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Porn Stars Are The Saddest People

By Peter Hardwick

(“Peter Hardwick” is not my real name but my stage name and, of course, nom de plume. I’m 29, a college graduate who comes from a liberal (read: my parents were former hippies) but exceedingly polite midwestern family; my folks say they’re proud of me but then again they may just be nice. I am single but looking, something that is hampered to a substantial degree by the fact that I currently work in the adult film business and have made it my career, at least until I can get enough work as a journalist (which is what I did before this gig) or until I’m no longer being cast or in the unusual event that the porn business suddenly goes caput, which entirely a possibility given the advent of the internet and the monopolistic behemoth that is PornHub, who don't pay a damn thing for anything they post. Anyway.)

November, Part II

Thursday, November 20

 Wake up, run five miles, shower, eat breakfast, go to work (or to the gym all day), plug holes, sweat, lift bars, lick clits, tug pulleyed bars on simple machines, squat and rise, spank and moan, plug holes, lift bars, tug hair, sweat, gravity boot sit ups, push ups, 69s, hurry up and wait, facials, lats, pecks, biceps, triceps, quads, calfs, sweat, make your come face, plug holes, anal, oral, abs and glutes, sweat, fucks tits, plug holes, lifts bars, lick and suck, grunt and wail, tug bars, help a woman contort herself into a bizarre unnatural position, then nothing; then the sweet relief, home, sanctuary, cook dinner (I’m a fair cook, took a class a few years back, to cook and mingle; the cooking stuck with me, the women didn’t), write, read, maybe some TV, sleep, wake up, run five miles, shower, eat breakfast, work or gym…six days a week with the gym on Saturdays, rest on Sunday after a pedestrian five miles.
   All sweat and holes. All clits and muscles. One of these days I’m going to accidentally fuck a barbell and lift a hole.

Friday, November 21

There’s a name for the “it” women of the moment in adult film, the women who catch fire and suddenly gain big followings only to fade away in a year or two, chewed up, used up and spat out a in favor of the next, newer model, younger, hotter, not as used-up looking, not as familiar, not as boring. They’re called the "Cliteratti" and they make this business, they bring in the eyeballs, the ad dollars (formerly, the DVD sales), they’re they ones who make sure Kleenex will never go out of business. Women actors make a lot more money per scene (or per day) than men and I’m glad of it, I heartily endorse this practice and hope it continues as long as there is porn. (If you’re thinking this pay differential is “reverse sexism,” fuck you, it’s not reverse sexism, it’s how things should work in the rest of the world, people paid based on their value to what they’re doing, to what they bring in. Female fashion models are another good example: they make more than their male equivalents because that’s where the demand is, that’s who brings in the eyeballs and money.)
   Yes, men get paid less, but their “shelf life” is much more stable and substantial, the long-term earning potential can be greater than the average female performer, with exceptions for ladies who are able to stay in the game and stay popular for a long time, who, in the internet age, have been able to cultivate and keep a loyal following, forge a brand, who’ve taken charge of their careers and become the producers of their own material.
   Given the choice I’d rather work for a female director or producer. Usually (not always the case) but usually the work is a little more complicated, a little more nuanced and interesting, not just tits and asses and wham-bam thank you ma’am, not just animals rutting but more often than not I’m put into a scene with a palpable sensuality and asked to deliver something more than just jack hammering and seed. When I know I’m going to get to work with a woman director or producer, my disposition brightens a little, the senseless drudgery of the day ahead eases somewhat. I won’t go so far to say I look forward to it, but it is a relief from the mind-numbing boredom of the usual.
   When I’m asked to give something of myself other than muscle and come, I’ve found that I can lose myself in the work. When doing hardcore, my mind will drift, the relentless boredom of pounding away mindlessly not unlike listening to a droning college lecture or any repetitious task, my thoughts straying to random oddities, if I need to pick up anything at the store, the launch of a new book by one of my favorite authors, a song I heard on the radio on the drive to the set suddenly back again. But putting myself in the mindset that I actually care about the woman I’m with, I have to concentrate, I have to be mindful of myself and her, I have to be aware of each moment, I have to pour myself into her, and when that happens I can lose myself in a completely different way, lost in the moment as opposed to bored by routine. Physically it’s not as difficult as a being a human jackhammer and the spent emotions can be draining but it is as near to fulfilling as this job gets. But in the end it’s just a job and I’m just the sausage. I get infinitely more satisfaction and reward from writing a few pages than I will ever get doing a lifetime of porn.
   So, yes, I’d rather work with a woman director and/or producer—and yet, I refer to my job as “plugging holes.” You may be tempted to think I’m sexist for saying this, and you may be right, but the way I view it, my job isn’t as a person or a man, it’s as a tool, a wrench, a hammer, pliers, a drill, a thing that is just a thing doing a thing. I call the vagina and anus holes because I’m the tool that fills them, I’m the machine and the operator and I’m as replaceable as any wrench, hammer, pilers, drill, you name it, I am of shockingly little consequence to the job—me, the person, the man, the individual, the one who loves reading Michael Chabon and Annie Proulx, who makes a fine homemade basil pesto sauce and homemade linguini. (I even grow my own sweet basil—along with a host of other herbs, oregano, cilantro and two types of parsley—on my back patio. And yes, I bribe the female directors and producers with homemade food and sauces and tell them I appreciate being given the opportunity to work for them, that I’m always available for them. It doesn’t hurt that I’ve shown I’m more than willing to take direction and do things however they want them done.) Calling women’s parts holes isn’t a reflection of them but of me, of my perfunctory nature in my job, a reminder that they’re not hiring me, they’re not interested in me, only A-Rod—I’m just an ancillary accoutrement, the vessel of his bearing. I’m the machine that makes the tool go.

