by Ron Jeremy
When you die, are you going to donate your penis to science?
Not a chance. But I have been asked. When I was in Reykjavík, the capital of Iceland, I visited the Phallological Museum. It’s a museum devoted to penises, and there are well over a hundred cocks on display, with specimens from the entire animal kingdom. They have reindeer penises, walrus penises, skunk penises, whale penises, everything. The cocks were mounted on walls, stuffed in jars, and embalmed in formaldehyde. I believe it’s the only museum in the world like this.
I spoke with Sigurdur Hjartarson, the owner and head “phallologist,” and he asked if I’d be willing to donate my penis to the museum after I died. I told him, “Hell, no! I’m an American. When I croak, my cock stays on American soil.” Maybe I’ll bequeath it to the Smithsonian if they want it. Or to one of my ex-girlfriends. But otherwise, it goes right in the ground with the rest of me.
While my penis was always my most famous appendage, there was another part of me that threatened to overshadow it, taking over as my most defining characteristic.
My belly.
As you’ll no doubt notice from my pictures during the 1970s and early ’80s, I wasn’t always fat. There was a time when you could have even called me skinny. I had a trim belly and washboard abs, and I was in the best shape of my life. But something happened during the last few decades. I started snacking and haven’t stopped. And I packed on the pounds like I was expecting to be stranded on a deserted island. I don’t know what I was thinking. Maybe I thought that the metabolism of my youth would keep up with me. But apparently it decided to give up the fight and let the calories take over, and I puffed up faster than a balloon filled with helium. As I’ve said before, I went from the gym to the buffet. I went from posing in Playgirl to Field & Stream.
It never stopped me from getting work in porn. If anything, I was getting more jobs now that I was on the beefy side. Porn directors couldn’t get enough of me, and apparently audiences shared their enthusiasm. How could this be, you ask? How could such a flabby guy, who couldn’t even look down and see his own dick if he’d eaten too large a meal, continue to be a performer in adult films?
Well, as I’ve said many times in my stand-up routines, I am living proof that anybody can get laid. When you watch a porno with somebody like Peter North or TT Boy—both hunky, muscular guys—it’s what you expect. Of course they’re getting plenty of sex. Where’s the surprise in that? But when people see me in a porno, they think, If this guy is getting lucky in the sack, maybe there’s hope for me!
Audiences identify with me because I’m just like them. I’m not a statuesque physical specimen, and, let’s be honest, very few guys are. I’m just a normal schlub who happens to have the kind of sex life that most men can only dream about. And there’s something inspirational in that. I like to think that I’ve given confidence to millions of men across the world. They look at themselves in the mirror and think, Y’know, compared to Ron Jeremy, I’m not that bad looking at all. Then they go out and, with their faith restored in their own sexual allure, actually muster the courage to talk to that hottie at the other end of the bar.
If you think of it that way, you might even say that I’m the defender of all men who think that only the pretty boys are allowed to get nookie. Or at least that’s what I tell myself whenever I go back to the buffet for seconds. Good rationale, huh?
My peers in the porn community haven’t been quite so generous. Once I started to let myself go, it was open season on Ron Jeremy jokes. When Bill Margold first called me “The Hedgehog” during the late 1970s, I was still skinny enough to dismiss it. But as I got older and fatter and my already hirsute body sprouted hair like a Chia Pet, it wasn’t so easy to escape Bill’s increasingly accurate nickname. I did look like a hedgehog. I was short and chunky and undeniably furry. I couldn’t very well refute my eerie physical similarities with the pilose rodent.*
Screw magazine publisher Al Goldstein wasn’t satisfied with that less-than-flattering moniker. He once lobbied to have my nickname officially changed to “The Manatee.” During a visit to his Florida mansion, I was swimming in the pool, doing flips and somersaults through the water and off the diving board, and he took one look at me and said, “You’re not a hedgehog. You’re a big, fat underwater creature.” He wrote an article in Screw and again in Penthouse saying I should file for tax-exempt status because I’m an endangered species.
