1. When the suitcase pimp gets too tired to hold the suitcase and needs a helping hand, porn talent scouts can make a call and see if someone is available that can help but you better be prepared to… ahem… show some appreciation

2. If the director doesn’t want to pay you when you balk about the price after finding out that you are expected to do an anal gang bang, then the porn agent can help you convince yourself that it won’t be so bad to get the exposure for being a wild slut willing to do anything even though now everyone will know that you are willing to do everything for almost nothing.

3. When your lingerie and shoes are stolen on the set by one of the other models on the agency roster then the porn agent can remind you how stupid you were to leave them out where someone could take them in the first place.

4. When your head begins to swell because you are getting jobs doing fuck scenes for all the top companies a porn agent is very handy at letting you know that other girls are probably better picks for the big contracts and bringing you down to earth.

5. Porn agents help you to decide that doing amateur porn for Homegrown Video wasn’t a good idea no matter how much fun you had and how much money you made because it makes it apparently makes it harder for you to be a porn star in pro porn.

Returning now to the same old story, success and failure in the black heart of Porn Valley USA, hate the player and love the game, facials and creampies and assholes spread wide, and so many hours in LA traffic going from porn set to porn set in studios, in homes, at hotels, in dorms, we find our heroine tragically now on heroin, oxy, and crystal meth. Her boyfriend split when the money went tight because he couldn’t perform with her anymore. His cock wouldn’t even get hard with a fistful of viagra thrown at it. Losing him however proved great for business… for a while. But then the producers stopped calling unless they were calling her names, like fucked up bitch, useless cunt, crackhead ho, and telling her to kick the drugs. No one wants to hire anyone that strung out.

Even the fact that she would now be willing to do anal gang bangs with truckload of tranny midgets wasn’t getting the phone to ring.

Time to take time off. A vacation was long overdue anyway. Getting clean and sober would be the perfect destination, she books the trip.

So with the same determination and spirit that helped make her a porn star, she walks, stumbles, but does not fall off the path to sobriety. Finally, clean and sober, she dates a doting fan. He stayed with her through it all. He made the trip and didn’t ask for much. He still loved her even when she swore off men for the rest of her life after the last bad break up and all the cocksuckers she had to deal with doing the porn star thing.

And life away from the scene? Life is good. Sure there were great parties. Meeting some of the celebs other people dream about fucking that paid to fuck could be notched off in the fun column, might miss that a bit from time to time.  The directors kissing your ass, friends passing by to get high, free catering, and getting things like underwear paid for until your drawers were overstuffed with frilly fraying lingerie, all that left a taste bittersweet but neither too bitter nor luckily too sweet, because that is the part that gets people into trouble.

Thinking back though, the fondest memory, the memory of when it was fun more than work, that was when way back when you made your first, your very first, amateur porn.

So if the studios were paying the Agency, then how could the Agency be working for me? The people that paid the cash would be the people to please and the people to actually work for it, those earnest young porn starlets and stars moaning and groaning away whilst they toiled, were essentially different products that could just be plugged in whatever way necessary to move more… product. The more sex scenes a producer could get for the less they paid the better. So the agent, his role was really to talk your rate down…

His whole gruff cowboy thing, the way his cig burned hot, the sneering leer, and flip top greased up hair cut straight out of 1952, all of it made you want to think twice. His goal was to draw on you first and shoot you down for whatever high falutin’ fool thing you might be thinking… That you have what it takes, and that he should be grateful that you are going to be so successful. His poker stare was so dead it buried you before you even could think  of what to say. This whole porn thing wasn’t going to be as easy as it looked.

When Jim South finally did get off the phone he looked at me like I had just farted in his face. I didn’t know if I have done something to personally offend him but I was starting to feel like I might have done something wrong. Not closed the door? Sat down on the wrong dirty brown couch stinking of cigarette butts? Only later would I realize that new guys coming into porn were essentially nothing more than a pain in the ass and about as useful as dead batteries in a whore’s vibrator. You could try them in a flashlight but you wouldn’t see much or use them long. New guys, until they proved themselves to be supercharged sex machines, were nothing more than expensive props that often fell apart and had to be rebuilt. In the days before a guy could pop a pill to get a hard on, a guy that couldn’t readily and easily command his erect cock to perform on cue was  an expensive waste of the director’s time.

