David Wallace - Consider the Lobster - And Other Essays

“Fellow MENSA members and aficionados of Shakespeare!” intones Al Goldstein of Screw, 62 and obese and white-bearded and crazy-haired and dressed in a sportcoat whose lapels are two different primary colors, looking pretty much exactly like that one certain old guy in the neighborhood your mom warned you never to try to sell Cub Scout chocolate mints to, and glorying in a Special AVN Achievement Award he confesses to feeling he’s long deserved. “I want to thank my mother, who spread her legs and made all this possible.” Large sections of the crowd are on their feet — Goldstein is a porn icon. He was distributing NYC’s Screw on photostat when most of the people in this room were still playing with their toes. He’s been a First Amendment ninja. He drinks in the applause and loves it and is hard not to sort of almost actually like. He’s clearly an avatar of contemporary porn’s unabashedness, its modern Yeah-OK-I’m-Scum-but-Underneath-All-Your-Hypocrisy-So- Are-You-and-at-Least-I-Have-the-Guts-to-Admit-It-and-Have-a-Good-Time persona:

“I salute the women with eleven-IQs and the men with eleven-inch cocks. The real heroes are the cocks and pussies who fuck on-screen. They’re the real heroes.” Goldstein is less conducted than borne back to his seat.

This has followed Robert Schimmel’s intro and a 20-minute “Musical Salute to the History of Adult,” in which topless dancing girls do a medley of disco, new wave, and so on. 46 The stage band is ragged and unevenly amplified, and they all have flared collars and tight perms — it’s like watching The Brady Bunch’ s final season through borrowed binoculars. The stage is lit by autotrack spotlights whose colors alternate w/o discernible scheme.

The whole 15th AAVNAs Show lasts 3.5 hours and resembles nothing so much as an obscene and extremely well-funded high school assembly. The mix of garish self-congratulation 47 and clumsy choreography is often so weird as to be endearing. There are never fewer than six presenters for each award, and they never seem to know whose turn it is to announce a nominee, and there are always a couple who don’t get close enough to the mike to be audible and a couple others who get too close to the mike and produce a jolt of feedback that sends people and cocktails flying out of chairs in the first rows of tables. Wicked Pictures’ Satyr, a multiple-category nominee, gets repeatedly pronounced “Satter.” Winners are supposed to exit stage-left after their acceptance speeches, but even people who’ve won and been through the process several times in recent years keep forgetting and trying to exit stage-right and colliding with the hostesses who are there to escort them leftward. Some presenters insert brief rote antidrug messages into their intros, while around them twitch and sniff other presenters — not many, but some — who are obviously coked to the gills.

Probably the most neutral and economical thing to say is that large parts of the ceremony are unintentionally funny. Winning woodmen extend earnest thanks to directors and execs for giving them “an opening” or “a shot” or “my big shot” and seem wholly unaware of the carnal entendres involved. Back at the journalists’ table with us is a 40ish woman in two-piece Armani who’s doing a spot on the Awards for ABC Radio; she spends most of the evening hunched over with her head in her hand and her tape recorder not even on. Dick Filth spends the show’s whole second hour trying to track down a waiter who owes him beverage change. AVN’ s Gene Ross pays tribute to ’98’s Male Performer of the Year by saying: “You haven’t lived until you’ve seen Tom Byron’s wrinkled nuts on a seventy-inch TV screen.” Rob Black’s Miscreants keeps getting nominated in category after category, and time and again there’s a frantic caucus at the podium about the correct pronunciation of miscreant, complete with a couple of presenters audibly whispering what in the fuck is the word even supposed to mean. 48

