*Not an erotic story per se, but one with a lot of sex and drugs.*
In 1999, at a film festival in Berlin, Denny met one of the bevy of beautiful but marginally talented “models and aspiring actresses” who hang around such events. He said you could tell the real actresses from the trash—his word—by how perfectly they dressed and made themselves up: the real actresses were content to be imperfect, while the models and aspiring types couldn’t afford to be. The fateful day was a case in point. Seated on one side of him was a blonde American dressed in a pink Star Trek t shirt and blue jeans, popping her gum and giggling with an ancient man whom Denny did not recognize was Billy Wilder; three years later this girl was a movie star named Scarlett Johansson.
On the other side, wearing a silver evening dress in anticipation of the cocktail party about to start, was a statuesque knockout with a perfect oval face and mahogany brown hair swept into a Jackie Kennedy bouffant; she made furtive eye contact with Denny and positioned her left arm so that he had a glimpse of her not inconsiderable cleavage. This was Marinka.
Marinka was Slovenian. She had been a child star on Slovenian television before the Balkan war, and then had escaped to Paris on a modeling contract. She learned five languages badly while traveling the world on photo shoots, had never become pregnant, and had managed to stay one step ahead of the cocaine addiction most of the models eventually succumbed to. This combination of factors kept her in the game past age 25, even as her freshness was beginning to fade, but she hadn’t saved any money and knew it was time to figure out something else. A realist, she knew that this would involve becoming a prostitute, more or less. The only question was the extent. She could fuck many men for small sums, or fuck one rich man for a long time, and thus she was at the film festival.
He knew her type, he told me. Vague central European accent, unbelievably gorgeous, yet not protected by bodyguards: therefore, an aspirant. But something about her eyes, a mixture of intelligence and hollowness, drew him to her. He must have recognized, he said, a fellow traveler. The rich have their homeless too—aimless, rootless drifters who happen to have resources. Like the homeless poor, they fill what’s missing with drugs, only they can afford fresh needles.
Marinka stuck like glue to Denny for the rest of the evening. In the taxi, cue the romantic scene music:
“Can I drop you somewhere?”
“Where are you staying?”
“The Adlon.”
“That’s my hotel too. What room are you in?”
“I never bother to remember; they remind me when I get there.”
“I’m in that room too,” she said.
She came up with him and when she saw the size of the suite and the quality of the suits hanging in the closet, began the most serious sexual seduction of her career.
She had, she figured, 36 hours in which to make this man think he could not live without her mouth and her cunt and her ass and whatever else it took to convince him. The initial act of fellatio, which she had practiced on hundreds of bisexual photographers and fashion assistants over the years, lasted over an hour. When he came, she made sure her hands felt exactly as good as her mouth, so that his come shot across her face in the precise photogenic spatter it would make on the cover of Vogue, if Vogue were a porn magazine. With this decoration slowly dripping down her cheeks and chin, she raised her face and told him the longest, filthiest story she could think of, distilled from years of louche behavior in clubs, VIP suites, yachts, and the backseats of limousines—a story about her and two sisters (whom she had worked with but who were not, in reality, her lovers) and how they had seduced her across Europe, conducting an affair both scandalous and irresistible until the piece de resistance, an abominable scene of pleasure and degradation on a porn shoot in the back room of a Mafia run nightclub in Hamburg. By the time she was deep into this story, Denny was hard again, and then she fucked him, drawing out both the act and the story in her beguiling central European accent, and when he came again she moaned his name.
And then she took out her stash.
“So she caught me,” Denny said, smiling at the memory of it. “And I can’t say which of us had the better of the other, if you know what I mean. Because she was incredible. I mean, she wasn’t just a gorgeous chick with a filthy imagination who really, truly wanted me. She wasn’t just a bottomless piece of ass who was always ready—whether she was ready or not, if you know what I mean… She also was smart, in her way. She had stories for days and weeks and months—I mean, sex stories, yes, but also stories of shit that had happened to her during her modeling career—and not only that, she also had this year where she went on some U.N. project to promote drinking water in Africa, and she would appear with Bono and Madonna, and it was insane. She was the secret lover of the head of Sony Europe and a French drug dealer at the same time; she had this wild story about running heroin on a fucking speedboat across the Mediterranean, and they stopped to pick up a sinking boatload of African refugees. Amazing.”
We were sitting in a bar at the W Hotel in San Francisco when he told me about Marinka. We hadn’t seen each other for a couple of years and he had emailed me and asked me to meet him, and we had been catching up for over an hour. I asked him if all her stories were true.
“Who knows,” he said. “In a way I didn’t care. You can’t ask someone every time if a story is true—it’s like asking a woman if she really came. A story is a story. In another life she would have made a name for herself as a performance artist, a sort of pornographic female Spaulding Gray. All she would have to do is sit on stage in an upholstered armchair and tell these stories. You wouldn’t have been able to print enough tickets.”
