"I can't believe I'm going to be fucked by five hundred men!"
There are, presumably, few women on the planet who are in a position at this moment to utter those lines. It is Friday night, the eve of the gangbang that is being promoted to world as the Houston 500. As luck would have it, I am among a select group hanging out with the woman who answers to the stage name Houston. We're on a big bus owned by Metro, the adult video company producing the gangbang, and we're heading for a dance club on Sunset Boulevard where Houston is supposed to make her second personal appearance of the night.
"I can't believe I'm going to be fucked by five hundred men!" she repeats.
It's not a statement that calls to mind an obvious response. Fortunately, I don't make the mistake of trying to get her to look on the bright side, say something like, "Well, look at it this way, at least it's not a thousand!" Among the very many weird aspects of such an evening, the fact that I am the one struggling to respond to Houston's statement ranks high on my list. I don't know a lot about eve of gangbang protocol, but my intuition is that she should be at home, surrounded by friends, or at least her professional handlers agent, manager, publicist, gynecologist, someone. Instead, that select group that I refer to is really just Houston and me.
So, not knowing what the hell to do in a situation like this, but feeling that the woman deserves somebody doing something, I try to make myself useful. When she breaks her last cigarette and looks like she might panic, I run out and get a fresh pack. When she breaks a fake fingernail and seems intent on fixing it, I track down some Crazy Glue and do my best to reattach the thing. When she decides that the outfit she is wearing is not right for the club we are heading to, I pick out something new and assure her she will feel more comfortable in it. When she is not breaking things or struggling with indecision, Houston actually seems to be doing amazingly well, considering, and I tell her so. We drink cocktails without ice as I try to find a decent radio station. When a song comes on that Houston likes, she sings along in a powerful, impressive voice. Occasionally, she begins responding to questions though I don't ask any. She comes from a loving family, is well-educated, was never molested. She got into the business in her mid-twenties, instead of eighteen, which she thinks is why she isn't messed up like so many of her co-workers. And yes, it's very hard to carry on a relationship, but she would like one, with somebody intelligent. Later, we have a drink in the basement of the club. It occurs to Houston that the last time she was at this place she was on a date. And no, it didn't go well. She had had a few drinks and ended up doing a series of back flips in the middle of the bar. Back flips? Yes, and apparently the back flips kind of freaked her date out. I can't tell if she is serious or not. She is so nonchalant about the information. Apparently she also does backflips on stage, when she headlines at strip clubs. Flips? On stage? In heels? Naked? Absolutely, she tells me. "And what do the guys think?" I ask her. "I don't think they actually know what to think. They're always a bit in shock." She had already established that she wasn't what one might expect from a gang bang participant, but this stuff about the back flips . . . Eventually, her publicist and a couple friends show up, so citing my responsibility to cover a gangbang in the rapidly approaching morning I say good-night. Houston holds out her hand to shake, but I wrap my arms around her and give her a big hug. I kiss her on the cheek. I can't help it. It's the back flips. I'm a fan.
"Amateur or Pro?"
These are the first words I hear a fellow human utter on the morning of the gangbang. It is eight a.m., so there's a sleepy moment of incomprehension before I get it and mumble, "Reporter." I drive off to the media parking area, fighting the urge to yell out the window something about that flight attendant down in Mazatlan, an effort which I impartially believe must have earned me at the very least semi-pro status, but the moment is gone. After picking up my press credentials, I make my way around to the back of the studio where the amateurs and pros are lining up. The line at this hour is about thirty deep. Doctors, lawyers, MBA's, CPA's they are not, though at first glance they are not as bad as I was fearing, not a string of circus freaks out for their first sexual experience. Still, at best they have the down-on-their luck look of drug informants you see on police detective shows. Up at the front of the line have clustered a group who somewhat haughtily inform me of their pro status. They have the self-anointed air of the cool, like the kids at summer camp who are in their second year and know the ropes. They consider the amateurs with derision. "Yep, the trailer parks are empty today," they joke, looking back over their shoulders and chuckling at the sight.
