"Movies bore me. Especially my own."

- Robert Mitchum

Don't get videotaped naked. You'll realize three things. One, you're fat. Two, you need a tan. Three, your penis is not part of your body. It's an alien device affixed to you by a God with a mean sense of humor.

Let's go in order... You're fat. Even if you're not fat, you're fat on camera. At the time Loren and I made the video, I was in perhaps the best physical condition of my life. I went to the gym daily and followed a strict protein diet. I wasn't cut, ripped, buff or shredded like some freak in one of those creepy late night ads for ephedrine-laced supplements, but I thought I looked pretty good.

...Until I saw the "test" video. Nobody goes straight to the fucking when they're on tape. You need the warm up - the get-acquainted-with-the-camera time - where you learn what looks good, what angles to shoot. And more importantly, what angles not to shoot.

"Jesus, I'm a slob. I have tits."

"That's just shadowing," Loren laughed.

"I look translucent." The second thing you realize with video is the devil's in the lighting. The lamps in Loren's apartment were soft white, complimentary when seeing a person in the flesh. But on video, the rosiest light may as well be a Halogen high beam. Manute Bol would have looked like a Hispanic Shawn Bradley in that video. George Hamilton would've come off grey. I was day-glo porcelain white, with scattered patches of hair and a whiffle bat sized member jutting out of my form.

Yes, there is the one benefit of video - the "John Holmes Effect." Video ads twenty pounds everywhere. The widening effect that bloats your face into that of a "Family Circus" character does the same to your conveniently horizontally positioned member.¹ The only problem is, this magnification highlights a seldom recognized quirk in the human form - your penis is a slightly darker shade than your body (all the more so when it's stiff as a lamp post). Before you run to the mirror, let me explain. The basis for the term "pink shot" in porn isn't exclusive to women. You're probably sporting a similar color scheme. Under normal sexual circumstances, your tan, red or purple engorged package is hidden, far from view, preferably slapping against something equally flushed. But on video, it's huge, and its subtle color difference from rest of you is amplified exponentially. I was a white guy sporting a Latin man's penis.²

"My dick is... its like kind of dark... Is that a circulatory thing?"

"Looks fine. You're just baked... I love this part."

"You kept that? Erase it. It's fucking awful."

Don't masturbate on camera.

"I want to have it to jerk off to," she laughed back.

"Don't say 'jerk off'. Chicks don't 'jerk off'."

"I hate 'masturbate'."

"Come up with a different term. You can't 'jerk' anything."

Loren smiled at the video. "Why did you bite your lip like that? Does it hurt?"

"Erase it."

"What? I'm not going to blackmail you. You don't have a political career anyway."

"That's not the issue. It's a piss poor performance."

There's no way to look smooth masturbating for a camera. I'd only done it because there's nothing else a man standing around with an erection can do for the camera. You smile. You walk around. You suck your gut in and wish you had a cigarette, a beer, anything to occupy your hands. Then you look down... For a moment I contemplated doing "dick tricks." Then I realized, showing her "Flying Squirrel" or "Cabbage" probably would have turned her off badly enough to render the evening a loss.

Watching yourself, fairly high, pretending to be seriously masturbating for a camera is a uniquely disturbing experience. The images gave me a new appreciation for the skills of porn actors. Feigning approaching masturbatory orgasm on film is no task for the layman. As I absorbed the playback of my pathetic contortions and horrible dialogue, I realized just how difficult a realistic "money shot" must be (thankfully, she stopped rolling before that became an issue). I thought I looked convincing, but it was terrible porn Karaoke. I sounded like Al Gore on mouthful of Ativan:

"Just moments ago, I spoke with George W. Bush and congratulated him on becoming the 43rd president of the United States. And I promised him that I wouldn't call him back this time. I offered to meet with him as soon as possible so that we can start to heal the divisions... <Insert Wavy Fadeout/Dream Sequence Graphics Here> ...I am going to come baby. I want to fuck you. You are hot and I want to come on you. Show me your tits. Do you want me to come for you? I want to come in you. You. Are. So. Fucking. Hot."

