Erotica Artist Ch. 05: Fantasyland

My writing career certainly wasn't going to pay the bills. I was making virtually nothing from my music criticism, and my attempts at serious fiction were stillborn. I lacked a subject, something that engaged me as potently as did music or sex. When I wrote about the low-lifes I'd come in contact with when driving taxi on the graveyard shift in the big city, I realized that drunks and drug addicts and even hookers bored me as much in my fiction as they did in real life.

When I wrote about myself and, say, my travels in Europe, my efforts were even more self-conscious and unconvincing. I just could not bring my characters to life, partly because I didn't know what I wanted them to do or say. I had no themes, no structure. I had nothing.

And all the time of course I was reading and re-reading the masters. I'd enrolled in university not to acquire skills for a career in the real world so much as to be exposed to the best of world literature. I wanted to learn what to read and how to read with a critical eye, for this was a practice that I knew would enrich my life more than any religion.

The problem, though, was that now I'd been exposed, repeatedly, book after book, to the very best in the world, how could I presume to emulate it? How could anyone presume to emulate it? And though every day there were thousands of people scribbling and tapping away trying to do exactly that, it was a task I found too daunting. Reading Joyce or Lawrence, Austen or George Eliot, Faulkner, Durrell or Henry James, did not inspire me to rush to the typewriter: it stopped me in my tracks and made me despair of even attempting to put any words on paper in the same language as these people.

I was no artist, I realized. I had not a fraction of the vision, the drive, the talent to create literature. And so while I could read the masters with reverence and appreciate what they accomplished with a real sensitivity, I could not hope to produce art myself. The art of fiction was beyond me, except as a reader. I could not make stuff up out of nothing, as powerful as my imagination was sometimes. And I had not the artistry at my disposal to bring the material to life, even if I had the subject matter to begin with, which I didn't.

By now Connie had come to know me pretty well and one night she summed up what I'd felt myself for some time.

"You don't write anything, you can't write anything worthwhile," she said, "because you're too much wrapped up in yourself. You're too unformed as a person also. Socially, sexually, in just about every way. You can't get beyond your own ego. You're trapped, imprisoned in it. And until you break out and settle these matters, you won't be able to write a thing."

"Thank you, Dr. Fountain," I replied, but I knew she was pretty close to the truth. I was self-obsessed. And while this wasn't a drawback for many artists, I lacked the extra-special talent with which the rarest of writers could transcend, or at least transform this affliction. I was no Henry Miller.

Yet within my self-obsession was another overpowering force: sex. Or, more to the point, lack of sex. Again Connie summed the matter up.

"Is it any wonder you're sex-obsessed? You never get laid. That's your whole problem in a nutshell. People who get laid regularly can concentrate on other things once in a while and get on with their lives. People who are sexually deprived are going to be sex-obsessed. It stands to reason. A starving man thinks of nothing but food. It's obvious."

It was true that my deprivation led me to spend countless hours in a world of fantasy. Since the end of the Webb fiasco my absorption had grown almost to insane lengths, I had to admit.

Well, Connie used pot as her escape. My co-worker Reed had his heavier drugs. Jan the morose Czech was another alcoholic, and Billy had his weird and wild gay world. My own particular escapist obsession was at least one of the safest and cheapest of preoccupations.

My girlie magazines had become more daring by the year. But this was also the era of legal hardcore material in the US and much of Europe, and I began sending away for pornography that was not yet readily available in my own country. This was my one indulgence. I didn't share Connie's or Reed's interest in drugs, or Jan's in alcohol. I wasn't about to join Uncle Billy and his boyfriends at the steam-baths on Hastings Street.

So I spent my spare cash building a collection of hardcore pornography made in Sweden or the US. I even bought a sturdy little eight millimeter movie projector. And so now, in this pre-video age, I could watch gorgeous models go through their paces four feet high on my apartment wall: living, breathing images of deepest erotica flickering about as if they were in the room with me. I was mesmerized.

