My Arm the Porn Star

By Dave White

Maybe Anal-Eze is at Albertsons now; it didn’t occur to me to look there. All I really know for sure is that I’ve been driving around the San Fernando Valley for ninety minutes, boldly marching into four different sex shops requesting the rectum-numbing cream by name and walking out of every single one of them empty handed. Still, I’m on a mission. I’m not to return without the product. Otherwise, the scene can’t be shot. A double-penetration scene. If you don’t know what that is, you could stop reading and Google it. It’s a little explicit, so maybe you don’t want to do that either. But I figure I might as well get the gnarliest bit of information out of the way first, so you can know that after this it doesn’t get any freakier than what you just read. Any freakier for you, that is. For me, it’s just beginning.

Being a writer is a great life. You work at home in your underwear. You set your own schedule. You bank, shop, and do laundry at nonpeak hours. You can see a movie on a Tuesday afternoon and have the whole theater to yourself. But you are not rich and probably never will be. So when a friend who also happens to be a gay porn director calls you and says, “I need a responsible person to be my production assistant for four days and I’ll pay $600 cash,” your first thought isn’t, “No way, not working on a porn set,” it’s, “Sweet, that’s tax-free income I can use to pay last year’s taxes.” Then, later, you think about how you can write about it someday. You tell your partner, Alonso, about the temp gig. “Money’s money,” he says. “Do it.” Anal-Eze doesn’t cross your mind.

The “movie” is being shot at a dark, overstuffed prop house, jammed into a low-rent residential area of the Valley about half a mile from the liquor store with the neon clown out front, the one where Alicia Silverstone gets robbed at gunpoint in Clueless. The action is set in a penitentiary, so two adjoining prison cells have been built inside the hollowed-out center of the space, the wooden doors and bars spray painted gun-metal gray to suggest something much sturdier. In the murky light it all looks authentic, but the walls can’t be touched on camera or they wiggle. The back of the cell panels have stickers revealing that these same walls were used on the set of the Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen sitcom Two of a Kind.

My job description:

1. Go to the grocery store. Buy food for snacks. Use best judgment but make sure there are at least bottles of water, Gatorade, Red Bull, bananas, and those terrible protein bars.

2. Pick up Reasonably Well-known Porn Star X at his hotel. Drive him to set.

3. Stock the food table. I know enough to avoid items like string cheese and Yoplait and sharp-edged, mouth-injuring tortilla chips. Instead I buy, in addition to the required snacks, Pepperidge Farm Milano cookies, oranges, oatmeal bars, and, because I’m going to be part of the eating team, doughnuts and my favorite crackers, Chicken in a Biskit.

4. Help the cameramen set up lights. Help the cameramen anytime they ask you to do anything. Get apple boxes for short performers, move cables, find the always-outside-smoking makeup guy.

5. Take lunch orders. Call in the orders. Pick up the order. Set up lunch. Clean up lunch.

6. Mop up … spills.

7. Run other errands, like to Starbucks or to the pharmacy for Viagra and condoms.

…

This is an excerpt of an article originally published in Slake No. 1. To read the entire story, purchase or subscribe at shop.slake.la.