A podcast of that delivery might get you laid on the DailyKos "Sex Chat" board, but viewing it then, all I was catching was a fast case of flaccid dick. I'd be an awful homosexual. Watching a man masturbate, even if it's you, does nothing for the libido. Women look sexy doing it because women do it slowly. It's subtle, smooth... deliberate. She licks her finger, slides it between her thighs and starts breathing heavily. It picks up, morphs to a sigh, building... she shakes, screams a little, then it's over. She smiles and wipes loose hair from her face. Save the grasping of the sheets with her loose hand, she's barely moved. A man masturbating may as well be that internet movie of the chimp diddling himself in front of kindergartners at the zoo. It's as frantic and uncoordinated as its favored nickname implies... 0 to 150, across the finish line like a funny car in 30 seconds, graceful as the motion you'd apply sanding an old banister, culminating in a frenzied search for paper towels. Coupled with the beers and bong hits, my personal video spectacle was only making sleep more attractive. "Just turn it off." I couldn't take another moment of it.

"Here, tie my hands." Loren placed the camera on the elevated slate base in front of the fireplace and handed me two scarves from the closet. "This one's a blindfold."

As quickly as my video had killed it, the site of Loren tied up naked on the floor revived my sex drive. I twisted her sideways to make sure my ass wasn't between her and the camera and pulled her legs apart. The difference between a sexy side shot of my head between her legs and a nauseating dead on close up of me straddling her, leaning over, my asshole in the center of the screen, was a very minor angling of the camera.

Loren rattled her hips. I wasn't sure if my tongue was the cause, or if she was just acting for the camera. The whole evening had been one extended performance. There was no future to "us," and we each knew it. But in the most craven sexual usury, you still have that need to connect - the release... the exposition of the sordid core you stifle all day. A real, honest fuck is the mirror image opposite of the performance we put on five days a week - a reversal, a photographic negative of our office selves. To get the hardest junkie rush from sex you literally strip off all the stiffness and facades, chuck the "suit" costume and devolve to What You Actually Are... As the song goes, "stick a pen in [your] heart and spill it all over the stage." You can do that - you can break down and let loose every filthy fantasy and fetish with an Automatic, more than might with someone in a serious relationship. There's nothing to lose. It's only rock n' roll...

And we all like it.

Who wouldn't? It's the only time we get to really feel human.

I didn't mind that Loren was using me for therapy. I was doing the same. But I did mind her fucking the camera. That's the problem with Filming It. You shift from performing for a theatre of one to putting on a show for a fantasy audience of people watching the tape. It's a different role, but you're acting, the same way you do at work. Nobody comes for shit when they're thinking about what their ass looks like on Super 8.

"Lower. Lower."

"I can't get into position. We're too close the fireplace," I strained to move a coffee table next to Loren. A combination of exhaustion and slight spins from the beer and dope was screwing with my balance. I grabbed the camera with my left hand and began running my right hand across Loren's breasts, working my way down her stomach, glancing back and forth over the delicate spaces just inside her hip bones. Fingering Loren while adjusting the camera's focus was making me dizzy, and her machine-gunning commands at me made it all the more difficult. "Another finger"... "Use your thumb"... "Pull inside, yes... like a trigger"... "Not that hard"... "Faster, but softer"... "Stay right there." It was amazing I didn't get tennis elbow.

"I want you in me."

"Lemme take this crap off you first." As I leaned over and looked down, I realized I'd been so focused on managing the camera and playing vibrator, I'd completely lost my erection. "Actually, uh... Hold on just one second." I ran to the bathroom.

People describe the penis as Soft or Hard - terribly incomplete descriptions, missing many states in between. The proper staging is more along the lines of:

Mushroom Cap: Just out of cold water; Running from Rottweiler; Police lights flashing in rear view mirror, open beer in your cupholder.

Limp: Three beers; Watching the 900th Chappelle rerun; General "normal" condition.

Semi: 15 minutes of porn; Talking to attractive woman; Adrianna Lima underwear commercial on television.

Bratwurst: Jerking off to fall asleep; It-took-you-four-Anchor-Steams-and-two-vodkas-to-go-home-with-her; Desperate "must break drought" late night call to ex you realize you should not have made as soon as she answers the door.

