I like the guy. I don't know why, exactly, but I always have.

He's funny, for one thing, often at his own expense. He seems fair-minded and honest. He's very polite. He even seems kind, although I know he is capable of extravagant cruelty. Most of all, though, he so desperately and transparently wants to be liked that I can't help myself. I like him because I want to be decent, because I want to do the right thing. I just wish in my heart of hearts that I didn't think he, Gregory Dark, might be the devil.

I met him four years ago. He was making pornography then. He was famous for it, sort of--famous for making the worst pornography, a pornography of transgression and violation, a pornography that seemed intended less to glorify sex than to advertise the death of the soul. People were calling him the devil back then--in fact, that's exactly what he said when I met him: "People call me the devil"--but I liked him immediately. He was solicitous, and he was smart. He talked about surrealism and breaking down the wall between viewer and participant. Then I went to watch him make a pornographic movie out in the Valley and saw something so irredeemably obscene that I figured, Okay, Gregory Dark really is the devil, or at least someone I should stay away from.

Then, last year, I watched a Britney Spears video for a song called "From the Bottom of My Broken Heart" on MTV. I kept waiting for that adorable little cutlet to break out into a suggestive hootchy-koo, but she never did. The video was aggressively wholesome--given over to a wholesomeness that was unreal and fetishized--and at the end of it, when I looked for the name of its director, I saw that it was Gregory Dark. Then I saw a video by Mandy Moore, another teenage glamour-puss, who is marketed to little girls who are still too innocent for the coy come-ons of Britney Spears and the frank sexual howling of Christina Aguilera. Gregory Dark directed the Mandy Moore video, too. I called him up, and he said, "Oh, yes, I remember you--we were sort of friends." He said that he didn't make pornography anymore but had, in the years since, made about a hundred music videos. He said that he was in great demand, and that in fact he was trying to work out a deal to direct a feature film for New Line. I asked him what he was doing next, and he said he was directing a video for a fourteen-year-old girl. I asked whether I could come out and see him, and he hesitated--he was, he said, a changed man, and he didn't want to be judged as a pornographer anymore. I pressed. I said, C'mon, man, you know me. At last he gave in, and I went out to see whether Gregory Dark was indeed a changed man or had simply cut some kind of crafty deal to take control of the hearts of America's virgin daughters.

THE GIRL COMES ALIVE when the camera rolls. She transforms herself, or tries to. All morning, she has been here, in a studio somewhere in the Valley, trying on clothes and submitting to the attentions of stylists. They have painted her lips and exaggerated the almondish shape of her eyes, but she still looks alternately sweet and sullen and petulant and passive and scared--like the teenager she is--until she hits her mark, and the music begins, and she has her moment of incandescence. The music is very loud. It is being played through two tall, shuddering black speakers, and its sheer volume has the paradoxical effect of seeming to scour the studio of all sound--of everything but image. There are video monitors of varying sizes, and the girl's face fills them. For a moment, her eyes are downcast and abashed, as if to build suspense, as if to raise the question of whether they are going to be able to answer the camera's gaze. Then she opens her pink mouth to pantomime the lyrics of her song, and her eyes not only move, not only show themselves--they dance according to some well-established choreography. They move from side to side with the beat of the music and roll toward the ceiling for the big, bouncy hook. The girl has pretty eyes. She has good skin. She has bright white teeth, and she is proficient at lip-synching. Slyly, expertly, she crinkles her nose and folds back her lips in a simulacrum of girlish innocence, and although there is the sense that everything she does she has done before--that what animates her face is the exacting memory of bygone spontaneity--there is also the sense that she has been waiting to do it and so has managed to complete herself in front of the camera, as all good performers must. She is just fourteen years old, but she has already succeeded in making her image more vivid than her person, and when the song ends, there is a round of applause from her mother, her sister, her stylists, her hairdresser, her makeup artist, her coach, her tutor, and the executives from her record company.

