His helmet bumped up and over her sacral flexure and, for the first time, she felt what it was like to have the fist of Zeuss buried deep within her concavity, filling her, forcing her, willing her to open her mouth for his fingers.

I didn't remember our actions as being so desperate, so preternatural, so painfully, breathtakingly disturbed. Watching the proof of it now I am rendered ashamed, not so much of her but of myself for having videotaped it.

A sex tape is supposed to be a short, elliptical little record of a carnal exploit, like a wedding video of your fucking without the irritation of your closest friends and family members there to opine or lament or generally talk shit. Historically the penetration and pursed lips should be inter-cut with an intermission consisting of a video diary of a vacation (boat trip, rented cabin, sailing, fishing, yachting) that exemplifies the happy foundation on which your relationship is built. In the case of a friends with benefits scenario or a casual one night stand the catalyst for the sex tape traditionally agrees to shoot the whole thing, or the more salacious portions, in night vision, so as to hide the flaws of the obliging participant. The overall tone of the tape is expected to be light and playful and portray your partner as a cheerful, fun-loving gal with a child's giddy joie de vivre.

Perhaps our mistake was in being too intimate. It has been said that the primary source of attraction and sexual stimulation between two partners, after looks and social status, is an air of mystery. Once you've spent an interminable succession of days and nights in close proximity with someone, witness to their every idiosyncrasy and made aware of their routines and goals, there is little left in the way of intellectual or physiological incitement. There is nothing left but cheap tricks to galvanize the other. For us the only thing that remained to titillate was the presence of an inanimate third.

Gen had expressed a desire to bring a girl into the mix, but I was selfish; I wanted her sex all to myself and, at the time, my sensibilities weren't nearly as European as they should have been. Failing at persuading me to engage in a menage a trois she suggested we play with a camcorder, an error in judgment that she would come to regret. When you first start dating someone, especially someone you are crazy about, the tendency is to withhold certain details about yourself that might not conform to that someone's ideal of a significant other. In our case, Genevieve, the otherwise cutting edge admirer of the arts, professed a loathing for cinema and complained of having kept company with fan boys who obsessed over films she never intended to sit through.

"Oh, that ain't me," I had said early on. "I think those guys who reference a flick for every situation in life are just the most pathetic dudes around."

This situation was like the antithesis of that diner sequence between the cop and the cokehead love interest in P.T. Anderson's Magnolia. I fucked up. I betrayed her trust and betrayed my own integrity by misrepresenting myself and who I was as a person. It was like Jimmy Belushi pretending to be a millionaire in Taking Care of Business or Heath Ledger pretending to dig Julia Stiles in 10 Things I Hate About You.

Genevieve had to find out the hard way that I was a cinephile and a compulsive voyeur. As soon as we shot our first scene, a stripped-down ode to Britney Spears' 1999 MTV Awards performance that found Gen donning red fishnets, green toenail polish and a black fedora, I was out of the celluloid closet, hitting record whenever I could get her drunk enough to play dress-up. Which was often since we were both binge drinkers from the get.

But this was not to be a thematically cohesive piece. When Genevieve had tired of me and the costumes, her true colors came out, and those colors were black (clothes, hopelessly flaked nail polish) and red (blood). In a ratty pair of rolled up sweatpants, on a ratty cigarette butt-charred carpet overrun by silverfish, my petit mécontent ignored me for more than twenty minutes (of running time) and traced stars over her calves and thighs. She then took a razor blade from between the yellowed pages of her moleskin journal and commenced cutting, gracefully gliding the edge up and down her dermis, drawing goose bumps and, finally, beads of crimson that led to a clot.

My camera and I watched without blinking, without pause, occasionally zooming in with blurry auto-focus to observe what must have seemed, at the time, like the fibers of her beautiful being to my retarded and amorous love muscle, but which was, in reality, nothing more than broken follicles and shaving irritation. The climax of our sequence found the heroine (Genevieve) catching the clot on the flat surface of her gleaming rapier and holding it aloft for the audience, in a muted fascination punctuated by a slight innocent smile. This purplish brown globule was probably made up of equal parts incarnadine and ink, from the pen she had used to trace her constella tory designs. That's what the audience would deduce thanks to the early exposition. But our protagonist clearly saw it differently--This bit of visceral gook was symbolic of the disgust and exhilaration she had for herself and the act she was absorbed in. This bloodletting had yielded a denouement that reflected her noir-ish existence. She was pleased by the on-screen execution of her activity, probably more so because of how it ran counter to what she knew my camera was seeking. No beautiful geisha girl licking a lollipop (as could be found elsewhere on the tape, in one of my more gaudy mis-en-scenes). Just self-infliction and a moment of relishing the absurd.