I can't help thinking that if these boys are pros, they need a better union. One of them is wearing the Members Only jacket I donated to the Goodwill ten years ago. Another looks kind of elfin, with white hair and beard, an accent I took to be gay Transylvanian and a mini-toiletry bag, the kind airlines give on transatlantic flights. He lurches back when anyone tries to touch the bag. Number one in line is the class clown. He was going to be one of first five guys or forget it, joking that any later is too messy, "Can I get a clean-up on aisle five?" He was going to come out at three in the morning, to be sure he was number one, but then he remembered, "Hey, this is the porn industry, no one shows up on time." Number One even has prior experience at a gangbang, "It was all right for the three minutes I fucked her. Easiest money I ever made." Leaving the porn stars to their yucking, I drift back to the amateurs, whose ranks are steadily growing, and only then do I appreciate how much personality the stars exhibited. Many of the amateurs won't talk to me. I feel like a parole officer. I ask one guy if he plans on keeping in touch with Houston after the event and he soberly informs me that he has no illusions about their relationship. Another guy, in an effort to explain why he is here, tells the story of how he was on the same freeway offramp with some porn star twice and it just seemed like such a coincidence, he couldn't pass this up. Uhhh, what?
One of the big questions I had obviously hoped to answer in coming here was, What kind of guy participates in a gangbang? But these guys are too much. The pros were at least weird guys with senses of humor. The amateurs are that other breed of weird guy, guys who you can't relate to at all and if you joke around with too much might cut your throat. Why do I get the feeling they all hitchhiked over here?
I retreat to relative safety inside the studio where, true to the form of any video or film production, the primary activity is waiting, while unseen people tend to things that are never revealed.
Except for the set, the studio is dark, cavernous. There is nothing in the facility that isn't nailed down, as though tenants have a habit of leaving in the middle of the night. The set itself though actually looks good. Going with the Houston 500 theme, the production designer has created an auto racing mechanics shop. It looks like the set they might build for Tim Allen if he ever switches from home improvement to car repair. There is also a small grandstand, just big enough for the fans of a very rural high school football team.
After a lot of milling about including my own thrill-seeking gesture of eating from the craft services table we get a sign that something may soon happen: the fluffers arrive. Fluffers, for those who don't know, fulfill an integral roll in the gangbang. Not to give innocent gangbang fans a there-is-no-Santa-Claus moment, but all five hundred men do not get to have a complete love-making session with Houston. Neither Houston nor anyone else could actually survive that. Instead, the fluffers sportily dressed in white T-shirts, black leggings and knee pads are enlisted to help bring the men to that point where they will hopefully be able to pop during their fleeting moments with the star. Fluffers: the unsung MVP's of a gangbang. Even more than the participants, I'm dying to know why the hell anyone would be a fluffer. It's all the work, with none of the glory, nor the money.
The first fluffer I pull aside begins mildly shaking soon after we begin speaking. Strangers make her nervous, she explains. At the risk of frightening her further, I mention that she is about to meet a lot more strangers, and in a much more intimate fashion. "Oh that," she says, "No, that don't bother me. It's talking to strangers. I can fuck all day. It's just talking makes me nervous."
The next fluffer I interview is equally confused by my questions. She also seems to consider nothing more natural than spending an eight-hour day blowing strangers. Not only that, but this fluffer keeps asking me to explain so she can get it straight. "So, you ask me these questions because you are trying to understand what I am thinking? Oh my god, that is so weird." The fluffer even stops a passing Houston 500 participant to tell him about this unusual thing I am doing. It turns out that the participant, Number Eleven, just happens to be her husband. That's right. I don't even bother asking them if this isn't a slightly unusual place to find husband and wife. I don't want them to look at me funny.
Number Eleven, as it turns out, strikes me as one of the saner people I have met this morning. Eleven, who is a pro, is a big strapping guy, dressed in Adidas pants, who stretches out his hamstrings as we speak. I've never met anyone who actually throws the javelin, but were I to, this is what he would look like. He tells the story of his first shoot, some fifteen years ago. A big production, big-time director, and a scene with two cute actresses. All great, except nothing happened. He couldn't perform. The director escorted him out the back door, and it was years before he would try again. Eleven is philosophical about the dilemma he says that it can be a struggle, that everybody on set gets stressed when the lead can't get it up. Then he and another pro standing nearby get into a discussion of whether a noisy set or a quiet set is better for performing. The other pro is saying he likes it quiet, something about not liking to hear laughter, which he worries is directed at him. Eleven respectfully disagrees. He needs noise, I hear him saying as I walk away, lots of dirty talk, lots of You-whore-this and You-whore-that.
