Some Came Running

Unaware of the fact or fiction section of the Watford Public Library

I feel a little bit bad for Mike Daisey. Slightly on a personal level, mainly because he's a neighbor of mine. I think I had a brief bodega discussion with him once, a long time ago, around the time maybe he first moved into the neighborhood, definitely after a run of that Dog Years thing finished, and it was reasonably amiable, but it didn't lead to any kind of connection or even acknowledgable acquaintance. So after that I would see him around the neighborhood and I'd think, "Oh, there's that guy," and then, on this past Sunday evening, I saw him getting out of a cab on Court Street, and I thought "Ooh, there's THAT guy," which was an interesting phenomenological experience I guess. 

But on balance, I have to say I'm kind of on the side of the outraged or at least irritated. Although I'm not inclined to get on board with Jack Schafer's tedious continuation of his largely ginned-up"what's good for Stephen Glass should be good for A.J. Liebling" argument. And when a guy as thoroughly smug and prolix as Michael Woolf is telling me "never mind the facts, focus on the writing," he's just giving me another good reason to ignore him. But even given the ostensible porousness of formats that Daisey is citing in order to absolve the fact that he just made shit up, I think he's being pretty goddamn disingenuous, and his crouching behind a "cause" is not likely to help him or his cause a whole lot in the long run. Daisey's case does differ from James Frey's largely in that he made shit up for a larger purpose, rather than to make himself look more badass/sad/pathetic; and the fact that Frey talked so much shit about other writers before his sins were discovered made his fall rather uniquely satisfying. One thing that makes the Daisey case so, um, fascinating for me is my own experience of having stood by and vetted the publication of a piece of writing that I was fully aware contained a large number of factual inaccuracies, and that I convinced the legal department of the publication's parent company that doing this was a good idea. 

This is an odd thing to admit because of something that I'm reasonably sure a lot of this blog's readers are unaware of. That is, while I was at Premiere magazine, besides writing film reviews and occasional thumbsuckers and editing top-drawer literary types, I also worked on a number of investigative journalism pieces and such. One of my first editing jobs was shepherding a piece by Mark Ebner about the actor Peter Greene's struggles with drug addiction. This was a more sensitive piece than I was even aware of at the time, but that's another story. I also edited all but one of the pieces John Connolly (of late working for Vanity Fair) wrote for Premiere between 1997 and 2001, including a well-known article called "Arnold the Barbarian." One piece I worked on with John was so fraught that it took eight months between pitch and publication and was punctuated by regular confabs with very expensive lawyers. Lots of them.  My attitude toward this kind of work was not atypical of an individual of my temperament at the time, e.g., I could be (and was) a complete fuckup in every other respect of my personal and professional life, but THIS I was going to get RIGHT. And I did, even while overplaying my only-guy-in-a-roomful-of-suits-wearing-a-Tex-Avery-t-shirt schtick.

And it's here that I'd like to direct the reader to a piece I wrote a little less than a year ago about David Foster Wallace's posthumously published unfinished novel The Pale King. If you're disinclined to read the whole thing, as they say, a particularly pertinent passage is below: 

Reading Wallace or someone like him assert that a clear fiction is in fact “really true” brought to mind working with him on the piece that was initially published as “Neither Adult Nor Entertainment, It Turns Out” in the September 1998 edition of Premiere, and then printed in expanded and unbowdlerized form under its original intended title “Big Red Son” in the essay compilation Consider The Lobster. Here is a passage from the beginning of the piece:

Let us not forget Vegas’s synecdoche and beating heart. It’s kitty-corner from Bally’s: Caesars Palace. The granddaddy. As big as 20 Wal-Marts end to end. Real marble and fake marble, carpeting you can pass on without contusion, 130,000 square feet of casino alone. Domed ceilings, clerestories, barrel vaults. In Caesars Palace is America conceived as a new kind of Rome: conqueror of its own people. An empire of Self. It’s breathtaking. The winter’s light rain makes all the neon bleed.

