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.

Small breasts, if you looked around the trade show floor would appear to be a detriment and an affront to the art of pornography. Tiny tits were like an abstract and minimalist rendition of what every other portrait of a porn girl looked like, where lush bosoms and ample buttocks were drawing crowds of gawkers. The critics and the pundits certainly had their two cents to spend on an opinion.

“She certainly has a unique look. Kind of like a Siamese cat. Something sort of sultry about her… and that pretty mouth, you just want to put your cock in and fuck it hard.” People who right porn video reviews always have strong opinions that border on kinky obsessions. No wonder. Eight hours of watching adult videos five days a week is enough to turn anyone into a freak. The guy handed me his card. I took it between my thumb and forefinger to try and minimize any potential contact with bodily fluids. I didn’t recognize the magazine but regardless I would have to kiss his pinky typing finger to make sure we came away with decent press for all our efforts. “You painted her with bigger boobs than she really has though.” No end to this embarrassment until we could break down the booth and turn ourselves back to San Diego.

“That is because, long story, that is really not a picture of Stephanie Swift.”

He looked at me with the slack blankness of disbelief and raised an eyebrow over a squint of skepticism.

“Well, she could really be a huge star if she gets her boobs done. I watched your scenes with her and she has this sort of slutty but sophisticated thing going on that is really hot.”

Stephanie Swift had with deft and surefooted pluck had made the transition from amateur porn to become a starlet with a contract. Ten thousand other models would suck off a sweaty fat man in dirty underwear to be in her shoes. But, her success, her art, being a top starlet, all that meant she had to find a way to be unique and set herself apart from the nameless, un-contracted hordes of girls wanting prove themselves more artfully slutty than the last girl at the gate. This was a time when directors would enema a starlet’s asshole with various paints and require her to spray it out her ass, inadvertently creating pornographic tributes to Jackson Pollack. How does a girl not get lost in a game where trying to always top the last bit of outrageousness becomes required faire?

Certainly, doing the gang bang where she had to lick out each guys asshole, including the hairy butt orifice of Ron Jeremy, was one way, but Stephanie was smart enough to know that would only get her so far. She would have to set herself apart, not just by being sexually outrageous, but developing talents and her God given assets to keep fans and producers happy.

Walking the AVN trade show floor, one would instantly be struck by a few things. First, considering the number of booths offering everything from mushroom headed glass phalluses, to polished silver nipple clamps, flavored condoms, and models hawking every kind of porn, big boobs, black dicks, fat chicks, and midget orgies, transgender, transsexual, hetero, gay, and bisexual play. Standing out in the vast mass of it would not be easy, but Stephanie clued in quickly and figured out her niche. She wasn’t going to go any further down the gross out gag factor dark and dirty fecal path of perversity. She would celebrate her natural and beautiful assets. At a time when every starlet was determined to get a boob job she would stay organic. Saline and silicone free. Instead of buying a new rack of tits that would fit like a pair of bolt on boobs, she would keep her breasts natural, no matter that they were small by industry standards.

Being an artist, like Mark the graffiti artist who studied art at famous schools in Europe, then went into the world with a couple of cans of paint cans and a few nozzles, means starting with a head full of dreams and a belly full of bluster, then slowly starving until someone, anyone, recognizes your talent and stands ready to exploit it, willing to feed the urge and fuel the inspiration. Then, if luck and talent prevail, the rewards of that hard work are paid out. You earn the right to flake. Just like Mark, whose spray painted walls full of outlandish extraterrestrials and gorgeous nymphs and psychedelic landscapes kept him busy enough that he never had to worry about where the next job was coming or where the next deadline would end, Stephanie Swift had arrived.

“Where did you get that picture of me to work with?” Stephanie Swift asked me the question and I tried to come up with at least one of the excuses that I had been anxiously rehearsing in preparation for this moment. Unfortunately, everything that I thought I might say sort of twisted into a heap of umms and ahhhs when it tried to pass from my brain to my tongue and all I could say was, “Well, that is a great question.”

I thought about the artist, Mark. He was an amazing talent with a couple of crates of spray paint and a nozzle collection suited to conveying every nuance a brush stroke might be capable of rendering. He could get detail and texture and lines out of a can of spray paint, stunningly classic neo realism, a regular DaVinci of the pressurized paints. Everyone who knew his work which was in graffiti murals on buildings all over the world told me that I was lucky to get him to paint our trade show booth. They couldn’t believe he was actually doing a piece for, shame, shame, shame, an amateur porn company.

