I Saw, I Conquered, I Came (4)

I Saw, I Conquered, I Came (4)

Number 4: There's a Market for Everything

Back in the old days, people didn’t really expect very much from porn: they wanted a picture of a pretty lady, probably with a nice smile, lacking clothes. If she had a bit of a gut, or a weird birth-mark, or she wasn’t even completely naked, that was fine—you’d just use your imagination and work out the rest... At least, that’s what Fritz keeps telling me.

Fritz’s a pretty interesting guy. He works in the studio, but I’m not entirely sure what he does. Given that he comes to watch every single sex scene we film, which is a lot, I’m not convinced that he does anything, except for watch free, live porn. Fritz is living every filthy old man’s dream.

He’s probably sixty-five, but he looks at least ninety—his skin’s gone gray, his eyes glaze over when he’s talking to you, and the edges of his mouth are crusted over with white powder. I used to think it was coke, because that’s not so uncommon around the “office,” but a few weeks ago, I saw him eating a half-dozen sugar doughnuts on a break between scenes.
“Sorry,” he muttered, suddenly ashamed. “I just... I just.. I really love these.”

He was born on the wrong side of the Berlin wall: the side where you couldn’t legally get denim or porn or, apparently, pastries. “My mother used to save up flour,” he explained, shoving yet another one into his mouth. “And oil, too, she’d save that, for weeks and weeks, until we had enough to make a giant batch of Pfannkuchen. Dough-nuts, you call them.”
“Were they any good?”

He thought about it for a minute.
“No,” he said, throwing away the empty packet. “These ones are much better. I buy them in the morning before I come in to work.”
“Monty does too,” I replied, pointing over in his general direction. “Usually chocolate, though, or jam.”
He smiled at me like I’d just told him all his childhood pets had come back to life.

Ever since then, I had a bizarre and vaguely horrible story to look forward to whenever he spotted me. It was kind of like having your weird uncle, the one who served in Vietnam and who sometimes shouted at the dinner table, following you around while you worked.

“What are you kids doing today?” He said one afternoon, patting me on the shoulder.
Monty snickered, but fortunately, Fritz was too deaf to hear. “I haven’t heard that Russian tart screaming like a Frenchman on the Autobahn, yet—what’s going on?” He roared with laughter.
(Tatiana, unfortunately, was not too deaf to hear, and proceeded to queef loudly by means of retaliation. He didn’t hear that either, but I did.)

“As a matter of fact, old man,” Monty said, straightening his glasses, “What we are doing today is a new style of pornographing. Actually, it’s not new at all! That’s the fuckin’ clever part!”
“I don’t follow, Jake.” Fritz said to me, sadly.
“God, it’s not like it’s that complicated!” He was getting really excited, now, “Every artistic medium goes through cycles. Something is invented, then copied by everyone and his dog, then fades into obscurity, right? Right? It’s the natural order of things.”

“Sure,” My camera was acting up, again. I needed to fix it for the shoot. The trouble with all modern technology is that it has an awful tendency to fuck itself up, simply because it is smarter than you are. It’s like working with the fuckin’ Terminator—it's in control, it shows no emotion, and when it's around, you’re always on edge. “Whatever you say.”

“What people forget, though, is that there’s one more stage after the fade into obscurity.”
“Can we hurry this up? My nipples are so cold I could cut glass with them.” Tatiana: always a lady.
“Rebirth! Revival! That’s the final stage! So, if porn began with bland nudity and no fucking, then this is the way it will become again. We’re on the pulse of the X-rated revolution!”

Monty had been hitting the absinthe pretty hard. I kept hoping he would come to his senses switch back to lukewarm lager, but it seemed to me like he really enjoyed being psychotic. He was delivering a monologue for the first time in years, after all.

“And we will call it... Dinosaur Porn!”
Everyone on set—me, Tatiana, Fritz, the lighting crew, the makeup crew, the other writers, and the director—all appaulded. It just seemed like the appropriate thing to do. If his parents have been there, they too would have clapped... Because they paid for his four-year schooling in theatre.

“Question— what if people don’t get that ‘Dinosaur Porn’ is just vintage-style porn, and not porn about actual dinosaurs?” I figured someone would have to ask, and it may as well be me.
“No one wants actual porn about dinosaurs, Jake,” he snapped, “There’s no market for that.”
“If there’s a market for Care Bare pornography, then there’s a market for dinosaurs, too. There’s a market for everything, really—I mean, just check out the internet! If something exists, there’s porn of it, right?”

“I love this country.” Fritz said sagely, offering doughnuts to everyone. “I really do.”