SERIES:  If You Love Me

PART: 1 of 1

RATING:  R (Refers to the pornography industry; sexual content; adult themes )

PAIRING(s): L/L

DISTRIBUTION: To Myself  so far; any other archives are welcome to ask, but disclaimers must be included, my email left intact. send a URL, and provide full disclaimers as well as credit me fully. Please inform me if you are going to submit my work to any sort of search engine.  Please do not submit my work to a search engine that picks out random sets of words and uses them as key words, such as "Google"

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CATEGORY: Romance/Drama

FEEDBACK: PLEASE?!

SETTING IN TIMELINE:   Set about ten years post-canon, AU California.

SPOILLER/SUMMARY: " Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future " (Lavenny, AU)

NOTES:  Inspired By something I talked about with Shotzette.

***

“Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future.”  - Anonymous

***

As the party he’d planned swung around him, Lenny Kosnowski picked up a red Fiesta Wear cup and jostled around the slushy orange stuff inside.    A cautious sip raped his tongue and wondered why he’d let Squiggy make the drinks this time.   “That ain’t a daiquiri!” he remarked under his breath, abandoning it on a swivel chair near his desk.

Turning his back to the scene in their crowded office, Lenny  smiled.   These yearly parties were Squiggy’s idea, a cheap way to boost up morale and grab new clients while making himself seem a generous and trustworthy figure.   It seemed to work – Squignoski had expanded in the thirteen years since it’s inception so rapidly that they now operated from the top floor of a recently-constructed office complex off of LaBrea.   It was a strange act of conformity for two men who had been fighting normalcy their whole lives, but Squiggy had insisted the move would make them seem bankable.

Lenny thought they were both plenty bankable but, as always, did what Squiggy asked of him.  After all, he wasn’t the genius in the family.

“Len!” Squiggy yelled as he wrapped a gentlemanly arm around the waist of Helen the Bearded Lady, “we’re running out of chips!”

Lenny moaned – leaving meant he was destined for a block-long hike down the street to the Star Mart on second, but no amount of arguing with Squiggy would save him from his fate.  Grabbing his old Lone Wolf jacket from his chair, he gave Squiggy a brief gesture that indicated he was on his way and left.

With the door shut tightly behind him, Lenny could hear his every footstep echoing in the brightly-lit night, following him to the elevator with the grace of an elephant’s stride.   He pushed the button marked “ground floor” and hoped the elevator would come before the wolfman ate him up.

The metronomic “ding” of the elevator as it opened brought a rush of relief to him – quickly he stepped inside and pressed the door for the lobby, feeling the queer sensation of the cart plunging as they descended and weakened his knees.

He noticed a small, feminine figure standing beside him, leaning back on the gold-painted handicapped railing, her long, red, vividly dyed hair brushed forward , hiding  her face.

The figure, cloaked in a short sable fur jacket , cut such an intimidating and classy figure that Lenny wasn’t sure if he should speak aloud.  As they rushed to the ground floor he finally spoke out.   “Hi!” he said cheerfully.  “I’m Lenny!”

The woman paused, then turned to face him.  Her newly-revealed nose was unmistakable.

He gaped.  “Vernie?”  don’t look at her boobs!   His mind shouted, too late.

She smiled at him faintly and pulled the sable closer to her chest.  “Yeah.  Hi, Len.”

Desperately, he looked away from her.  He couldn’t let her know that he’d seen her…all of her… “Boy, I ain’t seen you in a long time!  How’re things?”

She shrugged and said evasively, “okay.  How’s Squig?”

He shuffled, wild in his struggle.  “He’s fine!  We got an office upstairs.  How’s San Fernando?”

Her features tightened.  “I ain’t there no more – I just moved back to Burbank,” she said.

Lenny backed off.  “Oh,” he leaned back against the railing, watching her in the glass door of the elevator.   Usually language was his friend but at the moment his tongue lay silent and numb in his mouth.

Feeling completely rejected, Lenny rushed out of the elevator as soon as the doors opened.

He heard he heels clicking behind him.  “Len!” she called, struggling with the sable,  “can I have your number?”

He grinned, nearly said something filthy but held his tongue.  “Uh huh!” he groped around in the pocket of his pants and pulled out a Squignoski business card.

She took the card with a smile.  “I wrote my new number on the back,” she opened the cobra head clutch of her navy purse and pulled out a green card embossed with gold letters.   “It was swell to see you, Len.  Call me.”

