Smile for the Camera
Chapter One:
Time for a Little Exposition
By Pendragon
I have made a living out of exploiting the personal affairs of the rich and famous. I have ruined careers, rejuvenated a few others, been sued more times than the LAPD, and have generally been looked at with contempt for most of my professional life. Hi, I’m Steve Murdoch. I’m a paparazzo.
Most people think that it’s paparazzi, but those people are wrong. That’s the plural. By myself, I’m a paparazzo. Well, enough with the faux modesty, I’m the paparazzo. The shots of Meryl Streep spilling wine on her blouse, causing her dinner partner to tap her bosoms with a damp napkin in a of-so-sensual manner? That was me. Drew Barrymore giving Tom Green a BJ in their yacht? Me. Paris Hilton being…well…being Paris Hilton? If it involves her pubic hair (or in Lindsay Lohan's case, a famous lack thereof), it probably was captured by my camera. I get the shots that no one else can get. Publicists wake up at 4 AM in a cold sweat screaming my name. I am the toast and the terror of Tinseltown. And the best part? No one knows who I am.
Most paparazzi make the mistake of just following celebrities around. Their targets get to know who they are and, more likely than not, they eventually wind up with a broken camera or a broken nose. Their shots are limited to Red Carpet glam shots, and perhaps the eventual walk to the courthouse. Sometimes they stumble upon something good, something juicy, something to justify the years spent waiting with a camera outside the Sunset Boulevard In and Out, but this is the exception that proves the rule. Not for me. I get the real dirt. Always. I invade privacy like it was an oil rich Middle Eastern country. And I get results, profitable results, to the tune of $10,000 a roll.
What’s my secret? Well, you probably wouldn’t believe me if I told you.
You really want to know? Alrighty. Here goes.
*Ahem* Had to clear my throat. This is a long one.
*Hack hack hack*
God I need to give up smoking.
It started quite innocently. I was an artistic kid in High School. Same at college. Things were pretty normal for me. I got decent grades, excelled in photography, and spent my afternoons taking candids in the girl’s locker rooms. I loved it. The thrill of seeing what no other guy could see, of risking a knee in the balls or a thirty day suspension or a trip to the dean's office to get my kicks. And, for the longest time, I didn’t get caught. Things went well until the field hockey team heard a puttering fart coming from the “out of order” stall in front of the showers. Once I got my cast removed and I figured out a way to smooth things over with the dean (bribes are never a bad start, shots of him fucking a girl on the field hockey team is an even better one), I dedicated my afternoons to finding a way to remove this painful, embarrassing hurdle from my path to pure voyeurism. As much of a jolt of pleasure I got from the omnipresent danger of being caught, I decided it wasn’t worth 2 months in traction and getting my food fed to me intravenously. The sponge baths I liked. Except when Herman was on call, of course. Oy, that image is going to be stuck in there for a while.
Claire Danes. Nicole Kidman. Eva Longoria. Desperate Housewives. The Desperate Housewives cast party. The hot tub at the Desperate Housewives cast party. The effects of a jug of sangria on the cast of Desperate Housewives while they frolic naked in the hot tub... Ahhhh. OK, mind clear. Panicky repressed homosexual childhood memories filed back in the “do not open” section of my cerebrum.
Anywho, right. I looked for a way to make my innocent picture taking as safe as photographing a sedated kitten. A really sexy kitten. A sexy coed kit…alright, the kitten metaphor was unfortunate. Anyway, this took a while. The rest of college came and went. Classes, beer, exams, beer, all-nighters, bad acid trips, and lots of dorm room masturbation. And sometimes, there was beer. Before I knew it, I woke up with a job doing web design for the DOD in D.C. (this was long before my paparazzi work made it imperative for me to move to L.A.), and I still hadn’t found a solution to my problem.
Long story short, while I was setting up a couple of web cams under the desk of my boss, Ms. Schilling, I found, hidden in a false drawer, the confidential schematics to a very promising device, of which I promptly took several very detailed photos. After a few months of tinkering, I had my workable prototype. After a few successful trial runs, I tendered my resignation for the last 9-5 job I’d ever hold. The very next day, I took the device out in the field. It was a day that would change my life forever. That was about 8 years ago.
