The last time I saw Lisa, she was sitting in her usual spot in a cheap plastic chair next to the entrance of our apartment building. It was a gorgeous Spring afternoon, bringing everyone outdoors to soak up the sunshine after the last gasps of winter faded from memory. Lisa was cradling a cigarette between the fingers of one leathery hand while the other clung to a giant styrofoam cup from the gas station up the road. It was half-filled with Mountain Dew and judging from the smell, topped off with bottom-shelf gin. Her brown eyes darted around like a couple of captive horses yearning to break free from her head. She had a malnourished look to her. Her gray hair was disheveled, her face wrinkled and dry, and her smile was as jagged as an industrial skyline. At odds with the rest of her body, her breasts were a pair of unnaturally large, free-standing mounds. She was dressed in faded cut-off jean-shorts, plastic flip-flops, and an old, neon yellow tank top. The top was stained and loose fitting, with a tendency to carelessly flap open and expose an indecent amount of ‘side-boob’ whenever she moved. She didn't bother with bras.

Like Lisa, the building was also well past its glory days. It was a squat two-story sixteen-plex in a run-down area of Clinton City. The affordable rent was like a watering hole in the high-cost desert, bringing university students together with the dregs of society in a shared communal living space. I was one of the former, while Lisa was obviously the latter. “Assistant Building Manager,” was my official title, but that generally just meant that I spent most of my time unclogging sinks and toilets, taking out trash, and cleaning up puke in the hallways. In return, I was given free lodging and a small stipend while I studied theater at Clinton State University. For the amount of shit I put up with, I should have been paid much more, but at least it allowed me a flexible schedule to work around my classes. I kept telling myself I was doing research for vague, unpromised roles in the future. One day, people would talk about my stellar performance as ‘Janitor #2,’ in the same tones that they spoke of DeNiro in Raging Bull or Hopkins in Silence of the Lambs.

“Suck your cock for forty bucks,” Lisa offered as I passed her by on the way into the building.

“You’re gonna have to pay me more than that,” I fired back.

Lisa unleashed a cackle that quickly transformed into a hacking cough. When she recovered, she eyed me up and down and taunted, “What are ya? Some kind of Hoe-Moe?” She pronounced each syllable as if it were its own distinct word, not giving a damn about political correctness.

“No,” I countered. “But you’re definitely making me rethink my options.”

“Fuck you,” Lisa crowed, leaning back in her seat. She took another long drag on her cigarette.

“You can always dream,” I replied with an indifferent shrug, then looked at the mess that surrounded her seat in spite of the tin can I’d purposely placed there for her ashes. “And quit flicking your cigarette butts everywhere. Who the hell do you think has to clean them all up, anyway?”

Lisa laughed again and defiantly sent another burning filter flying a few feet away into the grass where it continued to smolder for a minute. “Earn your keep, ya fuckin’ trash-monkey,” she slurred drunkenly.

“Goddamn porch gargoyle,” I returned.

She cackled even more loudly at that and shot me the middle finger. I sighed, rolled my eyes, and carried on inside as she fished her next smoke from the pack she kept by her side at all times. The past year had desensitized me to Lisa’s abrasive nature. Now, our exchanges felt just like neighborly banter. Propositioning me was just her way of saying hello, and “Go fuck yourself” roughly translated to “Hope you have a good day.” I’d come to learn there was no real malice in any of it. Just Lisa being Lisa.

After that, I didn’t see the old lady for a few days. I didn’t think much of it. The weather had turned rainy, and it wasn’t unusual for Lisa to vanish for days or even weeks at a time. Sooner or later, she’d turn up again, looking wretched as ever, harassing passing tenants for spare change, cigarettes, or laughs. Life always went back to normal.

Except this time it didn’t.

