Page 11--Hardfellas--Ryan Mattern

Today is the day Sally “Tally Ho” Briggs, star of some 500 adult blockbusters, the founding mother of “girlONgirl” cinema, will leave the business for good.

“You’ve been gettin’ sloppy Sal,” Nick, her grease-ball Italian agent told her, his cramped trailer-office littered with Diet Coke cans and Big Mac boxes. It smelled like a litter box used as an ashtray. Prune Day at the old folks home. “The last five or six shoots you’ve looked out of it. And not that sexy, droopy-eyed rape look——I could sell that——but that I don’t wanna be here, I’m slowly startin’ ta realize there’s more ta life then gettin’ fucked by a fake plastic dick look.” Sally took a cigarette from Nick’s pack sitting on his desk and lit it quick, tiny silver ghosts creeping out of her mouth.

“What can I do?” she asked.

“Act like ya want it, Sal! Act like you don’t wanna be just another flash-in-the-pan broad that no one beats it to in ten years.” Nick handed her a script for her upcoming shoot: Hardfellas, Cock-N-Roll Productions’ take on the Scorsese classic. She thumbed through it. Apparently, in the card game scene when Tommy shoots Spider in the foot——later Spider would tell Tommy to “go fuck himself!” which would inevitably be his last words——her character, Marie, brings the guys drinks and gets gangbanged by Henry, Tommy, Jimmy Conway and Frankie Carbone. It was Sally’s first dick-flick in a long time, and it was sure to be her comeback. In the industry, girls who only fuck girls tend never to last as long as the ones who hit for the cycle. “You can start by puttin’ that shit out!” Nick taking the cigarette from between her lips and dropping it into an empty soda can. “For Christ’s sake, you keep that up and ya face’ll look like a leather handbag.”

“All right, all right. Keep your hands off, you creep,” she said swatting Nick’s hands away.

“Ya test results will be in this afternoon. We’ll start shootin’ tomorrow.”

Sally hated that she had slept with Nick. In fact, it haunted her on more than one occasion, both on the job and off. She was doing a scene many years back in a movie called St. Elmo’s Firecrotch, the first time she had ever had to dye her pubes, and she had an issue on set that put an end to filming for the afternoon. It was the end of a big kegger scene where she went upstairs with Billy Hicks, the orange collar of his button-down shirt popped underneath his turquoise suit jacket a number of sizes too small. He laid on the bed as she mounted him and pulled his Ray-Ban sunglasses down past his nose and off his face. It was the first time in the entire shoot that she had seen Billy’s eyes, that deep green she despised. It stuck on her face like algae. Right then she was in Nick’s office-trailer, listening to his sickening New York accent tell her of how she’s going to be the queen of the industry. How she’s going to make lots and lots of money. How people are going to celebrate, love, WORSHIP her. How all she has to do is lay on the desk and close her eyes. She didn’t open them for long after he had finished. Nick was standing in the corner, zipping up his slacks and casually tossing his jacket over his shoulder then finally leaving. Sally just laid on the table with her eyes closed, feeling a warm and gooey stream start from her belly button running down to her thigh. Back in the frat house, she started hyperventilating as she sat on Billy’s now softened lap, then fell crying into his shoulder. He ran his fingers through her hair, telling her everything was going to be all right and not to cry, then mouthed to Mikey, the director, get this bitch offa me!


Embarrassed, she ran to her trailer, slamming and locking the hatch behind her. She sat underneath the fold-up table, biting her fingernails, swearing to god that this would be the last film she’d ever make. I’ve been doing this shit for ten years man, TEN YEARS, she said to the air vent who whispered an adversarial hum back to her. No more, she thought. No more.



*****

Sally left Nicky’s office upset about her tits. She checked them out in the driver side window of her Deville. Hmmpf, she sighed. All the doctors in Beverly Hills can only do so much. When she was in her prime, she could hold an open beer under her left one and pour it into a glass waiting underneath her right one. Her favorite party trick. But years of twisting, groping, tittyfucking, and Newton’s goddamned joke of gravity had left her treasures a little closer to her waist, a little more cone shaped than round, and a little less symmetrical. She had heard the term cross-eyed torso somewhere before and it immediately came to mind.

She got into her car, looking at herself in the rearview mirror. God these bags, she thought, pulling down the skin under her eye with her index finger. She remembered a time when things couldn’t be held in these bags. When wrinkles didn’t crack and run across her face like so many dried up rivers. The Tigris and Euphrates zigzagging from her forehead down. She decided her nose was the fertile crescent. All these horrid lines and aging scars, which would give some lucky woman dignity and validity, gave her nothing more than a stomachache. For she was in the younger, prettier business.

Sally turned on the radio with the button on the steering wheel. She listened to a static-ridden KFI broadcast about the state of the nation. Something like thirty percent of Americans out of work. Health care’s a joke. Homeless people are no longer allowed to sit down on the Santa Monica Pier. Mayor Villaragosa’s fucking some reporter from Telemundo. Edwards is campaigning despite his dying wife. KSSSHHHH. Just in, he’s also cheating on her. Twelve million Californian households are in some phase of foreclosure. Two San Diego high school students killed by illegal... She switches over to satellite radio and Confetti by the Lemonheads starts playing.

She’s crying. Harder than she has in a long time. Her car hasn’t stirred from its parking space and her head is against the dash. It’s a conflicted cry. She’s happy. But she feels guilty for being happy. People are starving, not getting the right medical treatment, being forced out of their houses and she’s making millions of dollars per film, living in a gated community in Diamond Bar, and for what? For her tongue? Her tits? The key and pitch of her fake orgasm wail? She’s miserable, miserable for feeling so very thankful that she has it so easy.


Sally again looks at herself in the rearview mirror and thinks of how ugly she looks when she cries. God, what a terrible actress she would make. She starts her car and takes the 10 to the 57 home.



*****

Being in the business so long, sex like anything loses its thrill. Sally had started to take her sex life in a dangerous direction——not only to her person, but in violation of her contract. Porn stars must disclose all relations with their agency, and use their assets off camera as little as possible. This helps preserve their appeal. Tiger Woods doesn’t go around smashing mailboxes with his putter. Same idea. Or maybe not, but you get the picture.

Sally had trained herself not to cum naturally. That way she could give her audience the kind of screaming, ecstatic, plane’s going down kind of orgasm they expected from her. This meant she had to resort to things weirder and kinkier than she’d every tried before. Acts stranger than those performed during Once Upon a Time in a Mexican Girl, where she appropriated a six shot revolver with Carolina. And what got her off completely were public places. The most outlandish were always on her mind.

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