Saturday, May 01, 2004

The Porn King

When I was a kid, I had a buddy name Bobby. He and I were pretty good friends. Hung out together and got in trouble together. I’ve lost touch with him over the years but heard from him out of the blue yesterday. He called me to say that he’d become the Porn King.

One day when we were 16, Bobby and I were hanging out in his room. We were flipping through Penthouse magazines and talking about how we would take on this girl or that girl and other assorted remarks hormoned 16 year olds make. Suddently Bobby gets up and starts to comment about how the photo is artistically striking and the detail of the layout...the angle, the softness of the lens and how the photographer is truely capturing the essence of sexuality. He says he could do this. Only better. He can turn nudity into pure artistic expression. "It's not exploitation," he proclaimed, referring to the accusations hurled by the feminist groups of that era, "It's's art." Bobby maintained that he could go beyond Guccione and push porn into a pure art form. “I can be the King of Porn," he declared.

I’m not following this at all. All I know is I have a “woody” the size of Manhattan, and my buddy’s gone soft in the head. Excessive masturbating will do that to you I tell him. He grabs his Polaroid and tells me he’ll show me what he means. “Pose," he directs.

“What?”

“Pose, you asshole, I’ll show you what I mean”

To pacify him, I lay back and strike an exaggerated pose. He doesn't click the shutter and instead makes some lewd comments about what a waste of film it would be or something to that effect.

After that day, Bobby starts snapping. Pictures. Lots of pictures. He took pictures of girls extensively. He couldn’t get them to pose nude obviously so he settled for just rolls and rolls of girls striking a pose. Some of them were actually pretty good. Sexy even. Like the ones in fashion magazines.

Bobby was pretty serious about this. He pursued photography in college and apparently started hanging out with some noteworthy professionals in the fashion photography world. Not quite the roadmap to become a “Porn King”, but not a bad start for a photography career.

One day he's asked to do a freelance job for some news magazine. Apparently it involves some horrendous murder scene and victim photos and does a great job. So good he gets an offer to join the journalist on a few other assignments. After a few years, he’s a pretty sought after photojournalist. His trademark is his ability to capture and communicate the intensity of the moment. His fashion photography days are over. I saw him once during those days and asked him about the “Porn King” pursuit. We have a good laugh about it.

Years go by and I hear from him from time to time. He's doing well and I see his bylines in the news magazines. He talks passionately about journalism and the need to expose the true story and all that other stuff people in his trade lavish endlessly about. It was during one of those times that we somehow got onto the subject of the Vietnam War and one particularly vivid childhood memory.

We were probably eight years old and living in Japan at the time. Our fathers were in Government Service and our parents used to take us to the Officer’s Club at a large Army Hospital base called Kishine. We’d see the Officers there having a great time as if nothing was going on in the world. However, it was quite a different scene at the movie theatre across the street. There, we saw and sat among the casualties of war. Most of the guys were in their early twenties and hospital patients who were mobile enough to make it to the theatre. They were in wheel chairs or in crutches and all bandaged up. It was a ghastly site.

It was about that time when a particular issue of “MAD MAGAZINE” featured a 10 or 12 page pictorial about the Vietnam War. One particular photo was forever burnt in our memory. The photo showed heaps and heaps of corpses--similar to a scene from the movie, “The Killing Fields.” Under the photo was the caption, “War Is Hell.” It’s something we didn't expect from a comic book. It was beyond satire and it was the God’s honest truth. It still stirs a deep emotional feeling in me to this day.

So here we are in our mid-Thirties talking about this. Bobby’s pretty emotional as he explains to me how he tries to tell the “story” with his photography and how he has to “push” sometimes to get to the truth for the audience. I admired his passion and was proud for what he believed in.

It’s about ten years later. I get a call from Bobby. He’s very sullen and tells me how he’s in deep shit. How he’s done something beyond what he ever thought he would do. Seems he was after a fairly large story in the Middle East. It’s the summer of 2003 and the war between the United States and Iraq is still going on. The big search for Saddam Hussein is being reported nightly. Apparently Bobby’s crew is after some big story about the oppression that was rampant during Hussein’s regime. I’m still not clear about what happened but in the middle of reporting this story, Bobby just broke down. I guess he suffered some type of breakdown. It was a combination of fatigue, stress and seeing human suffering day in and day out. I guess it just fell apart for him one day when he gathered a group of teenage girls who lived in a village which suffered horrendous retribution from Hussein’s fleeing army which accused them of being pro-American. Needless to say, reports of rape and execution were a major part of the story.

Bobby was on the phone rambling aimlessly about how his team sought this opportunity to make a centerpiece story. They prodded and cajoled the kids to talk about what happened in detail, took extensive footage of the corpses, the family and close ups of the townsfolk.

Bobby’s commented how they were so engrossed in making this their Pulitzer piece, they forgot about the actual suffering experienced by the villagers. “You know, they weren’t even crying or sobbing. They were just plain numb. You could have told them to do anything. It only hit us when we were doing the editing. Here they were, positioned perfectly in the shot. The reportage was right on. We built the emotion into the story and it was just absolutely impacting. But you know what? We forgot all about the emotions of the victim. It was all about us trying to score with the story. You know, exploiting the circumstances. Here I am back in the US and they're still there. I started to think about about those young solders in Camp Kishine and all the residual effects of the Vietnam War we saw when we were kids. It’s still happening. Only now, I'm the one who’s taking advantage of the situation. I suppose, I’ve become, in some way, the King of Porn.

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