67 – Playing the part
Louise came through the beaded curtain into the main room
looking a bit discombobulated, her hair strewn around her face and not just
from how she had slept on the bed. She had apparently come home and gone
straight to be exhausted. Her make up was smeared, especially her lipstick,
giving her something of a ghoulish expression, made worse by her accusing stare
that said without her having to say it, “Where the fuck were you all night?”
Over the previous few days, I had said all I could say to
her, made all of my arguments, and did not have energy after my night on the
hill to start it all over again. I hoped the arguments I had already made would
sink in and she would quit the job without further asking.
She made coffee, then carried it back through the beaded
curtain to the bathroom where I heard her start the shower, and after that the
clinking of the bottles in the medicine cabinet that testified to her fixing
herself up, reapplying her make up and such, then with the groan of the door,
she made her way into the bedroom to get dressed again. She emerged a short
time later, fully dressed, as she had appeared the previous day, but in a
different outfit.
“They’re coming to pick me up,” she said. “So, don’t bother
walking me out.”
Hope sank in me. I dared not speak, giving her a begrudging
nod as she made her way out the front door, the clatter of her shoes down the
stairs, and then down the drive informing me of her progress. I heard the car
stop and the car door open and close, then the whine of the gears as the car
took off again.
I sat for a few minutes staring into space, the lingering
effects of the previous night still clinging to me, the visions in the flames,
the intense feelings, and the near sense of despair. Finally, I got up, went to
the bathroom to take a shower, then to the bedroom to put on clean clothing.
When I came back into the hall, Dan emerged from his room, giving me another
frown.
“Where are you going?” he asked.
“I have an appointment,” I said. “The coffee is on the
counter. Lock up when you go out.”
Cool air greeted me on the landing outside the door,
swirling around, stirred up by some westerly wind off the ocean. Even the tall
palm trees swayed, partly a lingering illusion from the trip the night before.
My skin tingled with it. I could not trust what I saw as completely real, even
as I made my way down the stairs to the driveway and then out to the street.
No cab waited at the curb for me the way it had for Louise
only moments earlier. So, I had to hike up to Fountain and across to Highland
before I found a phone at a gas station there to call the agency, the woman
from my previous visit, sounding a bit surprised when she came on the other end
of the line.
“You’re serious about this?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said, but thought, “I wish I wasn’t.”
She gave me an address in Beverly Hills, and I called for a
cab to get me there.
It was not a movie star’s house, but it might as well have
been, stucco, exaggerated ranch-style building nestled into the rising hills
behind it. Other houses rose to either side of it, blocked by a tall vine
covered fence that circled the property like a fort. A sprawling rock garden
thick with thousands of seasonal flowers of mostly yellow and blue flowed up
from the street, through which a path of pavers led through it, and then stone
steps to the building’s front door. The whole front of the house was nothing
but glass, wind chimes stirred by the moving air above where I stopped, while
an assortment of life-sized figurines showed on the inside, like guardian
angels blocking for the most part any view further inside.
I rang the bell. Someone shouted from within, but I could
not make out what was said until I rang the bell again and the shouting became
for distinct for me to come in.
My hand trembled as I turned the glass door knob, the door
swinging open into a cavernous hall with marble floors and a marble staircase
going to a second floor I would not have expected to find if seeing the
building only from the outside. A strong odor swept over me, of wine and clover
incense, the second covering over a third scent I could guess at but not quite
define.
To either side, largely vacant rooms opened onto the hall,
vacant except for some wicker furniture and a narrow blue rug that led through
these rooms to other rooms at the rear of the house.
For all the sparsity, the place was tastefully done, a few
mellow murals hanging on several walls, and beyond the figurines I had seen
through the window, several other sculptures in the corners, including a bust
of some historic figure I didn’t recognize.
“Hello?” I shouted, voice echoing back at me, off the stone
and glass, sounding odd, not like my voice at all, or perhaps like the voice I
had when younger and scared of the dark.
“We’re outside!” the previous voice shouted back, its echoes
less distinct, like the echo of an echo.
I picked one of the two rooms to either side of the hall,
and then proceeded to follow the blue carpet, assuming that it had to lead
somewhere, perhaps to the rear door even, which it did.
For all of LA County’s concrete, this place was a paradise,
rivalling perhaps even Eden for its lusciousness, green bordering the yard and
the small (by Beverly Hills standards) pool and the surrounding patio. A garden
ran along the white fence, with not just flowers, but vegetables as well,
including tall corn stalks and more squat tomato plants I recognized from the
yards of my Italian relatives back home. But the owners had although
thoughtfully planted bushes and trees, something more suited for back east than
in the dust bowl of the west coast, well-tended, watered often, providing shade
and a sense of peace. I could smell the evergreen. It reminded me of Christmas.
The patio encircled the pool with a slightly wider side near
the house where a table stood, surrounded by wicker chairs, with a half dozen
people seated in them, sipping cool drinks. A small table held a few platters
of finger food, vegetables and dip, and some cut up fruit.
