Peter Buwalda - Bonita Avenue

After she’d got undressed and done the obligatory pirouette (“OK, kneel down on that chair, yeah, ass facing us, like that, yeah, drop your back, look at us — that’s great”) she told us she had flown to L.A. with $4,000 she’d earned waitressing in a steak restaurant in Steamboat Springs. She was renting a condo way up in the Valley, no air-conditioning, no stove, nothing. I imagined that poky room and the kind of life she was facing, and then pictured her on the sets where she’d be spending the coming months with those scrawny teenage tits of hers. I was overcome by a feeling I’d never had before in this kind of meeting: the desire to take her under my wing.

Rusty was possessed by another urge altogether: he flipped open his crocodile-leather diary to book her first shoots. Like always when a newcomer caught his fancy — and when did a newcomer not catch his fancy? — he scheduled himself as her first co-star. He was consistent in that respect. This is what he did it all for. Then the snuffbox appeared on the table: coke, Viagra. Wells was hopeless without his magic potions. Seeing as Bobbi considered three or four shoots in the space of a month a little scrimpy, he phoned up Kwimper Girls with her still sitting there. He praised her to Toby Kwimper, throwing little winks in her direction. Kwimper was a captain of industry from day one, and for thirty years had run his agency from a smoke-soaked Buick in which he crisscrossed the San Fernando Valley every afternoon until deep in the night. “Bobbi is a special lady, Kwimp, and you know what that means if I say so. Bobbi’s got big things ahead of her.”

These were prophetic words. Rusty thought so himself, and he was right. Bobbi Red, the former Meryl Dryzak, became a celebrity, a cult figure, a porn star of new and unheard-of proportions — still mostly underground, to be sure, but known far and wide, and completely crossover. “Bobbi will be the new Jenna Jameson,” Rusty parroted Rolling Stone , but Rusty and Rolling Stone were both wrong. Jameson was “old school,” an old-fashioned porn queen. Not Bobbi. Bobbi was not to be pigeonholed — Bobbi demolished pigeonholes. Although her films were no less hardcore (she won one AVN award after the other), this mysterious, profoundly shallow girl struck a chord outside the Valley. Internet trend-watchers were euphoric about Bobbi, top photographers wanted her to model for them, indie bands invited her to appear in their videos. She was on the cover of the Smashing Pumpkins’ new CD. She let an editor from the Los Angeles Times follow her for six months. She posted video blogs on YouTube in artsy-fartsy black and white where she philosophized freely in that loose, serious way of hers about the rough life she led. And now she was going to be on Tyra Banks.

At the end of the interview Bobbi offered us a bony hand and got up to leave. As I accompanied her down the wooden stairs to the lobby I grappled with my urge. In the doorway, as she took out her cell phone to call a taxi, I offered to let her stay with me, free, no strings attached, so she could get her bearings. She looked at me, surprised, and politely turned down my offer — that, too, was atypical for her kind. But I kept insisting until she gave in.

Why? Every year hundreds of Bobbis washed up in the San Fernando Valley, damaged, grubby, dumb, shrewd, adventurous, broken, victimized sluts who infested the innumerable 1,000-bucks-a-month one-bedroom apartments between Ronald Reagan Freeway and Ventura Boulevard like baby-pink cockroaches. Depressing white stuccoed condos where they lay on their Wal-Mart mattresses, in the heat or the cold, waiting for the phone to ring, their agent sending them the next day, or even that very afternoon, to some anonymous villa with hideous sofas to appear in Share My Cock 12 or Cum Dog Millionaire . Maybe I wanted to have a closer look at this kind of life. Maybe this girl triggered my big-sister gene, material that slumped jadedly on some dead-end side street of my DNA.

Bobbi stayed for two months. I gave her a large room with a balcony looking out onto Sunset and a view of the Pacific. Although I occasionally cooked for her — more nutritious meals than the tzatziki pizzas she otherwise had delivered, we spent at least ten evenings together at the dinner table — we never became close friends. She was either too aloof, or maybe she didn’t think I was interesting enough. All I could pry out of her was that she was raised under the wing of a mother and an elder brother. Her father was killed in 1991 during the first Gulf War, friendly fire, she said drily.

She was constantly asking questions, but they were always practical ones, even when it had to do with my own past. “What did you study?” “Could you also be a director without having studied?” “Do you think about going back to Germany?” “Do you ever use an enema?” “Does that guy Rusty have a family or anything?” “How did you tell your parents about this?” “How much was this house?” “How’d you get into the industry?”

When I answered that last question by showing her a handful of pictures I’d saved from the Enschede time, she laughed tenderly, maybe even teasingly. “Why, that’s not porn,” she said.

Bobbi could spend two hours in the bathroom, in the Jacuzzi with one of her literary heroes, the door open but in absolute silence. On the bathroom stool was a Louis Vuitton bag she took with her to the sets. One evening I snuck a look: washcloths, shower foam, perfume, mouthwash, lube, toothbrush and toothpaste, condoms, a telephone charger, dildos in a variety of colors and sizes, a hairbrush, the enema bag I suggested if there was an anal scene on the program. I caught myself subconsciously keeping track of how often Bobbi went out with that bag. When, after about seven weeks, she came to me with an apologetic pout on her face to tell me she’d found her own loft in Sun Valley, the counter was already on thirty-eight. Thirty-eight films, five of them at Coldwater; based on what she earned with us, she must have hauled in some $40,000 by now.

“Fifty,” she said. “But it’s not about the money, Joy. It’s about the oeuvre ,” and with that word she let out a rare giggle. “About everlasting fame. It’s neat, isn’t it, that people can always see how I followed my heart.” Oh yes, life in the Valley was everything she’d expected it to be, even better , and that was in part, she said sweetly, thanks to my hospitality.

On one of the last evenings she would make use of that hospitality, I returned from Coldwater and overheard, my hand on the front doorknob, muted voices coming from the living room. Unfamiliar voices conversing with Bobbi. I heard the word “Dad” and “absolution.” I entered the room and saw a woman sitting next to my house guest and, seated on the sofa across from them, a dark-skinned fellow covered in tattoos. I remembered that Bobbi’s mother and brother were planning to come visit her in her new city, an event that kept getting put off; Bobbi harbored a vague dread of this meeting, because she was planning to inform her family of her newly launched career. It was clear she had just done so.

“Hi, Joy,” she said, smiling, straightening her back, “let me introduce you to my mother and my brother.” The hulking young man, who stayed seated when I walked over and offered him my hand, was the exact opposite of his sister in every respect: everything about Bobbi that was petite, elegant, and feminine had found its masculine complement in this half of the Dryzak offspring. The guy was disproportionately muscular and had a gruesomely exaggerated nose and eyebrows; I looked down on a fully tattooed pair of shoulders that bulged out of a sleeveless T-shirt, the blinding white of the shirt inflaming the pitch-black eyes — eyes that, despite being housed in a pockmarked face, were obviously descended from the same jar of kalamata olives as Bobbi’s. He didn’t look at me, but stared angrily at the female wrist he held clamped in his vise-grip.