Consider for a moment the phrase “synecdoche and beating heart.” (By the way, the "Rome, conquerer of its own people" riff is repeated, as it happens, in The Pale King.) Wallace just dashes it off, but its implications are kind of mind-boggling, particularly because of the use of “and” instead of “or.” We’re not just talking about a part referring to a whole, but that part being the driving, essential organ of the whole. It’s significant, but that phrase isn’t the reason I’m reproducing that particular passage; the reason is that one piece of data, that Caesars Palace contains “130,000 square feet of casino alone.” As it happens during the fact-checking process leading up to the publication of the article, we couldn’t verify that information. Dave didn’t give us a source for it, we couldn’t find a source, and so on. There were plenty of other pieces of data in the article that were entirely empirically verifiable for instance, the number of men that Stephanie Swift performs analingus on in Gang Bang Angels 1, and the number of gobs of spit she takes in the face from those men some moments after. You could sit there in front of the TV watching the tape and just tick them off. But the actions and the tales told by the fictionalized composite characters Dick Filth and Harold Hecuba (based on myself and Evan Wright, then writing for Hustler magazine and quite miserable about it) were not entirely above board in the actual fact department; the whole bit about Hecuba getting throttled by porn star Jasmin St. Clair and his “special autotint trifocals” disappearing into the “forbidding décolletage of Ms. Christy Canyon, never to be recovered (the glasses) or even seen ever again” becoming a source of particular concern and confusion for our unusually helpful and cooperative legal department, members of which I did not pester with rationales concerning postmodern practice or tensions between provable fact and larger truth or any such thing but merely said, “The author of this piece is a really big deal, it’ll be okay.”

I admit that I was not in fact QUITE that cavalier with the Hachette legal department when they raised an eyebrow at the piece that was then, and would again be, titled "Big Red Son." The two top vetters in that department were astute general readers as well as sharp legal minds, and they were well aware that, say, glasses that sink into a woman's exposed cleavage do not dematerialize, that even in the context of a career in adult entertainment no individual named Richard Filth would go by "Dick Filth," and so on. They were kind of nonplussed by the piece in general; "What IS this?" is a question I heard early on.

I've discussed the fact-checking process on the piece with someone who's working with D.T. Max on that writer's forthcoming biography of Wallace, and I don't want to step on her or his or its toes, but the Daisey affair reminded me of working on this article for a bunch of reasons, not least of which was that Daisey's protestation "I'm not a journalist" is something I heard a lot from Dave during the process. (The variant was "I'm not a reporter." By the same token, I've never seen anyone, journalist/reporter or otherwise, take observational notes with the furious intensity with which Dave did.) The way we were able to get the piece published in more or less the form in which it was written was, frankly, via what some would call collusion. The fact of the false first-person-plural narrative voice was a function of the article bearing a dual pseudonymous byline. Now, Premiere had agreed that Wallace was gonna write and publish the piece under a pseudonym anyway, so two psuedonyms wasn't a big deal. As for the fictional constructs/characters named "Harold Hecuba" and "Dick Filth," adult-industry journalists who were "guides and docents" for Matt Rundlet and Willem deGroot (for such were the dual pseudonyms of Wallace); well, as I note above, they were stand-ins for Evan Wright (the future Generation Kill author was, again as I note above, then at Hustler magazine) and myself. And Evan and I made it very clear to legal that we were not going to object in any way to our characterizations by proxy, as it were. I don't think we were asked to sign anything to that effect; I was, after all, a full-time employee at Hachette, and Evan aspired to freelance for Premiere. But I do remember having to reassure legal more than once that Evan and I were "cool."

Still, there were at least two things in the piece that could conceivably be considered as potentially actionable, the first being the above cited throttling of fictional construct Harold Hecuba by real albeit pseudonymous porn performer Jasmin St. Clair. Well, Evan had in fact been accosted in a similar fashion and for the cited sin of having gone public with St. Clair's get-rich-quick scheme concerning pornographic gumball machines, so when push came to shove he said he'd be willing to back that up. The other possible problem point was this statement attributed to Dick Filth, pertaining to the actual integrity of the AVN Awards themselves: "The best perception, backed up by tons of anecdotal evidence, is that they are totally, totally fixed and rigged." Now you don't need a law degree to ascertain just how much legal wiggle room is already built into that statment. But just in case, I believe I was gonna volunteer to be the fall guy on that one. Although my default first position in the event of any saber-rattling on the part of the aggrieved parties was gonna be to say, "Oh, come on, guys." (Some kinda-sorta saber-rattling DID in fact come to pass, and a person at the Wallace-enthusiast website The Howling Fantods was kind enough to preserve it; see here.)

