The Porn Star Sibling
Fiction. If that isn’t blatantly obvious.
We’re halfway through our second round of drinks and I’m starting to think things are going pretty well when she tells me she has to ask me a very serious question.
Which is usually not a harbinger of great things to come. But I say, “It’d probably be bad if I said no, so, yeah—go for it” while I take a sip of my halfway-decent Malbec and attempt to gird my loins for what fresh hell is likely to come.
(I’m not the most optimistic dater. Or conversationalist. Or, well, anything. I tend to very quickly and easily default to anticipating extremely uncomfortable and potentially doomed scenarios. This is part of my temperament, sure, but it has been bolstered through the years by the almost staggering amount of times I’ve been correct in my foresight. I’m far from clairvoyant, but have honed my skills at reading the proverbial writing on the wall before it’s even had a chance to be fully scrawled. Sometimes being correct is the absolute worst.)
“It’s a weird one, but I have to bring it up,” she says.
Goddamnit. Not this shit again, I think to myself.
“Are you, like, catfishing me?” she asks.
“It took you a drink and a half to bring up that suspicion? I most certainly am not,” I say, mocking over-the-top shock. I even put my hand to my breast, all flustered-like. “I mean, I’m sitting here right in front of you, with you, and I think it’s pretty apparent that I am, in fact, the person you matched with on Hinge. Though I do admit some of my pictures are a bit old. Got more gray in the beard now and less hair on top. But I can promise you that all the witty banter I’ve served up in our messages so far have been written entirely by yours truly, and have been representative of, well, me. I plan to hold out at least a little bit longer before I resort to flagrant lies or the assistance of ChatGPT. I’m very traditional in that way.”
I’m trying to not get too upset by her question and where I assume it’s going to lead, because I’ve been here before, answered varying iterations of this question that leads to me telling someone much more about my personal life way ahead of when I’d prefer to do so. (I’d prefer not to at all, but it’s unavoidable.) And i have to think that she’s uncomfortable about it too. Because the conversation we’re about to have is a strange one. Or at least extremely uncommon. It’s inevitably going to be about something very niche—the kind of issue that has been encountered so few times in documented history that there probably aren’t even enough people who can truly empathize to form some sort of support group, though one would be pretty beneficial. It’d be a strange club, to be sure.
“Okay, well, I’m not positive that’s exactly the term for it, what might be going on here,” she says. “There are terms for everything these days, and it’s tough to keep track. But I guess I’m just wondering if you’re really who you say you are.”
“I am me,” I say, and reach to my back pocket for my wallet, ready to show her some government identification, of which I habitually carry two forms, mostly for if—and, ultimately, when—I find myself in conversations like these. “The real deal. You can take a look at my license if you want. Got my passport with me too, if you want to see that.”
She laughs nervously but does take a peek at my license.
“And you do what you say you do?”
“Copywriter for an advertising agency? Yeah, that’s what I do. For better or worse.”
“And is that all you do? The only thing?”
I could clear the air real quick here, but for some reason I want to see how long it takes her to stop beating around the ole’ bush and get to what I’m almost positive she really wants to know—and how she’ll really broach the topic. You’ve gotta get your kicks somehow in this life, and there are worse things than watching people squirm a little bit—to revel in some way in their discomfort. It’s the little things, sometimes.
“Well, it’s what pays the bills. But I dabble in a lot of other writing too. I’m working on a novel, in fits and starts, so there’s that.”
“No, I mean, professionally.”
“Ouch.”
“Oh my gosh, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it that way.”
“It’s okay. It’d be my preferred profession if I could make it work, and actually worked more at it, but I’d be surprised if I ever find a way to turn that kind of thing into a way to remain even remotely financially solvent. It’s tough to get paid well for art. Though I’m not going to sit here on a first date and wax poetic about how I view myself as some sort of struggling artist. That’s one way to potentially scare someone off with a quickness. Or at least that’s what I’ve found. And I’ve done diligent research, I’m slightly ashamed to say.”
“Hey, I appreciate art,” she says with a laugh. But the squirming continues and I can tell she’s trying to figure out how to get down to it. “It’s just—you look a lot like someone a few of my friends know, or know of, rather, and he’s not a writer. At least, I don’t think he is.”
“A few of your friends, huh? Interesting. What’s this other dude do, and why, if I were him, would I be posing as someone I’m not?”
I’ve decided I’m gonna make her say it and continue faking that I have no idea where any of this is heading.
She takes a sip of her drink, steels herself and says, “He’s, uh—he um, works in adult films.”