To be fair, some of the nominated products’ titles are genuinely confusing. Triple Penetration Debutante Sluts 4 is up for Most Outrageous Sex Scene — along with Wild Bananas on Butt Row and 87 and Still Bangin’ —but loses out to a scene the Program entitles “Anal Food Express” 49 from a video called My Girlfriend’s Girlfriend . Paul Thomas’s Bad Wives wins Best Film. Evil Angel’s Buda wins Best Shot-on-Video Feature. The Best Foreign Release statuette goes to something European called President By Day, Hooker By Night. Bad Wives also wins Best Actress/Film for Dyanna Lauren, Best Supporting Actress/Film for Melissa Hill, and Best Anal Sex Scene/Film 50 for Lauren and Steven St. Croix. Best Compilation Tape honors go to The Voyeur’s Favorite Blow Jobs & Anals . David Cronenberg’s mainstream Crash comes out of absolutely nowhere to win something called Best Alternative Adult Feature Film. Ms. Stephanie Swift wins Best Actress/Video and tells the crowd: “Thanks, everybody. My gang bang was a blast.” 51

Max Hardcore, to Table 189’s immense and unkind delight, doesn’t win one single thing.

An actor named Jim Buck wins AVN’ s Gay Performer of the Year Award, and you better believe yr. corresps. sit bolt upright when the person who appears onstage to accept the award is a pink and leptosomatic 4'10" and is wearing an Eton collar and appears, even under 125X binoculation, to be a twelve-year-old boy. And it turns out it is a twelve-year-old boy: It’s Jim Buck’s little brother. “Jim can’t be here tonight because he’s performing in a Shakespeare festival in New Orleans,” the little boy says (correspondential expressions of bug-eyed inquiry at Hecuba and Filth — Shakespeare festival? sending a prepubescent relative to collect your excellence-in-filmed-sodomy prize? — are met with bemused shrugs), “but I’m here to thank you on his behalf, and to say that I taught Jim everything he knows.” [Enormous audience laugh and ovation, single spasmodic shudder from hunched ABC Radio lady.]

A strange and traumatic experience which one of yr. corrs. will not even try to describe consists of standing at a men’s room urinal between professional woodmen Alex Sanders and Dave Hardman. Suffice it to say that the urge to look over/down at their penises is powerful and the motives behind this urge so complex as to cause anuresis (which in turn ups the trauma). Be informed that male porn stars create around themselves the exact same opaque affective privacy- bubble that all men at urinals everywhere create. The whole Caesars Forum’s men’s room’s urinal area is an angst festival; take it from us. The sink-and-mirror-and-towelette area, however, turns out to be a priceless mash of Insider jargon and shoptalk, all made extra-resonant by echolalic tile and a surfeit of six-dollar drinks. One performer-turned-auteur is telling a colleague about an exciting new project:

“Found this Russian, this chick like nineteen, can’t speak a word of English, which for this [= for the exciting project] is perfect.”

“You going to get in there? Just for maybe like one scene?”

“Nah. That’s the whole point. I’m the director . This is my package now.”

“Oh man though but you got to get in there. Just one scene. Nineteen, no English. Probably got a butthole about this big” [illustrative gesture unseen because auditor is still standing complexly traumatized at urinal].

“Well, we’ll see.” [Mutual laughter replete w/ warmth of genuine friendship, fellow-feeling; exeunt.]

The Awards Show’s planners have obviously studied at the Oscars’ feet. Not only are the high-profile AVNAs held to the end — though with occasional teasers like Best Supporting thrown into the first two-thirds to keep people attentive 52—but the endless lists of categories and nominees are interspersed with little entr’actes of musical entertainment. Ms. Dyanna Lauren, for instance, appears between Best-Selling Tape and Best Foreign Release to sing her original composition “Psycho Magnet,” a hard-rock ballad about being a porn star and getting constantly stalked and harassed by mentally ill mooks. The song’s argumentation strikes yr. corresps. as a bit uneven, but Ms. Lauren struts and contorts and punctuates her phrasing with uppercuts to the air like a genuine MTV diva. The downside is that vocally, even with heavy amplification and digital synthesis, Dyanna Lauren sounds like a scalded cat, although Dick Filth points out that so does Alanis Morissette, and H. Hecuba chimes in by shouting: “Say whatever you want about the song-and-dance numbers here, they sure beat what Wahlberg and Reilly were coming up with in Boogie Nights !”