I began to cross the border on a regular basis, making weekend trips to Seattle, where I would sometimes catch an NBA or Major League baseball game, but invariably spend the late evening browsing the porno shops close to the Pike Street Market.

It was a weird nether world of magazine emporiums, peep-show arcades, and hardcore movie theaters, some of which were musty, cavernous old vaudeville houses fallen on desperate times in the downtown core. I was often one of only half a dozen patrons in these pleasure palaces.

It might be immature, obsessive, even neurotic behavior, but it was better than the frustration and torment of life with Dawn Webb. Who needed the emotional minefield of romantic fantasy when you had the velvet comfort of pornographic make-believe?

I tried to imagine sometimes what sex with Dawn would have been like, had we ever gone that far, and I concluded that it would have been absolutely awful. I could not picture Dawn, or any real live girl I'd crossed paths with up till then, acting sexually with a fraction of the abandon I saw regularly in the erotic fantasy world that had blossomed since the early seventies. I asked myself if women like Dawn ever thought about sex at all. But I didn't dwell on the matter. For the foreseeable future fantasy sex and masturbation were infinitely preferable to involvement with a frigid alcoholic lunatic.

How much time had I wasted on Dawn, without getting so much as a decent kiss? How many months had I mooned over Kirsten, totally besotted with my romantic delusion and too terrified to speak a word to her? The women I now saw in hardcore pornography were often of a physical beauty so stunning I might have spent years yearning for them in real life, without of course standing the remotest chance with them.

Women I could have invested deep emotion pining for were here, on the screen, casually fucking and sucking one male after the other, sometimes more than one at the same time. The sex was completely free from emotional entanglement, from jealousy and anguish. There was no commitment, no pregnancy, no disease. No two partners ever stayed the same. And everyone was so willing!

Attractive people having sex as if they enjoyed it, as if it was no big deal. What a concept! Gorgeous women hungry for sex: when had I come across that in real life? The real world was full of such ordinary looking people. Look at most of us up close, and boy, are we ugly! Who would want to fuck us?

It seemed to me sometimes that the porn stars of the world had discovered the meaning of life. Strip away the sordidness of the business, the money, the drugs, the total lack of emotional context, and a hundred other things, and you had a semblance of paradise. There you wandered around all day naked and unself-conscious, in cozy indoor or sun-drenched outdoor settings, and simply fucked and sucked your brains out with other beautiful people. It was an endless neverland with no responsibilities, no worries, no frustration or rejection, no existential angst. No time for it! Too busy fucking and sucking! Having too much damn fun!

And so the months passed with no more contact with women other than in glossy magazines or in flickering images on my apartment walls. I went to work in the warehouse, I jogged and played tennis and swam, I wrote my reviews and attended my concerts, and in my isolation I was sustained and kept from insanity by this world of erotic fantasy.

Nothing came close to the power, the allure, of this underground fantasy life. And it wasn't just the visual image I found fascinating. My life-long love of the printed word played no small part: I read dozens of pornographic novels.

Most of these were mediocre in the extreme, and without any blinding flash of insight I one day took up some abandoned fragments of erotic fiction I'd written long ago and realized I could write better erotica, more interesting erotica, for my own particular tastes, than anything I'd ever read. It was a similar feeling I'd had when first composing music reviews: I knew I could do as well or better than the people being published. Why not write about what had obsessed me all my life? And so I put pen to paper once again.

And as I stumbled through my first few pages I saw that I was writing about other people at last, not about myself. This was imaginative fiction, not autobiography. They were my own fantasies I was putting down on paper all right, but they were not experiences I had ever had myself. I had never enjoyed sex this abandoned, this ecstatic, this free.

Here at last was the solution to the problem of what my characters would do or say: they would have sex ceaselessly, all described in minutest detail, and they would say all that I longed to say, to scream, if I ever got to experience real, liberating sex. They would moan, they would groan, they would howl with rapture. I had found at last an avenue, a thru-way, a wide open plain on which to whoop and bellow my endless frustrations.

