big date tonight? can i interest you in a battery operated-vagina? my boss tells me i have to do more suggestive selling. it's your call, but you're gonna be sorry when you're in one of those everyday situations that call for a battery-operated vagina and you don't have one. thank you for shopping at adult bookstore. have a nice day. once you pick it up you can't put it down. i tear off the cover and paste this one on. you know how it is. might get drummed out of the pornographer's union, and then where would i be? came back for that battery-operated vagina, right? told you you would. thomas welles. nice picture. cover me, beth. i'm taking a break. i don't know what you're looking for, mister, but so we're clear from the start, i'm straight. three, four years. max. there's not much illegal. you're not a cop, are you? if i ask and you are, you have to tell me. you're a private eye. like shaft. from pennsylvania. p.i. from pa. what are you doing out here? how much? four hundred a week, off the books. sounds good, pops. tomorrow night, i get off at eight. wake up, pops. your education begins tonight. come on. fuck you, larry. you've got penthouse, playboy, hustler, etc. nobody even considers them pornography anymore. then, there's mainstream hardcore. triple x. the difference is penetration. that's hardcore. that whole industry's up in the valley. writers, directors, porn stars. they're celebrities, or they think they are. they pump out 150 videos a week. a week. they've even got a porno academy awards. america loves pornography. anybody tells you they never use pornography, they're lying. somebody's buying those videos. somebody's out there spending 900 million dollars a year on phone sex. know what else? it's only gonna get worse. more and more you'll see perverse hardcore coming into the mainstream, because that's evolution. desensitization. oh my god, elvis presley's wiggling his hips, how offensive! nowadays, mtv's showing girls dancing around in thong bikinis with their asses hanging out. know what i mean? for the porn-addict, big tits aren't big enough after a while. they have to be the biggest tits ever. some porn chicks are putting in breast implants bigger than your head, literally. soon, playboy is gonna be penthouse, penthouse'll be hustler, hustler'll be hardcore, and hardcore films'll be medical films. people'll be jerking off to women laying around with open wounds. there's nowhere else for it to go. what you saw tonight, we're not talking about a video some dentist takes home over the weekend. we're talking about stuff where people get hurt. specialty product. there's two kinds of specialty product; legal and illegal. foot fetish, shit films, watersports, bondage, spanking, fisting, she- males, hemaphrodites. it's beyond hardcore, but legal. this is the kind of hardcore where one guy's going to look at it and throw up, another guy looks at it and falls in love. now, with some of the s+m and bondage films, they straddle the line. how are you supposed to tell if the person tied up with the ball gag in their mouth is a consenting or not? step over that line, you're into kiddie porn. rape films, but there aren't many. i've never seen one. i heard you asking. that guy wasn't yanking you around. there's no such thing. first of all, basement sales like tonight aren't gonna last much longer. it's too risky, one, and two, everything's going on the internet. anyone with a computer and enough patience can find anything he wants. it's heaven for those degenerate chicken-hawks. they're swapping pictures back and forth as fast as their modems can zap 'em. but, there's still some weird shit under the counter where i work sometimes. no one knows where it comes from. that's local underground, where information spreads by word of mouth. those are zombies, hardcore junkies. their hands are permanently pruned. they go out in the sun they don't burn, they blister. other than that, all i know about is the mail. classified ads in the paper with hidden codes. secret couriers. credit card orders to dummy corporations. interstate wire transfers. revolving p.o. boxes. but, if you're asking me who do you go to to get illegal shit. who knows? that's the whole point -- the seller stays as far away from the buyer as possible, and vice versa, and cops can't trace the deal. there's ways to do it so nobody knows who anybody is. twenty-five. i don't know, where are yours? i'm not mixed up in anything, hayseed. what are you talking about? yeah, i'm a real genius. what choices have i got? fuck, just because i know about stuff like tonight doesn't mean i deal it. i work a job. it beats pumping gas, beats making hamburgers. you can't sit there all day watching the parade of losers that comes into that place without going numb. so what? am i gonna go off and be a race car driver? go to harvard? run for president? what about you, pops? i see a ring on your finger. you have any kids? so, you have a wife and kid waiting for you in pennsylvania. what are you doing mixed up in all this? dino velvet. yeah, he's like the john luc godard of s+m flicks, supposed to be a real weirdo. his stuff comes out of new york. bondage and fetish videos, gothic hardcore. definitely not for the squeamish. you're learning. out of the back of bondage magazines mostly, but you can find it on the street if you look. he'll also do commissions, for enough money. nothing illegal, it's always borderline. like if some freak wants to see a transvestite in a full rubber immersion suit getting an enema from a. he cuts all kinds of other stuff into his movies; photographs, newsreel footage, subliminal images. thinks he's making art. i'm a working stiff, pops. you want me to come out there and play private eye? see ya. you didn't say it was gonna be this luxurious. great. oh, come on, man, what are we doing in this flea bag? dino velvet. wha. ? he's one of the lunatics dino uses. he's in a bunch of these. why? he have something to do with whatever you're into? i told you, he's one of dino velvet's stock players. nobody knows his name. that's his thing. he always wears a mask. you never see his face. he calls himself "machine," that's what they call him. machine. they say he's half brain-dead from all the steroids he's using. he's a brutal motherfucker, man. he loves what he does for a living. what kind of junior p.i. would i be if i didn't go with you? you're the only one still shooting film and transferring it to video. nobody appreciates that kind of integrity anymore. the grain, the gritty look you get. i know if i had to pick, it'd be "choke," or "devil." what's next? still don't want to tell me what you're doing? what's this? look. that's awful generous and everything.