Money was low. I had taken all of my checks to various backstreet check-cashing joints all over the city. They often had to be sought out. Fabric stores, shoe shops, and vendors of cheap, imported tourist trinkets were always a good bet. “Payday Advance” was the most commonly used euphemism.
Soon after receiving my last illicit ninety-three pounds from one of these transactions, I decided to see if my card would bear the cost of one more travel card for the underground. As soon as I slipped the useless strip of plastic into the machine, the screen blinked up RETAINED—RETAINED—CONTACT YOUR BANK OR FINANCIAL INSTITUTION. I hopped the turnstile with my last forty quid in my pocket and vowed to find another source of income.
WANTED. SALESPERSON. ADULT ENTERTAINMENT / BOOKSTORE. OVER 18 ONLY. NO CRIMINAL RECORDS. 15 P.H. CALL MICK.
Well, shit. There was money to be made in porno. Back in LA I had gotten paid $50 when I really needed money for dope to be an extra in a porno flick called Snatch Adams. The shoot had taken place in an abandoned hospital in a run-down neighborhood called Boyle Heights. I went along with a guy I knew from the methadone clinic called Speedball Eddie, who did this kind of shit as a profession of sorts. He would fill in as an audience member for any and all of the crap that was filmed in LA: Judge Judy, The People’s Court, Rosie O’Donnell, whatever. He’d make his dope money by just sitting there, clapping maniacally whenever the “APPLAUSE” light went on. Sometimes I’d catch a glimpse of him on my little portable TV, with his lopsided, self-administered Beatles haircut and his wide, brown, burn-out eyes, clapping like a seal for his fifty dollars, while more mundane human dramas than his own played out on-screen.
I thought the shoot might be kind of fun, but it wasn’t. It was odd and creepy. I was skagged out of my mind and so nothing really turned me on anymore. The hospital itself was like something out of some cheesy “after the apocalypse” kind of movie. The place was in total disarray: glass cabinets hung open as if people had looted the place and fled, gang graffiti covered a lot of the walls. Wandering the halls, Eddie and I came across room after room, each more forlorn and desolate than the last…overturned institutional tables…metal stretchers with frayed and worn leather restraints…trays of rusted, unusable, obscure medical instruments…it was possibly the coldest, least inviting place on the planet.
Our scene lasted less than a few moments. They filmed it at 11:30 in the morning. On a dirty-looking hospital bed, a blond, plastic-looking girl in a nurse’s uniform was being fucked by two guys. The director kept stopping and repositioning them, and then they’d carry on as if nothing had happened.
“Yeah…take it you fucking bitch!”
“Oh…Right there…. Faster…”
On cue, Speedball Eddie and I walked past the scene in white doctor’s coats. We paused, looked over at the action on the bed, and, unfazed by the sight of the woman getting screwed from behind as she sucked the other guy’s oddly oversized cock, we nodded to each other, made notes on our clipboards, and walked on. We were so close to them, you could smell the sex. And we had earned our fifty bucks, just like that. They actually offered Eddie an extra seventy-five if he would take part in a gangbang, but it would involve hanging around till 6:00 P.M., and Eddie had people to see. Despite the fact I would have turned down the money also, I was privately a little offended that they didn’t ask me as well.
So there was no embarrassment in my showing up for the interview for the porno store. When I called, Mick grilled me over the phone, mostly about whether I had a criminal record. When I insisted for the third time that I didn’t have one of any kind, he relented and told me to stop by the shop for an interview.
The store was on Wardour Street, the heart of the Soho porn trade. For a while it was the only place in the whole of the UK where you could buy hardcore porn legally. When the Internet rendered such laws obsolete, hardcore finally arrived in the provinces, but the porno trade is still one of the most thriving businesses in Soho, alongside prostitution, drugs, and trendy wine bars. I showed up five minutes early. Mick was still with the interviewee before me. The store was being watched by two kids, who looked like typical council estate boys—white trainers, chunky gold jewelry, cropped hair gelled tightly to their heads, bulldog tattoos and tracksuits.
“I’m here for the interview.”
“All right mate. ’E’s in the back right now. ’Ave a browse and ’e’ll be out in a bit.”
It was pretty typical fare. Dildos of varying shapes and sizes lined one wall. Magazines, with names like Color Climax, Euro Sluts, and Backdoor Beauties filled the center aisles. The other wall was covered in DVDs. In England, there is still a furtive feel to porno shops. It is how I imagine a liquor store in Utah would feel. There is a sense that what people here are doing is legal, but still beyond the pale and rather degenerate. A few embarrassed-looking customers shuffled in while I was browsing, men who refused to make eye contact with each other and who bristled with discomfort when the kids in the tracksuits threw out a casual “All right mate?” in their directions. A door against the back wall opened, and a big guy with a beard walked out, followed by the other guy there for the interview. He was wearing a dirty-looking T-shirt and jeans. I had at least made the effort to wear a shirt. Well shit, this asshole probably didn’t need the job as badly as I did. I nodded at the fat bastard with a beard and he introduced himself as Mick.
“Step into my office.”
The office turned out to be a stockroom, and a small one at that. It was stuffed with magazines and DVDs. Everywhere you looked there were spread cunts, asses, tits, and more erect cocks than I had probably seen in my entire life. The room was crammed and airless. Oh Christ, what if I got the job? I couldn’t turn it down, I needed the cash badly. But the reality of working in this store started to cut through even the insulation of the methadone I had injected before showing up and I started to feel claustrophobic and sick.