I remember trying to talk to him when he had been working, one part painting, another part smoking, another drinking beer, in the dense noxious fumes of his studio. He was sort of unintelligible. He peered from heavily lidded eyes that occasionally would widen. He seemed to look around at things that were only visible to him and everyone who has recently eaten a bucket of peyote washed down with a keg of suds. Whatever was there didn’t seem to readily present any danger to me but I couldn’t be certain. Who could know what type of demon might suddenly possess the guy and control his behavior, suddenly turning him into a slobbering, seething, raving mad Englishman.  I certainly didn’t feel lucky trying to get him to finish the painting by our deadline. Homegrown Video could definitely not show up at the biggest trade event of the year with a half painted booth. Unfortunately, all our conversations seemed sort of one sided since apparently so many years of using spray paint altered his brain to the point where conversation required an advanced degree of obscure dialects in the language of mumbling.

“Why did you paint Stephanie Swift?”

“Mmrrmwu? I wasn owngone erm doan  painsteswift.” It sounded sort of Gaelic but I thought he was saying that he didn’t know who Stephanie Swift was. No way to be sure which meant I had to be careful responding. I decided it was best to just talk as if I hadn’t actually completely finished what I had to say before.

“She is that porn star that was working with us but now isn’t and… How can you not know who she is when you painted her picture right there? She is not going to be in our booth at the show; she is going to be working for our competition… and we are going to look pretty frigging funny promoting her when she is not even going to be at our booth.”

“SurreyMeht.” Mark answered, and continued. “I cuddoerm mek… mumble, slur, babble…pay me more.”

That last part made too much sense.

In a shanty town of trade show booths that all looked like they were built by the same company out of the same materials that were left over after the last trade event, our little hand-painted sprayed by a popular graffiti artist stall certainly stood out. The fact that it looked like a booth celebrating Stephanie Swift was just going to be something we had to run with even though it  was completely accidental that her picture ended up there in the first place. If anyone asked why we had erected a Stephanie Swift alter when she wouldn’t be signing autographs at our counter, then we wouldn’t be lying to say that we shot amateur porn with her long before she became a contract girl pro porn star. Getting mocked by our business peers was certainly something we had grown accustomed to anyway. Still, Stephanie was bound to see it at some point and I wasn’t looking forward to explaining to her how her face ended up on our wall. Any explanation was pretty much a lock to convincing her that I was some sort of jealous stalker freak that couldn’t accept that she had signed with our competition and not with Homegrown.

Finally, Stephanie appeared. She has an almost mystical sort of eerie translucence about her to begin with and that sets her apart from 99% of the other girls in the room. She doesn’t have big fake boobs. She doesn’t put on several pounds of cake make up to hide bad skin and black eyes from suitcase pimp boyfriends. She doesn’t dress like a tranny hooker at the corner of Hollywood and Vine. Her skin is pale and perfect. Her feline eyes survey everything in quick intense stares. There is sort of a perpetual smirk balanced somewhere between disgusted and bemused on her face but not because she is taking any of the drugs popular with so many other starlets. She was walking toward the booth and obviously supremely content, a cat that has caught the mouse, batted it mercilessly for twenty plus minutes, and is relaxing before swallowing it down. Well, at least she liked what the artist did with rendering her even though he was painting someone else’s face and body that had been plucked from the back of a nudie mag.

Of course, admitting that would only make me look like a bigger moron. So I asked her, “How do you like it?”

I didn’t need her to answer. The fact that she couldn’t stop looking at herself interpreted in spray paint on a huge billboard of wall space in an immense hall filled with thousands and thousands of people that would be walking by to take it in too offered all the explanation that words would never satisfy.

We learned about the situation when we saw the booth with Stephanie Swift’s sexy picture plastered up in a larger than life poster at a booth three times the size of our humble little space. In the picture, her makeup looked great. Her hair was perfect. Her unblemished body had been digitally polished to perfection. Stephanie Swift was definitely not a Homegrown Video amateur anymore; rather, she was now a true blue film star. Thousands of trade show attendees would be filing past that image and looking up to it and wagging their tongues and pitching tent poles in their pants to salute her and encamp their approval so their little helmeted soldiers could stand at attention. Then if they spied our booth, they could march on over and find out why we had a booth painted with an image of Stephanie when lo and behold we had no Stephanie at our booth.

