* * *
Like I said, the man’s not my uncle. Though I’ve known Johnny my whole life, I can count our interactions on one hand. Our family is not the reunion type. We’re either united already or distant for some very good reason. Growing up, I saw Johnny at funerals and shivas, possibly a wedding—definitely one Thanksgiving when my father got a real kick out of offering him breast meat. And yet we referred to him as “uncle” in a way we did not with his brothers, who were cast as childhood friends of my mother’s.
A combination of factors made this possible. For starters, my otherwise straitlaced parents could barely contain their excitement at having a porn star in their midst. A porn star is chum in the water for people who think getting wait-listed from college is a haunting secret. Also, Johnny’s other brothers are both doctors. One practices in Paris, which means he can say things like “femur” in French (fémur). Even I will concede this is a dramatic divergence in life paths—it’s not as if the other brothers work in marketing or club promotion. But my parents’ reverse mythologizing of Johnny made it impossible to get an accurate sense of the guy. Which is my family’s way.
One of their favorite pastimes is diagnosing a person’s entire character by latching on to arbitrary details. They’re really good at it. When I was twelve, my friend Alexis and I were watching TV in my parents’ bedroom. Alexis was lying on the bed with her chin in her palms when my mother entered the room. Alexis said hello, but failed to remove her feet from where they rested—on my mother’s pillow. And that was that. I tried to defend my friend, citing the layer of sock that separated her feet from where my mother put her face, but it was no use. When Alexis and I had a falling-out years later, my mother danced on the grave of the friendship.
“That girl,” she reiterated, “was a bad influence.”
Meanwhile, my friend Dave, who once tried convincing me to have sex in the back of a van so we could “knock it out” before college, could do no wrong after once ringing the doorbell with our newspaper in hand.
In this same way, snippets about Johnny were presented as essentials or in lieu of essentials. I knew that he dropped out of UNC Chapel Hill, which meant he was smart enough to get in, and that he’d spent the last thirty years living alone in an apartment somewhere in Los Angeles, which meant he was sad. I knew he was once so lost to a world of sex-crazed degenerates that he sent his mother, my great-aunt, a magazine with an advertisement for one of his films. The photo featured Johnny, bespectacled and naked, pushing a woman on a swing, also naked. I’ve always imagined him giving a thumbs-up but I can’t confirm this because I’ve never actually seen the magazine.
But most shockingly of all, I knew that Johnny got into porn to find a girlfriend.
To me, this idea was always the most difficult to grasp. It seemed the most implausible. What kind of cockamamy plan was this from a man who got accepted to UNC from out of state? It’s common enough for people to spend their whole lives building careers or amassing wealth in order to get laid. So one could argue that Johnny had cleverly skipped the middleman. His career was to get laid. Which is all well and good—unless that was never the point. Unless Johnny only ever wanted to cuddle and spoon and take turns spitting toothpaste into a bathroom sink. What if all those lawn orgies and park-bench encounters were constructed solely for Johnny to find love? For years, I thought about this every time I sat on a park bench. Until one day, when I couldn’t stand thinking about it anymore.
* * *
“What do you need his e-mail address for?”
My parents are skeptical about me contacting Johnny. They have spent most of my life portraying this man as a caricature, but when push comes to shove, Johnny is suddenly quite three-dimensional. They don’t want me pestering a seventy-four-year-old man with stunt-cock inquiries.
“He’s a very sweet person,” adds my mother.
“What is it you think I’m going to do to him?”
The truth is I don’t know exactly what I want from Johnny. Certainly, an academic curiosity about pornography is not a revelation. What am I going to do, blow the lid off fake orgasms? Nor is a sociological curiosity. David Foster Wallace wrote at length about the Adult Video News Awards, thus pissing a circle around the subject for all eternity. My only credential is that I am a blood relative. But even this is a lame justification. People related to politicians, for instance, don’t get more insight into them than the rest of us. If anything, they get less.
At least some portion of Johnny’s draw comes from my own coastal turmoil. I have often felt I was mistakenly born a mid-Atlantic baby. I’m happy in San Francisco and have taught myself to be happy in Los Angeles. But after a few weeks, some tendril pokes up from my core and says: “You can’t stay here, you’ll go crazy.” And so I come back east, feeling smug and sane, having taken advice from a talking tendril. Yet the more I heard of Johnny’s “running off to California,” the more I felt a kinship with this person over my family.
But I can’t tell
