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

by Howie Gordon

  Oh, by the way…

  Over the years, I’ve struggled to explain this simpering, whimpering, embarrassing end of my career as Casanova. Recently, this article appeared in The San Francisco Chronicle, reprinted from The New York Times:

  Study Says Kids Sap their Dad’s Testosterone Level

  By Pam Belluck, The New York Times

  Updated: 09/12/2011

  This is probably not the news most new fathers want to hear.

  Testosterone, that most male of hormones, takes a dive after a man becomes a parent. And the more he gets involved in caring for his children - changing diapers, jiggling the kid on his knee, reading “Goodnight Moon” for the umpteenth time - the lower his testosterone drops.

  So says the first large study measuring testosterone in men when they were single and childless and several years after they had children. Experts say the research has implications for understanding the biology of fatherhood, hormone roles in men, and even health issues like prostate cancer.

  “The real take-home message,” said Peter Ellison, a professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard, is that “male parental care is important. It’s important enough that it’s actually shaped the physiology of men.”

  Testosterone was measured when the men were 21 and single, and again nearly five years later. Although testosterone naturally decreases with age…men who became fathers showed much greater declines, more than double the childless men.

  And men who spent more than three hours a day caring for children — playing, feeding, bathing, toileting, reading or dressing them - had the lowest testosterone.”

  Oh.

  Chapter Twenty

  Stale Kimonos

  Well, I didn’t know about any of that stuff back then. What I did know was that I had just had my thirty-ninth birthday, and I began thinking that this whole sex star business might just be a younger man’s game.

  I had just had four difficult sex scenes in a row. I was one for four in orgasms, but I was on a three-scene losing streak, and those failures really do take it out of you. Twenty, thirty, forty people are watching you. It was one thing to struggle with all that pressure on my way up the mountain, on my way to learning how. It was quite another to fail as a star, to plummet into the embarrassment, to be an aged Willie Mays stumbling in the New York Mets outfield after he had previously known life as a GIANT.

  And in this whole last “comeback year” of safe sex, I must say that I never could really get comfortable with the idea that on the other side of this condom, might just be death. It all wasn’t much of a turn on. It was a different world.

  At home, there was no AIDS, there was no condom, and there was no fear of death. There was Carly, waiting, both patiently and un, for me to have done with all this madness of my youth. And, of course, there were three little kids who needed Daddy to just be Daddy.

  It was time. It was like baseball to me. It had always been like baseball to me. I just couldn’t get around on the fastball anymore. It was time to hang ‘em up. Spikes, by the way, the shoes with the metal cleats, that’s what you’re hanging up when you quit baseball. You’re hanging up your spikes.

  1. We now know that kissing does not transmit HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. Saliva does not transmit HIV, only blood, semen, pre-cum, vaginal fluid and breast milk. — Current AIDS information supplied by Robert Gordon, Director of Special Projects for the UCLA Art & Global Health Centers.

  2. We now know that the risk of transmitting HIV through unprotected oral sex is significantly less than that of unprotected vaginal sex or anal sex. In terms of ‘relative risk’ the riskiest sexual activity is unprotected anal sex, followed by unprotected vaginal sex, and then unprotected oral sex. — Current AIDS information supplied by Robert Gordon, Director of Special Projects for the UCLA Art & Global Health Centers.

  San Francisco Chronicle

  Pacheco joins the mafia. Gordon Archive.

  Bloody Howie! Gordon Archive.

  The Joan Rivers Show. Joan Rivers Show

  Joan Rivers Show

  Anybody need a writer? Gordon Archive.

  Seka also asked me to direct it. Suze Randall/Video-X-Pix/Caballero

  On the set with Seka & Richard Pacheco. Vincent Fronczek/Gordon Archive/Seka

  Alex de Renzy & Richard Pacheco on the set of Careful, He May Be Watching. Vincent Fronczek/Gordon Archive

  This here’s Baby Bobby! Gordon Archive.

  Juliana and Polly say hi to their baby brother. Gordon Archive.

  Sam said he had no problem with that. Gordon Archive.

  I was back in the business! Gordon Archive/Hustler Video/LFP Video Group, LLC.

  And I’d be working with Hyapatia Lee! Gordon Archive/Hustler Video/LFP Video Group, LLC.

  Gordon Archive/Hustler Video/LFP Video Group, LLC.

  Gordon Archive/Hustler Video/LFP Video Group, LLC.

  Gordon Archive/Hyapatia Lee.

  Job Hunting. Gordon Archive.

  Off I went, alone to New York. Elizabeth Schwegler

  Carly stayed home with the kids. Elizabeth Schwegler

  Annie Sprinkle/Candida Royalle

  Gloria Leonard, Nina Hartley, and Candida Royalle. Annie Sprinkle/Candida Royalle’s Sensual Escape

  Gordon Archive.

