Comparing Clouds in Vegas

New Year’s in Vegas is a special time. The natives are all tucked awake in bed. Most tourists are still bleary-eyed from “Cowboy Christmas” festivities. Hell, Ronnie Spector couldn’t even make it to her own goddamn holiday spectacular. The gambling and the drinking take on spiritual, almost sacred, purposes. Yes, there’s a sense of a real obligation to the finer arts of getting properly and constantly fucked up. PNP and cloud emojis become ubiquitous on the popular hook-up apps and overwhelm the synapses. It was 2016 and there we were, amidst the lazy lollipop mobocracy, testing our odds and negotiating the societal grain. When in Rome, do as the Romans. When in Vegas – well, I go Vegan. No meat? Sure. I’ll raise you no solid foods at all. Taste some meat? Absolutely. But I’m only ingesting milk and clouds.

So it was with lifted spirits and a spring in my step that I found myself setting up and blocking a shot for what would eventually become the debut feature for Previtus Media, only feeling slightly silly.

The shot, like the concept, seemed simple: Dominant straight man uses a cock-obsessed sub. I figured a shot of a dicksucker kneeling in front of an alpha would be a piece of cake. Miles agreed and we blocked the shot. Or tried to, anyway. Even before he called “action” he was unhappy with our then embryonic fake meth, so! back to the drawing board I went to “tweak” the recipe and compare Previtus PNP clouds to the genuine article in front of the camera and on film.

You can imagine the trial and errors; the relentless questioning. How do they look in this light? How do they look at this shutter speed? Are we sure we couldn’t get it more real? Look, the real shit isn’t smoke – it’s a vapor! I know Miles, this is a vapor, too. But it shouldn’t LOOK like a vape pen. Does it? Lemme try comparing clouds under an incandescent light. Okay, now try this lens… Imagine a PNP version of Sigourney Weaver’s audition for Alien.

I’m not sure we ever blocked anything that night, except maybe our vape pen coils, but we hadn’t  begun production yet so, there was time. All we knew is that we wanted to master the art of PNP Porn. I mean if you’re going to coin a genre and claim it…

PNP’s screentest ended before long, cameras and lights abandoned in the on position, and we found ourselves on our cellulars and laptops, sifting through porn in search of the cream of the crop. Some kind of big finish or finale flick to wrap our blocking fail. I perved over countless vids of amateur military guys on leave some of which are still in my bookmarks. Miles, on the other hand, seemed to be jumping through pornographic hoops without a safety net. I kept one eye on his laptop monitor out of mere curiosity, all the while keeping the other on my iPhone, and before long, The Light came on.

“You’re making it.” I told him.

“Huh?”

“What you’re looking for. You’re making it. It’s not out there. That’s why you’re making it.”

I watched him mull this over. I have to admit, I understood his fascination with the concept of PNP porn. PNP porn or the shortage thereof, rather. And, so did he. Among the homosexual community, PNP was quickly becoming as traditional as apple pie. Vegas, more than any place in the world, understood and celebrated this. Hell, the city was practically built on a fast foundation. We felt strangely at home there.

Miles spent another hour sifting through search engine results from tube sites, Bing, Google and the lot – coming up high and dry, so to speak. Then he said to me, ever the optimist, “you know, I just thought of something.”

I don’t mind telling you, I was scared.

“If I’m the one making it – PNP porn – you realize that means I’m never going to be able to enjoy it myself, don’t you?”

At Previtus nobody can hear you scream.

 

Austin Silver

Louisville, KY 2018

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