"I can't trust your opinion," she said to me once, with contempt in her voice. She had just shared a painting with me, one of her own watercolor creations, and was refusing to accept any of my prospective criticism. "You're biased, it means nothing. I could puke in a loose-leaf notebook and you'd tell me how great it is."

Sadly, she was right. I was blindly in love with her, a love that bleached out all her fuck-ups and obscured my vision or acknowledgment of her every transgression. When she cheated on me with an ex-boyfriend, disappearing for three days and only resurfacing to appear by my side in court, for a shared OCLD ticket, she expressed interest in my new footwear before she expressed any remorse. Her élan did not apply to matters of guilt, despite being raised a devout Catholic, nor did she try very hard to fake such sentiment.

And I had taken her back, with minimal hesitation, and even made love to her the same night without bothering to wear a condom or get her tested. It was well-established that she had me under her thumb, so well-established, in fact, that she thought she could convince me to hang out with and purchase low-grade marijuana from the very same ex-boyfriend with whom she engaged in her infidelity. In short I was a schmuck and so, too, was my camera. Anything so degrading as to ordinarily give me pause was exempt from question if I could see it through a viewfinder. The camera was my Faustian goad, and it was appropriately amoral.

"You know you want to," it would whisper to me, hissing like sizzling microfiche from deep within the bowels of its mechanism housing. "It's what she wants too, so give it to her."

"But she's not awake," I would tell it as we both watched her flinch and fart in her face down-blackout-drunk-snoring slumber. "So it's not consensual. So there's no way to know if it really is what she wants!"

"And that, my friend, is exactly what she wants."

Daffy robo-logic, maybe, but accurate. Genevieve had conveyed to me, on more than one boozy eve, that she was no longer intent on fucking praying mantis style or with our faces pressed to each others' as we did at the advent of our affair. Now she wanted me to leave her to her drinking until she had a twelve pack and a half stowed away or, at least, a sufficient amount to put her off into a somnambulist's state. Then I was to "fuck her awake," to invade her and roust her from her sleep like a rapist in a ski mask. Pin her legs back over her shoulders and force myself into every hole and slap her in the mouth if she moaned to the contrary or anything else I felt like doing to a disobedient corpse. But I was no good at this sort of aberrant behavior on my own; we had tried the rough stuff in slightly more sober waking hours and it was always too much or not enough. I didn't emote boisterously to her level of satisfaction and couldn't talk dirty worth a shit. When I called her a filthy cunt and threatened to strangle her my follow-through revealed my words to be vacuous or half-hearted at best.

If she badgered me to try harder I obliged by spanking her pink and tearing her stockings violently, coiling them around her throat...And then the tears would trickle into her Eustachian tubes, she would blubber like a wounded porpoise and lock herself inside the bathroom. It wasn't until I bought the camcorder that the sex met her standards. It's only too bad she was never more than barely conscious to experience any of it. Alas, that is how she came to like it.

My Canon HV20 was a good director, an auteur of formidable influence. Together we produced what amounted to a long short, or, as the more liberal film festivals would classify it, a "short feature." We never watched the footage back with each other and I'm fairly confident that Genevieve has never seen a single frame. But, then, we live worlds apart these days, divided by the Pacific Ocean, amongst other things. We broke up before I ever got a chance to videotape our anal escapades and it is, most likely, for the best that it ended when it did. If the first, frightening scene of the picture, that of her bloodletting, is any indication, our homegrown motion picture could only have reached its conclusion in tragedy.

I was a long time in coming around to the idea of reviewing our three tapes and even longer in bringing myself to digitize and edit it into something I could watch on my home entertainment center. The first time I glimpsed the footage, many moons after we had parted ways, I was taken by what a gritty aesthetic the whole production had. My post-modern mind immediately held it up against the similar look of something like Harmony Korine's julien donkey boy or Lars Von Trier's Dancer in the Dark. Only my dancer in the dark never stole a stillborn fetus and brought it home to cuddle. Though if she had I'm sure I would have filmed the event.

I forgot--E.C.U.s of her smile, the footsy from black flats, the kicks to the groin with peep toe sling backs, her tongue replenishing her pink flanges, the length of time in which I was able to gape at the sight of her licking a rainbow round twist stick and how fool-hardy a rapture it was. I knew this when I was editing, ergo my decision to end the film with her taking a chunk out of the hard candy with her canines; a finer metaphor for emasculation I never have seen.