  Old friends. San Francisco Chronicle

  Ready… Annie Sprinkle/Candida Royalle’s Sensual Escape

  Get set… Annie Sprinkle/Candida Royalle’s Sensual Escape

  …Go! Annie Sprinkle/Candida Royalle’s Sensual Escape

  Sitting at the Maestro’s side. Gordon Archive.

  Intropics Video.

  Howie & Annette Revisited. Caballero

  Ona Zee. Gordon Archive/Ona Zee

  Shanna McCullough. Shanna McCullough

  Yeah, it was time for me to hang ‘em up. Gordon Archive.

  Part Seven

  Believe it or not, that’s Marlon Brando and my wife Carly in 1957. She wasn’t my wife then, she was twelve years old. Their families knew each other. Gordon Archive.

  The Tippy-Tippy End

  Chapter One

  Many years later…

  A Mid-Summer’s Night Scream

  or…

  My Wife as in France

  “As men get older, the spirit is often embarrassed by what they have to go through to put the will in their willies.”

  “Who said that?”

  “I think you did.”

  “Oh. Okay, but don’t quote me.”

  My wife was in France.

  Did you know that the noted philosopher, the vastly worldly Marlon Brando once said, “I don’t think it’s the nature of any man to be monogamous. Men are propelled by genetically ordained impulses over which they have no control to distribute their seed.”

  And while one could easily argue the point about a man’s actual ability to control that urge, I, like many another married men, have certainly had the occasion to resent the need for such an exercise.

  But, like I said, my wife was in France.

  Albert Einstein, a mere sliver of a man when compared to the great Brando, may very well have been the most oft-quoted scientific genius of the twentieth century, but his views on marriage were largely given short shrift. The father of the atomic revolution failed at marriage, y’know — twice.

  Einstein regarded falling in love as “an incident.” He proposed that the idea of two people remaining happily married and together for the rest of their lives based upon “an incident” was a virtual mathematic impossibility.

  In any case, as I told you, my wife was in France. Carly had gone on a ten-day excursion to an artists’ retreat. I had amicably declined the offer to accompany her, and now there was a big ocean between us. Not surprisingly, I was looking to mess around. Please, after all we’ve been through, spare me your shock.

  But, before we get any deeper into this story, I must say that it would be naively unsophisticated on your part to assume that these are the ravings of a man who no longer wishes
to remain married. I assure you, it’s quite the contrary. I love my wife. I love the kids. I love our house and all of our things. I even love the goldfish too, though it is a major pain in the ass to clean the fish tank. We could certainly use a little more cash flow around here, but then again, who couldn’t?

  The point is, as sure as there is rain, there comes a time, or two, or five, in every marriage, when the husband looks around one day and feels like “the ass is definitely greener on the other side.” No doubt, Brando and Einstein, amongst others, perhaps even you, would concur.

  The whys and wherefores of such a moment may or may not be significant to a lasting marriage, but the problem remains. What is the husband to do about it? Or the wife, for that matter, this being an era of feminist revolution, but my experience has shown that it is the male of the species who is most vulnerable to that call of the wild. And we men, the valiant keepers of the precious prongs, seem far more capable of the delusion that sex and love can be compartmentalized. Despite centuries of experience and mountains of evidence to the contrary, we are still able to believe that there really are women out there who will enjoy flaming-hot, extra-marital sex with us — without it having to wreak havoc in our marriages.

  “The seven-year itch,” it’s been called and “the mid-life crisis.” Call it what you will, but when this moment arises for a couple in their mating, there are as many attempts at solution as there are marriages.

  My wife, who was in France, and I have been together for almost thirty years now. As I told you many pages ago, in the early days, we both slept around. Plenty. And Chaos had ensued. The green-eyed monster of jealousy proved formidable. As I’ve said, we found it difficult to practice Free Love and try to be Romeo and Juliet at the same time.

  If Carly had been a mere lover, this relationship would have ended years ago. But alas, from the very outset, I knew that she was destined to be the great love of my life, the beans in my burrito, the one I was intended to marry, and the mother-to-be of my children. The deceptions and shenanigans that had worked well enough for so many years with previous lovers no longer applied. Carly and I had to make up our own new rules. And we did that, endlessly talking about our relationship.

  Yes, we agreed upon telling the truth. Fidelity was not determined by who stuck their what where, but by the willingness to engage in the telling of the truth. While this necessitated hours, days, and months of slow, agonizing torture — which might have perhaps been easily avoided had we the strength of character to successfully lie — in the end, it at least afforded us the opportunity to actually know what we were dealing with at any given time.

  For both of us, this amounted to a significant improvement upon previous relationships. We lived and we learned.

  Of course, the truth, while sounding so noble, high gloss, and universally praiseworthy, does not always play well in black and white. It is colorful, vulnerable, and subject to any number of accents and shadings. Like the infinity point of mathematics, it can be approached, but never really attained.

  In truth, there was little room to maneuver with a “Did you fuck her or did you not?” A simple “yes,” or “no,” pretty much covered all the options. But with issues like: “Do you want to fuck her?” “Are you going to fuck him?” “When are you going to fuck her?” “Where are you going to fuck him?” and the like, the game was afoot.

