Like any twenty-two year-old guy whose girlfriend had just dumped him, I was at a bar, drowning my sorrows. I didn't know the bar. Not wanting to run into any acquaintances, I'd picked a dive a few miles from my neighborhood. I'm not much for hard liquor, so I was slugging down beers and spending almost as much time going back and forth to the john as drinking my beer. But, after the fourth or fifth beer, I had a pretty good buzz on. I was just half-watching the ballgame on the TV and exchanging a word or two from time to time with the bartender. Mostly, I was emotionally numb - anesthetized with alcohol. Just what I had been shooting for.
Then she walked in. It was impossible not to notice her. She was almost movie-star hot, though she looked kind of cheap and trashy. But, still, she was sexy as hell - long legs with ridiculously high heels and a tight skirt that barely covered her round ass. Her blouse was tight, too - the front sides pulling apart slightly between the strained buttons. If her clothes weren't enough of a "fuck me" message, her make-up left no doubt.
I noticed her; but I wasn't interested. I mean, in some abstract sense, I was, of course. But I really didn't feel in the mood to chat her up. Besides, she was probably a hooker looking for a john. I'd never paid for sex before. I wasn't opposed to it in principle. In fact, I thought it might be interesting to try sometime. But now wasn't the time. I was nursing my wounds and perfectly happy to wallow in my misery. And if she wasn't a hooker, she was probably looking for a sugar-daddy type - a rich old guy, not a poor young guy like me.
But then she sat down next to me. It wasn't like that was the only seat left in the place, or even at the bar. There were plenty of seats where she wouldn't have been next to anyone. I didn't know what to make of it. I turned toward her slightly, nodded, and smiled, but just to be neighborly. I went back to my beer without saying a word.
"I'm Shelley," she said, breaking the silence. Well, you can't just ignore an invitation for an introduction so I told her my name was Mark.
"So, Mark," Shelley continued after she'd ordered her drink - some sort of fancy Martini - "what you do when you're not swigging beer in a dirty little dive like this?" I told her that I had just graduated from college, majoring in marketing, and had gotten a job - even in this lousy economy - with a retail electronics company. It was entry-level, but it had potential.
I didn't ask her right away what she did. I was still entertaining the hypothesis that she was a hooker and, if that was so, I thought it might be rude to ask her what she did. So we chatted about nothing in particular for a while. It was kind of nice, really, to be drawn out of my funk. I even forgot about Victoria for a while.
Shelley made no sort of invitation for a sexual business deal so I began to suspect that I'd been wrong about her profession. When I asked her what she did "when she wasn't in a dirty little dive like this," she said she was "in the entertainment business." Okay, now I figured I was right in the first place and I didn't pursue it.
"No," she said - almost as if she was offended. She'd clearly read my expression correctly. "It's not like that!" I was embarrassed and began to sputter and apology. She cut me off with, "Well, it's sort of like that, I guess. Depends on how you think about these things." She had my interest, but she teased me by taking a sip of her drink and getting out a cigarette. I was silent while she lit her cigarette and took her first drag. But when she didn't go on without prompting, I prompted.
"What does 'sort of like that' mean?"
"Well..." She took another drag. "I make movies." She looked at me for my reaction. "I mean, I act in movies."
"What kind of movies," I asked before I really thought about it.
"You're bright. Just graduated from college. You figure it out."
"Oh, wow..." I said, not feeling very bright. "Sorry."
"No need to be sorry. I wouldn't do it if I didn't like it - at least mostly like it. And, if I were embarrassed, I would have told you I worked at Macy's or something."
Now I was really intrigued. I'd never met anyone in the porn industry before and I had a ton of questions that I'd wondered about for a long time. But I didn't want to seem like a rube so I approached things gingerly. I started with innocent questions like when she started making movies.
"You mean *porn* movies," she said, hoping to break the barrier by saying what, for me, seemed unsayable. "About five years ago." And then she went on, speaking about it with surprising openness - answering some of my questions and making me more comfortable asking others.
"It's a good way to make money, if you have the looks and aren't hung up." She took a sip of her drink. "I can make a lot of money without working very hard and I can decide when and how much I want to work."