The girl's name is Leslie Carter. She is from Orlando. She is one of the Orlando Carters. She is the sister of Nick Carter, the Backstreet Boy, and Aaron Carter, half-pint heartthrob, and so she is being counted on to extend her family's pedigree of pubescent dominion. Her record company is DreamWorks. It has budgeted $400,000 for the production of this video, in the hope that it can find its way onto MTV's Total Request Live and thereby help Leslie's first big single, "Like, Wow!" catch on with the rapacious little girls left unclaimed by Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Mandy Moore, and Jessica Simpson. The DreamWorks executives on the set are named Frances and Goldie. Frances has short hair, and she wears a scarf and a denim jacket, while Goldie, the senior A&R man, wears a hooded sweatshirt and has cropped his hair like a penitent. They have come to the studio to make sure nothing goes wrong, and they would be satisfied with Leslie's performance were it not for the fact that something has gone wrong already, even before the first take. Because she is one of the Orlando Carters, there was reason to believe that Leslie would show up for the shoot in a manner befitting the Orlando Carters, which is to say rigorously and even pitilessly prepared. Instead, she showed up with "issues," which is to say she showed up overweight. Leslie Carter is a big girl, and if there's anything little girls can't abide--if there's anything they fear as a rebuke to the possibilities of their own rapacity--it's the prospect of becoming a big girl, and so, despite their applause and their polite smiles, Frances and Goldie are uneasy, which is to say panicky. They spend a lot of time in hushed conference, trying to select slimming outfits and to devise flattering camera angles, or else speaking to Craig Fanning, who owns F.M. Rocks, the production company making the "Like, Wow!" video. Craig Fanning is the only person in the studio who did not applaud Leslie Carter's first turn in front of the camera. Although he wears a white windbreaker and white Stan Smith tennis shoes, and although he has neatly cut red hair and a face full of freckles, he has hard, narrow eyes rigged for unsparing assessments, and his assessment of Leslie Carter's first take was this: It's not enough. She's not selling the song enough. She's not feeling it enough and not having enough fun. Leslie Carter has to do enough in front of the camera to overcome her issues, because the singers she is in competition with--Britney and Christina and Mandy and Jessica--have no issues to overcome. They are perfect. Their hair, their makeup, their clothes, everything is perfect. They are pros. You ask them to do something, they do it. They do not show up unprepared. They are not big girls, and now, because Leslie Carter is a big girl, everybody--from the Orlando Carters to Frances and Goldie to Craig Fanning--is counting on Gregory Dark to transform her more than she was able to transform herself. They are counting on Gregory Dark to make her beautiful, to make her commercially viable, to make her--somehow--perfect.

HE WAS GOOD AT IT. That's what always seems to surprise and excite him, even now. He was a good pornographer. He was good at pornography the way he's good at making music videos. You see, at first he didn't know that it was his calling--"I just had to make a living! I just needed a job!" He had gone to Stanford; he had gone to film school. It was the mid-eighties, and he was doing some work on a documentary about the pornography business called Fallen Angels. He met a guy named Walter Gernert, a businessman, a guy who was making money off of porn. He started asking Gregory some questions. Like, Do you have a car? Like, Can you pay your rent? Like, Do you have milk in your refrigerator? He offered Gregory a deal: my money, your talent. ... And so were born the Dark Brothers. Their first hit was called New Wave Hookers. It came out in 1985, and it was a big success, not only because it featured sixteen-year-old Traci Lords rutting like a hog--of course, um, back then no one knew she wasn't legal--but also because Gregory Dark asked people to do things ... curious things ... and they did them. And do you know why? "Because I was good at it!" he says now. "I was good at getting people to behave like animals! I was good at tearing away all their socialization, everything their parents had taught them. It was weird. I never even had to raise my voice. I just appealed to their egos, to the sin of pride. People will do anything for the sin of pride, even become beasts! And that's what I was good at getting on film--that moment when human beings become something else, other than human."

He liked weird shit, no doubt. He was interested not only in turning people on but in making them feel uncomfortable about it, just as he was interested in indicting his performers for the act of performing, for the sin of pride. His oeuvre includes various installments in the New Wave Hookers series and the Devil in Miss Jones series and Sex Freaks and is, from top to bottom, absolutely freaking filthy, dedicated to the task of making human sexual congress look inherently unwholesome and unnatural. No sentimentality here, and certainly no story--just dwarfs and clowns and people sniffing each other like dogs and snorting like pigs and screwing in cages or on top of mounds of dead fish. Once he filmed a girl getting gang-banged, and when it was over--the second it was over, when she was still lathered in sweat and spunk, when she was still breathing heavily, with a dazed look in her eyes--he asked her, on camera, if her stepfather had sexually abused her. And he made her answer. Creepy? Sure. But his audiences knew they were seeing something; they knew that this was for real ... and you know what? There were people who loved it! They lapped it up, especially the kids.

