This is the intellectual equivalent of an anal pounding in a ten man gang bang. In fact, I know it will cause some people to tighten their sphincters and turn up their noses like they just smelled the stink of sweat and ass and sperm in a humid hotel room where aforementioned gang bang was in full swing.

Max Hardcore is an artist. Yes, artist. You can even add an “e” to the end. Artiste.

Love or hate his body of work; you cannot deny that it has the consummate power to move your spirit, shake the foundations of your most sacred sensibilities, turn you on or off, turn you around, and make you react and question and examine yourself upon greater reflection. And that, at least with the benefit of some fine arts education, is what anyone with a few glasses of Chablis at any gallery opening would have had to agree and admit; albeit, usually begrudgingly, especially if they are one of those people.

The people, those people, you know who… those people that think they are better than you or I looking down at all of us from such lofty perches, with more, more, more; more education, more connections, looks, money and property and more of everything that you don’t actually have but wish secretly that you actually did, including even more proximity to God, those people are the ones condemning porn for appearances sake. Why? We all know from so many examples of them being caught with their pants down (shrink dink small dicks after all) the reality is they, those people, are just as entertained by porn’s artifice and the sleazy, smutty, dirty, nasty, slutty sense of itself.

Still, from some kind of intellectual cloud of vast and mysterious superiority, so aloof and all knowing, like self declared hands of God they wield the sword of righteousness that somehow cleaves what is art from what is obscene. Parting awesome good from evil bad, weaving gorgeous sophist rationales to excuse their own hypocrisies, casting golden judgment on what is not worthy; punishments and rewards must be handed out accordingly! And they are just the ones to decide who lives, who dies, and who lives to be immortalized… and… of course… who needs to go to jail for being obscene.

In Max Hardcore’s case, this even meant a trip to the penitentiary. You see… his work was judged to be obscene and that meant his work was not actually art. In fact to them it was anti art. The complete and utter absence of art, devoid of meaning and merit, and pandering to the basest of instincts… Now, to really make that decision about something so subjective as any work of art one would assume you actually need some background, an education would be best, to actually have some sort of serious credentials to make that sort of subjective opinion. Because, not only was freedom of expression on the line but also freedom from being physically incarcerated. On top of that, this opinion would need to be articulated in a way that a majority of people actually think it is utterly objective and just bow down then and there in agreement to its perfect logic and submit to the faith of its total truth now and forever.

So, how could anyone on that jury know if Max made art or pandered to obscenity if they hadn’t attended even one semester of Max Hardcore University? Before owning Homegrown Video, as a graduate from his program I learned firsthand just how much blood, sweat, tears artistry went into his work. I was astonished by his vision and devotion. Moved by his tortured soul striving to express something to the world, I was witness to his mad repulsive genius.

I lived to tell the tale.

Of course, then she would be reinventing herself again. Stephanie Swift would no longer be the Homegrown Video amateur porn girl. She wouldn’t be the ass fucking cum bubbling lickity spit hairy boy butt sniffing super slut anymore. Now, at Wicked, Stephanie Swift could finally rise to porn superstardom. The sad irony is that is a place more asexual than sexual, cold and foreboding. The gorgeous women that inhabit that place don’t want to be touched. The highest aspiration there is to have less sex, make more money. The fans become annoying, subjects that must be ruled, and having a body guard to enforce restraint and limit access is handy. Besides, the bodyguard can also always carry the suitcases too.
Forget the ass sex. A facial is going to be a privilege to be negotiated like you have been married for 20 years.
Max Hardcore’s latest starlet Catalina parted the sea of fans and approached with a huge smile. Her swaying hips and tight dress came from the clearance rack of the stripper attire aisle at Kmart. I said hello as Max made the introduction to his “latest whore”. The smile didn’t fade or rust. I said hello. The smile creaked faintly, then she turned to Max and declared she was ready to go.
Max may be the driver, with his pit crew ready to change the lights, the action, the scene, in a heartbeat, but he knows the whores are the gas which fuels the supercharged engines in all those horny little fans. So he put the pedal to the metal and raced away with a crowd of gawkers snapping shots as Catalina preened and flirted with them under Max’s wary eye.