Mark Carriere, my friend and boss at Leisure Time, wanted to take it even further. He decided that I more closely resembled a chupacabra, the mythical South American beast that sucks the blood out of goats. It’s half man, half beast, and all stomach. The nickname caught on, and now even my closest friends call me “Chup.”
So now you have a choice. I’m a Hedgehog, a Manatee, or a Chupacabra, depending on who you want to believe.
I never took any of it personally, because I knew that it was all meant in jest. The worst slurs usually came from my friends, and if you’re too thin skinned to endure a little mockery from your friends, you’re probably taking yourself way too seriously.
Hustler publisher Larry Flynt hated when I would flirt with his daughter, Theresa Flynt. Whenever I’d stop by the Rainbow Bar & Grill or the Hustler Store not even to see her, she’d grab her cell phone and say, “I’m calling Daddy.” She’d put me on the phone with Larry and he’d say (half in jest), “What the hell are you doing with my daughter?”
“Nothing, nothing,” I’d say. “I swear!”
“You keep your hands off of her, Jeremy. I don’t want your filthy DNA anywhere near her.”
During one of my visits to Larry’s office, he told me, “There’s only one thing that would make me want to kill myself. And that’s if my daughter ever left her husband to be with you.”
“Wait a minute,” I’d say. “What about Dennis Hof?” Dennis was the proprietor of the Bunny Ranch, and a close friend of both Larry and me. “He’s a fucking pimp. He owns a brothel. Why isn’t he on the list?”
Larry just looked at me and said, in a completely deadpan voice, “Kill myself.”
“I’m a nice Jewish boy. I have some money in the bank. I’m a former schoolteacher with six years of college. Your daughter could do worse than me.”
“Kill myself.”
“And you didn’t even mention Al Goldstein. He’s a fat, obnoxious old man. He can’t even wipe his own ass without an intern. Why does he get a free pass?”
“Kill myself.”
“What if she asked to marry me? What if we were in love and there wasn’t anything you could do to stop it?”
“Kill myself.”
Mark Carriere had the most fun finding new ways to make a mockery of me. He took some of my old movies and gave them new titles that were designed to emphasize my Falstaff-like qualities. He retitled one of them The Humpster and gave it the tagline: “He’s fat, he’s hairy, he’s ugly, he’s the Humpster.” He called another film Ugly Fuckers, which later became Fuckin’ Ugly.
I let most of it roll off my back. Try as he might, Mark could never come up with a title that crossed the line. That honor belonged to Adam Rifkin.
My first mistake was introducing Adam to Mark at all. I thought they might get along since they seemed to share a similar sense of humor. But I was really pushing my luck when I invited them both out to dinner. Putting them in the same room was a recipe for tragedy. Mark decided that it was an excellent opportunity to brainstorm porn title ideas; the more deprecating to me, the better. Vivid had recently released a film starring one man and lots of women titled The World’s Luckiest Man. Mark owned a film with me and lots of women, so Adam suggested, “How about The World’s Unluckiest Women.”
Mark laughed so hard I thought he was having a stroke. I could have killed them both.
It wasn’t enough for me to be the biggest porn star on the planet. I needed a challenge, to prove once and for all to the industry that I wasn’t just a one-trick pony. I wanted to show them that I was more than a fat man with a
big dick. I looked for anything to justify my fame. If there was a first happening in porn, I wanted to be a part of it. A director needed an actor to have sex with lifelike, synthetic dolls? I’d do it. They were shooting a five-hundred-man gang bang and needed an emcee? I’d step up to the plate. They wanted someone to bone an elderly woman for a fetish video? I was their man.
It’s all true, I’m afraid. Even the part about sex with an elderly woman.
It was for a movie called 87 and Still Bangin’, and, just as the title indicated, I did indeed have sexual relations with an eighty-seven-year-old woman. But in my defense, the film had socially redeeming value. I wanted to prove to the world that you’re never too old to have sex.
My costar was a lovely widow named Rosie who had been trying for years to find a lover, mostly by taking out personals ad in national newspapers. When the producers at Heatwave Video learned about her, they called and offered to put her in an adult film. And then they hired me because, well, I suppose because I said yes.
