pussycat with the porn stars
I had tried to say hi to him, (we'll call him "Winter") a couple of days earlier and he had ignored me. That's why I was surprised that when I walked past him on a seamy Capitol Hill street, outside of Club Seattle, a private "bath house" he said hi to me warmly.
He insisted he hadn't seen me at the party. Said he hadn't seen me in years, and asked how I was doing. I was glad to talk to him, and told him about school and all that. We talked warmly and exchanged cell phone numbers.
I asked how he was doing. "Well, actually..." he said he'd been working a little in the porn industry.
"Like motion pictures?"
"Motion, stills, everything." He went on to say that his girlfriend had just kicked him out and he was kinda scrambling for a place to live.
He told me it was a crazy industry, and that some pretty borderline characters worked in porn. "Yeah," I said, (and it's here that I firmly wedged my foot in my mouth) "you don't really have to have your shit together to work in porn...you just have to be able to get your dick hard."
The conversation ended shortly after that, and we went our seperate ways.
I thought about him all the next day though. Adrift in the world, no place to stay, hanging out at Club Seattle hustling and trying to put something together.
So, the next night I called him and asked him if he needed a safe place to stay that night or something. He said he was okay until the 31st, but was more worried about food and such, and a place to live after Halloween. He asked if I was looking for a roommate. I said definately not, but if he was in a dire situation I was more than willing to let him crash for a few days. Plus, I'd always be happy to feed him.
It seemed like I hadn't entirely ruined things by my callousness the night before. He told me a friend of his had suggested seeing the late night movie at the Egyptian Theater, and wanted to know if I wanted to go. It was late, and I wasn't sure I wanted to do it. He didn't know what the movie was, so I said I was going to check and get back to him.
The movie was the 1965 sex farce What's New Pussycat, which I instantly decided I was going to see in honor of Shauna.
I called him and told him we were on, and met him inside. We went and sat down and instantly started laughing at Peter Sellers' rendition of a sex-obsessed psychotherapist, and his sex-obsessed patient Peter O'Toole, who looked pretty foxy back in the day.
A few minutes later his friends showed up in true porn-star style. In tight clothes, beautiful mussy hair, and several king cans of 211 Steel Reserve. Two women and a guy, I could only barely make them out by the light of the flickering screen...we were briefly introduced and I was handed a long, cold silver can of the swill, popular with old chronic public inebriates.
I did not open it, but let it cool my nuts until the movie was over, at which time we made our grand exit, where I made the further aquaintance of the guy, known as Yuri, by splitting the malt liquor with him in the men's bathroom. He was in a grand and expansive drunk, speaking eloquently and gesticulating madly and dancing around.
We made it out on the street and I met the two girls, Yuri's girlfriend, Vicki Victory, and the other girl a native Russian speaker, both young, slim, tight, devastatingly pretty in their mussed way. They just projected this energy that said, "bend me over that couch, big boy", but like...not really.
It was after 2am, and there was nowhere to get decent beer anymore, so I tried to choke down some of the truly most repulsive malt liquor I'd ever tasted as we danced down the street like young trouble.
They said they were going to a bookstore. Yuri was wicked trashed, spouting Shakespeare and metaphoric cum on the streets of the randiest nieghborhood in the city. Truly they were going to a bookstore. I had forgotten that Twice Sold Tales was open all night on Saturday nights (books half price after midnight) and we entered in grand style.
Yuri and I staggered through the stacks. He picked up a book and read convincingly from Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. The staff was surprisingly tolerant of us, and I realized that you'd kind of have to be if you worked in a bookstore that was open all night in Capitol Hill.
Finally I had had enough and, without a word, walked out into the delicious fall night towards my car, and my relatively normal little life.