Sex and Murder Magazine

By Tyler Knight

The sea bag goes with me. Always. It slides heavy off my shoulder so I heft it back to its place and continue walking through the black. To lose the bag is to surrender. A dot ahead of me glows orange and hot before the night wraps around it with the indifference of a tar-pit smothering a bleating mastodon calf. The next time the dot flares it fires closer; the sweet scent of the kush reaches me a full pace before the man’s features fill in around the blunt between his lips.

I recognize him from the smut rags. For years, he’s always wearing his perfect shoes while railing hot pieces of ass. His teeth glint gold in the light of a passing car; he wears chains not unlike those our ancestors fought with their lives, over many centuries, to divest future generations of. Chains that now rattle and slap against his chest with pride as we approach each other on the driveway; him on the way down me on the way up. I remind myself to pause and chat so I can maintain the subterfuge.

He smiles, but in Los Angeles amongst competitors a smile is never what it means. Although I never let on, the look on the competition’s face when he sees me coming is beautiful.

That’s how it works in this business. As a new guy I’m still a mope so I take what foothold I can get. Someone can’t get his dick hard, I get the call that starts with, “How soon can you get here?” He leaves, I take over. A pile of cash gets pushed my way and my “fuck you” stack gets a little bit bigger. I nearly have enough to pay the move-in cost for that apartment—two more scenes will get me there. I could use some of the cash stuffed in the bottom of the bag for a room for tonight but I save every cent. Discipline. If my old man taught me one thing it’s discipline. Still ringing in my eardrums.

Note to all the other male talent out there: I’m not your friend and if you see me walking up the driveway, you probably fucked up. Sure, I joke around with you and laugh at the appropriate moments, confide my throwaway secrets and pretend to listen to yours but I don’t give a damn about you. I want you to fail. I pray to God you blow a scene because at this stage in my career, just a lucky baker’s dozen number of scenes in, your failure is food filling my gut. I’m sick of being a broke nobody and I have zero problems elbowing you out of the way so I have cash for a place to stay another night.

I see how the upper echelon guys live. They roll up in their flash cars, brag about the civilian girls that send x-rated MySpace messages or picture mails with their pussies spread open. The most famous male talent get stopped in airports by guys who would offer their girlfriends to be like them. And some do. The top male talent live like gangsta rappers and rock stars. The piles of cash, upwards of twenty-thou a month. For fucking.

A grungy, pretty boy pornstar—who thinks Linkin Park’s “Crawling” is an anthem not a warning—took me aside on a set last week to spin tales of Bacchanal parties in Vegas during the ATM awards; signing autographs at the convention for exotic milfs with wandering hands during the day then diving into a mountain of coke and cunt while the vacationers are long asleep. How he stood with his pants at his ankles while clutching his award-for fucking-back against the floor-to-ceiling glass window, at a height that will kill a man long before he hits the ground, while twins played spit-and-swap on his cock; the lights of the Vegas Strip bursting thermite-neon at his back below.

Pussy and money. The ultimate scam.

I pretend to be in awe of my gangsta-porn friend but inside it’s all glee.

He says, “If anybody hasta replace me, I’m glad it’s you.”

That Tyler. He’s such a nice guy, they always say. Good. I give them zero thought when it’s my balls instead of theirs slapping against the porn starlet’s taint. I’m cashing the check they should have been cashing.

This guy, like everyone, else sees me as a harmless, bumbling, Colombo type; allowing me to operate with impunity. Sun Tzu would be proud. My “friend” crosses his arms. I mirror him by crossing my arms.

“And when you get to be my level Tyler,” he says, “soma these bitches will fuck with you. Normally I regulate on a ho, but this was my third scene today an that’s why I struggled.”

Right. Whatever makes you feel better.

He offers me a hit of his blunt. A police helicopter passes nearby so I kill it and crush the red embers between my toe and the driveway. He slows his speech to a drawl and his posture to a slouch. So do I.

He talks and talks. The kush seeps it’s thick, sticky fingers into skull, massaging my brain and I feel the ghetto-bird’s thwump-thwump-thwump tingling in the back of my teeth.

He looks down at his fresh-from-the-box shoes that cost more than the average American worker’s wages for a week. Fucking shoes.

I look down at my feet. The uppers look okay but there’s cardboard between the insert and the sole.

