Chapter 1: A Really Shitty Day

I still remember the moment like it was yesterday. I had just finished a meaningless, run-of-the-mill scene with a Russian chick, Nadia, Nastia, Natasha, whatever, and I was leaving the shower, when Floyd, the producer/director and a sorta-friend of mine, came into the bathroom looking shaken and close to tears.

“Rick, I just got a phone call. Charlie died.”

For a few precious moments my brain refused to acknowledge that information. A misunderstanding, a mishearing, a mix-up. Floyd kept on talking, though, eliminating all those comforting explanations.

“She had a heart attack, right in the operating room. They did everything, but they couldn’t bring her back. Oh my God! I talked to her, just yesterday and now ... she’s gone.”

Floyd was crying like a little boy by now. I couldn’t. Not yet. Not before this news settled fully on me. I was numb.

Charlie was a friend, one of the perhaps ten people I called friends. She was a colleague, too. I befriend a few colleagues since most others folks won’t give me the time of the day. I am an adult movie performer. That’s the description I use. Calling myself anything with “actor” in it would be laughable. This isn’t the seventies or eighties anymore. These days, the script for a major smut production fits on the screen of an iPhone, and you don’t need to scroll much.

When I was still a greenhorn, the veteran performers told me how they rehearsed dialogue for the seventies’ smut flicks. I found the idea hilarious. These days all the rehearsal some guys need is provided by Pfizer. For the girls, it’s a douche and an enema.

Anyway, I met Charlie five years before, when she came in fresh from the cornfields of Kansas: a naive, blue-eyed cheerleader who believed her piece-of-shit agent when he told her she’d make it big by starting in the ‘minor leagues’. That’s what he called the adult movie business. She wised up within a year and kicked his sorry ass to the side, but by that time she had done thirty-two productions and no legit producer would consider her even for a hemorrhoid ointment commercial.

The strange thing was that she kept up that naive ditziness in spite of all the hard knocks she got. Peritonitis due to an overeager anal dildo fucking at the hands of a brain-dead bimbo, two broken fingers when an inept dominant fucked up with his clamps, and worst, a severe concussion when she was supposed to do an upside-down blowjob and her moron partner dropped her. Well, he, too, was severely concussed when my buddy Jean and I found him later that day. He was blacklisted, too, and last I heard, he does gay stuff in Brazil. We must have damaged his head more than we planned.

All that did not change her. She was cheery, friendly, and incorrigibly optimistic. Ditzy, too, in a heart-warming, endearing way. There wasn’t a bad bone in this girl. And now she was dead?

“What was she doing in surgery?” I heard myself asking.

“Boob job,” Floyd answered miserably. “I told her that she looked great the way she was. Jeez, Ricky, I know you told her, too. It’s those fucktards from Alluring Angels who talked her into that shit.”

AA are a major outfit and they produce smut by the terabytes. Their boss, Larry Highwater, brags that he has shootings going on every fucking day of the year. Charlie wanted to get in there for the regular work they offered and she thought it was a good idea to invest in a set of aftermarket tits. Damn it to Hell!

“Hey, she’s your friend, too, right. You know anything about her folks?”

“Yeah. She’s got a kid sister in college, up north in Eureka. Charlie bankrolled her. Parents, I wouldn’t know. Charlie started clamming up when I mentioned anything about family.”

“Think you can locate that sister, Rick?”

“Not off-hand. There ought to be some stuff in her apartment, though. I have a key, but then again, let’s have the cops do their stuff first, right?”

I drove home to my Canoga Park condo in a funk. The weather was gorgeous, no smog, and the traffic was light on this Friday afternoon, but LA looked like shit in my eyes. Another girl chewed up and spat out by this place. At home, I found a bottle of Glenmorangie, still half full, and it helped to tide me over the evening.

At least it was good stuff and I didn’t have a hangover the next morning. I was scheduled for a scene at a place in Bel Air. There’s always empty houses, in between owners, and the real estate agents love to take the five hundred bucks wild money for a few hours of shooting. Andrew Conolly was our producer and he made the introductions with my partner du jour, Sophie Derriere, and the fluffer, Shawna.

At least, I knew Shawna. If anybody could keep me hard for a morning of shooting, Shawna was the girl. She isn’t the cutest girl around, hell, she has a bit of a dog face, and she is chubby, but what she can do with lips, tongue and throat makes her earn steady money as a fluffer. Okay, for those of you who don’t know, a fluffer makes and keeps male performers hard between cuts. I know, in the golden days, male and female performers retired to a private room and made out before a scene, but time is money these days. Plus, the female performers need to be readied for the almost inevitable anal penetration that is almost standard fare these days.

Anyway, Shawna did a great job as usual and I entered the set sporting a decent woody. A real one. As a rule, I don’t use the blue pills, at least not yet. The lesbian scene with Sophie Derriere was in the bag already, and they had draped her over the four-poster bed in a very fuckable position: on her side, her delicious derriere — she had picked an apt name — tilted upward. It was an encouraging sight and I settled right in, doing the old in-and-out while the guy with the hand camera zoomed in.

