The Hardest (Working) Man in Showbiz

by Ron Jeremy

  She laughed, though I wasn’t trying to be funny. “Are you kidding me?” she said. “It’s like Godzilla’s penis. Trust me, Ron, it’s very, very big.”

  I had her repeat it a few more dozen times, just for good measure. A guy can never hear a thing like that enough.

  I was on top of the world. I had a big dick, and a girlfriend who was willing to go on the record saying as much. Who could ask for anything more? Little did I know, however, that this valuable bit of information was only the beginning. In just a short while, my entire world was going to change.

  During the summer of 1968, I went to the Ten Mile River Boy Scout Camp in upstate New York. It was a camp for urban kids, and it was exactly what I needed to burn off some steam. For an entire month, I did nothing but canoe and ride horses and swim with my friends. Sex was the last thing on my mind.

  But one morning, when I was alone in the cabin getting dressed for a hike, I made a startling discovery as I leaned over to tie the laces of my boots.

  I could kiss it.

  I didn’t actually kiss it, of course. I just touched my lips against the crotch of my pants. But I knew exactly what it meant. If I was naked, I could have…well, you know. I sat there for a minute, marveling at my newfound ability. I had never tried anything like this before, but it was remarkably easy. I just leaned forward and my mouth was buried in my own lap. Could every guy do this? I wondered. Was there something wrong with me? Was this dangerous for the back, even?

  I immediately ran to the nearest pay phone and called my dad. I explained everything to him. He listened intently until I finished, and then took a moment to collect his thoughts.

  “Is anybody in the room with you right now?” he asked.

  “No, I’m alone.”

  “Well,” he continued. “I suggest that you don’t tell anybody else you can do this. They might think it’s a bit strange.”

  “Should I be worried?” I asked, my voice cracking from the panic.

  “No, no, no,” he said calmly. “It’s not bad at all. It’s just…well, a little unusual. It’s not something everybody can do.”

  “Would they want to?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “If everybody could do it, would they want to?”

  He paused and considered the most prudent way to answer me. “It’s not something most guys think about,” he lied. “You don’t want to kiss your own penis, do you?”

  “Not really,” I said. “It’s kinda gross.”

  “Exactly. And when you turn eighteen, there’ll be plenty of girls who’ll want to kiss it for you. So if I were you, I wouldn’t give it a second thought.”

  And I didn’t. At least not for another decade. And even then, I should’ve taken my dad’s advice and shut my big, fat mouth.

  Even before I showed up for the Co-Ed Fever shoot, I knew that the mansion in San Jose that we were using as our set was a piece of sexual history. During the 1970s, it was a popular spot for swingers’ parties, hosting more casual sex than most homes see in a lifetime. It had also been used for several adult productions over the years, most famously Marilyn Chambers’s classic of erotica, Insatiable.

  It’s no surprise why so many porn producers picked it as a location. It had over forty bedrooms, horse stables, a private courtyard where you could enjoy outdoor sex without being leered at by noisy neighbors, and even its own indoor bowling alley. The bowling alley was probably the most notorious attraction, thanks to the now legendary scene in Insatiable where Marilyn violated herself with a bowling pin. I’d heard rumors that Sammy Davis Jr.—yes, the same Sammy Davis Jr. of the Rat Pack—was a producer for Insatiable and may have even stopped by the mansion during the filming. The tales were possibly exaggerated, but it was hard not to wander through the mansion and imagine that you could still hear Sammy’s crooning.

  It may have been the perfect location for a porn film, but it was an even better setting for casual, unscripted encounters. Like, say, taking a porn starlet into a back bathroom and demonstrating the finer points of self-fellatio.

  I was leaning against the sink, my pants around my ankles, looking disapprovingly at my flaccid penis. I made a few halfhearted attempts to reach it with my mouth, but never quite made contact, always missing the mark by inches.

  “It’s kinda difficult to do this when I’m limp,” I said with a groan.

  The actress looked at me with an impatient expression. “But you could do it if you had an erection, right?”

  “Well, sure,” I said, making a few last futile lunges before giving up. “I’m sorry, I don’t know what to tell you. I’m not really turned on by the idea of my own mouth. The little fellow doesn’t want to come out to play. I guess I won’t be able to show you after all.”

