Episode 1: "Gretchen Hill"

"Where Porn Stars Go to Die" is a storytelling podcast about an aging porn star known for his large testicles. He breaks his penis and has to navigate life in the real world.

In this episode, a wealthy matriarch suspect pornography is being filmed in her neighborhood.

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Looking over top the Hollywood Sign in Los Angeles there's a vast valley painted with houses, streets and shopping malls. Here begins the infamous San Fernando Valley: a purgatory located somewhere between broken dreams and compromise. Nearly two million people inhabit the valley yet you'd be hard-pressed to find a worthy attraction. Unless you count the abandoned nuclear test complex which you can quickly hike past.

This is the place where the term 'soccer mom' was coined. As well as the term “Urban Sprawl.” This is the original urban sprawl. It's as if Los Angeles had a boil that popped and it oozed into the adjacent valley until it was full.

It's a trendy place where residents buy Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop products and don't experience any sense of shame.

In 1982 Frank Zappa's song Valley Girl topped the music charts and put the valley on the cultural map. Moon Unit Zappa, just 14 at the time, brought Valley Speak to the rest of the world and popularized phrasing still used today.

For example, the word "Like" as a discourse marker. As in, "Mom, I like, drove the car into the pool and now I'm, like, drowning.”

Twenty miles away from the Hollywood sign you can easily see where the valley ends at the slopes of the Santa Susana Mountains. That's where our story begins, in the upscale community of Porter Ranch because that's where the hero of our story is busy “working.”

We meet him though the eyes of fifty year old Gretchen Hill who, by her own admission, is no fun at all. She lives with her husband Ronnie in a home in Porter Ranch. A nice home. A mansion-y home. A professionally decorated home. A home with a highly-desirable 1.6 to 1 bathroom to bedroom ratio.

She doesn't think she's rich because she's always running into people richer than her. Whether you live in a cardboard box with a piece of scrap tin for a roof, or you're ensconced in the middle class but have to make your own breakfast, you'd probably consider Gretchen rich.

Her property sits inside a gated community. Not one of those fake gated communities with the fake guard booths. Roaming rapists pass right by those. No, Gretchen lives in a real gated community, with a real guards, and a real gates. She, like most people within her community, has a housekeeper. She also has a gardener, and a weekend housekeeper.

Some people, not Gretchen, have a weekend Gardner. There have been occasions where Gretchen has felt insecure about not having a weekend gardener. Unfortunately, today will be one of those days.

The vehicle of choice in this part of Porter Ranch is the luxury brand, Bentley. although there's a real trend towards large black Suburban SUVs with tinted windows. This conveys an air of being too important to be seen. which is desirable. It could even imply someone is of high enough stature that they need to be protected and hidden by such a large, stealthy vehicle. That's also desirable.

When a blacked out SUV drives by, You can never be sure who's inside. It could be your neighbor Alice headed to the galleria in an attempt to fill the void in her soul, or a chauffeur taking an entertainment executive to a meeting with snoop dog. One never knows.

In a limited number of cases, it's just people giving the finger to the Prius crowd. That too is desirable in some circles. Regardless, anyone seen in a Honda Civic after dark will be suspected of being a drug dealer or worse.

Gretchen got out of the shower, towel dried her hair and slipped into her bath robe.

It's 8 am on a Sunday morning. The sky is as blue as it gets in L.A. There's not a wildfire for miles. A steady breeze from the ocean is blowing much of the smog inland to Palm Springs where it belongs. Gretchen was in a good mood and unaware of the horrors her day would bring.

She looked out at the back of the property and was startled to see her husband, Ronnie, fending off a raccoon with a long pole by the pool. The raccoon seemed unafraid of Ronnie, which was not surprising to Gretchen, nevertheless she was glad he was getting rid of the vermin. This maddening scene reminded Gretchen again that other people have a weekend gardener but not her.

Gretchen had decided to forgo breakfast since the maid was late getting in. She put her hair in curlers because she wanted to look good at brunch with her book club at noon. The book club “girls” had all agreed to drink champagne this week. It was an attempt to spice things up after a string of terrible books involving wild horses and misunderstood cowboys. Gretchen anticipated a spate of naughty behavior and possible overeating this week.

She groaned when Ronnie tripped over a deck chair and was teetering at the edge of the pool. He was now, out of necessity, balancing himself with the long pole like a high wire artist teetering on the edge of doom.

What's become of him, thought Gretchen.

Then she noticed movement by her neighbor's pool. Well that's odd, she thought. The house had been sitting vacant on the real estate market for months and it was very strange to see activity early on a Sunday morning.

Gretchen looked back at Ronnie to find that he had lost his fight with gravity and had fallen into the pool, fully clothed. The raccoon, not ten feet away under a shrub, sat looking at Ronnie sympathetically.

Gretchen knocked on the window to get Ronnie's attention but Ronnie was already climbing up a ladder onto the roof of the pool house where the raccoon had led him. In Gretchen's mind, the raccoon was intentionally leading Ronnie somewhere precarious, perhaps as a means to kill him.