“Maybe she told them only for you,” I said.
“That’s awfully nice of you to say,” he said. “I’d like to think that was true. Maybe I shouldn’t think about it too much, then I can assume it is.”
“During the time we were together she was still doing some modeling work, and I’d go with her if I had the time—I always deducted the expense saying I was scouting for locations. We were in the Mojave Desert and they were shooting the girls, Marinka and another model, against this big rock outcropping. You can shoot only during the 90 minutes before sunset because otherwise the sunlight is too flat and the models get sunburned.
“It was late summer and there was a storm in the north coming, you could see the black clouds, but it made the light we had even more beautiful. The photographer went nuts shooting the girls in this light. Then the storm covered the sun and the wind started blowing and we ran for the car. Luckily I had a hardtop because as soon as we started down the road we went through hail.
“Within fifteen minutes the storm passed. The sun was balanced on the horizon, and opposite the sunset, in the southeast the sky was black with the storm. But there was a fantastic rainbow. Marinka made me stop the car, and she ran off into the desert to a low outcropping. There she tore off her clothes and stood atop this boulder, stark naked, her arms raised, glowing gold in the last rays of the sun and outlined against the black sky and the rainbow. I was able to take one single picture before the sun finally disappeared. I was fifty yards away and it could have been better, but man—how are you going to duplicate that?
“That night in our bed in a little motel, she was beatific. A light shown from within her, as if in that moment on the rock, balanced between the sun and the rain, she had captured the light. I couldn’t keep my eyes off her. She was 28 by then, and the cracks in the façade of her beauty—imperfections detectable only to someone in the fashion industry—only made her more beautiful to me. And I could imagine her at 35, at 45, at 55—she would still be so beautiful.
“I told her I wanted to get married. Las Vegas was only a couple hundred miles away. We could drive there in a few hours, get married at 7 a.m., and get back to Joshua Tree in time to finish the photo shoot. She said yes—but then thought about it and said, “But if I’m up all night I’ll look like hell for the shoot tomorrow, yes? So let’s go after that.” I said fine, of course. We made love and sank into sleep.
“The next day the wind was from the east, the air dry and electric. Her hair was frizzing, she was bad tempered. After fucking with her hair for an hour in the bathroom she came out and threw herself down on the bed, cursing in Slovenian and Russian and whatever else she could think of. She said she wouldn’t go, her career was over, she was good for nothing but whoring on the streets of Belgrade. I’d seen these moods before so I didn’t take it that seriously. But when it was time to drive up to the shoot she was still dressed in nothing but a t shirt and panties and said she wouldn’t go. Fortunately the photographer was a German with a hard on for punctuality. When he saw our car still in the parking lot he called her cell phone. He must have given her quite a Kraut earful, because her face flushed and she bit her lip as she listened. Then she went into the bathroom and made herself throw up and said she was ready.
“We drove up into the national park in silence. Finally I said, ‘Marinka, I love you. You don’t have to do this. We’re getting married and you don’t need the money. Let’s call them and tell them to go to hell.’
“She turned her head to look out her passenger window. We continued driving up into the park. Finally she said, ‘If you make me cry, I’ll look like shit.’
“We arrived at the site. The trailer with the dressing rooms was rocking in the wind. There were two hours to go until the light was right, but if the wind kept up like that there’d be so much dust in the air that it wouldn’t matter.
“We sat silently in her trailer smoking cigarettes; then she growled something in Slovenian that probably meant “Aw, fuck it,” and took a little baggie of coke from her purse.
“We each did a line and felt a little livelier. She kicked off her shoe and reached it under the little table and began kneading my crotch with her toes. She said, ‘You like me because you like whores, don’t you?’
“She didn’t give me a chance to reply before she went on: ‘Because you know what a whore I am? I had to suck cock when I was 13 years old to get someone to buy me clothes just so I could have test shots. Not only the photographer—all his friends too. Then I had to suck the cock of every man along the way until I got out of Yugoslavia. Then I had to suck the cock of every man in Vienna. Then I had to suck the cock of every man in Berlin until I finally was taken on by an agency, and then I had to fuck the owner of the agency. You know why I sucked all those men, Denny? To keep from getting fucked. I was so good at cocksucking I never got fucked until I had an agency contract at 16. For a girl from Ljubljana that’s not bad. At least I got the fuck out of Ljubljana!’ She started laughing. ‘I got the fuck out! But not the suck!’
“I told her to shut up, but it was too late. ‘But I thought you liked my stories, Denny. If you don’t like that one I have some others.’
“I decided the only way to shut her up was to fill her mouth, so I told her if she was so fucking great at it, she’d better get on her fucking knees and suck my cock right now.
