Johnny laughs. I laugh. Finally, I see my opening.
“So did you ever date Annette? After that?”
“She had a boyfriend,” he says. “And it wasn’t like that.”
“Right,” I say. “But did you ever want to date one of your costars?”
“You mean like was I in love with one of them?”
I put my fist to my mouth and clear my throat. “I was under the impression that you got into porn to find a girlfriend.”
“Ah,” he says. “It’s true. I was always scheming about how to make one of these women my girlfriend. I know it’s not the standard reason people do this. A lot of people I knew were aspiring actors or models. Mainstream Hollywood was getting more risqué and porn was getting longer scripts and so they thought eventually it would meet in the middle. They thought they were going to be needed. But they weren’t needed. And then it was just—over. But I was looking for a relationship.”
“Did you ever find one?”
“I haven’t dated a woman for more than three months my entire life,” he says, popping a blueberry into his mouth. “The last time I had sex was the night Mike Tyson bit Evander Holyfield’s ear off.”
“And you haven’t dated anyone for longer than three months since then?”
“Nope.”
The irony of this is not lost on Johnny. He runs a singles group at his local temple. He spends half his days helping other people find love.
“I hate to say this, but I think it’s the ultimate form of going after something you can’t have. If people become available to me in a real way, I think: How could they be interested? How could I have been interested in them? When I was working, I’d feel a connection with someone but then she’d start having sex with someone else who was taller and better-looking and I thought: I can’t compare to that guy.”
This is a familiar scenario for anyone living in the world, but Johnny subjected himself to the experience in real time. When he says “start having sex with someone else,” he means on the same piece of furniture.
Johnny made his last film in 1987. He was really attracted to the woman he was paired with and thought she might, at long last, make a good girlfriend. Then it turned out she already had a boyfriend and said boyfriend was a Hells Angel.
“I thought, well, that’s not going anyplace.”
“And that was the last straw? After a decade of this?”
“It would have been nice for it to come earlier,” Johnny agrees, “but I guess I’m a slow learner.”
He looks at me for the first time without blinking or smiling, just dead-on like he knows exactly why I’m here.
“You don’t just stop being who you are when you reach a certain age. You know that, right? You don’t magically outgrow yourself. The life you’re living now is your actual life, the habits you have now are your actual habits. I hope I’ve evolved—but I’m not so sure. But I can tell you that if you’re setting things up so they never work out by picking the wrong partners and you know you’re doing it…”
Johnny trails off. He looks at the photos on the piano.
“Yes?” I ask.
“Just stop it,” he says.
* * *
Johnny has never watched himself on-screen. He doesn’t own a single copy of his films and the idea of going to some retro-themed website holds no appeal. He thinks the Internet is plenty masturbatory without having to watch himself have sex on it. He is happy enough knowing that his movies are out there, that there’s proof he was the best ever at something, which is more than most people get. He recently told his piano teacher. They were swapping stories about their younger selves and Johnny was growing uncomfortable with all those unaccounted-for years. So, wary as he was, he told her. But when he saw her again the following week, the first thing she did was advise him not to go around telling people about his “film career.”
Having finally gotten to know the real Johnny, I am livid on his behalf. Who was this woman to go around passing out scarlet letters? Stick with “Chopsticks,” sweetheart, and leave the moral shaming to the religious right. But Johnny took it in stride. He knew the risks of sharing in advance. In fact, he knows how lucky he is—Johnny’s particular brand of fame means he can deploy his history at will, pluck it out of obscurity or keep it buried.
“It will always be mine,” he explains. “It may be a red flag but it’s my red flag. Like I said, this is my actual life. This is the one I chose.”
It’s getting dark out. Johnny walks me into the hall, where a halogen light flickers above our heads. He presses the elevator button for me. Nothing is revolutionary about Johnny’s advice. It feels as if I’ve always known it. Which is the flawed nature of all advice—you can have all the wisdom in the world laid out for you but it takes a lifetime to apply it. But just because Johnny’s plan didn’t work doesn’t mean it was ill-advised. His costars weren’t undatable by virtue of their profession. He just kept relating to them in a way that made them impossible to date.
“Hey,” Johnny says, moving in front of the elevator doors as they open, “you want to hear a dirty joke?”
“Sure,” I say, stunned that he knows any.
“How many porn stars does it take to change a lightbulb?”
“How many?”
“One,” he says, and grins. “So long as he screws it in himself.”
Brace Yourself
I go to France. I go because I am researching a novel that takes place in a château in the middle of nowhere in Normandy. I chose my topic wisely but not conveniently. It’s tough to locate “the middle of nowhere” in a