I got the call from the building owner as I was walking home from class. Lisa was dead. Her next of kin didn’t want anything to do with her, much less her accumulated shit. The owner had a professional cleaning crew coming to de-Lisa-fy the place. I just had to be around to let them into the apartment. I met them the next morning around eight. They worked efficiently, and by the time they left that evening, the dumpster out back was overflowing with the meager possessions of Lisa’s life. It was strange seeing the cigarette-burned armchair, the chipped folding breakfast table, the bags of old clothes, and piles of trashy novels (who knew Lisa was a reader?) decontextualized from their natural habitat, and displayed like museum pieces in the back corner of the parking lot, waiting to be picked up on garbage day along with all the other used-up junk no one had any use for anymore.

As I carried my own bags of trash to add to the refuse heap, I noticed a group of teens picking through the pile and strewing Lisa’s stuff all over the place. They were probably looking for anything valuable to scavenge and pawn. I’d seen them around before on bikes and skateboards, smoking weed and hanging out. Something more than just the irritation at having to clean up whatever mess they made suddenly gripped me. It felt… disrespectful. They didn’t know Lisa, the way I knew her - Not that I really knew her well at all. What I did know was that she’d been part of the building, one of us. She was ours. And now she was gone. It hit me harder than I ever expected it to.

“Hey! You! Get the hell out of here, you little shits!” I shouted at the kids. “Fuck off!”

I took several menacing steps towards them to show I meant business. It worked. They jumped on their wheels and sped away, calling profane taunts and insults over their shoulders. When they were gone, I surveyed the chaos. It looked like they’d spread her clothes around, tearing and smearing them with parking lot grime. They’d also smashed a bunch of her knickknacks and electronics. There was broken glass and plastic all over the place which I’d have to sweep up before anyone got hurt. I was about to go back for one of the big push brooms and a dust pan when something brightly colored beneath the opening of an overturned cardboard box caught my eye. I bent over, righted the box, and then opened the flaps.

Inside was a collection of old VHS tapes. Their covers were vibrant and exciting, with titles like “TAN-ning Salon” (TAN, standing for Teen Anal Nymphos, apparently) and “Jane Bondage: Golden Thighs.” Somehow, the fact that Lisa owned a box of old porn didn’t surprise me. It was probably what had drawn the attention of the teen vandals. I looked through the scattered detritus and found Lisa’s VHS player in pieces, surrounded by eviscerated ribbons of tangled black tape.

“Goddamn it,” I swore to myself.

I gathered up the remaining porn, knowing that if I left it, it would just attract more scavengers, or worse, one of the building’s conservative tenants. The last thing I needed was to get fired because Mrs. Johnson, the meth-head Jesus-freak in 2B, couldn’t handle seeing tits without making a big stink about them. I picked up the box, and brought it inside to store in my own apartment, at least until I could properly dispose of it.

***

“Hey, what’s that?” asked my girlfriend, Anita, gesturing to the box sitting beside my TV stand. We were sitting on my sofa, cuddling and trying to decide what we wanted to binge-watch on Netflix.

“Oh, just some old movies from a tenant that passed away the other day,” I answered. “You remember Lisa?”

“That gross old lady who always talks shit about everyone?”

I nodded.

"She died."

"Oh... Sorry..." Anita said. “But what are you doing with her videos?”

“Well… Have a look,” I invited.

Anita went over to the box and looked inside. “What the hell? It’s just porn.”

“Yeah, I know,” I acknowledged. “That’s why I couldn’t just leave it outside. Some teens were getting into it.”

“Yeah, but still…” She started pulling out cassettes, and examining the covers. “Have you looked at these?”

“They’re VHS. I don’t have a machine,” I answered. Honestly, I hadn’t been too interested in looking through Lisa’s porn collection when probably much better videos were easily accessible online. The box had just sat there by the TV stand all week, almost forgotten.

“I guess she was a big fan of this porn star, Misty Rose,” Anita observed. She held up one of the cases to show me. “Her name’s on all of these.”

