Charles Bock - Beautiful Children

“Baby, I'm telling you. You make it onto the covers of the videotape box, you gots it made in the everglade shade. Getting paid, getting laid, drinking king-size lemonade. All it takes is a demo. One demo and your future is locked up. Cover girls are famous. They get their own 976 lines and fan clubs and personalized websites. What do you think makes the Internet run, baby? It's horny guys — they love your movies, right? They pay twenty, thirty bucks a month for clips of you. They like go into special chat rooms with other fans, argue about which one of your scenes made them come the hardest. Swear to Christ. Box cover girls get on Howard Stern. ”

From outside came a compact discharge, a low-level explosive being detonated, the drunken cheering of overgrown boys with nothing else to do. For a moment, Cheri wasn't sure whether some jerks were playing with fireworks, if her mind was exploding. She grabbed a throw pillow, held it in front of her chest. Her brow furrowed.

“Howard Stern?”

“That's just the beginning, baby. Did you know that Paris designers put porn stars in their fashion campaigns? Sweetie, do this right, you get your own personalized blow-up dolls. You won't believe this, but there's this company? They do the dolls with a customized version of your mouth, plastic vag, plastic anuses. I know it's trippy but they do. For reals. I guess you like sit and they make a mold from off you and when it dries it's got all the contours and whatnot. You get a fifteen percent slice — heh — from all sales of the plastic version of your vagina. How awesome would it be to have a doll of you with like the bull's-eye and the light-up tits and everything? Right, I'm getting ahead of myself. But I see the world here.”

His eyes were ablaze, the cords in his neck tense.

“It's a breeze, baby. I already talked to Jabba.”

She smacked him with the pillow. “You got this from him?”

“He's totally willing to help.”

“I bet.”

“You just got to go in there, do a interview. Q and A stuff. One interview scene, baby, that's all. Hell, you could do it with me.”

“It doesn't matter to you that the whole world's gonna think I'm a slut?”

“It's not like that. You do it one time. All anyone sees is the video.”

“Yeah — a video of me fucking somebody.”

“You do it with me.” Ponyboy rocked in place and he looked down and his cheeks ballooned and he rubbed his hair and tried to rein in his temper. “I mean, shit, Cheri, you're already lighting your fucking tits on fire.”

“THAT’S NOT FAIR.”

A few silent seconds. Ponyboy looked at Cheri with pleading, lost-puppy eyes. When his apology was successfully communicated, he eased the pillow from her grasp. “I swear to you,” he said, “all it is is one time. You do this, we'll find out where we stand. Either you get into an agency or they put you on the B-girl heap. If it's a B-girl, forget it, we're out. No discussion. Goodbye, thanks for playing. But if we get you to the right agency, baby, you're on the fast track. Hell, cover girls don't even do porn. Maybe a flick a month. Maybe. Two scenes a month, tops.”

“I don't know.”

“You bang your boyfriend ten times a year in front of a camera. Lick a girlie maybe ten more.”

A smirk. “What's a B-girl?”

“Huh?”

“What's a B-girl?”

“Don't worry about it. It's just a name.”

She pulled on his sleeve. “Why are they called B-girls, then?”

Ponyboy did not react, then seemed to concentrate, his face becoming vague, almost childlike. “Don't you worry about them, baby. You're cover girl material no problem-o. Guaran-fucking-teed.”

“That's not an answer.”

“Baby. You just worked the longest shift of your life, right? Made more money in one night than in what, a week? I mean, let's look at things. Flaming nipples are a great trick. But they're a trick all the same. You been doing it how many times a night now for what — five months. And the Garden, they just don't seem to have your number.”

Ponyboy rubbed his jaw. “I'm sorry, honey, I hate to say it, but they don't. And the way things are going, if nothing changes, I mean, if you don't get your shit in gear, you're going to be stuck in the Slinky Fox, on your knees in the back room, sucking some loser's crank for a hundred dollars a pop.”

Cheri did not try to hide how each word made her feel, she had to shut her eyes, shielding herself.

“All I'm saying,” Ponyboy continued, “one way or another, it seems like this is where you're headed. But we do this right, Cheri, honey, sweetie, listen to me, we get you on the box covers, then you're a name, you get to say who you work with, you get to say when and you get to say where. One week a month, you're making a movie. The other three weeks you travel to the best strip clubs in the country.”

She opened her eyes; he was still there.

“Better than the Garden of Venus. I promise. I promise you. The big time, baby.”

She swallowed slightly. “Suki and Jane have been telling me about Guam.”

It was a fragile statement, one that wasn't easy to make. Afterward, Cheri waited for Ponyboy's reaction. When there was none, she hesitated, then continued. “They say it's this really beautiful island. White sandy beaches. Waterfalls. Even a real volcano.”

“Yeah?”

“It's supposed to be a like eighteen-hour flight from America, but people from Japan vacation there all the time. I guess the army's got all these naval bases, for refueling and stuff, so there's all these clubs. It's really hard to get hired. If they sign you, it's for two months. Suki worked there and she bought an Escalade when she came back.

“We could go off to Guam together,” Cheri continued. “Take a vacation.”

“That's what I'm talking about,” Ponyboy answered.

“Go snorkeling. Fall asleep in a hammock at sunset.”

Ponyboy scooted toward her, took her hand, and kissed it. “Baby, we do this right, we'll be living the high life. You'll see. Rock and roll all night. Party every day. I promise. I promise you.”

A crescent of blue light shone upon a limited, triangular swatch of the alley, illuminating the outline of a rat running along the top of an opened dumpster. The blue light vanished, and when it lit up the same specific area a second time, the rat had disappeared. Watching the blinking pattern from a spot three steps inside the alley, Ponyboy was vaguely reminded of his promise. It seemed like years ago to him now instead of a few weeks.

He was using his back as a protective shield against the noise of the Strip, and had his head tilted to the side, his free hand cupped against his ear. But the carrying hum of neon still was too loud. The foot traffic from the walkway behind him was disruptive as fuck. Ponyboy jammed the cellular phone to his ear canal. Through the waves of radiated heat — pulsing from the metal phone into his eardrum, down the side of his face — he heard enough for this to be clear: for the first time since the tryout, his perpetually frustrated girlfriend possessed hope.

“So the tattoo would jump out from the skin, I guess. I don't know, it seems kind of funky to me. It is crazy. He wanted me to do it, but I don't know. I told him it sounded more like your thing.”

Ponyboy turned in place, looking into the alley, and let the wall support his weight. He thought about responding and bit his lip. Simultaneously, as if someone had pushed a lever, Cheri switched back into the mood he knew all too well of late: Okay, you tell me, just why the hell is it that every single guy I meet has a ridiculous scheme? And how come when YOU want to exploit ME, everything's hunky fucking dory, party all night sleep all day, whatever I have to do is no problem. But if I learn about a get-rich scheme, you get all—