I was holding in my hand, palmed like a basketball, the back of my co-star’s head. She was kneeling before me on the ground. I couldn’t remember her name; I’d only worked with her a few times before. Her wide-open mouth, poised just an inch away from the head of my large member, reminded me momentarily of Hellmouth, or the Mouth of Hell, an artistic representation first appearing in Anglo-Saxon art.

I’d studied the Anglo-Saxon period of English history briefly in graduate school before dropping out. “It should scare you: art.” That was what my faculty advisor had told me. “Good art, in the participation of it, whether as creator or as participant, should scare you.”

Hellmouth or the Mouth of Hell, by Simon Marmion, from the Getty Tondal, detail, ca. 1475.

I was scared by Hellmouth. I sill am. These artistic representations that spread across Europe in the Middle Ages and reached into the Renaissance, showed hell as the gaping mouth of a monster. It made me wonder now how many times I’d “gone deepthroat,” as we say in the industry, into the Mouth of Hell over the course of my long amateur and professional career. It was hard to say, exactly. I knew only that she would be my last, this Krystal or Sugar or Porsche or Tina or Nikki or Alexis or Candy.

I had given my two-week notice. I was retiring. They were going to throw me a party with a phallus-shaped cake as I’d seen them do with the older guys when they could not longer keep it up and when, to cut production costs, they had to simulate Achieving the Meaning of Life, or AMOL, as we called it for short, with sugar-water thickened with starch. I wasn’t going to be that guy. I was getting out with my dignity, while still full of juice.

But I suddenly wanted—silly or sentimental as it was—to savor it. I really wanted to know what it might feel like to be in the moment, to not feel the pressure, the crunch of the deadline. I could even ask her out. I considered doing that now, with my member in her mouth, while the director, the infamous Robert Chang, yelled from off camera, “Good, good, good!”

I could ask her again for her name and what she was doing afterwards and if she wanted go out to dinner and look at some art. I had long fantasized about taking a woman back to my place and playing a game of Scrabble. We all knew where this was going to end up, and more than anything, this saddened me, for I did not want it to end. I wanted to enjoy the look on her face this one final time before I pulled out and as cliché as it sounds, I understand, but, nevertheless, with a grunt, shot my wad into her eye.