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It was a glorious summer, heat and spiky aloes and the clear desert air and all this optimism, this crazy cabalistic energy or synergy or whatever the fuck we called it and there was Waldo Deutsch, impresario, pornographer and CEO of Beavershoot Productions. Waldo in his short-sleeved Hawaian shirt, prematurely bald, smoking a cowboy killer outside La Luna, ‘Hey babes I can take you behind the green door… through the slits in the sky where the stars peep through.’
I was a young girl from Wisconsin, dreams of being an actress, heading to where the neon burned bright. I could sing and strum folk guitar, cutesy songs about bad-assed badgers but I was drawn to the dark, the homicides, the cop killings, all the shady stuff in the valley. Waldo sensed all that when we locked eyes. He told me he was doing a movie: Zombie BumFuck 4—part of a successful franchise. The zombies didn’t eat people’s brains. When they turned they bum-fucked strangers, the women zombies wore strap-ons, and they went at it anywhere but mostly supermarket floors. It was high-concept, low-budget straight to video schlock-horror. Why didn’t I pop over to Westwood tomorrow where they were filming in an old gymnasium? Waldo’s brother-in-law worked nights as a janitor and held a spare set of keys.
That night I had this dream that I was dressed in white and studying The Iconography of the Virgin. The women from my church stood with their arms and legs crucified wide, trembling as they faced the altar with vaginas open for Jesus, waiting for the Holy Spirit to come inside of them (I bet he promised to pull out too) and my legs crept apart and then I was surrounded by all these unwashed Jesus lookalikes in bell bottoms and beards, patched up with blood and exploded sausage meat all heading to the gymnasium.
We filmed nights and I didn’t want to let Waldo down. The film would pay for his wife’s dialysis treatment. Waldo told us we were the brave ones, the truth seekers, being penetrated and interpenetrated and bum-raped in the name of the avant-garde, with our big hairy 70s bushes. Not like the depilated eunuchs of today. I don’t think I’ll forget all the bodies coughing on the gymnasium floor while egg white dripped from the vaulting horse.
By the time I found out that Waldo didn’t have a wife we were in to the second night’s shoot and I was sore and had a rash on my thighs. Waldo kept whispering things, ‘we’re on a different vibrational frequency… we have to ignore presets,’ and then he asked me to do a scene with him: a private high-quality one-on-one tantric tease video. I guess that’s how it all went right for me. But today the optimism has gone. The synergy of that Summer was special.
About Daniel Jeffreys
Writer, acid-folk guitarist and community librarian hoping to find peace among the rolling shelves . My stories have appeared in AMBIT, LITRO, The London Magazine,The Lampeter Review and Esquire. I review books for The TLS and Tablet and have a special interest in the 'strange tale.'
It really exploded off the page, i got a sense of those big spaces and the craziness of LA. What really struck me was the dirty innocence of the protagonist, her wide eyed openness to all the weirdness making me unsure who was exploited— I’m afraid I look at porn rather a lot and wish I didn’t but this nails the naivety and the fuck-ups who think they’re getting their kit off in the name of liberation. Nice one
I was aiming for wide eyed innocence a dirty cracked mirror thanks for reading
Short but thorough, much like the experiences of the girl from Wisconsin. Deutsch could conceivably have been Jigsaw’s predecessor, albeit with satyriasis.
Sandy it sounds like you might be a veteran of the adult entertainment industry. Jigsaw, do you mean the high street shop? Short but thorough I wanted a concentrated burst