‘Is that a friend?’ I ask. ‘Who is that lady?’
‘That’s Maxi Mounds,’ says Woody. This is the legendary Maxi Mounds, the most enhanced woman in the world, on paper at least. But as a quick call to her agent confirmed, she is currently retired. It’s hard to picture a woman that looks like that being ‘retired’. I can’t picture her playing for pennies at a local bridge club, or wandering the aisles of B&Q, looking for solar-powered garden lamps. Maybe she just knits.
‘Woody, I’ve just noticed one of the films there is The Milking of Minka,’ I say. I suspect it’s thin on plot. ‘And then there is another one called The Orient Express, what’s the storyline in that one?’
‘It’s the Orient Sexpress,’ corrects Woody.
I wasn’t playing dumb. That’s how green I am about these things – I actually missed the very demonstrative pun. I go on reading the blurb about it. ‘Starring Minka, Mr Hanks…Is that Tom Hanks?’ Now I am playing dumb.
‘That was me,’ says Woody.
‘Oh, you were in one of those movies?’
‘I have done a lot of the movies with her.’
This is a surprise – I didn’t have Woody down as front of house. So it turns out, like Bogart, his doppelganger, he has a career on celluloid too. Though I suspect The Orient Sexpress isn’t quite the cinematic masterpiece that Casablanca is.
‘So you have starred in these adult movies, most of the movies?’ I ask.
‘Yes, because there is things she will do with me in a video that she won’t do with other guys.’
‘OK,’ I say.
He goes on. ‘She will do me orally without a condom, but she hasn’t done that lately and she has got to go back, she has got to go back to doing the nasty stuff for it to sell.’
I go on to ask him what the nasty stuff is. He gives me an example.
‘Well, do you know the expression cream pie?’ he asks.
‘No I don’t.’ I don’t.
‘It’s when a guy comes into the woman and you have a close-up of the vagina as the semen comes out,’ he says nonchalantly.
The expression ‘I wish I hadn’t asked’ can’t be more appropriate at this juncture. And I have had those moments in the past. I’ve asked plenty of women who were overweight when the baby was due. And, enquiring as to how long they were staying with us, I asked a gravely ill friend, ‘When do we lose you?’ Thankfully they actually survived, and spared my blushes…
But asking Woody to elaborate on the context of the ‘nasty stuff’ is my gravest error. Aside from the misfortune of being presented with this image in my mind, I am amazed at Woody’s sheer boredom at describing these things. It’s like when the heroes of the trenches during the First World War became very sanguine, nay flippant, about death and images of death, so Woody is a veteran of the sex industry and thus has a certain attitude to the human body and its reproductive processes, which is reflected in the language he uses. But how can you possibly talk about your wife in these terms? It struck me at the time as cold and brutal, and even now, looking back on it, fills me with a sadness.
But the flipside of it is they are married and she did nurse him through cancer and I think they genuinely care for each other. Love comes in all shapes and sizes and though I felt sorry for one of the parties involved, ultimately their relationship functions. It works and each partner has a set of duties and expectations on them which are wholly unconventional and unedifying, but that is the relationship. It’s ironic to think that this dysfunctional union has escaped the statistic of one in three marriages failing. Woody and Minka, for all of the horror of their domestic arrangements, are still together after all these years. And they clearly need each other.
‘Minka, how do you feel about this, this business of having to do the nasty stuff?’ I ask. She is leaning on the ironing board, which is creaking at the combined weight of her, and her breasts.
‘Hmm, I have to do it, I have to do it. They want to see something different, you know. I have to do it. It’s money yeah. Income,’ she says.
I feel that she’s rehearsing the party line. But she believes it too. That said, there is no enthusiasm in her answer. It strikes me as a doleful acceptance of the status quo. They do live in a big house. They have cars, jewellery, and huge medical bills (welcome to America). Minka has certain material expectations which trap her in a job she would rather not be doing. But while plenty of people compromise professionally to keep themselves in iPods, foreign holidays and posh sausages, few have to make their bodies available to the latest well-hung movie star. And even fewer have to pay the 24/7 price of carrying these monsters around, even when asleep. Minka’s never off duty from her own body.
‘But is money really worth it for what, you know, for what you go through?’ I ask Minka, pushing this point.
‘Money, money, power. Money control whole, all over the world. Right?’ she says.
Woody fires up, almost evangelically. ‘You can’t live without money,’ he announces. ‘The bottom line, this is a business; any business the bottom line is money and you got to do what you got to do to make the money.’
Minka then interjects, supporting Woody. They’ve cornered me. It’s good cop, bad cop. Big-boobed cop.
‘They want to see something different, you know. I have to do it. It’s money yeah. Income,’ she says.
She seems convinced. And it’s time to experience one of the fruits of Minka’s labours now. It’s time for Minka’s tennis game at her local club. We are on our way in the car. A white Mercedes with cream leather seats. The seats are firm, not mushy. The Germans don’t do mushy. Woody has the hangdog expression of a professional chauffeur as he ferries his VIP with the USPs to her next engagement.
There is a brief, amusing argument about how Minka is flaky when it comes to her financial paperwork. Woody is still sore from a lost three-week period in which Minka didn’t put her petrol receipts through the books. Something you’d think would be hard to get cross about, but Woody’s rage grows as he recalls this fiscal misdemeanour. There’s a serious hue to this discussion though, as at the heart of it Woody is anxious that she couldn’t manage on her own without him. A scenario less abstract for him than most, since his brush with the big C. Minka reverts to her inner pouting teenager during this discussion. The look on her face says ‘woteva’. She claims none of this is true, though notably she offers no evidence in her defence. I tend to side with Woody on this one. He’s clearly business-minded to the core and, like all American citizens, has an acute, vitriolic hatred of paying tax. They continue to and fro with this argument, which has a rehearsed familiarity to it – it feels like one of their argumentative ‘greatest hits’. Like a well-meaning child sitting in the back, I change the subject to try to stop ‘mummy and daddy’ bickering. In much the way I used to try to stop my parents having their occasional ruck. Except I’m not related to these people, and I’m a thirty-five-year-old man.
‘So how often do you play tennis?’ Trying to sound cheery, to break the tension.
‘Every morning,’ says Woody grumpily. ‘Her world revolves around tennis.’
‘Oh really?’
‘Her entire lifestyle revolves around tennis,’ he repeats.
‘Minka…?’
She doesn’t have time to speak.
Woody