Our memories of people are never as adequate an indicator of reality as the lucid perception provided by a videotaped account. As I'm sure Zapruder would tell you, the hard fact of what is projected on a screen is infinitely more truthful than a distant memory filtered through personal prejudice. For example, when I went on memory alone, I imagined that Genevieve had had massive breasts and massive calves with a slender neck and a smoky voice. Watching our sex tape, three years after production "wrapped," I was confronted with the image of a girl with perfectly middle-of-the-road tits, average sized legs, a full throat and a high-pitched though somewhat raspy vox. It took watching our sex tape for me to recall how fond I had been of her supple ass, her succulent lips and her domineering squint. The raccoon-like eyes I had remembered, with some derision, were vanquished in favor of narrow almond dashes full of mischief and come hither loneliness. She looked both more lascivious and more regretful on camera.

The one thing I hadn't forgotten was her "fat rabbit," the robust pubis that had been my mouth-watering delectable dish for the entirety of our relationship. Even when we were too tired to bathe, too bored with life to care about personal hygiene, even when bed-ridden sloth had left in-grown hairs or heat rash on our crotches, I could always rely on its sight and its scent, the brilliantly alluring musk that seemed old and oaken, to draw me to its core. When in the midst of resentment it helps to have a fat rabbit to bite down hard and chew on, whether you are a vegetarian or an all-American meat-eater. And hers deserved a Zagat rating.

I titled our sex tape Genevieve in Repose, because it belied the actual nature of her lifestyle, the maddened drug-and-drink-crazed shark that she was, while poetically encapsulating the end result of the same--Her blackout. Her deep, remote hibernations. Her repose. The only time you'd see her sit still. It was also a pompous title and Genevieve and I were nothing if not pompous, often carrying on about how we were going to co-author the great American blue collar novel, one that would have the longest, most pretentious title that could fit on a book jacket. This never came to pass, but I like to think she would have approved of such an airy fairy designation for something so gut-wrenchingly alarming.

If I was a competent planner there would have been some additional variety to the picture, a video log of the sublime occasions when Genevieve would get frisky after flirting with a strange boy in a blue vest at Ride Aid and would jerk me off with her stockinged feet across the gear shift of her Honda Civic. "Two Thumbs Way Up!" would have greeted a montage of her catching my sperm on her gums and rolling it around with the churning axis of her bar-bell papillae piercing. As it happened, though, we never had a shooting schedule and I would hate to think of how our script would have read.

Genevieve in Repose is a record of love, as much as any sex tape can be, but it is also a record of hate, the kind of reflection of a failed union that most people would want to erase, the kind of reflection that Dorian Gray would stash in a musty attic. For reasons that are still opaque I couldn't bear to do it, I couldn't hide it away. In retrospect there is something comically ingenious about watching a girl in torn stockings and a baggy Disneyworld sweater lumbering around a derelict apartment, throwing an empty pack of Marlboros at the camera and saying, "Oh, Bobbyyyy! Do you have any cigarettes?" Only for the footage to cut via organic in-camera editing (natural segue) into the very same girl blowing her boyfriend POV style. Porn amateurs refer to every homemade romp, however forced, as "gonzo," but watching our chronicle of highs and lows and fists and blows fits more neatly into the classic "Gonzo" definition. Buy the ticket, take the ride.

I had bought the ticket, racking up tens of thousands of dollars in credit card debt to support our shared lifestyle when we were together. And, now that the smoke has cleared, I can honestly say that all I have to show for the accumulation of usury is one compact collection of "vignettes," among them a choice bit where I stick my thumb in a sleeping girl's rectum and ejaculate on her ankle. If I had left the camera rolling my trusty Canon would have seen me crying in an inebriated state of despair, regretting, as perhaps Genevieve should have, the very depths to which I had sank. But it is better that my Faustian friend urged me to hit the little red button when I did, for it is ultimately cinematic just the way it is.

I edited our tape as I would any raw footage, shaping it in the same style as every movie I had done, giving it the same structure I had several art films (which, as irony would have it, were considered to be pornography by some). The opening titles, seldom seen at all in most sex tapes, here played out at least ten minutes into the "narrative," in what amounted to a half-assed homage to Scorsese's The Departed. The action was broken up by sensational title cards that would doubtlessly make the video a saleable property on the exploitation genre market. "A fuck story that plumbs the depths," goes the first anguished font to appear against black, followed by a snippet of doggy style ugly-bumping accentuating mon ami's dimpled derrier.

