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

by Howie Gordon

  Considering that I appear to be seriously overmatched in this battle between the sexes, my doctor, therapist, clergyman, insurance agent, personal trainer, and guru have all advised that it might be better for my health if I attended that event — with Carly!

  Chapter Two

  Some porn star I turned out to be, I spent the night sleeping alone in my car.

  I did! There I was, a featured player at the World Pornography Conference, virtually surrounded by world-class perverts of every ilk, and I ended up all alone in the middle of the night trying to fall asleep in the back of my station wagon.

  Well, maybe that’s why I’m an ex-porn star.

  Beginning with Annie Sprinkle’s invitation to come down to LA and contribute to an opening-night round of performances — I was the token heterosexual male — the World Conference On Pornography had been an absolute gas for me. It was magical time-travel. It was a resurrection. I was once again, Richard Pacheco, the porn star.

  Since my retirement from the business, there haven’t exactly been too many job applications where I’ve been able to put that on the résumé. But here at this conference, it was once again a badge of honor! They were proudly showing some of my old films and calling them classics! I ran into a whole bunch of my old friends and colleagues. And the best part was, if I didn’t look too closely in any of the passing mirrors, it was all just like yesterday in Brigadoon! Time had stood still.

  Oblivious to the gray in my hair, the deeper lines in my face, and a certain thickening around the middle, I felt a bounce to my step that I hadn’t felt in a long time. For four days, with the possible exception of those weird hours spent trying to sleep in the car, I was back in the game.

  I turned fifty years of age in May of that year. The only thing that I was sure of in facing that monumental milestone was that I didn’t want to do it fat. Beginning in January, I fought back the tide of middle-aged spread with a tennis racquet. My birthday in May came and went. I stayed with the program. By conference time in August, I was tanned, lean and mean, and almost too pretty for Carly to let me out of the house.

  This little drama of vanity and self-esteem reached its zenith as I stood naked on the stage that opening night of the conference. I did my little performance bit and was well-enough received, but the real story was, that after a long absence, filled with colossally mixed emotions over my retirement, my self-imposed exile, my increased family responsibilities, and the sheer weight of all that time, I had once again successfully grabbed at the brass ring of sex star!

  While the audience applauded, I stood there holding it and feeling it, like some glorious Achilles fresh out of a timeless rehab from his heel injury. I was ready and eager to do the battle once again. I was Ponce de Leon with my finger firmly planted on life’s rewind button.

  What did it all mean?

  I don’t know.

  What did it all mean?

  The moment came and the moment went. In the afterglow, I found myself at a hotel party in Jeffrey Douglas’s room. He was a bright, young attorney for the Free Speech Coalition. I was looking for a place to sleep, an uncrazy woman to fuck, and something to eat.

  The food came first. In order to get my body ready for that big performance, I hadn’t eaten much for an entire week. I was starved. And while I was grazing at the food table, a fresh batch of rowdy revelers entered the party. An odd looking guy made his way over to me and said, “Hey, you don’t look too happy to see us!” Fact is, I wasn’t, but I mumbled something welcoming, non-threatening, and tried gently not to strike up too much of a conversation with this way-over-the-top lad.

  A truth I’ve learned about the porn world over the years is that sometimes the fans scare me more than the enemies.

  This guy looked like a Hollywood street person to me. He was a bum, some mother’s lost child, another in a long series of twisted, attention-seeking oddballs who had somehow found their way onto the bus. If they weren’t naked in the streets, shouting and breaking glass in the middle of the night, with their eyeballs chemically enlarged to the size of silver dollars, you were lucky. This guy had augmented his beard with black magic marker and was playing with a latex penis, stretching it from his ragged groin to comical lengths like a yo-yo. He was followed in by Betty Dodson — yes, that Betty Dodson — and she came right up to me and promptly sat down in my lap.