And hand-in-hand with the invention was a particular conscientiousness. Wallace had an innate understanding of the margins he was playing with. When Evan pointed out that the pseudonymous porn performer Vince Vouyer had a real name that was, in a sense, even more ridiculous than his stage handle, Dave was dobermanesque in his determination to pin down that said name WAS in fact John LaForme, although this was a group effort and I do believe it was Evan who was able to track down the relevant documentation. When the piece was making the transition to book form, Dave was crestfallen/irritated at having learned that he had possibly misidentified one of the characters on the Felliniesque Adult Software exhibition floor as director Gregory Dark, and hedged a bit by mentioning Jeff "Hatman" Marton, and so on. There's also the matter of the fleeting moments that he got right in a way that's kind of scary, as in this passage: "Tom Byron, who is 36 and has precisely one attribute, affect the air of a Mafia don at the Sands' bar's nightly porn parties, extending his hand knuckles-up as if for obeisance." Yes, I was there, standing next to him (Wallace), we saw it, and it was exactly that. And on the other hand, no, Dick Filth wasn't drinking Grand Marnier, it was Jack Daniel's, and he didn't HECTOR any waiters for change, that he remembers, and dozens of other not-quite little details that didn't actually happen.

But for all that, well...I have become what I beheld and I am content that I have done right. We stand by our story.  

Literary interlude, with cowboy hat

Amber L. Younger was nobody's fool. He'd been around. Thirty-seven states and fourteen foreign lands including Germany, Japan, England, and the Canal Zone. When a man spends thirty years in the United States Army, he doesn't come out of it a hick, no sir. He comes out of it knowing what's what. 

Younger had had some sort of title in front of his name for almost as long as he could remember. At twenty, a green frightened dumb kid from the hick town of Sagamore, in Nebraska, he'd become Private Abner L. Younger, USA. That was the time of the Great Depression; there was no work for Abner's father anywhere to be found, and if there was no work for the father there was sure as hell no work for the son. If he wanted three meals every day and a bed indoors every night, the only thing in the world for Abner to do was join the Army. 

Promotion came slow both sides of the ocean in those days, and when the Second World War came along in 1941 Younger had advanced only one small step, up to Pfc. But with the war came promotions for everybody, and soft jobs for those who'd been smart enough to be in the Army, already when the war started. Younger spent his wartime service at a basic training camp, and wound up a buck sergeant when the war was over. 

He had twenty years of duty behind him a few years later, and could have retired then, but he'd just got another promotion, and knew he had a good chance to make master sergeant by the time thirty years was up, which would mean a hell of a lot more pension, so he decided to stick it out the extra ten. 

He made master sergeant. Almost anybody can, if he stays in the Army long enough. Then his thirty years were done, and while he was going through the discharge red tape a clerk asked him what his civilian address was going to be. 

And he didn't know. Neither of his parents were still alive, and he'd been out of touch with any other relatives for decades. He finally told the clerk General Delivery, Sagamore, Nebraska, as a temporary address, because he couldn't think of anything else. He'd forward a permanent address when he had one. 

That was the only reason he went back to Sagamore, to pick up his pension checks. But once there, there was no reason to leave, nowhere else to go, no one anywhere in the world that he wanted to see or that wanted to see him. So he stayed on. He joined the local American Legion Post, and through that got to know some of the better elements in town, and settled down to enjoy his retirement. 

But he was only fifty. He'd had something to do all his life, donning a uniform every day and going to a specific place and having specific things to do. Time hung heavy, now he was retired. He had no hobbies, and his pension wasn't lavish. He found he was lying around the house late in the mornings, and going too often to the movies, and spending too much time in front of the television set either at home or down at the bar in the cellar of the American Legion Post. He was drinking too much beer, eating badly, getting too little exercise. He was putting on weight, and his digestion was going bad. 