Saturday, November 22

Seriously, though, I am starting to wonder about the long-term effects of using Viagra. It hasn’t gotten to the point where A-Rod won’t work without it, but that is a genuine fear I have. I remember reading an interview with God, Eric Clampton, who is an alcoholic. He said that after he got sober, he couldn’t get a hard on without booze in his system, that his body had gotten so accustomed to being partly or wholly drunk when having sex that when the alcohol was no longer present, his body didn’t what to do, it didn’t know how to react. This, naturally, was long before Viagra and the like had come along. Eventually Clampton (and his body) worked through it and Slow Hand became the master of his domain once more. Sadly, the child he fathered after becoming sober fell out of a high-rise apartment window in New York City when he was four, the grief and sadness prompting Clampton to write “Tears in Heaven.”
   But I do worry about the same thing happening to me. I have no idea if my body will eventually become so used to it being in my system that I won’t be able to perform without it. Viagra is what allows me to do my job, not in the physical sense, but it’s what alleviates the boredom, what allows my mind to drift when I’m plugging away so that I don’t get so sick and tired of doing it that it becomes unbearable, untenable. The first few years I didn’t need a respite from the routine of the job, it was still new and interesting, I was still learning and refining my technique and craft but as the doldrums began to set in, I quickly realized I would need a way to be borne adrift, to let my body work while my mind remained free, my own, untouchable by what surrounded me. Thus, drugs.
   I’m only doing this job for two more years, once my mortgage has been paid off (luckily, I bought cheap, when the market had bottomed out) and I’ve saved and invested enough that these can subsidize my writing habit indefinitely. I’ve become increasingly concerned that once I’ve retired from this job and I meet someone who can handle my past, that my body will betray me. My solution to this potential threat to my theoretical future relationship has been to switch drugs. Unfortunately, this has only increased my anxiety about the future, my neurosis chiming in, unhelpfully, yelling to the corners of my brain that instead of needing one drug to get it up, I’ll need four, that my body will then require an ungodly hard-on cocktail just to keep A-Rod at full mast, that this will be my life, this will be my sentence and punishment for needing it in the first place, for not being able to tolerate a mind-numbingly boring job.
   Clearly I’m going to have to start researching not only the long-term effects of dick pills but techniques to forestall boredom in a high repetitive job.