  It was, of course, bullshit.

  I could easily kiss my penis in any state, whether I had a raging hard-on or if it was just peeking out of its shell. I could’ve just squeezed the base and pulled it up to my lips. But it didn’t look that impressive. It was much more visually pleasing (at least to the ladies) if I was actually sucking on something with some girth.

  We stood there together in silence, both waiting for the other to suggest what was becoming obvious.

  “Well,” she said, moving closer to me, “can I do anything to help?”

  I smiled at her with a devious twinkle in my eye. “Well, sure,” I said. “You could pose for me or something.”

  “Would that get you excited enough?” she asked softly, letting her finger slide down my chest.

  “It might,” I said. “Or, I don’t know, maybe if you touched it.”

  “Yeah?” Her breathing had quickened, and she was already loosening the straps of her flimsy lingerie. She grabbed my cock with both hands and began to jerk it.

  “Or,” I said, pretending that I didn’t know exactly where this was heading, “you could kiss it a little. Just enough to get it hard.”

  “And then you’ll kiss it, too, right?” she asked, dropping to her knees.

  “Oh sure,” I said. “No problem.”

  You might not believe this, but the ruse had never been my idea. That honor belongs to Veronica Hart.

  A year earlier, I met her at a party in New York. She was new to the business, and we were going to be working together soon in a movie called Fascination. For some reason I mentioned to her that I could give myself head. Veronica insisted on seeing it, and I brought her to the bathroom for a private show.

  I dropped my pants and started kissing on it while my dick was soft. Veronica watched me for a few minutes and then, without any provocation on my part, crawled to the floor and began sucking it with me. We alternated between her sucking it and me kissing it, and then did it together. It was a first for me, and it remains the only time I’ve ever received and given myself a blow job simultaneously.

  To be fair, it wasn’t really Veronica’s suggestion to use my self-fellatio skills as a regular seduction technique. But she did plant the idea in my head.

  As I left the bathroom on the Co-Ed Fever set, having just completed another class in self-fellatio 101, my newest student, John Leslie, was standing there smiling at me with his famous leer.

  Leslie was one of my heroes. He had been in the adult industry many years longer than me, and he was very respected both sexually and as an actor. He was like a cross between a sophisticated gentleman and a nasty old man, and he played both sides of his personality to perfection. He was most infamous for something he called the “Rat Look,” a sneer that was so charged with sexuality it’d wet a girl’s panties within seconds.

  He was giving me the “Rat Look” when he caught me outside the bathroom. But this time, it wasn’t meant as a sexual advance.

  “You son of a bitch,” he snarled at me. “I can’t believe it.”

  “What?” I said, giving the actress a quick peck on the cheek and sending her on her way.

  “I’ve watched you take a few women in and out of that bathroom. What the hell are you doing in
there?”

  “Nothing,” I lied. “We’re just…talking.”

  “Don’t bullshit a bullshitter,” he sniggered. “I heard about this trick you’ve been pulling. Can you seriously kiss your own dick?”

  “I guess. Why? You want to see it?”

  He howled with laughter. “Fuck you, Jeremy!”

  He put an arm around me and gave my forehead a soft noogie. “You are a genius, my friend. It’s the perfect seduction technique. My hat goes off to you.”

  “It’s not like I’m doing it on purpose,” I explained. “They asked to see it.”

  “Of course, of course,” he said, giving me a knowing wink. “Y’know, Ron, one of these days, you’ve got to do that in a movie.”

  “Yeah,” I said sardonically, “because that’s what guys want to see when they watch a porn flick. Some hairy dude polishing his own knob.”

  “Trust me,” he said. “This talent of yours is going to make you very, very famous someday.”

  Leslie didn’t know the half of it.

  The first time that I kissed myself on camera was for a film called Inside Seka. I played a factory boss named Burt Morris who discovers one of his workers messing around with Seka in the company stockroom. I watch the two of them go at it before trying to get myself invited into a threeway.

  “I get an erection every time I look at you, you know that?” I told Seka. “How about playing a Hoover on my ding-dong here, huh?” (Great dialogue.)