The ghetto-bird hovers a few streets over, its light snaps on turning night to day. The rotors split the air, waking neighbors that have to slave away an existence in a few hours.

Hey says, “Hey Travis—”

“Tyler.”

“Taylor, come down to the street. Lemme show you the DVD player I put my car.”

I don’t believe this! This motherfucker is stalling. He’s trying to cockblock me from succeeding even though it’s too late for him.

“Some other time,” I say. “If I don’t get inside and let them know I’m here they’ll just call somebody else.” I excuse myself and continue up the driveway.

“Did you see my car is sittin’ on DUBs?” he hollers at my back.

I don’t slow down.

Shit, phone call and a taxi ride ago the sea bag was at my feet as I sat at a 24 hour internet café, where I was going to spend the night, stealing shut-eye by the minutes. Now it’s slung across my shoulder as I walk up the driveway to a single-level ranch style house in Panorama City.

I enter the house without knocking. There’s talking going on in the back of the house. When I reach for the cell to turn the ringer off I see there’s a missed call I didn’t hear because of the copter.

It was the director of tomorrow’s scene, the one that, with today’s scene, will put me over the edge with the money I need to get a place of my own. I’ll call him back after I let these people know I’m here first.

The voices lead me to the kitchen. Sink full of dirty dishes that looks like they have been there since Man first learned to cook with fire. One of those tables that has wings folded underneath that extend the surface area. The red cups littering the table remind me of a college party.

Everybody is smoking. The director, the assistant, and the girl. A naked goth girl who’s all elbows and knees. She reminds me of a hurt fawn limping alone in the woods, decoying would be predators straight to prison; where inside of ten minutes of incarceration the predator is now the prey—passed around, hurt, limping. Whore-red lipstick is smudged around the filter of the cigarette she’s holding. Not my type, but whatever. The other male talent, I’m told, is on set in the living room. The director’s assistant hands me paperwork, takes my IDs to photograph them. The director explains the scene.

“Ever done a dp before?” he asks.

Nope.

“Once.”

The assistant hands my IDs back to me.

“How did it go?”

A roach scurries across the wall behind the director’s shoulder.

“Okay I guess,” I say to the roach. I finish my sentence to the six foot tall insect that’s going to pay me, “the proximity of another dude’s balls, as he digs in a girls ass while I’m fucking her pussy, isn’t my favorite thing in the world to do; but, fuck it, it’s money, so whatever. As long as there’s no sword fighting or ball touching involved I’m cool.”

The director walks away. Conversation over.

The girl and I play I’ll-show-you-mine-if-you-show-me-yours with our std tests. The other male talent’s test is on the table.

After the homework is done, I shoulder my bag and excuse myself to the bathroom so I can freshen up and return the call.

*****

The single, bare bulb above is layered with dust, basking my skin jaundice yellow in its light. Black and fuzzy mold or mildew, the fuck if I know for sure which, speckle the beige walls with their spores.

A Smurf-patterned shower curtain hangs outside the tub. It dangles on two rings, giving the middle a depressing sag. Hanging there on its ring-as-hands for love of life. Caked-on soap scum at its tattered bottom.

The tub itself is a primordial tide pool with exotic life spawning from the sludge. A corpse could be dissolving in the bottom of the murk for all I know. I give it a wide berth, as if I expect a hand to thrust out and pull me into the Abyss. It wouldn’t surprise me if the home owner has gills and fins. Calcium deposits on the shower head probably focus the flow into an industrial water-jet beam that can cut steel.

Not going to wash my balls in that thing. May as well return the call.

He answers on the first ring. “Yeah, look man, I’m sorry but I can’t use you tomorrow.”

I take a breath before speaking. I don’t say the first four things to come to mind. “Why?”

There is a pause. “You know I like you and I think you’re gonna do well in the business—”

“Brian, get to the point.”

He says, “Nadia decided she doesn’t want to do interracial.”

I suppress a chuckle but nothing is funny. Even though I’ve never heard the term before, it’s self evident. I still want him to come out and say it. “What the fuck is ‘interracial?’”

“Look, your black—”

“Really?”

“and she won’t work with you, Tyler.”

The police helicopter’s thwumping fades away. I want to set the bag down but think the better of it.

I say, “This is ridiculous, look at Nadia and look at me. I wouldn’t fuck her if I wasn’t getting paid either. Shit, I’ve fucked models from all over the world, my race was never an issue with women until I got into this business.”