His thick leather wrinkles and manly mustache and Okie accent gave him the Marlboro Man swagger like he had just jumped off the prairie rounding up little doggies on his way into the World Modeling porn agency where he would be wrangling strippers looking to up their game doing porn. He made it clear that work would hard to get for me. New guys only get hired if they have a cute girl to work with that won’t work with anyone else. That would not be a problem. My girl was the one that wanted us to get into porn in the first place. So, begrudgingly, Jim handed over the paperwork to get started to sign with the agency.

As I was filling it out he laid out the ground rules which were essentially a threat against working with any other agents and why they were all never to be trusted and how he was the only legit one. Pretty much everything he said sounded like a threat. Clearly, the point was this – as an agent, he didn’t work for you.  You worked for him. If you went behind his back and didn’t get paid for fucking all day on set, then that was your fault. However, as long as you followed his rules, then he would make sure you got paid… but only if you didn’t do anything wrong that the director or producer took issue with. I had to re-adjust my understanding of the role of agent. Instead of being your advocate and rep, he was really just a procurer for the production companies.

There was once a porn agent from LA

who said you’d only get work if you did A

so you could sit on your butt or get fucked in it

which of course really sucked if it only paid shit

but either way he gets his cut off your butt on pay day

The office smelled like an overflowing butt-filled ashtray out of a Buick on blocks in the weedy yard of a house inhabited by meth heads. The greasy brown couches had literally absorbed so much oil of nicotine that they were shiny with a waxy film and then buffed by a thousand cute porn starlet butts sitting there and waiting their turn to get hired. Pictures of starlets I recognized from my own time spent…  doing research…  hung on the sort of beige sort of mustard yellow walls that reminded me of the color of old newspapers and told old stories good and bad and otherwise newsworthy too.

There was a picture of Savannah who was infamous for dating the rock star Slash, but more notorious for later killing herself. There was a picture of Sunset Thomas, who went from being an amateur porn princess to being the Queen of the Mustang Ranch and becoming popular on an HBO series. Pictures of the older starlets told of the good old days of looking good and the hairstyles that made them what they were.

Going into the office you could tell right away where you stood, in the way, so sitting down on one of the couches was the best way to get out of the way. Sit and wait. And wait. And wait for Jim to get off the phone, the life of the porn agent depended on a nose for talent, a taste for fine ass pussy, an eye for bullshit, and an ear to stand on going on and on call after call all holding patiently in queue.

My first experience with a porn talent agent occurred at  the infamous World Modeling Talent Agency, located in the heart of the San Fernando Valley on Van Nuys Boulevard. One of the chief reasons San Fernando is often referred to as “porn valley”, the agency was the original place for producers to call that wanted to hire not just actors and actresses but an actress that would, if necessary to convey the reality of the character and add substance to the plot, take a hard cock up the asshole and a massive cum blast to the face to fully portray her character. World Modeling managed to draw the line in the sand between the cheesy entertainment industry of Tinseltown and the sleazy side of that other Hollywood of failed actresses that became successful hookers and escorts. If you were “acting” and having sex was essential to the performance then that part about getting paid to act didn’t also mean necessarily paid to have sex. We all know that would be illegal… because paying people to have sex is just bad, bad, bad, wicked bad. Ok? (That’s ok, I don’t particularly agree with it either)

The first thing the original owner Jim South would tell you was about what he had to go through to help make that point clear. He had to fight the cops that wanted to bust him for pimping and the pimps that wanted to bust him up for making his style of pimping legal. It must not have been easy and word on the streets, lined not with gold but with golden condom wrappers and glimmering with shiny used hypodermic needles and other bits of the detritus of sleaze, had it that Jim fought back hard and perhaps even some things, like a leg or an arm here or there, might have been broken along the way.

I went the agency on the advice of a now former pornstar that went by the name “Aja” back in the day. She said Jim’s World Modeling was the only legit agency and the best way to break into the porn biz. Up until that time, I was just doing homemade sex tapes and sending them to Homegrown Video, but I wanted to hit the big time of getting paid to get laid. Going through the doors of the office, I had no idea of what to expect so I was nervous, curious, excited, anxious, and didn’t know whether or not to climb the stairs to the office and get on the path to porn super-stardom or run out the door and try to find an alternate direction to the future besides the road to ruin.