Sunday, November 23

   Went out with some friends last night. We were “celebrating” Davis being let go from his job (or as he put it his “Job”) at Buzzfeed. There was a giddy sadness to the whole thing, Davis sorry to see his steady paycheck go but gratified to see the return of his integrity. The funny thing is, Davis was my editor at LA Weekly and the guy who let me go. I never held a grudge over it and that might be part of the reason we became friends after I was dismissed. Of course, it didn’t hurt that a couple years after I was given the boot Davis was canned as well. Most of my friends are journalists or former journalists who now work in the Hollywood Industrial Complex or folks that crew or used to crew in Porn; Davis, Tom, Petra, Karen and I are all the former, recovering writers who, like alcoholics, still feel the call of the pen (or keyboard), who’ve leveraged their skills to their advantage—writing is a dying art and if someone can communicate effectively and powerfully through the written word then that sets them apart and makes advancing that much easier and likely. Perhaps it goes without saying but if you’ve never hung out with a bunch of writers and ex-writers then you’ll never be able to appreciate the true meaning of cynicism and bitterness.
   It was a decidedly low-key affair, the 1980s retro-themed bar on the southwest side of LA providing an appropriate back drop for five people whose entire career field either no longer exists or is rapidly becoming extinct. So we sat at a plush burgundy half-round booth, ex-journo relics getting slowly wasted on pitchers of cheap beer and bitching about the world, how nobody reads anymore (unless it’s on Twitter or Facebook), how, like in porn, the population of gatekeepers has shrunk to a remarkably small number of already-rich fuckwits. Hunter S. Thompson would’ve been proud.
   Watching them bemoan their lives, the sorry state of journalism, the seemingly endless slide of the culture into a parody of bad taste (“Fuckin’ reality TV, man. Like, who watches that shit?” Tom bitched) really made me aware of my own self-pity. Journalism and culture aside, Everyone at that table, including Davis, who already had some venerable freelance work coming his way, was actually doing pretty well financially, having hustled or honed their way to better-paying jobs and respectable careers (yours truly excepted), having learned that the age-old cliche “money can’t buy happiness” has resonated for centuries for a reason. Looking around, no one could say they were really, truly Happy. They were making good money, they had families (again, your truly excepted) and stable, fortifying relationships, they had mortgages and high-end cars, a litany of first-world problems that millions (perhaps billions) would envy or kill for, but no one was doing what they really wanted to, no one had cracked the code on exactly how to bring to fruition that unaccountably sanguine title of an old, best-selling book, “Do What You Love and the Money Will Follow.” There was no deep, foundational love for their current careers or jobs and Davis, should he try to make it as a freelancer, was in for a financial roller coaster, destined to be under the proverbial financial gun for his entire tenure as a freelancer. Listening to their grievances sounded horrifyingly familiar, like a recorded loop ripped from my own head, an echo that resounded daily in the banal drudgery of my work, my routines, the dull, meandering repetition that is my life. The reality was none of us had it that bad or as bad as we wanted to believe we did, none of us were anywhere near rock-bottom or were suffering anything approaching real misery.
   The only person at the table still under 30, I was both dismayed and heartened by what I heard and saw, dismayed that I’d so easily let myself slip into a sad-sack malaise that I hadn’t come anywhere close to earning but heartened that I’d recognized it now instead of five or ten years from now, when the pattern may have become too entrenched to do anything about. At least I had a chance. Question was, and is, what am I going to do about it? A good first step seemed to be develop a little bit of gratitude, to try to counter my cynicism with an appreciation for what I had instead of what I didn’t. We’ll see.
   By the end of the night, the cynicism and bitterness had bottomed out, the combination of venting and intoxication bringing everyone to an emotional valley that was as melancholy as it was clarifying. We all had at least one thing that mattered in life, be it a spouse or children, integrity, a worthwhile if not wholly satisfying career, or in my case, a chance to actually do what I love regardless of whether or not the money ever follows—and we all recognized it, if reluctantly, if belatedly, even if it took several hours and an absurd number of beers. But most of all we had each other and yes, as we said our good byes, there was heard more than once, “I love you, man” and more than enough hugs to last every damn one of us until Christmas.

