily ever after raising chickens? There are few things you can do when your looks fade. As an actor, if you've got it, you became a 'character actor.' As a porn star, you became a pile of shit that nobody wants to tread into. People look at you and scream,
---Oh gawd he's got so fat. And he was so cute! My gawd how he let himself go!
And that's what they shout after those who've kept their figure!
---Fuck I loved him when he came out, but that was what...ages ago...like.... three years! And look at him now, all pudgy in the face! He had the fattest cock in Hollywood.
/I still have, you prick, but it ain't for you. /
A porn career lasts five years at most, seven if you overstay your welcome like I did, and feel the pain head-on, when you walk into a bar to strip, and nobody showed up that night. Then you hustle for two more, or four if you are good, and then it's off to Idaho without a lover. Why without? Because the pain is worse for them to bear than it is for you. They have to see your face on the Internet all the time: the face you had ten years ago, five years ago, that face and that body, the body that millions wanted to share with you. Being a pornstar's boyfriend is purgatory! It's a sign shoved in your face shouting 'I loved him when he was cute and young, but look at him now!' And why do people give a shit about looks? Because they do. Get off my back!
At thirty, the desperate still try to be real actors. The really muscular hairy ones stay on in business, looking sad and tired until their hair falls out completely and their dicks retire. The deluded record music or write books. The smart top themselves in a nightclub and go out in style. The timid and gutless move to the country and sip wine by the river, and buy a fucking Kindle.
That relentless focus on looks in the gay world is what's making us the inhuman beasts we are: the violent, abusive fuckers ordinary straight people despise. We don't make our dreams come true; we live the nightmare instead. Jay claims it is all acting and fun, but he knows better. We went to Hustlaball and got our monster cocks sucked by a senator's son and for some reason, that made us feel proud.
We took our five-hundred dollar bills and spent the money on drugs and a rug from IKEA, and a steak that was bloody and tasteless. He took his ATM card and got out some more, then flew the Brazilian to Barbados and passed out while João fucked him with his beer-can cock. On the way back in the Learjet, he dumped the rest of the coke and sat on Miguel for the landing. A limousine picked him up and drove him to Westfield, where he kissed his mother on the cheek and sighed how tough the term had been at Yale. She told Maria to make omelets, which they ate in the kitchen---she to /rough /it; he because he could sit down on a chair for a week.
Jay was still standing there smiling as I remembered our life together. The senator's kid had been our favorite john for a winter---we had fucked him so often he seemed like a permanent fixture in our lives. He had a penthouse in Manhattan Jay and I shared---sleep in the morning in satin sheets, yoga in the afternoon, sex all night. Jay and I have more memories of luxury than you can imagined; but today, I am lucky I don't live in a trailer. Hell, I am lucky to be alive.
I have hustled for six-hundred men, and most of them wanted to be used, abused, beaten, slapped, and in all but one way treated like the weak and passive human beings their powerful selves and handsome shells hid. We are never what we seem from the outside. The truth is always darker. Oh fuck, I get so moody and the river stinks tonight. I want a Jake, a Philip, a Carl, an Igor, whoever, to bring me a bottle of beer from the house, instead of that stale cheap wine, but I have to get up myself. When you slept with a thousand man in your life, the loneliness is intolerable. Last week I was thinking of calling an escort myself, but that would be...what? Incest?
I took a few stairs up towards him, ready to kiss him, my Jay. Jay, give me at least that, a hug once in a while, and a kiss! If I can't have you, at least have pity on me. But he walked way.
---This is so fucking embarrassing, I couldn't tell you on the phone. It's...
---What? What is it?
---It's this client I have.
---Here in the house? What, did you lose a diamond ring up this ass when you fisted him?
---No, much worse.
---Who is he?
---Oh, here, have a beer.
We stood in the kitchen, no sign of his 'client,' or his predicament. We drank, and he smiled at me.
---Is it serious?
---It is, but not...that type of serious.
---What?
---It's not life-threatening, at least not yet. He's not gonna die. No 'Arab sheik kills his fuck-toy.' Did you read that?
---Who? What are you talking about?
---Oscar told me it happened in London. We skyped all evening---he is coming back next month, did yo know? He is mostly working in Europe now. They arrested this Arab dude who strangled his lover/fuckboy/something in a hotel room. Did you not...
---Jay are you on drugs?
---Only one E, don't worry. I've seen it with my own eyes, you know, that time this dude flew us to Riyadh and showed us the boys in cages. Do you remember? Fucking mad!
---I don't. You didn't go with me.
