Hindsight: True Love & Mischief in the Golden Age of Porn
Page 41
The Greatest X-rated Movie Never Made
Seka’s side of the story
May 30, 2011
I have to tell you what I remember about that whole thing. I knew that I was making some big bucks for doing the movie in the first place and I had pretty much control over most everything. That being said…
I wanted the people in the movie to be people I really liked and respected. I wanted them to be paid VERY, VERY well and to be treated like actors and not livestock. Now that you know that, you know why Howie was playing the lead male role. I was and still am just crazy about Howie. We were friends then and we are still friends to this day. Howie, I love you my darling, sweet friend.
Now, about that day. I could tell that Howie was very nervous as he was acting a bit strange, but not knowing how he normally acted before a sex scene, I didn’t want to say anything to him because as we all know, all a woman has to do is say one wrong word and the dick is going to run away and hide and he AIN’T coming out again ‘til he knows the coast is clear. So, I just watched and waited, watched and waited. We all watched and waited for a long time that day and it was not because of Howie. Doing any kind of movie is a lot like being in the army…hurry up and wait.
Now, it’s time and we are in bed kissing, sucking and being sucked. I thought to myself while Howie was down there in the throes of the war that he was going through (that I was unaware of), HOLY CRAP, the boy knows what he’s doing! Howie, I don’t know if I ever told you, but you eat some good pussy. Back to that, I was getting wet and sweaty when I noticed that he had a twelve-fourteen hour beard. I have to tell you, that is what put it over the top for me. It was very tender and rough at the same time — a very delicate tight rope to walk and Mr. Gordon was the master. That was what made me want to give some of that pleasure back to him — so I slid his manhood into my mouth gently sucking, licking, and tonguing his lovely unit. The next thing I remember he was inside of me and I was in heaven. We were sweating, dripping from almost every orifice. Then, as quickly as it seemed to happen, it was over and we were just there in an orgasmic heap, basking in the afterglow of one hell of a roll in the sheets.
It was not until much later that I knew of the pure HELL that Howie had been going through. You know, looking back on it, Howie is pretty much like that with most things in his life. There are few men in this world that have their big head control what happens with the little head, Howie is one of those men — and the man that I have been with for some ten years now is the same way. So, Howie, you see after all, you were and are the kind of man that I have always looked for. A man that knows how to use his head.
I love you Howie.
Seka
Chapter Forty
Sober Monday
“I always fall in love while I’m working on a film. It’s such an intense thing, being absorbed into the world of a movie. It’s like discovering that you have a fatal illness, with only a short time to live. So you live and love twice as deeply. Then, you slip out of it, like a snakeskin, and you’re cold and naked. What worries me is that when these loves die, they hardly leave traces on me. I wonder why I don’t suffer.”
Natassia Kinski, actress, Time magazine, May 2, 1983
I don’t know why you didn’t suffer either because I was seriously into self-inflicted wounds myself. Since Sunny Days ended, I smoked a ton of pot and munchied myself into a good extra ten pounds while trying to make the reentry from the swashbuckling X-rated movie star to the stay-at-home husband, daddy-of-one, and expectant-daddy-of-another.
When I’d been home three weeks, it was arbitrarily time to put away the pot and sober up. Carly was nudging me back toward writing my X-rated memoirs and I was going to try and go with it. It had been my plan all along to have them done by January 1, 1984. Guess I’m running a little late!
It was a friend’s cancer that was kicking our asses hard in those days. He was a fellow therapist at the clinic where Carly worked. Carly’s pregnancy had all of her emotions on the surface with the shields down and the cancer in our friend was spreading. Nobody was talking about how much longer he had left, but that seemed to be the undercurrent of things, all the words between the lines.
Carly’s belly was starting to get out there as we moved through our sixth month at the end of summer. I was eager for the fall. I’d had enough of the hot, sunny weather. It was hard to sit inside and write on such days. I wanted the cool comfort of the fog.
Birth and death are always happening at the same time, all over this earth, aren’t they? It’s just that we don’t often feel it. We did that year.
It was a time to revise, rededicate, and make plans. My tobacco smoking was beginning to scare me. Our friend was a Marlboro man and he was dying of lung cancer.
He died on a Friday afternoon. Shortly before that, he told Carly that he’d had a dream Thursday night in which he’d left his body. When he woke up Friday morning and found himself still in it, he was pissed.
Carly told me that his last hours were peaceful and without pain. When she finally got home late that day, after having been one of the sisters of mercy who attended to him at the end, she was strong and shaken at the same time.
Several days later, I found getting through the memorial service to be scary and tough. I took solace in tuning it all out and writing a letter to be read at my own:
Don’t make eulogies for me,
I didn’t know shit.
And if the Truth be told,
I don’t think you know all that much either.
I long ago made my peace with the fact
that the human mind was just way too puny to comprehend
just about any of the important anythings.