Monday, November 24

Six holes to plug, all one-on-ones, another blur of a day except for the last scene with Liana C. Having worked with her a few times before, I knew things were going to start slow, and they did, but finish hot and heavy, which it did, but not until things got…interesting. It’s not every day that something that’s never happened before happens but today was one of those days. Early on, she pulled me in for a kiss (we were in missionary on a sofa) and then yanked my head into her shoulder where she whispered in my ear, “I’ve been doing Kegel exercises. Better tell A-Rod to hold on.” I sat up, on my knees, plugging a little harder, which elicited a noise that was a cross between a purr and a moan, when she began to squeeze. I won’t lie, it was pretty fucking amazing and an involuntary gasp escaped me. Liana looked me in the eyes and mouthed, “Fuck me.” We were starting to get hot and heavy when I pulled out to flip her onto her belly. A-Rod was about to attempt reentry when I noticed something: the rubber I’d been wearing was gone. Vanished. For a stunned second or two I didn’t realize what had happened. Liana looked over her shoulder and said with a smirk, “Don’t tease me, bro.” She backed the truck up to the dick-loading dock.
   “Uh, got a little problem,” I said, looking at Jim F., the director, then at A-Rod. It took Jim a few seconds.
   “What’s the, uh—oh. Shit.”
   “Oh my God, what’s going on?” Liana asked, turning over onto her back.
   I didn’t even know what to say.
   “Cut!” Jim said.
  “What the fuck?! Why are we stopping?!” Liana threw both palms at the ceiling.
   I stammered. “The rubber. I, I think it’s…I think it’s inside you.”
Liana’s thick eyebrows arched up. Mystified for a moment, a brief flicker of panic crossed her face before she looked at A-Rod, then me. Her eyes lingered on mine for what felt like an hour, her face flat and expressionless. Everything hung still in the room, no one seemed to move or breath, like the moments before a detonation, an infinite duration in which your life flashes before your eyes. Suddenly, though, Liana threw her head back and laughed the laugh of the Gods, a full-bodied, lusty roar that filled the whole house. The tension gripping Jim and the entire crew, myself included, melted away. “Well? Pull it out!” Liana said, opening her legs further.
   I looked at Jim. He gave a half-hearted half shrug as if to say, “Got me, man.”
  After a short hesitation, I gently stuck my right index finger inside her, probing to the right, the left, up, down. Liana cackled, a low, rumbling, darkly comedic sound. Starring at the ceiling as I concentrated, I could feel my face contorting as my finger swam around inside her, blindly stumbling. Liana then said, “You ever play that card game as a kid, Go Fish?” She cackled again, her whole body shuddering.
   What seemed like several minutes passed. Finally I pulled the condom out, slimy, limp, the rubber stretched and shredded.
  “Ooo, you know what this reminds me of? That movie Teeth, about a girl with vagina dentata, or pussy teeth.” Liana asked. “Every time a guy sticks it in the teeth take a bite. She even goes to a gynecologist and the poor bastard loses his fingers!”
   “So, uh, we good to go?” Jim asked.
   Liana flipped over and slapped her own ass. “Batter up!” She grinned at me and said, “I’ll try not to break it off, baby.” She clacked her teeth together, a loud biting sound, cackling some more. After donning another hat, we got back to work.
   So, yeah, that happened.
  Gratitude: I’m thankful I have a steady job that pays well, that has provided a decent house and a future outside of porn. I’m grateful I don’t have any STDs or AIDS (I ALWAYS wear a condom), I’m thankful I’m healthy and strong and not a blathering idiot. I’m grateful I know the difference between “your,” “you’re,” and “yore.”

Tuesday, November 25

Half day, four holes to plug then a free afternoon. Ran a few errands, groceries, some liquid fertilizer for my gardens, a few other odds and ends. On the drive home my little sister (let’s call her Jane) called me. We were still talking when I go home so I stayed in the car, in the carport.
   Jane is the only family member who’s ever visited me in LA—and that was because she had a job interview and decided to stick around a few days to see if she liked it. Three years younger than me, she’s a computer genius, works as a cyber security expert. Though she’s never copped to it, I often suspect the job interview was either a ruse or a job she was never going to take, using it as a pretext to check up on me; I hadn’t visited home since starting my current job at that point and, well, there were questions. Lots of questions. Questions of sanity and hygiene, questions about diseases and mental faculties, questions about what I intended to do with my life. You know, the usual.
   Talking to her is always an adventure. If you’ve ever seen the movie Real Genius then you have an idea what Jane is like. The character Jordan, the brilliant but hyperactive girl next door, could have been based on Jane, a spastic word vomiter whose brain works so fast you often have to reconstruct the conversation as it’s happening, Jane skipping from topic to topic to topic and then back, only to suddenly jump to something else altogether. And usually, she’s talking about things that are lightyears above my head.
   She had big news: she was moving to California. Having taken a job in D.C. with a defense contractor out of college, she’d been headhunted by a Silicon Valley behemoth (you’d know their name; you may even be reading this on one of their products) and was taking the plunge and moving to the Bay area. She even made the semi-joke, “Now we’ll both be working in the Valley, but, of course, in completely different valleys!” This was great news; now she’ll only be a short flight away. I promised I would visit often, promised I would help her find a place to live, help her move in. She was due to start in two weeks, having already resigned her current job, so she said she’d be in LA Wednesday night then we’d jet up to San Jose Sunday and start looking the next day. I always take the month of December off (there’s usually not much work between Thanksgiving and Christmas anyway), so I was free to spend as much time with her as I could. The best part: for the first time in seven years I was going to have Thanksgiving with family. Normally, this realization would have made me sad, that I’d unnecessarily avoided my family because of my job, because of all the baggage that comes with going home but by the time I hung up the phone I was as happy as I could remember in a long time, so long that I couldn’t remember the last time I was this happy.
   Instead of going inside, I went to the store to buy a small unfrozen turkey and a few things to make side dishes with, including a pumpkin pie, which I’ve never made before. The store was damn crowded, a fucking madhouse, I was glad to get out of there with all my limbs still attached.
   Gratitude: Jane. Having a job where I can mostly pick and choose my schedule. Having the means to go visit and help my little sis for a whole week.