I took a look at the cover. The movie was called “Enter the Pussy.” Given the pseudo-martial arts poses of the actors, I guessed it was an awkward play on the classic Bruce Lee film. What was most surprising was the face staring back from the cover. She was youthful and pretty, but the defiant look in her eyes, the fuck-you attitude in her face…

“She looks just like Lisa,” I said. “I mean, Lisa was a lot older, obviously, and… She didn’t have all the make-up and hair and everything, but… I’m almost certain it’s her.” I joined Anita, looking through the other tapes in the box. Lisa’s face stared back at me from cover after cover. “What the hell?”

“Talk about a brush with celebrity!” Anita mused humorously.

“I had no idea,” I said.

“Too bad, Misty could have been your Hollywood connection!” Anita continued teasing. “Your big break!”

“Yeah right,” I replied, rolling my eyes.

“Well, I guess she must have been pretty successful to be in all of these movies, you know?” Anita deduced. “There must be almost two-dozen of these things.”

I started spreading out all the different cassettes on the floor, showing Lisa surrounded by a variety of well-endowed co-stars in a number of different poses, settings, and costumes, but with one thing in common: They were all stark naked. I turned the cases over, examining the production information on the back of the covers, and began to organize them chronologically.

“You can see a kind of timeline,” I said. “Look, this one’s from ninety-one, and that one’s from eighty-nine. You see?” The images revealed distinct pre-and post-breast implant eras dividing her career. In my opinion, she looked better before the surgery, though that period was only represented by a handful of films.

“The life and times of a porn-star,” Anita joked.

“Of my neighbor,” I corrected her more sternly than I intended. I found myself preoccupied with the mystery of how someone like Lisa ever ended up in porn. Even more puzzling, how had she then ended up here, wasting a way in a shitty little apartment in Clinton City?

“Okay, sorry. It’s just kinda weird, you know,” she apologized. “I mean, keeping a box of your old neighbor’s porn videos in your apartment.”

“I told you, I’m going to get rid of them,” I argued.

“Sure,” Anita agreed sarcastically, rolling her eyes.

“I don’t even have a way to play them,” I defended.

“I doubt it would be that hard to find a VHS player. Try the pawn shops, or goodwill, or…” She thought for a minute. “I bet there’s one lying around the theater department somewhere that you could borrow.”

“You actually don’t care if I watch these?” I asked suspiciously.

“Why not? You’re allowed to have your fantasies - Even if they’re about old dead porn stars.” She held up her hands in a gesture of blamelessness. “No kink-shaming here. But just remember, when you want the real thing, you come back to me.”

With that, Anita began nibbling on my ear and kissing my neck, which she knew would make me instantly hard. I forgot about the porn, and refocused on squeezing my girlfriend’s beautiful (very real, and very living) tits just the way she loved. We undressed and fucked right there on the sofa while a whole bouquet of Misty Roses looked on seductively from their video boxes.

***

Over the next week, I scoured the internet for information on Lisa. Of course, there was nothing about the real-life woman. Only a few odd mentions of her screen-name, Misty Rose, could be found in footnotes to wiki-porn articles on more popular movies. Her career had come to an end long before the world moved fully online and everything had been digitized. None of her films seemed to have made the transition, and so they seemed to be mostly forgotten by history.

I told my faculty advisor at school about the cache of videos - Not the specific details, of course. I only mentioned that I’d discovered some old home movies my grandmother had left behind, and wanted to check out what was on the tapes. She agreed, proposing that it would make a great in-depth character study. Together, we managed to track down a working VCR, perhaps the last of it’s kind in Clinton City. In return, I was expected to do an independent study and produce a polished monologue from my findings. I had no idea what bullshit I’d actually turn in to my advisor, but that was a problem for future-Justin. Present-Justin had some vintage porn to watch.

I sat on my sofa and scanned the stacks of videos on my coffee table for maybe the hundredth time. There were twenty-eight of them in total. The last was called Butt-Man Returns. It had been released in the mid-nineties. Lisa played the role of Cunt-Woman, clad (at least initially) in a sexy black vinyl outfit that clung to her curves like a second skin. The movie was about what you’d expect of a porn-parody from the nineties. There was big hair, big jewelry, big bushy landing strips, big fake boobs, big muscles, sets constructed from painted cardboard boxes, preposterous dialog, and a ludicrous plot that served only to move the story from one prolonged fuck-scene to the next.

