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

by Howie Gordon

  And she was talking. I kept waiting for the “fuck me-fuck me woman” to show up, but she just kept right on talking. And I realized that this was just another person! There was no X-rated woman. It was a delusion. She’s got a kid. She’s got a life. She was nice enough. I took some pictures with my still camera. She was posing. We touched a little bit. There was zero passion going on between us.

  Eventually, the alarm was going off in my wedding ring and I figured it was time to go home for dinner. And I excused myself and went home, a wiser man.

  Well, the problem was they called me up two days later and offered me a part in their movie!

  Oh!

  It was $200 a day for two days work. Day one would be getting a blow job and day two would be taking part in an orgy. Did I want the job?

  Chapter Four

  “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”

  Yogi Berra

  It was the mid-seventies, and all of the dropouts were looking for ways to drop back in. When that phone call for the X-rated audition came along, I was working as a laborer and house painter for a friend’s mother out in Walnut Creek. Specifically, I had spent that day in a hot August sun, breaking up a long cement path with a sledgehammer.

  Mary used to buy run-down houses, give them an upscale makeover, and then resell them for big bucks. I had become her main foot soldier in the great army of the “half-tusk,” the shade of off-white she chose for all of her painting needs.

  It had begun a year earlier when Mary had daughter Karen bring out the whole commune for a day’s work in the early stages of one of those makeovers. There must have been twenty-three, twenty-four of us hippies running around doing various jobs under her watchful eye. When she paid us at the end of the day, she fired everybody but me. She said they were useless, but that I showed a little talent. I could come back tomorrow if I wanted. It was five bucks an hour and she promised that she’d work my ass off.

  Mary and I were a good match. To begin with, I had been struggling financially since I moved to California and I very much welcomed a steady job. She taught me how to paint. And I would get damn near snow blind trying to distinguish between the second and third coats of half-tusk white that she would require on just about everything. Mary taught me the grace of hard work. And I very much took to that. It filled me with a very sane satisfaction to do a job right and make her happy. It gave me a gentle peace to come home from work feeling like I’d earned my tired. And it restored my confidence that I might actually be able to be a grown up and be able to pay my own way in this world.

  My salary went from $5 an hour to $7.50 when Mary started lending me out to her friends, but it just wasn’t the same after that. That kind of work wasn’t particularly special to me. It had been my relationship with Mary. I knew that a significant episode of my life was coming to an end. It was time for me to look to the future and see what was up for next.

  I applied to the Episcopal Theological Seminary (ETS) at Harvard. A friend of mine had gone there and shared that it was a great place to study history, which was one of my passions.

  Likewise, I applied to the Hebrew Union Seminary, a rabbinical school in Cincinnati for largely the same reason. I could see myself becoming a rabbi, but I didn’t really want to have a congregation. I just thought I might want a graduate school opportunity to study some more history.

  And then, of course, I got the offer to play the part in a porno movie.

  ETS responded first. They rejected me. They said while it was true in the past that they had accepted non-Episcopal students for various postgraduate level studies, this year they were focusing on accepting only applicants who were seriously committed to becoming Episcopal ministers. And thank you very much.

  A tough choice remained: rabbi? porn star? handyman?

  As it turned out, I soon learned that the first two years of the rabbinical school program would have required me to move to Jerusalem to study Aramaic. Boy, was that ever a wrong number. No thanks.

  Then, getting the offer of $200 for a blow job on the same day that I had just been paid $5 an hour for breaking up concrete with a sledgehammer, well, that really helped make my decision.

  I’d be trading four days of backbreaking labor for one blow job. And when you threw in another four days hard labor for one orgy, well, it seemed like a good time to move on from being a handyman.

  I’m sure there were hundreds of good reasons not to put myself in a porno movie, but ya know what? I couldn’t think of any of ‘em.

  Bring on The Candy Stripers! The fat kid is gonna be a sex star!

