Martin Amis - Yellow Dog

Again by courtesy car he was driven to the U Hotel, past suburban gardens of brown grass and haggard cacti. Xan read about it in the complimentary Lovetown Journal , fished from the pouch of the seat in front: the U Hotel belonged to a chain whose owner had earned 78 billion dollars for realising that w was the only non-monosyllable in the English alphabet. Scrapping the supposed abbreviation, which had human beings gabbling out nine syllables, and replacing it with three other syllables chosen at random (or, indeed, with the unabbreviated phrase ‘world wide web’) would save global businesstime half a decade per day …

As he climbed from the car a boobjob of a raindrop gutflopped on his baldspot. Lovetown: a sprung-rhythm land of earthquake, brushfire and mudslide, of stripmall, freeway and gridlock, of hatefuck, cockout and boxback, of blackeye, of whitehair, of yellowtongue.

‘ Hatefuck evolved very naturally in a way ,’ said the voice of Karla White, ‘ because there had never been … any love lost between the actors and the actresses. The girls earn five or six times more than the men, and the gap goes on widening. As you can imagine, the scenarios for Hatefuck are extremely monotonous. “So this is the big guy, huh?” “You’d better believe it, bitch.” “Have you taken your pill like a good little boy?” And so on. And she’ll ask him about the car he drives, if any, and the square-footage of his shitbox in Fulgencio Falls. Then came Cockout.’

‘ Cockout ,’ said a man’s voice.

‘ Cockout ,’ said Karla White.

Xan went on to the balcony and smoked a cigarette. Down at the desk they had told him about the English journalist who was recently arrested and jailed for smoking a cigarette in his room. They had also given him Karla’s package: the script of Crown Sugar , the audiotape (‘Background’), and his docket for the courtesy car which, the following morning, would take him to Dolorosa Drive …

‘ Cockout is a sub-genre, or an anti-genre , within Hatefuck. Much prized for its rarity, Cockout occurs when the man actually succeeds in arousing the woman — to such a point where she stops calling him a piece of shit and starts offering encouragement or even praise. The father of Cockout , Lover, Trash My Ass, was an uncontrollable hit. Nothing like Princess Lolita, but very considerable business.

‘Very soon, “I cocked her out” became the pet boast of the porno male, “He cocked me out” the pet peeve of the porno female. But its rarity created pressure, giving rise to a further sub-genre, Bullshit Cockout. Bullshit Cockout is when the — usually very minor — porno female pretends, after grim resistance, to get herself cocked out. And a lot of ten-year-old porno started being recycled as, in effect, Bullshit Cockout, suggesting that that was what porno was, all along: Bullshit Cockout.’

Below, Xan abruptly noticed, in about half of the thirty or forty plotlike gardens he could see, pornography was being made: little brown bodies around little blue pools.

‘True Cockout seemed to throw a lifeline to the porno male — to begin with, anyway. Every morning, as he thumbed his way to work, there was always the sustaining dream of getting hold of a headlining actress and cocking her out. The grunts, the poor stiffs, started rating each other by their cockouts. You know, stats and averages — like baseball. There was even an actor called Cockout. Kirk Cockout. He sure didn’t last long … Because Cockout was another poisoned chalice for the porno male. After a while no girl would even consider working with a guy who had cocked her out — or cocked out any of her friends. Porno men with any kind of rep for cockout stopped getting phonecalls. Then they started fearing cockout. A further humiliation was on its way in the form of Boxback.’

‘Boxback.’

‘Boxback.’

The sun was dropping down over the shoulder of the building. He leafed through the twelve-page script of Crown Sugar. In his only scene, Xan was supposed to exchange some words with Charisma Trixxx and then watch her perform with Sir Dork Bogarde (as follows: ‘Blow. Doggy. Cowgirl. Reverse Cowgirl. Facial’). His lines were not difficult or numerous but he was surprised by the ease with which he got them by heart. He paused … Something is happening to me, he thought. He paused, he listened; there was inside him a great hope that he didn’t dare reach for; with it, or instead of it, might come pain and grief of the same size. The bright sky was torn by contrails in various stages of dissolution, some, way up, as solid-looking as pipecleaners, others like white stockings, discarded, flung in the air, or light bedding after beautysleep, others like breakers on an inconceivably distant shore. He went through his lines again, in his head. They were there.

‘Which brings us to the heart of it. This is just my view, of course, but I hold it for reasons less obvious than they may appear. Boxback. Ill-named, I think. And containing a serious structural flaw … Classic Boxback is simply premature ejaculation — inflicted by the woman. The more premature the better. Now it’s certainly very humiliating for the man, because he has to go again, much diminished. So: the shower, the pill, the wait, the headache, the hatefuck. But this new footage will precede the earlier ejaculation. Unlike Cockout, Boxback leaves no filmed evidence of its own achievement. And then there’s the question of the Facial.’

‘The Facial.’

‘The Facial. Even the most rigorous Hatefuck demands the Facial. Market force number one demands the Facial. And Boxback never even tried to do without it. So what kind of victory is that? Sending the grunt on his way with a sneer and a taunt when you’ve got his come all over your chin? The Facial is there, always, because the customer wants it to be there. What do men want? They want the Facial. And it’s the one sexual act that barely exists outside porno. A prostitute might do it, but a free woman, on her knees? That’s another good reason for calling the Facial what they call it: the Money Shot.

‘ You know … They sometimes call it the Popshot. They don’t call it the Momshot. Because, at one remove or other, you get the feeling: it’s how Daddy would have liked it. Beauty and the Beast, innocence and its opposite. And the woman looks up, from her knees, at someone far more powerful than any lover …’

He drank half a bottle of wine, out on the balcony, with his early dinner. His equanimity now tired and wavered, and the evening clouds looked like wigs — toupees, perukes, the tawdry syrups of the sky. But then came Venus, with a pale aura, like a set of silver eyelashes, and simpering down at him. And then came the quarter-moon, seen at an unfamiliar angle, as if from somewhere behind, like a platonically perfect breast.

At nine o’clock there was a knock on the door.

‘Who is it?’

It was the hoary bellboy, who offered him a bouquet of the most hideous flowers he had ever seen: redface and yellowtongue. Who is it? Joseph Andrews.

Xan checked: yes: it was still what he wanted.

During thirty months of activity the Sextown Sniper seemed to have evolved a set of rules, or restraints: no high-velocity bullets, no headshots or heartshots, no freeway hits causing extra traffic backups, no incursions into Tuxedo Terrace or Dolorosa Drive where core property values might be undermined, no sarcastic notes beginning ‘Grieve, blind worm’ or ‘I am God’ for the mayor and the SSVPD, no targeting of Meso-Americans, no targeting of help of any kind, no targeting of the very young, the very old. And if a pointy-bearded Director of Photography got grazed across the ankle, if a towel-boy or a makeup-girl lost a finger or two, if Charity Divine had her hairstyle scorched or Schlong Gielgud stopped one in the rump — who cared? Porno people cared, but no one cared about porno people and what porno people cared about.