Lisa, or Misty, didn’t appear until the third scene. When she did, she easily stole the show. Compared to the over-the-top and obviously fake performances of her dead-eyed co-stars, Lisa showed restraint, personality, and commitment to the character. She slow-burned her way to a series of very convincing climaxes as Butt-man took her in every hole she had to offer. She had two more scenes in the movie. I fast forwarded the others, just to get to hers faster. There was a girl/girl scene in which Cunt-Woman kidnapped and tortured Butt-girl by licking and fingering her to several intense, squirting orgasms. The movie concluded with a grand orgy in which Butt-Man, Butt-Girl, and Little-Bird (casting had spared no effort to find a porn star with a small cock to play the ‘Robin’ role), fucked a costumed host of big-titted baddies. In the end, Gotjam City was saved from some vaguely sexual peril the script writers decided wasn’t really worth fleshing out.

Every time Lisa showed up on screen, she easily outshone the rest of the cast. The tension and animosity between the stars was evident from the pissed-off glances she received from others in the scene. But she seemed to take it all in stride and rise above it, refusing to break character, even if everyone else could barely play their own parts. I found myself actually admiring her talent as an actor - not just a porn star, but an actual thespian of sorts.

After Butt-Man Returns, I decided to check out the other end of her career, back-tracking to the earliest video I could find. It was a blank tape with a magic marker label that simply read: Misty Rose, 1984. The scenes recorded on the tape made Butt-Man look like The Matrix. The image was blurry and grainy, the lighting dim, the sound muddled. There was no story, no set, no real dialog. There was just Lisa in a cheap motel room, probably not long past her eighteenth birthday, looking curiously into the camera, and smiling nervously. Or was that innocent image just a seductive lure to entice and excite her viewers? I had my suspicions.

Even then, submerged just below her innocent façade, there was something unspeakably intriguing about her. Her performance had layers. Every movement, breath, and glance - It all seemed precisely calculated to project a latent and barely restrained yet effortless sexuality. I watched for the kinds of things that only other actors who had spent significant time polishing their craft would notice and appreciate. It was in the way she held her body and posed with an awareness that could only come from studying her own image and movements for hours in front of a mirror. There was a subtle knowingness in her performances, as if she were acutely aware of the exciting effect she had on the viewer - In this case, myself.

It was that lurking, defiant confidence more than anything else that linked Misty to Lisa. She simply did not give a fuck what you thought of her. She refused to be looked down on by anyone, even on her knees with some anonymous producer’s cock down her throat. She rejected all sympathy and shame equally. With my own life wrapped up in constantly needing to impress my professors and peers, I was more than a little jealous of the way Lisa could just exist so unapologetically herself, fully owning her desires and decisions without any need to justify them to anyone. Nubile porn starlet or toothless old hag, you could take her or leave her just as she was. It was all the same to her. Whatever problems you might have with her lifestyle, they were yours and yours alone.

After getting my fill of Lisa’s earliest amateur highlights, I decided to look at one of her mid-career roles: Lisa as Misty Rose as Diana Jones and the Lust Crusade. It had been released at the turn of the decade, and from what I could tell, was her last movie before getting implants. I was mid-way through the movie when I heard keys in my door. I felt a familiar spasm of panic, simultaneously switching off the TV while reaching for a cushion to cover my very conspicuous erection.

“Hey, babe. What’s up?” Anita announced herself as she entered the apartment. We’d exchanged keys to each other’s places about a month ago and had been coming and going freely between them.

“Nothing,” I said, trying to project a sense of calm though my heart was racing. I couldn't quite manage to keep a guilty look from crossing my face. Anita glanced at me suspiciously.

“What are you doing?” she asked. “Just sitting on the couch staring into space?”