I feign surprise.
“You’re saying I look like a porn actor?”
“To a pretty startling degree,” she says. “He could be your doppelgänger. And honestly, he’s more of a porn star than a porn actor. He’s apparently pretty well known. And rather…prolific.”
“Interesting. And you think I’d go on an app, as a porn star, and pretend to not be a porn star? A prolific one who apparently has a pretty solid work ethic and has been seen by enough people that he’s likely to get called out on it right away? And that if I were making up a personality for myself, I’d choose to go with writer?”
“I don’t want to think that, but it’s a weird world out there, you know? Especially when it comes to dating.”
“Amen,” I say, and we clink glasses, each take another sip. “Do you think, though, that maybe we just bear a striking resemblance to each other and that I get this question in some form on a near-daily basis?”
“Well, it’s a pretty uncanny resemblance, in my defense,” she says.
“Why don’t you pull up a picture and show me?” I ask before quickly telling her that I don’t actually expect her to fire up some hardcore porn in the middle of a bar on a Thursday evening, that that would be uncouth, and that I know precisely who she’s talking about.
“So you get this a lot?”
“You have no idea,” I say. “More times than I care to or even can begin to quantify. It’s um, it’s definitely a thing. And I gotta tell you—it’s a pretty funny way to find out what kind of porn people are into before you even really know them at all.”
“Hey, I don’t watch porn,” she says. “Not a lot, anyway.”
“Define ‘a lot.’”
“I’d rather not.”
“Fair.”
“When we were planning this date my friends demanded screenshots, and shortly after sending them I was treated in turn to screenshots of a more graphic variety. For a second I wondered if you’d been sending nudes all over Chicago…”
“As one does.”
“As one does. But our ensuing conversations really cleared that up.”
“Well, I am not the man I’m sure you’re referring to, but I am very familiar with him.”
“Oh, so, big porn guy?”
“Not in the slightest. The opposite, in fact.”
“Do guys think they’re supposed to say that?”
“Probably. Yeah, definitely. At least initially. But this is kind of a unique case. I’d say I watch porn with a much lower frequency than the average American male. Mostly out of self-preservation. And that is specifically because of the guy in question.”
“It is? How so?”
“Well, nobody likes to fire up their way-too-old personal laptop after a long day in the salt mines, ready to make some sweet sweet love to themselves, only to be greeted by a video of, for instance, their brother vigorously getting after it with a stranger in the back of a conversion van while it drives around the outskirts of Miami.”
A look of shock registers as I continue: “And it’s difficult to avoid because, yeah, he really is everywhere out there on the porn circuit. I guess the two ways I’d explain the guy would be extremely hard-working and very well-endowed. Third would be that we share the same blood and spent plenty of time together in the same womb.”
“Wait. That’s your brother? Your brother is a porn star?”
“Correct. My twin brother. Identical. As you can see. Though technically he’s older by a couple minutes. He came first. Which is ironic in some ways, if I’m using ‘ironic’ correctly, I’m not sure, because I absolutely cannot hold out as long as he can. Not by a long shot. It’s a strange situation for me, that’s for sure, but I have to respect his prowess and professionalism. I look exactly like the guy, but am certainly not confident that I fuck like him. Which is, you know, not not a shame. By most accounts, he’s very good at what he does. My parents are even begrudgingly proud, I think. And I also acknowledge this is not something I should be saying on a first date. But here I am.”
“Yikes.”
“That, in a word or a similar one, is the general reaction.”
“If you don’t mind me asking…”
“I can talk about it, sure. Like I said, it’s far from a foreign topic for me. Though the awkward nature of it never really seems to dissipate.”
“Well, if you’re sure…”
“And I can gladly address what I assume your next question is going to be without you even having to ask it. Or, if it’s not what you’re about to ask, you’d probably be lying if you told me the thought hadn’t crossed your mind. The answer is yes.”
“Yes to what?”
“We are hung pretty much exactly the same. I just haven’t honed my skills in that arena like he has, and it’s certainly never made me any money. I’m not exactly the ‘in-front-of-the-camera’ type.”
“I was going to ask how he got into sex work, but okay, good to know.”
“Anyway, want to hear about my novel?”
“I was thinking more like you could prove to me that you are indeed on the same level of hung-ness, but I did say I appreciate art, so…”
I look around for the bartender, catch his attention and motion for the check.
“I was gonna go home and work on the outline, but that can wait.”
Sometimes it’s strange how our families can benefit us in unexpected ways.
Oh brother