He grinned.  “Okay,”  came the giggle as he opened the door and watched her walk away, the strength of her DeFazio walk buckling the red spikes. 

He turned the card over on his palm, seeing the words she’d tried to scratch out.  But they remained embossed beneath the surface, the town legible and infamous.

Los Angeles.

**

Lenny knew Laverne’s journey – through stage door whispers, second-hand knowledge and weeknights spent at the Bijou XXX.  All of his firsthand information didn’t explain how the girl he’d gone to catechism class with had become one of the better-known if not highest paid actresses in the porn boom the city was going through. 

He was able to piece together this much information: Laverne had left Burbank two days after her father’s funeral, leaving Lenny a short note and a stripped apartment.  (I’ll be back some day.  He still had the paper, could inhale the fading scent of her perfume whenever he wanted to.)  He never could blame her for such a brief goodbye – Shirley had left him less.  Laverne had faithfully nursed her father only to watch him die a wasting death through cancer, and that would drive anyone to seek a new life.

He learned from various acts he managed what happened next; she had traveled to San Francisco but ended up back in LA, where work as a waitress got her hooked up with a tall buck-toothed stud named Paddy.  The two of them explored the wild new world that was the early 70’s.  The jungle of the barely blossoming sexual revolution had been theirs for the taking, but it got too heavy for Paddy and he apparently split the scene.  Davis The Elephant boy had seen her at the Roxy dancing to Barry White in a tight red dress, pressed between the forms of two anonymous younger men.  She had apparently been spotted indulging herself with those two in the ladies’ room later in the night, where a scout for Minty Pictures saw her and offered to let her audition for the company ‘despite her unorthodox looks’, said her bio in one issue of AVN.

Lenny had learned the truth accidentally, at a matinee of the big new blue picture Detention for Wendy.  He and Squiggy had been given tickets by a young singer they were representing, a long-haired blonde calling herself Temperance who sang breathy disco songs under a throbbing beat.  

“It’s gonna be groovy,” she winked at them, indulging the two horny old men with her affection.  Temperance wasn’t at the theatre that night, but plenty of scary-eyed porn people were.

The plot had been thin – college girls, men in priest’s collars, rulers, nuns in heat.  Lenny had been particularly enjoying that part when a spindly-looking girl with blonde pigtails was sent to the principal’s office for chewing gum in class.

In denial, he watched as “Sharon” was paddled and fucked (upside-down) by “Principal Vernon” .  “Sharon” made it with a short brunette with a mole on her right thigh before she met her match in short, pudgy Tim.  So shocked was Lenny that he couldn’t even think straight, much less jerk off.  Squiggy had left with the projectionist by the time the credits rolled and “Anita Starr” was  billed for her performance. 

As if under a spell he returned again and again every Friday night, watching one of his closest friends act out every fantasy he’d ever had about her.   Two years rolled by, consuming him in jealousy – God, he would give anything to be that space alien/jungle man/suave career guy, just to be inside of her. 

But the more often he snuck off to the Bijou the further the truth was pounded into his head – whatever those movies were doing to him were no contest for what they were doing to her.  In Untamed Women she wore an ugly bruise on her buttocks; for every film she did in 1975 she had two dark, deep bags under her eyes.  When she whined her lines a little tremble showed up in her voice, as if she were holding back a scream. 

And Lenny saw it all from his third row seat, unable to find her address or her agent.  He understood she’d moved to a gated palace somewhere in the Holmby Hills, where she saw no one and went nowhere.  Laverne had always been the life of the party – and now she was a recluse?  It was unthinkable.  And yet he couldn’t stop himself from going every week and watching her, occasionally accompanied by Squiggy, who was so fooled by her fluctuating weight and varying hair colors that he never seemed to put it all together.

When she eventually disappeared entirely from the screen, Lenny’d tried to find out where she’d gone to, but all of his sources turned up dry.

And here she is, Lenny thought as he headed back upstairs with his sack of chips.  It was a miracle and a curse.  How could he keep pretending he didn’t know her secret?  What if she ran into Squiggy and he managed to match up Laverne with the millions of anonymous genitals flashing across the Bijou’s screen?  It was too much to risk.  No, he decided as he opened the door to the office, he couldn’t talk to her when Squiggy was around, or bring her back to his place where he could walk in on them.    Not calling her back at all was unthinkable; he didn’t entertain doing that for a second.