"There's a whole generation of kids who learned about sex from my fucked-up movies," Gregory Dark says. "A lot of gangster rappers and guys in heavy-metal bands still come up to me and say, 'Gregory Dark, I had my first sexual experience watching New Wave Hookers!' "

That's how he got out of porn--by the largesse of those he got into porn. There was a band, Sublime, and they were familiar with his work, and they asked him to make their video, and the video made it onto MTV, and Craig Fanning saw it and signed Gregory to a contract with F.M. Rocks, and now here he is, four years later, directing young Leslie Carter as tenderly as he once directed young Traci Lords.

"You know," he says, "I always approached those movies like I was some kind of anthropologist performing these experiments--to see what human beings would do, how far they would go. I kept waiting for people to tell me to fuck off.

"But no one ever did."

HE'D FOUND OUT ABOUT Leslie's issues the day before at a preproduction meeting in a studio on Melrose. He was sitting in a room with his producer, John Thorpe, and a cohort of digital artists and special-effects people. They were all looking at a bunch of storyboards and color photocopies scattered on the floor, trying to establish the visual language of the "Like, Wow!" video--trying to come up with images and colors--when Frances called. She wanted to know if he could stretch Leslie in the video to make her look taller and thinner. Yes, he said, though there was only so much he could do, because you don't want her to look distorted. Then she called back. John Thorpe answered, and when he hung up, he said to Gregory, "Frances wants to know if Leslie can wear black in the video."

"Why?" Gregory asked.

"Because it's the most slimming color."

"And what did you tell her?" Gregory asked.

"I told her we'd figure it out tomorrow, on the set."

"No," Gregory said and indicated the storyboards and photocopies on the floor, which were all images of toys and flowers and teary comic-book kisses in the manner of Roy Lichtenstein. "Look at this stuff. It's all about innocence and bright colors. She's going to have sunflowers shooting out of her fingers. She can't wear black in the video."

"Well, we'll tell her that tomorrow," John Thorpe said.

"No," Gregory said, rising excitedly off his seat. "Call her back. Tell her now. Tell her Leslie can't wear black. And tell her that if she keeps calling with these stupid questions, I'll push the video. I'll walk, and she won't have a director the day before the shoot. I don't care--"

"Gregory, relax. We'll tell her tomorrow."

Gregory smiled and sat back down. "I am relaxing," he said. "But sometimes you have to put your pimp hand down with these people. And that's what I'm doing. I am putting my pimp hand down. That's what Leslie needs, anyway. How old is she? Fourteen? I know exactly what she needs. She needs a street pimp and a crack habit. She needs someone to put the pimp hand down. Let her smoke crack for a year--she won't have to worry about wearing black. She'll be good to go."

"Gregory--" John Thorpe said.

"No, call Frances back. Tell her we're changing the scenario so that Leslie can wear black."

"Gregory--"

"Tell her we're going to have her sawed in half by a magician, except that she'll actually be sawed in half."

"Gregory--"

"Her intestines will be hanging out, and then all these cockroaches will start pouring out of her body while she looks on in horror. Tell Frances that--"

"Gregory ..."

Well, what do you want? It's Gregory Dark, after all, and the guy still looks ... well, he still looks diabolical, doesn't he? He might not want Leslie Carter wearing black in her video, but he's wearing black, from head to toe, because he never wears anything but. He's got black tattoos adorning his arms. He's got longish fingernails. He's got the goatee, and he's got ... he's got ... he's got pointed ears, man, big, flagrant flappers that each twist into some kind of visible apex, and he decorates himself with silver jewelry--silver rings, a silver neck chain, silver hoop earrings--and he even has some kind of aroma about him, not offensive, certainly, but sort of unfamiliar, sort of hard to place in a human being, maybe sort of evergreeny, spicy, like wintergreen and juniper. And his mind! His mind runs so reliably toward depravity that when he gets going, the people around him treat him as though he were an eighth-grade boy who by the very insistence of his perversity has acquired a weird kind of innocence. They know where he's going, know that he's going to start talking about naked pygmies poking spears into bloody sides of beef, but they all just laugh and smile, because that's just Gregory, and people, well, people--