  Chapter Five

  “Life is trouble, only death is not. To be alive is to unbuckle your belt and to look for trouble!”

  Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek

  It was two weeks before my first scene in the movie. I was to play Dr. Bishop getting a blow job in a closet from one of the nurses.

  Okay. I did my sit-ups. I did my push-ups. My body was spectacular. I had my lines down. But I soon get to thinking:

  You can learn your lines. You can do your sit-ups, but there is no way in God’s universe you can promise that at 10:00 o’clock on Tuesday morning, you’ll be able to get a hard-on!

  There is no Viagra! This is the Dark Ages! It hasn’t been invented yet. This is gonna be a trial by ordeal. It’s just you, you and her, actually, whoever she turns out to be.

  And I’m worried.

  I’m worried.

  I’m worried. I’m really worried. I’m so worried that one morning I wake up and there are red blotches all over my body! HUGE red blotches! I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I figure I must have poison oak or something. I call up my friend Michael Rossman, the nature expert.

  “How do you get rid of poison oak really quick?” I ask him.

  “You don’t,” he says. And after I describe my symptoms, he says that it doesn’t sound like poison oak to him. He advises me to go see a doctor. He’s right. I need to know if I’m contagious.

  The doctor says, “You’re nervous.”

  “Yeah,” I tell him, but I don’t tell him why.

  “You got hives,” he says.

  “Hives? I’ve never had hives before. “

  “Well, you got ‘em now!” he says. “Go home, take a Valium, and go to bed.”

  I did. They were gone the next day.

  I have to tell you that I secretly really loved this. My favorite author at the time was the great Nikos Kazantzakis. He’s probably best known as the author of Zorba the Greek but he’s written many great books. Kazantzakis was a literary giant. He wrote his own version of The Odyssey that began where Homer’s ended. It’s a thousand pages of poetry. Kazantzakis was always writing about the spirit and the flesh, the conflict between the spirit and the flesh.

  He told a story in his autobiography about going to have his very first extra-marital love affair in Europe of the 1920s. He went to Vienna to meet his paramour, his lover. He arrived in town the night before she did, and the next morning when he woke up, his head was like double its normal size! He had turned into some kind of a grotesque gargoyle. It must have been an infection or something, but the doctor who first examined him had no idea what it was. Kazantzakis s head had just spontaneously swollen up to a monstrous size and he was appropriately scared.

  Well, as the story goes, he called upon his friend, Sigmund Freud, who happened to be living in Vienna at the time, and asked him for his help. Freud suggested that it might be due to some kind of guilt reaction and advised him to call off his intended affair and go home. Kazantakis took his advice and the swelling soon subsided. It just went away.

  All of which I’m telling you because when I got those blotches, I felt just like my hero! I was hoping it would make me a better writer!

  Chapter Six

  I was practicing getting hard-ons in my car as I drove over the Bay Bridge to the soundstage in San Francisco. And as soon as I would get it up I’d stop because I didn’t want to waste it. I just needed th
e confidence that I could do it. So, I’m riding along and whenever a truck was gonna pass, I’d cover myself up because they could look down into my car and see what I was doing. But, every now and then, I would miss one and they would see me. This made for some insane horn honking and some very amused finger pointing. The guys were laughing at me.

  What could I do? I had to rehearse.

  Chapter Seven

  I believe foreplay consisted of the director saying to me, “You drop your drawers,” and then saying to my partner, “You get on your knees and suck his cock. When he gets hard, we’ll start shooting.”

  “What? And give up show business?”

  Chapter Eight

  Oh, I got hard right away. When she slipped my penis into her mouth, my body knew exactly what to do. I just had to stay out of the way. The blood flowed in, I engorged, and it all felt pretty good.

  There were like twenty or thirty people on the set that day and I’m looking everyone in the eye. “How ya doin? How ya doin? Welcome to my blow job.”

  I’m thinking: Last week, I was busting my ass with a sledgehammer for five bucks an hour and now, I’m gonna get $200 for letting you watch while this woman sucks me. It was the American dream come true, one of ‘em, anyway.