He made excuses to Squiggy and their guests once the chips were delivered.  His sister was calling – it was her birthday, they hadn’t talked in awhile.

“Okay – just make sure she reverses the charges,” Squiggy grumbled.

Lenny could barely force himself to lie to Squiggy as he swore he would and ran all the way back to Laurel Vista.

By the time he got there, the phone was already ringing.

***

All of his fantasies about a porn star’s lair were shot down when Laverne finally invited him to her place.  Her apartment was Spartan – the walls white and most of her possessions stacked away in boxes, ready for the next uprooting.  She talked often about leaving California altogether and starting a new life in Las Vegas.

“You didn’t like it when you was there,” he pointed out.

She smiled, “Len, I was stoned.”

He didn’t press the issue – things were going so perfectly between them, their frequent dates growing out of their genuine friendship and mutual respect.  In fact, Lenny could barely believe that a girl like Laverne wanted to go out with a jerk like him.

During one of those conversations about Las Vegas he had passionately taken her into his arms and urged her not to leave.  They kissed, kisses leading to caresses and the removal of clothing. 

Her lips low on his chest made him call out her name. 

And his love.

She sat up and away from him hiding her face against her knees.  He wouldn’t take back what he’d blurted out, but she put the bed between them, walking to her closet and pulling out a pile of reel-to-reel tapes. 

Putting them on the bed, she told him, “if you can watch these and still say you love me, then I love you, too.”

He stared at the footage, knowing what it was.  Stupidly he picked them up and loaded them into her Super Eight projector.  As soon as the reels were in he flicked off the lights and sat beside her on the bed.

The picture was a familiar one – Laverne-No- Anita being seduced by cowboys on the lone prairie.  She was bruised and exhausted-looking but still put on a good show.

Automatically he reached for her hand.  She took his.

Slowly, the film unspooled.  Slowly, it came to an end.  When it was over she looked into his eyes in the dim room.

“Wanna break up?”

His response was to hold her tightly. 

Words rushed from her lips.  “I started doing it for fun – I like being looked at Len, I ain’t gonna lie about that part.  Then it stopped being fun, so I started doing it for the money…”She turned her head.  “It ain’t worth it.  Doing it with people you don’t like who don’t like you…”  She rubbed her nose on the back of her hand.  “I got real hard-hearted about it.  I mean, why fake it in the backseat of some guy’s car for nothing when you can make a few thou doing it on camera?”  She rested her weight against him.  “I knew it wasn’t gonna last.  I was never the prettiest girl, or the best actress.  One day I got too expensive to keep around and they got rid of me.”   She held out her hands.  “All I got left is cash.”

He remembered her haunted eyes and the dark circles.  “Don’t beat yourself up,” Lenny requested. 

She barked a short laugh.  “I sold myself.”

“You did what you had to do to stay full and safe,” his eyes widened.  “How much’d you sell yourself for?”

 She glared at him and he smiled sheepishly.  “Enough,” she said.  “It don’t matter – I don’t got anyone to spend it with.”  Lenny coughed and she patted his arm.  “Okay, only one person.”  

“D’you take your camera on the set the first day?”

“I’m bearing my soul here!” she bellowed, punching him with the pillow.  “You think it’s all glamour ‘n’ glitz, but it ain’t.  I seen things I wish I didn’t, Len, and I did things I wanna forget.”

“You gotta look at the good side,” Lenny insisted.  “You ain’t doing something you wanna do anymore, right?”

She thought for a moment.  “Uh huh.”

“And you don’t owe no one nothing?”

She glared at the reels on the camera.  “I still get checks when they show those things, but I don’t got to make more.”

“Then you can walk around with your head high.  You lived through it, Vernie.  And at the end it looked like it was…”  he flushed as his secret was revealed.

“I knew you saw them,” she said, her voice dull.  “Every man I know probably saw ‘em.”  He knew she was grateful that her father hadn’t been alive to do that. 

“I should’ve told you…”

“You think so?” He bowed his head.  Her next words came out softly, in a needy tone.  “Do you still love me?”

He wrapped himself around her and let his body do the talking, and while she didn’t even come that first night it was better for her than it had been in years, because she was loved, and because she was allowed to be herself.