He says, “Photographic evidence.”

“Photographic evidence? What am I, a fucking yeti?” I reach into the bag, still slung over my shoulder, and pull out my toiletry kit. “That’s the problem, you people think everybody outside the porn bubble thinks like you do, and you assume that most girls outside of the business think like that.”

“I don’t make the rules, man—it’s whatever the girls and the studio wants.”

This month’s trade magazine has a full page, one-sheet ad of Nadia doing some truly apocalyptic shit on camera.

I take out my toothbrush and go to run it under hot water from the sink but my hand stops cold at the spigot. I settle for toothpaste and the saliva in my mouth.

I say, “So the act of getting chain ass-fucked by ten guys—all of them coming inside her while dunking her head in a toilet, then blowing shit-and-cum bubbles out of her asshole on camera—Is okay with the parents at home, as long as it’s white and not nigger cock. Is this correct?”

“Hey man—”

“Did it ever cross you mind to, gee, I dunno, cast a black girl for a change? Or perhaps one of the four-trillion other girls, most of them way hotter than her, that have no ‘moral dilemma’ with doing an interracial porn scene?”

He says, “Well, her morality has a price. She will do the scene but I’d have to pay her extra money to work with you. It’s not in my budget but if you agree we can pay her the extra money out of your chec—”

I click the cellie shut.

Tyler, the mope.

I take my time brushing my teeth. The routine relaxes me. A little. When I’m done, I wrap the brush in toilet paper, put it and the toothpaste back in my toiletry kit. A thought occurs to me and I take my toothbrush out of the toiletry kit and drop it on the floor. In my toiletry kit is an in-case-of-emergency Viagra.

Bird in hand, Eric.

I chew the pill. It powders tart and citrusy in my mouth like licking a 9-volt battery. It bites me back with a twang in my salivary glands. With my tongue I pry loose the caked-on deposit from my molars and swallow. No water.

Lovely. I’ll still need one more scene after this.

The toilet. Unfortunately for me I really have to pee. As if there is no end to the indignities that can be thrust upon me, I am reduced to relieving myself in a vessel that would be cruelty to animals if a dog was forced to use it. What I think is piss-rust (can piss oxidize?) around the base also stains the grout between the tile around it brown. I pull three arms-lengths of toilet paper, bunch it up into a softball-sized wad and use it to lift a toilet lid that’s attached to hinges that have said “fuck it” to being hinges.

More rings than Saturn, the inside of the basin looks like it was sprayed with a paint-gun but the nozzle had a beastly clog. Gobs upon gobs of white toilet paper form an unholy shit biscuit, trapping nuggets and pebbles like a county fair sized cookie from hell. The can hisses from the flush-jets under the rim creating a mini current that gives the pastry a graceful, counterclockwise rotation like majestic galaxy. Stabbing the middle of this web of woe, a half-sunk packet Meow Mix. It sits there. Trapped and helpless as the current swirls around it.

Fearing splashback, I piss at the cesspool, not in it; marking it top to bottom because what difference does it fucking make?

I’m aware of my eyelids weight in my skull. The muscles holding them up want to relax and let gravity do its thing. I fight them up.

*****

A Planck length this side of lucid, I lock my knees to stay my swaying. My bodyweight suggests to the soft shag carpet beneath my shoes to rise toward me as the Earth soothes me slack with its gravity.

I stand off-camera, away from the shot in progress and behind the man shooting the weighty Sony, who squats in front of the supple, suede sofa. My co-stars are screwing—the slapping sound of sloppy sex.

Each lethargic lap of the slow-swinging ceiling fan’s blades lulls me with a lisping breeze that’s not enough to sweep me over by itself, but with its seductive droning soliloquy the combined effect is a lethal lullaby.

I should see Amanda tonight. We could snuggle.

The other male talent, Lance, looks like he just came from off a Motel 6 drum & bass coke binge with Gary Busey. He and Goth-girl are already going at it where the scene left off before the camera cut and Gangsta-Pornstar was 86’d.

The scheme is to start from where they stopped with me stepping onto set for the rest of the scene. The footage of Gangsta-Pornstar will be edited out as if he never existed. The director is filming three minutes of run-time of the other two before I enter the scene so the editor’s job will be easier. I sit on the carpet and settle.