I had hardly enjoyed sex in real life at all, except with Mia in the cramped quarters of a VW Beetle. I'd mooned for months over a princess I'd put on a pedestal and spent nearly a year tolerating a frigid alcoholic and gotten barely a cold kiss for all my tender attentions. I was for all intents and purposes still a virgin! Well to hell with all that. Who needed romantic goddesses or frigid alcoholics?

There was, of course, at this particular time, an alternative. Sex, easily available, right below my apartment window, for a price. It was the oddest thing, but for weeks now traffic along the usually quiet street in front of my building had been growing heavier and heavier. Ladies of the evening, before dotted at various west end intersections, had taken to congregating along this singular peaceful block, just a few yards from busy Davie Street. And so from nine in the evening till sometimes, on weekends, three in the morning, the cruising punters streamed in endless flow. And once in a while a car would stop, a girl would chat, then climb in and be off for a brief blowjob or something more.

It would have been easy to approach a willing female, invite her up to my penthouse, and for the allotted time have my way with her, as the phrase goes. But for some reason this had no appeal for me. The age-old fear of some kind of infection, I suppose, was part of it, though in this day and age I'm sure the ladies took necessary precautions. But these were street girls after all. And some of them, truth be told, had seen better days. I was fearful then, for sure, but there was maybe, at this stage in my life, something else that held me back. A fastidiousness? Maybe. Probably just fear. Nervousness. Sex with a stranger? Maybe not yet.

And so I began to write pornographic fiction in earnest. I took erotic images in my soft and hardcore magazines and movies, sometimes no more than a lingerie-clad beauty with a smoldering look in her eyes, and I imagined her in situations I personally found arousing. One fantasy world fed another. I could grow so excited, so inspired, that the scenes wrote themselves. The material had its own built-in dynamic, after all, growing from teasing beginnings to a blistering climax.

I typed the pages up neatly and mailed them off to as many dirty book publishers as I could find listed in my Writer's Manual. And though I again suffered many rejections, and had material returned from publishers no longer in business, one day I received a courteous letter from southern California accepting my manuscript, offering me money for it, and asking for more.

The editor had a few polite suggestions: "Write from the female point of view. Avoid big words. Your stuff sometimes reads like smut for doctoral candidates. Write for a grade six reading level. Use four-letter words in narrative and dialogue. Never use medical terms or euphemisms. Avoid terms like penis, member, schlong or buttocks."

Use four-letter words in narrative and dialogue! What an exhortation! Imagine such a thing in school, or at home with my parents! No, up until now everything suppressed. No such thing as swear words or sex. Concealment. Restraint. Decorum. Repression. And now I was being urged to use four-letter words for publication! The real, adult world could be fun after all!

It was a thrilling letter, even more exhilarating than the acceptance of my first record reviews. For this was fiction I was writing. Pornographic fiction, to be sure, but fiction all the same, stuff I'd made up in my head.

It was something I enjoyed writing: it was no longer blood from a stone but rather, to strain a metaphor, another fluid pumped from an organ other than my heart. And it was something I was good at. Writing about sex, I was at last unself-conscious and totally engaged. Sitting at my desk or lying in bed scribbling this stuff, I was never lonely or sad. I didn't brood. I was liberated from my isolation. I was alive.

My obsession with sex had given my life meaning and now it had gotten me writing fiction. Porno had succeeded where world literature had failed. In trying to write real fiction I had been intimidated by the masters, but in the world of porn there were no masters. Frank Harris? Henry Miller? The Marquis? I didn't think of these guys as pornographers. More as artists of the underground.

In the world of porn I was fulfilling myself sexually and artistically. Lust was my motivation. Sexual obsession was my muse. It wasn't a matter of "Write what you know." What experience did I have of hunger-slaking, soul-satisfying sex? It was "Write about what obsesses you."

Remembering of course to write from the female point of view, which I had. What made my effort so arousing was in large part down to this: imagining a beautiful female with sexual appetites, imagining a woman who longed to do all the things the women I met in real life had no interest in whatsoever. And relating all through her perspective.