Max Hardcore approached the booth, accompanied by the “pit crew”. These are the guys that help shoot the scenes, talk the models off the ledge, and try to keep Max from veering off the road too far and ending up in a place where he can’t get back from. They wear vests patched with logos of the companies that sponsor Max to produce his singular style of smut and baseball caps to hide their balding pates.

Here it comes again.

“So why do you guys have a picture of Stephanie Swift if she is signing for Elegant Angel?

“Long story.” I replied. Max Hardcore and I had a fair share of long stories that we had actually shared in the making of. Besides the time he was accused of murdering a model by brutal anal sex and burying her body off some exit on the 5 freeway, there was the other time when he was accused of raping a model that he shot me performing with, a case thrown out when the Judge saw her saying how much she enjoyed having sex with me after the scene was finished and Max chose for whatever reason to capture our post porn coital bliss.

“Tell me about it.” Max said, “You just can’t trust these cunts”.  I would’ve liked to agree but I knew that “those cunts” couldn’t trust us either and for that reason alone the whole deal had a sort of balance to it which I was going to have to learn to accept.  In a chaotic universe, in a crazy place like Las Vegas, with freaks and fairies and all matter of trolls and troglodytes going every which way, one had to be prepared for that sort of uncertainty. That discordant mess was a constant that could be counted on.  I explained to Max the situation with the artist and Stephanie making the leap to the big show in Porn Valley USA. He had a good laugh and his pit crew had a chuckle on my behalf too.

“Don’t worry,” Max counseled, “these bitches always come back when they need the cash.”

Not Stephanie. She was neither a bitch or a cunt and considering where her career path went I guess she didn’t need the money. Instead of going downhill and falling off the map with her stint at Elegant Angel she went up to top and scored a deal with the classy, couples friendly, porn company called Wicked. At Wicked she would share a very bright limelight with porn’s biggest, brightest star Jenna Jameson.

“How did the shoot with Max go?” I asked. I had to figure that since it was not the police calling me in for questioning that the shoot couldn’t have been all bad. The pause at the other end of the line was just a little too long though to think that everything went swimmingly. Max Hardcore had a name to live up to and marathon anal sex was not something most ordinary people would be comfortable with even talking about much less engaging in. “We changed my name to Stephanie Swift.”

Oh, ok, fine with that, not a traumatic issue at all since our Grateful Dead themed named was sort of like a working title until she came up with something better. “How was the shoot?” I asked again, “Did you two get along ok?”

Again, a long pause.

“Yes.” He was completely professional but…”

“But what?”

Stephanie Swift spoke in almost a whisper.

 “Well, I did things… I did some things that I really wish I hadn’t done.”  Welcome to the LA porn scene. She couldn’t say that I didn’t warn her – extensively.

“Like what?” If I was a true perv and worth my salt as a porno kingpin then I  probably would have asked for all the juicy details and had my secretary take “dictation” while I listened to her recount her tale of having Max Hardcore savagely fuck her tight puckered little asshole like a dirty little schoolgirl but, alas, I am a failure in that regard. I just wanted to make sure she was not scared – physically or emotionally. Stephanie was hesitating to continue but I didn’t want to push her too hard.

“Did you do anal?” I finally asked.

“Yes. That was ok. I agreed that would be alright.” She said. “But I let him do it without a condom.”

For a second I felt a twinge of something very similar to jealousy. In fact, who am I kidding? I was jealous. She said no way to anal for my shoots with her much less doing it without a rubber which I was perfectly acceptable with. Chalk up one more failure to prove my worth as a true scoundrel of XXX, a defiler of innocents, an ass fucker phenom. So I guess I was sort of defensively antagonistic when I asked why that was a problem.

“I told my boyfriend that I was only going to work with girls.” Stephanie started douching her conscience. “If he sees me in that video he is going to be really upset.”