She taught me the Spanish word for floor is suélo…

A silent, over-the-shoulder wave from the director is my sixty-second signal.

...which sounds similar to sueño, meaning dream.

I’m sitting on the floor as I slide off my slacks; I’m half-way through the second leg when:

Crickets.

A stream sparkles, slipping through sequoias. Its surface shimmies a silvered moon.

Glowing sprites dance upstream; a gentle nudge behind my knees sits me on a floating toadstool.

The mushroom follows the will-o’-wisps over the running water. I dip a toe, it drags cool. Creatures peek through trees.

The canopy opens. More stars than space. Waterfall. Nymphs slashing.

Puck spins sonnets.

The motion of the director’s hand is my reverie back to reality, my mind sketches in the objects around me one by one and reminds me how I got here sitting with pants half-off, dick in hand. I kick the pants away, stand, and stumble into the sex with the deftness of a reanimated corpse on roofies.

Lance and Goth-Girl clear my spot on the sofa. I collapse on the couch; it pulls me into its deep. Pfizer’s finest sloshing through my system. Goth girl straddles me, spits on her hand, and drips stalactites of sparkling saliva onto my cock. I’m a spectator, watching. She rubs my head on her slit soft and slides herself down on me.

Insertion. Penis plunges into vagina, a syringe in reverse. My mind snaps alert!

Goth-girl exhales, spraying an aerosol of hot spittle on my cheek. Sour meth-breath. One of my hands grabs her hip, the other coils a fist-full of drenched hair. She coos. I grip. My fingernails find their purchase into her scalp and I yank her head back with a snap and hammer up into her.

Lance towers over us standing on the couch and shoves his prick into the girl’s O-shaped mouth. Bouncing. Tits slapping together in my face. A taste of dew trickles its glistening trail down her tit, across areola, curving the erect nipple then straight down again until it hangs on the under-slope; when my next upstroke flings it from its perch it falls salty into my open mouth.

Lance dismounts the couch, backhand strokes his dick as though his aim is to rip it off then positions himself behind the girl. Double penetration time. Because I’m on the bottom my job’s to anchor. I stop thrusting into the girl and I pull her down onto me so that her tits squish flush upon my sweat-slicked chest. I’m still in her vagina, her asshole is angled-ready for Lance to penetrate.

He spreads her cheeks, pushes at her sphincter. It gives with a thuk, and he’s past the o-ring and into her rectum. The added weight of him and the girl on top of me steals my air mid-breath, and sags the sofa like the wallet thin, piss-sponge of a mattress I slept on in the LA Mission two nights past. Her vagina is tighter as he penetrates and there’s a sensation on the underside of my vagina-sheathed dick like my penis is a tube of toothpaste and Lance’s cock is a marble-hard rolling pin forcing my mass upwards to the nozzle of my head. I steal sips of air. The standard amount of footage needed per position: three minutes. I count.

2:57

He starts slow. When lance finds his angle and rhythm I join the tandem-fuck action with the enthusiasm of mashing both dicks together and rolling on one condom. The two-finger width of girl-flesh and taint between us is compressed to the point of being moot. Each gliding pass of his dick pumping in her asshole feels as though I’m getting worked by a hardwood massage roller. Shutting my eyes with an imagination like mine is worse so I stare at a greasy hand smudge on the wall that resembles a sketched turkey with a severed head.

The assistant director stoops low and gets in close with the c-light—short for cunt light in porn speak—broiling my balls. The heat sizzles right up to the edge of discomfort, crosses into pain, then backs off to tolerable and stops, telling me he’s moved in and backed out to find his range.

2:42

Lance is looking over the girl’s shoulder and is searching for eye contact? With me!

What the fuck!

He’s determined to marry our eyes. My head’s range of motion is restricted, wherever I turn he’s always in my field of vision. His gaze sears into my face. The weirdness of avoiding looking at someone with nowhere else to look.

My eyes and his eyes dart about, climbing and diving in a dogfight for the ages. Me avoiding, him chasing; both of us fucking away at the girl-meat between us. My disadvantage is too great, he gets missile lock.

In his eyes I see Mr. Baines, the eight-fingered highschool janitor that hung out after the gymnastics meet and walked up to little Jayleen Stewart before security took him away.

A warm bed of my own. Clean socks. My own shower.