  There was no video back then, it was all film. And film was loaded into magazines that contained three, four, five, up to even ten minutes worth of footage before they’d have to stop shooting to reload. When we used up that first magazine, the director called, “Cut.” A bell rang, I believe, and the set buzzed into a different kind of action. Crew people popped up from everywhere and started doing their jobs.

  Nancy stopped sucking me then. Her stage name was Nancy Hoffman. Mine was Marcus Howard. She stopped sucking me and my erection went away. She’s having makeup fix up her hair. Somebody’s up on a ladder adjusting a light. People are reloading the camera. Pretty soon, it’s time to start up again.

  Bob Chinn is the director. He’s actually a very kind and gentle soul. Bob directs Nancy back on her knees. She returns my cock to her mouth. God’s in His Heaven and all is right with the world. I get hard again. Action! They start shooting again and life is good. Slurp, two, three, four, slurp, two, three, four, and pretty soon, “Cut!” It’s another run-out. They have to reload again.

  This time Nancy goes to take a pee break. Of course, my penis has deflated again. Eh, that’s all right. The crew is discussing last night’s game, the Giants or the 49ers. It’s all small talk chitchat while they finish reloading the camera. And pretty soon, we’re back at it once again. Nancy is sucking me. My cock gets hard. It’s a good day at the office, and motion picture history continues to be made.

  All right, this starting and stopping business happens maybe five, six, seven, eight, NINE more times, and my dick finally says to me, “HELLO! HELLO! WHAT’S GOING ON HERE? ARE WE GONNA DO THIS? OR WHAT? MAKE UP YOUR FUCKING MIND!” He hardly ever yells at me like that. It was very disconcerting!

  I told my dick, “Look, I’m just working here. I don’t know!” And right at that moment Director Bob says, “Okay, we have all the hardcore footage we need, now come!” He said to me, “Now, come!”

  I believe that’s when it all started to unravel. I looked down at Nancy. She’d been on her knees, on a concrete floor, for forty-five minutes, more or less, diligently sucking my cock. Frankly, at this point, she looked like someone who was ready to take a nap. If this had been a private sexual matter between us, I would have given her a big hug and suggested that we both go out for a slice of pizza or something. And that’s when the door opened and I saw for the first time the difference between “personal” and “professional” sex.

  We were hired to do a job, and right now, that job was for me to have an orgasm. Her job was to help me have that orgasm. Our personal feelings were supposed to be in the dressing room hanging with our street clothes. Mine weren’t. I was stuck thinking that she didn’t want to be doing this anymore. And while I’m playing Hamlet and juggling these conflicting thoughts, the director set us back to work.

  Nancy revved her engines and started sucking me on fast forward. I wasn’t even hard yet and she was trying to make me come. Well, hell, I was trying to make me come too, but, whoa! I wasn’t even hard yet! It all started to feel like my dick was in a blender.

  No, no, no, no, no, no, no, this was all wrong. This was not gonna work. My erection was nowhere to be found. She was chewing on my limpness and the sperms were all marching the other way in a full retreat. We stopped. We took another break. This one was on me. It was like striking out with bases loaded. I was reeling with the shock.

  And when no one was looking, my dick quietly tiptoed off of the set, stole my car keys, and then went home. Gone. Left me standing there alone with a bad grin on my face and dead spaghetti between my legs.

  You know what George Burns once said about trying to have sex at age ninety? He said it was like trying to shoot pool with a rope.

  They only had this one scene to shoot on this day. They had planned to be done by noon. They were gonna feed us all a fine catered roast beef lunch and then everybody would have the rest of the day off. It was around 11:30 a.m. when my dick went missing. Bob Chinn saw the crazed panic that was engulfing me. “Let’s break for lunch,” he said. “We’ll get the come shot after lunch.”

