FIVE

The warm California sun flayed the storm clouds into fleecy shreds and soon the morning reminded every non-native why they had moved to Los Angeles in the first place. The two days of rain had painted the hillside scrubs a verdant green and the palm trees wavered with the waning wind. The temperature rose into the mid-seventies in the Valley. Warm for January and a superbly conditioned brunette touched up her tan on the back balcony of the unoccupied apartment complex near Sherman Way. Any voyeur would have mistaken the naked woman to be a mindless sun worshipper. he would have been mistaken, because Sherri Conti was thinking very hard about how to get money to finish her first non-pornographic project ADAM AND TWO EVES.

She had the crew, the equipment, and the two actresses, Lena and herself for this low-budget feature about the last man on earth. They had shot 70% of the film throughout December. Neither woman had exchanged Christmas gifts, since they had financed the film through their credit cards. All their plastic was maxxed out to the limit. Another $20,000 and the film would be finished, however money wasn’t the biggest problem for this project. Sherri could get the money with a single phone call.

Their bigger dilemma was finding a male lead. Hollywood actors? fees were out of her league and most weren’t risking their careers on working with an unknown director connected to the porno industry. Sherri had scavenged every casting book in the business. She had auditioned almost a hundred. None of them had fit her vision of ‘ADAM AND TWO EVES’. He had to be out there somewhere.

Sherri turned her head to the bedroom. Lena was packing an overnight bag for her trip to Las Vegas. After forty-one films together their relationship had become more than simply sex for the older woman. Lena was unlike any other of her previous lovers and Sherri wasn’t the only one who felt that way.

Men and women at gas stations, supermarkets, and coffee stores demanded autographs, as if Lena was a budding Hollywood star. Most of them had seen the young actress in Sherri’s XXX videos, which portrayed women as instruments of their own desire rather than receptacles for men’s lust and Lena’s uncanny metamorphosis into the filmscharacters had helped these videos realize a massive cross-over demand from the mainstream. In recognition of these phenomena, Lena would be honored with the ‘Best New-Comer’ title at the XXX-RATED Awards ceremony tonight. She deserved much more.

Several minutes later Lena came out on the terrace.

“You all ready to go?” Sherri shielded her eyes from the sun. the young actress was wearing black jeans and a leather jacket. No tee-shirt. Lena didn’t like wearing clothes.

“But I wish you were coming with me.” Lena stood both hands on her narrow hips.

“I have some editing on the film, besides this is your big night.” Twenty years ago Sherri had been a young girl straight out of the Jersey Pine Barrens on the way to the top, completely blind, deaf, and dumb to how much the lifestyle of a porno actress would demand from her body and soul. “I’ll go to the gym later.”

“Exorcise the demons.”

“The only way I know how.” A strict diet and daily exercises fought off the tidal tug of her old life. She was in good shape for a woman her age or ten years younger, but her heart was a wasteland. Too much sex. Too many drugs.

“There are other ways besides gym and hard work.” Lena rubbed the back of her heel. New shoes had a way of tearing off her flesh.

“Like you.” A psychiatrist called her condition ‘adonia mixed with apathy’. This inability to feel pleasure stole any chance to fall in love and Sherri prayed that Lena was the cure, but as long as they were involved in porno, nothing would fill the emptiness of her soul.

“Yes, me.” Lena knelt between Sherri’s bare thighs. “You know I want you with me.”

“I know, maybe next year.” Lena was young and the only thing Hollywood worshipped more than beauty was youth, which was the one commodity that money could not buy in this town.

“I know the real reason you can’t come.” Lena inhaled the fragrance of burnt peaches off Sherri’s skin and her finger skated along the raised tracks of scar tissue inside her lover’s arm. “You can’t see any of those people. Those people from your past. You think it would kill you, if you did, but I wouldn’t let that happen to you.”

“I know, but I’m still not strong enough.” Sherri stroked Lena’s head, so the long black tresses tumbled onto her belly. “Sorry.”

“Nothing to be sorry for, Sherri, but if you don’t mind, I want to wait a few more minutes before I go.” Lena shucked off her jacket and the morning sun melted their nakedness together, until Sherri tapped her shoulder. “If you don’t go now, you won’t make it there.”

“Only if you insist.” Lena picked up her jacket from the tiled floor.

“Go have a good time.” She had lived through her own wild period without listening to anyone and understood Lena was too young for domestication. The two women kissed without parting lips. How long Sherri could hold Lena was a question she would never ask the girl.

“If you see anyone suitable to play the male lead for ADAM AND TWO EVES, get their number.”

“Anyone?” Lena had met tens of men who could have performed the role and Sherri had turned them all down.

“You know what I’m after.”

“Yes, a man in his forties. Blonde hair. Slightly beat-up. Not too thin, not too fat. A rough voice and a not just another pretty face.” Lena wouldn’t have been so strict as Sherri. After all it was just a movie.

“And he has to look like he has lived on the road.”

“Slightly brutish. Like Robert Mitchum with a heart of gold,” Lena joked, but Sherri remembered the actor’s darker roles. “Not from NIGHT OF THE HUNTER.”

“Or CAPE FEAR.”

“And he’s too nice in HEAVEN KNOWS.”

“And too young in THUNDER ROAD.” They would never find a man at this rate. “I have to get going.”

Sherri handed over the keys to the Skylark parked downstairs. “Drive carefully.”

“I’ll come back in one piece.” Lena could not bring herself to tell Sherri she loved her for letting her run free. She had heard the word ‘love’ from too many men and women in a multitude of languages, when they meant something else, instead she stepped into the hallway from where she would have blown Sherri a kiss, except the apartment door shut.

Accustomed to no good-byes, Lena pressed the elevator button for the garage.

As the Buick’s V-8 powered the Skylark onto the Ventura Freeway, Lena’s finger hit the CD’s PLAY button and Madonna’s MUSIC blasted from the speakers. Her body moved under the seat belt. A warm wind blew through the open window. This was really California and she was happy to be on the road, for like a river overflowing its bank, there was no controlling youth by the young.