The Hardest (Working) Man in Showbiz

by Ron Jeremy

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” Alison asked. We were holding the envelope together, dangling it over the mailbox as if we were daring ourselves to drop it.

  “Yes, I’m sure,” I said. She loosened her grip, which only made me clutch tighter. “I think I am.”

  She laughed. “You don’t have to go through with this if you don’t want to.”

  “I’m fine. What’s the worst that can happen? The entire world gets to see my tallywhacker. Big deal.”

  “Okay then,” she said.

  “Okay.”

  She glanced at my hand, which was still clinging to the envelope. “You ready?” she asked.

  I swallowed hard. “You do it first.”

  She smiled at me. “We’ll do it together.”

  We counted down, like we were preparing to launch a rocket.

  And then we both let go.

  When the October 1978 issue of Playgirl came out, I went to the nearest newsstand and bought two dozen copies. The salesman looked at me like I was some kind of pervert. He probably thought that I was gay, and very, very lonely. I considered explaining, but I was in too good a mood to be bothered. I almost wish that I had added a jar of baby oil to the stack, just to spook the poor guy a little more.

  As you’ve probably guessed, my pictures had made it into Playgirl! I had hoped they might call me in for a professional photo shoot, but instead, they used the untouched pictures for a new section called the Boy Next Door. They sent me a couple hundred bucks, and that was the end of it. It would’ve been nice to be on the cover—that honor went to John Ritter, the lucky bastard—but I was happy just to be in the magazine.*

  Now that my face (and the rest of me) was finally in print, I sat back and waited for the calls from producers to come pouring in. And just as I had hoped, they did. But they weren’t from producers. And worst of all, they weren’t calling me.

  “Ronnie,” my grandmother told me one morning over breakfast. “Some sissy called for you last night.”

  I nearly spat out my eggs. “I’m sorry, what?”

  “A sissy boy called and asked if you’d be willing to meet him at the gas station downtown. Does that make any sense to you?”

  “Uh…”

  “I assume it was one of your drama friends. He sounded like a sweet fellow, though he was breathing awfully heavy. I’m guessing he has asthma.”

  It didn’t take a huge leap of logic to figure out what had happened. Because I lived with my parents, I didn’t have my own phone number. But my grandmother, Rose Hyatt, did. She lived downstairs in our house and was listed in the phone directory under “R. Hyatt.” Anybody who had seen my pictures in Playgirl, where I was credited as “Ron Hyatt from Bayside, Queens,” would surely think that “R. Hyatt,” also residing in Bayside, must be the same person.

  But when they called, expecting to talk to a young stud with a big cock, they ended up getting a very annoyed elderly woman who was in no mood to be pestered by, as she called them, “sissies.”

  “A lady called for you,” she told me the next day. “She asked me to tell you that you’re very handsome, and she loves your body. Ronnie, what in the world is she talking about? Do you know this woman?”

  “Oh, yeah, sure,” I lied.

  “Well, when you talk to her, tell her that it’s not in very good taste to call a complete stranger and tell her intimate details about her grandson’s physique. It’s just…it’s inappropriate.”

  We expected the calls to stop after a while, but it only got worse. Rose even moved out of the house because she couldn’t take it anymore, and it took a month before we could get her number changed. My dad was furious, and, of course, he blamed me.

  “Listen, Ron,” he said. “I don’t have a problem with your getting into this naked, crazy business. But if you use the family name again, I’ll kill you.”

  “Don’t worry,” I assured him. “I’m done with it. No more nude photos, no more magazine layouts. I’m going to stick to serious acting from now on.”

  And I meant it, too. Little did I realize that my idea of “serious acting” was very different from what was in store for me next.

  One of my first professional photographs.

  chapter 3

  LIONS AND TIGRESSES AND BEARS, OH MY!

  “You must be Ron Hyatt.”

  “Ron Jeremy,” I corrected him with a nervous smile.

  “Ah yes, of course.” The production assistant scribbled on his call sheet.