"People like me," Gregory Dark says. "I mean, they seem to like me, right? I'm a pretty likable guy. ..." This is later, after the preproduction meeting, when Gregory's sitting in another room at the studio, behind a woman working to skinnyize images of Leslie Carter. There's an image of Leslie Carter on the monitor. She's wearing a pink top, and she has ... issues. Then the woman hits a button, clicks a mouse, and--blip!--she stretches, like an image transferred onto Silly Putty. Blip-bloop: Leslie has issues, and then she doesn't. She keeps going back and forth, and all the while Gregory's there, saying, "So, my world's really changed since I saw you last, right? I mean, now I'm surrounded by smart people. I used to be surrounded by really stupid people, all the time. I used to work for really stupid people and work with really stupid people. Now I work with really smart people, brilliant people, but people I work for--they're still not that smart. The record execs, I mean. They're very conservative. They're scared by the weird shit, and you know me--I like the weird shit. But now I've made a hundred music videos, and they can never say that Gregory Dark's not commercial, that Gregory Dark doesn't sell--you know, 'Let's not hire Gregory Dark, because all he wants to do is weird shit.' That used to be the case, but not anymore. I've changed. And people who get to know me, they like me, because I'm fair and I'm honest. I'm not like a lot of other people in the business--I don't try to fuck them. People might call me the devil, but at least I'm not an asshole. And so people like me. Like Britney Spears--she really liked me, even though her record company won't use me anymore, when it came out what I used to do. Mandy Moore really likes me. And my agent likes me. We're friends. I have a real agent now, with Paradigm."

He takes out his black cell phone, calls his agent, and immediately gets into a conversation about the movie he's trying to make for New Line, Stray Dawgz. It's a werewolf movie. It's urban. It's supposed to star Ice Cube as a guy battling werewolves. And it's supposed to have a budget of about $25 million, but now New Line keeps putting it off, and so Gregory's on the phone with his agent, saying, "Fuck New Line. They don't like me. They don't care about me, or else they wouldn't keep fucking around. So tell them I'm going to walk. I have a half-million dollars' worth of music-video work scheduled. Why should I keep on putting that off for people who don't give a shit about me?"

When he hangs up, though, his long, creased face is smiling in that hyperventilated way he has. "I'm not serious about any of that," he says. "I'm just trying to get my agent to work harder. That's what you're supposed to do in Hollywood. And the thing is, I like manipulating people. I'm comfortable manipulating people. I'm good at it."

Gregory Dark slumps in his chair and shakes his head while images of Leslie Carter are fed through the skinnyizer.

"How fucked up is that?" he says.

THE THING IS, "LIKE, WOW!" is a pretty good song. It's overproduced, sure, even to the point of being mechanistic, but under all that Orlandoesque clatter, you can actually hear a human being, and the human being, in this case, sounds as if she's fourteen years old, full of anxiety and uncertainty and genuine yearning. It's got a chance, which of course makes the video shoot that much more important, which of course is making Frances and Goldie tense, even when they smile. They hang around in the background, engaged in some kind of endless sidebar; they stay back, near Leslie's mother and sister--except that every so often, Frances comes forward to ask a question or to make a suggestion, either to John Thorpe or Craig Fanning or even to Gregory himself. And it's probably three hours into the shoot when she and Goldie come up with the idea of asking Gregory Dark to shoot Leslie in profile, the way she was shot for the cover of the "Like, Wow!" CD, because she's got a nice profile, because in profile her issues aren't so apparent.

