In the first few years after Deep Throat introduced a deathless new phrase into the American lexicon, porn carried a New York pallor, apart from firecrackers such as Vanessa del Rio. The entire industry hadn’t wagon-trained to the West Coast to take advantage of the sunlight, advanced surgery, superior physiques, and Hollywood aura. Porn shot in New York featured aspiring actors whose peeled-apple complexions and concave torsos had the effect of making them seem smaller than life, until you saw them in the flesh and realized they were even smaller than the scale model in your head. Many of these Lee Strasberg school dropouts were furry specimens, and bushiness reigned likewise below with their female co-stars, the close-ups evoking National Geographic expeditions up the Amazon. One porn actor whom I used to see shopping at the local grocery, instantly identifiable by his caveman unibrow, was so spidery that he was usually cast as antic comedy relief, availing himself of a host of the unfunniest funny foreign accents heard to man that always sounded vaguely mad-scientist and paprika’d with Yiddish, as if he fancied himself X-rated cinema’s Sid Caesar. (Only Caesar didn’t hop from one foot to the other as if he always needed to pee.) I often wondered if that checkout-line porn actor pinched himself every night at the improbable wonder of somebody like him—a schnook—being paid to have sex with sexy younger women, or if he whined between takes about the room being too drafty, or his character’s sketchy motivation.
If this neighborhood familiar was the Elisha Cook Jr. of porn actors, one of life’s supporting players, others achieved a cult fame that didn’t radiate into universal instant recognition but accrued into landmark status in the history of porn, most notably Jamie Gillis, whose curly black hair, sardonic eyes, and pent anger were tethered to a mind-gaming deck of cunning moves that reminded one of Philip Roth if Roth had been stripped of Kafka and radio voices: Roth in the predatory raw. At his shaggiest on-screen, Gillis looked like a more intense, unslouching Elliott Gould, but in most roles he was shark sleek. I saw Gillis now and again with the porn actress Serena, with whom he did nasty things on-screen, and strolling along drinking in the dirty air, they managed to suggest that they got up to even nastier things offscreen, all kinds of paraphernalia-intensive amateur theatricals that required ice packs afterward. Once I saw a fan approach to compliment them on their work. They thanked him with a gracious nod, like a couple of off-Broadway stars fresh out of the pages of Playbill acknowledging their public. Gillis became the boyfriend of the restaurant reviewer Gael Greene, who more than anyone turned food writing into gustatory porn, and a familiar at Elaine’s, friends with the unlikely likes of the neurologist and best-selling author Oliver Sacks and James Watson, the discoverer of DNA. When the sex author Susie Bright, in a podcast interview with Gillis in 2008, noted that he had begun in the business in 1971, he replied, “[It] wasn’t even a business. It was a dirty basement.” A dirty basement that ate its way up into broad daylight and got bolder with every bite, just as a dirty bar on the Bowery became the manger for the squall heard round the world.
It was a logical segue for Punk magazine’s former mascot and semi-lovable fumblebutt, Legs McNeil, to follow his oral history of New York punk, Please Kill Me (co-written with Gillian McCain), with an oral history of porn that made punk look like a romp in the pasture. Populated with an above-average percentage of sick twisties, both porn and punk were amateur uprisings from below deck, ragtag operations of low production values and high casualty tolls where fame was sought under an assumed identity. It was a short sharp hop from Linda Lovelace (porn captive) to Lydia Lunch (poet-punk dominatrix). Although porn performers occasionally tail-wagged into CBGB’s—I once saw the porn actress C. J. Laing stroking a denimed bottom belonging to a stranger, judging by the exclamation mark on his face—and punk bands deployed porn motifs, the correspondences mostly remained on the mucky surface. Punk and porn both regarded the body as unconsecrated meat, a punching bag for blows inflicted and self-inflicted, pain being the price of admission into the sideshow. Punk, however, sought transcendence from a launchpad of sound, a release from bondage; porn operated under a lower ceiling, its repetitions feeding on themselves, a cycle of recurrence in which those who didn’t become jaded simply became affectless, devoid, not much caring what was done to them, drugs and disassociation providing cloud protection. It wasn’t too long before they looked on camera the way many punks looked offstage—slugged.