The sex lasted only a few minutes, and I’ll say this much for Rosie, she was astonishingly agile for her age. The best part of the film was that we played off of each other like a veteran comedy duo.
“So what made you decide to do an adult film?” I asked.
“Well,” she said, “I haven’t been able to find many men my own age who are able to keep an erection.”
“Uh, Rosie, most of the men your age have been dead for ten years.”*
I was breaking sexual records left and right. I had supposedly already surpassed Tom Byron for the most adult films.** We were neck and neck for many years, but I finally beat him (I think) with more than eighteen hundred titles to my credit. But there was one hurdle that I’d yet to jump. I had never, in my twenty-five years in the adult business, had sex in front of a live audience.
During the 1970s, most of my porn peers were doing live sex shows. Actors like Joey Silvera and Jamie Gillis would have sex onstage at Show World in Times Square, and they were making incredible money. But I never even considered it. I was making a good living in porn films, and I didn’t need the extra income. And besides, I always felt like doing live shows was giving away too much. If my fans (all three of them) wanted to see Ron Jeremy have sex, they had to go to a theater and buy a ticket like everybody else.
But as I approached my fiftieth birthday, I felt like the time was right to make the plunge. I wanted to try it at least once, just to see if I could do it. I was invited to the 2000 Internext Convention in Las Vegas, which hosted “live content” evenings. Basically, the creators of Internet sex sites would pay a hefty fee to attend a live sex show. They would photograph all of the action and then use the photos on their Web sites.
I agreed to do it. What the hell, it’d be fun. It would be like any other porn set, I told myself. Except that instead of a single cameraman, there would be more than three hundred.
It was a little disconcerting at first. I was used to having sex in front of other people, but this was something altogether different. In porn I had more control. I always knew where the camera was pointed, and I could manipulate what they were seeing. I could suck in my gut or cheat the angles. I knew how to lean back so that my cock looked as big as possible. But with so many cameras in the room, aimed at me from every corner and vantage point, I was completely at their mercy. While I was focused on one cameraman sitting near the front, somebody behind me could have snapped a few photos of my flab. Or worse still, a wide shot of my ass, which is the last thing I wanted anyone to see.
And then there was the matter of my erection. On a porn set, I could always ask the crew to leave so that I could focus on my boner. But what was I going to do with three hundred guys staring at me? “Hey, would you mind leaving the room for a few minutes? Thanks.” Once I was hard, I didn’t care. The Mormon Tabernacle Choir could be watching. It was getting hard that made me nervous. I didn’t like people watching me while I jerked off. I needed privacy to concentrate on what I was doing. If somebody was watching, I’d be worried that they’d be thinking, What’s the matter, Ron? You getting old?
People have misconceptions about porn stars. They think we’re all monsters, like we just have to look at a girl and boing, it gets hard. The schlong just comes flying out of the pants like a Scud missile. But it doesn’t work that way.
Luckily, I had a very cute girl, so it didn’t take much to get aroused. Even with cameras flashing all around me like paparazzi on the red carpet, we did a great scene, and I walked away feeling like I could have sex in front of a Republican Convention without losing wood.
A few years later, I was asked to appear at the Melbourne Sexpo in Australia. It would mostly involve meeting the fans and signing a few thousand autographs. But the Sexpo also featured live sex shows at a club a few miles away, and they wanted me as a headliner. I was still riding high from the confidence of my first attempt at live sex, so I didn’t give it a second thought.
My scene was scheduled as part of a late-night sexual variety show at Maxine’s, a popular Australian strip club and sometime brothel. Besides me, the other performers included dancers, comedians, magicians, and a sixty-year-old stripper who pissed into beer bottles and masturbated with a traffic cone. I wasn’t sure how I could follow an act like that, but I was willing to give it a shot. I had every reason to be hopeful, as this time I wouldn’t be stuck with just one partner. I was doing a threeway with Jacklyn Lick and Serenity, two very sexy female porn stars.
What could possibly go wrong?
I arrived at the theater at midnight, exhausted from a long day of signing autographs. My hands were so badly cramped that I could barely make a fist. I was tired, I was ornery, and I just wanted to go back to my hotel room and crawl into bed.