Police Nightstick: "Fuck, how did I land her?"; "Morning wood"; "Those are real?"; Every time you touched a girl from age 15 to 19.

You can screw dry pussy with the Nightstick, and the slightest turned on woman with the Bratwurst. You can shoehorn a Semi into a generous receptacle and turn it into a Bratwurst, or possibly a Nightstick, after five or six thrusts. A Nightstick can also be downgraded to a Bratwurst if twisted into the wrong position. If riding recklessly on top, she flies off and "misses" trying to jump back onto your member on the downstroke, kinking you in half like a tube of toothpaste being bent in the middle, you can go from Nightstick to Mushroom Cap (and possibly the emergency room) in seconds.

All but the Limp and Mushroom Cap can be upgraded quickly by hand if necessary. A large percentage of women don't know how to manipulate a penis. They treat the testicles as they would a stress ball, or yank the shaft as they might a slot machine arm. Some think a dry hand job is acceptable foreplay, or the grind of teeth along the veins running the length of the shaft somehow pleasurable. In these cases, you have to pretend to go to the bathroom to rehabilitate your own equipment. Every man's done this at least once.

The fallacy that we can be kept titanium stiff indefinitely by anything with breasts and a pliable orifice is exactly that. The male sexual response is every bit as complex as the female's. There are myriad small things about a woman's technique, and a woman herself, which can turn a Nightstick to a Bratwurst to a Semi in seconds. If she disturbs you in one small way, that's one small issue you'll be thinking about, and it can snowball at light speed, eclipsing everything else. Say she's got breath like a Golden Retriever. There's only so much blood in the body. What's powering the frontal lobe to consider asking if she's got Listerine handy, and if so, how you might get her to chug half a bottle of it without having her show you the door, is blood diverted from the penis. Moaning like a man, talking about her love of hermit crabs or showing you a ceramic unicorn collection can easily downgrade an emerging Bratwurst to a weak Semi. Finding she has a handful of dark nipple hairs, discovering in the midst of a hungover morning screw that she has a Lebanese Cabdriver's unibrow/moustache combo, or scratching your nose and realizing your finger needs an acid bath in Massengil can drop a Nightstick to barely Bratwurst in seconds.

And fiddling drunk and stoned, like some alcoholic porn cameraman, with a Super 8 handheld, will bore you Limp. After a while, anything's just images through a viewfinder.

"Shit." I scanned Loren's medicine cabinet for a moisturizer. "A&D Ointment... exfoliator... scrub... mask... alpha-hydroxy... Vaseline..."³ The bong hits and beers were really laying into me. The room was listing slightly, as though I were on a large boat. The bathroom exhaust fan hummed like a jet passing overhead. Where's the fucking Lubriderm? The selection was overwhelming, an onanist's candyland - endless tubes, bottles, pumps and tubs of jellies, foams, creams and lotions. A lazy man would have jammed his hand into the cabinet and used whatever he grabbed. I'd learned the wages of that reckless approach in seventh grade; I still shudder at the scent of Ben Gay.

"Estee Lauder"... I recognized that name. I squirted some into my hand and sniffed it. Inoffensive. No pungent stench. I was in business. I slathered it on and went to work.

After about 30 seconds, I realized I had bigger problems than I'd thought. "Oh, come on," I stared at the flaccid organ in my hand. There's nothing lower than pulling a limp penis. Nothing - not Buckner letting that ground ball trickle trough his feet, Webber calling that fourth time out, or Duran "no mas"ing Leonard - encapsulates The Agony of Defeat like a limp dick in your palm. I could have quit then, and I'd probably fuck Loren another time... and many others after that. But dying in my bed, many years from then, would I be willing to trade that night's forgettable screw, that capitulation and those that would certainly follow, for one chance, just one chance, to tell myself that, despite the spins, the sheer exhaustion and inanity of the entire project, nothing would ever take... my hat trick? No, I still had a shot... I was still a contender. This was my fourth and goal, inches, literally, from the end zone, down by 6, no time outs, seconds on the clock. One play left. If I stayed any longer, she'd think I was using the toilet in a seated position, which You Just Don't Do in the middle of foreplay (even if it is epic foreplay).
I ran it up the middle, smashmouth, Big Ten style. No fancy strokes. No "Western" or "Interlock" grips. No two hand action. I just closed my eyes and yanked until I achieved a Semi. I checked my new profile in the mirror. It wouldn't support a wet towel, but it was holding steady, just north of 90 degrees. I ran to the living room.