“And she did for a second, but then she wanted more coke—and then I really couldn’t shut her up. Once she started she was like a radio you can’t turn off, about her sexual degradation in the years before she met me, only told in the most hostile way possible. Previously she’d told it to me to turn me on—she made it sound like she enjoyed it. Now she was telling it like it had stolen her soul. And listening to her, it was hard to say that it hadn’t.
“She paused only when a production assistant banged on the door saying she was wanted in the makeup trailer. With a great shout she knocked the ashtray and glasses and everything else off the table and stood up. From where I was slouched in my seat, trying to stuff my dick back into my pants, she loomed over me, hair askew and dressing robe falling open, scowling like one of the Furies. She went past me and flung open the door; the wind practically tore it off its hinges. She stood in the doorway laughing her head off, the open silk robe billowing around her.
“She might have stayed like that until she had a heart attack, only the photographer came marching across the sand and started yelling at her—I could see him through the window. She shouted back—they’re standing only ten feet apart but screaming at the tops of their lungs because of the wind.
“Finally the photographer—who is this 40 year old German, but tip top shape, dressed in a fucking safari outfit—he spins around and grabs the first thing he sees, which is an aluminum pole lying in the sand where the wind had blown it down. He grabs it and waves it above his head, and then fires it into the air like a javelin. Then he screams more curses at the top of his voice. And suddenly the wind dies down, the clouds begin to break, all the dust falls out of the air and in two minutes it’s a sparkling late afternoon.
“Marinka is standing there in the doorway with her mouth hanging open. The German claps his hands and says, *‘Jetzt—können wir einige Photos machen?’* He walks off and she stumbles after him like a little kid.”
Denny finished his drink. I reminded myself that I had one too, since through most of this story I had been sitting there spellbound.
He went on: “After a while I left the trailer and walked around the location. We were beside what seemed like cliffs, though they were only fifty or a hundred feet high and were in fact simply very large boulders. You’ve seen these Joshua Tree Park rocks in lots of advertisements, if I showed you a picture you’d recognize them. Lovely big sand colored boulders, smooth for the most part. I lifted my head and saw rock climbers clinging to the side of these rocks. They looked like bugs against the stone, their arms and legs spread out in crazy angles on whatever little toe holds or finger holds they’d found. The only thing moving was their heads, as they looked this way and that, trying to determine their next step. And the whole time they’re talking it over with their climbing buddies. After five or ten minutes of clinging motionless to the rock face they’d suddenly hoist themselves up a foot or two to the next invisible handhold. Then they’d talk it over again with their mates. It was odd to hear these voices coming from the rock face.
“After a while I went back to the photo shoot. I must have gotten turned around, though, because I turned a corner around a rock and I practically bumped into Marinka and the other girl, straddling boulders in silk and taffeta gowns, their hair piled up like the foam on a cappuccino. Marinka says, ‘What the fuck are you doing, Denny?’ and the German starts yelling at me. I’m going ‘Sorry, sorry!’ as I stumble out of the frame. I climb into my car and then I guess the last of the coke wears off because I pass out, and by the time I wake up, it’s nearly dark, all the other cars and trailers are gone, and Marinka is nowhere in sight. She left with someone else.”
“It was three months before I saw her again,” he said. “It was in Greece and we were both in a better mood, and things went on from there. But I’ll tell you something. Those things she told me in the trailer—the things she’d done—or had been done to her… I knew she meant to wound me, even as she was wounding herself by dredging up these experiences. But instead of feeling hurt—or along with feeling hurt—I felt compassion. It seemed as if she had suffered so much. I wanted to put my arms around her and tell her I loved her anyway. But I didn’t have the chance, because…” He shrugged. “She wouldn’t shut up.”
He sucked an ice cube out of his glass and crunched it between his teeth and put the glass down.
“Maybe that was the difference between her and me, in the end—that I had, at least, a little bit of compassion for her, and she had none. None for herself, at least.
“In the past she’d told me about her sexual experiences when she was making love to me, seducing me, because she knew they turned me on. Some of those stories were extreme enough, but what she told me that day in the trailer was different. Not in the content as much as in the intention. It was as if the degradation she had suffered at the time, she was once again inflicting on herself, to debase herself and me along with her. And it was terrible. But you want to know something? When I think about her now, when I want to remember something of our affair and what was so sexy about her, in order to have an image to jack off to—I don’t think about the stories she told me in love. I think about the horrible ones she told me that day. Those are the ones that turn me on. How fucked up is that?”
This is the second excerpt from my book How They Scored. (Here’s the [first excerpt.](https://www.reddit.com/r/Erotica/comments/lit5eq/just_some_straight_up_sex/)) You can find How They Scored on Amazon if you’re interested in more.
Source: reddit.com/r/Erotica/comments/ljug08/lets_make_some_pictures