And Leslie? Well, Leslie's getting tired. She's so young that she can't even kiss a boy in the video--she has to hold hands--and can't work more than eight hours without running afoul of child-labor laws, but how many takes has she done, lip-synching "Like, Wow!" for Gregory Dark's camera? Twenty? Thirty? Who knows--because by this time, Leslie herself has kind of blurred into an abstraction, and so when Frances suggests the slimming angle to John Thorpe, John Thorpe suggests it to Craig Fanning, Craig Fanning suggests it to Gregory Dark, Gregory Dark suggests it to Tony, her coach, Tony suggests it to Leslie, and Leslie stands bravely in front of the camera, her spacious chin cocked over her shoulder, and promptly dies. It's true. She just dies up there, and the look of scrambled terror that steals into her eyes--that winds up fixed in her lovely eyes--is reproduced on video monitors all over the studio. Her shoulders slump, her movements congeal, the breath flees her body, and suddenly everybody who applauded her after the first take--Mom and Sis! Goldie and Frances!--is back up again, cheering her through this last impossible one. Even the cameraman is hopping around and dancing, and yet still, what everybody sees in the video monitors is a girl who looks as though she's about to cry and who, upon the last booming note of "Like, Wow!" collapses into her sister's consoling arms.

"You can't keep telling her all the things she's doing wrong!" Tony pleads to Craig Fanning. "She's fourteen years old! You keep telling what she's doing wrong, she's going to cut off, like she just did! You saw what just happened! She just cut off."

"Fourteen-year-olds are not stupid," Craig Fanning answers calmly. "They can understand what you tell them to do. You tell Britney Spears or Christina Aguilera or Mandy Moore to do something, believe me, they do it, no questions asked, because they're professionals. What Leslie has to learn is that this is not about her. It's not about Leslie Carter. In fact, she has learn to void herself of Leslie Carter and become a professional."

And now Gregory Dark stands up from behind his monitor. He's been there all morning, exuding ashen calm, and now he stands up and approaches Leslie Carter. And Leslie looks at him, at his approach, with ... fear, yes. She's wide-eyed. It's Gregory Dark, and she's too tired to defend herself, but when he reaches her, he touches her shoulder with his hand ... those long fingernails ... and tells her, in his soft voice, to take a break, to get some rest, that she's doing just fine and everything will be all right.

IT'S NOT LIKE HE REALLY WANTED to do the Leslie Carter video in the first place. It's not like he was all excited about it. He just wrote a scenario, the way he does when he's bidding on any other job, and DreamWorks liked it. The scenario was heavy on special effects, heavy on postproduction, heavy on the manipulation of Leslie's image. Gregory was literally going to turn Leslie Carter into a puzzle; he was going to break her face and her body into little pieces and put them back together again, and then he was going to pixelate her face so that it looked like an image you see in comic books. Like all of Gregory Dark's work, the video was going to be curious, visually, so he was surprised when he got the job, and he was surprised when he started putting DreamWorks off and DreamWorks kept insisting that they liked his scenario, that they liked him, that they were willing to wait, that they wanted Gregory Dark to direct the "Like, Wow!" video. Then he saw Leslie, and it all made sense. She had issues, and DreamWorks needed a director who would make Leslie's video ... curious.

But that's the thing with all the video work he's been getting. It, like, comes to him. He was a pornographer, sure, maybe even the worst pornographer ... but it's not like he sits around plotting to direct Britney Spears, Mandy Moore, and Leslie Carter so that he can corrupt them and the little girls who idolize them. And it's not like he has to worry about making them pornographic, either--about straying over the boundaries of taste, about eroticizing them, about fetishizing them, about doing all the things he used to do as a pornographer. They've already been eroticized and fetishized by the culture itself. In 1985, he directed Traci Lords and he was very nearly a criminal ... but now the entire culture is besotted with the erotic promise of teenage girls, and so by the time they come to Gregory Dark, the girls have already been, well, pornographied. Britney Spears? That's a porn name if there ever was one, no matter if it's her real name or not. That Rolling Stone cover of Christina Aguilera with her shorts unzipped and her athletic tongue licking her lascivious lips? That's a porn box cover, though without the usual accoutrement of bodily fluids. The lure of jailbait now supplies the erotic energy to a popular culture desperate for what's new, what's young, what's alive; and the pornographication of the American girl has proceeded at such a pace that, as curious as the phenomenon of Gregory Dark directing a girl like Leslie Carter in a music video seems even to Gregory Dark himself, it also makes perfect sense. It seems almost inevitable, and the really weird part is, well, when Leslie Carter comes back from her break, she seems refreshed, renewed, but still a little spooked, though not by Gregory Dark. No--and as the afternoon wears on and she keeps going back to the dressing room with her mother and Frances and Goldie, in the hope of finding that one magic outfit that will obscure her issues, she disappears for longer and longer periods of time, until at last she doesn't come back at all, and Gregory has to dispatch John Thorpe to see what's going on. And then Thorpe disappears for a while, too, and when he comes back, he's, like, shaken, and says, "You wouldn't believe what's going on up there. It's surreal. I mean, Leslie, she doesn't even want to be here. It's all the mother. They keep having Leslie try on outfits, and all Leslie keeps saying is, 'When can we go? I want to go home.' And Goldie's up there saying, 'Think urban.' Urban! Leslie Carter's from Orlando. She's not urban!"