And boy, did my main character have appetites! She marries too early, before she and her beau have even had sex. (We were already in Fantasyland, with this particular concept.) Then on the honeymoon she discovers not only that her new husband is one of the dullest men alive, but that his interest in sex is only half-hearted. (More Fantasyland, for this young woman is mouth-watering.)

What does she do? Why what any frustrated newlywed does on her honeymoon, of course: she fucks and sucks every male within grabbing distance, and not necessarily one at a time.

The theme of the piece, of course, for I discovered to my amazement that pornographic writing had given me even this, was that other old obsession of mine: betrayal. What better representation of that could there be than a wife who not only screwed other men, behind her husband's back, but sometimes screwed two or three of them at the same time?

This was the antithesis of romance. This was sex for sex' sake with a vengeance. And of course I was perceptive enough to acknowledge that in this particular line of work, vengeance was mine. This was my therapy.

Three months later came the unspeakable thrill of finding my book on the racks of the funky little adult store in Bellingham. My working title, "Betrayal" - what else? - had been changed to "The Bride's Horny Honeymoon," which gave me a moment's pause, but the cover was gloriously garish, with a stunning model, familiar from my girlie magazines, posed topless and transcendent on a rumpled bed.

The text had been tampered with very little, and as I read through it at home I actually grew incredibly horny. Here was a story I'd concocted myself, every word, a tale I was familiar with from top to bottom, so to speak, and yet I was becoming aroused reading it. The characters, the sex, had a life and believability that astonished me. It was as if I were reading a story written by someone else.

The erotic visual image was stimulating up to a point, I decided, as if preparing a master's thesis on the subject. It provides the set-up. But when a background story is added, even one you've written yourself, there's some semblance of psychological verisimilitude, and excitement is increased immeasurably.

The characters start to live and breathe and yes, have sex, all on their own. The creation comes to life with a power that is indeed transcendent, I concluded. Yes, arousal was all in the mind, and the secret of a truly intense sexual release was having the imagination primed and lubricated for long minutes beforehand.

I realized that I had a real talent for this sort of thing. I might not be able to write a serious novel with artistic merit, I might be unable to compose so much as a short story with even a modest claim to literature, but I sure as hell could deliver a tale of blistering, unadulterated sex that would have the hapless reader masturbating merrily within minutes. I could arouse people with words. And though my novel would never be stocked in a library or mainstream bookstore, it would grace the racks of porno stores from Seattle to Miami.

I began a second novel, completed it in a matter of days, moved on to a third. A week or so later I received a check for four hundred dollars US with my working title, "Betrayal," emblazoned on it. I had perhaps found my calling at last. Though Connie was not particularly impressed.

"I just wonder how a person of your sensitivity can write hardcore pornography," she said. "You love literature, and music, you're cultured and artistic and imaginative and refined. In many ways you're a complete romantic. And yet you write sleaze. I find it baffling."

I had not shown her my stuff, of course. I just happened to answer her truthfully one day when she asked if I was writing anything other than record reviews.

"My stories are fantasies born of deprivation and obsession," I answered, finally getting to use a line I'd been rehearsing for weeks. "You discussed this theme yourself not long ago."

"I suspect you prefer pornography to real sex."

"I haven't had enough real sex to say for sure, but you could be right. Real life can never compete with fantasy."

"What about respect for women, Mason? How can you write that stuff and say you have any real respect for women?"

"I think I have the greatest respect for women. It's a big part of my problem. Didn't you tell me recently that I was too nice in that particular area? I've spent much of my life romanticizing and idolizing women and it's gotten me absolutely nowhere."

"And so your solution is to write pornography?"

"Yes. I think sex obsesses me because it's as close to heaven as any of us is ever going to get. Pornography fascinates me because it's sex without all the anguish and turmoil. Is porn disrespectful toward women? I suppose it is. It's not very respectful of men either, I guess. It's capitalism at work, that's all. The women in porn are paid much more than the men, I believe. And they're not compelled to do this for a living. They sign on the dotted line."

"They're compelled by economics more than anything, aren't they? By lack of opportunities for women."