Then the police job came along. He heard talk about it down at the American Legion, about old Captain Greene retiring and wonder who'll take over, there's no men with good leadership qualities on the force at all. The pay's too low to attract first-rate men, somebody said, and that led straight into the old argument about property taxes, but Younger had heard enough.

So now he had the highest rank of all. Not Private Younger anymore, not Pfc. Younger, not even Master Sergeant Younger. Captain Younger. Yes, and it could just as well be General Younger, because he was the highest-ranking man on the force. Seventeen men, and he was their captain. 

At first he wore the uniform all the time, dark blue with modified riding pants, and boots and a garrison cap. But the weight he'd put on never came off again, and he had to admit he didn't look good in the uniform. Besides, R.H.I.P. Rank Has Its Privileges. As captain, he could wear civvies if he wanted. As captain, he was the only man on the force who could wear civvies. So he started wearing civvies. 

But that made a problem. In the uniform, he was declaring his rank for the whole world to see, but in civvies what was he but just another stocky civilian? He thought about it and thought about it, and finally settled on the cowboy hat. A good ten-gallon hat would set him apart, announce to the world that here was a man who held some rank, that was for sure. A cowboy hat and a good suit, the combination would show he was something special. Besides, he thought he looked good dressed that way. 

At fifty-one, he'd reached the peak. Captain of the Police Department, a respected citizen, secretary of the American Legion Post; he was content, he had everything he wanted.

And then he was shown the possibility of wanting a lot more. 

—Richard Stark, The Jugger, 1965, Pocket Books

Literary interlude

"Hey, Lou, you got anything to drink?"

"No...You don't know what you're doing, you haven't done any research. You make it good for the rest of us by taking the crap off the market. Plus you're poor. [I told you he'd stop at nothing. It's this kind of thing that may well be Lou Reed's last tenuous hold on herodom. And I don't mean heroism.] And even if you weren't poor you wouldn't know what you were buying anyway. You wouldn't know how to weigh it, you don't know your metabolism, you don't know your sleeping quotient, you don't know when to eat and not to eat, you don't know about electricity..."

"The main thing is money, power and ego," I said, quoting an old Ralph J. Gleason column for some reason. I was getting a little dazed.

"No, it has to do with electricity and the cell structure..."

—Lester Bangs, "Let Us Now Praise Famous Death Dwarves," Creem, March 1975

Literary interlude

You set particular by the use of irony in bringing me up, it was also especially fitting given your superiority over me. You usually reprimanded me like this: "Can't you do it this way instead? Isn't that a bit too much for you? Surely you don't have time for that?" or similar. And all of these questions were accompanied by a spiteful laugh or a spiteful face. You punished me sometimes even before I had done wrong. When you particularly wanted to antagonize me you would refer to me in the third person, as if I was not even worthy of an angry address; you would say ostensibly to Mother, but actually to me as I sat there too, something like: "We simply can't have that kind of behavior from our son" (This produced a counter habit in me: I never dared, or later never even thought, out of sheer habit, to address you directly while mother was present. It was far less dangerous for me to put questions to Mother as long as she sat beside you, so I would ask Mother: "How is Father?", thus protecting myself from any surprises). Of course, there were times when I agreed with your extreme irony, notably when its target was someone else, Elli for example, with whom I had been on bad terms for years. For me it was an orgy of malice and Schadenfreude when you referred to her like this at almost every meal: "Look at the fat cow, she has to sit ten meters from the table," and again when you imitated her, in spiteful and exaggerated fashion as you sat in your chair, without the faintest hint of warmth or humor, but rather with bitter enmity, as if trying to show how terribly she offended your sensibilities. How often scenes like this must have occurred, and how little they actually achieved. This, I think, was because the extent of your anger and spite was so disproportionate to the matter at hand, we felt that your anger could not have been caused by such a trivial thing as sitting so far from the table, rather it must have been latent from the beginning, triggered in this case purely by chance. Since we were convinced that it would eventually be triggered anyway, we did not really let it trouble us, we were also desensitized by your constant threats; little by little we gradually became aware that there was no danger of a real thrashing. We became surly, unobservant, disobedient children, constantly preoccupied with escape, mostly internal escape. And so you suffered, and we suffered. In your opinion you were doing no wrong when you stood there with clenched teeth and that gurgling laugh which had given me my first idea of hell as a child, and said bitterly (as you did recently on receiving a letter from Constantinople): "What a rabble!"