Since I’m already gone,
I’m just delighted to not have to be where you are…
sitting there, fucking grieving, that’s the worst.
Go home. Go play some miniature golf.
Death is the great humbler of us all.
Since I’m gone, I suppose now, I know who
killed Kennedy…both Jack and Bobby.
Think of me as a fart that smelled like a rose.
I know I did!
Chapter Forty-One
Sex Play
Producer Ted Paramore flew me down to LA for a day of rehearsal.
Sex Play was going to be shot in Los Angeles. More and more of the adult films, and now, the adult videos, were being shot down there. Evidently, the police heat had been turned way down. I have no idea why. The world was changing. It was cheaper to shoot down there and except for the posh, twisted miracle of Sunny Days, cheaper was the magic word for the X-rated industry back at the end of 1983.
X-rated films and their movie houses were dying. The video revolution was deeply cutting into the profits. Perhaps rightly so, for all of the obvious reasons, people preferred to stay at home to watch their sexy movies. In order to keep their profits up, budgets for making films were going down. Sex Play was such a film.
It began life as The Fan Club. It was the story of Jeff Justice, porn star. Played by the talented, handsome, adult veteran Eric Edwards, word was that Jeff Justice had become impotent. The plot hinged upon the premise that if this secret information somehow got leaked out to the public, then his studio would lose millions of dollars.
Porn loved to portray itself as if it were bigger than it was, like it was the financial equal of the straight Hollywood. But it was not often the straight corporate Hollywood of today that was depicted; it was usually the one from the days of the Big Studios. A cigar-chomping, X-rated producer like Ted Paramore loved to pretend that he was a Warner Brother or a Louie B. Mayer, only operating in smut.
Ted was an award-winning, successful producer and a charming rogue to boot. He could bounce a check on you every now and then.
Ted once took me out to lunch to a great deli in the Valley. I think it was called Canter’s. My test for a great deli has always been, do they have stuffed kishki in gravy? They had stuffed kishki in gravy.
“I’ll have the stuffed kishki, please, extra gravy. I don’t care what it costs.”
This movie had a plot. I read all about it in the script, on the morning I flew down to LA for the rehearsal. Unfortunately, large chunks of that plot would later be expunged when the money ran out.
At the rehearsal that afternoon, I sat in a room where there were three women that I’d already had sex with, three more that I was scheduled to have sex with, and besides all of them, there were two more women that I actually wanted to have sex with. Imagine that.
What was the protocol for this type of moment? I didn’t know who to talk to first, or who to touch, or even where to look without slighting somebody. I solved, or rather avoided, the problem by keeping pretty much to myself. Later, I did check in with the three women that I was to work with in the movie. Business before pleasure, I suppose, and I had to ask each of them if they had herpes. Each woman told me that she did not. I decided to believe them. This wasn’t exactly being very scientific.
It wouldn’t be too much longer before that question would become, “Do you have AIDS?” or “Are you carrying the HIV virus?” And by then, just their word would no longer be good enough either. The world was changing.
I was impressed with the work of director Robert McCallum on that rehearsal day. He was quick to the point with an eye toward being simple and eliminating any confusions.
I worked with Kay Parker in this film too.
Yes, I loved her. Still do. Kay Parker was unique in the business. She had a natural immunity about her, a true heart that made the beast of pornography stand down. She was like the good witch in The Wizard of Oz. We worked together three or four times in all and were usually lucky enough to find whatever magic we needed to transcend whatever manure they were throwing at us. We allowed each other dignity and humanity. We had the grace to appreciate each other. We brought the best parts of ourselves to the dance and we never had to apologize to anybody, about anything, ever.
Kay Parker was Hall of Fame stuff and one of the best people that ever happened to the X-rated business.
I also was very impressed by Helene, the red-headed production manager. She fell into that special category of one of the two women that I actually wanted to have sex with. She had a ton of chutzpah, two guns, and a fancy sports car. When she told me that she also worked some as a straight Hollywood agent, I told her that I would love to have an agent who had her kind of nerve. She shook hands with me and said if she could get me anything outside of the X, then we’d work out a deal. I gave her some headshots and wished her luck. This was a sex scene begging to happen if I hadn’t had to rush off to make the plane ride back home. She drove me to the airport.
Oh, don’t worry, I heard it too. It’s that same old song again.
You want to know how a guy that gets us all goo-goo eyed over his great love for his pregnant wife and young baby can still get his nose all wide open when a loosey-goosey, red-headed, two-gun Annie Oakley comes zooming around the corner with her top down?
What can I say? It’s like a recurring theme with him. You can’t really tell if he’s bragging or if he’s ashamed. It might just depend on who he thinks the audience is at any given moment. He gets like a politician who changes his message to fit the crowd.
Why am I talking about him like he’s not even here? Have we given up all pretense of supporting characters and just surrendered to all the voices in his own head? Howie! Are you splitting up with yourself? Get it together, man!
