V. In which the author considers a career in porn

Fortunately, there are still pockets of the country where a healthier attitude survives. In North Carolina, I stayed with my pal Sean, who works at Phil Harvey Enterprises. PHE, for those of you who don’t know, is one of the nation’s premier purveyors of pornography and sex toys. It is located in a quaint little industrial park, which Phil himself built on the outskirts of Hillsborough.

The PHE nerve center is housed in a nondescript building just past the artificial lake with the geese. It’s full of the standard corporate stuff: cubicles, workers hunched before computer monitors, bulletin boards with perky blood-drive announcements.

Only when you take a closer look do you start to see the nature of the office tchotchkes: dildos, photos of porn stars, the odd butt plug.

One of Sean’s jobs is to write the blurbs that go on the movie boxes. This requires him to watch half a dozen movies a day, fast-forwarding through the sex scenes so he can get a sense of each film’s deeper ambiance and setting. The porn no longer arouses him, he says, though given that he’s heterosexual, the gay stuff is still a little tough to watch. (He’d just finished up Ass Angels 3 when I visited.)

Sean’s tour of the facility included the administrative offices of PHE’s film division, which does not house an actual studio — the movies are shot in LA — but did include two women cheerfully talking PTA politics and splicing money-shot scenes together.

PHE’s warehouse is 40,000 square feet and contains, in addition to videos and DVDs of every possible stripe, the largest selection of sex toys in the world. Sean was quite excited, on the day I visited, about a new device that, when affixed to the end of one’s tongue, aids in cunnilingus.

Here’s the coolest thing about PHE: Phil Harvey himself is a raging humanitarian. He’s a former president of the ACLU who funnels a large portion of his profits toward promoting safe sex in the Third World.

That’s right: all us wankers over here in suburban America who are ordering Phil’s products so we can stroke off into napkins — we’re the ones funding the fight against STDs and unwanted pregnancies abroad.

It’s enough to make me love America, just for a minute.

VI. In which the author (finally) sees one of his fans buck naked and writhing

This was in Portland, where a striking platinum blonde walked up before my reading and introduced herself. She told me she was a friend of my pal Jane and that she did an act with music, and invited me to come see her show after the reading.

I knew from Jane that this woman had gone to Williams (possibly the most uptight college in the entire country), that she was "a genius" and a social activist. I naturally assumed she was some kind of performance artist.

Nope.

By the time my pals and I walked into the club, Jane’s friend was gone, replaced by a creature named Viva Las Vegas, a heartbreakingly limber and uniformly tan stripper with a penchant for exotic yoga positions and a breathy Marilyn Monroe voice. Without dwelling on particulars, I feel compelled to note that Portland allows full nudity in bars and that Viva appeared to have more than a passing familiarity with hair-removal products.

Fortunately, her club was not the kind where cokeheads and mouth-breathers prevail. It was a sort of local strip bar, with low-key regulars and women who clearly loved what they were doing.

Viva told me she’d been stripping for more than five years, that the freedom of expression was what hooked her — though I can’t imagine the money hurts, either. True to her role as an activist, Viva led a contingent of strippers to City Hall several months ago, to protest an attempt by the city council to place restrictions on her profession. The local media, predictably, had a field day.

Viva told me all this on her break. She gave me a little hug and wished me well. Then she leapt on stage and performed a heavy-metal set — in honor of my book — which featured a remarkably acrobatic version of "Once Bitten, Twice Shy."

VII. In which the author concedes defeat

When I talked with my (male) friends from the road, they wanted to know one thing: whether I was getting laid.

These friends had a great deal of difficulty expressing, in complete sentences, their disappointment when I reported to them that I was not.

Dude, c’mon.... No-brainer, man.... Close the deal.

They had expected some juicy stories, after all — and not the kind you read in some damn book. They wanted Penthouse Forum–type action. Exhibitionistic librarians. Swedish twins. A mŽnage ˆ trois (at least) with horny groupies.

Strangely enough, I did receive a few interesting e-mails over the next month or so. It seems that a number of my friends were reading my stories to their partners, using my book, in essence, as a kind of high-brow sexual aid.

After an initial period of confused envy, I’ve come around to liking this idea. I think it’s just great, actually. So I’ve gotten in the habit of sending these folks a very special gift: one of my unused condoms.

Steve Almond’s book, My Life in Heavy Metal (Grove, 2002), is available in stores now. Visit his Web site, www.stevenalmond.com, for information on upcoming readings. He can be reached at sbalmond@earthlink.net