Liam Mulligan: Cliff Walk Part 29

"Yeah. Took off a couple of days ago and won't be back till the end of the week."

"I'd like to have a word with Sal," I said.

"What makes you think he's here?"

"His car's right out front, Joseph."

"Oh, yeah. I told him he shoulda parked in back. Hang here and I'll see if he'll talk to you," he said, and slammed the door in my face.

I was watching an alarming number of grackles gather on the telephone wires across the street when the opening guitar lick to "b.i.t.c.h" started playing. I didn't see Keith Richards in the immediate vicinity so I pulled the phone out of my pocket and flipped it open.

"You ... f.u.c.king ... b.a.s.t.a.r.d!"

"And a good afternoon to you, too, Dorcas."

"Today is my birthday, a.s.shole."

"Shall I break into song?"

"I'm still your wife, you know. You could have sent a f.u.c.king card."

"Have you checked your mail today?"

"What? No. Hold on a sec," she said, but Joseph was swinging the door open now.

"Happy birthday, Dorcas. Gotta go."

Joseph ushered me into a vestibule with peeling green walls and a splintered wood floor. A naked bulb burned in a fixture that dangled by its wires from the ceiling. In front of us was a new steel door with a keypad lock. Joseph punched in a sequence of five numbers. I managed to catch four of them. He turned the handle and led me inside.

There, a young woman in a forest-green business suit sat behind a kidney-shaped gla.s.s desk decorated with a framed family photo and a pink orchid in a ceramic pot. Antique photographs of Rhode Island landmarks, most of them long gone, hung in bird's-eye maple frames on new drywall. The off-white paint was so fresh that I could smell it.

"Please take a seat," she said. "Mr. Maniella will be with you shortly."

I dropped into a red leather couch-probably better than anything that had been in the place when it was a discount furniture store-and Joseph sat beside me in a matching easy chair.

"Where'd you get the gun?" I asked.

"Mr. Maniella give it to me."

"A Glock 17?"

"Just like his other bodyguards got."

"Seventeen-cartridge magazine, right?"

"Yeah. Lot more firepower than the Remington Arms piece of c.r.a.p I got at home."

"Got a permit to carry?"

"It's pending."

The phone on the desk beeped. The receptionist picked it up, listened for a moment, hung up, and said, "Mr. Maniella will see you now." She touched something on the desk, and the lock in a steel door to her right clicked. Joseph and I got up and went through it.

To our left, rusted fluorescent light fixtures, all of them dark, hung over a scarred wood floor lined with rows of makes.h.i.+ft plywood display tables left over from the building's flea market days. To our right, two studio lights on tripods loomed over an unmade bed in a set built to look like a five-star hotel room. Joseph kept walking, so I followed him past another set, this one built to look like a room in a ma.s.sage parlor. Over the ma.s.sage table, bottles of oil glistened on a shelf that also held an impressive a.s.sortment of d.i.l.d.os.

The third and final set had pink walls hung with posters from the latest Twilight movie. A huge teddy bear sat at the foot of the bed. Piles of girl's underwear had been scattered on the floor. A teenager's room. A pretty young blonde who couldn't have weighed more than a hundred and ten pounds-maybe just a hundred without the implants-was on all fours on the bed's fresh pink sheet. She wore a Hope High School cheerleader's uniform, the top yanked up to expose her nipples and the skirt flipped to expose her a.s.s. An older guy with a handheld camera moved in close to catch the spittle dripping from her lips as she sucked a grinning twentysomething's large black p.e.n.i.s. A young guy with another handheld trained it on an enormous white phallus as its owner doused it with lubricant and then wedged it, with some difficulty, into the girl's r.e.c.t.u.m. Her eyes got wide, and she went, "Mmmm," pretending to enjoy it. White phallus saw me watching and winked. I gave him a wave. Dwayne Carter, a lanky murmuring dude who ran the Sh.e.l.l station on Broadway in Providence, had been helping me keep Secretariat on the road for years.

We tiptoed past the set and walked on until we arrived at an oak door in a new off-white wall. Joseph rapped softly, and a deep voice rumbled, "Come on in." Joseph opened the door, stepped aside, waved me in, and closed it softly behind me. Inside, the walls were decorated with movie posters from the 1970s, when feature-length p.o.r.n played in theaters all over the country: Debbie Does Dallas, Flesh Gordon, Deep Throat, The Opening of Misty Beethoven, Babylon Pink, The Devil in Miss Jones. Maniella was seated behind an enormous cherrywood desk. He could have parked his Hummer on it and had enough room left over for a sorority house lesbian orgy. He rose and strolled across a newly laid rust carpet to greet me, taking my hand in both of his.

"Mulligan," he said. "It's good to see you. Please sit down and make yourself comfortable."

I dropped into a black leather couch, the back of my head inches from the blond tresses of Marilyn Chambers, the all-American girl star of the Mitch.e.l.l Brothers' 1972 gang-rape fantasy, Behind the Green Door. In front of the couch, five AVN awards, the Oscars of p.o.r.n, stood on a spotless gla.s.s coffee table.

"Can I get you anything?" Maniella asked as he opened a small refrigerator and rummaged inside.

"Whatever you're having."

He took out a bottle of Evian, poured the contents into two crystal gla.s.ses, handed me one, and sat down beside me.