I peeked out at the audience from the backstage curtain. They were mostly young men, clean-cut and harmless, but they appeared to be in a rowdy mood. They were hollering and stamping their feet, like bikers looking for a bar fight. Maxine Fensom, the host and emcee, wasn’t doing anything to calm them down. If anything, she was just throwing fuel on the fire.
“So who here thinks they’re as big as Ron Jeremy?” she asked the frenzied crowd.
Dozens of hands shot up. “Okay, big boys,” she said. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”
The guys began unzipping their pants and pulling out their dicks. And there were not too many limp ones in the bunch. Some of them looked like they had sequoias growing out of their crotches. You could tell how old they were by counting the rings. I don’t know what they’re feeding them in Australia, but whatever it is, they should bottle it and sell it to the rest of the world.
But Maxine was unimpressed. “You call that a cock?” she cackled. “That’s nothing. Just wait until you see Ron Jeremy.”
This was not good. This was not good at all.
I certainly don’t have a problem with somebody complimenting my penis size. But she was building me up to an unrealistic standard. The more she insulted these big-dicked men, the more they’d expect me to walk out with a fire-breathing hydra hanging between my legs. If it didn’t have horns and snapping jaws, they’d boo me off the stage.
“Shut up, shut up,” I whispered to her from backstage. “Please shut up.”
“When Ron Jeremy comes out here,” she told the crowd, “then you’ll see what a big cock really looks like.”
They screamed and hooted, waving their penises at her like conductors.
I was dead.
I went into Jacklyn and Serenity’s dressing room to discuss the specifics of our scene. They would take to the stage first for a lesbian tryst, and after they’d warmed up the crowd I’d join them for some hard-core sex.
“Are you okay, Ron?” Jacklyn asked, eyeing me with a concerned expression.
I was pacing the room, nervously running a hand through my hair. “Yeah, yeah, I’m cool,” I said. “Just make sure I get a good look at what you’re doing out there. I need to be really turned on before I come out, okay?”
“Calm down, sweetie. You’ll be fine.”
Jacklyn and Serenity walked onto the stage, and the audience went into hysterics. They danced around for a bit, doing a hurried striptease, teasing the crowd with a few playful licks of each other’s breasts. I watched from behind the curtain, frantically jerking my cock and praying for a monster erection. I tried to focus on what Jacklyn and Serenity were doing, blocking out the hundreds of faces that were staring from the darkened theater like unblinking owl eyes.
The girls jumped into bed and began eating each other out in a 69 position. I felt something stir down below. Now we were getting somewhere.*
“Just look at the pussy,” I muttered to myself like a mantra. “Look at the pussy, look at the pussy, look at the pussy being eaten.”
Jacklyn flipped over and lowered her face into Serenity’s snatch. The crowd had a perfect view, but from my vantage point in the sidelines I couldn’t see a damn thing.
“Goddamnit,” I grumbled and ran toward the other end of the stage. When I stuck my head out of the curtains, they had switched positions yet again, and all I could see were a few intertwined legs. The crowd seemed to be in a trance, so whatever I was missing was probably very hot.
I ran back to the other side of the stage. But because it was pitch-black, I couldn’t see where I was going and plowed into a costume rack, knocking it over with a crash. Clothes scattered across the backstage floor. I picked myself up, hoping that nobody had heard me, and continued running.
I peered from behind the curtains and caught a brief glimpse of Jacklyn’s face. She was shoving her entire tongue inside Serenity. I tried once more to jerk at my unhelpful genitals. But just as I was making progress, the girls tumbled across the bed again, shifting into a position just out of my sight line.
I was starting to think they were doing this on purpose. Their moans had reached a fever pitch, but I swore I heard one of them giggle. They could certainly hear me running around backstage, crashing into things.
I raced back to the other side. I tried to negotiate a path around the overturned costume rack and ended up tripping over some stage lights, falling through a piece of scenery, and landing headfirst into a box full of props and instruments. It was like a pratfall out of vaudeville. From the stage, it must’ve sounded like an earthquake was rattling the theater from its rafters.