Loyal readers who share my lonely nights in this rag know I despise porn DVDs that include the old standby, fucking on a pool table. Why porn directors continue to crank out this tired scene is beyond me. At last, we have a porn director who has brought forth a new twist on the old cliché—a girl walks around the table shooting pool. Now, admittedly, a sultry vixen lining up a shot with her cue stick is hardly a moment of high drama. It’s mundane, really, and one can easily foresee when a camera is set up in a room with a pool table that somebody will play pool. But not in porn. I can’t possibly see the thousands or so vids cranked out every month, but I have viewed at least a hundred-plus girl-fucks-on-pool-table scenes. The DVD is ASIA NOIR from Video Team, the director is David Aaron Clark, and the girl strutting around the pool table is the lovely Asian dewdrop, Lucy Lee. You might ask, “Why is it so important she play pool since she is about to get hosed on the felt?” Not to put too fine a point on it—this is called reality, and Clark understands this. I mean, if you were going to fuck a woman on the pool table, don’t you think you’d rack ‘em up first? At the same time, through excellent use of lighting, a musical score that doesn’t turn your brain to mush, and careful camera work, Clark induces enough feverish fantasy so an impotent geezer could feel a warm glow flooding over his decaying body and shoot his final wad across his smelly sheets. One vignette in Asia Noir plays on the fantasy of getting a knob job from a cat woman played by Kimme Kahn. The kittenish Thai babe in her cat suit slithers across the floor after her quarry, a black dude lounging in an armchair. (Clark shoots exclusively Asian chicks and he usually teams them up with black wood.) After the spade baller busts the cat girl’s crack, he slips a saucer of milk under her lips, whacks off, adds his own cream to the mix and has her drink it. Instead of coming off as repulsive, it’s a riot. The only comic note missing is a big meow. The last segment in Asia Noir heads straight into territory porn avoids like the plague: drugs. While footage of people snorting lines or driving smack into their veins is rampant in Hollywood films, the major players in the adult industry won’t depict drug use in their product. Bad for their image. What morons. Do these gutless directors really think erasing drugs off the porn blackboard will convince anyone the industry is marching in tune with the 12 Steps? Clark tosses a dose of truth in this big lie. The scene opens with a close-up of a drug-addled thug snorting a thick line of Peruvian Marching Powder up his nose, slides into a ten-minute fuckfest with two girls going down on the tweaker who gazes balefully at porn on a wall-size flat-screen TV, and ends with another close-up of the dude sitting alone in his room with his eyes half-closed, his head wasted. So what does he do? He snorts another line. The cure that never cures. This is porn that hits home. You can say, “I’ve been there.”