Porno Party
Eve Marx
Word Count 1122
My first Christmas in LA was a total mindfuck. For starters, while never a fan of snow or ice, I was nevertheless unnerved by Christmas decorations and twinkly lights adorning palm trees in our west side neighborhood. I was homesick for cold weather and bundling up on starlit nights but what I got was an anorexic Santa at the Century City mall sweating in a red flannel onesie as moms wearing shorts and flip flops lined up to get their kids’ picture taken with Santa. I’d brought my young son there for the same reason but the environs filled me with bilious anger.
We’d been living in Los Angeles only a few months and I was adjusting poorly. I hated the freeways and traffic and had yet to make friends. I’d only agreed to this move from the east coast because my husband was a screenwriter. That Christmas he had at least six projects “in the works” and spent all his days and many nights taking meetings with independent producers. When he wasn’t taking meetings he was holed up in a fake-wood paneled room at the rear of our rental house toiling on spec scripts. Having quit my magazine job on the east coast, I had little to do and found myself making endless pots of coffee to serve my husband and his co-writers as they batted around plotlines and chiseled dialog. I was just catching on to the fact that Hollywood was one big crap shoot and who you knew and what parties you went to were way more important than what you actually wrote.
On Christmas Day we opened presents and I made pancakes. I walked the dogs. By midday we were bored and climbing the walls. We drove a few blocks west to the Venice Boardwalk where every shop was open despite the holiday to hit up Jody Maroni’s Sausage Kingdom where we scarfed down Chicago dogs. Back at the house, just as I was wondering how to not kill myself, my husband got a phone call from an actress friend inviting us to a New Year’s Eve bash at the home of a wealthy man who founded his own film company to produce glitzy X-rated films. The actress, who had briefly flirted with the X world herself said it wasn’t a porno party but more of an industry thing. “You never know who you might meet at one of Walter’s parties,” she said enticingly.
For the big night, we secured our regular babysitter, an elderly but lively cousin of one of my husband’s childhood friends, a very nice woman named Ruth who didn’t ask a lot of questions. She had a four-hour minimum which we often struggled to fill, but I assured her this night we would be out late and I didn’t know when we’d get home.
The producer lived in an Italianate villa in the exclusive Fremont Place enclave of Hancock Park. At the time he was married to a porn star. Multiple young women, we were told, were living in the house, women from Toledo and Kansas City and Kalamazoo, drawn to LA with dreams of becoming an actress. How they met the producer was unclear, but in exchange for room and board, they ran errands and picked up the dry cleaning. Eventually they either packed up and returned to their home towns or commenced performing under assumed names in the producer’s videos. He’d recently enjoyed a breakthrough in his own career co-producing some of the hottest music videos on MTV and if you hung out with him, there was always the possibility he might introduce you to someone he knew in the legitimate business. Some of those people it was rumored were attending this New Year’s Eve bash.
Valets were positioned at the ready in front of the home, accepting keys to Porsches, Lamborghinis and a Delorean. We exited our vehicle, a ten-year-old BMW2002 gussied up with a cheap paintjob from Earl Sheib. Here we go, my husband said and we entered the fray.
At 11 p.m. when we arrived, the party was in full swing. We passed through multiple rooms where people were dancing and drinking. It appeared everyone was doing cocaine. We didn’t recognize a soul which was unsurprising. I drifted into the kitchen where a harried team of caterers were fussing with trays of hors d'oeuvres. Bowls of caviar and potato chips sat ignored on the granite counters.
Twenty minutes in, I was thinking we should leave. We weren’t into heavy drugs and the vibe was weird. Since it was a Hollywood party, everyone was angling for something; drugs, sex, an introduction, an audition, pitching a script. Pressing through the sea of strange faces I was suddenly pulled into a bear hug by Gloria, an old friend from New York.
Come upstairs, she said.
We spent the next half hour chatting with our friend who told us she was planning to move to Hawaii soon to lie on a beach. We sat on a grouping of overstuffed loveseat sofas some decorator had positioned just outside the master suite. We joked we were the only people at the party not doing hard drugs and gamely tried to ignore an escalating argument going on behind the bedroom door. The producer’s wife had locked herself inside her ensuite bathroom and was refusing to come out. I recalled her from my earlier days of employment at High Society magazine and remembered the producer’s wife as a high-strung skinny bitch with ominously protruding clavicles and legs like pins. After a protracted avalanche of angry words including her assertion that she wanted a divorce, there was the sound of wood splintering and then glass breaking. Moments later the wife streaked past us, blood on her face.
Happy New Year, we said to Gloria. Love you forever, we said. We went downstairs and outside and the valet brought around our car. There was a fresh new dent on it but we didn’t say a word.
We were back home before our babysitter’s minimum. The following day she returned and we went to a New Year’s Day brunch at the home of an assistant director on the tv show, Knot’s Landing. It turned out everyone at his party was in AA. Never have I wanted a drink as badly as I did at that gathering; it was so boring, and also vegan.
Don’t say a word, I said to my husband in the car on our way home after we’d made our escape. Two years later we were out of there and back in New York just in time for the 4th of July, but that's a story for another time.
Eve is a journalist and author currently scraping out a tiny living crafting police reports for newspapers in New York and Oregon. She is the author of What’s Your Sexual IQ?, The Goddess Orgasm, 101 Things You Didn’t Know About Sex and other titles bearing some relation to her stint editing Penthouse Forum and other ribald publications. She makes her home in a rural seaside community near Portland, OR with her husband, R.J. Marx, a jazz saxophonist, and Lucy, their dog child.
