Hindsight: True Love & Mischief in the Golden Age of Porn

by Howie Gordon

  Chapter Eleven

  I wanted a girlfriend. It seemed like I had always wanted a girlfriend. Masturbation was all well and good, well, actually, it was both frightening and ecstatic, but I really wanted to be in love. Who knows where that comes from?

  As far back as kindergarten, I had always picked out a girl in the class and imagined that she and I were in love. Sometimes, I actually told them of my feelings or let them know through a friend. Once, I even gave a girl a giant Valentine on Valentine’s Day. Oops, she wasn’t interested, none of ‘em were.

  “Hit your hand on a stone,” they say, “and expect it to hurt!” I learned to keep my longings secret. It was the handsome boys, the athletic boys, the slender boys what got the girls. Chubby, pudgy, husky, you can roll your own euphemism here, but the fat guys like me generally rode the bench when it came to true love.

  By the time I became a teen-ager, all these early influences worked in combination to make me the kind of kid who overate until he was about to explode. On the outside, I was the fat kid, either being jolly or trying to act tough. On the inside, I was wondering what the hell I was doing with tits. I was alienated and frightened, ashamed and desperately romantic.

  Chapter Twelve

  “I know what you’re trying to do here,” Marty the agent said. “You’re trying to get people to feel sorry for you with all this ‘Davy the Fat Boy’ crap.”

  “Didn’t Randy Newman write that song?” I asked him.

  “Yeah, I think he did,” Marty said. “But it ain’t gonna work. It ain’t never gonna get you on Oprah.”

  “I’m just telling my story, Marty. It seems like people should know something about me before I get to the part where I talk about my career in the business.”

  “The porn business!” he said.

  “Yeah, the porn business,” I answered. “You remember, ‘Richard Pacheco, the smallest cock to ever hit the big time?’”

  “I always liked that line,” he said. “It’s funny.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome, but the bottom line is I’ll never be able to get you published.”

  “So you’ve said.”

  “I don’t make the rules! Nobody gives a fuck about the porn business. It’s dirty. It stinks. And it’s not worth anybody’s attention.”

  “Worldwide, it now makes more than $10 billion every year.”

  “Yeah, well, you may have a point there, but that’s got nothing to do with getting you a book deal that’s gonna make either one of us any money. Look, I’ve told you this before. In America, a porn star is — a porn star is a cultural villain. Get it? They’re the bad guys! They’re up there with wife beaters and child molesters. They’re all cunts and whores and Mafia lowlife!

  “But I was the senior class president.”

  “You! You precious little fuck! You want to be a hero and you want to be funny and poignant and fuck all the girls. You fuckin’ think that you can be a porn star in a white hat, but I’m telling you, schmendrick, [1] that no such animal exists. Period. It’s all fucking trafe! [2] Ferstaysh? [3] Stop wasting my time! In fact, stop wasting your time! You’re a good writer! Write about something else! Anything else! Now, get outta here. Let me make some money.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  “So what do you think about that, God? Is Marty right?”

  “Marty’s got a lot on his mind,” God said. “You should maybe cut him some slack.”

  “He’s a gatekeeper! You know I can’t sell this book by myself. I don’t have a huckster bone in my body.”

  “I don’t know,” God said, “You been huckin’ me pretty good.”

  “Well, what am I supposed to do?”

  “You? You’re supposed to write the damn book already. You’re over sixty years old for Christ’s sake. You think you’re gonna live forever? Just write the damn book.”

  “Whatever you say, God.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  When Howie Met Sally

  The hottest sex I ever had was in the ninth grade.

  The fifties had become the sixties. The aging World War II General Eisenhower had yielded the White House to the young and dashing Senator from Massachusetts. John F. Kennedy was now the president and the “New Frontier” had begun. Years later, they would call it “Camelot.”

  Among the First Ladies, the young and stunning Jackie Kennedy replaced the doddering Mamie Eisenhower. Things were looking up for America and closer to home; I had somehow found a young woman willing to explore the Garden of Eden with me.

  Sally, my sweet Sally! Had I only known that my first hands-on sexual experiences were going to be carved and burned into my erotic psyche for the rest of my sperm-bearing years, I would have done things differently.

  I would have insisted that she let me take off her shirt and her bra. I would have begged — even harder than I did — for her to let me touch those breasts. I would have demanded that she let me suck her nipples. They had to have been epic.

  Don’t get me wrong here; I’m not talking about rape. We were young. We did a lot of wrestling. I just would have wrestled a whole lot better is what I’m trying to say. The roles were very clear back then. The male was responsible for initiating all the sex acts. The female was responsible for putting on the brakes when things got to be too much. It was a negotiation of bumbling lust versus paranoid fear.

  Sweet Sally let me take her panties down. She did! She let me finger her vagina. She even sucked my penis — but she would never let me touch her breasts! She wouldn’t even let me see them. She always kept on her shirt and her bra. And when the weather was hot, she also wore pads under her arms too.

  “Shields,” they were called. We were part of a social group that was uptight about letting under-arm perspiration come through and dampen your shirt.

