“Yeah!”
“No! I jerked off to one of your scenes the other day!”
I’ve never talked to a pornstar before, so I’m not sure if this compliment is appropriate or out of line. I know I’d be flattered if somebody told me that they jerked off to me:
“Are you Granite Wall?”
“Yeah.”
“Dude, I totally came to one of your scenes the other day!”
“Thanks, man. That means a lot to me. Want me to sign the napkin you blew in?”
Kitty squeals with laughter and covers her face, embarrassed. I think this is funny considering she routinely takes foot-long black cocks in her ass on camera. She’s about 4’11. Tiny, Asian, and looks like a twelve-year-old girl. If you have a dick and internet access you’ve probably seen her. I tell her that I’m a fan and that she’s one of my favorite actresses, even though I don’t have her freeones.com page bookmarked. She giggles and blushes and we take a picture together.
For the next thirty minutes I tell everyone I met an Asian pornstar.
“Who?” Brian, the PT manager, asks. Brian’s tall and reminds me of a cool math teacher (“Bro, I wanna bisect her vertex”). He and I kind of have a friendly, unspoken Asian-getting competition going on. Not because we objectify Asian women, but because we objectify all women.
I point Kitty out.
“You would break her,” Brian says.
“You wouldn’t say that if you saw her movies.”
The Comedy Store is a quiet black building in the heart of the Sunset Strip. It stands out by not trying to stand out. You want to see Dane Cook dance around and shout overly-enunciated words? Go down the street to the Laugh Factory. This place is for people who tell jokes. An indie theater. Not a multiplex.
Pauly Shore’s party is in the main room. The crowd is composed mostly of comedian-looking schlubs (“Hey, have you heard the one about the guy who didn’t get laid…”) and plastic-surgeried bimbos who can barely see over their cartoonish chests. Your standard party songs from your standard rappers boom from tall speakers while overmakeupped barely-legals in slutty black dresses crank and shake and dip onstage like they’re auditioning for “America’s Next Rape Victim”.
Needless to say, I’m digging the motherfucking scene.
I spend most of the night drinking free beer and trying to dance. I feel inadequate in the shadow of Aaron, my light-skinned black friend with a poofy firework ‘fro. Unlike me, he’s able to dance without attaching himself to a girl’s ass. All I can do when I’m alone is hold my drink up, bob my head, and say “Yeah!” I also do something with my fists and shoulders, but I’m not quite sure what the fuck that is.
After I scare off a couple of girls that are feeling Aaron’s infinitely feelable moves, he tells Patrick that I need to work on my game, which is very very true. But Aaron is black. Game-spitting is in his blood. Him telling me I need to work on my skills is like Superman criticizing Joe Public for not being able to burn shit with his eyes.
One of the things that sucks about getting out of a long term relationship is your inability to talk to girls. Once I get past “What’s your name?” and “What do you do?” I’m pretty much fucked. I’m not used to the bullshit-for-pussy barter system. I’ve been getting a free ride for the past five years. And suddenly I’m expected to pay? What the fuck? Where’s the manager?
My friend Annarose tells me the trick is to act like you don’t care, but how are you supposed to do that when your dick is leading the way?
This is something Clarissa never explained.
As the night presses on, I gawk at more girls. Some smile. Some don’t. I overanalyze everything and my insecurities eventually consume me. Living/working/partying in the vapid part of LA doesn’t help things when you’re a semi-attractive gym employee with no money who drives a ’92 Subaru with close to 230,000 miles on it. How can that compete with an ‘08 Bentley? How can my unpartitioned nook in a tiny one bedroom compete with a house in the hills?
You can charm your way into lives out here, but you won’t be taken seriously until there’s something in your wallet.
I see Pauly making the requisite birthday rounds, getting kisses, shaking hands. I hang around his general area until he sees me.
“But Jeff, how the fuck do you know Pauly Shore?”
Well I don’t, really. He’s in and out of the gym all the time and I say hi. The only conversation we’ve ever had was about Wes Craven suing him for water runoff or something (they’re neighbors). I think I called Wes Craven a prick, although I’m sure if I was having the conversation with Wes Craven I would’ve called Pauly Shore a prick. That’s the thing about me: as much as I try not to kiss a celebrity’s ass I always end up doing it.
Pauly recognizes me and gives me an extended, reach-over-a-couple-of-people high-five and a bro-ish hug. I wish him a happy birthday and the party photographers snap a couple pictures of us. Then I get my own picture:
Kiki, a trainer from Northern VA, has a friend that I actually went to high school with. Kiki’s friend tells me that she hears Pauly’s an asshole. I nod and shrug – one of those I-respect-your-opinion-and-semi-agree-with-it gestures that you do when you don’t respect somebody’s opinion or agree with it. But she’s cute and I feel like I have a chance working the nostalgia angle (“Hey, remember when…”). What bothers me about her, other than her sour demeanor and constantly-judging-everything-you-say personality, is her lips. They don’t exist. I have this fear that I’ll fall in love with a girl who doesn’t know how to kiss, who doesn’t have the equipment to kiss. I’m fucking packing in the lip department and don’t want to feel like I’m making out with my palm.