---Yeah, that's right, I went with what's his name...who was too fucking scared to...Nico, yeah, and they didn't keep him because he was too hairy and had dark hair, and I, imagine, stupid me, I said we could always dye our hair. They actually keep young boys locked up in cages, shackled and beaten like...what...man...real sex slaves. And I always thought these were stupid stories on fucking nifty. The world is sick man, sick, really sick. Men with money trample everything under their boots. Here comes the boot man, watch out.
He was most certainly high on something. But I watched him stomp, and noticed the long cock in his leather pants. Say the word Jay and I lick them clean. Just say the fucking word!
Jay has always been mysterious, has always kept me in suspense. My third year in porn, after three studios thought I was too masculine for their taste, I met him at the famous blue company in West Hollywood---you know the one, you've been watching their porn for a decade now---and fell in love, at first sight. His tall frame, the cheeky look, the dimples, and those eyes, oh god, those eyes. Now they are harder, and not so unbearably loving, but I still can't stop looking at them when he is near.
I told him that night over fish and chips in an Irish pub that I wanted him, but he didn't take me seriously. I took him home, the dump that was /home/ back then, and told him I wanted nothing more of porn, I wanted to get out, live with him in a house by the sea, but he called me crazy. I even offered him a dog.
---I am just getting started, man, I don't want to stop now. I can't settle down now.
We met at the wrong time, and after that, he always wanted to get ahead, become more and more famous, and I, whose body by then was on ten Falcon covers already, I wanted to get out and away, and be invisible, have a house and a car, and raise chickens in Iowa. I couldn't go out in West Hollywood anymore without being recognized by everyone from the bartender to the cleaning lady. Fuck all, we went to Paris with a client, and I was hit on by a cop who'd seen me on xl-studs. I did him for free, because of his smile and his accent. He was the only client I ever had who gave his own orders.
---/Ah, oui, I suck your gogg! I suck your gogg!/
We stood talking in the kitchen for five minutes. Jay told me about the Asian kid who had called him from the airport. Hong Kong family, rich snotty kid, but, as it turned out, quite in good shape: taller than expected, tanned and lean. His father runs a clothing conglomerate with thirty thousand employees. Oldest son, just got married to an actress, but needs a man once a month to empty his nuts.
---Can't get it up with the females, takes so much Viagra so his wife doesn't get wise, he was admitted to hospital twice for drug-induced priapism.
---For what?
---It's when you have a constant boner.
---That's a disease?
---In Hong Kong apparently. Chinese. Weird stuff. Beats me. I'm always hard.
---Maybe you got the same thing?
The kid had hired a limousine to take him to Jay's place, and insisted on small talk and the game of seduction before he got what he really wanted: to be humiliated and dominated by Master Jay. Spit on me, white man, and tie me up.
---And that's where I got into trouble.
---What do you mean?
---With the tying up.
---You tied him up?
---Yes.
---And?
---Wait till you see!
Jay and I had done gigs together, weekend meetings with clients in remote cabins or anonymous hotel rooms, double-tagging some French bottom once a month in Miami.
Our longest and best job together was for a film director. Long afternoons by the pool, fucking him under and above water; quick trips to New York and London in the Learjet, he, hands tied at the back, kneeling before us, sucking us at 37000 feet. What I wanted, in all of these situations, was to be alone with Jay, was for Jay to smile at me and say, aren't we a great couple? We may be hustlers, but we, you and I, do it for love. But not Jay. When he was /working/, he was professional. Always the client first: never distracted by my presence as I was by his, incredibly so. There was one gig in Chicago with a politician, a blond and blue eyed Harvard boy groomed for greatness, but much rather on his knees, who saw what I was doing, sensed that I was there for Jay and not for him. He asked me to leave, and I did, spent the rest of the night in a hotel bar drinking myself senseless. Is there anything more a pathetic than a porn star falling for another?
We didn't speak after that for a year and a half. He never called me. We turned down movie scenes and live casts that would have involved us meeting. I flew to /Men at Play/ in London to receive my award, alone. In the hotel room I got so drunk they called an ambulance when they found me. I noticed the doctor recognizing me and smiling at me that most terrible of kind smiles: pity. I wanted to bawl at him: you fucking jerk, you did this to me, you made me what I am. But it would have been a lie, and I couldn't remember how to move my lips anyway. They pumped my stomach and the next day sent me back. I called Jay in L.A., waking him up, and he barked at me. But he came, and I sobered up, and cried in his arms. That one time, and I remember every fucking second of it. A porn star with a heart. What's next?