Punk was rooted in opposition to pretension, whereas porn adopted pretension as soon as it broke out of the basement and sought respectability, pursuing the fine cultural cachet of the art-house film where ennui hung heavy from the false eyelashes. A porn movie with a piano tinkle of sophistication such as The Opening of Misty Beethoven aimed to be a combination of My Fair Lady and Modesty Blaise, boasting location shooting, stylized sets (islands of white designer space), and an ingenue in the title role—the adroitly named Constance Money—who resembled a skittish foal, receiving instruction in the oral arts as taking her first clarinet lesson. (Jamie Gillis was the film’s Professor Higgins, with a glop of gigolo.) It was one of the few hard-cores that marketed itself like an art-gallery preview and preened its cat whiskers and coat to a glossy finish. Its smug vanities were preferable to the bitter medicine that other directors spooned for our own good. After Deep Throat, its director, Gerard Damiano, got an acute case of auteuritis, his The Devil in Miss Jones a study in damnation that consigned its title character (a very moving, soul-bruised Georgina Spelvin) to an eternity of diddling without deliverance. The Mitchell brothers’ moment-breaking Behind the Green Door was a satanic Black Mass where the white slave goddess—Marilyn Chambers, the all-American model on the cover of the Ivory soap box, a Warholian conceit that probably flipped the master’s silver wig—was sacrificed to an African native in tribal war paint and necklace, a solemn traducing of taboo. Fiona on Fire, which took Otto Preminger’s Laura and tarted it up, starred Amber Hunt, whose baby-cheeked appeal and scarves were visually echoed by Nancy Allen’s in Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill and Blow Out. (De Palma knew his porn, wanting to cast the porn ice princess Annette Haven in Body Double.) One of the more interesting cross-mirrorings transpired between the more deluxe pornos and the sullen parables of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Similarities: the oppressive furnishings that obstacle-coursed the bourgeois rooms like Douglas Sirk props, the wallpaper patterns and colors that looked like jaundice visiting for tea, the drag-queen soap-opera wigs and eyelashes that might have been daubed on with Magic Markers—and Fassbinder reciprocated the favor from Munich. “His strategies often indicate a study of porn movies, how to get an expanse of flesh across the screen with the bluntest impact and the least footage,” wrote the critic Manny Farber in an essay from 1975, citing the scene in The Merchant of Four Seasons in which a “woman who had heretofore been all tightness is suddenly exposed in all her white length, being serviced from the rear by a stranger whose tiny smirk is hung on until its meaning is in your brain.” The seventies were big on tiny smirks, which complemented the swinger mustaches.
If classic erotica from the Olympia Press and mortifications of the flesh such as Story of O gave off the ruby flicker of Catholicism gone bad, seventies porn had a more Jewish smack. Its profaneness was unfermented with metaphysical properties, allowing it to get much quicker to the beefy point. It wasn’t simply the preponderance of Jewish performers in porn, especially on the protruding side (Gillis, Ron Jeremy, and mustachioed Harry Reems), that lent this impression, but the amplifying impact of cable-access TV in New York, where the two biggest porn hosts were Robin Byrd and Al Goldstein, the latter especially bloating up every Jewish stereotype into larger-than-life self-caricature that made the cartooniness of Portnoy’s Complaint look like Victorian lithography. The editor of Screw magazine had no illusions about porn or its audience—they weren’t ascoted gentlemen who read Aldous Huxley and appreciated a fine Chianti with their hand job, but losers who couldn’t get laid unless they left money on the dressing table, or begged. Goldstein belittled and berated
his readers with the zeal of an insult comic, not wrapping his editorials in some larger Playboy philosophy of epicurean wisdom (his weekly rag, Screw, looked like something to line a sex offender’s litter box), even though his commitment to free speech and expression was as staunch as Hugh Hefner’s and Larry Flynt’s. Like Flynt, the publisher of Hustler, Goldstein maintained an unshakable conviction that First Amendment protections covered filth as well as artistic merit and feints at redeeming social value; censorship should have no part to play in quality control. The inadvertent comedy of Goldstein’s interviews with porn actors and directors was that his questions could gross out even these veterans of the trenches, so crudely were they formulated, so porcine his presence; his interrogatory mode not even aerated with the aging-dirty-boy glee that Howard Stern would bring to his radio interviews with silicone starlets and their suitcase pimps. Where Stern still sends the impression that two strippers spanking each other is a bar mitzvah special, porn for Goldstein was more of a wallow in the larger mess hall of Manhattan, where connoisseurship consisted in being able to spot and appreciate the better-quality slop. At one point Goldstein tried to platform Screw into something more upscale and slick, launching a spin-off magazine called National Screw (he was never one for ornate package-labels), which mated porn and punk on the masthead, using contributors from Punk magazine and running articles on Television, among others. The magazine came and went without leaving a scent. As Goldstein’s girth testified and his words italicized, food was his true salivating lust, the vowels in his enunciation of “pastrami” or “cream cheese” glistening more avidly than any paean to some porn starlet’s landing strip. He would end up, over thirty years later, working as a greeter at a Second Avenue deli for ten dollars an hour, a humbling comedown from his former notoriety and yet fictionally apt, in an O. Henry story kind of way.