  Seka turned to me with a scowl and said, “Why don’t you suck yourself off?”

  Dejected, I wander back to my office while Seka blows a growing number of working stiffs. As I’m beating myself off, it occurs to me that Seka might’ve had the right idea.

  “Maybe she has a point,” I said, admiring my erection. “Hmm. I’ll tell you, this looks so good, maybe I should eat it myself.” And then I do.

  Okay, before we go on, I’d like to set the record straight. This is the only film in which I have ever—and I mean ever—had an erection while doing this. And even then, I only popped into the air. I did not, and have not, and would not, and would never pop a load of my cum into my own face or mouth.

  Are we clear on that?

  I didn’t even want to blow myself with an erection, but the director insisted on it. So I asked for a fluffer, which was the only way I was gonna get hard enough for a porn-worthy scene. An actress named Barbara Burns volunteered to come to the set to help me out. She and her husband, Mike Feline, had been close friends of mine for years. They had turned me on to swinging and Plato’s Retreat (we’ll get to that later). So Barbara was more than happy to lend a helping hand, not to mention a helping mouth and a helping pussy.

  In between takes, Barbara and I would be having sex, doing whatever it took to get me hard for the scene. She was an amazing lover who never failed to get me hot and bothered. When the cameras started rolling, she stepped away and I had to continue blowing myself without any assistance. I’d go limp almost immediately, and the cameras were stopped while Barbara went to work getting me hard again. I had fun fucking Barbara, but the rest of it was just a chore. It was difficult and probably the least erotic experience I’d ever had on a porn set.

  Very few people believe me when I tell them I don’t enjoy blowing myself, but it’s true. Conventional wisdom has it that self-fellatio is every guy’s dream. As George Carlin once observed, “If I could reach, I’d never leave the house.” And sure, it sounds like a good idea in theory. But when you’re actually doing it, unless you’re gay or bisexual, it can be a profoundly disturbing experience. A part of me is thinking, Hey, you’ve got a nice set of lips on your dick. That feels pretty good. But the other half is screaming, Ron, there’s a fucking dick in your mouth! Get it out! Get it out!!

  Anyway, this back-and-forth with Barbara and me went on for one half an hour. She’d suck it for a while, then I’d suck it, then she’d suck it, and eventually we had enough footage for a proper scene. When the director was ready to shoot the cumshot, he asked if I might consider popping in my own face.

  “Are you crazy?” I boomed. “It’s not gonna happen.”

  “Come on,” he goaded me. “It’ll be hot.”

  “Nope. Not a prayer. Don’t even think about it.”

  I wasn’t thrilled about giving him any kind of pop shot, but I finally agreed to shoot it into the air, aimed squarely away from my face. We had to time it down to the last second. I wasn’t going to reach orgasm with my own mouth, so Barbara got me to the point of nearly exploding and then leapt out of the frame while I jerked myself off, making it appear that I had blown myself to completion.

  “Never again,” I told myself. “Never again.”

  “Never again,” however, soon turned into “just one more time.”

  Chuck Vincent, a brilliant porn director who gave me my first starring role in Fascination, asked me to kiss my dick in a film called This Lady Is a Tramp. It was for a scene involving a traveling circus of sex freaks. He had already cast an actress named Veri Knotty who could tie her pussy lips into a knot. I agreed because Chuck was a friend and I wouldn’t be the only sexual oddity on display.

  But never again, I said.

  Until Lips. It was a Swedish erotica film, and the script had a funny scene that had been written just for me. I played a pervert, watching two girls have sex from an outside balcony. They catch me in the act of kissing myself and invite me inside for a threeway. It was just used as a joke, and I had to kiss myself only for a few quick seconds.

  But that’s it, I told myself. You’re done. No more blowing or kissing yourself on camera.

  Until The Devil in Miss Jones, Part 2. I had to do that one. In it, I was a lost soul damned to the bowels of hell, where I was forced to lick the tip of my cock for all eternity. And it was a prosthetic forked tongue, so it wasn’t even mine. (Good rationalization, huh?)