The last straw wasn’t when the boyfriend found out that you did the boy/girl fuck scenes without telling him. He got over that as quick as the next week’s hotel bill being due. The last straw wasn’t even when he drunkenly got pissed off and mean as a fucking snake with a nail through its tail either; he took the swing at you that left a bruise but that wasn’t the last straw either, even when you had to make an excuse for the mark. Saying that it happened on a fetish shoot yesterday got the director off your back even though he grumbled about having to deal with extra time in make-up to hide it and time is money. You could even forgive him for smoking the last bit of weed or doing the last line of that crystal that burned like a motherfucker.

Nope, all that was bad but the problem came down to the fact that you were doing all the work. He did jack shit because after a while the pick your dick up meds stops working no matter how many you pop. When the guy can’t get his dick hard and can’t get any real work and is just jerking off for $50 bucks  a pop in a gang bang that just wasn’t going to pay the bills, buy the drugs, or even purchase a ticket to get the bus home. At this point, it wouldn’t be so much breaking up as it would be firing his lazy ass and kicking him to the curb so you could make some real cash without him holding you back.

At this point you would be willing to do more anal scenes, as long as the money is good, and there are a few directors out there that said to let them know when you were willing to take some cock – besides the dick of that dickhead ex-boyfriend that couldn’t get his dick hard – up your asshole. Once those options ran dry then a change of hair color and a new stage name would be the way to go. Rebooting the career might be just the thing to do under the circumstances.

He holds the power

To make you or to break you

Only in his mind

The agent reminds you not to say anything about having made amateur porn videos for Homegrown Video. In fact, he makes you feel like it was a mistake. He also makes you feel like having a boyfriend is a mistake too.

“He may not be a suitcase pimp”, the Agent tells you, “but it doesn’t matter because that is how everyone is going to see him anyway and no one likes when suitcase pimps are on set.” He is a broken record and you already know what tune he is going to be playing next but of course you have to listen to it again anyway. “Producers don’t want to hire you if you only are going to do boy/girl scenes with him exclusively anyway.” The hardest part of hearing it again is that you already know that the bill on the cheapest hotel you could find in the Valley is coming due. The roaches don’t have to pay it but you have to pay for the roaches. Your man is getting depressed because the work has been getting tougher and tougher to find. Producers don’t want to hire him. Even though you said you would be ok with him doing fuck scenes with other starlets, none of the producers are interested in him.

“How do we know if he can perform?” The producers all have their studs that they like to work with and hire all the time. The idea of trying anyone knew means that they will all be standing around waiting. Waiting to see if he can get his dick hard. Waiting to see if he can cum on cue. Waiting for him to fail so they can say, “Sorry, I told you so.” Then they will suggest that you break up with him. “He is just holding you back.” That is when they are being obnoxiously polite. Other times it is more scathingly impolite. “You have to get rid of that suitcase pimp if you really want to make it in this business.” They tell you then add something along the lines of “I would hire you for a ton of shoots if you would work with my guys. You would like working with my guys. They know how to fuck like stars and will make you look good… unlike that limp dick motherfucker you call a boyfriend. That bitch can’t even keep his dick hard with a fist full of viagra.”

The mere suggestion of doing fuck scenes with other guys though just is not something that he is ok with. Oh yeah, it is fine for him to be with other chicks, and you can deal with that, but not ok with you to be with other guys. That is not ok.

But neither is it ok not having enough money to pay the hotel bill… so you can enjoy another week of cigarette smoke stained ceilings, brown and orange shag carpets with ominous swampy spots, and a tv that only seems to successfully carry channels that are in Spanish.

So it all comes down to making a choice. Do you take the job on the sneak and try to not let the boyfriend know or do you just tell him “fuck it, we have to pay the rent and do it no matter how pissed off he gets, or do you just pack the bags and use whatever money is left to try and make it home and forget the whole frigging thing and give up on being a porn star.

Only quitters quit. Liars lie. Porn stars fucking fuck.

He is just going to have to deal with it. But should you tell him before or after you do the scene? That is the question…