And so the weird part is, when Leslie comes back downstairs and steps in front of the camera, and Gregory starts shooting her in shards and pieces as she valiantly lip-synchs "Like, Wow!"--a shot of one of her eyes, a shot of her nose, a shot of her mouth, a shot of her cheek, her fingers, her lip, her toes, everything in what Gregory calls "asymmetrical quadrants," so that Leslie Carter can literally be taken apart and disassembled in postproduction--he speaks to her softly, and she looks at him as if he's the only person on the set she can trust to put her all back together again.

I LIKED THE GUY. Then I went and saw him make a porno movie--saw him do things just because he could and saw him turn a woman's compliance into humiliation--and I wasn't sure I liked him so much anymore. Now he was telling me he was a changed man. He was telling me he was a gentleman, and as proof he offered his behavior toward a young woman on the set at the Leslie Carter shoot. She was "built for fun," he said. Not just because she was young and pretty--she was vulnerable. There was a brittleness about her. She had long hair with henna in it. She had small features and pale skin. She was wearing a black leather coat, platformy shoes, a shirt that rode up on her midriff. She had a little pale belly. She was eighteen years old, and, okay, she was Leslie Carter's sister. She was one of the Orlando Carters. Her mother had introduced her to Gregory early in the morning. The mother had very blond hair and very white teeth. She wore a kind of tailored sweat suit of powder blue, and a diamond necklace hung around her neck. She said her daughter couldn't sing like Nick or Aaron or Leslie but was studying to be an actress; she had an agent and a head shot. When the mother told Gregory that she would have the agent send him the girl's head shot, the girl flushed and apologized for herself, and when he walked away, Gregory told me that Leslie Carter's sister reminded him of girls he'd known in his previous life--girls who didn't look as pretty to themselves as they looked to others; girls who needed to be told how pretty they were; girls who didn't know themselves as well as he knew them. And so he'd shown them who they were and what they wanted, and they never said no. When he used to arrive on the set of a pornographic movie, well, it's hard to explain, but he was treated almost as though he were some kind of spiritual presence or something.

Built for fun? They were the hottest women in the world! They would do anything! And he had sex with them whenever he wanted! He was a Viking! Now, though, he was ... a gentleman, and, indeed, every time Leslie Carter's sister came anywhere near him, he went the other way or emitted, through clenched teeth, a sort of pitiful high-pitched moan, the cry of a creature in the act of resisting temptation. "I've mended my ways, you understand?" he said to me, and then, as if to prove it, took out his cell phone to leave a message for a woman he'd just started dating. She was, he said, "the first straight girl I've ever gone out with," and when I asked him to define his terms, he said, "the first girl who is not a porn star, a stripper, a call girl, or a dominatrix. She's like a lady, with a bread box and all that. She asked me in the other night, and I said, Not on the first date."

