Lunch with a pornographer

At the height of the housing crisis, we short sold our Tennessee home. My husband's career with a well-known drive-in restaurant chain was tanking, so he took his buy-out from them and went to work for another fast-food giant in a different capacity. The new job took us to Tuscaloosa County, Alabama. There, my husband, Brett, managed five twenty-four-hour burger joints.

I looked for work but didn't find much in the way of opportunity. Hourly pay was abysmal for most of the jobs I came across, and flexibility was demanded. I didn't have that because my husband needed it; somebody had to rear the children.

The university was one of the largest employers in Tuscaloosa, and they had a policy of finding jobs on campus for the spouses of people they placed in higher-up positions. I can't prove that practice prevented me from getting on at the school, but I suspect it played a role. I interviewed for them and scored well on pre-employment testing but never got any callbacks, not even for the fucking typing pool. I have a degree in English and type seventy words a minute.

After school let out for summer, my son and daughter visited my parents' chicken farm in Arkansas for a week. During their absence, I scheduled a luncheon with Bilky, an independent film producer out of Nashville. I had met Bilky two years earlier when we lived in Tennessee. Teachers at the elementary school had encouraged me to sign my outgoing daughter up with a local talent agency called Talent Trek. Because Cassie was in the agency's database, I received notifications for extras and even landed a couple of small paid roles myself.

I played a rape victim in a crime reenactment that aired on the Oxygen Network. And, one time, I got $100 to dress up with a coworker and film in the freezing cold outside an old theater.

"We'll tell our grandkids about this one day," my friend said as we shivered in our high heels out in the elements.

"Right. I'll say, 'Gather around chil'ren, let me tell you about the day your grandma lost her pinky toe filming an ad for a chaise lounge,'" I said with a chuckle.

In those days, I worked as a floating manager for my husband at the restaurants he supervised and picked up a little editing work when I could find it. Mondays were typically off days for me because those lunches tended to run slower. One Monday, I received an email request for unpaid extras at a well-known mansion in Knoxville. The kids were at school, and Brett was at work. There were worse ways to spend an afternoon than hanging out at a mansion with free snacks. So, I mozied over there.

When I arrived on set, a little person asked if I was the stripper. "No, but I guess my mama was right about this hair color," I said.

Bilky joined in on the extra scene and apologized about the stripper question. "We had a scene scheduled for the little person to wake up with his head at the foot of the bed and two topless young women were to have their heads on the pillows. One of the young women in the topless scene changed her mind about doing it. So, we called in a stripper to get the scene shot."

During the time it took to film the party bus episode for which I arrived, the producer and I became better acquainted. A few weeks later, I interviewed for a job as Bilky's personal assistant. The job required occasional travel to Los Angeles at a moment's notice, so I turned it down. I couldn't just up and leave my kids like that. So, I rejected the offer for that but also because Bilky made it clear, after he had some wine, that he would want to fuck me on the overnight trips.

Two years later, over fish tacos in Alabama, I asked Bilky, hypothetically, how a woman who could still pass for, maybe early 30s, might make some cash in a hurry. I was thirty-seven.

“Hypothetically,” he said, “you could make a lot of money doing topless work in independent films. There’s a movement of sorts to use ‘real ones,’ and yours are nice."

I had sent him some photos taken by my husband to be considered for an oil tycoon's wife in another independent film. Bilky had said Sam Shepherd was in talks to play the tycoon, but I didn't get the job. They gave it to a brunette schoolteacher in Mississippi who had gone completely nude in her audition photos. Bilky had shown them to me to encourage me to be bolder the next time. "Always take it a step further than what they're requesting," he had said.

That 2009 day in the restaurant, he continued, "Travel would be required for the topless roles, and you already said you aren’t open to that. I’d use you as a madam in a film we’re about to shoot if you’d wear something sheer--like completely see-through, I mean. You’d have to get down on your knees in front of my hitman, and your character would get killed at the end of that scene. I’d want your hair to be red.” He looked me over thoroughly. “You have an innocent face. And I’d love to use you in any number of non-innocent roles.”

Bilky further elucidated about how there was so much free online porn anymore that the value of a regular nude woman alone was almost nothing. Fetish pictures had a little value, like balloons or feet, for example, and the prices went up from there based on what was going on in the photos or video.

“Brace for it, though,” he said, pausing to look about and lower his voice before continuing, “Right now, where producers and webmasters bid for porn online, interracial sex brings in pretty good money. But there are things we can sell on the dark web that could make you $8,000 overnight. You spend twenty minutes doing something that was unthinkable before you sat down with me today, and you can pay off your car the next day. I can show you recent videos of new celebrities in similar films. No kidding. That’s how they get their plastic surgery money. I filmed some of them myself with a borrowed pony.

"There's also BDSM. We could talk about that if you like. You’d be perfect for the interracial stuff. They look for a young, dark man and put him with a fair woman, usually with bleached or red hair. You could wear a wig, but you’re already blonde. I could set you up in a Nashville hotel for a few days and find a guy or two.” He told me a name to search online for footage of another woman he'd helped after a divorce. Bilky told me her real name and her stage one. "Today, her house is paid for, and her kids are in private school."

He swore he had porn footage of a well-known brunette actor from before she became famous and offered to show it to me. “You can get yourself out of your money troubles if you want to. I have the cameras, and I can make it happen.”

I thanked my friend for his time and honesty and politely promised to consider all that he had to say and offer. After taking leave of Bilky, however, I stepped into the restroom to vomit. We needed money, but there was no way I could ever work for that man. I wondered where he found people willing to do the vile things he filmed for the dark web. Were they needier than I was or just greedier? Of course, I'd gone to the trouble to hear about the options he presented. I was not without sin.

In the restroom of an upscale grocery store, I opened my palm to reveal the razor blade I had concealed there. I nervously removed the bar codes on a few canned items and dropped the cans into my bag. Fingertips bleeding, I paid for a loaf of bread and stole the canned items so I could keep making the same casseroles the kids were used to. In my head, I started keeping track of all the food I shoplifted trying to earn back what I was losing each month to bank overdraft fees. But it takes a lot of sixty-cent cans of corn and string beans to make up a $35 bank fee. I graduated to batteries, Madagascar vanilla, nice ink pens, and even packages of meat, but the meat could be messy and tricky. I had to line my purse with plastic wrap for that.

Bilky was right. I did have an innocent face, and I got pretty good at what I was doing. By the end of the summer, I'd stolen back a year's worth of overdraft fees. According to Bilky, though, I could have made eight times that overnight.

I looked up the divorced mom in Tennessee that Bilky had mentioned. The husband she'd left was a Baptist preacher. She was known for teacher-student scenes, usually filmed in a classroom setting with her in a wig and two young adult males. “She loves her job,” Bilky had said. “She works five or six days a week.” I couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to make porn that often, shy a serious mental disorder or an expensive drug habit. No, that wasn’t for me.

THE END

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.