Being the ceremonial sort, I returned to my old university, thinking it would be the perfect place to usher in my new life. But when I got to the campus and saw the kids, I realized how much time had passed. I was a rather conspicuous twenty something in the midst of kids. And dear god, they looked young. Too young. Scarily young. Not sexual at all young. Well, yeah, they were sexual. But. Well, it’s weird. When you’re smoking pot in the dorms, you’re convinced that you’re an adult. Now that I was an adult, a real one with a mortgage and everything, I couldn’t see them as anything besides kids. I won’t say that girls in short skirts and halter-tops can’t get my engine going. It just didn’t feel right. Plus, the security guard was coming in my direction, stroking his nightstick. So I decided it would be prudent to fuck ceremony and find a much less conspicuous target. After all, this was my first time. I was a novice. And a novice doesn’t go to a place with so many variables. I needed something…more controlled.
So, I went where every twenty something goes when they have to blow off some sexual steam. I went to the local strip club, the one by the airport.
I parked my Civic hatchback in the parking lot of the grocery store across the street from the club. Less conspicuous that way. I began to cross the street when I realized that it was still about 11 in the morning. Somehow, I doubted that entering a strip club while the sun was still out was going to help out on the conspicuousness front. So, I decided to head back to my car, opened up a flask, and took another look at my equipment.
First, there was my old high school Nikon. Not the best out there, but I had owned it for so long, it felt like another part of me. With it, I had a camera bag which I could secure around my chest like Chewbacca’s chest belt thingy. The bag also held about 5 rolls of film (and a jar of lube) and had space for an extra lens, a super nice 10x zoom which, with all the digital shit I'm using now, is now so incredibly obsolete it's not even funny. It had gotten me a shot of Brenda Butler’s camel toe from the bleachers while she was cheering at the homecoming game during my junior year. Good times. But I was so comfortable with my lenses it that I could attach them blindfolded. Then there was the device. I won’t bore you with the details. It would take pages upon pages to give you the inner workings and, frankly, I don’t want to risk giving up any trade secrets. I’ll just give you the basics on how to use it, but not on how it works. It fits on the belt, like a cell phone holder. There’s a series of scans and sensors that required weeks of mind numbing busy work before hand to set a containment field around my person, my equipment, and my clothing. And, with a couple of knobs twisted and a full battery and a press of a clichéd red button, I can shrink myself downwards of about 2 millimeters tall.
That’s how I do it. Makes sense, huh? Now you know why my photos usually have a very unique perspective to them. That’s not artistic, that’s just the way it works. I can shrink myself down, get into a celebrity’s inner sanctum, and take photos that give the people at Star, Us Weekly, and hundreds of other publications raging hard-ons.
Here’s the one drawback. As you can probably guess, this thingy requires massive amounts of electricity. Much more so to reenlarge than to shrink. And devices that are as portable as this can’t have huge ass battery packs attached. That would just erase any benefits of portability. The solution? The device has a solar charger. That makes it pretty easy for me, seeing as a good 70% of my pics are outside, at the beach, at a cafe, on the street, whatever. I can shrink down, take my pics, charge up for about 5 or 6 hours, get big again, and then run off to develop my film. Nowadays I can just upload my pics, sometimes before reenlargement, but back in the day I had to develop them the old fashioned way. So, you got the basics down? Good, I don’t want to have to explain it again.
So where was I? Oh yes, sitting in my Honda in the parking lot of the Giant grocery store across from the Girls Room strip club, about a mile away from Dulles Airport, taking swigs of SoCo from my flask and listening to WHFS as I waited for a more decent time to enter the club. In my rearview mirror, I saw a single limo pull up in front of the club and a shadowy figure stepped out, surrounded by two giant muscle-bound thugs. The figure entered the club, the limo pulled away, and the two thugs stood guard outside the club door. It was 4 PM. The girls had probably just shown up. Something was going on. If only I could see what.
Oh yeah.
I stepped out of my car and casually crossed the street, making it look like I was just headed to the 7/11. Once I was out of the sight of the guards, I made my way to the side of the strip club, took a deep breath, and shrunk myself to 1/4 an inch tall.
