Image: “Ordeal of Man-E-Faces” by Deviant Art user ~danbrenus
Previously on Passions:
Custom Jerkoff Encouragement Videos. That was the new idea. Men would pay you to make a video where you sat with your legs spread and talked to the camera about their fetish, liberally incorporating their name. I want you to cum inside me, Darren. My life is almost complete but I want to have a baby. Your baby, Darren. I want to feel your cum spray inside me, Darren. This was the example Yuri showed her. He had bought a studio, which is to say a building with a camera in it in Pacoima between a CLINICA FAMILIAR with posters of frightened pregnant girls in the window and Rudy’s Auto Shop, Specializing in Transmissions Since 1989. I need you to give me a baby, Darren. And she smacked her pussy, the star of Yuri’s first producorial effort, betraying her stripper roots. Smacking your pussy makes a guy who’s staring into his vodka red bull look back up at you in a titty bar; on a laptop video screen it looks cheap and clownish. Astrid would do better. Darren had paid one thousand dollars to have somebody tell him she wanted his baby. The girl got two hundred. It was eight minutes worth of work and it didn’t seem to be a problem that the girl ran out of material at the two minute mark and just repeated herself. The American sex industry is the last place in the world where the buyers are so desperate that incompetence is forgiven, even expected. The quality of acting– the insincerity of the enthusiasm, or the horror in the case of something like rape porn, would have got any Wal Mart greeter fired on his first day. But you could still feel pity and disgust pretty transparently in the passenger seat of some guy’s Honda as you took off a pair of panties that you’d been supposedly sweating and cumming in for two days and handed them to him for a hundred dollar bill. You could still be obviously creeped out as long as you held eye contact. She bought them in packs of six and swabbed them in her armpits after jogging.
Oh God, I can feel your seed spraying inside of me, Darren. The performer had not described Darren’s ejaculate in any terms beside “cum” and “seed,” each of which she had said at least twenty times. But then what could you do– the language has enough prickly Latinate words about sex to make a fifty minute video, and similarly, enough words like “jizz,” “nut” and “choad,” but nothing in the tasteful middle. With her presumed lack of education and poorly thought out prep process she had done a fine job. The proposed new film was for Scott, who wanted to be addressed by name as Astrid or whoever pointed her vagina and anus at the camera and looked backwards over her shoulder discussing how she was cheating on Scott with a black man. How his big dick made her cum like Scott never could and now she wanted to have his baby inside her. The black man, not Scott. Astrid had taken the black man’s cum, his seed, and now Scott was going to have to pay for the black man’s baby and take care of it. She would reminisce about his impossibly thick and satisfying meatpipe and contrast it with Scott’s own undersized member. Scott had fought tooth and nail to get to a station in life where he had one thousand dollars in disposable income and he was going to spend it on masturbating. Good for him. The star of Darren’s film had begged off, objecting to the racial content.
Fine, I’ll do it, Astrid said, and it was because Rudy’s sign had reminded her that her transmission was in need of repair. I need you to get inside of me, Rudy. I need your hands to make me flush out my dirty fluids, Rudy. I need to feel the power of a real driveshaft for once.
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When she was 14 a social worker had taken an interest in her. A mousy woman who wore giant cable knit shawls depicting hunting and fishing tableaux. You seem like you need a place that’s going to respect your individuality, she said. What? Fuck yo– oh, wait. Yes, I do need that. The word “individuality.” Most social workers wouldn’t have assumed she would know it. This person was paying attention. Astrid had blue hair and a nose ring at the time. I have a home that I think is gonna be a great match. Astrid had been raped by a one eyed hunchback who had been sent to clean the group home’s rain gutters that morning. Sign me up.
Carol lived in a modular housing unit, which is a nice name for a double wide trailer, on a piece of land in the North Woods that also had a little pond and a barn. The goats enjoyed better architecture than the people. She had a biological kid, Kenny, who was nine; he had eyes like hard boiled eggs and his jaw was hung a little to the left. Probably he was gestated before Carol made friends with Bill W. But he smiled a lot with his weird little gappy teeth and laughed and spent his time playing in a dirt pile with a huge collection of old thrift store Star Wars and G.I. Joe action figures; they all participated in some huge Gabriel Garcia Marquez-esque soap opera together regardless of what universe they were from. A Man-E-Faces from He-Man whose face was stuck in one position would have a romance with a Go-bot, who then betrayed him and launched an attack on the coffee can that was his fortress, and etc. And Man-E-Faces would rebound with a figurine of Garfield on which Kenny had drawn eyelashes to make clear he was now a woman. Man-E-Faces made a baby in Garfield’s butt with his thing and this broke the heart of Starscream, who himself was pined for by a Rock Lord to whom he would barely give a second glance. Garfield gave birth to Cheetarah, who savagely avenged the Go-bot attack. And so it went.
Astrid showed up with her bowling ball bag full of stuff and looked right past Carol to a pine book shelf stacked with VHS tapes. They were the kind that poor people tape on the free weekend of HBO. One tape would have Beastmaster, Eddie Murphy: Raw, and Metalstorm: the Destruction of Jared Syn, which was known to have boobs at the forty seven minute mark the way Richard Gere was known to have harbored a gerbil in his rectum. The other families had had motorcycle and gun videos, or the Christian version of entertainment. Davy and Goliath. Cassettes of Amy Grant and Michael W. Smith. There had been a brouhaha when one of the other girls had brought home a Stryper tape from a gas station and it was decided that despite the fact that they named songs after bible verses their hair was too faggy to be appropriate. The girl had run away and was found slashed up in New Mexico. John Walsh did a story about it.
But these people watched real actual movies. Their TV was hooked up to something. Music was playing, and it did not say “He died for your sins.” There was not a clock made from the diagonal cross section of a log painted with a sunset and hand lettered with the poem “Footprints.”
I like your hair, Carol said. She sounded like she meant it. She made hot dogs and beans, frying the hot dogs in a pan. Some people like ’em boiled but a soft hot dog makes me wanna puke. Hot dogs and beans and red Kool Aid. It was delicious. There was a blackberry patch in the back and it was August; Astrid and Kenny would bring back a big bowl of blackberries and they would watch TV together. Carol liked Beverly Hills, 90210 and Melrose Place and so did Astrid. Kenny wasn’t a fan but he was outvoted. He fell asleep under the afghan and Astrid and Carol would stay up and laugh and talk. Carol had been all over the country at Astrid’s age following a boy in a band. Astrid told her things, and Carol didn’t get that fake solemn oh my poor dear I’m so sorry. She knew the way men were.
It lasted six months. Carol had a biker boyfriend named Spider who she met in AA, who owed alimony to that bitch tramp even though she was serious with the guy whose dad owned the Pick ‘n’ Pull and he had had enough. He took Carol and Kenny to Minnesota where the courts wouldn’t chase him, and Astrid couldn’t leave the state. Before he left he taught her how to shoot an Uzi, in case the niggers ever rise up. Back to the group home, with your bowling ball bag. Half the people she knew were gone; there were other institutions you went to when you got pregnant, or stabbed another kid, or tried to hang yourself. The new crop seemed more sinister, somehow. She was not greeted like a returning hero for learning what it was like to have a home.
delicioustacos 
Wut?
No joke: this is probably your best writing in a single piece so far. Well done.