I realized that was exactly what it looked like I’d been doing, and couldn’t help but chuckle at the absurdity of the scene from the outside looking in. As an actor, I recognized it was a dumb choice.

“Yeah, no. Actually, I was watching some of those videos,” I admitted bashfully, and gestured to the cassettes piled on the table.

“Oh, your old-lady porno stash,” Anita teased.

“She wasn’t that old when she made them,” I defended awkwardly. “And I don’t know… I was just curious. Like, how well do you really know your neighbors, you know?”

“And?” Anita asked, coming to sit down next to me. She looked genuinely intrigued.

“Well… She’s actually… Good,” I haltingly admitted. “Like, really good - You know, for a porn star. She could have been a real actress.” I began excitedly counting off points on my fingers. “She’s got amazing timing. She doesn’t rush her performances. She gives them space to breathe. And she plays well off her co-stars’ performances. Like she kinda steals the scenes... But not in a greedy way. And she’s not just reciting lines. She actually inhabits them and responds to what’s happening around her. I know it’s porn, and the stories are totally dumb, but still... She makes you believe her characters could be real people in some alternative porno-verse.”

“Porno-verse, huh? That’s cool,” Anita said, humoring me. “Can I watch with you?”

“You want to?” I looked at her uncertainly. For me, watching porn had always been a very personal and private thing. But I reasoned that rather than base self-gratification, maybe Anita and I could share an aesthetic appreciation of Lisa's performance. The boner raging beneath the sofa cushion was purely academic.

“You’ve got me curious now. I wanna see,” Anita nodded with a devilish grin. I felt a wave of affection for her. She was easily the coolest girl I’d ever dated.

“Yeah, uh, sure,” I agreed, turning the TV back on.

Lisa was completely naked in some exotic torch-lit chamber. Her back was arched, her tits pointing proudly to the ceiling. She was riding some muscular dude in a metallic mask resembling an ancient Aztec deity. She moved her hips with a rhythmic fluidity, her hands pressed into the love-god’s chest, pinning him down, as she steadily held his gaze. Her sense of restraint and timing made her moans and breathy ad-libs even hotter. I pointed out the finer details of Lisa’s performance to Anita while I filled her in on the back-story of the movie - Not that there was much to tell. Diana Jones was in search of the lost fountain of eternal youth, which had taken her on an international odyssey of fuckery, finally arriving at the Temple of Dong where the scene was presently taking place.

“She’s really sexy,” Anita commented. “It’s so weird to see Lisa back when she was young and hot. And then knowing how she ended up…”

“I know,” I agreed. “It’s been kinda fucking with my head a bit.”

Lisa had dismounted the sex-tamed god and was now delivering a delicious-looking blowjob to his massive cock, taking her time to tease and build his excitement to a nearly unbearable level. I couldn’t help but think back to the last time I’d seen her out front of the building. “Suck your cock for forty bucks,” she’d offered, and the idea had been so repulsive, it was absurd. But here she was on my TV screen, thirty-something years younger, vital, gorgeous, talented, before time and hard-living had wasted her, giving head to her well-endowed co-star. My throbbing cock wondered what beautiful pleasures I might have passed up.

Anita decided to lay her head on the cushion in my lap, stretching out across the sofa. Trying to get comfortable, she reached her hand underneath and encountered my hard-on straining against the fabric of my pants.

“Wow, you’re really into this,” she admired.

“Yeah, sorry,” I said, shifting awkwardly in my seat.

“Don’t be,” Anita replied as she began to massage my length over my pants. “Like I told you, you can have your fantasies, so long as the real thing belongs to me.”

With that, she sat up slightly and tossed the cushion onto the floor, exposing the boner that prominently tented the front of my jeans. She made short work of undoing them and freeing my cock, letting it stand tall, free, and proud in the light of my apartment.

