BLISTER

Editor’s note: Billy Manes is taking a much-deserved vacation, so this week we bring you vintage Manes from “The B-List,” originally published online Sept. 22, 2000. Enjoy!

Strolling through the sugar walls of Fairvilla Adult Megastore’s skewed voyeur sexuality, it’s sometimes hard not to lose oneself in a warbly, vicarious yelp. Video-box mouths seemingly pried open in violent sexual ecstasy, prodding tools in various shades of urethane, and the backs of heads of people far beyond their own personal shame all fill the aisles like some graveyard to physical sensation. You never really have to feel anything yourself. It almost makes you numb down there.

But when Fairvilla announces an event so potentially horrific as “adult film auditions,” hosted by real-life silicone-penetration princesses who want to know YOU, even my pants start to stir. This is, after all, the syrupy-sweet abandon you study so fervently in your formative years. These are, ostensibly, the very boobs that lined the bottom of your flash-lit tent when your mom caught you matching more than wits with your best friend’s midsection. That feeling, it never goes away.

This one will, though. Porn star Juli Ashton is standing right in front of me with that (been) glazed (too many times) look on her face, entertaining a court of balding fat rolls, and I want to go home. Not because Juli Ashton is a bitch or anything (actually, she has a sort of schoolteacher demeanor about her – a big Van Halen turn-on), but because I feel like something is about to explode in my face. Seems my trusted friend, Aaron, has it in for me and has decided to sign up both of us – presumably as a “couple” – to, er, penetrate the interview experience. Only I don’t want to be a porn star. I, um, don’t have it in me. Gross.

A mind-boggling six consent forms, a driver’s license and a Social Security card later, all of a sudden Mike Hock and Sally Struthers (our stage names … hint: I’m not Sally) are set for their close-up.

“We’ll have to change the name a little to avoid a lawsuit,” laughs the soccer mom-ish orchestrator of this whole sordid affair. “Like to Sallee Struvers or something.”

The situation couldn’t really be more awkward. On the stairway landing between floors – halfway up from hell, halfway down from sense – sit three director’s chairs and an imposing man with a fuzzy-microphoned camera rig. We’re going to be taped and quite possibly ruined on the Playboy Channel. I’m not aroused. I mean, amused.

A shortage of chairs means that both Aaron and I will be boarded by two top-heavy blondes with bottom-heavy resumes. I entertain images of my very being being swallowed up as Juli (who is very tall) climbs atop my thigh, brushing lightly over my personal space. Aaron is graced with a chain-shirted Inari Vachs, whose brassy, Daytona-girl-gone-good demeanor eases the obvious tension associated with my lap and this situation. We’re going to have a good time. Especially because Aaron remembered to bring with him the prosthetic Juli Ashton vagina replica (her picture is ON THE BOX), and we’re gonna use it! Eeeeeew.

Inari shares a story about how the vaginal party gift actually weighs so much that it costs a fortune to ship, and Juli starts to look a little embarrassed. Assurances are offered that the real-life Juli is much cuter than the machine (including tufts of creepy blonde Barbie hair curling off the top) currently at hand. Speaking of hands, Inari is quick to spit on hers so that we might get a better idea of what it is that Juli likes. Things descend into an inflammatory sex mess – and yes, the camera is still on – as Aaron is then goaded into a plastic mowdown for all to see.

“Eat the pussy!” I scream like, perhaps, an overweight gang-rapist might. “Kill yourself,” I whisper internally, completely ashamed of how far I continue to fall.

Even freakier is Juli’s own attempt at gratifying her other, make-believe self – which by then has been over-handled by each of us. (I simply take a minute to pretend it’s my own, lay it on my lap and completely freak out, “Pretty Boys and Pretty Girls” playing over and over in my head.) Something very dear has broken. We’re all going to hell.

But first we have to sit through our interview process, an oddly sterile technicality, mostly based around the sad generalizations and misunderstandings associated with the undervalued porn industry. Yeah.

“I wanna be a fluffer!” barks Aaron, mistakenly.

“There are no such things as fluffers, except in gang-bang movies,” etc., etc., etc.

In the interest of my journalistic professionalism, lost somewhere before (or perhaps in) the prosthetic vagina, I try to turn the tables a little bit. What would Barbara Walters do?

“Do you ever get tired?” I quiz. “Does it ever hurt?”

“Yes,” the world universally responds.

Queries strip about like this for about a half-hour, and all of the fat people who actually don’t have a chance are starting to look restless and in need of entertainment. So I decide to show my big gay ass, one final time.

“I AM A BIG PORN WOMAN!” I offer, like Evita might, were she ever to let that hair down. The people, they love me.

Inari assures me that she’ll see me again … naked (she will, actually; an hour later Aaron and I are sitting naked on chairs with a bottle of lube beneath them, cameras rolling, attempting to stiffen our coked-out cocks), to which I reply, “You’ll have to ask at least three times,” and then we’re off to go rinse away the numbness with some alcoholic salve, walking down the stairs and past the display-case boobies lining our path. To hell.