“Show me the video first.”
“Do I look that stupid?”
“Okay, okay, if it’s as good as you say, I’ll agree.”
“Write that down. I want you on your honor.”
He frowns, then takes out his pen, writes, and hands me the contract. I fish a disk out of my pocket, walk over to his DVD player, and switch it on.
It was kind of cozy watching Yammy’s private masterpiece, which had the Colonel chortling and congratulating me. With the FBI standing next to him wearing her new gun, Yammy used two cameras to somehow make magic of a sorry tale. He made Smith and Tanakan confess slowly, deliberately, as if reciting poetry on a stark stage in front of the hut the elephants had shattered. They speak in solemn, well-modulated voices, as they recount every detail of their contract with Damrong and the morbid passion that led to it. Yammy and I used her extensive notes as a kind of film script.
Sometimes I think things are almost normal again, but of course they are not, because they never were. The illusion of continuity is busted, my concentration shot. Yesterday, hardly aware of what I was doing, I bought a bronze statue of the elephant god Ganesh to use as a paperweight on my desk. Not a minute passes without thoughts of Gamon. I frequently find an excuse to go to the wat to meditate. Even then I see him everywhere. Something he said almost inadvertently one day repeats itself over and over in my mind: When you tear away the last veil, you know with certainty that love is the foundation of human consciousness, that there really is nothing else. It’s our constant betrayal of it that makes us crazy. Hard to live by, but I guess you have to try.
There’s one other little thing I ought to mention. Damrong came to me a few nights ago, and I found no strength to resist her; but in the dream (it is comforting to call it that) a figure in saffron robes, with a machine gun slung over his shoulder, held up a Buddha hand of peace, and she disappeared. When I awoke with a jolt, Chanya was sleeping peacefully beside me.
It’s Vikorn, of all people, who keeps reminding me that I have a loving pregnant wife waiting for me at home. Who would have guessed that he was capable of worrying about my mental health?
But what of the FBI, whose sudden passion was quite eclipsed by events? Seduced, in my turn, by the sickly temptation of do-goodery, I took her last night to Don Juan’s, because I knew Lek was rehearsing there for a katoey cabaret they were planning. I sneaked her in surreptitiously and had her sit with me at the back of the bar while Lek and his chums laughed, screamed, ad-libbed, and made wicked jokes about how Pi-Lek would soon go under the knife. I took Kimberley’s hand by way of comforting her, but she removed hers very quickly. I thought she was angry because I was showing her just how perfectly Lek fitted into his katoey world, and how impenetrable that world was even for me, let alone a female farang. Wrong.
Afterward, sipping drinks at a bar in Pat Pong, she said, “That was sweet of you, in a way, Sonchai, but you’re behind the curve. A week has passed, and I’ve grown up. I know that different cultures produce very different human beings. Americans find that hard because the empire that dare not speak its name doesn’t like us to know there are alternative cultures on earth—but I’m not stupid. I know he can’t love me. Hell, maybe he is a spirit in human form. I also know that if I deny love one more time, I’ll turn into just another drone with no life outside of work. That’s a trap in the States, especially for a single woman over thirty-five. Bizarre it may be, incompatible we may be, but I have to see this through. We’ve done a deal. There’s no way he’ll be able to remain a cop after his operation, and I can’t stand the thought of him selling his body in a bar on Soi Four. I’m going to be like one of those lovelorn white men —I’m going to send money every month from the States to keep him off the Game, and he’s going to come visit me from time to time, except he’ll be a she then, of course. It finally dawned on me that money is something I have that he needs. And guess what, I made him laugh the other day—so some communication is possible between alien species, right? I think we’re going to be good friends. Don’t underestimate the glamour of my country—he can’t wait to see Hollywood and the Grand Canyon. If you want to be useful, keep an eye on him and send me reports.” She smiled.
Well, that’s it, farang, save for one loose end: I never did find out who sent me the Damrong DVD.
I am yours in Dharma, Sonchai Jitpleecheep.
Appendix
Erotica Inc. —A Special Report: Technology Sent Wall Street into Market for Pornography
By Timothy Egan (The New York Times), 4297 words
Published: October 23, 2000
Correction Appended
The video-store chain that Larry W. Peterman owned in this valley of wide streets and ubiquitous churches carried the kind of rentals found anywhere in the country —from Disney classics to films about the sexual adventures of nurses. Mr. Peterman built a thriving business until he was charged last year with selling obscene material and faced the prospect of bankruptcy and jail.
Just before the trial, Mr. Peterman’s lawyer, Randy Spencer, came up with an idea while looking out the window of the courtroom at the Provo Marriott. He sent an investigator to the hotel to record all the sex films that a guest could obtain through the hotel’s pay-per-view channels. He then obtained records on how much erotic fare people here were buying from their cable and satellite television providers.
As it turned out, people in Utah County, a place that often boasts of being the most conservative area in the nation, were disproportionately large consumers of the very videos that prosecutors had labeled obscene and illegal. And far more Utah County residents were getting their adult movies from the sky or cable than they were from the stores owned by Larry Peterman.
Why file criminal charges against a lone video retailer, Mr. Spencer argued, when some of the biggest corporations in America, including a hotel chain whose board of directors includes W. Mitt Romney, president of the Salt Lake City Olympics organizing committee, and a satellite broadcaster heavily backed by Rupert Murdoch, chairman of the News Corporation, were selling the same product?
“I despise this stuff—some of it is really raunchy,” said Mr. Spencer, a public defender who described himself as a devout Mormon. “But the fact is that an awful lot of people here in Utah County are paying to look at porn. What that says to me is that we’re normal.”