Having opted not to let the teamsters charge their exorbitant fees to carry the booth in and set it up for us meant we were sweating our balls off to carry every single heavy wood piece inside. Since we weren’t going union to get the job done meant a few things. One, we learned the hard way that we couldn’t bring the stuff in through the conveniently close exhibition space giant doors; no, we had to carry each piece the long way, all the way through the casino, down the endless hallways, and no form of cart was permitted.  So we were sweating and breathing hard when we stumbled across the booth which was already installed and it looked like a temple with Stephanie as its primary inspiration for worship. At first it chilled us and took our breath away, but with each subsequent trip past it, I grew more heated and let a big grudge grow. Now I wasn’t just hauling huge 4’x8’ sections of graffiti painted plywood I was carrying a heavy load of unwieldy anger which I desperately wanted to drop off on Ms. Swift Porn Superstar’s head.

As the assembly of our booth took shape, peers and business associates mulling about making sure their booths were in order and sizing up their competition.  The questions started in right away. “Why do you guys have Stephanie Swift painted on your booth when she has an exclusive contract and is signing over there?”

Great. Well at least I was going to get some practice coming up with excuses.

Naturally, the fact that Stephanie Swift wasn’t returning our calls because she was too busy doing gang bangs in Los Angeles with big name porn stars like Ron Jeremy kind of hurt my feelings. This was just the sort of thing that might lead me to become a calloused, crotchety, disgruntled porn king pin and for that I suppose I should’ve been grateful. Maybe once I turned cold and mercenary enough by moments like these then I could really get down to the nasty of doing these XXX nasty amateur sex videos  and put the dirt back into dirty sex movies. Maybe I should’ve been thanking Stephanie for snubbing us so she could get her sweet defiled asshole up to Los Angeles where she could truly become the porn queen that seemed her destiny to fulfill and her rightful place in the universe.

Besides, why should I hold that against her at all? Wasn’t it her right as a model to go make top dollar licking Ron Jeremy’s asshole? I hope she made extra hazard pay. I hope the producer paid for her tongue transplant. I hope she made such a great impression on the whole LA porn scene that she would forever be the top anal gang bang butthole licking super slut in the entire history of porn. She sure wouldn’t be the first girl to deny her roots of working in amateur porn making a Homegrown Video scene. That was typical, par for the course. The models never realize that a huge contingent of porn fans only cares about those amateur scenes where the model is not jaded and over-choreographed and where they might as well be telephoning in the moans and groans of yet another faked orgasm.

Unfortunately, too many porn models begin to resent the fans that made them so popular in the first place. The girls come to hate the slobbering affections of those horny minions which is unfortunate because those are the people putting in the money to make the whole machine gone kiss,  kiss, bang, bang and sputter along with a tank of spunk and spit.

The business. Can’t forget about the business.

Stephanie Swift was NOT going to sign at our booth at the trade show in Las Vegas, so be it. Business is business and she went her way and we would have to go ours, that’s just business. That might have been the least of our problems if my graffiti artist with the noxious inhalant chemically fried brain didn’t finish the painting of our booth. What the hell was taking him so long? We were down to the wire and the last time I had gone to  the studio to check on progress I saw essentially a few pieces of plywood and some paint splattered tarps and a few milk crates  full  of spray paint. We might be able to take that to a spray paint show and stitch up  something that would inspire a few aspiring Pollocks working in spray paint but for the biggest adult trade show of the year we would be laughed out onto Vegas boulevard so that we could join the rest of the losers that gambled and lost.

The more I had tried to not sound pissed and impatient, the more I was snapping at the seams of what was left of my tolerance for the situation. His laconic responses of “don’t worry, man, it’s going to be fine” were starting to make me insane. I was afraid to even step in his studio since I would start to hallucinate just standing in the fumes of the workspace. When I was there I worried about anyone lighting a match and blowing us all up in a fiery ball. I was preparing my last reasonable speech about the deadline for the work when I walked through the roll up door. The artist Steve greeted me. “I have something I want to show you.”

I  was ecstatic and I don’t think  that was due to riding the dragon of those paint fumes. I walked over to see the work in progress.  He pulled away the canvas and…

Stephanie Swift was not returning the calls. I gave up. We would have to find someone else to sign at our booth in Las Vegas at the AVN show. Worse, I know I sounded like a frigging didn’t know  he’d been dumped yet high school boyfriend that hadn’t taken the hint yet when I left the messages basically pleading with her to return my calls on the promise, made weak with such hesitation and uncertainty, that it would hopefully, maybe, possibly be worth her while. Time was running out. We would just have to try and find someone else that would stand there and look hot and keep a smile through grueling hours of slobbering guys paying her greasy compliments all day long. In addition, I had other concerns to deal with because our genius graffiti artist hired to spray our booth had not come in yet to discuss the artwork and he was becoming just as hard to get a call back from. I am not sure if that is a compliment to porn stars or a critique of artists but either way I was going nuts and was ready to throw the artist into an anal gang bang scene or spray the flaky porn girls with a can of rust-O-leum.