Wednesday, November 26

Fucking exhausting day. Ten holes to plug, three one-on-ones in the morning, and a long afternoon orgy scene that took place on a “space ship,” many of the actors in full-body “alien” makeup. Luckily I got to play a human. One guy, made up in blue, had three cocks, his own and two blue strap-ons. It was painful to watch the guy try to plug three women at once doggy-style; the four of them just couldn’t seem to get in sync with one another, even with the guy gripping the two outer-most women’s hips. It was an awkward mess that only partly worked part of the time, the dildos always popping out, forcing them to start over and try to fall in unison again. It was inevitable that most of their scene was going to get edited out or only be seen in the background. It wasn’t my first orgy scene, not by a long shot, but it was by far the weirdest. Overall, it was a disorganized mess, no direction really, just the director dragging the camera man hither and thither, once in a while shouting, “Switch it up!” meaning change partners like it was fucking square dancing or something. The weird costumes and make up of the other actors was actually pleasantly distracting, my mind never drifting too long before I caught sight of something alien and intriguing. It was a weird way to end my working year but so be it.
   Yesterday I was going to describe my little house, so I’ll do it today instead. Up in the hills above Malibu, tucked away and hidden from the road by lush trees with silvery leaves, Home is a 1,500 square foot modern set on 1/3 of an acre, the one-story house set in an “L” shape. From the road the driveway curves right then straightens, leading to a two-car carport at the outside corner of the “L.” The siding is western red cedar set vertical with a clear matte finish. The roof is flat with generous eight-foot overhangs on every side, with vast cedar soffits pocked with recessed lights, the wide overhang adding to the shade from the trees. The front double doors have large half moons of glass and open to an open design: (from left to right) kitchen, dining room (if I had a table and chairs) and living room with a small wood-burning stove in the far corner and a work desk along the back glass wall. The front, right and back walls have at least two floor-to-ceiling panes of glass, bookended by siding. There are sliding doors leading to the right side porch, mainly just a stone floor with a small wood pile, and large back patio, stone floor, built-in seating (I do a lot of my reading out there) and several long, low raised garden beds I made. The trees, the overhang, the shape of the house make the back patio feel protected, even cloistered at little, which suits me perfectly. There’s another sliding patio door leading to a large master bedroom with its own bath, then another bed room, a small full bath, and a cozy laundry room as you make your way back toward the kitchen. It’s a basic, modern kitchen with stainless steel appliances, granite counter tops, a large island, and upper cabinets with frosted glass inserts in cherry frames. The floor throughout is polished concrete, glossy, shiny, nothing too fancy.
   When I bought it, it needed a fair amount of work, new kitchen cabinets and countertops, bathrooms gutted and upgraded, the cheap wall paneling in the bedrooms ripped out and replaced with drywall and solid wood paneling, the exterior power washed and refinished, the floors re-sealed. I did all the work (except for the plumbing) on the weekends and evenings. It was tough work and not of the tile in the guest bathroom is perfectly square and straight but it was satisfying in a way that my job has never been.
   Sometimes at night you can see flickers of light from the neighbor’s houses on either side, but other than that when you’re there, the outside world disappears, melts away, even most city and traffic sounds muted by the trees and hills. I spend most of my time on the back patio, reading, sometimes writing, tending garden, though there’s not a lot of daylight to read outdoors by the time I get home this time of year; also, it does get cool in the evenings—not cold, mind you, by midwestern standards, anyway, but it does get the tiniest bit chilly.
I don’t have people over very often, mostly because this is my sanctuary, the place where I can get away from everything and everyone, detach from society, from work, from family, from scrutiny and just relax and escape, if only for a short while. But soon I’ll be picking up Jane at the airport and I’m glad for the “invasion.”

