Laid Bare: Essays and Observations, Judson, Tom [best self help books to read .TXT] 📗

gigs in the short-term until the studios had no choice but to hire union performers.

And here we have the crux of the matter. In porn, “short-term” is the only term there is. Men going into porn don’t think about it as a lifelong career. There are a very few cases where performers’ careers have lasted a decade or more, but you can count them on one hand. Most young men (and they are mostly young) aren’t thinking past the end of the day, much less 5 or 6 years down the road. Will they be willing to part with $500 of their $1000 fee for union initiation if they think this movie will be their first and last?

In 1913 New York actors shut down Broadway with a strike and forced the producers to the bargaining table. In 2003 one of the major issues confronting the 90-year-old union was the willingness of young performers to accept non-union employment. And that’s a business in which people hope to spend their entire lives. One afternoon on a porn set—as a lark—doesn’t engender commitment to “the cause.”

I’m no apologist for the porn industry. Do I think we performers are treated fairly by the production companies? No. Do I think the studios are making profits way out of proportion to what we’re paid? Yes, I do. Do I think we should earn residuals on the units sold? You bet. But there is no single performer in the business that could not be replaced with someone equally as popular, so holding out for a cut would be meaningless. When I was working regularly in porn was there anyone holding a gun to my head? Not that I ever noticed.

Don’t get me wrong, I believe the biggest dilemma facing the heads of the various production companies—several of whom are friends, I hasten to add--is how to spend their excess profits. And I do feel that the naïvete of vulnerable young men is exploited by those same companies. (If I were in charge of this hypothetical union, 30 would be the minimum age to be eligible to work.) But since I am congenitally unable to hold a job for any length of time I have work experience in many disparate fields and can say without hesitation that there is virtually nothing unique about the porn business.

Except that it can’t be organized.

THE HOUSE PAINTER

Climbing the sidewalk up the hill from the train, Clive Simmons managed to convey a sense of dignity despite the circumstances in which he found himself. The elbows and knees of his tweed suit were worn, but the suit itself was clean. With his thin, elegant moustache and slight British accent he managed to present a picture of someone who had not been as deeply affected by the Depression as, in fact, he had. Prosperity might be around the corner, as the last President had said, but Clive had never had a good sense of direction. So, he was glad to have the address--engraved just beneath “Mrs. Marion Giles, Rooms”--on the card he held in his hand.

Six months in New York after returning from his studies in France had left him near penniless. Evenings in his sweltering flat were spent anointing canvas after canvas with oil paints—tubes of color that were becoming more precious in direct proportion to his decreasing funds. His maitre in Paris had encouraged him in his visual experiment; Clive was trying to perfect the technique of seamlessly blending colors from opposite sides of the spectrum into one another. He hoped to reach the point where the viewer’s eye would discern cobalt blue, then cadmium orange then manganese violet before realizing the hue had completely changed. His work progressed through autumn and continued even now when the early winter cold made his fingers stiff as he stood at his easel. But, the matter of rent was quickly overriding artistic pursuit.

Packing a small bag, along with his paint box and a few canvasses, he took the Hudson River Tubes to Hoboken and there boarded a northbound train. The Simmonses had left Monroe years earlier, but it was an area Clive knew well and, at this point, familiarity would be as welcome as friendship. And a man he had met at the artist’s supply store had given him the business card of a young widow with inexpensive, clean rooms to let.

Mrs. Giles’s house was a two-storey affair with a wide front porch. It sat on the street among similar houses. The shade offered by the enormous maples must be welcome in summer, thought Clive, but now, under the gray November sky, they served merely as a skeletal reminder of warmer days.

The shingles of the house were painted white on the second floor and green—Forest green, he’d have to say--at street level, thereby distinguishing it from the solid-color dwellings on either side. There was one area at the back of the house near the kitchen door, however, that was still the old brown. Mr. Giles had gotten just this far with the project when his wife, Marion, found him hanging from a rope around his neck in the detached garage. Month after month of a fruitless search for employment had taken its irreversible toll on the man, leaving his young wife to fend for herself. Two years later the brown patch remained as a silent testament to continuing hard times.

Responding to the knock at the front door, Marion emerged from her kitchen wiping her hands on a towel. Her chintz dress complemented her black hair, which, in turn, drew attention away from the fact that, really, the dress was quite threadbare and faded.

“Mrs. Giles,” asked Clive. Marion reacted to his dapper appearance by instinctively reaching up a hand to smooth the hair piled on her head.

“Yes?”

“You received my telegram saying I would arrive today?”

“Oh, Mr. Simmons, of course,” replied