“Nice guy,” Mick said, by way of introduction. “I would have given ’im the job too. He’s done this kind of thing before. But he had a criminal record. Can’t hire someone with a criminal record. Do you have a criminal record?”
“No,” I told him, again.
“I mean, it’s not that I give a shit what anyone’s done in the past, right? It’s the fucking council. They’re all over this trade. They’d close us down if they could. They control it from the fucking ground up! Basically, if you take this job, you’re working for Westminster Council. That’s why I have to ask. Fill this in, will you? I’ll be right back.”
He handed me a blurry, photocopied form. It had only a handful of questions: name, date of birth, national insurance number, address, and, finally, “Do you have a criminal record—y/n?” and he left me alone. I filled out the form and waited for Mick to return. On the shelf above me, a huge pink dildo poked out over my head like the sword of Damocles.
Dave came back in and gave my application form a cursory glance, before placing it on his desk.
“You done this kind of work before?”
“Well, shop work, yeah. I know how to work a till. But it’s been off-licenses and music shops. Not porn.”
“That’s all right. Here, I want you to take a look at something.”
He pulled a magazine from a pile on his desk. It was called Anal Cream Pies. I looked at the cover, which showed a close-up of a red-looking anus with a huge drip of semen hanging from it. Next to the ass was a blond girl with an extended tongue. She was winking at the camera as the cum leaked from the ass onto her tongue. It wasn’t quite embarrassment that I felt. It was an oddly disassociated feeling. It was the oddness of the situation that was the worst—pawing through a hardcore porn mag, in a tiny stockroom, with a big sweaty bearded guy called Mick all but sitting on my knee. By my standards, I’ll admit, it was pretty tame. In LA I had injected enough meth and smoked enough crack that I had found myself in plenty more bizarre situations than this. Still, it wasn’t Sunday school.
“Take a look inside,” Mick instructed.
I did. The front cover had pretty much said it all, to be honest. The magazine consisted of photosets, all telling the story of how a young woman—or a pair of young women—end up getting an anus full of semen. Each picture had a caption in German, Spanish, French, and oddly translated English: “Pretty Anna is surprised by presences of her boss Duke, in the after hours of the office. ‘Oh’ says Anna ‘I thought you had left, Duke!’…‘Not yet. You and your sweet little ass are burning the midnight oils I can see,’ Duke sneers, loosening his belt.”
“Does it offend you? The magazine? Cos it’s exactly the kind of thing we sell here.”
“Well, the grammar’s a little offensive. But apart from that…no.”
“The grammar? How’d you mean?”
“The little bits of story they have under here. Does anybody actually read that?”
“I’ve never given it much thought.”
I handed the magazine back to Mick. He looked at me with a sardonic grin. I started to worry that he thought I was trying to be a smart arse. I needed the job. Fuck. If I didn’t get it, no rent, no drugs. Rent I could deal with, except without a fixed address I stood to lose my methadone script, which didn’t bear thinking about. I decided to shut the fuck up and speak when spoken to.
“Okay. Lets role play,” Dave said, leaning forward.
“Sure.”
“A geezer comes in, right? And he wants a contact mag. D’you know what a contact mag is? It’s a mag that carries adverts for people who want to meet up for sex. Men looking for women. Women for men. Men for men. Women for women. Men for sheep. You get the idea, right?”
“Yes.”
“And he needs one for, say, West London. He’s looking for a dominatrix in West London. Right?”
“Right.”
“But we only have a mag that deals with piss drinkers in South London.”
“Erm…yes…”
“Do you tell him to come back when the mag is in stock next week? Or do you just sell him the piss drinker contact mag for South London regardless?”
I knew where this was going. This was just another “fuck the mooch over for money” gig. This I could deal with. This interview I could nail.
“I’d sell him what we have in stock,” I tell Mick. “Don’t let ’em walk out without buying something.”
“Good!”
Fuck it was hot in there. And small. I could hear the bastard breathing in and out.
“Okay, here’s another one. Let me show you this….”
He rummaged though the junk on his desk again, this time coming up with a small bottle of clear liquid.
“Spanish fly,” he informed me with a leer, handing the little bottle over for me to look at. It reminded me of those little bottles of amyl nitrate I used to sniff to get high when I was younger. “You know what Spanish fly is?”
“Sure.”
“This is the original, mate. Before all of that Viagra rubbish. Spanish fly keeps you hard for hours and drives the women mental. Thirty quid a bottle, that goes for. It’s the pheromones, you see?”
I looked the unassuming bottle over again. It seemed inconceivable that grown men could fall for shit like this.
“Would you still sell this,” Mick continued, “if I told you that there was nothing more potent than ginger ale in that bottle?”
“Sure. Why not?”
“Right answer!”
Mick leaned over and shook my hand. “I have one more geezer to see today, so I’ll give you a call in the afternoon. Thanks for your time.”
“No problem.”
“Hey, before you go…could I interest you in some Spanish fly? Drives the women crazy!” He cackled his dirty smoker’s laugh again, and I told him, “I think I’ll pass, thanks.” Walking out of the shop and into a Soho afternoon, I felt gripped by the complete patheticness of my situation. In six years I had gone from someone who had just gotten signed to a major record label, embarked on a world tour, and been on the verge of truly great things to a penniless junkie, banking on getting a job in a Soho porn shop so I could earn enough to feed my habit. I started to laugh a little, but it was a sad kind of laugh so I stopped again. It sounded stilted, forced, and ugly as it bounced off the bricks of Walker’s Court.