  “I’m using my middle name,” I told him. “My dad, you see. He doesn’t want me…It’s a long story. I—”

  “Yes, that’s fine,” he said, cutting me off. “I’ll make sure the director knows.” He opened the door to the house and pointed inside. “Right this way.”

  I was already having second thoughts. When the producers gave me the address for today’s shoot, I had expected it to be a studio warehouse, or at least something that passed for a proper movie set. Instead, it was at a town house in lower Manhattan, which had been loaned to the producers just for the weekend. It all seemed too amateurish, like a student film that was operating on a limited or nonexistent budget. I wondered if it was too late to make a break for it.

  I began to relax as the PA led me inside. The living room was filled with boom mics and cameras. Electricians were mounting lights, gaffers were running equipment, the director was barking orders at his crew. At least it looked like a real movie.

  I walked in just in time to watch the first scene in progress. Samantha Fox, the film’s lead and star attraction, was sitting on the floor, chatting with her male costar. I’d never met her before, but I was well aware that she was one of the biggest names in the business. I thought about introducing myself, but I didn’t want to interrupt. And it seemed a little weird just to walk up to a completely naked woman and say hello.

  The director called for action, and Samantha began furiously sucking on her partner’s cock. The crew and I watched silently, though they seemed more bored by the proceedings than I was. She gave it a few more strokes before looking up at the camera.

  “When I have a lovely piece of flesh like this in front of me, I just fall apart,” she said. “Most guys don’t know it, but all women are tigresses. You should feel my cunt right now. It’s open and wet.”

  She returned to her task, gulping down the guy’s shaft as if she thought it might contain some magical elixir. Just the idea that I would soon be on the receiving end of this human vacuum cleaner was enough to give me a woodie.

  “Not every gal is as direct as I am when it comes to hard cocks,” she continued. “That doesn’t mean they love stiff pricks any less. Sexually, they’re tigresses, too. They just use a different approach. Some set their traps in the thorny jungles of social acceptability.”

  I felt a tug at my shoulder, and I turned to see another PA motioning toward the stairs. I followed him up to the second floor and into a back bedroom. Inside, there were five men standing around, talking among themselves and looking just as nervous as I felt. Sitting on the bed was a beautiful woman with long blonde hair and not a stitch of clothing.

  The PA cleared his throat, and I managed to avert my gaze, at least momentarily, from the naked girl.

  “Hello, Ron,” he said. “I just wanted to take a moment to welcome you to our set. I understand this is your first shoot.”

  I shook his hand and tried to focus on keeping my balance. I had the sudden sensation that I might pass out at any moment.

  “We’ve seen you in Playgirl, and we know you’re a college-educated boy, and, from what we can gather, you have a nice, big dick.”

  “Uh, thanks,” I said, swallowing hard.

  “Hopefully you’ll have fun today. As you saw, Samantha is in the middle of a scene right now, but we’ll probably be ready for you in another fifteen minutes or so. In the meantime, feel free to enjoy Christie here.”

  He pointed toward the naked blonde girl. She smiled at me, and I gave her a wave. “Christie is our flu
ffer for today,” he said. “And she’ll be getting you hard so you’re ready when the time comes.”

  “Sounds great,” I said. I glanced over at the other guys, who didn’t seem to have any intention of leaving. “So, uh, do we do it here or is there anyplace more private that we could…?”

  “There are four bedrooms on this floor. Feel free to use any of them.”

  “Good to know,” I said.

  “If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask.”

  “Is there a script?”

  “Excuse me?” he said, already turning to leave.

  “A script. I haven’t learned my lines yet, and I was wondering if I could take a look at the script.”

  His expression turned suddenly dour, almost apologetic. “Yeah, about that. You’re not going to have a lot of dialogue today.”

  “Okay, that’s fine. But if I could just—”

  “Actually, you don’t have any dialogue.”

  “No dialogue?”

  “No, sorry.”

  “Just sex,” I said, the color leaving my face.

