“He won’t be around forever,” I say.
“Neither will we,” my father says. “And we’re interesting!”
“Not that interesting,” my mother corrects him, and forks over the e-mail.
* * *
Johnny writes back right away. It’s nice to hear from me, but he’s hesitant to chat. He needs to mull it over. I tell him to take his time, mull away, no problem. In truth, I am surprised. Not because I expect him to expose himself emotionally as he has physically, but because he has been a public participant in his former life. Only a few years ago, he was inducted into the Legends of Erotica Hall of Fame in Las Vegas. No one in my family was told about it, but during a recent Google search I read how a former colleague introduced him as “the most important person in all of Northern California during porn’s golden age; the guy who literally taught me how to fuck on camera—and this was before Viagra!” (The invocation of Viagra seems to be the porn industry equivalent of telling a younger person that you used to walk uphill to and from school, both ways.) At the end of the ceremony, the host wheeled out a block of cement for Johnny to stick his septuagenarian penis into. He demurred and signed his name instead.
A full month later, Johnny’s name reappears in my in-box along with the subject line “apologies.” Of course, “apologies.” Of course, I should never have contacted him. I should have done as my parents suggested and let the man live his life. But Johnny is only apologizing for the delay. He was in Ojai and off e-mail. Ojai, I think. He has a place in the mountains! A place he can escape to or at least visit. He is not sad, he is happy. One rumor debunked already. Ojai. That’s where they have the turtle sanctuary. I imagine Johnny stepping out of a sun-dappled ranch house. The air is perfumed with flowers as he heads out on his morning turtle feed. I imagine him sitting on one of the great big ones, being carried in slow motion across a green meadow. Then I imagine him doing all of this naked and giving a thumbs-up.
And so I stop imagining and get on a plane.
* * *
Reality is quick to replace fantasy. This is true in every arena except for sex, where pornography has more or less ruined sex for all men under thirty. But it remains true that once you visit a place, it’s almost impossible to replicate the images you had of that place before you went. As I stand across the street from Johnny’s apartment complex in Culver City, I make a mental note of what I think it might look like inside. From my febrile imagination, I conjure a time capsule of the seventies—faux wood paneling, disco records, memorabilia and awards. Maybe a sunken living room. Maybe a sex swing. Maybe a wicker sex swing.
Johnny comes out into the hallway to greet me as I step off the elevator. He is shorter than I am, soft-spoken, with a shy grin. Some people are more comforting to look at than others and Johnny is one of them. He has a face like the man in the moon. He’s also noticeably spry. I pick up the pace and follow him to his apartment. He opens the door to an aseptic one-bedroom with white carpeting that stops at the kitchen. The counters are overrun with rows of vitamin bottles. In the living room sits a white sofa, white sitting chairs and a white table with a glass bowl of fruit on it. Angled on a small piano are framed photographs of his nieces and nephews, a family that is not quite mine. This is the apartment of a dental hygienist. There is, however, a curious amount of exercise equipment.
“I like to stay fit,” Johnny says.
The place is laden with bars and bells and core-strengthening mousetraps. Two purple balls take over the whole sofa like giant dogs. Across the bedroom door frame is a pull-up bar, gleaming in the sunlight. Johnny removes a hand gripper from one of the chairs and offers me a blueberry. I sit and sigh. Then he sits and sighs. We then proceed to talk about his brother’s cockatoo for what feels like ten minutes. This is my doing. I’m the one who broached the subject of the cockatoo. When I was nineteen, I spent an afternoon with the Paris-dwelling doctor while backpacking across Europe. We sat on his balcony, drinking tea, while the cockatoo sprawled out on his lap, getting the underside of its wing scratched.
Johnny informs me of the cockatoo’s recent demise. I thought they lived forever, like African gray parrots. Apparently they have an average aviary lifespan.
“Do you think he’ll get another one?” I ask.
“Oh, I don’t think so,” says Johnny. “I think the cockatoo was burdensome, shrieking every time the phone rang.”
Have I flown to Los Angeles to make a retired porn star say “cockatoo” over and over? People go to Los Angeles for less.
“I’m don’t know why I’m here,” I confess.
“That’s okay,” Johnny says, gracious and smiling.
I had said those words to myself many times en route—at airport security, while stomping through the empty tennis-ball can of a Jetway, in the bathroom at LAX, plugging Johnny’s address into my phone—but saying them out loud, I realize just how untrue they are. Deep down, I know exactly why I have come and it is not because I have a California fetish. It’s because, like Johnny, I have been looking for love in all the wrong places.
While I have not been frequenting strip clubs in the hopes of snagging a soul mate, I have become increasingly attracted to unrealistic or unobtainable men. I have broken things off with them or vice versa but each relationship feels quicker than the one before it. This is a problem everyone I know seems to