Watching Midnight Blue often made you feel dirty inside, dirty outside too. Not the good kind of dirty that tingled of emblazoned afternoons under the high-school bleachers, but the kind that put you off your feed, like gazing upon buffet food that had been under the heat lamp too long. But that the show was on TV at all and popular among New York’s sophisticated lowlifes was proof that Lenny Bruce hadn’t died in vain, though he might have wished his disciples had been more deserving primates. Seventies cable access would also be where reality porn made its first trudge out of the primordial bog in the semi-upright figure of “Ugly George” (real name: George Urban, so apropos), who trolled the streets of Manhattan in a bare-chested silver spacesuit outfit, bearing the bulk of a heavy backpack with a satellite dish attached that looked as if it belonged to a lunar land rover and a shoulder-mounted camera always ready for action. Ugly George, unlicensed provocateur, would approach attractive women on the street and try to coax them into taking off their clothes on camera with all of the sweet-talking charm he could muster, which wasn’t much even by the meager standards of the day. Those who agreed to remove their tops for whatever occult reason he would usher into the nearest secluded alley or building hallway, where they’d peel off for the lens, as if it were a department-store changing room. Some would even accompany him to his basement apartment, which looked like a future crime scene in its seamy seclusion, a forensics field trip to collect a Jackson Pollock galaxy of DNA samples. Those who rebuffed Ugly George’s come-ons had insults hurled at them for blowing their chance at stardom, a choice they evidently found more palatable than the prospect of blowing him. The situational suspense of each will-she-or-won’t-she-show-the-goodies? episode is what gave the repulsive compulsion of The Ugly George Hour of Truth, Sex, and Violence (the violence was strictly verbal) its jagged teeth as a bottom-feeding enterprise.
Like Midnight Blue, The Ugly George Hour was a New York seventies phenomenon (the seventies: the mattress that exploded), must-see viewing for stay-at-home sickos and amateur sociologists; but like Al Goldstein, Ugly George himself was only capable of lateral movement in the slime field, limited by his lack of luster and immediate-gratification gluttony. Had he been a smoother operator and discovered Florida spring break instead of hulking and skulking the same old chewing-gummed sidewalks, he might have tumbled into the fountain of youth and beaten Joe Francis to the Girls Gone Wild franchise. Had he been able to talk a good art game and owned a more low-slung Dadaist imagination, he might have become the Harmony Korine of his time, Korine’s 2009 movie, Trash Humpers (masked grotesques literally humping Dumpsters), availing itself of a VHS vomit-bag aesthetic that has Ugly George stamped all over it. But he went only where the snout of his camera lens led him, which wasn’t high or far.