  But somehow, our marriage survived all of that. In time, Carly settled down to a monogamous approach, even though I remained loath to accept such a fate. In fact, my entire career in the sex industry developed as a means to insure the flow of extra cookies into my sex life.

  After I retired, we tried everything from the occasional carefully orchestrated and negotiated extra-marital indulgence for me, to my agreeing to abstain from such a thing.

  Indeed, one of the great pay-offs for my willingness to forgo some extra-marital fling and stay at home had been the mutual revelation and exploration of those deeper and darker, secret, sexual desires between us. They were the kind that didn’t even emerge until we’d been married for maybe ten or fifteen years. They were the kind that had me sniffing around outside of the house to begin with, because I never thought I’d be able to satisfy them at home. Those treasures have greatly served to enrich the marriage, but still, time, repetition, and familiarity, eventually, take their toll. Sooner or later, the eyes begin to wander again. And in this case…

  My wife was in France. And there was a big ocean between us.

  Unfortunately, she did not take our three children with her. One of the main reasons she so easily acquiesced to my not going along with her was that it would clearly be beneficial — and cheaper — if one of us stayed at home to take care of the kids. Yea, Daddy!

  Well, the net result was that far from being given ten days off, free to exorcise recent years of repressed lust for other females, I was more like a single-parent with double the usual amount of child care!

  BUT, there was a weekend sandwiched in the middle of those ten days that my wife would be away in France — and it was over that weekend, my weekend, that I was determined to make my stand. I would arrange babysitting, sleepovers, or do whatever I had to do so that both Friday and Saturday night would be mine to prowl and howl in an attempt to sate my wanderlust.

  Uh-huh. It should be noted here for future fools that the married man loses all touch with reality when fantasizing about the actual availability of loose, free, interesting, uncomplicated, and undiseased women on hand at any given moment to suit the needs of his own schedule of desire. I had no secret admirers waiting in the wings, none that I knew of anyway. The fact that I had once been Richard Pacheco, the Pre-Columbian Panty Sniffer of Porn, no longer meant a thing. In fact, by now, the whole industry had actually moved away from the Bay Area down South to LA. My “little black book” had been rendered useless. I truly had become a civilian again, just another bozo with a boner.

  I suppose many men would seek the services of the professional ladies of the night under such circumstances, but between the threat of incurable disease and the perpetual funding crisis, this offered me no solution.

  I did, however, still have one lady friend who owned and managed a dungeon in San Francisco. Yes, I said a dungeon, where SM play parties were still held every Friday night. By invitation only, you paid twenty bucks at the door and stepped into a kinky fantasyland. Most people came in couples. If you came alone, you had to take your chances of attracting a partner. At a minimum, you got to watch SM sex players “playing” all around you. At a maximum, well, maybe you got the opportunity to connect with someone of like mind and possibly “distribute a little seed.”

  Having chosen that course of action, it was amazing how the days preceding the event rapidly passed without incident. I was the perfect father, patient, loving, and kind, and spent my time cooking, cleaning, and driving as the week came to its close.

  The daylight hours of Friday could not go by fast enough, and when some child-care complications extended on into the night, I ended up being over an hour-and-a-half late to the party. But arrive I did. And when I descended the steps into the dungeon, the party was in full swing.

  There was a big man, a truly large man, a truly large, big, and naked man, who was chained by his wrists and harnessed from the ceiling. A smaller man — at least I think it was a man, he had facial hair, but he also had beautiful breasts — was slowly and forcefully spanking the big fellow with what looked to be a kitchen cutting board. A small crowd, which I was now joining, watched in complete silence with rapt attention.

  “Ugh!” the big man grunted in answer to a smack from the paddle.

  I noticed that there was a second harness secured between the big man’s balls and his body. From this second harness hung three heavy chains.

  “Ugh!”

  At the end of those three heavy chains was a bowling ball, a big, solid black bowling ball, the kind that weighed sixteen pounds. I swear to you that this man had a sixteen-pound bowling ball dangling f
rom his stretched and severely taxed scrotum.

  “Ugh!”

  While spanking the big man’s ass bright red, the smaller man with the facial hair and the beautiful breasts would occasionally give the bowling ball a little shove so that it swayed back and forth in a further pendulum of pain.

  You’re laughing. This was my big night out, and you’re laughing.

  There was a second scene going on in the dungeon. I slunk my way over to join that little clutch of revelers. There was a woman. She was a hard-looking woman. She looked like the kind of woman who would sprinkle roofing nails on her breakfast cereal. She was dressed in black with silver chains about her body. This paragon of femininity had a naked man tethered on his back to a table. There was a shoe-box-sized lid of some kind placed over the man’s genitals, which were protruding through a hole. The man’s penis was erect. It was tied back to the lid with some kind of twine. His scrotum was splayed wide against the bottom of the lid like an animal skin drying on the side of a barn. When I had happened upon this little scene of erotic bliss, the woman had just finished securing the scrotum with some kind of staple or tack.