Martin Amis - Yellow Dog

Feeling something lift from her, Karla followed Clint’s gaze. She said,

‘They go together, don’t they — porno and puns? It couldn’t be otherwise. Because humourlessness is the lifeblood of porno. One genuine smile, and everything would disappear.’

‘It’s finished, though, this, isn’t it: video. Now it’s the Web.’

‘Rentals are dying. Despite Princess Lolita . See the girls. They have a flared-pants look. A beehive look. The future’s in interactive. What they call “self-tailoring”. And the viewer will direct.’

Clint slid off his sunglasses, and smiled, deciding to exercise his new confidence: the confidence he enjoyed as a Laureate of the San Sebastiano Academy for Men of Compact Intromission. He said,

‘Do you miss it? Performing?’

‘No,’ said Karla, who had answered this question, and all others, many times before.

‘You were an abused child, weren’t you. Were they all that, the actresses?’

‘There’s something in it. It’s the … creation myth of porno. But porno’s just an industry now. Times change, Clint. I know a girl who goes to the Mature Video Awards with her parents. Her father came out brandishing her statuette for Best Anal.’

‘Is there anything you wouldn’t do? As an actress. Fisting and pissing and that?’

‘… I stopped before it went that way. I stopped before Pussies Are Bullshit.’

‘Uh, fancy a drink later?’

‘With a view to what?’

‘You tell me. You’re the pro. Another day, another cock. You tell me.’

He noticed that she was staring at him with unchecked fascination — with entirely undissimulated fascination. Clint started to feel twenty-seven thousand dollars poorer — and Karla hadn’t yet said what Karla said next.

‘That’s right. And the men I’m used to’, she said, and suddenly seized the tumbler of water on her desk, ‘are like this .’

Clint followed instructions: faced with noncompliance, construct the counterfactual. ‘Well. Wouldn’t have worked out anyway. Off to Hawaii in an hour or two.’

‘I thought you were seeing Dork Bogarde.’

‘He’s uh, he’s out of town himself.’

‘No he’s not,’ said Karla, standing. ‘I’m expecting him at Dolorosa Drive tomorrow morning. He’s doing a scene with Charisma Trixxx. Day one of Crown Sugar. ’

‘Hold up. Got me days confused.’ Clint added ruefully, ‘Kate, she’s always going on at me about it. So maybe I uh, I’ll look in. Fly on the wall.’

With an illegible shudder she said, ‘This set will most definitely be closed .’

That evening, after three hours of Black Eye and Cockout in his hotel, Clint attained a sense of belonging: a sense of belonging, in Lovetown.

Sir Dork Bogarde lived in a porno pad with a porno pal, Hick Johnsonson, in Lovetown’s Fulgencio Falls. When Clint arrived, and was made welcome, they were out on the porno patio … In the small garden enchained porno parrots swore and shat around the porno pool. Dork lolled on a porno pouffe, his head supported by additional porno pillows; Hick poured the porno wine. It seemed that Dork had only one thing he wanted to talk about, however: porno pay.

‘I mean there am I,’ he said, with a certain finicky jauntiness embedded in his indignation, ‘naked as I am. I’m out there, with sweat pouring off my person, cocking out … some little rube who’s just climbed off the Dog — and I get three hundred dollars? Excuse me. Excuse me. While the guy watching , in an easy chair, some … asshole from Ye Olde England, gets ten grand? They do me that indignithy? I don’t think so. I don’t think so.’

Sincerely puzzled, and yet with the rosiness of genuine admiration (indignithy: he made other slips like that — but you had to hand it to the guy, with his porno pectorals, his porno ponytail, his monstrous porno penis, familiar to all Dork’s fans), Clint said,

‘Yeah but you’re the one getting it wet, aren’t you mate.’

Sir Dork implored Clint to consider something: porno pressure.

‘Did it get here yet?’ Dork asked Hick. ‘It’, Dork had told Clint earlier, was ‘the tape of the test-fuck of Charisma Trixxx’, to whom Dork was to be introduced the following day, on the set of Crown Sugar . ‘Clint? Could you perform with three breaks for coffee and one for lunch? The lights? The people?’

‘Yeah but there’s a way round that now, isn’t there.’ Clint thought resentfully of Karla White, and what she had told him about porno and Potentium: ‘They all use it and they all say they don’t.’

‘I never use it,’ said Dork.

Clint recalled her words. Potentium, said Karla, had turned out to be a Midas curse for the porno male. Pre-Potentium, a flop meant a skipped day and a net loss. Post-Potentium, it meant that the man was ready fifteen minutes late, and had splotchy cheeks (hence Red Face) and a porno headache. But there were fewer suicides and crackups, and they all started using it. ‘The change sparked controversy,’ as Clint would later write; and we must remember, along with Dork Bogarde, that ‘this was at the heighth of Pussies Are Bullshit’ … Some said that Potentium was bullshit too: it affronted the market forces having to do with the reality of arousal. People who argued that way turned out to be purists — because the customer didn’t care. ‘Being able, or likely, to perform in public’, Karla said, ‘was once a marketable skill. Now anyone can do it. The men — the grunts, the stiffs — never were a draw. And now they’re just life-support systems for a tab of Potentium.’ Karla said she was surprised. She said she had always thought that the customer was a lot gayer than that …

Dork now confronted Clint with a porno paradox. ‘See, Clint,’ he said, ‘we get pressure coming the other way: Cockout. How can a man fulfil his fanthasy when, hanging over him at all times, he faces the spectre of Cockout?’

After a while Dork returned to the subject of porno pay, and porno percentages, until Hick confirmed the arrival of the tape of the test-fuck of Charisma Trixxx.

‘Look at that,’ said Dork, gesturing at the screen. ‘Suave ass. Sincere bush. I don’t just mean the mohawk. I mean the presentation. I’m talking the whole box.’

‘She chugs good,’ allowed Hick.

‘Good neck-work on the back-take.’

‘And I like the tongue-slide on the feed-draw.’

Fifteen minutes later Hick said, ‘Here we go. Gracious address for the facial.’

‘… Wow,’ said Dork. ‘See that? Right in the eye. ’ Dork turned to Hick (it was established earlier that Hick had been known to do Gay). ‘Does that hurt? I mean, does it kind of burn?’

‘Burn? It’s like fucking fire. And she didn’t even flinch.’

‘I won’t have any kind of problem tomorrow. Flinch? She didn’t even blink. Clint, hadn’t you …?’

‘Yeah well thanks, lads,’ said Clint. ‘Dork mate. I happen to know one of your uh, conquests.’ And he felt luxury as he pronounced her name: ‘Donna Strange …’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Donna Strange …’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Uh — big English brunette with a silver streak in her hair and a crinkly mouth … She sucked you off underneath a pyramid and then you had her up the arse in a helium balloon. Then you landed on Everest and shot all over her tits.’

‘… I spent on her breatsts? That’s so— passé. You’d think I’d remember that.’

On his way back to the hotel Clint pulled in at another video store. And there it all was, yet again, laid out in categories, like a dramatisation of the words of Karla White. Not Hatefuck, because everything was Hatefuck unless labelled otherwise. But Cockout, and Bullshit Cockout, and Boxback, and Red Face, and White Hair, and Yellow Tongue (‘Yellow Tongue’, she said, ‘is for those who miss the motel room, the handheld video cam, the ghoulish lighting, and the plain cast ill on drugs’), and, of course, the category called Princess Lolita.