  But that’s where it ended. I was through being porn’s sideshow attraction. I vowed that, from that day forward, I would never perform self-fellatio, or kiss it, or lick it, or even stare too closely at it ever again.

  Except for Sulka’s Wedding.

  And Consenting Adults.

  And Cosmopolitan Girls.

  And Olympic Fever.

  But that was it. I was done. I was officially retired as a self-fellator. If they wanted to see Ron Jeremy kiss himself, they’d have to imagine it.

  Absolutely.

  Seriously…

  The funny thing is, I wasn’t even the first porn actor to display this talent for the cameras. That achievement belongs to Ken Turner, a seven-foot-tall blond giant who played a sadistic pervert in the 1976 kink film Femmes De Sade. There was also a gay actor named Dr. Infinity who performed self-fellatio in several stag films during the 1970s. And more recently, Al Eingang devoted his entire career to the art of sucking his own penis, putting out films like The Young Man from Nantucket and Blown Alone. All of these actors deserve at least a little of the spotlight.

  I know that I’m almost solely to blame for creating my own mythos. I haven’t exactly turned down many opportunities to demonstrate my abilities, and it’s had a weird way of catching up with me, usually in inopportune moments. Once I was invited to be a guest with Seka on Tom Snyder’s TV talk show. It was a debate on pornography, and both Seka and I surprised everyone with our well-spoken arguments.

  “You really are a fascinating and intelligent young man,” Snyder told me during a commercial break.

  But later, seemingly out of the blue, he turned against me.

  “Oh, Ron,” Snyder said with a frown, “is it true that you kissed your own penis in a movie?”

  “Where’d you hear that?” I asked miserably.

  He shook his head like a disapproving parent. “I was even starting to like you.”

  “You still can,” I said, but I knew that any respect he’d had for me was long gone.

  Despite the occasional humiliations, I still thrived on the notoriety that came with my self-made
image. I had a standard set of jokes that I told at every opportunity, whether doing stand-up comedy at strip clubs or giving radio or TV interviews or even before kissing my cock in a porn movie.

  “I make sure to wear a rubber before I do it,” I’d say, “‘cause I don’t know where he’s been.”

  Or “Before I do it, I take myself out to dinner.”

  Or “I gave myself a wrong phone number so that I don’t call me anymore.”

  John Holmes, who had a much larger penis than mine, once asked me how to do it. Lucky for him, I have a foolproof technique that will work for just about anybody. And it doesn’t involve removing a rib or having costly penile enlargement surgery.

  * * *

  Self-Fellatio 101

  Begin in a standing position, tilting your body slightly at the waist, with each hand on a hip bone and your head facing your penis. In yoga, this position is called the “Crouching Penis.” Roll forward from your hips, pushing your head toward your toes and allowing the weight of your upper body to stretch your back. Exhale and hold for twenty seconds. Now pull back and repeat, pushing from your hips while keeping your spine in its natural arched position. When you’ve stretched as far forward as you can, have somebody jump on your back, snapping your spinal cord like an old piece of candy. When you get out of the hospital, you should be able to do it.

  * * *

  I’m kidding, of course.

  I’m just having fun with you.

  The truth is, there is no technique. It helps to have a huge dick, but John Holmes had a horse cock and he couldn’t come close. It helps to have a short torso and a flexible spine, but that won’t mean a thing if you’re hung like a peanut.

  What can I tell you? It’s a genetic crapshoot.

  Filming Bad Girls. (Courtesy Collectors/Gourmet Video)

  chapter 6

  SWINGING IN THE RAIN

  There's an opening montage in a film called Fascination—my first starring role (as a nerd named Ernie Gordon) and still my proudest moment in porn. In it, I’m seen wandering through New York, gazing at the lights and sounds of the city at night. But it’s not the New York that’s usually romanticized in movies. It’s the New York that was personified, at least during the late 1970s and early ‘80s, by Times Square, the one-time epicenter of sleaze. There are the triple-X theaters and strip clubs and massage parlors and porn palaces…and hookers plying their trade along Eighth Avenue. Everywhere I look, there’s sex for sale, and I’m drinking it all in with a grateful smile that seems to say, I’m the luckiest boy in the whole wide world.