Devan writes: Upstairs, on the rooftop nearly the pool, with the fantastic view of Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Press Club was hosting a book party for Luke Ford, and his two newest books. This is what I blew off XRCO to attend, the celebration of the newest works of a man who I have had a tumultuous and terrible past with, a man who is neither my friend nor my enemy, but who has been constant during my tenure in the adult entertainment industry. Despite imagining a wild mix of adult personalities commingling with prominent Jewish intellectuals, or an empty party with Luke and Rob Spallone sitting in front of a stack of books, I was shocked to see a large crowd of sophisticated adults. For a minute I thought I was in the wrong place. I did not recognize a soul. I wandered to the cash bar and picked up a Perrier then wandered around until I found Luke, flitting back and forth like a social butterfly between different parties. Until I saw him I assumed I had crashed the wrong party, or that the invite had been a joke, and that I alone had fallen for it.
Luke greeted me warmly then excused himself and told me he would be back. I sat alone at a table and watched the proceedings for a while, until a woman named Gabriella joined me. Well into her thirties and possessing a raw candor she informed me that Luke looked like he was after the cheap and easy p----, and explained that she was a psychoanalyst that worked with young men on probation. She told me that the operative word they used for sex was poonany and that she spent the better part of her counseling time listening to them talk about their dicks. She claimed she lived in a dickcentric universe.
I asked her if this was Luke’s book party and she told me that she had come to help play wingman for a needy friend who had hooked up with a man and gone off to have tea with him at his apartment. I told her she must be pretty good at her job to pull such a feat off and she laughed and took no credit. Scores of pretty and young and desperate Jewish girls flocked around Luke and any other man, except me, because I had Gabriella and that was just fine by me.
Luke finally joined us and introduced us to several girls that kept jocking him and I told Gabriella that men wrote books to get laid, a remark she immediately agreed with. Then I told her I had written a novel and couldn’t sell it and she laughed. Although she had never met Luke before, and knew it was his party, she immediately began to pick on him, telling him candidly that he liked cheap women. I couldn’t help but adore this mysterious lady who was keeping me entertained at what surely would have been a rather dull and introspective evening. Sensing that things were going downhill rapidly, and not wanting to kill the buzz, Luke excused himself and floated off.
Luke and I talked momentarily and I met his friends, a beautiful copyright lawyer and the producer of an independent film, but I was not right after that. Luke was either being funny or embarrassed of me because he kept trying to tell them I was a novelist (make that failed novelist) and that I was working on a book on how to protect Christian youth in the new millennium. Playing along I told them that I was a screenwriter, relying on my one credit for an obscure horror film that Lion’s Gate may one day put out on video, and that I was working on a book about Pop Culture and it’s influence on rape.
