Peter Buwalda - Bonita Avenue

You’re phenomenal, that’s what. As I got undressed we eyed each other in the mirror. God, what an old tart I am alongside you. Bobbi’s deep-brown eyes were, as always, half shut, and a geisha-like smile floated around her small mouth — controlled mockery, the maximum indignation her stoic face would allow. She was stunning. Hardly surprising that this cult bombshell had caught Steven Soderbergh’s fancy — that is, if what she said on Tyra was true.

“So, what’s with Soderbergh?” I asked. “Did he really offer you a part?”

“Hang on,” she said. “So I get there, and those jerks from production go: this isn’t how an eighteen-year-old girl looks. That’s right, I say, it’s how a nine teen-year-old girl looks. Maybe, they say, but today Tyra’s talking about teenagers in the porn industry, and that’s why you’re here. So they bring me over to a rack of children’s clothes. Oilily. They made me dress up like … like …”

“Gretl von Trapp. Pass me your soap?” I walked toward the showers.

“Did you see that pink sweater?” she called after me. “And those flats? Even the earrings had to go. That production bitch gave me little pink studs.”

I picked up the shower cap and twisted the calcified faucets. The showerheads vibrated and sputtered, the slushy stream of hot water splashed onto my shoulders. She stood in the doorway and watched as I soaped myself up.

“Hair pulled back in a ponytail, hardly any eyeshadow, too much blush, you get the picture. I thought: Just you wait, you fuckers.”

She did look like the Virgin Mary on Holy Saturday, but in fact that only enhanced her performance. What charm, what icy composure. Without getting worked up, she explained her decisions, just as she always did, you couldn’t even call it defending herself. Tyra, with all her prescripted questions, couldn’t poke even the slightest hole in her argument. As always, Bobbi spoke in a dry monotone, her words as salty as beef jerky, the vowels flat. Her speech was filled with street-smart wisdom, she exuded a faint disdain that even put that Tyra on edge. (“Bobbi, you don’t have to answer this, but I’m going to ask you anyway: were you sexually abused when you were young?” “Me? Oh no. I had a terrific childhood. Why? Were you, Tyra?”)

But the knockout was that Soderbergh movie. Right after a censored compilation of Bobbi in action, Tyra asked how long she was planning to stay in the business, and when she answered that she’d keep going until she stopped having fun, Tyra asked how she saw her life after the porn industry. She replied that she was considering a mainstream acting career, and when Tyra only just managed to stifle a patronizing titter and asked Bobbi if she really thought Hollywood was sitting around waiting for her, she said that of course she didn’t know for sure, but that she’d be having lunch on Broadway tomorrow afternoon with Steven Soderbergh.

“Steven Soderbergh?” Tyra said. “You mean the director Steven Soderbergh?”

“ Ocean’s Eleven, Twelve, Thirteen, ” Bobbi answered, “you know, with Clooney and Pitt?” And when Tyra gawped at her for a few seconds like a bumper car with a dead battery, she continued: “ Sex, Lies, and Videotape ?”

“I know who Soderbergh is,” Tyra snapped. “You have an audition, I take it?”

“A role. I’ve got the lead in Steve’s new movie.”

Just the wrong starlet to bring out to New York. What a delight to watch the desperation glide over Tyra’s smug face. In the audience, a shell-shocked delegation from the Anti-Porn Movement: a Bible-basher and a feminist, both of them with a Ph.D. on the psychological and sociological damage that people like Bobbi and me and Rusty inflict on society. Are we supposed to believe this teenage floozy? This depraved cocksucker whom the underworld plebs of L.A. elected SuperSlut 2008? Who has won awards for the year’s filthiest blow-job scene, the year’s filthiest threesome, the year’s filthiest whatever — are we supposed to believe this doe-eyed skank? You saw Banks thinking: why don’t I know this? Why didn’t my editors know this? And the desperation spread over the rest of the audience, and then onto us, the viewers at home. Is she lying? But in the studio there was no time for that, the show must go on, so the question just hovered there like a buzzard over Tyra’s head: is this possible ? Or has she been fucked so senseless that she’s delusional? And if she’s telling the truth, what’s the point of this whole show? What exactly am I trying to tell America?

I turned off the faucet. It was Q — I hadn’t heard him come in — who handed me a towel. I was struck, not for the first time, how much his craggy face reminded me of Larry King, but without the glasses.

“So is it true?”

“Is what true?”

“The movie, Bobbi.”

She chuckled. “I thought it couldn’t hurt to do a little PR. Of course it’s true.”

I walked over to Q, who was fussing with a plastic crate he’d placed on the improvised make-up table. “So how’d this all come about?”

While Bobbi told me how she’d received a message on her MySpace a few months ago from someone claiming to be Steven Soderbergh — not just one message, but four — and who turned out to really be Steven Soderbergh, Q hoisted a sort of leather harness onto my hips. A week later she had “Steve” on the phone, he knew her work, that’s how he put it, he’d read about her in Los Angeles magazine. Steve was looking for someone for his new project, a movie about a high-class call girl in Manhattan. It wasn’t a bit part, as she initially thought, but top billing. She was the first person he’d thought of. She did not believe him. The next day they met for coffee in the L.A. Zoo, and while the man did look just like the director Steven Soderbergh she still didn’t believe him. The plan was for the movie to open the Berlin Film Festival in February.

His knees creaking, Q sank to his haunches and buckled the belts around my waist and thighs. With a face like a gravedigger he fished a green hard-plastic penis out of his crate and screwed it into a notch in the corset right above my mound of Venus.

“It was in Newsweek the day before yesterday, by the way.”

“Did you know this before you went on Tyra?”

She smirked sarcastically. “Well yeah, how else could I have told her about it?”

“I know that. I mean, at the time of the phone call. Did you keep your mouth shut on purpose?”

“I kept my mouth shut on purpose.”

There was a knock on the heavy industrial door, and right away it swung open. A slim-built black guy in a shiny blue shirt came in. “Ladies; sir.”

“Hi, Ralph.”

“Because you knew you’d get your chance.”

“Those jerks were just itching to tell me I’d blown my whole future. Itching to. From the very first minute I was sitting there with my finger on the trigger.” She extended her arm, her dainty hand formed into a pistol. “ Bang . Tyra got it right between the eyes.”

Ralph went over to the washbasins and laid a brown leather case on the plank. He grabbed my penis, pulled me toward him, his lips pursed and eyes closed. I gave him a kiss. Only then did he unsnap the case and bring out brushes, eyeliner pencils, and little oval make-up boxes.

“But is it a serious role?”

“ Soder bergh?” she said with an uncharacteristic edge. “Of course it’s a serious role. I’ve read the screenplay, it’s subtle.” She picked up Kristin’s script between thumb and index finger and dangled it in the air. “Not as subtle as this, naturally,” she said with a snicker.

The set teemed like an anthill, everyone was moving — everyone except Bobbi. From the hall I could see her kneeling crosswise on a bed that looked as if Oliver Twist had to sleep on the floor tonight. Vince was tying Bobbi up with a length of thickly twined rope. Her wrists were bound tightly behind her back, the rope wound around her upper body, cutting into her breasts, which hung out of her puffy red blouse. She was wearing cute embroidered canvas peep-toes with huge cork wedges, linen ribbons crisscrossing up her calves. Her fragile wrists were pulled upward by a cord that ran to a ring in the ceiling.