You see, it isn't as if he stopped liking what he liked before--the weird shit. No, if his pornographic movies were about anything, they were about the grotesque persistence of our pleasures and the possibility of following them unto perdition. No, you don't mend your ways because you stop liking what you like; you mend your ways because you, like Gregory Dark, grow scared of liking what you like forever, of liking what you like alone, of liking what you like unloved--because that would make you the devil. Is Gregory Dark the devil? Well, he sure as hell doesn't want to be, and recently he began to worry that he would never be able to connect with anyone else, that he would never be able to find a "nice girl" in L. A., that he would live alone and die alone, without anyone even knowing his real last name. Then he met the lady with the bread box, and to his gratified surprise, they connected on their first date, so much so that he was very frank with her about what he wanted from her, about what he desired, and was very frank with me when we went out to dinner after the "Like, Wow!" shoot. And as it turns out, Gregory Dark wants what everyone else wants: He wants to love and be loved. He wants someone to talk to as he grows old. He wants a child. He wants a family. He wants to reconcile with his mother before she dies. He wants to make a real movie, so he will finally be thought of as a director--"a member of the club"--rather than as a reprobate ex-pornographer. And he wants to inspire someone with his success; he wants someone to look at his life and say, If Gregory Dark can change, then so can I.

"You know, all it takes for you to do something in this life is for one person to believe in you. One person. Remember that guy I told you about, Walter Gernert? He was the worst human being I've ever met. He was cruel and vicious and greedy. But he believed in me. He created me, for better and for worse. And I'm hoping I can do that for somebody else. Maybe they'll go out and do something good with it."

He paused to look over his shoulder at the TV in the restaurant. He had no interest in it, but I kept telling him to look at it, because it was historic--because it was Election Night, and the nation was just beginning its slide into stasis. He did, and then went right back to talking about the last things on earth he desires.

He said, "It must be weird hearing this shit from Gregory Dark the devil, right?"

WE WENT BACK to his apartment. It's a dingy place in Hollywood, old by L. A. standards, with two bedrooms, two floors, a lot of books, and editing equipment. I had been there a long time ago, when he had a coffin in his living room. I had been there the night before, when the lady with the bread box called him and wanted to come over, and Gregory went into a frenzy of prophylaxis--"Put away the books on black magic!" he cried. He has quite a few books on black magic. They were his father's. His father was an occultist. He used to read to Gregory from the works of Aleister Crowley, the noted satanist, when Gregory was very young, and Gregory has kept some of the books in his collection--his only heirloom. Now, tonight, in his apartment, he excused himself to call his lady friend, although it was very late. "Goodnight, my love," he said to her. "Are you sad? Don't be sad. I miss you, sweetheart. Goodnight." He spoke to her in a voice of amazing plaintive tenderness, considering they had just started dating, and when he hung up the phone, he made a face--he flinched, for he had sensed in her voice a resistance, a fear, a demurral. He rubbed his face and sat for a while. He looked suddenly old and bereft, even ancient, and wondered if he was going to be judged as a pornographer forever. "So I made a couple of porno movies. Big deal. Brian De Palma made a porno movie! I didn't hurt anybody. Am I proud of everything I did? Am I proud of driving the final nail in some girl's coffin, of making her more of a whore than she started out being? No, I'm not. But do you know why I did it? Do you know why I made those movies the way I did? Because I needed to be entertained!"

Then he said that he decided he didn't want a magazine article written about him. He said that he didn't want me to mess with him anymore--indeed, he used those words, "I don't want you to mess with me anymore." He said that if I wanted to be his friend, I could be his friend--"I don't have many friends"--but that if I wanted to be his friend, then I couldn't write an article. He didn't want to be driven by the sin of pride, the way everybody else in L. A. was--everybody who wants articles written about them, everybody who wants their name up in lights. "People say the porn girls are damaged," he says. "But everybody out here is--all the stars. Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman can't go out to eat in a restaurant. They can't go out to a movie. Who wants to live like that? Damaged people. But not me. You know what I want? I want to be anonymous. I want to be invisible. Already too many people know who I am, and I hate it. I was walking in a mall in the Valley the other day, and two girls came up to me. They were, like, in high school or something, and they had seen my movies. They said, Are you Gregory Dark? I said no and kept on walking. ..."

I went home and wrote an article about him anyway. I wrote this article, and when the time came for the research department to check its factual accuracy, a woman named Annie called him up. She is twenty-six years old and has a bright young voice on the phone. He took her call, and she told him she had some questions to ask him about the story. He was slow to answer, until he started asking questions of his own. He asked her how old she was. He asked how long her hair was and what she was wearing. Then he asked her if she liked what she was wearing--if it made her feel pretty. She paused. Oh, c'mon, he said--you said you would answer my questions.

"Do you feel pretty today, Annie?" Gregory Dark asked.

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