  It was a mid-twentieth century curse invented by corporate America to sell antiperspirants. This poor young woman was driven to wearing shields, but, God bless her, she was the first female to ever pull down her panties for me. I never got over it. I don’t think I can.

  Truth be told, I have spent a lifetime revisiting the memories of my intimate discoveries with Sally. What delicious wetness there was!

  It was the great Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis who once suggested that there really was only one woman in life, one woman with many faces. In much the same vein, in hindsight, those first sexual experiences with Sally were the most powerful of my whole life. All of the rest have been echoes. I’m not talking about romantic love here, but just the sheer power of sexual desire.

  What makes it all the more extraordinary was that we never did have any penis-vagina sex. There was no penetration. It was all just petting, but those memories became immortal. Perhaps it was because of the firstness of everything. Those memories have had enormous erotic power. Like personal French postcards frozen in amber, they have returned to me thousands of times and aroused me again and again while I’ve made love to my wife and all the others.

  The passing years can fall off in a blink. I’m back in her game room. I can hear The Kingston Trio singing. It was always The Kingston Trio singing. To this day, if I hear The Kingston Trio singing, I get a hard-on. And if I concentrate real hard, even the smells of Sally’s young body remain fresh in my mind forever.

  The strange part is that I actually had another girlfriend at the time. Sally and I were “cheating.” I was supposed to really be in love with Sharyn, pretty much the only Orthodox Jewish girl in our crowd. Sharyn was the one I took to all the parties. Sharyn was the kind of girl who when we first started kissing — well, neither one of us knew anything about opening up our mouths. We were pre-French, but we’d kiss real hard anyway because that’s the way we saw them do it in the movies. We were trying to be passionate…and it was just like in the old Bill Cosby routine, our teeth would cut up the backs of our lips and we’d have to stop the make-out sessions for several days at a time just to heal. The wounded lips and resultant swellings would contribute to short
periods of a speech defect that came to be known as the Elmer Fudd Syndrome.

  “I wuv you.”

  “I wuv you too.”

  I did “love” Sharyn. Her whole family was great. We were good friends. But Sharyn wasn’t ready for any heavy petting — and Sally was. Sally opened her mouth. Oh, my God, did Sally open her mouth!

  So, Sally and I met secretly in her game room.

  “Hang down your head, Tom Dooley,

  Hang down your head and cry …”

  Forget Viagra, Cialis, and Levitra, The Kingston Trio still works for me.

  It all began on a Continental bus ride to Washington, D.C. Our civics class was on a field trip to the nation’s capital. Sharyn just wasn’t in our class. And in the dark of that nighttime bus ride, as the miles rolled by, Sally and I shared two rickety seats next to each other and couldn’t keep our young hands out of each other’s laps. We began discovering the shivering ecstasies that were going to change our lives forever.

  I’ve often wondered why Sally chose a chubby like me for our mutual initiation into the erotic world of fun and games. Perhaps it was because her daddy was a big man too — a really big man.

  I don’t know why she picked me, but I’m glad that she did. Sally never did become a “girlfriend” girlfriend. I didn’t take her to any parties and we never went out on a date or anything like that. All we did was just to share the hottest sex that this universe has to offer.

  My daddy worked across the street from her daddy. We shared a lot of the same classes and hung out at school with many of the same friends. But after that initial springtime trip to Washington, there followed an entire summer of hot, sultry nights in her game room where The Kingston Trio was playing “They Call the Wind Mariah,” and we drove each other nuts with massively titillated and restrained passion.

  I used to pedal over there on my bicycle. I’d have a hard-on the whole way.

  “A way out here, they’ve got a name

  For wind and rain and fire

  The rain is Tess, the fire is Joe

  And they call the wind, Mariah.”

  And don’t for a minute think that I haven’t checked out Sally since those days. When I saw her at our tenth high school reunion, I confessed how wonderful my memories of our sexual discovery were. There was no missing the invitation I was extending to renew our lustful acquaintance.

  She stiffened her back and said to me in a chill voice, “My husband takes care of all of my sexual needs!”

  Oh, my God, did she ever miss the point! My wife took care of all my sexual needs too, but so what!?! Sally and I had something special! We had eternal youth and this unique volcanic fire of first lust to remember and share forever, but Sally, my dear sweet Sally, just wasn’t there. I sighed and shrugged and sadly deflated.

  Well, Goddamn it, I was mad at her. If she was going to dismiss me, then, hell, I was going to dismiss her too. For a while, I tried not to think of her when those old pictures cropped up on my erotic screen during lovemaking or masturbation. I pridefully tried to shut them off and switch to another channel, but the Sally of memory just wouldn’t go away. She refused to be dismissed.

  In time, I got over her later rejecting me and once again delighted in our steamy, creamy memories. After all, she couldn’t take away the memories.

  At the twentieth reunion, I had the feeling that she was toying with me. It was like she knew of the lust I was feeling whenever she glanced at me. Was she enjoying being the object of desire without ever having to mention it? The casual glance I gave her as she walked by on the arm of her husband just dripped with my desire, but nothing came of it.