2:09

Lance’s jaw is slack, his tongue looks like it’s breaded in flour and it’s draped out the corner of his mouth.

I’m inside a vagina. This is totally natural.

1:58

He crashes against Goth-girls ass in waves. I hold fast, rowing my dinghy against the following sea. My job as the dp’s anchor is stabilizing the girl and rooting her in place. If she moves, one or both of us pops out of our respective meat-holes.

Vaginae are good. It’s just me and her. Alone.

Lance is not looking at me as much as he’s looking through me. His eyes seem to focus at a point on the other side of my skull. I imagine what movies are playing inside his. My clenched jaw powders my molars to tooth dust.

Fucking. Just like God intended.

1:43

It’s not Goth-girl’s job to fuck, it’s to receive. My arms coil around her waist, my hands fix into a wrestler’s Gable grip. The pace quickens. Dueling pistons in alternate in-and-out action. I can’t see the director, he’s crouched down feeding his hungry camera lens a cock-Mc Muff’in-cock sandwich.

Goth-girl’s pussy is so good with the added tightness of something in her asshole at the same time.

Okay, so I gotta mix this Jim Beam stuff with the Coca Cola like Daddy does. How much of each though? I shoulda paid attention better. Might as well pour an equal amount of both .That was kinda sweet for a second but now it’s worse than Listerine. Shit! Why did I swallow, it burns! It’s just sitting there in my throat and in my gut.

1:30

Lance gets lazy with maintaining the optimal angle to avoid ball-to-ball clearance and the director’s sight line, I feel the first hint of scrotal heat on my privates. The proximity alert juxtaposed with the super snug cooze milking my dick and spinning my world are conflicting. Lance hammers harder, he moans, the girl is slipping and I double my grip. The hair of his ball tickles the nape of my dick where my cock and sac meet. My natural reflex is to cringe. My flinch and Lance’s anal ramming pops me out of the vagina and my dick is a balloon with a slow leak.

Bobby Fischer’s hand comes out of exile and slaps the scene-clock stopped.

I say, “Can I get a minute, I need to get my edge back?”

Partly because the words are spoken on a third of a breath, partly because I’m flustered it comes out as a whisper. I’m insta-pissed at myself as the words leave my mouth for sounding so fucking weak.

The director says, “Fine, but we need to get an additional 30 seconds of runtime for the editors because you verbally asked to stop.”

“As opposed to semaphore?”

“Yes, actually. If you need a break, signal when the camera isn’t on you.”

“Noted.” I say to the flesh pile, “Get off me. I can’t breath.” And to the director again, “Why an extra 30 seconds?”

It’s now that I notice the room is fetid and the faint rattle of the police helicopter.

He says, “Because now I have to look at where we left off through the viewfinder and cue it back a good ten seconds to overlap your voice. On top of that, I have to give the editor some extra footage to work with so he has a margin of error.”

“Oh.”

“When we start again,” he says, “you guys have to give me the same pace so that it matches.”

I step out from under the intense lights that are triangulated on the couch. As soon as I do my sweat dries cool on my back.

I say, “Lance, chill out with that nonsense. That was some creepy shit.”

Lance says, “I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about, man.”

Is he for real?

“The staring into my eyes and the ball-on-ball touchery! Not cool.”

Lance scoffs. “If that bothers you then you shouldn’t be doing porn.”

I say, “Incidental rubbing is to be expected but you were digging it.”

“Hey,” Lance says to the director, “his negativity is messin’ with my Chakras.”

“Did you just tell on me like a little bitch?”

“Let it go,” the director says. “Both of you.”

I’m standing next to a coffee table that’s been pushed aside to make room for the lights. There’s an ice-cooler filled with sodas and waters next to the table, and a box sitting on the table. I reach into the box first. The rape kit-the ubiquitous plastic box on porn sets that has lube, douche, enemas, condoms that never see the outside of a wrapper, and baby-wipes. I grab the lube from the rape kit and stroke my dick back up.

Once I’m hard I plunge the same hand into the cold, sloshing icewater of the cooler, hold it there for a moment, then free a dripping bottle of water, chug it, and chase it with another. The third bottle has a hunk of ice in it which slaps against the inside of the plastic as I turn it horizontal. I hold it on the blue veins criss-crossing the underside of my forearm until they recede.

I take a Tyler moment with the waterbottle on the back of my neck. It’s good.

Money.

