Relentlessly gray morning. I woke to a kitchen without coffee. Left at sunrise to go to the Starbucks that opens at six. The police were setting up roadblocks throughout my neighborhood. Road race. I bobbed and weaved my way to the Boulevard worrying I wouldn't be able to get back home. I jumped a few unmanned blockades, though, and made it back to the house. That is when I realized I didn't feed the cat last night. The water dish was bone dry. I had gone to the studio mid-afternoon and then out to dinner and drinks. I got home early enough, but I must have been drunk. A real heel, I feel, but the cat is all over me like we are lovers. I think of the old saying and transpose it to the cat. "You can always treat a cat too good, but. . . . " Maybe I should have been a little more careless with the women I loved.
I get to meet a lot of beautiful characters making the pictures I do. You never know who is showing up. She was married, a mother of three. She said she hadn't shot for over a year. She used to shoot with some pretty famous photographers in L.A., she said, and she named them and their credentials. She still stays with one of them when she goes to work or visit. She looked nothing like the pictures I had seen of her now being perhaps twenty or more pounds heavier. She was super friendly, however, and we hit it off right from the start in a way that you sometimes click with a person you have never met. We talked for an hour before we even began to get ready for the shoot. Bit by bit, her story slipped out.
It was her husband's idea, she said. He was working but they couldn't pay their bills. "I wish I could get paid for masturbating," she said. "Really? If you are serious. . . ." They set up a site. She was able to stay at home with the kids and work when she wanted. Then she expanded, branded her site and hooked in with a larger company and began to hire her own "models." Suddenly she was making six figures.
"Why'd you decide to shoot with me?" I asked. "I am so far from that."
"My parents are both artists," she said. "I wanted to work with when you when you explained your project. I like the vision."
We talked about what sold. It is the weirdest things, of course. Smishing up gooey things with your toes. Bouncing up and down naked on balloons. Most of the money comes though from "regulars," guys who have come to the site for a long time, who just want to pay for a private "room" and tell her about their lives, about their businesses, their meetings, their wives. . . . That, I said, is what dancers tell me, too. The money comes from the guys who just want to talk.
We had to move some furniture to change the set. "You know," I said, "I don't really care about the photography much. I just have a fetish for watching naked girls move furniture." She laughed then said, "We could set up a site for that. We could probably make a ton of money."
Making a ton of money has never been what I am good at, though. I do, however, love to hear stories. We went to dinner at a nearby restaurant. We had drunk a lot of wine and drank much more. One of my old friends came by and I called him over. He sat down and started chatting up the wife, the mother of three. . . the cam girl. She told him all about it.
"Give my your phone," she said, and she typed in her web address.
"Is that your pay site," I asked her?
"Sure."
"Don't be hustling my friends," I laughed, but I knew my buddy. He's a cheap bastard and would never pay to see a naked girl no matter what she was doing. There will be no money there. I on the other hand had called for the check. It was a good one. The restaurant was very, very proud of their food and drink. "How much money would I make on that furniture moving website," I asked her.
"Fifty-fifty," she said. "A hundred a day, minimum."
She was a good and funny girl. I liked her a lot, but it was time to go. Her husband was calling and freaking out. "I can hear the kids yelling in the background," she said. "He's not used to having them alone."
I have a feeling that I'll never get my furniture moving website, will never make one hundred dollars a day. But I got the story, and really, it will last longer than the money.
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