I was worried about Stephanie going to Los Angeles to work with Max Hardcore. There were plenty of models that after working with Max decided porn was definitely not for them  and would hit the eject button on the porn vehicle career path before even really pulling out of the starting gate. Shooting a Max Hardcore scene was certainly a trial by fire. He demanded high intensity, extreme sexual acrobatics, and absolute obedience to his directing style. Love him or hate him for the type of content he makes, one still has to acknowledge that he does have a standard of style and, scoff at this all you want, an artistic vision for what he is doing.

I once saw a memo from one of his chief production company clients, internationally successful porn company Private Media, and one of the directives stated “Start with the female dressed up and with good make-up then start with one male performer but add another or two or three more and do not retouch the make-up during the scene. By the end of the scene the female should look completely opposite, sweaty, disheveled, a complete mess”. This was the type of scene that made Private a successful company and Max cut his porn chops on this kind of client, but I wasn’t sure Stephanie was ready for this type of stuff. It was a long way away from the kind of amateur porn Homegrown Video distributed, which apart from the Max line was based on letting horny folks do whatever they wanted to do with whomever he or she wanted to be with.

I told Stephanie to call me and let me know how it went.  When I didn’t hear from her, I didn’t know what to think.  I worked for Max back when there was a rumor that a girl had died on his set and he had buried her in the San Fernando Valley somewhere. Even though I knew that wasn’t true I still knew some models that were so freaked out by the sort of crazed scenes that they did afterwards would disappear to mend their fragile and shattered sense of self. Then you might never hear from the model again, or the model would say “Don’t ever work for Max” to any other aspiring starlets, or the model would realize that it wasn’t so bad – the pay good, the notoriety better – and they would spend the next couple of weeks  shooting exclusively for Max.

I called Stephanie a few times. Almost a week later she finally called me back.

“Be patient,” Stephanie assured us, “when I am ready then we can do that.”

We never felt comfortable in the hard sell approach to these matters. Nobody wants to be responsible for encouraging someone to do something that later he or she might regret. At least, nobody that operates from a considerate consciousness and a humane respect for his or her fellow beings wants to pressure anyone into a porn career. Making amateur porn and becoming a porn star are things that need to come from the heart and soul of the truly sexual, unashamed, and uninhibitedly exhibitionistic of us. Stephanie so far had been so spare in words, soft in her tone, and shy in her demeanor that we wished to tread especially lightly in any conversations about doing more videos. However, just because she was quiet and not terribly extroverted, we should not have underestimated the sexual demon that lurked inside of tender, innocent, dainty Stephanie Swift.

The first clue was that she asked to work with Max Hardcore, the notorious producer distributed exclusively with us at the time. Only the truly freaky hardcore porn girls would request such a thing where so many others said “absolutely no fucking way” otherwise. We had told her about Max, the annihilator of assholes, the pugilist of puckered orifices, and the destroyer of derrieres.  And we showed her the footage of his scenes which some reviewers had described as being hard to look away from in the same way that is true of an accident on the freeway. But instead of scaring her straight back to amateur porn where one can do whatever, however, with whomever, she  wishes, Stephanie wanted us to make the introduction immediately.

For even a city the size of San Diego, most young adults that make the choice to go to Los Angeles feel that it is a big jump – LA represents another planet. For a young amateur porn model on her way to becoming a big time mainstream porn starlet, Los Angeles presents another universe entirely. There are agents, and producers, and people that alienate you because you challenge their space as competition to that piece of the stardom that shines hot with flashy cash. There are hardcore physically demanding sex scenes that you might not want to do but if you don’t then that person aligned directly behind you is going to land the part and collect the cocaine dusted do-re-mi.

We warned her. Max only shoots anal scenes. “I don’t want to do anal.” She said. “My boyfriend only wants me to be with girls.” She said.

We reminded her. Max doesn’t work with condoms in his anal sex scenes. “He can only have sex with me if he wears a condom” .

What about only working with girls?