—Franz Kafka, Brief an den Vater (Dearest Father), 1919 (translation Hannah and Richard Stokes)

Literary interlude

Winston stopped reading, chiefly in order to appreciate the fact that he was reading, in comfort and safety. He was alone: no telescreen, no ear at the keyhole, no nervous impulse to glance over hisshoulder or cover the page with his hand. The sweet summer air played against his cheek. From somewhere far away there floated the faint shouts of children; in the room itself there was no sound except the insect voice of the clock. He settled deeper into the armchair and put up his feet on the fender. It was bliss, it was eternity. Suddenly, as one sometimes does with a book of which one knows that one will ultimately read and reread every word, he opened it at a different place and found himself at the third chapter. He went on reading:

—George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949

Literary interlude

Let us deride the smugness of “The Times”: GUFFAW!

            So much for the gagged reviewers,

It will pay them when the worms are wriggling in their vitals;

These are they who objected to newness,

Here are their tomb-stones.

            They supported the gag and the ring:

A little BLACK BOX contains them.

            So shall you be also,

You slut-bellied obstructionist,

You sword foe to free speech and good letters,

You fungus, you continuous gangrene.

 

Come, let us on with the new deal,

            Let us be done with pandars and jobbery,

Let us spit upon those who pat the big-bellies for profit,

Let us go out in the air a bit.

—Ezra Pound, "Salutation the Third," 1914

Literary interlude

    With a soft palpitation the small screen had fizzed into life—and there it was, the Royal Wedding, the crowd-ribbed Mall, the sun, and the horses getting people to the church on time. Blushing and glancing downwards in the glare of all this history, Lady Diana cruised slowly up the aisle, her tottering dad at her side and the pocket bridesmaids smirking in her wake. There was Charles, my age, standing uniformed among the ramrod princes. Is Fat Paul right? Has Charles given her one already? He's going to give her one tonight—that's for sure. As I twisted in my seat and muttered to myself I found I kept looking Martin's way. The lips were parted, suspended, the eyes heavy and unblinking. If I stare into his face I can make out areas of waste and fatigue, the moonspots and boneshadow you're bound to get if you hang out in the twentieth century. Of course, you do see people who appear to be quite unaffected by all this, by the timing of their time travel, not just their own journey but the planet's parallel travel through time. They have a colour. You never see them in the streets, not in the streets plural. That colour, it looks like the sheen of health or sun or gimmicked youth but it is only the colour of money. Money softens the fall of life, as you know. Money breaks the fall. Anyway, Martin hasn't got that colour. And neither have I. And neither have you. Shake. Princess Diana has it. She is nineteen years old, just starting out. There she goes now, gathering herself into the carriage while the horses stamp. All England dances. I looked at Martin and —I swear, I promise—I saw a grey tear glint in those heavy eyes. Love and marriage. The horses ticking down the long slide. 

—Martin Amis, Money: A Suicide Note, 1984

A short observation about "The Pale King"

I am reading it, slooooooow-ly, and really don't have any plans to write about it when I'm done, since Lev Grossman clearly has the whole thing covered (kidding) (asshole) (incredibly great guy though) (grow some fucking hair) (a model of tonsorial integrity)...but I did want to register—actual circumstances of the composition notwithstanding, and ignoring altogether the various feints involved in the chapter in question,and all that—that I did/do take immense satisfaction in seeing that even from beyond the grave, David Foster Wallace denies that fucker James Frey the satisfaction of even acknowledging Frey's existence. I'm sure Frey is livid, and getting a new pissed-off tattoo as we speak. (The opportunity, such as it was, would have been in footnote nine of Chapter 9, page 73. The "Author's Foreword," which is a multivalent, as DFW would say, hoot.)