  Chapter Nine

  They piled their plates high with food and sat down at long tables covered with nice tablecloths. I went into the bathroom and locked the door. It was great to get away from the prying eyes of everybody: people and cameras.

  While they dined on their fine roast beef, I continued the search for the lost polar bear in the snow storm. To my mounting fear and humiliation, I could not find him anywhere. Even by myself with the door locked, I could not get my dick to work. I had never met a panic like this before. Ever.

  Chapter Ten

  When we returned to the set around one o’clock, it was a lot more of the same nothing.

  Everybody had resumed their proper positions and Nancy tried once again to get my engines restarted. There was an eerie, hushed silence while she sucked and sucked until her ears touched. Oh, Lord, I died many times that day. The eyes of the people on the set that I had so boldly stared into earlier in the morning were now all boring holes in me. And I had no place to hide. I was free falling in a bottomless pit of shame and humiliation. It was one-thirty. It was two o’clock. They weren’t happy and I was scared. Nancy and I stopped and started many more times, all to no avail. It hardly surprised me. If I couldn’t get myself going alone in the bathroom, what chance did I have with Nancy in front of an audience of gawkers?

  I was thinking: I’m not a man anymore. I’m not a woman. I don’t know what I am. I’m a eunuch. I’m dead. I’m dying. This is Hell.

  It was two-thirty. It was three o’clock. Bob Chinn remained tenacious. He wanted a come shot to end this scene. If they’d been smart about it, they’d have had a stunt cock on standby for just such an occasion. Like a relief pitcher in baseball, he would have stepped in, given them the squirt they needed, and with the magic of movie editing, nobody would have ever known the difference. But for whatever reasons, there was no stunt cock, only me. And Bob needed me to crank one out so that we could all go home. He was willing to give me all the time I needed. Okay, I kept trying to get there. Poor Nancy, she was working awfully hard.

  It was three-thirty. It was four. The set was looking like one of those airports where a snowstorm has shut things down and stranded, weary travelers are lying around everywhere just trying to get comfortable. Of the crew, only Bob Chinn remained alert, watching us try every which way we could think of to get me going.

  I had started the day with fantasies of becoming the next big porn star and now, I didn’t care if they paid me or not. I didn’t care if they told me not to come back for that second day at the orgy. Obviously, I stunk at this. And I had no idea of the disassociation that was possible between a man and his penis. For all the good mine was doing m
e, it might just as well have been yours! Sooner or later, I thought, they would tire of all this and we could all just go home.

  It was somewhere around four-thirty or so when I started thinking about the first sexual experience I ever had. Sally. She came out of nowhere and boy, I was glad to see her. You may remember Sally, I told you all about her. Sally was the first girl I ever made out with.

  Nancy had actually dozed off and her head was resting on my thigh. Who could blame her? She needed a break. I sat there idly flipping my dick about with my right hand when Sally just showed up in my imagination. Shhhh! I could hear The Kingston Trio…

  “Hang down your head, Tom Dooley,

  Hang down your head and cry.”

  Sally! Of course! Where have you been? Back in the ninth grade, I had had the hottest sex in the world with Sally and we didn’t even fuck. It was all just petting! Sally! I could still smell her smells.

  “Hang down your head, Tom Dooley,

  Poor boy, you’re bound to die.”

  We always had The Kingston Trio playing in her game room. She sucked me. She was the first woman ever to suck me! She was the first woman to let me pull down her panties. God, it was still dizzying.

  These memories of Sally were like spinach to Popeye. The Phoenix was rising from the ashes.

  Bob Chinn was right on it. He poked the cameraman and got him to pay attention. He alerted the soundman and the boom guy too. Nancy still dozed in my lap. Bob motioned for me to extricate myself and stand up. When I did, Nancy’s head slid to the floor. Ooops! She looked around, stunned for the moment. The look on her face when she realized where she was came right out of The Three Stooges, but at least she was awake again. My penis, however, had deflated in the excitement. Bob came rushing over. The set had come alive. Everybody in the crew was back in action.