Finally the artist came by the office to discuss the booth. I told him we wanted it to tell a story about the evolution of Homegrown Video, how we started as a purely amateur porn company but blossomed into something completely unique and how far we were looking into the future as we grew and matured as an adult entertainment company. He nodded but when he nodded he seemed close to nodding out since I think he had worked perhaps one too many late nights with a can of paint spraying out mind altering vapors of toluene without the protection of a gas mask. This may have had some benefit to  the creative side of the process but nailing down some sort of  business arrangement was becoming increasingly complex; I might as well have been dropping acid and trying to take the police entrance exam.

I couldn’t be sure that he actually understood that we needed the work done by a specific deadline in order to send the booth to Vegas in order to be set up in time. I couldn’t even tell if he had actually started work on it. He asked if I could provide some reference material to help inspire the female figures that he wanted to paint. Well, in an amateur porn company that certainly was not  going to be a problem. Why it took so long to get to that point, dude wants a porn handout, fine, not like I haven’t  heard that before, was a bit beyond me. I wasn’t about to sniff paint to figure it out though; I went to the rack full of all the porn mags that we had and grabbed a few for him to review. He showed me some pictures that he wanted to use and I said no problem, good luck, ok I will advance just a bit  more of the cash that was not due until completion, please, please, please  get this  done in time and sent him on his way. He tore out the images carefully and went on his ethereal, dopey way.

A few days later, the magazine was still on my desk.  I opened it up to see if we had any of our movies reviewed. Nothing. But there was something that certainly got my attention faster than a porn star faking her first orgasm. I turned the page and there was Stephanie Swift. Not only was she very clearly and prominently featured absolutely blatantly in a porn rag, but also she was engaged in an act that truly represents the very pinnacle of porn sluttiness. There was sweet and shy Stephanie Swift, who didn’t  want her boyfriend to know that she did anal or other guys and didn’t want her boyfriend’s parents to know that she did an amateur porn for Homegrown Video, pure and natural amateur Stephanie Swift in a gang bang video. Anal, oral, vaginal, the triple penetration crown of dirty nasty whorishness, massive multiple loads of spunk plastered on her face from a bunch of meat heads and mooks, even a line of guys bending over for her to lick each and every one of their assholes, including the hairiest and nastiest puckered sphincter of the king of smut himself Mr. Ron Jeremy, Stephanie was doing it all and with a sly smile on her face. Maybe she was just happy that she had a multi-video contract. Maybe she knew that once people saw her licking Ron Jeremy’s sweaty stank of pubic twirled and curled anus they would know that she was capable of going where not porn star had gone before.

Time rolls on in the porn biz at fast forward speed so you can get to the good parts faster and forget about the crappy and boring parts sooner than later. If Stephanie Swift wanted to settle down with her boyfriend and have a nice life hoping his parents never found out about her secret porn alter identity then we were more than happy to support her in that effort. Homegrown Video honors its promises and we would keep our vow not to put her on the box cover of any of the anal sex scenes or blow job scenes or group sex scenes that we had shot up to then. We rolled up our sleeves, stiffened our… upper lips… and went back to the orifice, business as usual.

We kept producing more amateur sex videos and started gearing up for the big trade show that happens every year in Las Vegas. The previous couple of years we had a booth that was starting to come apart at the seams. Rather than haul it out one more time only to find out which parts never made it back into the boxes from the previous year – which always sent us into manic fits of stress as we tried to pull it together into something that looked halfway decent – as long as no one looked too closely to see the duct tape and chewing gum holding it together, we decided the time had come to upgrade our look and hit the show with a stylish new booth.  The new booth would have to be sexy. It would need to be modern, eye catching, unique, but still be able to celebrate our amateur status. The new booth would have to tell the world “this is Homegrown Video and we make the best amateur porn that money can buy!”

Of course, we would need hot young amateur porn girls to stand there and make pleasant small talk and sign autographs for the droves of horny and curious fans that packed the aisles, sometimes waiting in line for hours to get autographs from top tier starlets. One local girl of course would’ve been a perfect candidate but I wasn’t going to bother calling Stephanie Swift and pepper her with invitations to come back and work for us. If she didn’t think we were worth her salt then so be it. I was a seasoned pro after all and I knew they came and they went through the porn grinder every day. However, one or two calls might be worth the effort.  What was I thinking?