It took only a few minutes for the jury to find Mr. Peterman not guilty on all charges. His case illustrates what has happened to an industry that used to be confined to the margins of commerce, in the seedy parts of most towns, run by people who never dreamed of taking their companies to Wall Street.
Spurred by changes in technology that make pornography easier to order into the home than pizza, and court decisions that offer broad legal protection, the business of selling sexual desire through images has become a $10 billion annual industry in the United States, according to Forrester Research of Cambridge, Mass., and the industry’s own Securities and Exchange Commission filings.
Whatever the phenomenon may say about the nature of American society, the financial rewards are so great that some of the biggest distributors of explicit sex on film and online include the country’s most recognizable corporate names.
The General Motors Corporation, the world’s largest company, now sells more graphic sex films every year than does Larry Flynt, owner of the Hustler empire. The 8.7 million Americans who subscribe to DirecTV, a General Motors subsidiary, buy nearly $200 million a year in pay-per-view sex films from satellite, according to estimates provided by distributors of the films, estimates the company did not dispute.
EchoStar Communications Corporation, the No. 2 satellite provider, whose chief financial backers include Mr. Murdoch, makes more money selling graphic adult films through its satellite subsidiary than Playboy, the oldest and best-known company in the sex business, does with its magazine, cable and Internet businesses combined, according to public and private revenue accounts by the companies.
AT&T Corporation, the nation’s biggest communications company, offers a hard-core sex channel called the Hot Network to subscribers to its broadband cable service. It also owns a company that sells sex videos to nearly a million hotel rooms. Nearly one in five of AT&T’s broadband cable customers pays an average of $10 a film to see what the distributor calls “real, live all-American sex—not simulated by actors.”
For all the money being made on sex—legally—by mainstream corporations, the topic remains taboo outside the boardroom. The major satellite and cable companies do very little marketing of their X-rated products, and they are not mentioned in annual reports except in the vaguest of euphemisms.
None of the corporate leaders of AT&T, Time Warner, General Motors, EchoStar, Liberty Media, Marriott International, Hilton, On Command, LodgeNet Entertainment or the News Corporation—all companies that have a big financial stake in adult films and that are held by millions of shareholders—were willing to speak publicly about the sex side of their businesses.
“How can we?” said an official at AT&T. “It’s the crazy aunt in the attic. Everyone knows she’s there, but you can’t say anything about it.”
For hotels, the sex that can be piped through television generates far more money than the beer, wine and snacks sold from the rooms’ mini-bars. Just under 1.5 million hotel rooms, or about 40 percent of all hotel rooms in the nation, are equipped with television boxes that sell the kind of films that used to be seen mostly in adults-only theaters, according to the two leading companies in the business. Based on estimates provided by the hotel industry, at least half of all guests buy these adult movies, which means that pay-per-view sex from television hotel rooms may generate about $190 million a year in sales.
At home, Americans buy or rent more than $4 billion a year worth of graphic sex videos from retail outlets and spend an additional $800 million on less explicit sexual films—all told, about 32 percent of the business for general-interest video retailers that carry adult topics, according to compilations done by two trade organizations that track video rentals. Chains like Tower Records now stock nearly 500 titles in their so-called erotic category, far more than films about history or dinosaurs.
On the Internet, sex is one of the few things that prompts large numbers of people to disclose their credit card numbers. According to two Web ratings services, about one in four regular Internet users, or 21 million Americans, visits one of the more than 60,000 sex sites on the Web at least once a month —more people than go to sports or government sites.
Though estimates have been greatly inflated by some e-commerce sex merchants, analysts from Forrester Research say that sex sites on the Web generate at least $1 billion a year in revenue, providing a windfall for credit card companies, Internet search engines and people who build Web sites, among others in the commercial food chain.
Some of the most popular Web properties—which feature quick links to sites labeled “Virgin Sluts” and “See Teens Have Sex”—are owned by a publicly held company in Boulder, Colo. That company, New Frontier Media, has stock traded like any other, and it expects its video network to be in 25 million homes within a few years. It does business with several major companies, including EchoStar and In Demand, the nation’s leading pay-per-view distributor, which is owned in part by AT&T, Time Warner, Advance-Newhouse, Cox Communications and Comcast.
Another company, LodgeNet, whose chairman is Scott C. Petersen, does $180 million in annual business selling sex videos and other forms of room entertainment to hotels. LodgeNet is a major employer in Sioux Falls, S.D., its home base. It is a client of the accounting giant Arthur Andersen, and nearly a fifth of the company’s public shares are held by a Park Avenue investment firm, Red Coat Capital Management of New York.
“We feel good about what we do,” said Ann Parker, a spokeswoman for LodgeNet, which trades on the Nasdaq market. “We’re good corporate citizens. We contribute to local charities.”
The biggest provider of hard-core sex videos and adult Web content, Vivid Entertainment Group of Van Nuys, Calif, whose founders and principal owners are Steven Hirsch and David James, has been making the rounds of investment bankers of late, preparing for an initial public stock offering next year that could ultimately lead to the first porn billionaire.
“The adult entertainment business is just exploding,” said Bill Asher, the president of Vivid, whose offices are in a new granite and glass building that houses investment and venture capital firms. “Right now there are a lot of people making a lot of money. Somebody’s got to take control of it, and we figure it might as well be us. We see ourselves as the designated driver of this business.”
To the astonishment of Mr. Flynt, who began in the pornography business by selling poor-quality pictures of naked girls as a way to build interest in his strip clubs, his competitors in the $10 billion annual adult market are mainstream corporations whose board members are among the American business elite.
“We’re in the small leagues compared to some of those companies like General Motors or AT&T,” Mr. Flynt said. “But it doesn’t surprise me that they got into it. I’ve always said that other than the desire for survival, the strongest desire we have is sex.”
