N I N E
“We’re all just doing it.”
- Paul Anderson
“Do you date?” Noah asked.
“No,” Paul said. “That ruins everything.”
“I’ve tried it,” Noah admitted. “But then there comes the time when you have to tell the guy what you do for a living, and sometimes he pretends he accepts it, but you can see him looking at you like…. You do that?”
“I used to be in love,” Paul said. “But that was a while before I went into this. I just didn’t think I could have a real relationship, and do what I do. I think I would see that look on someone’s face, and I couldn’t deal with it.
“Porn stars date each other, though,” Paul said. “It makes sense. Who should date a porn star but someone who knows exactly what it’s like. And it’s not always good,” Paul warned.
“With you it was,” Noah said. “It was great. It was better with just you and me last night. But it was good the other day at the studio.” “
“Well that’s because I care about you,” Paul said frankly. “But you won’t always get that, and sometimes you won’t even like the guy and he won’t like you. You just have to get through it. Sometimes they have boyfriends make movies with each other, but that shit never lasts. Its hard dating someone who’s busy getting fucked by other people all day. I don’t think I’d do it.”
Noah’s face changed and then he said, “Whatever we are…”
“Friends,” Paul said quickly. “And listen, everyone isn’t my friend. I don’t really have friends.”
“Well, friends then,” Noah settled on the word. “Can we still have sex? Can we? Because real sex hasn’t happened for me in a long time. Making money. That’s making money. But what we did…”
“I know, right?” Paul nodded. “I feel the same way. Yeah, I’d like that. Us keeping this up. Being with someone I care about. And maybe we should never date. Just because of that.”
Noah stayed with Paul all that weekend. He didn’t want to go back to his apartment which seemed so far from everything.
“We’ll find a new place for you in the neighborhood,” Paul said. “That way you can always be near me and the studio. We’re like a big family.”
Paul had wanted to say that Noah was like a brother. But early in the morning and late at night he was fucking him, and he had a real brother back home in East Carmel who didn’t think much of him at all.
Sunday they spent all day in separate films, Paul beginning a movie with an actor from another studio, Danny Orlis. He was nice enough, and it was work enough, and Noah was shooting what they were calling an amateur porn, one with no plot where it was just guys in front of a camera supposedly being themselves. He would be with Burt and Paul, who had been with Burt many times, got—he had to admit to himself—a little bit jealous. When he needed to come and shoot all over Danny, he thought of Noah.
That night they sat in Paul’s apartment eating pizza when there was a knock at the door and Paul murmured, “What the fuck?” as he got up.
He opened the door and it took a while for him to process who the shy blond boy was.
“Remember. From last week. You told me to…”
“Yeah, yeah,” Paul took him by the hand, “Are you in a hurry?”
“Nope.”
“Have some pizza,” Paul said, “this is my bro, Noah.”
The boy gave him a lose handshake and Noah, sitting on the floor, pushed the pizza toward him.
They had been eating a while when the boy said, “So, is this going to be like a threesome?”
The boy still looked good, and Paul realized he was here to make money.
Noah looked to Paul.
“It can be,” Paul said.
Noah looked unsure, but Paul said, “I want to see you suck my friend’s dick.”
The boy said, “Are you joining in?”
“Probably. If you two want me to.”
Paul wasn’t sure if he was right to do this or not, but after knowing that Noah spent the day having sex with someone else, he wanted to see it.
Noah got up and sat on the edge of the bed, and the blond boy pulled his shorts and his underwear down. And then Paul watched the boy’s mouth working up and down on Noah and he saw, after a while, how both of them went into it, how Noah’s eyes glazed over and soon they were getting undressed, moving together on the bed and it was when Paul saw their young bodies, their smooth round asses, hands moving over each other, that he stood up, lightly pulling his clothes off, his penis pointing out. He climbed onto the bed and joined them.
Early in the morning the boy said, “I don’t want to leave this place,” while Paul pressed into his back and ran a hand over his arm and Noah fondled his nipples,
“You don’t have to, brother,” Paul drawled. “You can stay as long as you want. Your cash is on the table and there’s plenty of it, and it’s not going anywhere.”
“Oh, shit!” the boy moaned as Noah kissed up and down his stomach and then, slowly pulled his cock into his mouth.
“So, if you’re staying with us,” Paul said, “you should probably tell us your name.”
“Jimmy…” he cried out, then moaned his last name, “Wallace.”