Thursday, November 27

It’s late, close to midnight, Jane is asleep on the couch behind me. She conked out around 11; the time change from the east coast to here can be a bear. We had a great day. Jane tried to help cook but that’s definitely not her forte—she spent more time looking up how-to videos on YouTube than actually cooking, but it was fun. Everything turned out okay, the turkey was golden brown, the mashed potatoes were only a little lumpy, the stuffing (not in the bird) was moist but lacking fluffiness, the sweet potatoes were fine; the pumpkin pie, however, was delicious. I didn’t even mind the interrogation-by-proxy during dinner, Jane apparently given some kind of to-do (or to-ask) list by the parental units. Every time she asked an obvious parentally-advised question, I gave a wry, “Really?” look and the briefest possible answer, quickly followed up by a question about what kind of house or condo she was looking for; her answers were as vague and nonspecific as mine. Jane knew a ton about computers, sci-fi movies and TV, and pretty much every meme and stupid internet trend but she gave little thought or attention to much else, save for the occasional faux-political and social outrage (as in ‘let’s get really mad but not actually do anything about it because that would be inconvenient and a real bore’) fomented by the Twittersphere and Facebook.
   Afterward, I managed to persuade Jane to go with me to Point Dume for a walk on the beach. Jane snickered at the entrance sign as we parked, “Ha. ‘Point Do-me.’ No wonder you picked this place.” Everyone loves a comedian. It was an overcast day, a damp chill in the air, a steady breeze coming off the water, the soaring bluff of Point Dume looming ahead of us as we strode along. There were only a handful of people out, the very un So-Cal weather deterring. We were quiet for a while, the churn and roar of the ocean, the imposing Point, awesome in the most meaningful sense of the word. In that moment I was grateful for the calming effect Dume was having on my sister.
   “I’m gonna miss seasons.”
   “They’re overrated.”
   Ahead, a boy gripped a spool of kite thread, the kite high above, it’s long tail trembling, a man, presumably his father, anxiously instructing the boy. The boy either ignored the instructions or was just inherently mellow, his placid, fixed, expressionless face regarding the kite as if it were a mild curiosity, something to occupy the eyes for a moment or two.
   “You ever think about having one of those?” Jane asked.
   I shrugged. “Sure, but kites are kind of childish, don’t you think?”
   She nudged me with her shoulder, I feigned being knocked off balance. “Like, what are you going to tell them about, you know, what you do?”
   “Well—”
   “Because they’re going to find out, they always find out, like we found out about mom and dad living on that commune, like that time Captain Piccard—”
   “Great, now you’re hyper again.”
   “Hey! You know, just for that, I’m going to tell them myself.”
  “Please do. Please tell my hypothetical, theoretical children their dad used to do porn.  That’ll show me.”
   “‘Used to’? Wow, that implies you wouldn’t still be tossing salads and scrambling eggs.”
I stopped walking. “Look,” I turned to her. “If I tell you something you have to swear not to tell mom and dad.”
   “Depends.”
   “I’m going to be out in two years.”
   She snickered again. “So…you’re gonna pull out in two years?”
   “God damn it…” I started walking.
  “Wait, why don’t you want me to tell them? Ohhhh, I get it. Because if they know you’re going to quit two years from now they’ll ask, ‘why don’t you just quit now?’ So why don’t you just quit now?”
   “I’ve got a plan, a schedule. In two years, my mortgage will be paid off, I’ll have enough set aside and enough invested to do whatever I want to do for a long time, long after I’ll be able to earn money writing again.”
   “Wait—people still read?”
   “Only the ones not addicted to social media and internet memes.”
   “Touché.”
   “I keep telling mom and dad not to worry about me, to trust me, but they never listen.”
  “You mean you don’t like that they question your judgement, Mr. Porn Star, Mr. Muff Diver, Mr. bury-the-bishop?”
   “So I was thinking, you don’t seem to know what kind of place you’re looking for. But what I can do is ask you about features and styles and we can figure out what you like by eliminating what you don’t like.”
  “See, now I’m really concerned about you because you just dodged that question like a politician and if there’s anything worse than someone who’s made your life decisions it’s a fucking politician.”
   I turned to look out at the Pacific, apple green, capped in white. “It’s appropriate we’re right beside the ocean given how salty your mouth suddenly is.”
   “Yeah, you want to talk about salty substances, don’t you? Like, really?”
   “Look, this is my life, these are my choices, I have to live with it, I’ll have to live with it for the rest of my life. But so far, it’s working out, so far the benefits outweigh the negatives. So far, I’m making it work, no matter how unpleasant it may be for some people, no matter how unpleasant the job can be. And for the record, I don’t particularly like my job. Ninety-nine percent of the time it’s boring as hell.”
   She snorted. “‘Boring.’ Yeah, let’s drill down on your word choices a little more, shall we?”
   “Swear to fucking god…”
   “Wait. Did you say you have a mortgage?”
   “Duh.”
   We made our way to the top of Point Dume, ragging on one another the entire time. We took the obligatory tourist-style photos (for her social media; I’m not on any social media, yet) and after we returned to my place, I lighted a fire and we huddled on the couch, perusing Silicon Valley realty listings on line. Apparently her “style” of architecture and housing consisted entirely of the “I’ll know it when I see it!” variety. Style aside I recommended she make a list of preferences for her realtor, number of bedrooms and bathrooms, whether or not a view or a yard was important, etc. She didn’t outright reject the idea so that’s good.
   Gratitude: whatever, it’s late, I’m tired.