Finally, the bulk of the participants have filed in and there is movement on the set. A man with a megaphone calls all participants to the stage. The man is none other than porn legend, porn forefather, Ron Jeremy, just as short, pudgy and homely as he is on video (as he would be the first to inform you: "If it weren't for porn, I wouldn't get dick, let alone ladies"). Ron quickly goes over the rules: be a gentleman, no fingers, no sex with the fluffers (participants all boo), and most importantly, wear those Houston 500/Metro T-shirts!
Then Houston steps out on set for her press conference. Photographers, videographers, reporters all surge in before I realize what's happening. Left without a clean camera shot, I climb up on a cement barricade. Houston is wearing a bright red jumpsuit tailored to her size-one figure, which she has unzipped to reveal her over-stuffed breasts. Her bobbed blonde hair has been enhanced with a long, elaborate wig that was probably used for some naughty period video about the court of Louis the XIV. And, apparently realizing her make-up would not stay on, she has opted to put on less than the usual porn star garishness. All in all, she actually looks very cute and for a moment I realize that, yes, I would.
Which is just the moment that Houston sees me standing over the scrum. Her face brightens into a huge smile and with both hands raised high she gives me a big "yoo-hoo" wave. The other press briefly look back, wondering who the hell the guy on the barricade is. And what can I say, Houston is my girl.
Reporters start in with questions. Houston responds to the one about how she prepared for the event with a lot of running and a lot of dildos. Some of the press chuckle. A tall, square-jawed chap who I have the sneaking suspicion is the proud owner of an Ivy League diploma, manages to miss Houston's facetious tone and asks her to follow-up on the specifics of her dildo regime. She looks at him like he is unbalanced. He then comes at her with this humdinger: "Would you consider yourself a promiscuous person?" Houston smiles radiantly and rolls her eyes in a way that is both perfectly bemused and dismissive, the only legitimate response for someone about to fuck five hundred men.
I pick a funny time to realize I've never actually in person watched someone else having sex. The fluffers are standing at the back of the set with numbers one through fifteen, all chatting away amiably, and we in the press are carrying on as if we are at an office Christmas party. And then, suddenly, a hush falls over the room. The press all leans forward. The participants in the bleachers lean forward. One of the fluffers had dropped to her kneepads and gotten to work. In that instant, a charge seemed to run through the room, an animal awareness on everyone's part of something both primal and taboo. It passed. The press moves forward, starts taking notes, snapping pictures. The video crew moves in for shots. The other fluffers all go to work, and the participants who don't for the moment have fluffers take matters into their own hands, self-fluffing as it were, but totally unconsciously, like seasoned craps shooters shaking the dice. My consciousness of seeing something I have never witnessed before disappears like a smoke-ring in the breeze. And then it is time for Houston.
Naked except for knee-high black boots, she climbs up on her gangbang throne, a padded Lazy Susan mounted on a stack of used tires. Over the megaphone, the director calls for the first "dick" to come out. One by one, the boys assume the position, begin thrusting away, and try their darndest to pop in the allotted time, which isn't easy. I didn't clock it, but it couldn't have been more than sixty seconds before the megaphone is back with, "Okay, Dick, that's enough. Next."
We watch Houston have sex, repeatedly. At times she cracks jokes, other times she seems to be getting off on the experience, but most of the time she just looks like someone at work. In between men, she squirts herself with copious amounts of lube and makes frequent changes in position, on her back for one man, on all fours for the next. After every five dicks she gets up and is toweled off. The only time she shows any temper is when there is a delay in between men, or when the director forgets to watch the clock. "Okay, that's enough," Houston growls. One onlooker said of the event, "It's so preposterous, so over-the-top, that it becomes abstract. I'm sure she wouldn't call it sex." There's something to this. The lights, the set, the guys in T-shirts and shoes part of the reason that it all isn't more weird is that it's so obviously a media spectacle. It would be more disturbing to walk in on two people at a party having sex than watching Houston fuck five hundred.
And yet, her friend, I know, has a hard time watching. And I, as her fan, am none too thrilled myself.
I see some reporters making their way around to the back of the set, so I follow to check it out. A small group, including an enterprising janitor, has gathered at the set's fake window to watch the scene from behind. The fluffers are working away, with diligence reminiscent of a crew on a Habitat for Humanity project. I see Number Eleven in there, the javelin thrower, and can tell from his face that things aren't going well. Looking south I see the problem. He's about as hard as a licorice whip, but he has taken matters into his own hands and is furiously self-fluffing while he paces in tight circles and takes big cheek-puffing breaths. His furrowed, panicked brow is that of a husband and father with his livelihood on the line. A fluffer drifts back to the window to take a breather. I ask her how its going and she jokes that everything's backwards, meeting the dick and then the man. She asks what I'm up to and I tell her reporting. She looks suggestively in the direction below my belt, then looks up, asks whether or not I'm going to give it a try. Not today, I say. Got to work.