  Now, understand, despite the fact that Betty Dodson and I had never met before, her gesture did not seem all that extraordinary to me at the time. For one thing, they say, “the rich are different.” And I always figured that you just might as well throw “the famous” in there too. Maybe this was just the way that she did things. Hell, if she behaved like everybody else, she wouldn’t even be Betty Dodson, then, would she? Besides that, you had to factor in some major chutzpah because she lived and worked in New York City.

  But none of that even occurred to me at the time. It may have been Jeffrey’s room and Betty’s chutzpah, but it was my return to backstage, backstage in Pornoland, and backstage was mine! I had paid the dues. Hell, I’d done some of my best work backstage. If you belonged there, it was a wonderful place. It was different. The conventional rules of intimacy did not apply. Clothing was optional. Titties fluttered. Grab-ass abounded. Friends were friendlier there and strangers who were about to go out and get naked together on a bright, hot set, did not remain strangers there for very long.

  Backstage was one of my very favorite places on earth. Sure, Betty Dodson had just sat down in my lap. Big deal! Hadn’t she just seen me naked on the stage?

  And aside from all of that, this night was my triumphant return from exile, I was still Achilles, wasn’t I? Still bathing in the afterglow of my little performance, what did it matter if Barbara Streisand, Whoopi Goldberg, and Betty Dodson all sat in my lap? What the hell did I care? As long as it wasn’t that street bozo with the elastic penis, it was just fine with me.

  I certainly knew who Betty Dodson was. I had admired her greatly for years thinking her to be one of the planet’s good guys. She was a sexual pioneer, one of the heroes of Eros. My own wife had once plied the masturbation trade herself. In the early seventies, Carly led workshops training mental health professionals on how to treat “pre-orgasmic” women. Unlike Betty’s direct approach where the women would essentially circle jerk under her supervision, Carly’s used the less confrontational Masters & Johnson’s model where the women were sent away to do “homework” assignments and they’d later report back to the group. Either way, it was the work of “the flower,” and it was work that we both valued highly. I was nothing but honored that Betty Dodson had landed in my lap!

  And once there, Betty and I found an instant and easy comfort with each other. We were like old friends. In fact, many old friends had reconnected that night. It was like a high school reunion where the elixir was powerful and the heart was buoyed by easy laughter and warm memories.

  The party got loud, as good parties tend to do, and the hour became late. Neighbors, trying to sleep, registered their complaints with the front desk. When the hotel security folks came knocking at the door, our host announced that the party was over.

  I had already found a bed and a relatively uncrazy woman who had volunteered to share it with me. No, it wasn’t Betty.

  Betty, as a matter of fact, left the party that night on the arm of the oddball with the magic marker beard and the elastic penis. Jesus Christ, this woman was just full of surprises. I thought maybe the guy was her son?

  Where did I sleep that night? Who was the woman? What are you, my wife? Get out of here! It’s none of your business. You’re a troublemaker!

  “None of my business? Who are you arguing with?

  Myself! Isn’t it clear?

  “Well, you’ve told us about a hundred different sex scenes with a hundred different women and all of a sudden, you’re getting coy. Did you fall in love with this woman or something?”

  Hell no! I just didn’t want to sleep in my car again.

  �
��Did Carly believe that?”

  Not for a minute.

  “Well, what then?”

  This one was just different.

  “Well, what was so different about it?”

  It ended 13 years of monogamy, that’s what!

  “Oh.”

  But I never had agreed I’d be monogamous! I never promised anything. It just happened that way. Until it didn’t.

  “Wow, you really were time-traveling, weren’t you?”

  Yes, I was. And I liked it too, until I got back home and had to fight with Carly about it all over again. All that same old crap just came right back from where we had left it. I never wanted to be monogamous. I just didn’t want to fight with Carly anymore about it.

  “I know. I know. But shouldn’t we tell them about how you and Carly finally worked all that out?”

  Oh, I will, in the last chapter. I see now that it’s the only real ending that this book ever could’ve had. Who knew? But I’m getting ahead of myself. First things first: Let me get back to finishing the story about the World Pornography Conference.