Friday, November 28

The only thing I remember about the last dream I had this morning was that I was talking to a young boy, maybe eight or nine, apparently my son. We were sitting on a backyard bench and I said to him very earnestly, “Son, when a woman is sucking you off it’s very important to tell her when you’re about to come so she can decided how to handle it, whether to spit or swallow. It’s just good manners.” Then I started awake. I was dazed and flustered for a few minutes, suddenly convinced I had a son and, presumably, a wife and other kids before the haze of confusion lifted. Adding to the confusion was waking up and momentarily not recognizing my own room, not remembering where I was, the world of my dream blending into reality, temporarily making me think the house in my dreams was where I was supposed to be, that it was my real house and this one was just a mirage. Needless to say I didn’t tell Jane about my dream.
   After my run, hyper Jane was at full force first thing this morning, talking a mile a minute, prattling on about the things she’d like in a house or apartment, the kind of neighborhood, a park nearby, then suddenly talking about the Monterey Aquarium and how she’d heard it’s one of the best in the world, and how she’d never been to Big Sur or Hearst Castle near San Simeon and next thing I know she’s talking about a road trip. Within minutes, her bags were already packed in her head, the view from the road visible in her gleaming eyes. I tried to get a few words in about how if we drive up in my car it would mean I would have to drive BACK, a roughly eight hour trip. Then she said she’d rent a car. Which was absurd.
   “But you don’t know how to drive!”
   “Screw you, what are you talking about? I know how to drive, I—”
  “Do you remember your first driving test? You literally gave the guy testing you a heart attack. He nearly died.”
   “Oh, that’s such—it was a coincidence, I didn’t cause his heart attack.”
   “Sure, the fact that you went off the road and onto the sidewalk twice, and nearly t-boned a station wagon when you didn’t stop at a stop sign is just a—”
   “I passed the test the second time, I have a perfectly valid Virginia license, I drive all the time—”
   “You don't even drive to work!”
 “That’s so unfair! I carpool! Carpooling is an environmentally responsible practice, especially in a metropolis like D.C. where there are already too many cars—”
   “Have you ever driven in this carpool?”
   “No.” She paused. “Okay, once.”
   “And never again, right?”
   “That’s…circumstantial. If you don’t want to go with me, just say so!”
   “I want to go with you I just don’t want to give my life to do so or have to bury my little sister because she doesn’t know how to drive.”
   “I think you’re afraid, I think you’re afraid that your little sister has surpassed you and is more successful—”
   “The only thing I’m afraid of is you pulling a James Dean. You barely watch the road when you’re driving, you’re always looking at other cars and drivers and every little thing that catches your eye, including your phone. You’re the poster child for distracted driving.”
   “Fine. Then drive me. Drive us both. I don’t care who drives. If we leave soon we can make it to Hearst Castle. Can people stay there, like, overnight? Like a hotel or something?”
   “I don’t know, why don’t I call Patty Hearst and ask her, I hear she lives just down the road in Beverly Hills.” (Okay, I have no idea where Patty Hearst lives.)
   “Or we can look it up on the internet. I swear, sometimes it’s like you’re mom and dad’s age when it comes to computers and technology. You know, now that I think about it, since you drive that old Wagoneer from the 80s you may actually be a closet baby boomer.”
   “At least I don’t drive like a maniac who’s on crack, meth and PCP all at once.”
   So anyway, we left late this morning in my “Old Wagoneer from the 80s” on the PCH (Pacific Coast Highway, aka Highway 1) and made it to the Hearst Castle Visitor Center a few hours later, took the “Grand Rooms” tour and then the “Cottages and Kitchen” tour. Jane described so much information about Hearst Castle from reading off her phone as we drove it kind of felt like déjà vu when we took the actual tour. I don’t know what to say about it, it’s gaudy opulence, it’s an over-the-top display of wealth. Maybe I’ve just gotten used to living a somewhat plain and ascetic lifestyle with a car from 1985 and a no-frills modern house but it was just hard for me to conceive of spending so much money for a house, a place to live. Clearly it was meant as more than that, clearly it was meant as a giant display case for obscene affluence, an enormous brag, designed and built with the express intent of impressing all who crossed its threshold.