I'm distracted from this touching exchange by a flurry of movement. Through the milling Houston 500 T-shirts, I catch the back of a big guy taking Houston from behind. He is flailing away, a piston gone out of control. I realize it is Number Eleven. Houston looks crushed under his weight. I remember what he said about dirty talk, but it seems like he needs even more: dirty fantasy. This man is acting out taking her against her will. I realize I need some air and on my way out, a reporter stops me to say that I look like I'm about to be sick. He's right. I have that over-stimulated, nauseous feeling I associate with amusement parks. The fresh air slowly brings me back to Earth.
Coming back into the building, I nearly stumble over one of the pros from the first group to go at Houston. He has that unreal look of people on the cover of porn boxes. We in the press were calling him Mr. Nair and making jokes like, "So, do you think he rents or owns his tanning bed." Then I hear him say that he wasn't just in the first group, he actually was the first. I immediately think of the other big talker, the guy who had said he was going to be Number One. Turns out Mr. Nair bribed him, because he couldn't get it up. I ask about the bribe, and he is momentarily hesistant to tell me what it cost him. He's worried about the legal ramifications, but he can't resist.
"I gave him a Viagra. Yeah, I knew another guy had one who didn't need it, so I got it from him and gave it to Number One for his spot."
I return to the set where one of the gangbangers is in mid bang. This character is putting on a show. He's in full control, taking his time. At one point, he seems to be going for porn slow motion. The guy even breaks the sacred rule and takes off his Houston 500/Metro Video promotional T-shirt. And with seconds to spare, he pulls out and theatrically pops on Houston. Big beaming smile and still relatively erect, the guy is hamming it up for the encroaching cameras, behaving like a wide-receiver who just brought down a Hail Mary in the end zone. Except that, aside from black shoes, black socks, and hiked-down black underwear, he is naked.
I leave the showboat carrying on, intending to go interview three young women who recently showed up. They look like they must be in college, maybe in an actual sorority, and they are making disbelieving squeamish faces. But before I get to them, I start to recall something. The showboat, I know him, or he looks familiar. And then I remember. I don't know him, I interviewed him. He's one of the pros. He is Number One. Or, that is, he was Number One before he traded his coveted position for Mr. Nair's black market hit of Viagra. Of course, that explains everything.
I find myself having strange urges. Not to sound like Mr. Sensitive, but I honestly consider going out and giving Houston a hug during one of the clean-up sessions. I just start to feel that after a certain amount of gangbanging, the champ deserves one. But then I think about the reality of the situation. Houston is so in the "must-get-record" zone that any sort of reminder of the outside world might be annoying. She would probably tell me either to contribute to the tally or move along.
I think about Glenn Close in The Natural, standing up in left field as a silent gesture of support to Robert Redford. I climb up on the bleachers, take my place in the stands, surrounded by T-shirted, pantless men who happen to be playing with themselves. This isn't the answer either. I'm no Glenn Close.
And so I decide it is time for this reporter to hit the showers. With only ninety-eight down, I feel certain that I just don't fit in at the gangbang. I understand that Houston got herself into this whole thing, that she made the calculated financial decision to do it and that all I have seen is part of the bargain. But still, does a gangbang have to be like this?
Many of the boys who can't pop during their allotted time give up their position, shuffle around to her side and then finish themselves off. The result cascades over her torso like paint from Jackson Pollack's brush. But I can't help thinking that Jackson Pollack had more regard for his inanimate canvas than the participants do for her. The woman could jump up from the gangbang, haul off a couple perfect back flips and no one would know to applaud. In fact, the dicks probably think they should be getting the ovation. It's just too much.
The following day, I actually run into Ron Jeremy (a sentence I never thought I would write). Six hundred and twenty, he tells me. The final tally, six hundred and twenty. She hit five hundred and said keep on going, finally finishing up at 7:30 at night. And, Ron adds, he was the final pop. Not only that, but he had the participants all count down from ten and popped on zero. "I'll tell you," Ron says, "It wasn't easy, after being on my feet all day." Impressive indeed, but not quite in the same league with fucking six hundred and twenty men.