Sophia was still wearing a frilly blouse, with only her bottoms exposed and she looked sexy enough to last about a year in the business.

Next came doggie and no complaints from me. The girl even got into it a little bit, I could tell, wiggling her ass and clenching her pussy ever so slightly. Towards the end, Andrew gave me the finger and obediently I pressed my thumb against Sophia’s anus. She was greased and all, but she clenched, uncomfortable with the anal play. This would be a toughie.

It was. I was supposed to penetrate her anus in missionary, with her ankles up over my shoulders, but she could not relax. We tried five times. She was too tight. Shawna came in with more grease, but she could barely fit one of her fingers in Sophia’s clenched sphincter.

“Jesus, what is it with you?” Andrew demanded of the girl.

Her face was red like a tomato and her eyes were filled with tears already. She shook her head. “I’m trying, hard,” she claimed with a heavy Russian accent. “I thought I could do it.”

“Hey Ricky, why not push a little harder? Once you’re in, she’ll relax.”

I gave him a cold look. “Have you any idea how much that would hurt her?”

“Damn it! I paid for anal. If I wanted vanilla fucking, I’d have found a fucking nun!”

Sophia got the water works going just about then and she dropped back on the bed. Her blouse had ridden up a bit and now I had a look at the underside of her breasts. I could see the fresh, red scars of a lousy boob-job and within a second her clenching anus became a moot issue. I don’t think I ever lost an erection that quickly. Charlie’s death was in the front of my mind again. I climbed from the bed.

“What now?” Andrew demanded.

“Sorry, no can do, man,” I answered, thinking that no amount of fluffing would get me hard again.

“Shawna, get your fat ass over here! Our leading man is losing it.” Andrew yelled.

I shook my head. “Sorry, not today.”

“Listen, I can get an ass-double here inside an hour. We’ll keep the angles, you bugger her, and then you do the money shot over Sophie’s tits and face. Hang in there man; I’m on a schedule.”

“Andrew, haven’t you heard about Charlie Hell?”

“What of her?”

“She died yesterday getting a boob job. With Sophia’s fresh scars, you can pump a wagon load of Spanish Fly into my balls and I still couldn’t shoot over her tits.”

“Jeez, I didn’t know. Charlie? That’s heavy, man. Sorry. But still, what if she keeps on her blouse, you’re up for it?”

It was a shitty day. They got in the ass-double, a veteran performer whose face showed the mileage, but who had kept her legs and ass in decent shape. For the first time, I contemplated popping a blue pill. Yet, Shawna’s efforts got me at least hard enough to achieve anal penetration. I pumped for about five or six minutes until Andrew gave a signal that he had enough footage. I washed up thoroughly afterwards and then Sophie went down on me. Her eyes were red from crying and she was uncomfortable as hell sucking me off after I had just ass-fucked the double. She was a trouper though, and she did her best. So did I, but it was pitiful. I finally squeezed out a pathetic dribble that would only pass for a come shot under very liberal interpretation.

Sophie had also washed and rinsed, and she did not taste bad. Still, my heart was not in it, and we did not click. I licked and nibbled for ten minutes before Andrew called it a wrap.

“Listen, Andy, you better find someone else for Monday. I’m not up for it, and Monday will be Charlie’s wake most likely.”

“Yeah, yeah, I can see where you’re coming from,” Andrew answered. “You wanna cancel all shoots next week?”

“Yeah, I better. Guess I’ll take a week or two off. I’ll let you know when I’m available again.”

I had a fresh bottle of Glenmorangie and I was just getting acquainted with its contents when my cell chirped.

“Mister Richard Borgward?” the male voice at the other end inquired.

I wondered who the hell this could be who knew my real name.

“Yes?” I asked cautiously.

“James McFadden, attorney at law. I am calling in the case of the deceased Miss Carlotta Hellstrøm, also known as Charlie Hell.”

“Yes?”

“Miss Hellstrøm named you executor of her will, and I am contacting you to deliver a letter from the deceased.”

Now I remembered. Three years ago, Charlie had gone through four months of AIDS scare when a guy she had worked with died of the disease. It had been early in her West Coast career, and she had gone bareback with him at the insistence of the producer. Anyway, she never tested seropositive, but during her scare she had written a will and she had asked me a favor. More of this later.

“Yes, I remember now. Should I come to your office?”

“As a matter of fact, I’m standing in front of your house. May I come in?”

“The better even. I don’t think I should drive.”

I let him in. He was a stuffy old man, clearly not the type you’d associate with clients such as Charlie. The letter he handed to me contained a sweet greeting from Charlie and a reminder of what I had promised. Somehow, that letter did me in. I started to cry like a fucking baby. Imagine that, Ricky Ryder, the toughest fucker west of the Rockies, cries his eyes out over a sweet farewell note from a ditzy blonde.

Obviously, McFadden was used to things like that when dealing with estate matters. I poured myself a double shot and offered another to McFadden. We solemnly toasted Charlie with well aged single-malt before he turned back to business.