“Okay,” I say as I walk back on the hot side of the lights, “let get this fucker done.”

2:00

Same position. I’m holding the girl steady, lance lowers and enters her once again except this time something is different. It’s much hotter on the backside of my dick, far tighter inside her cunt too. The compression is right on my spot, my eyes roll half-lidded back in my head and I’m rounding the corner from inhaling to exhaling my own primal emote, then I feel the slither of the back-stroke and an instant understanding flashes by me.

No, he can’t be in the same—

“I’ll kill you, motherfucker!”

They all scatter but I pounce on Lance and tackle him faster than a NASA supercomputer calculates 100 digits of Pi. My fingernails dig in his eyesockets, my teeth clamp down on his ear and my mouth fills with warm syrup that tastes like old pennies. I lash my head to the side with an upward twist at the end.

The sound of wet jeans ripping.

Lance wails, voids his bladder and flails his arms like there are amps going through him.

The jagged back edge of his ear leaves him looking like a Keebler elf.

I chew and spit. Ear bits bound together by a matrix of saliva pellet his face like a shotgun blast.

Lance swallows, and his undulating Adam’s apple reminds me of our dicks wrestling for space in the same pussy. Cuspids dig into throat, I clamp down, something important cracks.

He gurgles. I laugh. I’m Apophis the Destroyer, my teeth need more flesh. I see his cock twinge in my peripheral vision.

Lance says, “Why you gettin’ all hostile n’ stuff, man? It was an accident.”

I don’t bother with my socks and underwear, pulling on only my pants and shoes.

“Let him go,” the director says to Lance. “Are you two available tomorrow so we can finish this?”

Shirt now on, I heft the sea bag over my shoulder, leave the room and go through the kitchen, past the table with the red plastic cups and the sink with the dishes piling up and out under the star-less night sky of the city. I walk.

The police helicopter buzzes in the distance. Its searchlight a white spec.

GODDAMN-MOTHERFUCKING-COCKSUCKER!

The residential neighborhood gives way to a street with shopping centers.

There’s a phantom sensation of him sliding on me, like the phenomenon amputees report about still “feeling” severed limbs.

I still need two scenes. Three really with what I spent on the taxi and the Viagra.

The chopper rattles closer.

Okay, so yeah it felt alright, but before I knew what was going on, so FUCKING WHAT! That’s just biology. Nerves doing what there supposed to do. Sending signals of pleasure and pain to my brain. It’s got nothing to do with who I am.

The copter makes thundering sweeps over the neighborhood I just left a few streets over. Amanda answers after a few rings.

“Hey.”

I plug my ear with a finger as the police cruisers wail past me and toward the ghetto bird.

“Hey.”

It’s hard to breath, my eyes sting and my vision blurs, and I tilt my head back as headlights from passing cars find my face, hang there, and move on.

*****

The gym never closes. It’s pay-by-the-day and for a couple of bucks, I can lift weights, take a shower, read or nap in the sauna. I did this last night. Nobody fucks with me here.

Towel slung around my waist, I walk over to the locker, unlock the pad lock and pull out my cell phone. Time to get to business.

“Good morning, DVD Gang. How may I direct your call?”

My voice echoes off the tiled walls,“Kendra, please.”

“Oh, she walking in right now. This is Tyler...?” she asks.

Finally. Okay, get right to the point and don’t take no for an answer.

I sit on the lockeroom bench.

“Knight. Remind her that I was referred by Wanda from VELVET.”

“Hold please.”

The girl doesn’t bother with placing her hand over the receiver. The intent is for me to hear everything.

“Kendra,” the receptionist says, “Tyler Knight is on the line for you. Again.”

There’s a sigh. A second woman’s voice says, “Tell him I’m in a meeting.”

Fuck this shit!

I hang up before the receptionist can spin some bullshit lie and I reach inside the sea bag. I swap the towel for clothes, pull out a VHS cassette, dump the bag into the locker then slap my pad lock on it. I give the lock a couple sharp tugs head out of the men’s locker room into the gym proper.

The floor is covered in those black, interlocking mats that give underfoot with each spongy step in most places and beat-to-shit carpet in others. Dusty fluorescents flicker and hum. The equipment is old. Free-weights that don’t do the work for you. No yoga class or spinning.

The few people in the gym are here to work, not to be seen reading a strategically placed script while on the elliptical machine. The motion by the cardio machines gets my attention. That motion coming from the girl on the stairclimber.

