Two Charaters in Search of an Auteur
Before she moved to Toronto, Enola told Kiara, in the Starbucks where they met on Danforth Avenue, near the Pape subway station, she worked for her uncle in his grocery store as a meat cutter. “I love to cut red, juicy, bloody meat,” Enola said. “I love chopping through the bones and gristle, carving the meat, cutting pieces of tenderloin and sirloin, trimming the fat from the steaks, but the job didn’t pay enough.”
Enola’s mother was an Ojibway and French Canadian from the First Nations reserve of Lac Seul; her father was Italian-Ukrainian from the nearby town of Sioux Lookout in Northwestern Ontario. She said the only reason she was conceived was because her mother was an easy lay—the only woman who would fuck her father, who didn’t like to shave or shower or change and launder his clothes. When she made this revelation, shocking Kiara, she burst into her heckling laugh.
She hunted big game, moose and whitetail deer. “Do you know how it feels to gut and dress a big bull moose you just shot with a .303 rifle?”
Still, Enola said she wanted to pursue something with purpose and meaning in life, but she didn’t think anyone would agree porn counted. Kiara also wanted to work in erotica and boudoir. She enjoyed sex more than anything, but she hadn’t slept around and didn’t have a boyfriend. Neither expected or anticipated the time would arrive when sex on camera would provide them with a modest source of income, albeit a limited amount—more a stipend or honorarium. They both answered the classified advertisement online with vague hopes and expectations.
In their pursuit of an entrée into the entertainment world, Kiara and Enola separately answered an online classified ad online by someone looking for a partner in creating short adult video clips. Konstantinos said in his ad he never shot video, although he was an experienced amateur photographer. When they showed up for the interview, the two young women stared at each other: Konstantinos’ face looked burned severely, but the scars didn’t bother them. In fact, Kiara thought his disfigurement explained things. His disfigurement made him more authentic, real. She remembered seeing a few individuals with similar facial disfigurement, begging on the streets of Delhi and Mumbai, when she visited her homeland of India with her parents. In fact, the scarring caused Kiara to look more deeply into his eyes; she wished to impress him with her belief beauty was more than skin deep and that the mind mattered more.
Making no pretension to being a professional, Konstantinos said he was a novice, a beginner. He was looking for models or actors who, like him, never shot porn to create short point of view videos—novices and beginners, who could possibly use the video clips for their portfolio or resumes, to land an audition or find an agent.
“You never shot video?” Enola demanded.
“If you like, we’ll learn—stumble through this—together. I said as much in the classified ad.”
Konstantinos sought two partners, so it appeared they had a meeting of mind and bodies. Enola and Kiara were both intrigued with the prospect of creating videos that attracted clicks and views on the Internet. More comfortable with two actors, so he didn’t have to worry about he-said-she-said situations, he said he wanted to create a comfort zone for him and the models.
“You’re trying to cover your ass,” Enola said, “but what happens if we decide to gang up on you.”
“I’m not ganging up against anyone,” Kiara said.
Afterwards, Enola said Konstantinos didn’t want to admit he was into threesomes, which she enjoyed. Enola and Kiara were apparently the only amateur models or actors who answered the ad, but he expressed satisfaction with them. Their compact curvaceous bodies and long dark hair, he said, reminded him of the porn stars Remy Lacroix and Riley Reid.
“Remy retired and had a baby,” Enola interjected.
Konstantinos explained he suffered facial disfigurement from a work-related injury. He was a welder on an oil pipeline near Fort McMurray when an explosion and fiery blast occurred, seriously injuring him and disfiguring his face. A lawsuit filed by his lawyer was settled out of court, since the explosion occurred due to negligence and shoddy industrial workplace practices. Not only was he awarded the usual compensation but he also received a settlement amounting to a few million dollars.
If he hadn’t been so upfront, Enola and Kiara agreed afterwards, neither would have followed through with the ad. His face would have been an eyesore to anyone else, but neither Enola nor Kiara found his disfigurement repulsive; in their early twenties, they liked to think they had open minds. They could adapt and adjust, and, besides, he had his Ironman wrestling mask. Enola thought he was in excellent physical condition, in his late forties or early fifties, with a lean, muscular body. He looked like a stud or a hunk, Enola said, as long as you didn’t notice his face, a mass of healed burnt flesh, which plastic surgery barely corrected. Even his eyes, though, looked as if they were nearly glued shut by the injuries. Enola considered him their Elephant Man.