"A preternatural turn-on that begs to be seen!" screamed the next in hot pink. "Shot, cut and fucked by Bobby," came the next in a fleshy typeface befitting the content. And from here I diced up the order of things ala Tarantino, skipping to the end of our relationship, whereupon the heroine crouched, bottomless, over a Big Gulp and urinated on her flat soda pop while the Canon and I admired her scrunched up feet. Her toes, arches and ankles are prominent throughout, my natural fetish emerging as a co-star to the galaxy of gashes she had carved in the first act. Sensational for sure but, nevertheless, true.

This was a work every bit as disturbing as A Serbian Film or morally devoid as a Lucifer Valentine offering. It needn't be presented in the ghostly night vision that makes hollow monsters of those men and women motion-picturing their estrus, because it is haunting and repulsive enough in standard DV pixilation. I was struck, upon watching it again, by how natural it all came to us. We really were completely different people.

All of this is to say nothing of the main attraction, the one that Middle America was guaranteed to consume like a splash of celebrity-branded toilette: Genevieve's mouth at work on my cock, the money shot that makes any sex tape, here reinvented, reinterpreted or remade, as is the Hollywood trend at the moment, by the simple fact that you can tell she has lock-jaw but perseveres because her Dom (Me or the camera? I'm not sure) is physically maneuvering her skull every time she moans and tries to turn away, taking her by the chin with my thumbs and pressing my helmet back under that pearly white overbite and against the ridged ceiling of her maxilla. It was bound to be commercial, on these grounds alone. People can yearn and, moreover, people can empathize. What that says of our culture, I am still not sure.

Slow fade.

Fade up and super across your screen, "Five years later..." I've sold off my first feature film to a company too pre-occupied with capitalizing off of shitty Hollywood remakes of their shittier 80's schlockers to be bothered with releasing the film that they acquired from me. I've spent more than twelve months attaching established actors to a time-sensitive movie about an Internet stalker and his drug-addled would-be victim (the final girl who, consequently, looks a lot like Genevieve) and the foreign producer who was supposed to buy the option on the script has reneged after driving himself into hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of debt. I'm broke, bored and beyond depressed. Plus I'm horny because I've been watching Genevieve in Repose on loop and guzzling the kind of grain alcohol that was our breakfast, lunch and dinner in the old days. In a fit of desperation I offer the sex tape to an indie distributor, assuming he will take it as the practical joke that it is.

Dissolve to: I'm sitting in this cat's office, discussing the prospect of the distributor buying and releasing Genevieve in Repose as a direct-to-DVD offering. I hesitate for a long time, mouth agape, wondering if this is a joke to one-up my own. Then he shows me the mock-up artwork their marketing department has put together, the illustrated renderings of Genevieve's freckled face, the buns of raven black hair punctured by chopsticks, and I think, "Fuck." I say it out loud, evidently, because the next thing the distributor says is, "Exactly."

The sex tape is released to select CD retailers, head shops and sex shops unceremoniously. The sex shops don't want to stock more than two copies because it's too artsy, the head shops don't know what to make of it because they're too stoned, the CD retailers are completely disinterested because they're too busy spinning the latest emo album, and of the half dozen or so legitimate video outlets that have purchased a few units, only one has refrained from breaking their deal with the distributor once they discover the DVD's actual material. The distributor is making lame excuses for why I haven't seen a check in the mail and then, suddenly, I'm in the middle of attempting suicide by way of paper cut when the paper in my trembling hands falls open to a movie review and I read all about how some important critic loves 'Genevieve' and is hailing it as this year's Blue Valentine.

In the subsequent days virtually every other critic in the Continental U.S. followed the lead of that first critic--in all probability because the majority of their brethren have no original thoughts of their own--and agreed that, "Genevieve in Repose is a significant work in the vein of Last Tango in Paris or Spun." I couldn't, for the life of me, remember any meth abuse taking place in our sex tape, but the comparisons were groovy regardless. The early praise branded the movie a "tone poem of awesome importance," and convinced intellectually-starved audiences that it "plays like Jarmusch and Renoir by way of Tinto Brass and Larry Clark." I didn't know who two out of four of those dudes were, but I was stoked. And so, too, was the Industry; worldwide acquisition and a theatrical "re-premiere" were not far behind.

'G.I.R.,' as we called it for brevity's sake, launched me into my career, a career not in pornography but in the art house. Since its public dissemination I have been hired to helm sundry art films, sundry shitty multiplex movies, and made more than one man's share of home video sex tapes. And you can bet I choked them and slapped them and fisted them and filthy shit-talked them right proper. Still. None of the above has approached the "sin-sational squalor of Genevieve in Repose."