Charles Bock - Beautiful Children

Tell me, what do you like most about dancing?

Why are you trying out for us today?

Great. Great. What's your favorite part of sex?

What's the biggest dick you've ever had?

What's the craziest sex thing you've done?

Craziest place you've done it?

That's cool. Let's see your tits.

Wow. Real tits are taboo in this biz. Like how kinky is doing it on a bed.

Ponyboy kept waiting for one to show some personality, shed some insight into her life. Nothing doing. The interviews were wheels spinning in mud: too basic to have been scripted, too pat for epiphanies. The young women waved their hair back and out of their faces and twirled loose ends around their fingers. They smiled big and pretty and uncertainly, playing along as best they could, trying to get through the butterflies, doing their best to vamp and sass and be flirty, drawing out their answers as if to tease. — Twenty-three years old. — Twenty-uhm-five. — I turned eighteen three weeks ago. — I'mgood at being bad. — I'ma nasty girl. — I'm an exhibitionist, so what that means is I like being naked in front of lots of guys for money.

Mid-answer, the sound could disappear. Some words were purposefully overdubbed, replaced by static, probably to protect those who might have needed protection. Sometimes the girl just stared through the questions.

Eight and ten years, she answered.

Three mont. Three mont in America.

No in school.

No in job.

That's some pooper you've got there, went the director.

Stick it out.

Bend over and stick it out for the camera.

Yeah. Give us a little show.

Take it off, yeah all of it, slow and sexy, yeah, like you're on stage, give us a good look.

Don't be embarrassed — what, him? Our photog. For the magazines. Don't worry about him. He's seen bush before.

The lens zooming in for an absurdly close close-up: a pubic mound that had been shaved bald. Shaved to look like a heart. The rare holdout, thick and curling and wild.

There you go. Beautiful. You, my dear, have a beautiful pussy. Now play with your pretty pussy. Go ahead. Just like you do at home.

If she liked that, asked the interview voice. How that felt.

The talent giggled, or smirked, or ignored him. She kept her eyes shut and strummed and the screen flashed white from the bulb of the still camera guy. For a count the camcorder shook and was out of focus, then everything was back and clear, coming from a medium distance now.

An overtanned, unshaven man stood by the side of the bed. The musculature of his upper body was beginning to sag and he was naked, except for a pair of blue braces on his knees. He was stroking himself.

Ready for your woodman? the interviewer asked.

A coy smile, maybe a pleasantry. The woodman lurched and shoved his tongue down her throat. He put his hand up her crotch. Whenever he grabbed the top of the woman's head and started guiding her face downward, Ponyboy noticed, the streetwalkers and porno vets did not protest, but went with it, spitting on their hands, smoothly widening their jaws so that their teeth did not scrape the skin. They bobbed their skulls, jacked their hands up and down. Pros knew how to pitch a man's tent, as well as how to override the gag reflex. Also they had a trick where their fist pumped up and down and it looked like they were deepthroating, but in reality only the head was in their mouth. In this and many other respects, watching a seasoned veteran try out was exactly like watching a regular porno; which is to say that Ponyboy was not the least bit interested.

The sections that held Ponyboy's interest, that had him forgetting about his plans and his girlfriend and what was going to happen next, that sprung him to life, those were the truly amateur ones: the girls who gagged and threw coughing fits and looked dumbly to the camera for help and guidance, the strippers and party gals and dead-enders and nymphomaniacs who figured they'd had plenty of sex before, and so of course they could manage this. Ponyboy liked watching the ones who understood this was not going to be the same kind of night they'd spend with a boyfriend, who knew this was not going to be a session of gentle and sweet lovemaking, and yet still remained clueless as to the significant differences between uncaring and promiscuous and even quid pro quo sex, and just what they had signed on for here. How could they know? They were desperate creatures. They had their own concrete reasons for arriving in front of those cameras. How the fuck could they know?

And it was when the blood had accumulated in the base of the woodman's penis, and his wood had revealed itself to be a full-grown sequoia; when, without compunction or pause, the woodman was pounding the girl through the gamut of positions inherent to a porn scene; when the director was calling out, You like that, baby, and Let me hear you scream, and Fuck her like a jailhouse boy; it was when the woodman increased his pace and the director shouted Fuck her like her daddy used to, and the woodman slapped her ass and spread her cheeks and laughed directly into the camera and plunged into her as deeply as he could, and the director screamed Break that colt and Who's your daddy now? when this happened, what always got Ponyboy was the face of the girl. The pulse of worry as she realized she was in too deep. The pain. The abject terror. What Ponyboy got off on were the girls who grabbed the bedsheet and held on for dear life. Who tried not to look as if they were being split apart. Whose legs buckled and gave way. The girls who had to lie down and fan themselves with a hand, then had to search to find which side of the bed the camera was shooting from so they could start staring at the lens again. The girls who gasped and winced and curled their upper lip and gnashed their teeth and shut their eyes. Who checked out and shut down, their faces freezing with distance and shock, and who then were told, Hair, hair, hair. It was the girls who ignored the welling tears and, through their shocked, victimized stares, compliantly looked at the camera. Who grunted from the force of the next thrust and wiped away the strands of hair and forced their tightly shut lips into a smile.

Your high-end garbage, your fake amateurs, even them tryout videos, in all of them, the money shot was as the name implied, the most important part, the payoff for all the guys, both on and off camera. Porno women never swallowed for this reason, because lots of your suits and mooks needed an on-camera money shot to trigger their own orgasms. The woodman would make eye contact with the chick. He'd warn I'm gonna pop. He'd pull out and quick like a rabbit she'd be off her back, on her knees, making sure to face that camera. Cut to the dude's head all jerking back. Now cut again, that first hard burst and the overflow, thick white drops scattering into her hair and her eyes. Smart motherfuckers delayed their own burst. Waited until after that first on-screen gush. You make it to those precious seconds after the girl's tonsils are splattered; now she's regurgitating the money shot and letting it gurgle all over her lips and down her chin, she's sucking that cock with a sexy laziness, draining its last drops and looking up at her partner. Your smart mother-fucker he's pumping and holding and ready to burst. That whore on the screen is nowhere near as pretty as Cheri, nowhere near close to being as good in the sack as Cheri, and all of a sudden this plan seems possible to Ponyboy, an event that might actually happen.

A rustle from the next office.

The cleaning staff doing its thing a ways down the hallway.

Lincoln Ewing shut his eyes and shuddered and then slumped forward. He took a breath and his heart fluttered like a baby hummingbird's wings, and he felt the same depression he always felt immediately after an orgasm, this intense sense of deflation. The smell of ejaculate strong and embarrassing. From the periphery of the hallway, the vacuum cleaner moving closer. He just sat there with his pants around his ankles, an excess of sperm sticky down the side of his fist and along his wedding ring. He was in no great hurry to hit the remote or grab a Kleenex from off his desk. In no hurry whatsoever to proceed with the rest of the night, let alone with the rest of his life.