   After the tour I suggested we have dinner in San Simeon and get a hotel nearby only to be informed that we had reservations two hours up the highway. This is my sister: as I was driving, she was talking about her friends from college that lived in Silicon Valley with whom we would be either staying with or seeing, constantly pointing out things like signs with superfluous punctuation (a restaurant named Burrito’s), a banana yellow hotrod, a prodigious convoy of what appeared to be actual Hell’s Angels and, apparently, not only planning a trip but making reservations for tours at Hearst Castle and a hotel south of Big Sur and answering emails, tweets and god knows what else on her phone. We checked in and had a nice dinner at the hotel. It was a place I would call fancy (or a “Luxe Wilderness Resort” as Jane called it, quoting from its website), the double room we shared with stone tile floors, high ceilings and a fireplace—oh, and a glass-paned shower and separate tub. Jane paid for the room but refused to tell me how much it cost over dinner. “What’s the point of being young and having money if you don’t spend any of it,” she said unironically after we’d just spent over two hours at a fucking modern castle that was a monument to conspicuous spending. I picked up the tab for dinner. For some reason, Jane spent most of the dinner attempting to pry into my life, as if the word “dinner” had become a Pavlovian response that triggered interrogation. After feigning being tired from driving and touring, Jane relented somewhat, though one thing still seemed to bother her: said she couldn’t understand why I had a mortgage and a decent house but still drove a car from the year “Back to the Future” came out. “If you can afford a house, you can afford a better car.”
I did my best not to be offended by the word “better.”
   “I like my car, it runs well, it’s roomy, I can haul stuff like construction supplies or help people move, which I’ve done a few times. And you know what, it reminds me of home and frankly, that helps keep me grounded. It’s like my house, it suits me.”
   “But it gets, like, 12 miles to the gallon.”
   “Well, 15 MPG, but whatever. Besides, the rear window slides down. You literally can’t buy a new car today where the rear window goes downs like that.”
   “Yeah, you can’t buy a car with that because it literally draws toxic fumes from the exhaust into the car when you’re driving.”
   “Whatever. You just keep the other windows cracked open and it’s not a problem.”
   She got a good laugh at that one.
  Okay, occasionally I get some shit about my car but I like it. I’ve driven my 1985 faux wood-paneled Jeep Wagoneer since high school, when I bought it from our neighbor, the prototype of the kind old lady next door, Melody Jensen. My dad and I had done a lot of handy man-type favors for her over the years and I always shoveled her walk and driveway in the winter and when she realized she wasn’t able to drive anymore (eyesight issues), she sold it to me for $1500, well below its value, on the condition I would be her chauffeur when her daughter couldn't. She’d taken good care of it, never drove anywhere other than the store or post office since her husband passed away in the late 80s and given that I liked and cared about her, I felt honored and humbled that she wanted to pass the Wag (as it was known in the neighborhood) onto me. She’d been around nearly my whole life (we moved to the neighborhood when I was four), she watched my brother, sister and me when we were younger and our parents needed a night to themselves, and when she passed away nine years ago, I was heartened and saddened to be a pall bearer along with her grandsons. So it means a lot to me and as long as it still runs, I’m keeping it.
   Apparently our Saturday was planned out, including where we were eating and sleeping in Monterey and everything we were doing in the meantime.
   Gratitude: having a sister that knows how to multitask and get shit done. The Wag. Long live the Wag.

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Copyright 2021 by Andrew Wallingford