It is a clement spring day in greater Los Angeles, and James Deen is driving through the soft green tumescences of the Calabasas hills on his way to a pornographic-movie shoot. If Deen betrays not a trace of anticipation, aversion, or excitement at the prospect of having sex on-camera today, it is because having sex on-camera is something the 26-year-old does more frequently than most of us use dental floss: "About 360 days a year" is Deen's offhand tally.

Deen's professional relentlessness has yielded a host of accolades. In 2009, when he was 23, the Adult Video News (AVN) Awards, pornography's Oscars, named Deen "Male Performer of the Year." (Deen was one of the youngest actors ever to be so decorated.) This on the heels of a similar distinction from the X-Rated Critics Organization, which in 2007 noted the arrival of a major talent with an "Unsung Swordsman" award.

Industry plaudits aside, Deen has managed an order of renown far rarer in the world of pornographic film: He is a male performer people actually know by name. According to Deen, 10,000 unique visitors peruse his blog every day. Women seem to like him. A recent Nightline segment alerted parents to Deen's crossover appeal among teenage girls, who, the piece warned, hold for Deen a place in their hearts alongside Timberlake and Bieber. (Anchor Terry Moran: "For any parent concerned about what their teen does online, the huge popularity of the young man you are about to meet may be deeply disturbing.")

A visit to the comments section of Deen's website appears to confirm _Nightline'_s claims:

"Hey James :) I'm 16 years old and i love your work"

"hey (; have you EVER banged a teen latina ? e-mail me...."

"i would totally rock your world...mind you im 16 about to be 17."

Deen brakes his truck at the bottom of a steep gated driveway,** **which leads to a sprawling mansion that looks made of nougat. Its dominant interior materials are faux gilt, beveled glass, and plastic flora. The game room, which is as big as my house, contains dartboards, a pool table, and a saloon area with a neon sign reading ICE CREAM fid above the mirrored back bar. The house's real-life owner, one supposes, is a fabulously well-to-do 14-year-old.

But today the mansion's fictive owner is James Deen himself, who has been cast in the role of a priapic millionaire with a gambling problem. The shoot is for a company called Digital Playground, which claims to specialize in "high-end" pornography for couples—"vanilla porn," as hard-raunch aficionados dub DP's output.

"As far as making visually stimulating erotic cinema, Digital Playground's pretty much the best," says Deen. "Personally, I hate it. It's too pretty. When I'm watching adult, I don't care about the lighting. I want to see dirty, nasty: Rocco Siffredi"—an Italian porn star known for full-contact choreographies in which he dragoons pretty ladies into tonguing his caboose.

Over the next seven days, Deen will exercise his full array of talents and preferences on seven projects in three cities—Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Las Vegas. I will be riding shotgun in Deen's utterly bitching pumpkin orange off-road-package Ford F-150 Raptor, watching him work, and trying to make sense of his extraordinary life.

I have many questions:

First off, brooking so much unremitting daily friction, how has James Deen's penis not been stropped to raw liver? "I don't know. I guess I've got pretty thick skin."

How does he keep his houseplants alive with so much travel? He doesn't. All the plants in Deen's 4,200-square-foot home in the San Fernando Valley have died.

Gosh, but mustn't Deen have an astonishing collection of venereal diseases? He and his colleagues undergo testing every month. Deen claims, incredibly, to never have had a test come back "dirty."