The first couple of times I shrunk myself back at my apartment, I threw up. A lot.
Luckily, the throw up was microscopic in size, so I didn’t have to clean it up. Outside the club I still felt sick, but I was able to keep my lunch safely inside of my stomach. Not knowing how much time I would have I ran over to the back door of the club, a 20 foot run that now was about a mile long. However, not too long after I shrunk myself, I saw a car park in the back of the lot and a girl in sweats and jean shorts step out. She walked over to where I was, pausing mere yards (my scale) from me as she finished her cigarette. One of the strippers. I had just found my ride. Throwing caution to the wind, I dashed to her foot and jumped a good inch or so onto the toe section of her sandals. Now, a one-inch vertical may not seem like much to you, but at 1/4 an inch, it’s like being on the moon and getting a nice 25-foot jump. One of the nice side effects of the shrinking.
After nearly being thrown off the foot as the girl stomped out her cigarette, I held on as she entered through the back door and walked into the dressing room. She opened the door, stepped in, and gasped, too shocked to take another step.
A gruff voice barked out. “Private party, girl. Stupid bitch. Knock next time. Fucking whore. Oh yeah. That’s the way I like it. Ohhhhh. Let me call you Mammie…”
I looked up to see who my ride had interrupted. It was the shadowy figure from before. Except, under the harsh fluorescents of the dressing room, he was no longer shadowy. Instead, he was the senior Senator from Alabama. The famously racist senior Senator from Alabama. The famously happily married and famously racist senior Senator from Alabama. The famously happily married and famously racist senior Senator from Alabama sticking his 3-inch cock into the mouth of an incredibly bored looking African-American woman. I hopped off the departing sandal and raised my camera. I wasn't even thinking about going into the celeb shooting biz, I just started clicking. It wasn't until I was safe back home that the idea of faxing them to the Enquirer first entered my mind. That roll alone netted me about $25k and more than established my name among paparazzi industry insiders (and a more sad and depressing group you'll never find) as a guy to watch.
That part of the day, the watching a 65-year-old man get sucked off part, was pretty boring, rather disturbing, and really not very much fun for me. It was just sad, really. Profitable, but sad. An old, stupid relic of the past getting his jollies off in an ironically amusing manner. It only took a few more minutes for him to finish up, slap down a few grand, and head back to shore up support with his party so he could pass some sort of bill to stave off our country’s moral decay. My day was looking much more strenuous. I still had to make it outside, charge up the device, and re-enlarge. Why leave now, just because I had accidentally stumbled upon a hugely embarrassing political scandal? I was 1/4 an inch tall in the dressing room of a strip club. There was no way in hell I was going home now. A ran to a nice corner of the dressing room, one with some nice ambient lighting, and prepared to fill my next four rolls with naked stripper flesh.
As the women started filing in, giving condolences to the poor demeaned girl, undressing and preparing to go on stage, my camera flashed. I shot my film wad early. 4 rolls in about 27 minutes. My trigger finger and my left hand were pretty sore. And my lube jar was empty. But I wasn’t sated. Something was missing. Something that had been impossible as a lurking perv in the bathroom stall. I wanted to get closer. I had to get closer. I would get closer. I secured my camera in its bag and set off to make contact.
It was ironic, really. The girls at the university, most in their late teens, early twenties, didn’t feel right. Even when I was still their age. And the women at the club weren’t any older, really. Maybe they were ages 19-23 instead of 18-22. But there was something about what they did, their dancing on stage, the theatrics, that made them older. Sexual maturity? At a strip club? They had a need for attention that was remarkable. It aged them without altering them physically. They felt old, no matter how young their bodies were. And I was going to give them all the attention they could crave. They just wouldn’t know about it. Weird, huh? I think that’s why I’ve gotten so good with photographing celebrities, especially those of the female variety. I can feed into their need to be loved without them knowing how much I loved them for wanting to be loved.
