When I went back upstairs, I had to face the task of viewing Paul’s compilation tape. The package he had sent over sat on my dining table like an exquisitely wrapped letter bomb. Disguised, discreet and perverse—exactly the way I was supposed to like things.
I sliced my way through the brown paper and cellophane. Exposed, the black plastic box bore an O-Tech logo and the title Microcircuit Sequence Systems: The Basics. Only a small red X in the upper right corner, and its tiny subscript reading “PM Videos,” signaled a variation from the usual corporate training fare.
When I took out the video cassette, however, identification got a bit more explicit. The label read Virgin Sacrifice, Live, Vol. 3. I could imagine the cardboard slipcase that would be added by enthusiastic graphic designers in the fly-by-night dubbing mills of Shanghai. With the Asian—particularly Japanese—market in mind, they would lift stills of the very youngest girls, adding a block of provocative text in demotic Chinese and bizarrely translated English.
Once the tape started, I saw immediately that Paul had gone for an outlaw effect. Everything was done by available light, and the moving figures had a ghostliness I associate with early video art. The decor was familiar—a U-shaped group of couches set around a low table bearing liquor bottles and dope. Nearby was an open space for dancing, and beyond that a doorway.
A mobile shot eventually took the viewer through the entrance and down a short hallway to a smaller room. In the center was an inflatable children’s swimming pool filled with a glutinous muck that looked like a mix of tapioca and mud. It was here, when things got serious, that the girls—mostly naïve party-lovers or early-teen runaways—would sometimes tumble and roll with each other, or be shoved down and mounted from behind by the Donkey.
El Burro, as his stitched monogram read, was a short Hispanic guy, about forty, who usually performed the climactic “sacrifice.” At first, when I saw him standing around in a kind of boxing robe, I didn’t really get the nickname. Then, with the first girl drugged and caressed, lightly kissed, ready, almost entranced as she was petted by three or four men, El Burro opened the robe like a theater curtain, and I understood.
The excerpts already sped up the seduction process, edited into a series of predictable acts: initial flirtation with soft words and light touches, followed by drinking and doping, group dancing, petting, some erotic roughhousing, more intoxicants. Then, in the back room, to cheers—full-on sex. Sometimes one wrangler took a girl through the entire process, alternating outrageous sweetness with an iron insistence and subliminal threats; at other times, the young mark passed from one guy to the next until she was delivered up to El Burro.
The repeated arcs of the little drama threatened to grow monotonous, but the variety of the girls—their physical types, their innocence or fake cynicism, their responses to booze or hash or the sight of a bare male organ, their reluctance or alacrity in the carnal act—created an insistent forward-surging-and-retreating structure, recalling episodes in some harsh, long-practiced initiation rite.
A remote control, like the one in my hand, made it possible for connoisseurs to pause, freeze frame, go back and repeat a favored passage in slow motion. Volume could be easily adjusted for those who preferred purely visual stimulation or those who got off on the confused, pathetic, occasionally overly eager vocalizations of the virgins. Only a few of them actually cried.
When the show was done, I lay back for a long while on the bed, looking at the blank blue of the screen and listening to the whir and click of the VCR as it rewound the tape. With the machine chattering relentlessly, I viewed the images again in my mind—backwards this time, in quick succession—as though each forlorn girl were being instantaneously restored, at a comic pace, to her original inviolate state, ready to fall again.
I picked up the phone and called Paul.
“Wasn’t it great?” he said.
“It had its moments.”
“Did you see that one red-haired chick who…”
“I saw it all.”
Calmly, but with a hint of urgency, I told Paul I had a business prospect for his producers. Something much more than distribution to the Balthus Club members, much more than their attendance at the tapings for three grand per head. I could double PM Video’s international reach and therefore its profits.
“It’s not up to me,” he said. “I don’t get involved in the marketing plan.”
“Who runs the show then?”
“I told you, Sammy, my backer. And a Chinese guy he knows.”
“Then hook me up with them. You’re good at that, right? I’d like to discuss this opportunity, one businessman to another.”
“If you ask to meet these guys, they’ll check you out first. Everything, you know. I already told them about Hogan.”
“What did they say?”
“They said they knew how to handle guys like him. One way or another.”
“All right then, let’s make some money together.”
Once we hung up, I went into the bathroom and waited forever until the water turned hot enough to wash my face and hands. I stood with my head lowered, while the tape distribution proposal formed itself solidly in my mind, tight and graceful as a poem. Opening the medicine cabinet to take out the sleeping pills, I glanced up and saw my face flash by, unreadable in the swinging mirror. I looked away.