I didn’t want to be monogamous in 1983, or 1984, or 1985…and maybe my explanation back then would have been to say, “Well, there’s breakfast, lunch, and dinner, y’know. Maybe even a midnight snack sometimes. You don’t always want to eat the same food, do you?” But even I could see that was too glib, crude even, and unworthy of beings who spoke of true love and dared to imagine the soul.
Then again, I’m not always as sensitive as my press clippings proclaim. I’m like any other man. I don’t always see things too clearly when I’m standing there with a boner, allegedly, pointing in the wrong direction.
I didn’t want to be monogamous. I knew that. And so what if I couldn’t explain it. Are all things rational? It was a feeling. And when I thought of being forced into monogamy, my claws came out. I had an animal self that just didn’t want to hear about it.
I wanted my wife and my family…and I wanted whatever else I wanted too.
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
When in doubt, quote somebody famous and then run for cover.
Was I really any different from any other man? Or was it just that I was more willing to let the demon take the wheel and drive sometimes? This latest redhead wasn’t even an actress. Couldn’t blame that one on the business. But nothing really happened, then, did it? I made my flight. I went home.
It would take me more than another twenty years before I could ever really say that I wrestled that demon to a draw. But by then, of course, I was well into my fifties. It might just have been that he was getting a little tired.
Chapter Forty-Two
“You’re killing me, Howie! You’re killing me!” Marty the literary agent said. “Every woman in the world hates you right now and none of the guys give a shit. They’re all watching ESPN.”
Chapter Forty-Three
Polly Just Around the Corner
Back in Berkeley, we were repairing the damage done by the fire to the front house and we were also building a new children’s wing for our cottage. The race was on. We were trying to get all this work done before the second bun came out of the oven. Baby Polly was due in January.
We were doing all this building in the rainy season. It was blue collar and it was messy. Did you ever try to shovel mud? The dirt was twice as heavy because of all the water. And when you went to throw it somewhere, it didn’t go anywhere. It stayed right there on your shovel. You had to remove each shovelful of muck by hand. And you had to scrape it all off before you could take your next shovelful. It took forever. It wore you out, even when you were working on your own house.
Carly had that late pregnancy waddle going and was having an awful lot of the Braxton Hicks contractions. They reminded me of labor trying to start itself the way drivers and pilots used to have to hand-crank those old engines of yore. I thought, Just one more of those cranks would surely do the trick and labor could begin itself in earnest! Polly appeared to have all of her bags packed and was in the final approach for launch down the birth canal. Baby Traffic Control was monitoring her flight.
The electrician made his first appearance since breaking our toilet some ten days ago. He was busy doing wiring in the kids’ new bedroom. Most of the indoor construction had already been completed and we were left only with the odds and ends like installing some shelves.
Outside, there was still much to do, but who cared! After three months, it appeared we would meet our deadline of getting the cottage ready before Polly’s birth.
Uh-oh, the electrician just broke the toilet again! What is it with this guy?
Chapter Forty-Four
Showtime
Carly woke me just after two o’clock in the morning.
These were still the days before TVs had remotes and the cable control box was on my side of the bed. Carly had been having trouble sleeping in the late stages of the pregnancy and was watching a lot of all-night television. To get at the controls, we had to switch sides of the bed. I thought that’s what we were doing again, but she kept on shaking me.
“I’m in labor,” she said.
> We did it differently this time. I was not going to be the labor coach. During the birth of our first child, Carly had completely bonded with a hospital nurse named Marian. She was both gentle and firm as a rock. Helping women to deliver babies was her profession. Marian just seemed to have come out of nowhere to be exactly what Carly needed to get through that difficult first birth. When it was time to get on that rollercoaster again, Carly definitely wanted to ride with Marian.
I was grateful and relieved. To begin with, it completely freed me from the preposterous notion that I should somehow be monitoring the doctor’s medical decisions in order to keep to some kind of hippy-dippy, delusional fantasy of natural childbirth. It freed me from having to pretend that I knew what I was doing. With Marian there, I could feel safe and secure because Carly was in the hands of a skilled, birthing angel.
Marian, I loved you then and I love you now. Thank you. Juliana, Polly, say thank you to the nice lady. Bobby, you’ll be getting your turn in a couple of years too.
Labor, which took over thirty hours with the first-born, took about twenty minutes with the second. The hard part this time was pushing the baby out.
She didn’t want to go. It took two or three hours to convince her.
Carly was spectacular. As I watched her in the throes of giving birth, I saw a galloping horse, the breath pushing and pulsing from her nostrils, her mane flowing in the wind, in the moonlight. She was strong, pulsating, and gorgeous.
Polly was born at 6:27 a.m. She weighed nine pounds, ten point two ounces. She looked like an Eskimo with dimples. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief.