I opened the door to Ing’s and bathroom nonchalantly, trying to downplay even the remotest possibility of any potential horror awaiting on the other side. I looked back with a shrug, “What could possibly be so bad?”

Spark knew. “You have to see it for yourself.” He said as if I might be walking into a room where someone just got hacked into bloody bits.

Then I saw it with my own eyes.

It could could have been a twisted prank. Some dadaist art piece designed to instigate disgust and provoke a riot. Or special effects from a horror movie made real  and therefore infinitely more disgusting. The bathtub. It looked like it was alive, crawling… hairy. From the hot water a steamy cloud thick with a stench of body odor and scented putrid soap scum hung in the air. The bathtub was thick with Ron Jeremy’s body hair, short, thick curly black hairs that clung to the sides of the tub with greasy suds drying to a hard fuzz lined it end to end. The puddled remnants of water that could not pass down the choked drain was grey with a dirty film. It rippled at one end trying to find a way down and out drop at a time.

Renting an apartment or house out for a location one is always taking a huge risk. The bored production minions, the apathetic actors, the selfishly arrogant directors and producers that are too busy trying to get their shots couldn’t care less. As far as they are all concerning, that space is theirs to do as they wish for the duration of the shoot. They own it.  They don’t care if they break the vase, flick burning ashes on the oriental rug, rip the upholstery moving the furniture into a stack in the corner. In mainstream or in porn, it is all the same regardless but ALL of those things would have been easier to handle than the devastation of Ron’s bath.

Ing stood behind me gently sobbing, demanding a new bathtub. “How am I going to clean that?” She wanted to know and I honestly was at a loss for any suggestion. Some sort of incendiary device would be too dangerous. Chemicals too noxious. It would require a complete hazardous waste disposal team to secure the premises and begin a toxic waste disposal process. Chances were good that Dupont hadn’t yet come up with a solvent that would break down such a biohazard as Ron Jeremy’s hairy soap scum.

I didn’t have the heart to warn her that we were probably going to find used anal sex condoms under the couch too when the Vivid shoot was finally wrapped.

Don't look under the couch...

I burst through the door, but silent as a shadow, creeping along to stay quiet so as not to disrupt the shoot. At the end of a long day, those hot lights can explode if things get especially steamy or the PA that has secretly been doing drugs all day with the starlets knocks it over; with patience on the brink, tempers about to snap, this is when the porn set is more like an accident waiting to happen, a bridge about to be burned,  the end of the fantasy of sex as something fun. Ing was outside her bathroom. Spark was holding and consoling her. She was trembling like she just saw the ghost of her dead mother walking her dead pet dog which was run over by the school bus.

“What happened?”

“He ruined my bathroom?” Ing wouldn’t look at me. At the time I don’t think she could see anything or anyone except Spark. He was completely the enveloping universe of love and protection, a perfect boyfriend, who was listening, reassuring, and warding from any further harm.

“What?” I was dead split between trying to sound deeply sympathetic but finding it hard to balance against intense skepticism.  ”Ron Jeremy ruined your bathroom? How did he do that?” Now I was looking at Spark too. He could be a mad dog when it came to protecting Ing, in all her innocence and demure naivete, an angel of rank in God’s Army. He would hopefully be the voice of reason in the next few minutes. He could just as easily be the boyfriend that opens up a can of psycho wuppass and starts WW III. Man to man, dude to dude, bro to bro… all that was easily disposable. Girls like Ing, so pure and true, were not typically the kind of girl he had ever been with since he was essentially a street kid that crawled out of the ooze of the LA river winding through downtown Los Angeles. Being with her was both a miracle and an evolution and as beyond true explanation as either for making the case of existence. Although their relationship was demonstrable by cause, because they were always, always, always together, and by effect, because they effectively were two opposites that were completely and utterly attracted to one another.

Spark was keeping it cool though. I guess at the end of the day he too realized that the only way everyone was going to collect a check for all the indignities suffered that day was if there was not a complete nervous breakdown, a boyfriend brawling, or any other sort of tremor that would rock the whole deal. Good thing because you really need that check at the end of the day for all the hassle, the spent analized condoms turning crusty under the couches. The broken dishes. The starlets talking porn outside your neighbors door even after you reminded them ten times not to.

“You need to see this” Spark looked at the bathroom door.

Ron Jeremy used the bathtub. What could possibly be so freaking tragic about that? It is a good thing to be clean right?

Ing wasn’t from that part of California, the Valley, the part where all your neighbors worked in film and television productions and moonlighted as porn set hands and had friends and friends of friends that all earned a few bucks on the side renting out to porn companies looking for places to shoot one-day-wonders. She was from the part of southern California where the neighbors were the ones everyone hoped would hire them for their next project so that they wouldn’t have to moonlight on porn sets anymore and risk getting outed to the Union.

From the softer sands of Malibu, a place where the green blue sea soothes the savage and sometimes heartless soul of Life in Los Angeles, Ing came from the whitest white Christian purity whiter than the walls of Pepperdine. She was innocence and cordiality, grace and refinement. She is the kind of gentle soft soul that should be kept a million miles away from things like cum gurgling and anal lube bubbles.

But having Vivid shoot a porn in her studio kind of made that impossible, now here she was practically catatonic. Still, she was coherent enough to say that she was going to be fine. She was going to make it through. Never again. But she was going to make it through. Rent had to be paid and at least the rental would cover it in a single day. A day of hell, but just one day of hell.

She left our loft to go back and check on her bathroom after Ron’s bath. Ron Jeremy was finally out after what seemed like hours that had no beginning water running or ending of its draining.

Shortly after is when we heard the screams.

bronski!

Ron Jeremy had been in the bath for a while. Since that was the location of the one and only restroom in Spark and Ing’s loft, that meant that our bathroom was now the main spot for the cast and crew to use, making waste, doing drugs, and having hissy fits. There was only so much one could do about it. The more pressing concern was still making sure that wherever the anal sex was being recorded that some measure of precautions were being taken to avoid leftover bio-waste. The place could have burned down as far as I was concerned as long as I could still use my couch without fear of finding a spent condom that had recently been stuffed up some starlet’s eager to get paid butthole.

Ron must have had some serious work to do in the bath. The only being I think that could spend more time in a  tub would have to have been part mermaid.

But Ron is a professional, so when the time came to shoot his part, no pun intended, he was out and ready to roll. Indeed, the strange thing was he still pretty much looked the same and smelled the same. In all honesty I doubt many would have realized that he just spent a couple hours preening and cleaning in a tub which proves that you can take the porn star out of the dirt but you can’t take the dirty out of the porn star.

Ing had been more than patient. Actually, she seemed as though she had taken a couple of xanax or something similar. She had the sort of emotionless patience that someone generally has to be on heavy medication to achieve without the benefit of a Guru. She had made it past the Landlords coming by to ask us to keep it down outside the lofts; porn stars had been commiserating over cigarettes, chatting about partying, anal fucking and cum bubbles, sex with agents, sex with trannies, sex, sex, sex, who has good wood and who doesn’t, and all manner of stuff ordinary folks aren’t accustomed to hearing right outside their trendy LA loft apartments.

Hold on, I guess that is pretty normal in San Fernando.

The time Ron Jeremy spent in the bath seemed to Ing like hours. She was becoming frantic. She couldn’t figure out what was taking so long and it was wearing her down just thinking about it. She looked like she had reached that point beyond where the last tear of worry has been shed and all that is left is a cold, expressionless shock that drained her face of color and froze every trace of emotion.

The Vivid shoot in the meantime was going on swimmingly. Scene after sex scene was wrapped and “in the can”. All the non contract stars would be performing the anal sex while the Vivid contract starlets didn’t have to put their asses on the line, so to speak, but assholes were being properly fucked and that what was selling so that is what had t be shot. The top studs in the industry were delivering the goods, wood lasting through all the camera and lighting changes and the starlets sagging interest when the camera was off.

At the end of a day of shooting multiple anal sex scenes, as one can certainly unfortunately surmise, there is a lingering stench of butt and sweat and cum. To director Paul Thomas, that smell was the smell of victory, the sweet and sour scent of a hard day at the orifice.

A long day, just one more scene to shoot. Someone would have to get Ron out of Ing’s bathroom.

nice clean big boobs!

Ron Jeremy is pretty much of an enigma. The more you know about him and see him in all his apparent contradictions, the deeper the mystery confounds. How could such a guy, who appears to be king of the mooks, be such a porn star? Well, there is that strange ability to orally pleasure himself. He once bet a woman that he could suck his own cock and if he was able then she would have to finish him off. She took one look at his big beer belly, that isn’t a beer belly because he is a teetotaler, and took the bet and proved quite literally that she was not just a sucker but a cocksucker to boot. And go figure, he may look sloppy, but he is not sloppy in the sack… many a porn starlet has marveled at his oral skills, which apparently he learned from another porn legend Nina Hartley.

Then there is that nickname – “The Hedgehog”. Hedgehogs are quiet and prickly little creatures that roll into a ball of spiked quills when provoked. Ground hog would probably have been a better choice since Ron seems to always be sleeping, waking just long enough to find out if it is time for him to fuck, then going back to sleep. Hedgehog is the name that stuck though and I guess it makes sense from the standpoint that he does have an extremely bristly rug of back hair. Still a hedgehog is a quiet little creature, and Ron, at least when he is awake, seems to always be performing shtick as if his life were a stage in a darkly lit comedy club with a row of hecklers for him to pick off one by one with he  New York wit, chewy as a proper bagel and saltier than a street vendor’s pretzel.

But Ron has mysterious skills, talents that make him strangely suited to a career as a male porn star. I am sure he was great as an highly educated intellectual and administrator in the NYC public schools, but being able to count from one to ten and ejaculate on cue was probably not an essential skill in that vocation. In porn, it is the difference between standing around for hours waiting for the “money shot” and actually getting paid. And Ron sincerely loves the idea of getting paid to have sex with so many women, big, small, tall, fat, hot, not, he has done it all. Unfortunately, somewhere along the line, he got a bad reputation for having poor personal hygiene. So the notion that he was going to jump into Ing and Sparks bath to clean up for his upcoming scene in Vivid’s “one-day wonder” was a contradiction. Sure he had wicked body odor, but that is just the curse of being as hairy as a werewolf I guess, at least he was respectful and considerate enough to want to bath prior to the upcoming anal sex scene…

I could see Ing wrestling with the idea. Yes, letting Ron Jeremy take a bath in her bathtub would mean that he would be clean at the very least and that meant she could worry a bit less about his body odor destroying her couch, even if she still had to worry about the anal sex scenes being shot on it later in the day. But one stressful thing at a time. She was on the verge of a nervous breakdown as things stood and anything to hold that off was positive. On the other hand, I could tell she was freaking about what would happen to her tub if he soaked down in it.

Ing’s boyfriend Spark walked in. He was munching on a sandwich prepared by the caterer. He couldn’t have come at a better time. On the surface, Spark was about as mellow a dude as ever deserved to be referred to as a “dude”. But woe to whomever crossed his path because underneath his live and let live mellow vibe was a dangerous beast. A lion. And since Ing was essentially paying all their bills it meant that, like the King of Beasts, all he had to do was get up and kick some ass every now and again for the pride. His animal instincts were sharp and he picked up Ing’s distress signals right away.

“What’s the matter, honey?” A little bit of turkey shot from his mouth onto my floor but that was fine. I was more concerned with Ing falling to pieces and Spark lighting a fire to Vivid’s shoot and kicking them all out like someone’s smoke alarm just went off. The shoot was spread across both our lofts so our getting paid would be contingent on them getting paid too and that was only going to happen if the shoot was completed.

I was pretty much holding my breath like I had just dove into a deep pool and didn’t realize I had gone so far down – unable to figure out if I could get back to the surface. Ing’s voice was quivering like she just came out of the same pool with its waters too cold for comfort. “Ron wants to take a bath.”  Now I could tell that she was really hoping Spark would say no go, but Spark wasn’t hearing the whispers between the lines. So he said, “Sure, not a problem.” Ron Jeremy thanked him and made his way back to their loft.

Spark and I both assured Ing it would be fine. In retrospect, Spark and I undoubtedly had a difference of opinion on the definition of  ”fine” but we could navigate that disparity well enough… Ing, on the other hand, well… “fine” only referred to the line that is so easily crossed and from which there is never any easy return.

We love clean soapy boobs!

You can’t really tell anyone to buy you a new couch, not even a porn company that shot an anal sex scene in your apartment on that very same couch and even if Ron Jeremy was taking a nap on it just then. Maybe if you had negotiated it into your location rental  contract but that would require foresight. Unfortunately that was something Ing had been short of at the time it mattered. Now it didn’t matter if she wanted a new couch, Vivid was not about to buy her a couch and neither was Ron. He also apparently was too busy snoring, making a noise that sounded vaguely familiar, in a sort of twisted way, something like a very unladylike pussy queef being mic’d and amplified through a super sub woofer. Ing was not taking it well. Her stress level rose to a point where the pressure was literally choking her. Her usually pale white face was red and her she had trouble getting words out.

“I… I… I am going… going to… done… their done… This is not what… not what was agreed.”

“You can’t stop the production right in the middle. That will cause all sorts of havoc and forget getting paid. They should be almost done. Get paid; get the couch cleaned. You made it through this far, you can make it the rest of the way.”

“He stinks. I am going to have to get a new couch.” She didn’t want to let it go. No one can blame her. But I guess I was to blame. I should have been more cautionary when they were considering renting their loft to Vivid. There will be anal sex. There will be used condoms found where you least expect and hope most for them not to show up. There will be porn stars standing outside your door taking a smoke break and talking loudly and incessantly about what stud they took in the butt last week that made it hard to walk for three days. There will be phone bills for calls to Jersey and Prague and all points in between. There could even be Ron Jeremy on your couch snoring away sounding like a giant endless pussy fart.

Just then Ron himself walked in.

“Ing. Do  you mind if I take a bath?”

Clean as Ron Jeremy!

No ass make up needed here!

Since Ing seemed to be on the verge of tears and totally freaked out about having to apply concealer to some porn girls pimply ass, I really didn’t want to push her over the edge and say something like “what the fuck did you expect?” I could understand where she might of thought that doing make-up on a porn shoot would only entail trying to make the girls look their best and not mean in fact that she was going to be painting the tail ends of girls getting ready for anal reamings. I recommended that her boyfriend Spark handle the ass make up since it certainly wouldn’t be something I would expect him to have a problem with and as a graphic artist he would have the necessary skills to blend any colors necessary to make those butts look good. Ing liked the idea which was cool because I could easily have seen her getting jealous about it. Luckily that was not the case because she was willing to take that chance more than she was willing to rub some model’s naked ass with  a sponge of cake make-up. Good to know your limitations when it comes to stuff like this…

So, of course, making porn is still show biz and the sex show must go on. Ing went back to her loft. Vivid was renting both our lofts out for the shoot and that meant more of everything. More girls. More grips. More suitcase pimps. More catering. More director – assistant directors – assistants to the assistants. More craziness. And of course more of Ron Jeremy hanging around waiting for his scenes to be shot. Ing came back over for a report.

She stood there staring at me. I couldn’t tell if she was going to kill me or cry me a river even while the sun of good fortune and easy money was shining brightly on her and making it so she could harvest enough cash to pay rent. Shadows from the clouds of emotion passed by reflecting each shade of expression so quickly.  Kill. Look, that one floating by looks just like a crazy guy with a knife. Cry. That one looks like a baby… being dropped. Kill. Cry. Kill. Probably everyone is asking her why she doesn’t do porn…

Ing is a gorgeous girl… but innocent as the lamb that ended up on the dinner table slathered in mint jelly.

“Everything ok?” I asked. Ing was from a good family, deeply religious, and had led a life very sheltered from the weirdness of things like the porn industry. I knew she was being immersed in a world that was completely alien and somewhat intimidating to those with any sort of prudish bent, which Ing certainly is – straight as the crucifix on top of the steeple. The sight of naked people walking around completely unconcerned as if LA was actually the Garden of Eden freaked her out, but she had weathered it so far. She was even cool with Ron Jeremy sleeping the day away on her couch… until she got close enough to realize, to her horror… he had B.O.

“He smells.” She said with a look of potent disgust cinching her lip to try and constrict her nostrils from any further abuse. “I am going to have to get a new couch! Do you think Vivid will pay for it?”

You don’t get to be Vivid if you buy everyone a couch. Of course, by the same token, everyone should surmise with a smidgen of forethought that couches on porn sets should be roped off with Hazardous Waste KEEP OUT tape. I would have laughed except I realized that she was completely serious.

One of the first things you do learn about renting your place out for a film production is the money you make is like the money you make going to the local Indian Casino. Things might go very smoothly, you have a great time, and walk to the bank with an easy check to cash. Or the opposite. What felt like a win at the time you were having all the fun is actually a loss when you reconcile everything later after the fun and the booze wear off. You get a check but it will barely cover the expense of the carpet the grip lit on fire with the cigarette that he should not have been smoking, nor will it cover the long distance calls the distraught starlet made to her suitcase pimp boyfriend that is still back in Ohio taking care of his court dates, you won’t get reimbursed for the couch that was permanently stained by the toxic jizz the stud launched for a facial but missed because he was too busy trying to jack himself off and couldn’t see where he was spewing with his eyes closed to concentrate on getting off. Of course, I warned Ing and Spark of all of that, but risks be damned, they needed the money to make back rent before the landlords served them with an eviction.

So, if they were going to let porn be shot in their studio then they had to take their chances, including letting Ron “the hedge hog” himself burrow into their couch for one of his infamous power naps that most speculated was actually mild narcolepsy.

They had to be prepared for anything.

Ing had also worked herself in to do make up for the shoot too. That turned out to be the first sign that not everything was going to be going as smoothly as I had hoped. Ing ran into our studio. She looked distraught but seemed to be holding herself together well enough to ask a question.

“I don’t know what to do.” She asked.

“About what?” I replied as casually as possible to try and foster a sense of peace and tranquility.

“Make up.” Ing said. Strange, she worked for a cosmetics company and had done make up for mainstream feature films in LA so that was not really what I expected from her.

“What about it? Do you need supplies?” Supportive. Concerned. Helpful.

“No, I have everything I need.” She was fidgeting and nervous.

“What is the problem then?”

“They want me to put make up on her ass to cover up pimples – I have never done that – I didn’t expect to have to do that – I don’t know if I am comfortable with that – I don’t know what to do!” She looked like she was going to cry any second.

“Well…” I guess I didn’t really know what to say to that. Anything coming to mind was going to sound callused and un-sympathetic. Sex videos have naked people in them; that is just a fact, and naked people sometimes have pimply  asses that require make up to hide those unsightly blemishes. Just be glad you aren’t going to be the one picking up the anal condoms afterwards, honey… I was thinking…