Christa Faust: Choke Hold

That was not planned or intentional. It just seemed to be an actual setting for that kind of events. I live in Los Angeles, so it’s easy for me to set things there, but I wanted to shake things up a little. There’s something very creepy to me about that desert environment the few times that I’ve visited. I’m such a city girl. I’m from New York originally and I’m so used to noise and light and sound and chaos and people and you go out to this desolate wasteland and it’s like you’re on another planet. I thought that was really evocative and wanted to use that in Choke Hold. And Angel is a city girl too, and so putting her outside of her comfort zone was part of my intention as well.

Oh that was very intentional. It’s something that I noticed from the beginning that really fascinated me. Part of the reason why I chose mixed martial arts for the backdrop of Choke Hold is because I really do see an interesting parallel there. The MMA fighter is the ultimate man and the female porn star is the ultimate woman. They’re like the ultimate expressions of their gender on opposite ends of the spectrum. What they’re doing is they’re selling their bodies. They’re pushing their bodies beyond endurance to extreme ends for the entertainment of others. Having spoken to so many young fighters and so many porn stars, there are a lot of parallels in where they’re coming from. The daddy issues are so prevalent that it’s a cliche. Everybody kind of jokes about it how daddy doesn’t love his little boy so he becomes a fighter, daddy doesn’t love his little girl so she becomes a porn star. Really, what are they looking for? They’re looking for that approval from daddy that was never there when they were growing up. That’s obviously oversimplified and definitely not the case for everyone, but I’ve seen it enough times that it really struck a chord with me.

My favorite way of doing research, and I’ve said this a thousand times, is just be a good listener. Fuck wikipedia. Be a good listener. If you want to know about something, go talk to people who do it. More importantly, listen to them, because if you’re non judgmental and willing to listen, people will open up to you. People like to talk about their job. Whether their job is a file clerk at the DMV or a porn star or a Peking opera actor, people like to talk about their job. All you have to do is listen.

Not normally. I don’t feel that anything is gratuitous. There are plenty of details that could have been added that were not necessary, but I don’t feel that I do that in order to coddle people’s delicate sensibilities. I do it based on the story. If the story warrants a detail, I put it in. If the story doesn’t warrant that detail, I leave it out. There are aspects of the adult film industry that may seem shocking but are really very workaday and ordinary to the people who do that job. What’s funny about Money Shot is that people talk about how sexy it is but really there’s hardly any sex on camera in that book.

There’s far more violence than sex and the one actual sex scene is off camera. You don’t actually see anything. But I think there’s a level of a reaction like that of Psycho where people go, oh, that movie was so bloody. Really it’s not. It just gives that impression of violence even though you don’t really see it.

Oh absolutely. And what’s funny about Choke Hold is that I am a fan, as a reader, of bad sex. I love bad sex, and by bad sex I mean unsuccessful sex. Awkward sex. Sex that just doesn’t work or isn’t right for whatever reason. The mistake that so many writers make when they write sex scenes is that they go through so much to be so honest and to describe things so truthfully and they get to a sex scene and it’s like turning on MTV where they’re always orgasming at the same time and it’s all so awesome and and it’s like, what happened? You shouldn’t pull over by the side of the road and insert sex scene. It should be a natural part of the story. The way that people fuck tells you who they are. We don’t all fuck the same just as we don’t all eat the same. Sex can be a vehicle for character development. And if it isn’t, that scene has no business being in the book.

For Angel as a character, sex is her default setting. That’s the way that she relates to everyone because it’s easy for her. It’s the path of least resistance. So when she encounters somebody for whom sex is not easy, she can’t use that as a distraction. Now all of a sudden you have to show all this other stuff that you can normally cover up with sex. A lot of people feel that sex is the most intimate possible act but not for Angel. Sex is not intimacy for her. It’s kung fu.

Well, the whole book is about her intimacy issues. A lot of the women that I met in the adult film industry have these tremendous intimacy issues. They’ll fuck anybody, but they won’t let you in.

I did indeed. It was a blast. I have got to find a way to digitize all that old footage because we made that for ten cents right on the cusp of the whole digital revolution. We have VHS copies of some of the episodes, but lord only knows what happened to the unedited master tapes. It’s just a big mess. I would love to be able to take those old episodes and digitize them and make them available because it was just so much fun. It was just a wild, crazy, wacky adventure. And let me tell you something, that Dita, she was a trooper. She let us torture her for days and days and days. [laughs] She was just fantastic. It was really really fun.

I’m always open. I’m dealing with one deadline after another and I never seem to have extra time to do those fun, goofy projects, but I would love to be able to do something else like that.

Well, one of my personal fetishes is that damsel in distress kind of jungle adventure type of thing like what I did with Dita. Anything that involved bondage and trying to escape. I love that. I would love to do more episodes of Dita in Distress, because at the end of the final episode, she’s in the future. Of course it’s a 1930’s future, a Flash Gordon future with zeppelins and clothes with fins so that would be just a blast.

It’s funny, I went through a sort of evolution of genre as far as what I was reading as I grew up. When I was a kid, like third grade, I was reading a lot of heavy science fiction. I was really into Frederick Pohl and Isaac Asimov and hard sci-fi. Then puberty hit and it was all about horror. I was really into splatterpunk. Then when I turned thirty I became really interested in crime fiction. So I’m forty-two now and haven’t given up the crime fiction yet, but who knows? We’ll see what’s next. But really, I don’t see horror and crime fiction as being all that different, because what are they dealing with? They’re dealing with death, murder, the darkness inside the human heart.