“That’s a terrible name for Hollywood,” Paul said, kissing him and stroking him while Noah’s mouth worked on him. Jimmy opened his mouth and let out a shudder.
“Let’s call him Casey,” Noah said, and then opened the other boy’s legs and began to lick between them, sucking on his balls, thrusting his tongue into the newly named Casey’s ass.
“Casey! Yeah,” Paul agreed, getting hard while he watched Noah. “Casey…”
“Williams,” Noah finished.
“Casey Williams,” Paul said, lightly moving the boy so that he was under him, and placing his hard cock gently in his ass.
“You like that name?” Paul asked.
And as he pressed deep inside of him, Casey Williams, eyes rolling into his head, moaned, “Yessssss.”
“And the best part,” Guy proclaimed, as they were all watching the newly dubbed Casey move about the stage, “is that he’s got work already. Little work, but soon, with the Internet, folks with little work’ll be posting it up and then everyone’s gonna be a star.”
“That really gonna happen?” Noah said.
“Don’t worry, kid,” Guy said. “It’s not gonna happen today. But yeah, Casey’s old boyfriend taped him in some stuff. In fact,” he said, while the blond young man was smiling nervously and laughing at something one of the other model’s said, “I remember that the guy he was with wanted to make a lot of money off of him, not for me, but for Back Door.”
“Isn’t Back Door that bareback place?” Paul said.
“It is.”
“They approached me.”
Guy looked at Paul and Paul said, “What? I told them no.”
“Alright then,” Guy said, relieved. and Paul said, “Is it because you care so much for my safety, or because you don’t want your prize star being shared with another studio?”
“Who says you’re my prize?”
“Keep it up, Mr. Guy,” Paul said, walking away, bored. He was doing a scene with Noah, and those were always light and easy, but they both had to make sure they weren’t too light and easy, that they didn’t get too lazy with what they were doing. They stayed a while to watch Casey with Brent. After it was all done, Brent would shoot an intto talking about how much he had looked forward to this and how everyone was going to love this newbie. Brent Tosh had his own niche market, and it was pretty definite that he would leave Eagle Studios one day.
“How do they know who’s gonna be a star?” Noah said. “I mean, we’re all just getting fucked. And no one here is really a star. I mean, no one is taking home a Golden Globe or anything.”
“None of us is a star,” Paul said. “But all of us can be porn stars.”
“But how do you know?” Noah said. “Who’s a porn star and who’s just… doing porn?”
The whole thing started with them going in the shower. Nothing could be heard as they fooled around and Casey’s ass was pressed to the glass. They came out from the shower, erect, and jumped into a pool doing some half laps before continuing. They blew each other a little, and then went back into the shower and came out again.
“It’s a lot of blowing,” Paul said, disinterested.
“We could do better,” Noah said.
“We have done better,” said Paul.
“When they find out he’s been in bareback, I wonder how many guys’ll touch him. “
“We’ll touch him,” Paul shrugged. “We’ve already touched him.”
Brent was eating Casey out on the bed now, and Casey, eyes closed, was moaning in genuine pleasure. Noah looked down and saw that, with no self consciousness, Paul was semi hard, his penis bobbing against his thin shorts.
Now Brent got on his back and Casey entered him slowly, fucking him slowly, and now quickly, Casey giving quick moans, Brent fucked him.
“You asked who’s a porn star and who’s just doing porn?” Paul said.
“Uh, huh.”
“Well, Meryl Streep is a star. Laurence Olivier was a star. We’re in porn, Noah. We’re all just doing it.”
That day Paul and Noah made their own magic on the screen. Paul was perfectly biased in saying that they were fantasic. But he loved Noah. He was open about that. Not that he was in love, which was fragile, but that he loved him the way he had wanted to love his family, the way he was allowed to love very few people. And that was always on the screen with them.
“If we could only shoot with each other,” he once said, “or if you could only love everyone you shot with.”
There was the inevitable movie he made with Casey, a couple of them, and one all three of them made, but Casey moved on to bigger and better things and soon he was on posters that proved that even if to Paul porn was just porn, to other people Casey was a star. He was a star posting controversial things, known for his nastiness, his sexual promiscuity, his insatiable desire for dick.
“You’re willing to try new things?” the voice off screen asked.
“Yeah! Love all sorts of stuff.”
“Why don’t you give Johnny over there a kiss for us.”