Gretchen saw two young women in bikinis come into the pool area next door. She knew this to be a warning sign. Her eyebrows furrowed causing her curlers to tighten against her scalp.

“This can't be happening!” she thought. She shouted for Ron but the windows were closed.

She awkwardly fiddled with the window hardware to try to open it but had forgotten how. The maid always did it for her.

She looked back at one of the women by the neighbor's pool. Those breasts aren't real, she thought. She sprang into action like a dog seeing another dog out the window. She moved from window to window and floor to floor to get a better look.

Gretchen only met the owner of the home twice. Once, coincidentally, was to warn him about raccoons in his trash. Then she had an uncomfortable conversation with him after he tried to entice her gardener to go work for him. Since then Gretchen and he didn't so much as exchange a wave. She certainly didn't wave to the traitor, Carlos, her former gardener who began working for the man next door.

Today, though, the goings on next door were even worse. Far worse than the brazen daylight theft of a gardener. It was, in fact, Gretchen's worst nightmare. Gretchen had “pornofilmaphobia”--the fear of porn being shot in your neighborhood.

This fear was confirmed when she saw an Italian-looking man with a pony tail talking to the women in bikinis.

Gretchen wasn't going to stand for it. She wanted to call out for the maid to locate her white sneakers so she could go over there and give them a piece of her mind.

Gretchen was horrified to discover Ronnie cordially talking to the very people she was upset about, the ones whose tanned flesh radiated in the sun from two hundred feet away. Blonde-haired women in bikinis. There Ronnie was on the pool house roof, dripping on the terracotta, talking away with a smile on his face while the women laughed.

Is he flirting? Gretchen wondered. To make matters worse, the raccoon was sitting on the roof waiting for Ronnie.

The person closest to Gretchen was betraying her before her eyes. She began to pace and bite her nails.

Gretchen was born rich and Baptist in San Antonio, Texas. When fate led her to the San Fernando Valley she became paranoid about the adult film industry.

She'd read an article in Vanity Fair that convinced her the place was crawling with greasy men with moustaches and sex viruses. In fact, the Valley had been home to film crews producing pornographic material ever since the nineteen-seventies.

Historically, cheap warehouse rent, access to film professionals and out of work actors made the Valley the perfect place for the adult film industry to set up shop. Nowadays the trend is to rent a mansion as it sits idle on the market. Then film as much fornication as you can indoors and out from sun up to sun down.

Wealthy people's homes are the preferred backdrop for most porn auteurs. It's widely understood that coitus just looks better in an opulent setting. Conversely, most amateur porn is filmed in trailer homes.

Gretchen was angry. The thought of her husband having a cordial conversation with one of those people caused her to snap. With her heart pounding, she lurched out the front door without realizing she was wearing a bathrobe and nothing else. She didn't even feel the pain of small stones under her naked feet as she stomped down the pavement to her neighbor's drive.

She arrived to find the horrific sight of two white cargo vans and an assortment of Honda Civics. This had all the earmarks of the porn shoot she saw on the evening news one time. An area couple had complained about people having sex outdoors in full sight of their grand parents. A quote in the story about the grandfather searching for his bottle of Viagra pills haunted Gretchen.

She found a young tattooed man pulling crates out of a van and she charged up to him. 

“This is a porno film isn't it?” Gretchen breathlessly asked.

“No m'am,” responded the man, somewhat unconvincingly. “we are here to fix the plumbing.”

“Then why are there young women with boobs by the pool?” demanded Gretchen.

“Oh he's a very good plumber, m'am,” said the man as he quickly rolled his cart up the driveway to escape her.

This threw Gretchen. What on earth did he mean?

Then she noticed that there were all kinds of wires and cords on his cart. Her eyes narrowed. Plumbers don't use those, she thought.

The man disappeared into the house through a side door before she could say anything.

She was left alone to be judged by a passing dog walker in full yoga attire. Gretchen realized she was just in her robe and pulled the belt tight.

"Good morning," she said to the woman, embarrassed.

Like others that morning, the dog walker didn't hear Gretchen, or even smile at her.

The yoga dog walker was listening to, and very much enjoying, an episode of Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop podcast on her ear pods. Gretchen might have guessed as much. Paltrow's powers are strong in Porter Ranch.

Gretchen was about to return home to call 911 when she noticed the front door of the neighbor's house was slightly ajar.

This tempted Gretchen to erase any seed of doubt the tattooed man had planted in her with his claims of plumbing.

As she got close to the door, she heard something she'd never heard before: a woman in ecstasy. This caused Gretchen to stop in her tracks.

Could she really proceed, she wondered.

But she decided she had come too far to turn back. Besides, her adrenaline was now in charge, not her. She was going to get justice at any cost.

Gretchen rang the doorbell and the woman in ecstasy became momentarily quiet. A second later, she started moaning again.

Then the door quickly opened and someone grabbed her by the wrist and forcefully pulled her in.