UPDATE/PERSONAL APPEARANCE NOTE: On Friday evening, April 15, at 7 p.m., New York's venerable Strand bookstore will be hosting a reading/discussion on Wallace and The Pale King. Through the intervention of my pal Charles Bock, author of Beautiful Children and one of the readers for the event, I have been invited to participate. And so I will. Other participants include literary critic Laura Miller and the above-cited Lev Grossman, gulp. It is true, I have my differences with the man, but this event will be about Wallace and not that, and I plan to discuss the porousness of the borders between fact (or "truth") and fiction within The Pale King itself and certain of the non-fiction I worked on with Wallace at Premiere. More info on the event here. 

A few words from Stephanie Swift

From "Neither Adult Nor Entertainment (It Turns Out)," Willem R. deGroot and Matt Rundlet, Premiere magazine, September 1998 issue: 

To be fair, some of the nominees' titles really are confusing. Triple Penetration Debutante Sluts 4 is up for Most Outrageous Sex Scene—along with Wild Bananas on Butt Row and 87 and Still Bangin'—but loses out to a scene the program entitles "Anal Food Express" [...] from something called My Girlfriend's Girlfriend. Paul Thomas's Bad Wives wins Best Film. Evil Angel's Buda wins Best Shot-on-Video Feature. Bad Wives also wins Best Actress (Film) for Dyanna Lauren, Best Supporting Actress (Film) for Melissa Hill, and Best Anal Sex Scene (Film) for Lauren and Steven St. Croix. Ms. Stephanie Swift wins Best Actress (Video) and tells the crowd: "Thanks, everybody. My gang bang was a blast."³⁶

^36. Though Ms. Swift won for Miscreants, she is here alluding to her and director Rob Black's real breakthrough video in 1987, Gangbang Angels, which is essentially a one-woman show and features the years' most infamous scene: twelve woodmen line up and do an about-face, and S. Swift performs analingus on each one in turn; she then adopts a prayerful/compliant posture as the twelve do a right-face and form a patient line and take turns hawking and spitting in her face. 

In addition to Best Actress (Video), Swift took home an award for Female Performer of the Year, perhaps in at least partial recognition of her game, shall one say, participation in the above described film. Well do I, and several other veterans of Premiere magazine, recall the fact-checking sessions for that piece; sitting in the section of our offices that we called "the pod," legal pads in our laps, counting one, two, three, four, yes, all the way up to twelve gobs.

That was several months after the actual awards—we had to wait some time before we had sufficient room to publish the piece—so let me flash back a moment to the actual AVN Awards of late January 1998. The actual author of the piece was, of course, David Foster Wallace, who would publish a somewhat different version of the piece under his original title "Big Red Son" in the collection 'Consider The Lobster' and Other Essays. (One indication of how different is that footnote number 36 in the Premiere version is footnote number 51 in the book version.) On the evening of the awards themselves, our photographer Nathaniel Welch mostly stood in the hallway outside the ballroom of Caesar's Palace, taking portraits of the various award winners; hence, the portrait of Swift with her two statuettes. We had devised a little game, Dave, Nat, our fourth musketeer Evan Wright (future author of Generation Kill and Hella Nation, at the time very unhappily ensconced at Hustler), and myself: throughout the weekend, at the various parties and receptions that surrounded the awards, at least two of us (and I always had to be one of the two) would approach a porn star and begin chatting him or her up. We would drink in their complete indifference and annoyance for a bit (for in addition to being "civilians" and probable "mooks," Dave and myself in particular were pretty poorly dressed), and then at a strategic point I would present the porn person with my business card, which of course had the Premiere logo very prominently placed therein, and have a good interior chortle as the individual's demeanor and approach changed. "Oh, you really should interview me," I recall Jill Kelly saying rather breathlessly, "because this is a very important weekend for me, it's the weekend I'm going to decide if I'm going to stay in the adult industry or not." Indeed.