I often make a comparison to being a pro domme cause I worked as a professional dominatrix for one a hundred and one years. When you do pro sessions, you have to go along with the client. The client wants you to wear a chicken suit, you wear a chicken suit. That’s how it works. It’s not the same as playing in your private life where you get to do whatever you like. The way I see it, novelizations and tie-ins are a lot like pro domme sessions in that there’s a structure, you’re given a list of things that you have to include in the scenario, but within that structure that you’ve been given, you have the freedom to do whatever. It’s like that cooking show where they make you have to cook a meal using certain ingredients. You don’t get to pick the ingredients, but you get to pick how you cook them. So I didn’t invent Sam and Dean Winchester but I can make them do what I want.

Exactly.

I don’t think so, but maybe that’s the sadist in me. [laughs] Part of what I love about crime fiction is watching the way that people fall apart. Putting people under stress and seeing what happens. That’s what good hard boiled or noir fiction does. It’s not about the mechanics of the heist. It’s about the way that people who are perpetrating the heist fall apart. That’s only interesting if you care about those people and the ways in which they come apart.

You have to understand, this was all part of my evil plan. I wanted men to read about women’s fear of aging. I wanted to get women to read about violence against women. I want people who would never read a book about a woman losing her sense of beauty and trying to understand who she is if she’s not beautiful, how do you sell them that book? A hot porn star with a gun goes on an ass-kicking rampage and gets revenge. So they buy it. But now they’re going to see all these other things. We’re exposing them to things that they may not have ordinarily picked up. And it goes the other way too. Because I can sell the book to female readers who would never read about an ass-kicking porn star with a gun but are very interested in the real meaning of beauty and what happens when you lose it. If you give them a pop pulpy idea on the surface and if you just read that surface novel, you can enjoy it. But if you want to dig deeper, that other stuff is there.

[laughs] What do you want to know?

For me, the spark that really made me interested in writing about MMA, in addition to this funny parallel that I saw with porn, was the issue of Chronic Traumatic Endocephalopathy, or Punch-drunk syndrome. When I first started looking into MMA and thinking about writing some kind of character who was a fighter, I started thinking about CTE and what those guys are going through. I don’t know if you remember the case of the pro wrestler Chris Benoit where he murdered his wife and son and then killed himself. It was revealed that it was not steroids, it was CTE, dementia caused by repeated concussions. Choke Hold doesn’t reflect that true crime story at all, but that was the spark that made start thinking about what would it be like to be right on the cusp of that. You are still aware enough that you can see it coming. You’re not so far gone that you don’t know any better, but you know that’s where you’re headed. How would that feel and how would that affect the choices that you make.

I spent a lot of time with a young eighteen year old fighter training for his first fight. Like I said, I like to do my research with real people and so I spent a lot of time with him, following him around, watching him train. I asked him, do you know anybody who is suffering from memory loss and concussive-related problems and he said, no, I don’t. So I bumped into his trainer, who’s my age, and I said, so, do you know anybody who’s been suffering from these problems. He said, yeah, me. After this interview is over, I’m not going to remember your name. To me, that in a nutshell is what’s going on in Choke Hold. You have this young man who doesn’t see any of this even though it’s right in front of him. You’re training with this guy every day and you don’t see the problems that he’s having. It’s like wanting kids not to smoke because it’s not healthy. They know that but they don’t really know it. They just don’t see it. I guess part of what I was trying to do with Choke Hold was put Angel in between these two extremes this young guy who’s got his whole life in front of him and doesn’t see any downside and this older guy who’s right on this cusp where he knows it’s all downhill from here.

Part of what I love about L.A. is the fact that everybody else hates it. [laughs] I’m contrary like that. There are so many things about L.A. that are hidden. I grew up in New York and in New York, everything is right there. You can walk the same route from your house to the subway station every day and you’ll see something different every day. It’s vibrant and dynamic and in your face. L.A. is very spread out and diffuse so if you don’t know anything about the city, and somebody just drops you in the middle, you’ll miss ninety percent of what’s here. There’s no serendipity out here. You don’t accidentally stumble across something. You have to drive fifteen minutes. You have to know in advance where you’re going. What I love about L.A. is it’s like a thousand cities bolted onto each other and instead of a thousand cities connected, they’re a thousand cities on top of each other. You can be standing on one corner and be in four cities simultaneously because there are these different levels that people see and levels beneath that.

I love the history. I love all the crazy true crime stories and all the wild adventures that have happened over the course of building up this dream factory that we live in. I also love the non-Hollywood aspect of L.A. because people always assume that L.A. is Hollywood. Blondes with fake tits and the beach. There is that. The entertainment industry is like our factory and we live in a factory town so a lot of people who live here work in the factory but there are plenty of people who don’t, whose whole lives never touch the entertainment industry, but they are Angelenos too.

My mother still lives in the same apartment on 45th street and 9th avenue. She’s been there for years and wow when I grew up there Hell’s Kitchen was a little different. Now it’s like Citywalk 2. How scary is that? That bulbous artificial environment for tourists that has taken over so much of Los Angeles has spread like a cancer throughout the country. It’s terrifying. But I refuse to let people hate on LA because yes, we have Rodeo Drive, yes, we have Citywalk, yes, we have Muscle Beach, but if you think that’s all we are, that’s like reading Money Shot as just a novel about a porn star with a gun. You can look at LA on that level, and none of it is a lie, but that’s only one level.