But it ends up not mattering like I thought it wouldn’t because I’m drunk and say this to her:
“You’re my nigga.”
“What?”
“You’re my nig-ga!”
She gets this disgusted look on her face like I just said her breath smelled like a thousand Mexican farts and backs away from me.
“No I’m not.”
“Don’t get mad. I listen to enough rap music where I can say that.”
I then tell her to chill out and not get like the movie Crash on me. I emphasized the “uh” sound. I was friendly when I said it. I may as well have been singing a Tupac lyric. Show me the fucking cross I burned, you know? Later, Patrick makes a good point and says that maybe she’s upset because she thought I was calling her black. Maybe she’s the racist. This is why Patrick is my best friend.
Kitty is on the dance floor with a couple of her friends. I approach her again now that I’m running on fewer inhibitions:
“Kitty!”
Giggles.
“Come dance on stage with me!”
Louder giggles. She covers her face and shakes her head. Keep in mind this is someone who has been videotaped swapping cum. So I pick her up with one arm (about 80 lbs) instead and we take another picture.
I feel powerful holding her, like King Kong. It’s nice when you feel like you can manhandle someone you’d like to fuck.
I think I recognize one of her equally small friends:
“Are you Tia Tanaka?”
“No no no no.” Head shakes.
“Yes she is!” Kitty squeals.
Since I’m kind of fucked up, I don’t know who to believe. On one hand, this girl looks a lot like hot Asian porn starlet Tia Tanaka and she’s hanging out with Kitty fucking Jung, one of my go-to creamers (along with Evelyn Lin). On the other hand, lots of other hot Asian girls look like Tia Tanaka, even a few at the party. She’s off the assembly line, a prototype: beautiful but unremarkable. No flaws, nothing that stands out. I’m sure I could dip inside any given Hollywood club on aZn night and point out twenty Tia Tanakas. I want to call her a liar in a jocular, drunken fashion, but I decide against it because lately I haven’t been watching as much Asian porn as I should. My ex-girlfriend is SoKo and I still get kind of sad when I see petite brown lips being impaled by dicks that don’t belong to me. For all I know, this girl could just be a Fast and the Furious extra. (note: after much early afternoon “research”, I have since discovered it was Tia Tanaka.)
I finish my beer and head outside to shoot the shit with Chris, a trainer (and former Wall Street powerhouse) and Dawn, a membership advisor. She tells me they just saw Dave Chappelle and I immediately head back into Pauly’s party to look for him. Pathetic, right? By no means am I a star-chaser. I’m pretty desensitized, actually. I don’t hound celebrities or ask for autographs or harbor delusions that we will one day be BFFs. I just want to get my picture taken with them so all of my friends back home think I’m the man. I want to be a celebrity by proxy – that guy that gets talked about when a bunch of people are sitting around smoking weed:
“Yeah, my boy Jeff is living out in Cali doing his writing thing. Motherfucker was chillin’ with Jeremy Piven the other night.”
“Who?”
“Dude on Entourage that’s the agent and shit.”
“Ohhh… that’s so cool!”
“I know, right?”
“Let’s go in your room.”
A celebrity-by-proxy proxy hook up. Those probably only happen if Brad Pitt is the lead off.
But I do chill with Piven. Well, not chill. He just comes into the gym sometimes when I’m working and I scan his card and validate his parking and ask the occasional question about Entourage and whatever movie he’s working on.
I see him at the party and wrap my arm around him:
“Jeremy!”
A “who the fuck are you?” look.
“I’m the front desk guy at your gym!”
After a moment, recognition registers. I’m not sure if it’s real recognition or polite, fake recognition, but as long as I can pretend it’s the former I’m cool.
“Oh… Hey.”
I tell him it’s good to see him and let him get back to the girls who want to take celebrity-by-proxy to the next step and fellate his fame staff. I run into him outside half an hour later and he’s nice enough to indulge me and snap a couple pictures. He’s looking away in the first one because my camera is old and takes forever.
I strike up a conversation with the prettiest Piven hanger-on while he chats with comedian Dom Irrera and the good-looking guy from Mad TV.
“Watch out for this guy. He’s an Emmy Award winner.”
“That’s what I hear.”
“What’s your name?”
“(I don’t remember what she said)”.
“I’m Jeff.”
“Nice to meet you.”
“Likewise. What do you do?”
“I’m an entertainment reporter for KTLA. Channel 5.”
“Cool… Are you gonna get a ‘scoop’?”
Thank you. I’ll be here all week.
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