"Are you enjoying the Grant memoir?" he asked.

"I'm nearly done with the first volume," I said, "and it really surprised me."

"How so?"

"I had no idea that he wrote so well."

"Yes, the prose is quite remarkable. He was a great general, too. It's a shame he wasn't a better president."

"So," I said as I cast my eyes about the room, "I like what you've done with the place."

"It's a work in progress."

"Moving your whole operation here, are you?"

"Just part of it. Can you tell me how you found us?"

"It's a small state, Sal. Hard to keep something like this a secret."

"True, but perhaps we could keep it between us for now."

"I don't know," I said. "The opening of a movie studio is a story for the business pages."

"I see."

"Then again, I don't write for the business pages."

Sal smiled and was about to say something else when the door flew open and a black woman with a narrow waist and enormous b.r.e.a.s.t.s burst in. The older man I'd seen holding a camera on the movie set stepped in behind her.

"I told this m.u.t.h.af.u.c.ka I do not do a.n.a.l," the woman screeched. Except for red high heels, she was stark naked.

"Then maybe you shouldn't have agreed to shoot a scene t.i.tled a.n.a.l Action," the older guy shouted.

"Okay, everybody calm down," Sal said. "Obviously, there's been a misunderstanding. Doreen, no one is going to make you do something you are uncomfortable with."

"That's for d.a.m.n sure," she said.

"Would you be willing to do the scene if we paid you an additional five hundred dollars?" he asked.

"No f.u.c.kin' way, Sal."

"All right, then." Sal rubbed his chin and thought for a moment. "Chet, why don't we just change the t.i.tle to reflect Doreen's most appealing feature? Maybe we could call it Black b.o.o.bs or something. Doreen, would you be okay with Dwayne e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.n.g. on your nipples?"

"I can do that," she said.

"Great. Back to work, now. And Chet, please close the door on your way out."

"Actors," I said as the door clicked shut. "Always complaining about the size of the dressing room, the brand of sparkling water, or somebody trying to shove something up their a.s.s."

"Story of my life," Sal said.

"So tell me," I said. "How's business?"

"Lousy."

"Really? I thought p.o.r.n was recession-proof."

"It is," he said. "That's not the problem."

"What, then?"

"You really want to know about this?"

"I do."

"Off the record?"

"Sure."

"Then let me give you a little background."

"Okay."

"I saw you looking at my vintage posters."

"Hard to miss them."

"They're from the 1970s, when Cecil Howard, the Mitch.e.l.l Brothers, Howard Ziehm, and Gerard Damiano were making feature-length hard-core films. People went to the theater to watch them. They attracted the raincoat crowd, of course, but some guys went with dates."

"So I've heard," I said. "I was in diapers then."

"The VCR changed all that," Sal said. "Once people could rent or buy videoca.s.settes, they preferred to watch p.o.r.nography at home. But the industry still made feature-length films. We employed scriptwriters. Our movies had plots. Then p.o.r.n went online, and things changed again."

"How so?"

"Attention spans got shorter. n.o.body cared about plots anymore. Ninety-minute feature films mostly disappeared. We still shoot a couple a year, but they don't make any money. We just make them to maintain our self-respect."

A half-dozen smart remarks ran through my mind, but I decided to keep them to myself.

"The thirty- and sixty-minute DVDs that replaced them were just compilations of ten-minute s.e.x scenes that could be chopped and posted separately on Internet pay sites," Sal said. "Turned out even they were too long. Guys just watched the first penetration, fast-forwarded to the money shot, and jumped to the next video."

"But it was profitable," I said.

"Very."

"So what went wrong?"

"The market got flooded. Cheap handheld video cameras made it easy for any fool to shoot a p.o.r.no. The number of online pay sites exploded. A price war broke out. We used to charge forty-five dollars a month for a subscription to one of our sites. Now we're asking nineteen ninety-five, and it's hard to get people to pay even that."

"Because?"

"Because our videos are being pirated. People download them and then post them by the hundreds on p.o.r.n-sharing sites where anyone can watch them for free."

"Like what happened with music," I said.

"Exactly. Then it got worse. Now guys are shooting videos of themselves having s.e.x with their fat wives and s.k.a.n.ky girlfriends and posting them online." Sal looked at me and shook his head. "I never dreamed people would be giving this stuff away."

"Sounds like you're in a dying business," I said.

"I don't think so. There are still people out there who want to see beautiful women having s.e.x, and who want their videos to be in focus and well lighted. There's still a market for our product, but the margins are smaller now, so we have to keep our costs down."

"Which is why you opened the studio here," I said.

"That's right. The rent is lower, and the actors we've recruited locally work cheaper. In Southern California, we competed with Vivid, Digital Playground, and a dozen other studios for the best talent, so we had to pay the girls three to five thousand for each s.e.x scene. Here, they take a grand and are grateful to get it."

"What about the men?"

"In the Valley, they get five to eight hundred per scene," he said. "Here we're paying them two hundred, and they're so glad for the chance to f.u.c.k girls like Doreen that they'd probably work for free."

"Know what all this reminds me of?" I asked.

"The newspaper business?"

"Yeah. Aggregators pirate our news, readers don't want to pay for something they can get for free, and we keep cutting costs to keep our heads above water."

"One big difference, though," he said.

"What's that?"