I tend not to remember my dreams. This may be a blessing, however, since the dreams I do remember are invariably nightmares. These horrors come in all shapes and sizes, from exhaustingly mundane repetitions of daily life to excruciatingly sick and surreal extravaganzas that could pass as the collaborative efforts of Hieronymus Bosch, David Lynch, and Aaron Spelling. Most prevalent among the regularly scheduled variety is the dream in which I am abruptly overcome by an ass-clenching realization that I have forgotten something extremely important.
Over the years, the Forgetting Dream has donned numerous guises: In it, I have entirely spaced on taxes, court dates, traffic school, movie shoots, college classes, and other hard-and-fast deadlines, only to remember my colossal fuck-up when it is much too late to do anything about it.
Like the dream itself, my reaction is always the same: total panic, followed by a brief flash of false hope, and then, finally, the calm acquiescence embraced only by the utterly doomed.
I was not dreaming in Florida, however.
Nor had I forgotten about the “O” Awards, the ceremony wherein AVN honors the best pleasure products and companies of the year. To the contrary, the event to which I play host had been constantly on my mind for the previous month. As noted in the many Post-Its and To Do Lists that run my life, I needed to tally the votes, order the trophies, secure the venue, and write the script. The latter required only a few quiet hours to come up with enough droll merriment to match the previous year’s show, which seemed to have been easily digested by the audience. So, on the Fourth of July, as I listened to the fireworks in the distance, I remember thinking that there was still plenty of time to complete that task. After all, the “O” awards were not scheduled to begin until 8 p.m. on Saturday, Aug. 7, more than a month away.
At 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, Aug. 7, I sat in my underwear at my desk in room 1445 of the Westin Diplomat in Hollywood, Fla., and stared at the brief opening paragraph that was the sum total of my efforts for the “O” Awards. In the furious run-up to the show, those few quiet hours I needed to write the script never presented themselves. My cell phone was ringing constantly, the callers at the other end wanting to know where I was, if the script was finished, and why I wasn’t there for the run-through. I turned off my cell.
I tried to concentrate, hoping to squeeze out in minutes what had taken hours to write the previous year, and though I work well under pressure, this was a whole new ballgame. It was unbearably hot and humid and though I had done my best to keep my room at the same temperature as a meat locker, every time I stepped out onto my balcony for a cigarette—which was now increasingly more often as the deadline loomed—the refrigerated air was instantly sucked out and replaced with something a notch below hot swamp gas. Already genetically predisposed to perspiration, I looked as if I had just stepped out of the shower. And I hadn’t even donned my suit and tie.
It had not been a good day. By 11 a.m., just as I had slipped back to my room to attempt to write the “O” Awards script before the afternoon seminars began, a handful of exhibitors, egged on by the most disgruntled and vocal among them, had grown into a small but angry mob. Unhappy with the amount of traffic, they had already driven one employee to tears, and I had barely typed the first few words when my cell phone commanded me to return to the show floor. On the way down, as I read the text messages, I fully expected to step from the elevator to find the entire village waiting for me with torches and pitchforks. And I had not even drowned a little girl in the pond yet. It just didn’t seem fair.
Eight and a half hours later, after Paul Fishbein had assuaged the half-dozen dissatisfied customers, and the seminars and meetings and impromptu glad-handing were over, I found myself back at that desk, half-nude and fully drenched, mocked by an empty laptop screen, and utterly out of time. My all-too-familiar nightmare had finally, after 49 years, become a reality.
And you know what? It wasn’t so bad. Instead of panic and false hope, I was filled with emotion No. 3, a disturbingly tranquil serenity which I imagined was the same felt by those who take their last breath of air before going down for the last time, or who stare out the airplane window as the earth races up to meet their doomed craft, or who are so late with his editorial for the post-AVN Show issue—the editorial about how his worst nightmare came to life in Florida—that another angry mob, this time his coworkers, is forming as he types these very words.
But I’ve been here before, both in dreams and wide awake, and I know that it will all work out in the end, for better or worse, because frankly there are no other options.
As the eight o’clock hour rolled around, I put on my suit and tie, still looking fresh from a sauna, tucked my laptop with less than the bare bones of an unfinished script under my arm, and casually sauntered to the packed ballroom where the “O” Awards were to take place. I even paused to smoke my last cigarette, as one does before facing a firing squad. The only thing missing was the blindfold, but I wouldn’t have wanted one.
After all, I’m just as compelled as the next guy to rubberneck a good car wreck.
Tony Lovett is publisher and editor-in-chief of AVN.
This article originally appeared in the September issue of AVN.