Man. I really need to lay off the reefer. If that made any sense to you, then I have a fence that I’m sure you’d love whitewashing. And then…pirate gold and Injun Joe and my best friend will have a pseudo sexual with his slave friend raft ride down the Mississippi and…uh…
Anywho, with my equipment firmly secured, I screwed my courage and took a couple of my NASA leaps towards the stiletto heel of the closest stripper. When I reached it, finding a temporary resting point between her big and second toes, I swore at myself for having used all my film. I was getting angles and distortions that created a vertigo in my head and a stirring in my crotch. From the shiny truck sized toenails to the skyscrapers of leg above me, I just wanted to take picture after picture. But, with no film, I instead began the long climb up what appeared to be a mountainous 21-year-old girl in a leather nurse’s outfit.
Luckily, I had developed a nice little way of speeding up the process. I would grab onto something- a tiny piece of leg stubble, the beginnings of her leggings, whatever gave me a handhold, and would use the normally weak, now proportionally strong muscles in my arms to hurl my tiny mass up into the air. This way, I could travel about an inch or so at a time up the girl, sometimes sliding a bit farther down when I couldn’t find a handhold. It was still slow, but going an inch at a time on a girl who is a couple of shades over 60 inches isn’t a bad deal. The physics of my situation definitely made me feel like Spider-Man, sans totally revealing costume and any vestige of a moral compass. With great power came great responsibility to abuse said power. A few weeks later, I would even later develop a glove with climbing spikes that would let me create a handhold anywhere on a woman without her feeling anything more than a hint of a slight itch. My moral compass…that’s still in development. I’d A&R it more, but I’m having much more fun being a giant perv photographer who’s filthy fucking rich. But that’s just me.
Getting back to the story, I had just found my way into the leather panties of the nurse costume when my stripper host began her short walk from the dressing room to the stage.
I had only a moment or two, as the girl waited for her selected stripping music to start, to figure out what I was going to do. The leather panties she wore covered an even skimpier thong. Should I stay here in the panties or try and hide myself in the tighter confines of the thong? Oh, the choices men must make. Before I could make up my mind, though, Talk Dirty to Me began to blare on the loudspeakers and my attention became consumed by the wild gyrations of the stripper’s ample hips. The hips that zigged when I thought that they were going to zag. The hips that soon became smaller and smaller in my vision as I was flung off of them into the house of the gradually filling girlie club. I landed someplace hard and promptly passed the fuck out.
When I awoke, I was sore, but none the worse for wear. The sounds around me were deafening. The strip club was in full gear. I could hear the sounds of working guys shoving hard earned bills into g-strings. A subtle sound, but easy to hear when you're friggin microscopic. I still had no idea where I had landed. So I got on my groggy knees, then to my feet, and tried my best to get my bearings.
I was on one of the patron's tables, which was, luckily, vacant at the moment. From the lack of bottles or condensation on the table, I don't think anyone had been sitting there all night. Which was odd, because the joint was packed. Well, it was odd until I saw the sign with Reserved stenciled on it in stuck between the salt and peppershakers. Reserved for who?
I heard the faintest rumblings behind me and a group of men in black suits, muscle-bound all to hell, came into the club, all in a circle, surrounding a mysterious figure in black. No, this wasn't the aforementioned Senator. This was someone else. Someone shorter. With long black hair. I couldn't see any more at the time. Until the mass of suited thugs made a beeline for the very table where I was situated. I was going to get a very good luck at who this well guarded figure was. I rushed over to the two-story saltshaker, to try and make my tiny form as unnoticeable as possible.
The group of men parted and a very curvaceous figure, wearing what looked to be a five-figure tailored suit, sat herself down in the chair directly in front of me. The bodyguards immediately reformed ranks in a semicircle, letting their employer get an unhindered view of the stage, whilst anyone one else in the club would only see bulging biceps and ear pieces. I drank in what was in front of me.
The subtly pinstriped suit contained, but did not attempt to subdue, the massive breasts kept locked under Italian silk and a wispily thin white dress shirt, opened 4 buttons down to give the most erotic suggestion of cleavage. One perfectly manicured hand held a bottle of tequila, the other was motioning towards a dancer with a hundred dollar bill rolled up tightly in a cylinder between her fingers. Her hair was pulled back in a bun. Her lips so fuller than the moon in Neil Armstrong's wildest dreams. Yet her features were so massive, I couldn't quite place her...