"What were you doing?"

"Nothing." The scarves came off and I was in her. The Semi kicked into Bratwurst in a handful of thrusts.

Success.

The morning sun was brutal. Loren's place was empty. I showered, leafed through magazines, ate an ice cream sandwich and drove away.

Loren called a few days later, on a bar night. Everyone in the house was pre-drinking, laying down a base. I took the phone in my room, still barely able to hear her over the noise on the other side of the door. "Live Rust" was screaming out of the stereo. "...I sure was glad I had what it took/To get away/Gotta get away, gotta get away..." Alex and a hockey buddy were barking half drunken gibberish back and forth over it. Lewis and his girlfriend fought about what bar we'd be hitting. I sat on a busted chair next to my stereo, pressing the phone to my ear. Loren was a soft slur of random syllables; nothing registered until I heard "I know you're fucking someone else."

"No I'm not. You're crazy." I cut it short. Brevity's gold in lying; every extra syllable's a risk. I told her I had to run, clicked off the receiver and downed my glass of Maker's Mark. Of course I was fucking someone else. So was she. Each of us knew that, and each of us knew the other knew it. Why the call? And more importantly, why was I still sitting there, staring at my bedroom floor through a glass of ice?

"To the bar," I kicked open my bedroom door.

An hour later, I was standing next to the pool table in the upstairs bar at _________, humming along with a live "In Memory of Elizabeth Reed" floating out of the jukebox. Undergrad hipsters with wiry patches of facial hair milled about drinking microbrews. A pack of preppy girls lit each others' Marlboro Lights to my left. In the corner, a gaggle of law students were huddled in a circle, talking at one another.

I caught the bartender's eye and jiggled my glass in the air. "Maker's?" He treated me well. It wasn't hard; my credit card never left a coffee mug next the register. "Nahhh," I barked over the bodies. "Johnny Red." It was a weeknight; I couldn't stick with The Brown. People will tell you scotch is an acquired taste, a heavy drink for heavy drinkers. As to those peaty single malts status drinkers favor, they have a point. But the blends - the Chivas and Johnny Walkers... they roll down the gullet smoother than spring water. Decent blend scotch is easy on the body. You can drink half a fifth of it and jog five miles in the morning. Bourbon's loaded with congeners, the impurities that provide its attendant skull-splitting hangover. And bourbon's not a drink - bourbon's an experience - a skeleton key to your Id. The why of that's puzzled me for years. It's a queer reality that the dirtiest liquor's the surest path to your purest self. However it works, the simple fact is, you're more the person you are on bourbon than you are sober. But once that monkey's split the cage, there's no turning back. Never press play on an answering machine with a dozen new messages the morning after a bourbon drunk.

Lewis was closest to the bar. He took the triple shot glass from my hand and gave it to the bartender. "Damn... You don't get much booze for that price."

"Yeh, but you can drink a ton of these." I was watching one of the cute bob-headed preppy girls out of the corner of my eye. Her thin little fingers fiddled nervously with a pack of cigarettes. Lewis kept talking. "Sounds like a lot of wasted trips back and forth to the bar."

"Yeh."

----------

¹ "Billy" from "Family Circus" and Jimmy Johnson... Separated at birth?

² If you must be on camera in this fashion, never lie on your back and allow yourself to be filmed from your feet. There's a "seam" beginning on the underside of your testicles, running into the perineum, which shows prominently in video. It gives the appearance of a sewn up hole through which your guts were shoved into you by some cosmic hand. The only place visible stitching's favored is the lapels.

³ Why Vaseline is stereotyped as a masturbatory aid baffles me. Its consistency - greasy cake icing - is entirely incompatible with the exercise. You wouldn't trowel Duncan Heinz chocolate icing on yourself. There's also something fundamentally unwholesome about a lubricant that causes your penis bead water for three days afterward.

Posted by PhilaLawyer at 7:51 PM

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