"You read a lot about women being exploited and abused in the porn industry," I hazarded.
"Not my experience," she replied without hesitation. "And I haven't really seen it. I'm not saying it doesn't happen. It probably does. I suppose it depends on who you're working with, how you got into it, how strong you are, and a lot more. For me, if I don't want to do something, I don't do it. I call the shots and I can walk away anytime I want."
"So you're happy in the business?"
"Yeah. I mean, I've met creeps in the business, of course. But you meet creeps in any business. For the most part, the guys are fine - the actors, directors, camera men and all."
She paused and then, when I didn't blurt out another question, she went on. "You know, there is real acting involved. I don't mean serious stuff. There are no Dustin Hoffmans or Meryl Streeps in the business. But it's not just people having sex on camera. Some of the guys who typically play studs, because they look the part, are kind of shy. And I know a girl who regularly plays a dominatrix but is really the kindest, gentlest person you can imagine."
"How about you? What sort of character do you play? And is it a stretch for you or are you just being yourself?"
"I play lots of roles. Most of us do. Don't want the fans to get bored, you know. But recently I've often been playing the hot-wife, cheating-wife, and cuckoldress roles."
I was a little puzzled. I've watched as much porn as the next guy, but I wasn't sure I understood the distinctions she was suggesting. It sounded like she thought she was separating these roles but they all sounded pretty much the same to me. I guess my confusion showed.
"They're different. I guess you've got to be into it a little to know all these distinctions. A cheating wife is just what you'd expect. Pretty ordinary run-of-the-mill, real-life character. She's just a wife who has sex with someone other than her husband without her husband's knowledge or consent. That's what makes it *cheating*. Sometimes, of course, the cheating wife gets caught. Then the story can go different ways. A cuckoldress has sex with other men, without her husband's consent but she lets him know about it. Sometimes she makes him watch; sometimes she even makes him participate, but not as a three-way, two men on one woman. He's in a subservient role. Maybe he just serves then drinks or something, but he might also have to get her ready for her lover or clean or both of them up afterwards. There's a big dom/sub element. A hot wife has sex with other men with her husband's blessing - often at his urging. Sometimes he's watching, sometimes not. Sometimes he's involved, too, but it might just be in a two-guys-on-one-chick way." She took another drink. "And, there are lots of variations; the boundaries aren't always clear. Isn't that the way it always is with art."
Shelley smiled. The art reference was intended to be self-deprecating.
"I don't get the hot wife thing. You mean guys get off on seeing their wives fuck other men."
"Honey, you wouldn't believe the things some guys get off on. But I'm betting more guys get off on imagining seeing their wives fuck other guys than do from actually seeing their wives do it. Fantasies aren't dreams for reality, you know. The lure of the strange and forbidden, and all that."
"So, why do you play those sorts of roles?"
"They fit me now. When I first started, I could do the wide-eyed teen roles - you know, the innocent teen who acts like this is her first time. She's stunned by how big the guy's cock is, doesn't know if she can fit it in her mouth, but tries hard to do it. You know, the angel-to-slut-in-one-good-fuck transition... Don't tell me you didn't know that guys get off on that!" Shelley laughed. "But now that I'm older, it's harder to pull off that role. And, besides, lots of the men who watch my stuff are regulars - fans. You have to move on. They've seen you do the innocent teen thing and they're not buying it forever. They want to see you progress."
Then I asked a question that had been bubbling up in my consciousness for a while but I hadn't known how to ask without it coming out as a variation on the, "What is a girl like you doing in a place like this?" question. I couldn't think of a way to avoid this so I said, hoping it would come off right, "What's a girl like you doing in a place like this?"
"You mean in a cheap bar? Where would you expect to see a girl like me?" She wasn't offended; she was just joking, too.
"No, I mean I know were not far from Porn Valley," referring to San Fernando, "but it's not just around the corner."
"Oh," Shelley began, "we were going to do a shoot in a guy's house near here. You know, we need different settings to keep the videos fresh. This guy my producer knew slightly has a terrific house for us to shoot in."
"So why aren't you there shooting the film."
"We're missing a crucial actor. The same guy who owned the house was supposed to play a role in the film. He chickened out."
