Bruce DeSilva - Cliff Walk

I dropped into a red leather couch-probably better than anything that had been in the place when it was a discount furniture store-and Joseph sat beside me in a matching easy chair.

“Where’d you get the gun?” I asked.

“Mr. Maniella give it to me.”

“A Glock 17?”

“Just like his other bodyguards got.”

“Seventeen-cartridge magazine, right?”

“Yeah. Lot more firepower than the Remington Arms piece of crap I got at home.”

“Got a permit to carry?”

“It’s pending.”

The phone on the desk beeped. The receptionist picked it up, listened for a moment, hung up, and said, “Mr. Maniella will see you now.” She touched something on the desk, and the lock in a steel door to her right clicked. Joseph and I got up and went through it.

To our left, rusted fluorescent light fixtures, all of them dark, hung over a scarred wood floor lined with rows of makeshift plywood display tables left over from the building’s flea market days. To our right, two studio lights on tripods loomed over an unmade bed in a set built to look like a five-star hotel room. Joseph kept walking, so I followed him past another set, this one built to look like a room in a massage parlor. Over the massage table, bottles of oil glistened on a shelf that also held an impressive assortment of dildos.

The third and final set had pink walls hung with posters from the latest Twilight movie. A huge teddy bear sat at the foot of the bed. Piles of girl’s underwear had been scattered on the floor. A teenager’s room. A pretty young blonde who couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred and ten pounds-maybe just a hundred without the implants-was on all fours on the bed’s fresh pink sheet. She wore a Hope High School cheerleader’s uniform, the top yanked up to expose her nipples and the skirt flipped to expose her ass. An older guy with a handheld camera moved in close to catch the spittle dripping from her lips as she sucked a grinning twentysomething’s large black penis. A young guy with another handheld trained it on an enormous white phallus as its owner doused it with lubricant and then wedged it, with some difficulty, into the girl’s rectum. Her eyes got wide, and she went, “Mmmm,” pretending to enjoy it. White phallus saw me watching and winked. I gave him a wave. Dwayne Carter, a lanky murmuring dude who ran the Shell station on Broadway in Providence, had been helping me keep Secretariat on the road for years.

We tiptoed past the set and walked on until we arrived at an oak door in a new off-white wall. Joseph rapped softly, and a deep voice rumbled, “Come on in.” Joseph opened the door, stepped aside, waved me in, and closed it softly behind me. Inside, the walls were decorated with movie posters from the 1970s, when feature-length porn played in theaters all over the country: Debbie Does Dallas, Flesh Gordon, Deep Throat, The Opening of Misty Beethoven, Babylon Pink, The Devil in Miss Jones. Maniella was seated behind an enormous cherrywood desk. He could have parked his Hummer on it and had enough room left over for a sorority house lesbian orgy. He rose and strolled across a newly laid rust carpet to greet me, taking my hand in both of his.

“Mulligan,” he said. “It’s good to see you. Please sit down and make yourself comfortable.”

I dropped into a black leather couch, the back of my head inches from the blond tresses of Marilyn Chambers, the all-American girl star of the Mitchell Brothers’ 1972 gang-rape fantasy, Behind the Green Door. In front of the couch, five AVN awards, the Oscars of porn, stood on a spotless glass coffee table.

“Can I get you anything?” Maniella asked as he opened a small refrigerator and rummaged inside.

“Whatever you’re having.”

He took out a bottle of Evian, poured the contents into two crystal glasses, handed me one, and sat down beside me.

“Are you enjoying the Grant memoir?” he asked.

“I’m nearly done with the first volume,” I said, “and it really surprised me.”

“How so?”

“I had no idea that he wrote so well.”

“Yes, the prose is quite remarkable. He was a great general, too. It’s a shame he wasn’t a better president.”

“So,” I said as I cast my eyes about the room, “I like what you’ve done with the place.”

“It’s a work in progress.”

“Moving your whole operation here, are you?”

“Just part of it. Can you tell me how you found us?”

“It’s a small state, Sal. Hard to keep something like this a secret.”

“True, but perhaps we could keep it between us for now.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “The opening of a movie studio is a story for the business pages.”

“I see.”

“Then again, I don’t write for the business pages.”

Sal smiled and was about to say something else when the door flew open and a black woman with a narrow waist and enormous breasts burst in. The older man I’d seen holding a camera on the movie set stepped in behind her.

“I told this muthafucka I do not do anal,” the woman screeched. Except for red high heels, she was stark naked.

“Then maybe you shouldn’t have agreed to shoot a scene titled Anal Action, ” the older guy shouted.

“Okay, everybody calm down,” Sal said. “Obviously, there’s been a misunderstanding. Doreen, no one is going to make you do something you are uncomfortable with.”

“That’s for damn sure,” she said.

“Would you be willing to do the scene if we paid you an additional five hundred dollars?” he asked.

“No fuckin’ way, Sal.”

“All right, then.” Sal rubbed his chin and thought for a moment. “Chet, why don’t we just change the title to reflect Doreen’s most appealing feature? Maybe we could call it Black Boobs or something. Doreen, would you be okay with Dwayne ejaculating on your nipples?”

“I can do that,” she said.

“Great. Back to work, now. And Chet, please close the door on your way out.”

“Actors,” I said as the door clicked shut. “Always complaining about the size of the dressing room, the brand of sparkling water, or somebody trying to shove something up their ass.”

“Story of my life,” Sal said.

“So tell me,” I said. “How’s business?”

“Lousy.”

“Really? I thought porn was recession-proof.”

“It is,” he said. “That’s not the problem.”

“What, then?”

“You really want to know about this?”

“I do.”

“Off the record?”

“Sure.”

“Then let me give you a little background.”

“Okay.”

“I saw you looking at my vintage posters.”

“Hard to miss them.”

“They’re from the 1970s, when Cecil Howard, the Mitchell Brothers, Howard Ziehm, and Gerard Damiano were making feature-length hard-core films. People went to the theater to watch them. They attracted the raincoat crowd, of course, but some guys went with dates.”

“So I’ve heard,” I said. “I was in diapers then.”

“The VCR changed all that,” Sal said. “Once people could rent or buy videocassettes, they preferred to watch pornography at home. But the industry still made feature-length films. We employed scriptwriters. Our movies had plots. Then porn went online, and things changed again.”

“How so?”

“Attention spans got shorter. Nobody cared about plots anymore. Ninety-minute feature films mostly disappeared. We still shoot a couple a year, but they don’t make any money. We just make them to maintain our self-respect.”

A half-dozen smart remarks ran through my mind, but I decided to keep them to myself.

“The thirty- and sixty-minute DVDs that replaced them were just compilations of ten-minute sex scenes that could be chopped and posted separately on Internet pay sites,” Sal said. “Turned out even they were too long. Guys just watched the first penetration, fast-forwarded to the money shot, and jumped to the next video.”