Now I myself had a little bit of a "thing" for none other than Ms. Swift—considered her "my type," or what you will—so it was a peculiar moment for me when Dave and I chanced to encounter her, along with the aforementioned Ms. Melissa Hill, on the steps of Caesar's after the ceremony had wrapped. How peculiar? Allow me to quote again from the essay: "Because porn films' worlds are so sexualized, with everybody teetering right on the edge of coitus all the time and it taking only the slightest nudge or excuse—a stalled elevator, an unlocked door, a cocked eyebrow, a firm handshake—to send everyone tumbling into a tangled mass of limbs and orifices, there's a bizarre unconscious expectation/dread/hope that this is what might happen right here in Max Hardcore's hotel room. Here your correspondents find it impossible to overestimate that this is a delusion." I remember after the piece came out that some clod or other argued that the whole "expectation/dread/hope" trope was an indication of immaturity on Dave's part. Must be nice to be so advanced; it almost goes without saying, though, that the "grow up, it's just a fantasy" stance tends to ignore the reason the fantasy exists in the first place. In any event. When we spied the object of my whatever the hell it was, Dave and I were saying our good nights; he  was suffering from a flu, and really needed to get back to his room and rest; in the meantime, Evan, Nat and I would work reconnaissance by crashing a party thrown by porn star Vince Voyeur. For some reason we had gotten on the subject of music, and he was asking me to outline the differences between Pink Floyd, Syd Barrett edition and Pink Floyd, post-Syd Barrrett edition. And then we saw Swift and Hill—like Swift, Hill was known for being a porn star that didn't look quite like a porn star, and no doubt at least partially due to this affinity, the two, aside from performing with each other on occasion, were known to be personally tight—and Dave was all like, well, here's your big chance. Dryly, that is. He didn't really MEAN it, in case the person who scolded the "expectation/dread/hope" thing is reading this.

So we made our approach, and rather than play any games I had my business card at the ready. For all of their not-looking-like-conventional-porn-stars, the male escorts of Hill and Swift were pretty, well, conventionally mooky—brightly colored satin shirts over tanned and buff physiques, overly moussed post-New-Wave pompadours, the works. One of them grabbed my business card out of my hand as I tremblingly offered it to Ms. Swift, gave it a thorough going over, and announced, "I think this guy's legit. His card is embossed."

No, really. 

And that was pretty much that. Swift went on to work as a "contract girl" for the adult entertainment concern Wicked, which put out far milder products than Gangbang Angels; when that agreement ran out in 2004, she spent a couple of years at a distance from the industry, but made a comeback a few years back doing material that tended to capitalize on the "Cougar" or "MILF" vogue that was sometimes credited with keeping the "legit" adult video business afloat. 

"In June of 2009," Swift recounts in a video that was recently posted on the XXX Church website, "I was diagnosed with breast cancer. And I really feel that cancer saved my life." And, yes, as you might have inferred, Swift is now not only a cancer survivor, but a born-again Christian. The story she tells in the brief video will not necessarily be an unfamiliar one; there was, it happens, sexual abuse in her childhood. She is very calm and clear as she discusses how she felt during the creation of what she terms "over 300 movies:" "There was this always...not really nagging, but just like a...uncomfortableness in my stomach." "I always wondered the real reason why I was in the business, and why did I win the awards, and why did I get the recognition...because in the industry...it's not a real accomplishment, I mean it's just a false sense of accomplishment, it just covers up..." And so on. 

It is odd, remembering all that, and reading Dave's words, and then watching Swift's largely calm but entirely...rueful recounting of what was her career. I post all this not to be, well, a prig, nor to get all hypocritically "You see! Porn is bad!" buzz-killish, or what have you. I do, on the other hand, believe Swift's words are worth a listen, and that while it is a coincidence that this news is coming out at around the same time as a rather squirm-inducingly-large portion of the pop-culture-consuming populace is having a not-so-good laugh over Charlie Sheen's porn-star "goddesses," it is perhaps a potentially not uninstructive coincidence. If you know what I'm saying. And of course I do, as is often the case, have to wonder what Dave might have made of this. 

Noir/VN/Noir

Vince Edwards, Murder By Contract, Irving Lerner, 1958

But whatever happens, wherever the scene is laid, somebody, somewhere, will quietly set out—somebody has already set out, somebody still rather far away is buying a ticket, is boarding a bus, a ship, a plane, has landed, is walking toward a million photographers, and presently he will ring at my door—a bigger, more respectable, more competent Gradus.

—Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire, 1962

Burt Lancaster, The Killers, Robert Siodmak, 1946