  It was the next morning. I was walking through the hotel lobby and I saw Betty Dodson as she was getting off the elevator. She came up to me rather sheepishly and said, “Remember when I sat in your lap last night like I knew you?”

  “Yeah,” I responded.

  “Well, I thought I did!” she said exploding in laughter. “I thought you were somebody else! The whole thing was a mistake! But I’m really glad I made it because I really like you and I feel like I’ve known you forever!” I let Betty know that the feeling was definitely mutual. “Good,” she said, “Now, the only thing is that I wish I could remember who it is I thought you were from New York???”

  And when I asked who was that guy she was with when she left the party, Betty howled with laughter.

  It was her cross-dressing girlfriend Kim Airs, who ran a sex shop in Boston called GRAND OPENING. Betty couldn’t believe that I had mistaken Kim’s male persona of “Leo DeGennaro” as a true penis-bearing man, let alone her son! She couldn’t wait to tell Kim.

  The next two days of the conference raced by like life at a fanciful, adult, summer camp. There was the pool and the hot sun. There were the movies and the meals.

  But best of all, were the over sixty workshops happening that completely cross-pollinated the porn stars with the mental health professionals and the First Amendment attorneys. There was a lot of fascinating stuff.

  The net result was that we won each other’s respect. We discovered that we were all players on the same team. And now, with the conference nearing its end, we all felt that we had just been part of something very, very special.

  The last session of the conference was to be a general assembly that would bring everybody together for one last time. It would be held in the Sheraton’s main ballroom and would feature An All-Star Porn Panel, subtitled: Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About the Actors and Actresses in Erotic Films and Videos From The People Who Know.

  Will Jarvis would be the moderator and I would be one of the many speakers that day including Nina Hartley, Ron Jeremy, Gloria Leonard, Vanessa del Rio, Miss Sharon Mitchell, Dave Cummings, Bill Margold, Serenity, Christi Lake, Annie Sprinkle, Juli Ashton, Randi Storm, Chris Cannon, Fiero, Meridian, Tracy Love, Shane, Johnnie Black, Anita Cannibal, Mike Horner, R. Bolla, and anybody else in attendance who had ever done a sex scene.

  Show Time

  I took a seat next to Nina Hartley on the dais. I had been one of her mentors when she was first starting out years ago in the business. By this point, Nina had taken on the Georgina Spelvin role as one of the grand old dames of the industry. Playboy Magazine had just declared her “the smartest woman in porn,” a distinction clearly open to a variety of interpretations. We were joined by a statuesque, young starlet named Meridian who took the seat on my other side. Meridian handed me a sleek business card that showed her naked with a long snake draped about her.

  Meridian and Nina fell into an animated conversation about a recent shoot in LA as the main ballroom of the Sheraton Hotel rapidly filled with people.

  That’s when I took off my pants.

  “You what?”

  I took off my pants.

  “What were you thinking?”

  I was thinking of baggy-pants comics. I was thinking of burlesque. I was thinking of Mel Brooks. I remembered reading that he once said, “Nobody ever snuck into show business. Don’t be afraid to do something bold. Don’t be afraid to make them sit up and take notice.” That’s what I was thinking when I decided to take off my pants.

  There were a lot of us up there who were going to speak and it looked to be a long session. The tables where we sat were draped in front so that the audience could only see us from about the chest on up. I thought, Wouldn’t it be funny to look out at them in all their Sheraton Universal Grand Ballroom finery — with my pants off?

  It was kind of a reverse, anti-nervous, performance gesture of imagining the audience in their underwear. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed like the thing to do.

  As the first speaker spoke, I quietly took off my shoes, slipped off my pants, and put my shoes back on. Nina and Meridian watched in amusement as I folded my pants neatly and tucked them under my chair. No one else knew.

