Prologue
You know me.
Come on, you know you do.
Maybe you pretend you don’t. Maybe you clear your browser history religiously. Maybe you pretend to be aghast whenever someone even mentions the word porn in your presence. Maybe you even wish you didn’t know my name, just like you wish you didn’t have that drawer with the lotion or the toy.
Yeah, I know about the drawer.
But the truth is you do know me. You know the shape of my hands when they’re curled around a woman’s hips, you know the way my eyes dance when I glance up at a woman from between her legs. You know the shape of my cock, the length of it, the thickness of it. You know my sandy brown hair and my bright green eyes, and you know the noises I make when I come.
I’ve won all the awards, racked up hundreds of thousands of social media followers, and get name-dropped everywhere, from Cosmopolitan to NPR to that hour on the Today show where those two ladies get drunk at nine in the morning.
Everybody knows Logan O’Toole, world famous porn star.
At least, everybody thinks they know me. For a country with the highest per capita porn consumption on the planet, a surprising number of people assume that I’m living like Mark Wahlberg’s character in Boogie Nights, or like Hugh Hefner, or some weird amalgamation of the two. That every day it’s nothing but sex and glamour and money, like I walk around in a Studio 54-esque bubble all the time, wearing a silk robe and dripping with gold jewelry, being followed by vacuous, fuck-me blondes.
But it’s just not the truth.
Yes, I fuck women for money, and yes, I fucking love my job. Who wouldn’t? I’m good at making women come, and for whatever reason, people like to watch me do it. I’m the luckiest guy in the world in that respect. But there are no Scarface-like piles of cocaine lying around, no train of needy women desperate to be fucked. No magic well of money either, courtesy of internet-fed piracy and the rise of amateur porn.
The truth is I work seven days a week for narrow profit margins, with a huge array of complicated, intelligent, sometimes damaged and sometimes delightful people. The truth is that I unabashedly love this business, and I love to fuck, even though I sometimes wish for more, for something bigger and realer and deeper.
The truth is that being a porn star is sometimes fucking awesome and sometimes fucking terrible, and sometimes just boring and sometimes so magical I want to cry. But despite the money headaches, the industry drama, and a state government hell-bent on driving our livelihood into the ground, I’m in love with my job. I’m in love with being Logan O’Toole, with being a porn star, and I plan on doing it until my pubes turn gray, no matter what happens.
So go ahead and pretend you don’t know me, but the truth is, I’m not going anywhere.
1
The light is all wrong.
Normally, this wouldn’t bother me. I am not bothered easily, especially not on a set and especially not on a day like today, when my day’s work involves fucking two beautiful women.
But the problem is that this is my set. And the two beautiful women are my friends, who are admittedly getting paid to be here. But still. They could be off doing anything else and probably getting paid better, but instead they chose to give me their time. Which means, as a director and as a friend, I feel a lot of responsibility right now.
I want this scene to look good.
Don’t get me wrong, the set already looks good because it’s my house, and my house is amazing. High up in the Hills, lots of windows, lots of open space. It was the first thing I bought myself when I started making decent money, and even though I could probably upgrade to Bel-Air or North of Montana, I’ve stayed put. I like Laurel Canyon and I fucking love this house. But right now, light is pouring in like God himself is outside, and it’s making everything over lit and high-key, and like a fucking Christian Singles ad, all bright and hopeful.
No Christian Singles here today, although I give myself a little grin at the mental joke and then glance over at Tanner, the twenty-four-year-old camera genius I’ve somehow tricked into working for my company. “What’s it look like?”
Tanner shrugs, not looking away from the camera, where he’s toying with a few settings. Ginger and Lexi are in the frame, both still in lingerie and both scrolling through their phones, looking like bored customers in line at the post office—save for the see-through bras and hickeys already blooming on their necks.
“We can fix some of this in post,” Tanner says, eyes still on the girls, “but right now, it’s kind of got a laundry commercial vibe.”
I chew on my lip for half a second. The essence of this business is speed and quantity, specifically the speed at which you can create quantity. Which often means sacrificing quality. Most directors wouldn’t give the lighting a second thought—in fact, there is a certain sense of tradition to the harshly lit scenes. What began as an accidental convergence of cheapness and lack of equipment turned into an industry aesthetic. After all, who gives a shit what the mood of the scene is? The mood is fucking. The mood is always fucking. And if you can jack off to it, then mood achieved.
But that wasn’t what I wanted O’Toole Films to be when I started it. I wanted to find a place between the high-end vanilla stuff that suburban couples rented on anniversaries and dirty dungeon porn. And there has to be a place in between, right? A place for the depraved porn junkie who also happens to have taste?
I make a snap decision. “We’ll finish the kissing here. Then I’ll pull them both into my bedroom. The windows in there are north-facing, so maybe the light will be less…”