  “That’s right.” He gave me an encouraging pat on the back. “Don’t worry, you’ll be fine.”

  As he walked away, the panic returned. My every justification for doing this movie had just evaporated. I had managed to convince myself that it still qualified as acting. But without any actual dialogue, everything had changed. I was just another piece of meat, fucking on-screen for the amusement of some lonely raincoaters in Times Square. All of my training in Stanislavsky and Bertolt Brecht suddenly seemed like one big fat waste of time.

  “You okay, sweetie?”

  I looked up and saw the fluff girl smiling at me reassuringly. “Yeah,” I said. “It’s nothing. I’m just—”

  “It’s okay, I get it.” She took my hand and led me out of the room. “Don’t you worry, I’m going to make sure you have a nice, big erection.”

  Actually, that wasn’t what was worrying me at all. But when in Rome…

  Fluffers are one of the most time-honored traditions of adult films, and also one of the most misunderstood.

  Simply put, a fluffer is a woman hired to get the male performers hard, usually by blowing them. They work off camera, away from the action, and don’t actually appear in the movie. It may sound easy enough, but it’s one of the trickier jobs on a porn set. For one thing, they have the daunting task of bringing a penis from limp to erect, which is especially difficult when you’re dealing with a bunch of nervous guys trying to learn their lines while they wait for their cue. On top of that, the fluffer has to get a guy erect, but not too erect. If a fluffer gets a guy so riled up that he walks on the set and explodes within a few minutes, or worse still, cums backstage, away from the cameras, she’ll get reprimanded. It’s a thankless profession, with none of the stardom or accolades of the featured actresses and at half (or less) of the pay.

  Probably the biggest misconception about fluffers is that they are used on every porn set. Fluffers were first employed back in the early 1970s, during the days of 8mm loop shoots. Cameras rolled almost continually because of the small budgets and minimal supply of film. There was no money for reshoots, so everything had to be perfect in the first take. A series of loops would be shot in one sitting, with each scene happening back to back without any downtime. Guys literally had to walk onto the set and be ready to go. There was no time to sit around and wait while the actors jerked themselves into a hard-on. Fluffers weren’t a luxury, they were a necessity.

  By the time I got into the business, budgets had gotten bigger and fluffers weren’t always required. They were still used occasionally, mostly at the request of the actress. Annette Haven, for instance, was famous for demanding fluff girls on her sets. I saw her on a few sets, most famously in Co-Ed Fever. She was worried about smearing her makeup, so she made sure there were always fluffers available to “do the preparation work” and deliver slobbery blow jobs on her costars before she went to work on them. That way, she would still look pristine when the cameras started rolling. There have been actresses since who misused the fluffer principle, letting their fluffers do almost everything and coming in only at the last possible second. I even saw a few of them ask for fluffers in between takes, while the camera angle was being changed or a lighting gel was replaced. The fluffers would jump in and continue blowing the guys while the actress would sneak away for a smoke. If you ask me, it was weird. If you’re so opposed to having sex, why the hell are you in porn anyway? Eventually fluffers were phased out completely, and by the early 1980s, guys had to get themselves hard on their own time, and the actresses, whether they liked it or not, had to get their hands (and the rest of them) balls deep into the nookie.

  In recent years, fluffers have made a comeback, no pun intended (well, maybe a little). With the popularity of gang-bang films, like the World’s Biggest Gangbang series starring Houston, Annabel Chong, and Jasmin St. Claire (all of which I emceed, by the way), fluffers became a requirement again. When you’re dealing with multiple partners, anywhere between fifty to five hundred guys, most of them amateurs, somebody has to help them get hard. The exhausted star, who has to take occasional breaks to ice down her vagina, can’t possibly attend to all of them. So fluffers became a booming business. But unlike the fluffers of the past, the modern-day fluffer would be seen on camera alongside the featured players. In technical terms, it wasn’t strictly fluffing, it was part of the production. But the same rules applied: get the guys hard, but not hard enough to pop.

