He remembered his first new day at the new agency. It was owned by three aggressive young men—no, kids—all of them in their late twenties. Their clients were rock stars. Two of the agents were bearded, and they all wore jeans and sport shirts and tennis shoes without socks. They made Clifton feel a thousand years old. They spoke in a language he did not understand. They called him “Dad” and “Pop” and he thought of the respect he had once commanded in this town, and he wanted to weep.
The once dapper, cheerful agent had become seedy-looking and bitter. Toby Temple had been his whole life, and Clifton talked about those days compulsively. It was all he thought about. That and Jill. Clifton blamed her for everything that had happened to him. Toby could not help himself; he had been influenced by that bitch. But, oh, how Clifton hated Jill.
He was sitting in the back of the room watching the crowd applaud Jill Temple when one of the men at the table said, “Toby’s sure a lucky bastard. I wish I had a piece of that. She’s great in bed.”
“Yeah?” someone asked, cynically. “How would you know?”
“She’s in that porno flick at the Pussycat Theatre. Hell, I thought she was going to suck the guy’s liver out of him.”
Clifton’s mouth was suddenly so dry that he could hardly get out the words. “Are you—are you sure it was Jill Castle?” he asked.
The stranger turned to him. “Sure, I’m sure. She used another name—Josephine something. A crazy Polack name.” He stared at Clifton and said, “Hey! Didn’t you used to be Clifton Lawrence?”
There is an area of Santa Monica Boulevard, bordering between Fairfax and La Cienega, that is County territory. Part of an island surrounded by the City of Los Angeles, it operates under County ordinances, which are more lenient than those of the City. In one six-block area, there are four movie houses that run only hard-core pornography, half a dozen bookshops where customers can stand in private booths and watch movies through individual viewers and a dozen massage parlors staffed with nubile young girls who are experts at giving everything except massages. The Pussycat Theatre sits in the midst of it all.
There were perhaps two dozen people in the darkened theater, all of them men except for two women who sat holding hands. Clifton looked around at the audience and wondered what drove these people to darkened caverns in the middle of a sunny day, to spend hours watching images of other people fornicating on film.
The main feature came on, and Clifton forgot everything except what was up on the screen. He leaned forward in his seat, concentrating on the face of each actress. The plot was about a young college professor who smuggled his female students into his bedroom for night classes. All of them were young, surprisingly attractive and incredibly endowed. They went through a variety of sexual exercises, oral, vaginal and anal, until the professor was as satisfied as his pupils.
But none of the girls was Jill. She has to be there, Clifton thought. This was the only chance he would ever have to avenge himself for what she had done to him. He would arrange for Toby to see the film. It would hurt Toby, but he would get over it. Jill would be destroyed. When Toby learned what kind of whore he had married, he would throw her out on her ass. Jill had to be in this film.
And suddenly, there she was—on the wide screen, in wonderful, glorious, living color. She had changed a great deal. She was thinner now, more beautiful and more sophisticated. But it was Jill. Clifton sat there, drinking in the scene, reveling in it, rejoicing and feasting his senses, filled with an electrifying sense of triumph and vengeance.
Clifton remained in his seat until the credits came on. There it was, Josephine Czinski. He got to his feet and made his way back to the projection booth. A man in shirt sleeves was inside the small room, reading a racing form. He glanced up as Clifton entered and said, “No one’s allowed in here, buddy.”