Chapter 13

(This chapter has been shortened and reposted – I added way too much to it AFTER my editor had read it. Hope it reads a little easier now.)

Before I started on counting up the points in Mel’s favor, I called her, just to check up how she was doing. She picked up quickly, but sounding wary, as if she was expecting that this would be the call to dump her, anticipating hurtful words. I promised her that I would make no rush decisions, and that I’d meet her face to face real soon to tell her how I felt. She sounded a little better after that. It seemed from her voice like she was suffering badly, maybe wondering if she’d done the wrong thing telling me about her past, and that possibility worried me. I liked her too much to want to prolong her time in limbo beyond what was truly necessary for me to make my decision.

I remembered that she’d mentioned her agent; I looked him up and was heartened by what I saw. He seemed the real deal if his website was anything to go by, but it might just be that he was good at bullshit marketing. He had a small and select stable of top performers, and he stated that he was helping them all set themselves up ready for life after porn with financial advice. That seemed a much longer-term approach than the things I’d heard about most talent agents – though having seen Atlanta take some abusive gigs while booking through him, he clearly wasn’t a saint.

What else had I learned as I’d tortured myself watching her clips? Actually, a whole load of useful stuff if we were gonna try and build our relationship. Some cautionary, some inspirational.

Man, that lady could do conflict. There were many early scenes where she fought with her stepbrother, raged at her dad or step-dad, dissed her mom, broke up with guys, caught them cheating, and in every one of them I could see the smoldering anger underlying the acting. It seemed like it came naturally, but it was often accompanied by a potty mouth that I hadn’t experienced from her myself. A couple of the movies, the F-bomb was probably the most common word in the script, if there was a script. Yeah, so she was nineteen, twenty at the time, so a lot of that exposed rage was probably fueled by normal teenage anxieties. What with having to pay for college, it most likely had been an anxious time in her life.

Marsha and I had had our moments of fighting, but could I handle this level of upset if it ever happened? I suspected / hoped that much of Mel’s screaming was acting, but if she ever tried that with me, we might be in for trouble. The staged conflict was absent from her later work; there were a few scenes where there was some scripted disagreement, but most of the time she was calm and businesslike. I guess she’d matured. There had certainly never been any of that when I’d been with her, even when we’d witnessed some appalling (even for LA) driving, she’d not used that word.

She had also done quite a few ‘cheating’ movies, where the ‘plot’ was that her boyfriend or husband was out of town, or had been with another woman, or wasn’t doing his job of keeping her sexually satisfied, or she was just looking for a wild time. The scripted rows tended to happen in this genre. I tried to make a note that I’d need to ask her about that; I guessed it was an easy screenplay to write to explain why such a lovely girl was hooking up with a guy who didn’t seem to have a whole lot to offer her other than a big cock; didn’t need a whole lot of character development or plot backstory. There was one particularly nasty scene where a tattooed black ‘bull’ used her brutally on her marital bed; erotically it did absolutely nothing for me, and from her facial expression, I guessed that she had merely endured it, thinking of the check with her name on it.

Okay, as a porn actor for ten years, Mel had a whole lot of sexual experience: way, way more than me. I had no idea if I could even physically manage some of the positions she’d had sex in, but I was more than willing to give it a go, as long as I didn’t give myself a hernia or slip a disc. I wasn’t sure that I could go as far on the mistreating her as some of her partners had gone; although I had to assume it was mostly acting and that no lasting damage or pain were inflicted, some of it was a little far down the BDSM route for my comfort zone. I was also assuming that the real nasty stuff had been for the money, not for the enjoyment, and she wouldn’t want to do that as part of a ‘normal’ intimate relationship.

Not that the new ‘normal’ would ever be the same as the old ‘normal’ for me, not after viewing that much hard porn. I’d learned things that, to be honest, I’d have much preferred to remain ignorant of.

From the social media entries, I’d worked out something else.

She was lonely, had been for years.

To tell the truth, I suspected that ‘lonely’ wasn’t a big enough word to cover it.

Alone in a big city, friendless and estranged from her family, isolated by her work, not knowing who she could trust, having to be watchful all the time. The victim of some real hurtful comments on social media and the online porn sites. I knew that for sure from her Twitter feed and some comments on her Instagram uploads. I’m man enough to admit it. When I read that old tweet on her timeline, three years back, the one that simply said ‘80 days til my birthday!‘, I cried. I shed tears for the sad lonesome woman who’d had nothing better to do that weekend than count days on her calendar and get on Twitter to tell her fans. She had no close friends who’d throw her a surprise birthday party; I wondered if she’d received any actual paper cards or gifts, or whether it was only tweets responding to her reminder the day before she turned 27. Heartbreaking, utterly fucking heartbreaking. I’d never been that alone in my life, always had someone to turn to. She hadn’t got anyone. Back then, she hadn’t even got her dogs for company.