Upgunned Read Free Page B

graveyard shifts running off-color folio pages for the likes of Pubes!, Just Past Jailbait, FunBag, Foxy Moxie, Drip Groove, Nipplemania, Sluts ’N Tarts, Gashette, Hollywood Loaf, Spankers, Grease Man, 2 Young 2 Date, Hot Trotting Tots, Cave Boy, Wet ’N Squishy, Yeast Beasts, Fistful of Udders, The Diary of Gloria Hole, Muff Divas, Great Big Onez, Marine Discharge, Blood Vamps, Gooey, and a variety of their high-quality sister publications. The sheet stacks were a never-ending catalogue of artificially moistened vaginae, peter-pumped cocks, leering browneyes, and glassy mannequin stares in ceaseless aggro recombination. You get inured to the flood tide pretty quickly if you don’t want to start dropping letters from the alphabet soup made of your brain by the busywork or the Mandarin hours.
    The payoff, for me, was the serviceable darkroom Boss also maintained. It was all mine when the adult entertainment portion of my shift was completed.
    I’d never liked color photography much, although I’d done my share. Attenuated night vision heightens your discrimination of gray tones, not color, which is why I keep the vitamin A in my medicine chest—to encourage more rhodopsin in the rods of my retinas.
    Clavius, as it happened, was attracted by the angle of having a porn sweatshop grind out the posters and prints for a show planned at a West Village gallery called Beneath 5th Street. His highbrow reputation was in no way compromised by his excellent nose for sleaze and he needed a confluence of the two in order to maintain street cred and his cachet as an edgy innovator. So Clavius approached Boss with nearly all the ancillary work for the show whose title won him his big-time sobriquet—“C.”
    It was a gathering of earth-toned, biomechanoid photo studies, post-Expressionist, post-post-Industrial, pre-Millennial; a style that has since become known, in our new century, as Meltdown, to predate it from “mashup.” Now, today, Clavius had left all that far behind in the quaint past. I looped all of it in the darkroom at New World Inkworks, and since Clavius was so fussy about quality control, he hung around while the waterfall of porn flew from the presses. We got to talking and it wasn’t long before he said, “I’ve got something perfect for a fellow like you, if you think you’re game.”
    I told him what cameras I had, what equipment. Showed him some samples of my own work. He was already sold—more or less—due to a conflict of schedule, and I was an at-hand solution. He pulled a couple of four-by-fives out of his Halliburton case. Hot-lit full bodies of a woman with bangs, long, straight, flat hair that looked to be the color of café crème, and huge luminous eyes, almost like a siren from Japanese anime brought to physical life. The eyes were the thing. They commanded your attention, sucked you in, and dealt no mercy.
    â€œThis is Skorpia,” he said, then laughed. “No shit, that’s really her name; she’s Greek. My problem is that I have to be at ‘C’—my show—at precisely the same time as her surgery is scheduled.”
    I was supposed to ask, but I just raised an eyebrow.
    â€œShe’s having a couple of ribs removed,” he told me. “A little brow work and some butt implants to round her off—see?” He flipped up another full-length shot from the rear. Skorpia was nude and about as unsexually posed as I’d ever witnessed. “That’s a problem with the taller ones—no ass. Her ass is like the line between two of my fingers when I clench my fist.” He demonstrated.
    I asked how tall she was.
    â€œThat’s the miracle. Six foot five, barefoot.”
    Barefoot and buttless, I thought. Poor baby.
    â€œWith the ribs removed she’ll be able to corset to fourteen inches; can you imagine how she will take the world by storm?”
    I was supposed to agree, so I