Konstantinos said he was a virgin up until his injury. While he was still an outpatient in the burn unit of the hospital undergoing rehabilitation, he decided to visit a sex club, in Edmonton. Over forty years old, still a virgin, with severe facial disfiguration, he put his clothes in a club locker, wore the monogrammed towel around his waist, and went into the basement dungeon and grotto. He saw a bodacious woman—couldn’t resist her attractions—allowed the towel to drop. The woman told him that if he put on a condom, she would have sex with him. He couldn’t believe how easy it had been. Enola didn’t think he understood that, while his face was literally an eyesore, he had an attractive body, particularly for someone middle-aged.
After Kiara started telling her more about herself, Enola started calling her a poor little rich Asian girl, but Kiara retorted, “I’m East Indian. My parents are from Mumbai.”
They both ended up taking the same bus from Pape subway station, walking across Pape Avenue from each other when they got off the bus at Sammon near the hospital. She said he was too trusting, so indiscreet—after she told that her father and mother were pharmacists who owned several pharmacies in the Toronto area.
“Your parents are a power couple, girlfriend!” Kiara exclaimed.
“No, they’re Hindu.”
Kiara’s addiction to prescription pills, like Oxycontin and Adderall, forced her parents to commit accounting and inventory fraud to conceal her addiction and pill theft. The good news: Kiara had been clean and sober for the past eight months. Since she couldn’t gain admission into the university of her choice, she decided she’d pursue teenage fantasy.
“The college of your choice? Why don’t you just go to, like, any college.”
“My father wants me to go to University of Toronto.”
“What’s so special about U of T?”
“He wants me to go to pharmacy school.”
“How does a criminal get into pharmacy school?” Enola demanded.
“I’ve never been arrested.”
“You’re right: you’re not a criminal, you’re an addict, an entitled bitch, even though it’s the same thing.”
In no mood to argue, thinking silence the best approach. Kiara realized Enola could be worse than biting and caustic. They both liked to perform oral sex and hand jobs on camera, while Konstantinos wore a wrestling mask, an Ironman superhero mask. Meanwhile, he worried about being accused of exploiting them, taking advantage of them. While they performed on camera, he kept asking them if everything was okay. He didn’t want them to perform if they were on drugs or had been drinking; as a Greek Orthodox Catholic, he had a guilty conscience about sex. He drove Enola nuts, constantly asking her if they were okay with the action, if they were comfortable, if they were certain they wanted to carry through with the action, if they needed a washroom break or wanted a snack or beverage. If they consented. He had an unusually large penis. When Enola told him she wanted him to have intercourse, he said that was not in the script, even though the action was strictly improvisational. He said the videos were about oral pleasure. Meanwhile, Enola and Kiara became friends of sorts. Enola said she could never understand why a young woman with her ethnic roots and background would become involved in such a disreputable venture. But like Enola, Kiara didn’t consider the venture disreputable. They both even regarded the action as performance art, acting, modeling.
They both wanted to become porn actors and liked their threesomes with Konstantinos, but the action followed a steady and predictable course, and became boring, partly because he didn’t reciprocate, aside from stroking their hair, and caressing our heads, which was why Enola wanted to fuck. They pleasured him with their mouths and hands while they progressively stripped off their clothes until they were naked, arching their backs, displaying their breasts and buttocks for the cameras. They caressed, massaged, and stroked him with their hands and tongues.
All the while he operated the camera, one on a tripod, one hand-held, which he kept focused on them. He said he was an avid amateur photographer ever since the photography club in high school. Did they not have a photography club in high school? If Kiara’s Etobicoke high school had a photography club, she certainly never participated in its activities. Enola looked as mystified and bewildered at some of his questions. Enola came to call Kiara her girlfriend, although she thought that, even though Kiara was smart and came from an affluent background, when it came to men and relationships, she was clueless.
