Porn Star(101)

I give up going out, I give up talking to friends. I spend my spare time reading through my poetry collection and reading The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Astronomy, because reading about space and the stars makes me feel closer to Devi.

I give up texting and calling her, but I don’t give up waiting for the phone to ring. It never does though.

I film two more scenes after Devi breaks up with me. The first is with a performer named Candi Hart and the second is with Ginger. I feel itchy and empty after both, even though Tanner tells me that they are some of the best scenes I’ve ever shot.

“You’re so f*cking in the zone lately,” he says as Ginger and I clean up after our scene. “Damn, you were intense.”

I shrug, because what can I say? That I have to completely disassociate myself from all emotion and thought in order to do the scenes? That I’m disgusted with myself as I f*ck other women, as I come for them, because Devi is the only woman I want to touch now?

After Tanner leaves, I trudge upstairs to my office. It’s been a week since Devi left me, and I’ve become a hollow version of myself. Even editing and writing my monologues is a terrible chore, and the worst task of all is finishing up edits of the last Star-Crossed scene because all it does is remind me of the heartbreak that came after the camera turned off. Every glance of hers in the footage, every pull of her mouth—I can see her confusion and pain so clearly now. How f*cking self-absorbed and arrogant was I that I didn’t see it before?

I can only watch a few minutes of the footage before the grief and guilt threaten to engulf me, and I have to turn it off. I’ll edit my scene with Ginger from today instead.

Except I can’t.

I plug in the external hard drive Tanner saved the scene to, and the minute I open it up, I know I can’t do it. Even just the still image of me cradling Ginger’s face at the beginning makes me cringe, because it’s something I used to do with Devi.

No. It’s more than that. I did it with Devi because I do it with almost every girl I work with. That move never belonged to just Devi and me, it always belonged to me and the hundreds of other girls I’ve worked with.

I can’t articulate to myself exactly why this bothers me so much right now, but it does. I try to force myself to look past it and press play, but the moving footage is even worse, even when I try to fast-forward to the less personal parts. But seeing my body pressed against Ginger’s, my hands rough on her tits while I f*ck her, it makes me sick to my stomach with shame. Not Puritanical, anti-sex shame—I’m not ashamed of having sex or making porn—but a deeply personal shame, as if I’ve betrayed more than Devi by filming those two scenes after she left. As if I’ve betrayed myself.

Which should be a ridiculous thought. How could I be betraying anything or anyone by merely doing my job? I try to remember all the things I’ve said before. It’s just a job. It’s only sex. But they don’t feel true any longer.

I close out the footage and pace around my office, running my hands through my hair. It doesn’t make any sense to me, any part of my life right now. I’m wrecked, emotionally and mentally and spiritually, but I can still get hard for other women, still come for them. How is that? Is it because, like I told Tanner all those weeks ago, porn stars have a more evolved concept of love and can separate it from sex? Or is it because I’m a man, and men are wired to f*ck indiscriminately?

No, I don’t think that’s it either, and not only because Tanner would rant for hours about gender essentialism if I told him I’d even considered that last one as a reason.

No, what I think is that maybe I’ve been asking the wrong question of myself—not how I can still f*ck other women, but why.

Maybe men and women aren’t naturally wired to be monogamous, maybe anyone can turn off their brain and their heart, and let their bodies respond to presented stimuli. But maybe that’s what makes relationships different. And special. Maybe that’s why people have given up their sexual freedoms for the last several millennia in order to bind themselves to someone else. Because it’s the sacrifice, the continued and repeated choosing of one person over all the others in the world, that makes a relationship stand apart, that makes a relationship significant and rare and unique.

So the real question is: why do I choose to share myself with other women when I only want to share myself with Devi? Why do I do this job when it means struggling against a heart that just wants to devote itself to one woman and one woman alone?

I don’t know if it’s right to change for someone you love, but I do know that it’s right to change for yourself, if that’s what you want. But is it what I really want? Devi’s so young, still so full of energy and opportunity, and it’s easy for her to change direction and start a new life. But how can I walk away from something I’m good at, that makes me a lot of money, without having anything certain in my future? What if I give up everything for her and she doesn’t want me anymore?

I sit back down in my office chair and stare at the bulletin board by my desk. It’s mostly covered in tax receipts and Post-It notes, but I’ve pinned something else up in the middle, The Hanged Man tarot card from my reading with Madam Psuka. I stuck it up there as a memento of my first real date with Devi, but now it seems like more than a reminder. It’s a call to action.

No growth comes without sacrifice, Sue said, and isn’t that exactly what Devi and the psychic tried to explain to me about the card? That The Hanged Man represented sacrifice and suffering without the guarantee of a reward, because the wisdom gained through the experience would be its own reward?