They were both only in baggy cargo shorts, Noah with a backward’s ball cap on. Johnny Mellow had wrap around shades. He had been chewing gum that he took out for them to make out. They kissed for a long time and their bodies were perfectly cut. Neither one of them looked bad now, but to remember what they had been, when looking good was a business, that was something else.
“Now why don’t you all strip.”
They stripped and Paul, once again, was amazed over the size of Noah’s penis.
And then Paul was naked too and going down on him, and then he was going down on Paul and then they were making out again.
Next they were on a sundeck before an empty path. They were on some private estate and Paul was fingering him and eating him out. Paul was lubing him up and the real Noah was laughing, realizing what was about to come.
They were only in sandals, with erections and Paul had his shades back on. They stood beside bikes, and the bike seats ended in…. yes… dildos.
Both of them, the camera on their shocked faces, mounted the bikes, impaling themselves, and then rode down the path
Beside them Guy was riding with the camera on their faces.
“How does it feel?” he asked Paul.
“It feels fucking good. Really intense.”
In the end they were fucking each other in a pool room, Noah began to pant and wail. Paul could hear Johnny Mellow murmuring between clenched teeth, “So fucking hot. So fucking tight. So fucking good!”
That evening as they were all on the beach sipping Hurricanes, wearing big sunglasses and looking out on the beach, Guy said, “Do you ever get tired of California?”
“Whaddo you mean?”
“I mean do you ever wish for something new? Everybody’s moving away anyway. Big Tent’s going to Miami.”
Noah shot up. “You wanna go to Miami!”
` Paul looked interested, but Guy said, “Miami was just an example. And its nowhere near my other business.”
“Drugs?” Paul said flatly.
“Honestly, Johnny.”
“Well, it is drugs,” Paul said.
“Look, Eagle can’t afford to stay here anyway, and I can’t afford to keep going between here and Chi. So I’m thinking of moving the whole operation to Chicago.”
“Are you serious?”
“If it’s good enough for Oprah.”
“Who does porn in Chicago?” Noah said.
“We will. When we get there.”
Paul flexed his oiled limbs under the sun and said, “I don’t fucking believe this. What about the beach?”
“They’ve got beaches on Lake Michigan.”
“And they’re covered in snow half the year.”
“Besides,” Guy continued, “we wouldn’t be quite in Chicago, anyway.”
“Really?”
“Then,” Noah looked suspicious, “where exactly would we be?”
Guy cleared his throat and said, “Indiana.”
The demon came again when Paul Anderson was twenty-eight, attending Loretto College. By then it came once a year or maybe it came more than once a year, but he usually knew how to distract it. This year, however, away from the movies and the sporadic sex, a way from the drugs, in his first year sharing an apartment with Noah, he came to the place where he could not get out of bed. He couldn’t even think of what would happen five minutes from now let alone tomorrow. The thought of opening the blinds to the oppressive sunshine was too much. He felt like the sun would fall on his eyes like elephant feet. Noah tipped into his room now and again, and at that time Noah’s boyfriend and mother were also at the place a lot. James whispered something to Noah, who nodded his head and Paul, head under the covers thought, “Do these dumb fuckers really think I can’t hear them?”
Less than an hour later Fenn showed up. He entered the room that no one had dared enter, and he did not open the blinds. He moved about in the semi darkness with a bag, and soon Paul understood that Fenn was packing up clothes. He left the room, went into the bathroom and came out a few minutes later with a toothbrush.
“Get up, Paul,” he said, lifting the blankets, much the way he would say it to Dylan years later. “I just need you to put some pants on and that shirt. Come on.”
Paul had spent the last years of his life being naked for everyone and now, when Fenn lifted the blankets, Paul felt a little embarrassment, but not much. In the movies the naked him they saw was the one that he wanted them to see. To be seen humiliated, crushed and despairing, unwashed, was something else. Paul pulled on the clothes that were on the floor, and Fenn handed him his shades and a ball cap. He didn’t ask where they were going. Fenn almost never drove.
James Lewis drove them to Fenn’s house, and Fenn brought him to the old bedroom he had stayed in when he first came to Rossford. As he helped Paul onto the bed, he closed the blinds and semi closed the door. As he was preparing to leave, Paul said, “Would it be too much… If you stayed a while?”
Fenn came back into the room, pulled out a chair and sat down beside the bed.
“Just a little while,” Paul said.
“Of course,” Fenn said.
He was like that for the better part of the week. At first he tried to stop the crying he was afraid would scare his friend away. But when it was finally happening, he had to let it come.
