Wages: Raven's Dildo

[This is the seventh of 14 excerpts, running Tuesdays and Thursdays, from John Armstrong's memoir of the working life: Wages.]

The government ran an employment agency called Manpower and a more dismal outfit you couldn't imagine.... Everybody in the place had already learned the chief lesson and had learned it to their sorrow: they were screwed. The place was filled with the unskilled and illiterate, alcoholic tradesmen and people who lived common-law in the cheapest by-the-week rooming houses. You didn't end up searching the job boards at Manpower unless you were already close to unemployable.

There were no good jobs here: if there were such things and if they existed at all they were administered and delegated by the job fairy. She worked part-time and slept through most of her shift even when she was on duty, but once in a great while she stirred herself and aimed her wand at random. There was no rhyme or reason or justice to it, any more than there was to finding a wallet on the sidewalk....

The employment counsellors didn't appear to have any special skills themselves, except an ability to face this parade of hopeless cases five days a week.... Occasionally you would get one who was unaccountably cheery, full of encouragement and advice, usually a woman. You weren't right for this job delivering pizzas because you didn't have a car but had you ever considered mining in Nova Scotia? No, I hadn't, oddly enough, but then again I was severely claustrophobic. It barely slowed her down. She flipped through a sheaf of papers on her desk.

"Oh, what about this -- do you know anything about the audio-video field?"

I did -- sound and pictures were involved. Beyond that, I lied....

"I think you should definitely go and see them," she said, filling out a referral sheet. "This just came in so you'll be the first person we've sent." She was beaming with pride. Another case solved, and it was well before lunch. I got out of there before she had time to change her mind.

When video was young

The paper said Wolfe Video Distribution on it, the address in the old downtown warehouse district, century-old four- and five- storey brick buildings with disused railroad tracks running past the loading docks at the rear.... The company had most of the third floor and a receptionist at a desk just inside the door with the rest of the operation screened off by portable office dividers. After half an hour the secretary told me Mr. Wolfe would see me now and she motioned with an arm for me to go around the dividers and keep heading in the direction of her finger. She had enormous breasts, real balloons stuffed into a tiny pink T-shirt with a sequined butterfly on the chest....

Mr. Wolfe was down at the far end waving me towards him. He was a tall, slim man in his 30s, in a V-neck sweater, pressed blue jeans and tasselled loafers, strawberry hair carefully mussed and falling across his forehead. When I got close enough to shake hands I could see he was older than I'd first thought, the kind of guy who looks boyish right up to the day they pull the sheet up over his face in the nursing home. He looked like a little leaguer with wrinkles, as if his mother had left him in the bathtub much too long....

"Manpower sent me." It was the best I could come up with. I handed him my referral sheet. He read it over and tapped the pen on his desk. There wasn't that much to read. It had his company's name and address on it, my name and age, a box that said Experience and another that said Bondable. They were both checked off.

"Looks good," he said. "It's part-time right now. I need you to start tomorrow. That okay? Nine o'clock?"

Of course it was, not that I had the faintest what I was about to start doing. But it seemed awkward to ask at this late stage of the negotiation and might give the wrong impression. How hard could it be for someone with my extensive credentials in the entertainment field? After all, I'd just finished a six-month engagement at the Regal Theatre....

We were the wholesaler for the entire country, save for Quebec which as usual had its own system. It was all news to me. Home video stores were still uncommon, and the machines an expensive toy only the wealthy could afford.

Breast reduction surgery

When an order came in I would pick the movies from the one set of shelves and move them to the other under the store's name. When the order was filled I would box it up and ship it out. It all sounded good to me. There wasn't a chicken or rabbit in sight, the video boxes weighed almost nothing and the loading dock was covered. Inside work and no heavy lifting, and my little domain was well out of sight of the boss....

There was a utility blade in the drawer and I started in on the boxes. I cut through the first one with a little too much authority and heard it go through to the merchandise inside. Shit and fuck. I pulled the flaps of the box open. I'd put a nice slice through the top layer of boxes. In fact, I'd performed breast reduction surgery. The titles on the boxes said Bra-Busters! and showed a woman with tits like watermelons looking out from the cover, a maniacal grin on her face. I don't know what she had to smile about, between the chronic back pain from hauling those things around and the wound I'd given them. I'd amputated just below the nipple. Maybe she was happy because she'd be able to stand up straight for the first time in her life.