  Without fluffers, the studs of today turn to religion. You’ll see them in some corner of the room, jerking their cocks and saying, “Oh God, let me get a hard-on. Oh God, I don’t want to be embarrassed by failing in front of all these people.” I assume that if the Lord above hears these prayers, He’s probably saying, “What? You want me to do what? Help you get hard so you can commit sodomy?* I’m busy right now. I’ve got things to do. Try downstairs. That’s his department.”

  People sometimes ask me if I miss the era of fluffers. Hell yeah I miss them. What could be better than showing up on a set expecting to fuck one girl and finding out that you get to mess around with two? It was twice the fun for the same paycheck.

  The fluff girl had been blowing me for several minutes before I recognized her.

  “Holy shit!” I said, nearly falling over backward. “You’re Misty Winters!”

  She looked up at me, my cock still tonsil-deep in her throat. “That’s me,” she said, or muffled words to that effect.

  I wouldn’t say that I was starstruck. She wasn’t exactly in the same league as a major mainstream celebrity. But at least in the porn world, she was about as close to the top as you could get. She had appeared in Debbie Does Dallas, one of the biggest adult movies of all time. When she was introduced to me as Christie Ford, I hadn’t made the connection.

  A lot of thoughts went through my head after realizing that my penis was in the mouth of a quasi-famous actress. The most prominent being, Why would the costar of a classic of erotica be fluffing guys off camera for chump change? Was she just in the neighborhood and decided to do the director (and actors) a favor? Was she such a fan of giving blow jobs that she’d jump at any opportunity, even if it meant she wouldn’t command the same salary as a featured actress? I might’ve asked her some of these questions, but it’s difficult to initiate a conversation when, as I mentioned already, your penis is in the mouth of a quasi-famous actress.

  Just as I was really beginning to enjoy myself, I heard a knock on the door.

  “Okay, Ronnie,” a voice from outside yelled. “We’re ready for you.”

  I pulled out of the fluffer and threw open the door. A PA escorted me downstairs, where Samantha and the rest of the crew were waiting for me. I just stood on the sidelines, not sure what was expected of me.

  “Okay, Ron,” the director said, breaking the silence, “whenever you’re ready.”

  “Should I…?” I motioned toward Samantha.

 
; Samantha slapped the floor next to her. “Take a seat over here, cowboy.”

  I wandered over and sat gingerly next to her. I was like a schoolkid on his first day of school. I squinted into the bright lights, waiting for some kind of direction. I had no idea what to do next. Should I touch her? Wait for her to touch me first? I looked at Samantha and managed a feeble smile. She laughed at my tentativeness and shoved me to the ground.

  “Don’t worry, kid,” she said. “I promise I’ll be gentle.”

  She grabbed my boner and gave it a few strokes. It was more of a friendly hello than anything overtly sexual. But as soon as the cameras began rolling, her mouth dived onto it and began sucking like a category 5 hurricane. It felt amazing, but my attention kept drifting over to the crew members, who were hovering over us on all sides. It was impossible to concentrate with so many eyes on me, and within a matter of minutes, my erection had disappeared.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry!”

  “It’s okay,” Samantha said, letting my flaccid penis fall out of her mouth.

  “This doesn’t usually happen, I swear.”

  “How can we help?” the director asked. If he was annoyed by my inability to perform, he wasn’t letting on. He voice was calm and encouraging. “Do you want to go see the fluffer again, or would—?”

  I jumped up and ran toward the stairs like somebody was chasing me. “Yes, thanks, that’d be great,” I said, all but pushing a cameraman out of the way.

  When I got upstairs, Christie was already working on the next guy. He looked up at me with panic in his eyes, probably assuming that it was his turn to perform.

  “Listen, I hate to be a bother,” I said, “but do you mind if I borrow her for a minute?”

  “Excuse me?” he said.

  I pulled Christie to her feet and dragged her out of the room.

  “Just five minutes and then I swear, she’s all yours.”