  As I sat back in my underwear, a hand from each side reached down to caress a thigh and beyond. This was an unexpected bonus. I sat there surveying crowd and grinning to myself. So, there was a God, after all. Nina and Meridian were fondling me like we were backstage at a shoot. It was fun. Lord knows, I did nothing to discourage them.

  The speakers came and went and no one else was aware of me sitting up there in my jacket, shirt, tie — and underpants — until it became my turn to speak. Even then, as I stood and walked to the podium, the audience still could not see me below the waist.

  This is pretty much all the audience could see. But if you were on stage or behind me when I took the podium, it looked like this:

  I looked around at them saying, “What? What?” with a deadpan face. Bill Margold motioned to a set of risers behind the podium as if I should mount them to let the audience in on the joke, but I declined. Somehow, this gesture was for me and the other actors, not for the crowd. I began my speech.

  It was a rare performance moment for me when fear just took a hike. The conference was about to end and this wondrous bubble of living again in my youthful yesterday was about to burst. I knew that within twenty-four hours I would be driving to soccer practice, clipping coupons, doing dishes, and assuring my wife that I wasn’t moving to LA to resume my career. I would be sitting alone again at my desk again wondering what to write about next that might pay a few bills.

  When I retired from the porn business, there were no ceremonies and there were no gold watches. My decision to quit, based upon the threat of AIDS, had not won me any friends from those continuing on with the business. At first, I thought that the epidemic would be over in six months and I’d be back at work. Somehow, six months had become thirteen years and the threat of AIDS was still no less imposing. Hell, it may even have been worse.

  The bottom line was, that over the years, I had moved on from a hugely significant part of my life without any real closure. I never wanted to, and I never did get to say any good-byes. And while former colleagues I viewed as absolute mediocrities were being honored and inducted into porn’s Halls of Fame, I was being ignored, reduced to being a quiet footnote of the now bygone Golden Age of Porn. Well, that sucked! My heart was full as I took the microphone.

  “How’d you like the conference?” I asked the audience. “Wasn’t it great? Don’t you just hate that it’s going to be over? I don’t want it to end.”

  I told them the story of how I had met Betty Dodson, of how wonderful it had been that night, and of how it had all been a mistake. Betty was sitting right in the middle of the audience at this final session when I said, “Lady, did you ever pick the right lap to sit on because I think you are one
of the most provocative women of the twentieth century!”

  The audience roared its approval. I had the good sense to just stand there and shut up as the audience poured out their love for her. She rose to her feet to acknowledge the adulation.

  And while this seemed to go on a long time, I had another one of those crazy thoughts. Who knows why these things happen, I think I was possessed. I reached down and pulled off my underpants. The audience couldn’t see what I was doing, but I think they came to understand the gesture. It became very apparent when I rolled them into a ball, held them up over my head, and then threw them out into the crowd. The joint was absolutely jumping.

  “Would somebody please see that those get to Betty?” I spoke into the microphone. And hand-to-hand, my underpants traveled row-to-row to where she was standing. Betty took them, drew them to her face, inhaled them deeply, and then thrust her arms into the sky like a triumphant Sylvester Stallone in Rocky. The audience howled.

  I wouldn’t trade that moment for a bigger dick.

  When the tumult died down, I began reading to the crowd from a piece I’d done called Richard Pacheco Is Dead.

  It was funny and poignant and I knew I had the audience with me. I knew it. I could feel it. And though I had never performed this piece before, I read the hell out of it.

  Back then, they didn’t have an AIDS test that was worth anything and it was to be a whole year before they even started talking about “safe sex.”

  It was over. The common sense of the family dictated that Richard Pacheco retire. He did. In effect, he died, but it would be six more years of mortal combat before his spirit would let his body rest.

  All that was left him were the occasional performances on the TV talk shows like “Hour Magazine” and “Joan Rivers.” During their ratings sweeps, the talk shows were always hungry for porn stars — even ones that made sense. Soon, however, the phone just stopped ringing altogether for Richard Pacheco.