Now, he patted me on the shoulder, and finally led me into the playroom, with the large leather covered four-post bed. Attached to two of them was a bundle of thick ropes, suspended, it seemed, almost in mid air, until I saw the feet and the head sticking out. Jay introduced us.
He had tied the Asian kid up, using a technique studied from a book. The book with an Asian hunk on the cover lay on sofa table like some /Coffee Houses of Vienna /and /Your Garden and You./ The rope was soft but with steel wires inside, hard to cut.
---So the problem is?
---The problem is that I can't untie him. Somehow it's...
---You are kidding me!
---I am so not. Try!
I looked at the parcel. The Asian boy's eyes looked at me in a mixture of fear and excitement. Two masters to serve now, Mr. Wong!
He murmured something, but the gag was too tight. Probably 'my name isn't Wong.' Always so fucking polite. That's what I love about my Japanese johns: you whip them and piss on them, and at the end of the session they bow and say /Arigatoo!/
---The problem is this knot here, said Jay, grabbing an ankle. The rope goes all the way round and then back under here, and up to the thigh, over the whole back, and is tied again here, so you cannot untie this knot without breaking his back, basically.
---Is this some kind of torture bondage you are never meant to get out of?
---I don't know, it was in this book I bought and I followed it to the letter. It doesn't say anything about untying though. Any attempt to open any of these knots---he pointed to one on the stomach, one on the groin, one under the balls, then two on each ankle and wrist---will either rip his cock off or involve some impossible contortion.
I sat down on the bed and studied the mess.
---You know this fucking hilarious, if it wouldn't be so weird. Nobody will believe you if you tell this. The only way is to cut the ropes.
---I'd rather not. They were expensive, and there is a steel cable inside, you need proper tools. Do you have any?
---No. We need to go to buy some wire cutters.
---Give it a try first. I'd rather not destroy my new ropes.
I gave it a shot, stripping off my shirt in the hot room, and making the Asian kid drool when he saw me. I hadn't shaved my chest in months.
I loosened one, then the other on one ankle, and with a lot of effort, after thirty minutes, managed to get one foot free. In a way, I thought, watching Jay drinking beer, watching me, it was rather like me and Jay, entangled like this, never able to brake free, and having no idea how we got there. It took another half hour to free the other leg, and then we had to pull both ends through the entire mess on the back and neck, slowly, not to burn the skin. Finally, we worked on the hands and arms, slightly easier now, and finished in twenty minutes. When I undid the elaborate cross-knotting over and under the base of the cock, the Asian kid came in my hands.
---That's the forth time he's shot his load tonight. He really digs this bondage stuff.
The man nodded, and, finally free of his ropes, made for his clothes, got dressed as fast as possible, and paid Jay, it didn't see how much. No complaints there.
Then we sat on the bed, laughing at the impossibility of the situation: freeing a client from badly executed bondage, or was it?
---Maybe that's what this really was, the sequence of knots, the type of cross-pattern ... maybe you are never meant to get free without help or cheating.
And then he surprised me, my leather stud, my escort of the year! He took my head in his hands and said,
---Rather like us, isn't it. We can run as fast as we want, but we always end up together.
I felt a pang of sentimentality, a sudden need to cry in his arms, but suppressed it.
---If I get out now, said Jay, turning towards me, putting a finger to my lips when I wanted to interrupt, if I want to get out now, completely, would you---there was a painful, wanton pause that seemed to last forever---would you consider moving in with me?
I chocked, and my heart somersaulted. Twice. I pissed myself, honestly. Then I remembered, just in time, to breathe.
---You are the only one I trust. The only one I can ... see myself getting old with.
That did it. The floodgates opened and two muscle-men, one in leather pants, the other in jeans, lay on top of each other, crying like fucking teenage girls. How's that for a headline on your fucking porn blog! Down-and-out has-beens, still hot, but quickly wrinkling, live show tonight: fucking crying like girls! How's that, eh, Mr. Porn-blogger? Does it turn you on to watch people at their lowest, at their most vulnerable? Get lost! Leave us alone! You fucking pervert!
Oh. You are still here. Sorry about the outburst.
Here is what happened: my jeans were off a minute later, and his leather pants too. He fucked me so hard I cried both from being happy and from the pain; I told you I'm not a good bottom, and Jay is far too big. But for Jay, I'd cut my fucking balls off, if he'll stay with me for good.
For Jay, I'd ... do anything.
We lay together for an hour afterward.
He was tender and sweet and nibbled my ears.
And then he stroked my hair.
For more of Marten Weber's writing, please visit www.martenweber.com http://www.martenweber.com/. Comments to webmarten@gmail.com mailto:webmarten@gmail.com
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