  Did I scare her off with my blunt predation? Did her husband even know? Did she ever tell him? I doubt it. At the time, I didn’t know any of those answers, but I had hope that by the time we got to our fiftieth reunion, she’d be able to sneak off to a hotel with me. We’d put our false teeth into one of those sterilized drinking glasses and gum ourselves into an insane frenzy. I wondered if she’d even let me touch her breasts?

  Sally had large breasts. They were the object of much desire and envy in our adolescent circle of friends. I think it drove her quite mad in those early years. All the small-breasted women dreamed of being big-busted like her. In those days, of course, women could not just save up their money and buy themselves a larger cup size. There were the blessed and the unblessed and that was that.

  In moments of heated passion, I would occasionally try to unfasten her bra before Sally was aware what I was doing. Forget about it. That bra was a true engineering marvel. Miles of wire and steel cable went into the noble effort to keep those melons perched high on the vine. This was not a bra to be taken lightly. It refused to be casually undone. It required leverage, blueprints, and the deft hand of a surgeon to unlock the treasures.

  Whenever she would discover me trying to get at her lovelies, she’d always threaten to send me home if I didn’t stop. I’d stop, for a few minutes, and then we’d reprise the whole scenario once again.

  Through her, I’d seen the wisdom in the old axiom, “The grass is always greener on the other side.” My voluptuous lover often regretted nature’s gift to her of that bountiful bosom. It made her an object that she was ill equipped to deal with in those days. For her part, she simply wished that they had been given to somebody else. She liked to pretend that they just were not there.

  I recall vividly and frequently that we petted ourselves to ecstasy on any number of occasions. As I said, we never had actual intercourse where my bare penis entered her bare vagina. We would probably have both spontaneously combusted and burned to death had we allowed that moment to happen. We came awfully close, though. She’d let me take out my penis and press it into the folds of her vagina through her divinely white cotton panties.

  They’d be dripping wet. I’d be trying to burst through those panties with all the pressure I could stand to mount on my muzzled member. God, it was hot. It was overwhelming. We were begging for an accident, but the material never gave way. Fruit of the Loom saved our virginity!

  We never did get to the point where we could actually just “do it.” We both had a morality that pretty seriously said fucking meant marrying and we were only fourteen years old. What we had happened upon quite accidentally was a tryst of sexual discovery. Each of us was well lubricated for a sexual partner, but the words, “I love you,” were never spoken. Maybe it was me cheating on Sharyn, maybe it was just the sexual guilt, but, Sally, sweet Sally, let me right the wrong. Let me speak those words now, I love you. And oh, how I wanted you! Amen.

  Strangely enough, had our affair continued on a bit longer, I’m pretty sure that she would have let me enter her long before she would have been able to take off her blouse and shown me her breasts. And in memory, it seems like I was gearing myself up to pulling those panties to one side and plunging myself into her heavenly forbidden zone when our affair vanished as rapidly as it began.

  We scared each other. We scared each other with our diminishing ability to hold back Nature and keep it all in the pre-penetration stages.

  Y’see, one of those times when I was implanted into her vagina about a half-an-inch deep with the panties still in place and straining not to give way, I had an orgasm. It was an Annie Oakley bull’s-eye.

  She jumped up with her jeans all around her ankles and a startled look on her face. She was sure that I had just impregnated her. She was trying to stick her head between her legs and look at herself. Ha, you’re laughing. It’s real funny now. It sure wasn’t then.

  “It’s all so wet!” she yelped. She was so genuinely frightened that it frightened me too. Of all the juices, she said, “I can’t tell what’s mine and what’s yours! I don’t know if any of your sperm got in me or not!” We were both convinced that she was absolutely, totally and undeniably pregnant. And boy, did we ever get religion!

  In the days and weeks that followed, I didn’t even masturbate. I was cutting deals with God. If I would refrain from touchin
g myself, would He please let her not be pregnant? Since I was in the habit of “touching myself” two or three times a day, I thought this was a hell of a good offer.

  When the time for her period came and her period did not, my fear became anger. I was furious with God. How could He create something as irresistible, as wonderful as sex, and then tie it to the horrors and melodrama of an unwanted pregnancy. This was Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter all over again. I could not comprehend His divine stupidity. I could not forgive myself mine.

  As a young man of integrity, I was preparing to do the “right thing” and offer to marry Sally when she finally gave the word that her menstrual flow had begun again. Allah be praised. All thoughts of marriage faded like hookah smoke. The very next weekend, we put The Kingston Trio back on the record player and reclined again in our private paradise of petting. Once more, I wrestled unsuccessfully with her bra and once more, we teased ourselves into liquid explosions. I was, however, very careful never to explode too near her “bull’s eye” ever again.

  Then, like I said, we just sort of stopped seeing each other. Yeah, like hell, I’ve been seeing her for over forty years, in living Technicolor and with smell-o-vision during some of the most intimate moments of my life. My dick might have been in Marilyn Chambers, Annette Haven or Seka, but often, I was still thinking about Sally.

  She used to call my penis, “Charley.” I used to call her vagina, “Ethel.”