“I’ll be your tampon any day,” the man said to a cherubic blonde who happened to be going down on another blonde, who was busy plunging a dildo into a brunette whose entire face had been swallowed in the gutter of the two-page spread. He flipped through the rest of the magazine quickly, until it was done, then tossed it aside.
“Purely Anal,” the man announced, shaking his head with what might have been delight. His head made a loud rustling sound inside the bag.
“This one’s kind of embarrassing. See this lady?” The man flipped the page. There was a picture of a disembodied white cock squirting onto the face of a black woman. “She’s always wearing sunglasses. See? Every picture.” The man turned the page and there was the same lady, giving a blow job, indeed wearing the same sunglasses. “It’s kind of cool, though. Almost a cult thing. This is a good one, actually, this issue. I think this is the one that, uh, deserves a reading.” The man hesitated. He stuck one of his hands up the bag to scratch his face, then reached down and readjusted himself. “Now I’m supposed to read this, right?” He stood up on the bed. For a second the camera zoomed in on his athletic socks, which had blue and white stripes at the top, then tilted queasily upward. The man was shifting uncertainly from foot to foot on top of the bed, his head close to the low ceiling, holding L’age légal away from his face at arm’s length with one hand.
“Halt!” he bellowed suddenly, in a labored Shakespearean baritone. “In this enseamed Greyhound station bathroom? But it is so dirty here, dear lass! Nay? Perchance, you cannot wait? My hot throbbing cock is bursting its seams and your loins cannot withstand it! Kneel then, by the porcelain throne yonder, as my hands caress your rock-hard nipples, as you take me unto yourself and my hot foaming jizz rushes like a cresting wave over your fair brow. Forsooth, your knees be raw, but thou art fucking me like a crazy bitch, a deeper and harder banging I hath ne’er imagined. Thy pussy, so wet, so fucking wet and—” The man, overcome with laughter, sat back down and bounced awkwardly a few times on the bed.
“Sorry, man. I couldn’t help it. I know I promised, but the writing in these things is pretty ridic, you know? Porn mags aren’t really about the writing. Sometimes I’ll be reading and, like, notice that I’m going along, correcting the grammar in my head? I’ll be like, ‘What the fuck?’ Psht.” He crossed his legs and went back to flipping through L’age légal. “Anyway, the other weird thing about this magazine? It totally isn’t purely anal. Look. Blow job. Fucking. Head. Head. Three-way.” The man kept flipping. “Anal. Only now we get to anal. The whole thing’s supposed to be anal and there’s, like, barely any butt action at all! But I kind of like the weirdness of it, like they’re tricking you into thinking it’s all anal. Even though,” he added, sotto voce, “I am really into anal sex.
“God, we have a lot to get through, man. This is a lot.” He paused, pulling another handful of porn out of the bag. “This bag is totally gonna rip soon, too. Want to know something weird? I bet my mom knows I have this stuff. She cleans in here. She must have found them by now. When my brother still lived at home, he kept his pornos under the bed, too. He’s the one who showed me. I could move them, I guess. Hide them better. But I like to be able to just reach under the bed, you know? It’s all about the easy access. And, OK, this is gonna sound really fucked up, but sometimes? Sometimes I think about my mom finding this stuff as I’m jerking off. Like, I picture my mom finding it and it gets me off that she pictures me getting off or something. Isn’t that fucking sick? You should bleep that out, dude. I can’t even believe I told you that. OK, but here are two more: Tight and Young and Tight. Young and Tight sounds like it would be good, right? But I actually like Tight better. It’s pretty disgusting.” He opened up an issue of Tight and flipped through it in silent contemplation. “I haven’t actually bought porn for a couple months, so these are all getting kinda stale. I mean, it’s not like I’ve squeezed everything I can out of every picture or anything. But I definitely could use another hit, you know? Whoa—I love this one. Check this out, man.” He held the magazine out to the camera, reading the title out loud. “‘The fragile beauty of young anal lesbians.’” He shook his head laughing again. “Hilarious.”
Then the man stood up but the camera stayed where it was and Anna could see only his midriff, his khaki shorts, and a roll of fat.
“Hey, do you want some cheese?” a voice asked from above. Then the midriff walked off camera and there was just the bed, the pile of porn, a lonely tentacle of ivy snaking down the wall. The sun hacked at the edges of the shades. The camera jumped to the ceiling, then cut out with a stab of static.
The scene reopened with the man’s ass backlit by the refrigerator. Asslit, Anna couldn’t help but think. He emerged holding a wedge of cheese on a plate, then made his way over to the sink to grab a cutting board. As the man rummaged in a drawer, the camera drifted around the room until it settled on a milk crate of empty beer bottles in the corner. The milk crate was set on top of another milk crate, also full of empties.
“Hey, you want some of this, man?” The camera swung back to the man, who was holding out a piece of cheese stuck to the flat end of a knife. “It’s Emmentaler. Good shit, seriously. I got it at the farmers’ market fresh. These two guys have, like, some kind of artisanal cheese farm out in Ashby and they truck it in on the weekends. Try it, man. It’s straight outta the sheep or whatever.” He waved the knife in front of the camera again. “Come on, man. It’s been all day, you must be hungry. At least have a glass of water or something …? OK, right. I forgot your whole thing.” The man snorted. “Who’s gonna watch this movie anyways? Me and cheese and butt fucking. Not exactly Avatar, man. You gonna have this in 3-D, too? Charge like sixteen bucks?” The man stuck the cheese into his mouth hole and chewed. “That’s not a bad name, by the way. Me and Cheese and Butt Fucking. You should remember that.”
He started walking back to his room and the camera followed.
“I was thinking of getting one of those pictures of the black lady in the sunglasses custom framed,” the man called over his shoulder. “With, like, a backing and glass and a really, really nice wood frame? Just as a joke. That’s only for when I get my own place, though,” he added. “Not while I’m still living here.”
Back in his room, he sat down on the bed and crossed his legs. “Back to work, right? OK. This one’s just, like, a catalog. They have a lot of ads for, you know, toys and videos. The place I go is basically a video store, by the way. Sugar’s. I remember going in there for the first time. It’s actually not far from here. You probably drove past it. Right after that Sunoco station at the exit? I was kind of scared. I walked in, looked around, and was like—whoa, these people are gross. Every time I go in, I’m thinking to myself, I’m definitely the least gross guy in here.” The man paused for a moment. “I almost got a toy for Kylie. But that was right before things got weird with us. We had butt sex once. Well, kind of …” The man trailed off. “Anyway, if you want to see that other stuff, it’s up in the closet. I’ve got some vintage, too, where it’s not all girls with Barbie doll parts—”
Then the camera suddenly swung to the door. A voice was calling from just outside.