I put the first boxes on the table and began stacking the rest on top of them in piles. It was all porn, and most of them take-offs on recognizable movies -- A Cock To Lips Now, Saturday Night Beaver, Das Booty, In and Out of Africa, Fatal Erection....

The three companies Derrick ran out of the warehouse were Video Marketplace, the company that imported the Hollywood movies, Solid Gold, the company that handled the fitness and instructional tapes, and Del Mar, which was the porn....

Pretentious porn is still porn

Derrick flew to Los Angeles every few weeks and he came back from one trip with big news. He'd made a deal with a California porn company that modelled itself on the old studio system. Every actor they used was under exclusive contract to them and they didn't sell the movie, they sold the stars. They gave huge guarantees to established names and locked them in to six- and seven-year contracts; at the same time their scouts searched the tittie bars, escort agencies, beaches and college campuses for new talent....

Something else the porn company adopted from the mainstream movie industry was in-person promotion, not just posters for the stores and ads in the sex magazines but putting the actresses out on the road for public appearances. The list of places they could send the talent to was limited -- there wasn't much demand for the star of Charlie's Anals at mall openings or 4H shows -- but they sent them anywhere that would have them. They did in-store appearances answering questions from the crowd and signing autographs and pictures.

It was a condition of their contracts and the studio picked up the airfare and hotel but since most of the actresses had started as peelers they also booked themselves into strip clubs in the cities they were visiting. Their celebrity status got them two or three times what the standard dancers got and between sets they sold autographed Polaroid photos of themselves with the patrons, $10 a picture.

Before the star had finished rolling up the rug she'd been writhing on and tied her robe, the men were lining up, jostling for position. The deejay and MC came out from his booth at the side of the stage to man the camera. The actress moved the fans along in professional fashion, an immovable smile on her face, chatting just long enough for the customer to get an arm around her, asking their name and spelling, and then click, she had the picture, signed it, and it was on to the next in line while the previous customer shuffled away, head bent over the still-developing blob on the snapshot. None of them seemed embarrassed in the slightest although they might as well have introduced themselves as "Hi, I'm Allan. I put your tapes on and jerk myself raw."

"Well, thank you Allan -- is that with two l's and two a's, sweetheart?"

The cello and the dildo

I'd been there about six months when Derrick said he needed me to go out to the airport and pick up Raven Little Bear, an actress coming in to do promotion. Her stage name was a nod to her alleged native American heritage but her real name was probably Darlene Wosczinski.

Normally they came alone but she was travelling with her manager, who was also her husband. Derrick would have chauffeured them but he couldn't fit three people into his Porsche so the next morning at 11 I was at Domestic Arrivals with a cardboard sign that said "Raven" in felt marker. I'd unpacked thousands of posters and boxes with every inch of her on them but I was still scanning the passengers when she touched my arm.

"Are you with Del Mar?"

I'd never have recognized her in civilian clothes, hair tied back in a ponytail instead of the back-combed and sprayed sex-mop she wore on the set. I didn't imagine she was going to get off the plane in a black vinyl grope suit but I didn't expect her to be wearing a track suit, sneakers and glasses.

"Do I need my raincoat? Oh, this is Leonard, my husband."

Leonard didn't look like anyone I'd pictured, either. He was a dumpy fellow in chinos and a golf shirt under a red vinyl team jacket that said Del Mar Entertainment on the back in flowing script. He had curly receding hair, a patchy beard and a whinging New York voice.

"Howyadoing," he said. "Where we going? Where's Derrick? We got time for me to hit the john? You watch the luggage?" Everything was a question. It was hard to imagine her getting into bed with him every night. Even in mufti she was a beautiful, charming, well-spoken woman; Leonard should have been selling speakers out of the back of a van in Brooklyn. It was more proof the world was unknowable, a game of diminishing returns -- the longer I spent in it the less I understood.