Louise, seated in one of the chairs, got startled when she
saw me, her lower lip trembling as if she had done something wrong and had
gotten caught. Her hands shook, spilling some of the red wine onto her chest
and she leaned out of the chair to deposit the glass on the table.
A white haired man rose to greet me, gray hair showing
thickly through his mostly unbuttoned shirt.
“Howdy,” he said, and thrust his hand out for me to shake,
his wide smile displaying a friendliness that I had not expected.
I shook his hand. He had a powerful grip.
“My name is Stacker,” he said. “John Stacker. Most of the
models call me Jack. You must be new. I thought I knew all the models that
worked out of Daisy’s place.”
I responded with a weak smile and a weaker nod, admitting to
him that I was a novice.
He laughed and told me to relax.
“I just gave everybody some drinks to loosen them up,” he
said. “What’s your poison? It will really help.”
He led me to the table. The two other men, shirtless and as
muscular as sports starts, gave me nods, though I could read nothing from their
expressions except perhaps impatience to get on with the shoot.
Louise was one of three women, and apparently overly dressed
for the occasion, judging from how scantily dressed the other two women were.
Louise glared at me. The other two smiled suggestively,
already in character, I thought.
“This is Marge,” the man said, waving his hand at the
redheaded woman in a bikini so sparce, she might as well have been wearing
nothing at all. She wore red lipstick and fingernails and had eye lashes that
were as large as monarch butterflies and flapped as if she planned to take
flight.
The other woman, the man said, was named Stacy, equally
undressed as Marge, but more modest in her makeup, pink lipstick, clear
fingernail polish, and a mere smear of pink eye shadow. Her auburn hair hung
down over her shoulders on either side, long enough to kiss the swell of her
breasts. She gave me a smile and a wink.
“And you are?” the man asked Louise, clearly less familiar
with her than with the other two women.
Louise told him in a near whisper. She’d stopped looking at
me.
“I’m afraid I didn’t get your name either, young man,”
Staker said.
I told him. He nodded at the two muscular men.
“They are Mark and Bill,” he said.
I shook hands with each of them, their grips nearly as
powerful as his.
“When you’re finished with your drinks, we’ll get started,”
Stacker said and returned to one of the seats to finish his, where he continued
a story, he had been conveying when I had interrupted.
One of the photographers later would tell me that
photographers from these slick dirty magazines fell into two types: the hard
core group and the nice guys.
The hard core people took pictures for any and every kind of
dirty magazine, and generally tended to steer novices like Louise towards hard
core still photography and eventually hard core films.
The nice guys were on the fringe of the porno market. Most
of these were respectable photographers who’d had hard times in their field and
so sublimated their incomes by doing what was called “soft core” stuff, meaning
no penetration, all of its staged, not even allowing a hard on from their male
models.
The hard core crew was sometimes so over the edge of
legality that they were forced to change locations frequently to stay a few
steps ahead of the vice squad.
John Staker was one of these, although more successful than
most, but thought of himself as an artist, generally walking around with a
camera strung around his neck, even though he had camera people to shoot the
action.
But after telling one of his notorious tales to the others,
he stood up, finished his glass of wine and said it was time to work.
Louise, of course, had not stopped staring at me. She looked
flushed and acted fidgety, knocking over her chair when commanded to get up.
Only then did I realize she was even less dressed than the other two, and
clutched her bath robe closed to hide the fact she was already naked and had
already completed some work before my arrival.
“All right, people,” Stacker said. “You know the routine.
Since Alfred is new, you’re going to have to guide him through things until he
gets wind of what we’re up to. I’m not looking for anything hardcore for these
shots. Keep it tame for him. Later, if you want to have some fun, that’ll be
your business.”
“You said you don’t want hard core,” one of the other girls
asked.
“I want it close,” Stacker said. “But nothing that’ll get us
an XXX rating. Not from this shoot anyway.”
When Stacker started to arrange shots, it gave Louise the
opportunity to come next to me to whisper, “What the hell are you doing here?”
“Working,” I said, “Just like you.”
“Here?”
“Actually, I didn’t know you would be here,” I said, as
flatly as I could manage.
This seemed to startle her. She looked at me, then away, and
then at me a gain, then was drawn off when Stacker summoned her.
As she moved off, I felt a surge of pain, white hot, and a
voice inside my head telling me to get the fuck out before it all started.
But I didn’t leave.
Once in his director mode, Stacker became a different man,
less overtly friendly, more authoritarian, shouting his instructions to each of
us.
I found myself as naked as Louise and in an entangled
position on a sofa near the swimming pool.
I was, although I had been paired off with Marge, while
Louise was with one of the muscular men.
Marge seemed confused as to what Stacker wanted, and he got
peeved, telling her to go with it and not ruin the mood, telling her she would
have to make it up to him later.
“You’ll have to do it for real later while I take pictures,”
he told her.
She gave a resigned nod, then repositioned herself with me,
leaving me to wonder if Stacker expected me to take part in the later, “real”
shoot with her as well.
As it turned out, Stacker wanted a more experienced male for
that part and tapped the other muscular man for it when the time came.
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