A dancer, panting from her pole set, wearing garters and heels and nothing more, sashayed next to this still unidentified, freakishly familiar figure. The mystery woman took a Hoover dam swig of tequila, offered the bottle to the woman, and snapped her then empty hands fingers. A grunt reached into his pocket and took out a shiny metal case.
I couldn't tell what the case contained, because the stripper, before taking her swig of tequila, had grabbed at the very same saltshaker that I had been hiding behind. It lifted away so she could tap some salt onto the back of her hand to act as a chaser for the amber colored liquid. I was exposed in the middle of a table, with a stripper, an obviously rich and powerful woman, and a gaggle of goons. I couldn't be found. I'd never make it out of there, except as a smudge on the table. So I did the only thing I could think of. I used the little juice that was left in my device to shrink to the limit - 2 millimeters. If I could avoid getting seen now, I'd figure out escaping later.
Unfortunately, as I activated my machine, the mysterious metal case opened up. Tons of white crystals poured out onto the table. Cocaine, natch. As the table and my surroundings got even bigger than their already insane proportions, I finally figured out who that woman was. She was in the news, having just been named a UN Goodwill ambassador. She was in town to meet the President before going on her first humanitarian tour to Somalia.
It was Angelina Jolie. I was looking up at Angelina Jolie. Who had a rolled up Benjamin up her nose. Which was coming down right over my current location.
Seriously, I had never been more bummed to be out of film. If I had been able to get just one shot of that, I'd have my own Caribbean island right now.
I really can't tell you what it's like being shoved up someone's nose. One second I was in a snowstorm of blow. The next, I was weightless. Then, I was in a damp black abyss. The sinus cavities of a 20 mill a picture superstar. A very drunk, very high superstar.
The next few hours...well, all I could hear were feminine moans and all I could smell was pussy and booze. I was kinda pissed I was missing it all, but I was happy enough to be safe. Well, as safe as being lodged next to a woman's brain can really be. After she left the club, she got a phone call from her husband, which I could kinda hear from my vantage point. At that time she was still married to that Sling Blade guy...what's his name...Billy Joe? Billy Bob? Something.
After she hung up, I remember wondering out loud, "What's a hot piece of ass like Angelina Jolie doing with that scrub? I thought she'd be with, I dunno, Brad Pitt or something."
So. Yeah. My bad, America.
Eventually, Jolie had to sneeze, and I was propelled from my hiding place into her gigantic hands. Which she then wiped against the front of her multi thousand-dollar skirt. The snot hardened around me and I could only laugh about the absurdity of my situation. I was where no man had ever been before. And by that, I mean stuck to Angelina Jolie's skirt, not stuck between her legs. Because many many men had been there before. I took a moment to let it sink in. This whole aura of celebrity, of being closer to it than anyone else ever could be...it was exhilarating. I mean, I had been up Jolie's nose! I had gotten that sick feeling of pleasure from this one-way intimacy, this surreal closeness in proximity. I knew that if I could do this all the time, I'd be a happy man.
It was then that I realized we were on a plane. To Mogadishu.
Many many many hours later, (after seeing Jolie join the mile high club with one of her bodyguards while lying on the bottom of an airplane restroom, still stuck with dried mucus to her skirt) we deplaned in the blazing heat of Somalia's capital city. I eventually detached from my host and was able to recharge my device's battery with a few hours in the sun.
So there I was, an American without a passport in Somalia, with little money, no contacts, smelling vaguely of alcohol, mucus, and cocaine. And I had never been happier.
I won't bore you with how I got back to the States. Suffice it to say, it would have been easier to stay shrunken and stuck to Angelina's skirt as she toured sub-Saharan Africa for the better part of the month. But I did get back. And within two weeks of my return, I was 25k richer, and had brought down one of the most powerful Senators in the country. And I had my bags packed for what I thought was going to be a quick trip to LA to make a couple more bucks. That quick trip has lasted 8 years. And I haven't gotten sick of it yet.
I'm Steve Murdoch. And I take pictures.