Corn rows. Sports bra. No shirt overtop.

Rain-slicked asphalt for skin. Oily beads of sweat find themselves collateral damage in the billions-of-years long fight between gravity and friction. One drop caught in this tug of war, forms a velvety ball, held together by surface tension, until finally it’s ripped asunder by its own swelling weight. One half staying in place, the other now a quicksilver tear on a hellish track, tumbling down the v-shaped swale of her lower-back, drawing a sparkling, jagged trail until the half-drop bumps into another, wresting it out of it’s place. The two beads form a large, rolling ball once again; its re-combined, juicy mass is heavy enough so that it streaks straight down and splashes into a salty stop at the waistband, darkening the fabric as it’s absorbed.

That saturated waistband stretches around a sculpted waist. The girl’s hips saunter wide, side-to-side, like a metronome ticking delicious tempo. Her tart, yellow shorts are stretched just below the tensile strength limit of where Lycra fibers snap apart.

Cheeks alternate, one swings inward, contracting with violence while the other swings out on the undulating hip, not relaxing, but setting up for another great squeeze. Two terrier pups tussling in a pillowcase.

The ass draws me in. My arms want to reach out, one snaking around the girl’s waist, pulling her into me while the other hand squeezes one of her magnificent cheeks. And they do.

I slap it, the smack chimes of a plucked tuning fork charging the air electric in my ear. Inside one beat of my hard-charging heart, the cheek gives two great jiggles that diminish into taught quivers then dissolve to rapid ripples of nothing. Sublime.

She squeals, and girl-voice ricochets inside my skull, flicks a switch in my brain that raises the gates, flooding my cock with blood. Time slams to a stop. Her giggles grabs my glands and my body teems with adrenaline and test.

I drop to my knees, plunge my nose into her crevasse, inhale and the heady bouquet sways me giddy.

My mouth is an overflowing trough of saliva but I do not swallow. The drool wants to run over onto my chin and it’s not so much a matter of me letting it as it is a case of me being rapt in the asses’s thrall. I’ve got a needing. It must be part of me. Now.

My teeth plunge into the succulent, yellow fruit. Her sex bursts crisp and sweet in my mou-

“What the hell are you doing?” she asks.

Oh shit!

I’m standing directly behind her, one hand is on the VHS cassette, the other outstretched—fingers curled inward—as if to pluck a succulent nectarine from a branch. She’s facing me now. Arms akimbo.

“Uh,you...I thought you were somebody else,” I say. I turn away and speed-walk to the door. She follows.

She says, “Hey come back! Lemme follow you around and see how you like it!”

Through the gym we go. I feel the heat of people’s eyes burning into my nape as she wails; I dash past the opposing-mirrored walls that reflect my hell in triplicate like a fun-house in purgatory. My pace increases to a trot and she matches me step-for-step. As we quicken she gets louder.

“Whas-a-matta, boo, you don’t like it when I creep up on you like this?”

I run. She runs.

“Yeah, I was looking at your ass!” I say. “What do you expect, dressed like that?”

Past the front desk with the dozing attendant that wakes up and asks “What the hell is going on?” Past the vending machine.

“Bull-shit,” she says. “I heard you breathin like you was gonna grab me or somethin. Well, here I am and you runnin away! That’s all you got for me, boo?” she asks.

The front door. I push. It slaps open.

“Sorry, baby. I’m all stalk, no action.”

My feet devour steps two at a time. Cars criss-crossing in the street ahead. People all around. I stay on the sidewalk and dash up Labrea Avenue. When I hit Hollywood Blvd. I don’t hear her so I slow down and check to see if I’m being followed. I’m not. Don’t wanna fuck around so I speed-walk to the Redline subway station, legs churning down two stories of stairs, double back to cram some coins and a wrinkled-to-hell dollar into the ticket machine and rip that motherfucker out of the metal mouth; I bound down the another set of stairs and thrust myself into a leg-scissoring leap through the open train door that takes a nip out of my ankle as it closes.

I snatch the pole out of the air and hook onto it,chest heaving. The passengers don’t look up, and I find a seat then flop down into it, videotape still clutched in hand. Just another guy who caught the train in time on the way to work.

The train burrows beneath the Cahuenga pass. I slouch.

*****

Part 2