Not long ago I was on the M104 bus taking in the majestic sweep of upper Broadway—Gray’s Papaya, Zabar’s, the nail salons—when a man got on who reminded me of Shrek, if Shrek were the color of disgruntled instead of clay-green. It was, yes, Ugly George himself, still among us. Had his former notoriety not placed him for me, I would have taken him for just another Upper West Side scruffian, a category of unkempt malcontent in which many unmarried men in his age cohort seem to belong. He took a window seat, scanning the busy view for something to shoot. Video technology having advanced and sub-compacted in the intervening decades, the camera he was lugging wasn’t the shoulder-strainer of his heyday. It drew no attention to its owner, and its owner drew no attention to himself, not like in the old days, when he was a clanking commotion. He aimed his camera lens through the window at any possible borderline-presentable woman in possession of youth who was passing by, even though she may have been passing by on the opposite side of Broadway; the bus was in motion, and he was shooting through the grimy glass of windows closed against the cold—no way could he have captured any savory images for his collection box, unless it was a motion-sickness documentary he was compiling. Ugly George had entered dirty-old-man stage in harness to a habitual mode he couldn’t shed and now had no application even on the lowest digital rungs of postmodern porn. It was almost sad, a parable of sorts. Mon semblable, mon frère, that could have been me! No, not really, and yet I felt a shudder of remote kinship with this survivor from the Jurassic Park of porn, and relief when he left the bus, taking the flaking past with him.
It would be sentimental to romanticize the antiromanticism of Times Square in the seventies, mourning a lost vibrancy and Brueghelesque teem more authentic than the toy mall we have today, where few tourists will ever know the thrilling fear of having defecation thrown at them or being caught in the middle of a difference of opinion between two hookers ready to cut each other into unequal chunks. The human wastage of Times Square weighs too heavily against slumming nostalgia. Entire blocks looked as if they had a case of cirrhosis. Nearly every doorway had someone standing in it up to no good. The contempt for women that often wore a sneer in porn films on its liver lips was an everyday dragon-snort in Times Square, where women on their way to work often walked a gauntlet of crotch-grabbing solicitations and insulting commentary only to undergo a round-trip replay at the end of the office day, and then who knew what the subway ride would be like? Teenage hookers irregularly lined the far west avenues of midtown in miniskirts and rabbit fur jackets, their bare legs stalky-looking in the passing car lights as they teetered from one rolled-down car window to another. Every X-rated movie marquee, movie poster, video store display, was a semiotic form of aggravated assault, the live sex shows likewise no altar to Venus. I saw only one and that was enough for me, sis. It was in an Eighth Avenue emporium still standing today, then a bustling hive of peep-show booths, sex-novelty counters, and a small theater that may have been in the basement, but even if it wasn’t, to enter it was to experience descent. The little playlet being performed was called “The Pimp and the Whore,” a lightly scripted episode that dispensed with backstory and character development to present a compact lesson in what happens to a whore who disobeys her pimp: a cursing lecture, threats of bodily harm punctuated with a couple of stage slaps (the hands clapping as the face snaps sideways), followed by kneeling submission, simulated in
tercourse, a cry of pleasure-pain, and a few parting comments from mack daddy before the dimming of lights to the sound of the performers shuffling offstage without taking a bow, a round of applause being perhaps too macabre under the circumstances. What I remember more than anything that happened onstage was the booming distorted intercom voice of the porn theater announcer telling us over and over again, overriding the dialogue, the title of the vignette, “The Pimppp and the Whorrrre … the Pimmmp and the Whorrre …,” selling what we were seeing like a lascivious strip-club DJ. It was a better Brechtian alienation effect than anything I’ve ever seen in Brecht, the sense of dehumanization compounded by the knowledge that the performers of this sketch were repeating it four, five times a day, like the last damned dregs of vaudeville. Forget Sartre and No Exit, this is what hell must really be like: an endless reenactment performed by dummies for dummies, and you’re one of the dummies.
After a disgruntled jazz musician and his girlfriend, about to be evicted, turned on the oven and stove burners and all the water taps before stealing out into the night, flooding my apartment and nearly turning the entire building into a minor replica of The Towering Inferno, I moved from my digs on the Upper West Side to a studio apartment on the farthest end of the West Village on Horatio Street. It was there that I was audience to a different sex show each weekend, with a quite distinct and varying cast. Moving into Horatio, I felt I had arrived: my first real New York apartment, the first empty space to call mine that didn’t have someone else’s history hanging around, the perfect snug fit for man and cat. Western light bathed the room with a warmer benediction than I had ever gotten in my old hideout (where the morning light seemed bloodshot), and my new place’s one redbrick wall was a sign that I had finally landed my own parcel of the bohemian experience. It even had a fireplace, what could be better. I slept on a captain’s bed, its three bottom drawers holding all sorts of bachelor necessities, and worked at a desk on a typewriter whose electric purr I would later associate with the sustaining hum of Transcendental Meditation.
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