“–Providence. . .” says the voice born not of woman’s the womb but from the cleverness of man.
My eyes snap open, the first breath of the day draws across my windpipe like a steel rake on a sidewalk. A swallow to wet my throat pushes my heart back down to its proper place from where it was sitting between my ears; when the thrumming fades to tolerable I notice the cellie ringing. I paw the phone off the night stand and onto the bed as the vestiges of the dream blow away on my neighbor’s Regaeton music. I missed three other calls but I snatch this one by the tail before it gets away.
I start the day off with a lie, “Good morning,” and re-close my eyes again, sifting through what my subconscious was trying to tell me. Futile, don’t have the tools; I catch and release a thought back into the stream and pick up her words buzzing those little bones in my ear.
“– next week, and she said she would really appreciate it.”
I say, “Who?”
“Candi Stix. She’s on the agency’s website. If she wasn’t one of our girls I wouldn’t even bother to ask…are you having a party?”
“No, it’s my neighbor. Look, Cindy, you guys know I don’t fuck with blowjob scenes, and I sure as hell don’t wanna commit myself to a full day for only $300 when you’ll most likely get another call for me to do a regular scene at my full rate for the same day.”
Where’s that other slipper, I gotta take a piss.
“I know, honey. It’s her boyfriend’s first directing gig and she especially wants to work with you in an interracial scene. She never does interracial scenes! Aren’t you excited?”
The cell is pinched in the crook of my neck. “It’s a blowjob scene–” I toe the toilet seat up and pee. “–and no, not really. I’m not gonna dance like Snoopy and frankly I’m getting sick of this “I-don’t-do-black-guys-but-you-don’t-count, Tyler” policy these bimbo’s have. But what the hell, I’ll do it for you.”
The tooth-rattling bass from next door stops right as I pin the words, “for you”, to the back wall as they say in theater-speak.
“Thank yoouuu!”
I shuffle to the kitchen. “Yeah.”
A screaming rips the air from my primary-colored id; Carlito, my parrot, reminds me of how he feels about me as I pass his birdie apartment. You can fool people but you can’t fool animals. I grab a slice of provolone from the fridge for me, a strawberry for him. The raptor ignores the berry and takes a nick from my finger. I negotiate a trade–my flesh for fruit–drag my feet back to the bedroom.
“Okay, sweetie. I’ll e-mail you the info!”
“Uh-huh.” Back in bed, cellie still between my shoulder and cheek. I don’t bother to hang up.
I drift.
——–
“Thanks, for coming, Tyler. This will be…interesting.”
She’s how the Swiss Miss would look if she paid her way through shrink-school working as a dominatrix. Her face, metric and precise is a world-class diamond etched by laser. This rivaled only by her delicious cunning. Formidable. Pussy does strange things to a man; stories of men doing stupid shit for the favor of a woman like her in history books are legion.
“Sure thing,” I say, “what’s the set-up?”
We are inside Rustler’s studio deep in Porn Valley. Specifically an all white room, the absence of delineation from floor to wall to ceiling robs the eye of sense of depth or focal point and is disorienting. In the center of the white room sits a toaster-sized black cube on a white stand. If I didn’t know the stand was there I’d think the black box is floating. A floor-safe sized cube is on the floor next to the stand.
She says, “Think Kubrick’s 2001. The idea is for us to establish a master shot with this small box here and–”
Her words are severed mid-thought, she looks over my shoulder and smiles. Feeling the vibration of the foot falls, I turn.
He moves with the grace of Big Bird lumbering down the catwalk in Jean Paul Gauthier swimwear; heels punch the concrete with each step. He stops in front of us and drops the plastic milk crate he is carrying on the concrete with a tympanum-rupturing slap.
“Hey babe,” Candi says to the boyfriend, “why don’t you explain the shot to him.”
The man looks me up and down. He looks disappointed. “Yeah. Right. So the idea is to shoot the small, black cube in this white room as if it’s floating. Candi slinks up to the little box and traces a finger on its surface. The black box senses her beauty–and who wouldn’t, right?–and gets an erection!!”
The excited director dives into the milk-crate and rummages around, tossing out bottles of douche, lube, and a packet of baby wipes. I got my usual wisecrack ready but it falls dead to the floor from my lips because…
“And this is the box’s cock!” He yanks a flopping, rubber dong out of the milk-crate and thrusts it into the air with the hyperventilating exhilaration of King Arthur freeing Excalibur from the stone.
…he’s waving my dick in ecstasy like trailer trash holding a winning Lotto ticket. Yes, my dick. Well, my signature sex toy, anyway. This is the first time I’ve seen the finished product. Their angle, why Candi is making this racial exception, is immediately clear. I say nothing. He may as well have taken my dildo and slapped the clever right out of my mouth.
He takes a deep gulp of air before continuing, “This beautiful black cock will just materialize from the box and Candi will suck it off!! We then fade out and when we fade back in, it’s you inside this big box–” he tosses the dong into the milk crate, trots over with astounding grace to the larger of the black cubes and hoists it over his head. He looks like a caveman poised to smash a rabbit. He sings his next words, “–with-your- real-dick-sticking-out-of-it! Forced perspective! See the hole here? Anyway,” he drops the box, “Candi sucks you off and then the cock–your cock– retracts into the cube!!”
I stand there. My eyes dart from the little box on the pedestal–the “Tyler Knight Vibrating Dildo”–the big cube–back to the phallus. Candi walks up to me, drapes her arms around my shoulders. Our pelvises touch; I feel her heat.
She coos into my ear, “Just think about your pulsing dick between my lips. My tongue is sooo soft.”
It’s as though a flashbang grenade has gone off at my feet. My mind is a virus-riddled PC stuck in infinite loop struggling to reset. All kinds of shit swirls in my head. The supa-fly Tyler inside me wants to tell them to kiss my ass, but the warmth from her muff transfers through her pants into mine, baking my penis like rising bread. She plants a one-sided kiss on my lips, her molten sex buckles my knees, and Candi and the director leave me alone with the props. A black guy in an all white room.
Decision time.
In the end, I’m no less doomed than any other man beguiled by a femme fatale. I get in that fucking box.
Continued…
Tagged: Creative Memoir