Derrick already knew Raven and Leonard from his trips to Hollywood and while they caught up on business I was sent out to get coffee and sandwiches. I came back with the order halfway through a dissertation on the finer points of porn management.

"Anal's no problem. We'll do double penetration for another thousand on top of the day-rate and it has to be the only fuck scene that day. Unless it's girl-girl. The lesbian shit is like free money. We don't do niggers for any money -- fuck sakes, this is my wife."

Raven nodded along with her husband and thumbed through a magazine. Apparently she was used to her husband discussing the going-rate for gang ass-rape with strangers. Leonard used "we" whenever he referred to his wife. I noticed it in the car when he asked, "Where are we dancing, is it a nice joint?" Well, how nice were strip joints in the first place? It was a dank little cave full of desperately horny men getting drunk. "We" ought to be very popular with them -- I had an involuntary image of Leonard in a pair of fuck-me heels pumping his flabby, pimpled ass-cheeks for the guys in the front row. It was an evil vision.

I put the box of food down on Derrick's desk and started handing out the orders.

"John's a musician, too. He writes songs," Derrick said, as if that were the most natural turn for the conversation to take. "He has quite a few records out." Raven looked up from her magazine.

"Oh, that's great. What do you play?"

"Guitar," I said, handing out the tuna on whole wheat and the napkins.

"I studied music theory at Berklee. I wanted to play cello for a living but it's a tough life."

As opposed to porn, I wondered, passing her coffee and a packet of Sugar Twin, but I couldn't figure out how to ask politely.

"Yeah, I played with the Sacramento symphony for a year after school but you can't make a living playing classical." She dumped the sweetener in and stirred it with a plastic stick, little finger elegantly aloft.

"She was doing escort work when I met her, on her days off," Leonard said. "I got her into the business." He was aglow with pride. "So what's the story up here regarding dancers? What's okay with the law?"

Uncle Frank by a nose

American strippers had to have their act worked out in several versions, depending on the local law of the state or county they were working in. They had to go right to the line of legality, the precipice, and perform on the edge of it to satisfy the audience, all the while keeping one eye out for the bulls, who stood ready to pounce if they crossed it. It wasn't just a matter of protecting the good citizens from filth and obscenity -- generally, the local sheriff didn't personally care whether they fucked goats on stage or held a Bible reading but if a dancer broke the law he could fine her wages away. Chances were he'd want a blowjob in the bargain.

Up here, the regulations strippers worked under were simpler than those governing film. They could not touch the patrons or each other, if it was a duo act, but they could go to gynecological extremes, something American dancers used to Bible Belt states that forbid anything beyond pasties and G-strings were shocked to see when they watched the hometown strippers work. Only the live-sex clubs in San Francisco were as wanton as the strip bars of Vancouver.

The dancers started off in the usual fashion. During the first song they sashayed back and forth, in heels and filmy outfits, chatting up the crowd. By the second song the clothes were coming off -- "dancing" was a strange term for it. It was actually a combination of an Olympic gymnast's floor routine, a circus contortionist's act and a pelvic exam.

The dancers were astonishingly limber -- they could bite themselves in the back of the head. By the time a girl got to the finale she was on her back, ass flush with the lip of the stage, legs bent back over her head until her toes touched the floor behind her ears. Then she grabbed the vaginal lips with both hands and hauled them apart, stretching the petals of womanhood like a hunter skinning a rabbit, or as if she were about to perform some depraved magic trick, just one sharp tug from turning herself inside out. Hey Presto! Alacazam!

The men in the front row, along the stage side counter the dancers called the sushi bar, leaned forward as far as they could, ties dangling into glasses of draft beer, hands on the table for balance, transfixed, breathing through their mouths, racehorses stretching their necks at the finish line ... and it's Uncle Frank by a nose....

"Great, Raven can do her dildo act," Leonard said. It was apparently a show stopper, a tour de force. Jolson had "Swanee," Streisand had "People" and Raven Little Bear sat on a giant rubber cock.

On Thursday, in the eighth of 14 excerpts, John Armstrong parlays freelance writing jobs into a stint at a daily newspaper. Find out more about the book Wages.