“Mmm, I love how hard you are,” Anita cooed. In another second she took hold of my cock with her hand and lowered her lips to the tip. The head of it throbbed in anticipation. “You like watching your old neighbor do this?” she asked with a smile, and then took me fully into her mouth, delivering an amazingly luscious blowjob. It was perfectly balanced on the edge between enthusiasm and control, edging me just the same way that Lisa edged her co-star on the screen. Anita kept glancing back at the TV, attempting to sync her own movements to Lisa’s performance.

“Fuck,” I sighed. “That feels so good, babe.” She looked up at me, grinning proudly. I brushed the hair away from her forehead to get a better view of her beautiful face.

“Just watch the movie,” she instructed.

I directed my gaze to the screen again. Lisa had gotten to her feet, and leaned over a cheap looking sacrificial altar, offering her pussy up to her male co-star. Anita stood, too, and bent over the VHS cassettes on my coffee table. I moved behind her just like the dude on TV, lining myself up with her entrance and pushing in. The gasps of the woman on the screen and the woman in my living room were almost identical. I began pumping into Anita, soon picking up the rhythm of the porn scene. Anita studied the screen, echoing Lisa’s gently building moans and whimpers. As we continued to fuck, Anita’s mimicry became less and less imitative, and more and more sincere. She was really getting into the role, copying Lisa’s every movement, and cry of ecstasy. A different face and body, but they shared the same assertively sexual energy, steadily coaxing me to climax. It was almost like I was fucking Lisa through Anita’s pussy, as if she were possessed by the spirit of my dead porn-star neighbor.

After several minutes, the stud announced with not a little urgency that he was on the verge of cumming. I was pretty close, myself, taking every ounce of self-control to stay in the scene. I was grunting forcefully with every thrust into Anita’s beautiful, creamy pussy, trying not blow my load before it was over. Lisa stood, spun, and dropped to her knees. Anita mirrored her, looking up at me, holding my eyes, and begging for my cum as I stroked fast and furious towards orgasm.

“Give it to me! Paint me with your elixir!” both women encouraged only a split second apart. Neither me, nor the masked-stud in the movie could hold back any longer.

“Oh fuck, here it comes!” the guy growled. I repeated the line a fraction of a second after. Both of us tensed in ecstasy, clutching our cocks tight in our fists, and blasted our huge hot loads onto the excited faces of our delightfully receptive partners. Gradually, the explosive release gave way to a deep sense of satisfaction. The bursts faded to dribbles. Cum dripped down Lisa and Anita’s chins and splashed on their gorgeous tits in thick sticky gobs.

“So, the fountain of youth was inside you all along!” Lisa cried. The line as written was so dumb, but she somehow made it sound believable. She swiped cum from her sloppy face with her fingers, and then sucked them clean. “Now, we’ll be young forever!” Anita dutifully repeated after Lisa, though she was unable to stifle a giggle at the sheer cheesiness of it. Lisa was too professional to break character and kept a straight face to the end.

I couldn’t help but think of the way that Lisa had been immortalized by the movie - Not as the old crone who haunted the doorstep to a low-rent apartment building in Clinton City, but as a young, beautiful girl at the top of her sexual talents. In one sense, Lisa was dead. But in another, she was perfectly preserved on magnetic tape. Then I gazed at the stacks of cassettes on my table and speculated about the life of the woman in them. None of her movies were likely to get the restoration and re-release treatment. Trapped in obsolete media, I might be the last person on Earth to see and appreciate Lisa as she had been at the height of her career. The thought was a melancholy one. History was a sieve. So many lives strained straight through it, just to run down the drain of oblivion.

“That was fun,” Anita commented, bringing me back from my reverie. “Your neighbor was actually pretty hot.” She’d gotten some paper towels from my kitchen, and was cleaning herself up. “Did you have a good time?”

“Yeah.” I smiled warmly. “Thanks babe.”

“Maybe we could try making our own porn sometime,” she suggested with a grin.

“You’d like that?” I asked.

“Just for us, you know? So we’ve got something we can look back on when we’re older and want to remember how hot and sexy we were.”

“Yeah, just like the fountain of youth,” I said, drifting back into my own pensive thoughts on Lisa and the nature of time, art, and memory.