MEETING A NUT FLUFFER

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User1 at 02.24.08 - 3:47 pm

THE NUT FLUFFER
Sarah BennettWed. February 06
(Or, how I’ve now met everyone I’ve ever needed to know)
http://thedistrictweekly.com/print/fine-print/2008/02/06/the-nut-fluffer/
I read somewhere that, in the grand artistic scheme of things, being a porn film fluffer is akin to being the guy that walks Ashton Kutcher’s dog. Actually, it’s more like sitting on a crowded LA bus the week before Christmas, waiting for it to take you to your dealer so you can forget—for a few hours—that you give guys blow jobs for a living.
It was the oversized pencil that first caught my eye.
The bus started east on Wilshire and I situated myself in an empty aisle seat near the back. Settling in, I noticed the guy on my left across the way doing a crossword puzzle with an enormous pencil. I mean, the thing had girth; the tip alone was bigger than the boxes it was supposed to fill in. It looked like a Honey I Shrunk the Kids prop and, clearly, did not belong on a bus.
But before I could fully process what the pasty man with the backwards hat and his pencil were doing here, he leaned across the aisle, shoved the disproportionate stick in my face and waved a can of Natural Ice to get my attention.
“Get that guy for me, will ya?” he said, motioning to the man staring out the window next to me. Hesitant, I poked the windbreaker-clad body next to me and, without saying a word, it turned around, reached over me and took the oversized pencil from his friend. He silently tucked it in his backpack and pulled out a golf pencil, which his friend accepted. A fucking golf pencil.
I was in awe. Crossword Guy nonchalantly went back to his puzzle. Windbreaker Guy pulled a fresh beer out of his bag. The bus passed Rodeo Drive. Everything smelled like Natty Ice. It was 11 a.m. the Monday before Christmas.
“Do you think your friend would get mad if I took a photo of him?” I asked Windbreaker Guy. He looked right at me, but kinda through me, his long greasy brown ringlets shooting out from under a “Los Angeles” souvenir hat. Even though he looked nearing middle age, I got the vibe that he still lived in his mom’s basement and got dressed up for anime conventions.
“You’ll have to ask him,” he said, more annoyed than concerned, “but we don’t like having our picture taken.” He hugged his backpack closer, protecting the pencils of assorted sizes inside.
Trying to ease the tension, I laughed and promised that I wasn’t a cop, just a passerby who wanted to walk off the bus with more than a mental image of his friend drinking cheap beer and pretending to do a crossword puzzle with a now-undersized pencil.
“Well, we don’t know you’re not a cop,” he said. I said I understood (even though I didn’t) and that I just wanted to take a photo because “coming across characters like this is one of the reasons why I love Los Ange . . . ”
“There are no reasons to love Los Angeles,” he said. “This place is shit.”
“Yeah, sometimes,” I admitted. “But it’s home, right?”
Wrong. The West Coast was not where this man called (or ever wants to call) home. He started going off about how people in LA are all the same and how if he were home in New York, no one would care that he and his friend were trying to get through a 12-pack before they met up with their dealer. New York had personality and culture, not a bunch of nosey ass-holes, and if I ever wanted to experience anything, I needed to leave Los Angeles and the clutches of its soulless inhabitants, “ASAP.”
“If it weren’t for the porn industry I wouldn’t even be here,” he mumbled at the end of his outburst and my ears perked up.
After remaining silent during the five-minute tirade, the naively sex-obsessed 7th grader within me blurted out, “What are you, a nut fluffer?”—never expecting his answer would be “Yes.”
Not that I thought a nut fluffer’s life would be glamorous, but I also didn’t think one would be on a Metro Rapid bus admitting to the strange girl next to him that he was on his way to pick up this week’s Ecstasy supply.
When I started bombarding him with questions, he casually told me he hates his job so much that he spends every waking moment fucked up, or trying to get fucked up, so he won’t have to think about it.
“What’s your job description?”
“To keep the guys hard between takes.”
“Do you use your mouth?”
“If I have to.”
“What about the rest of the time?”
“Whatever it takes.”
“Why don’t you find a new job if you hate it so much?”
“Because I make more money than I know what to do with.”
Because he gets paid $5000 a week, he only has to work a few months at a time. This leaves the rest of the year to sit around one of his two homes (North Hollywood and Las Vegas) and do as many pills, lines and glue huffs as it takes to forget what paid for it all.
He evaded most of my important questions (“How did you get into fluffing nuts?” and “Any famous penises you’ve ‘helped out’?”) and refused to give me his contact information, saying it would be detrimental to his mental escape attempts if I kept questioning him about his job. But as he and his oblivious friend got off the bus at Alvarado, taking them those few steps closer to that week’s supply of Ecstasy, I swear I saw a smile.
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