by Mike Edison
Offstage and outside of the studio—where we spent our afternoons working—I had as little to do with the band as possible. I was having a great time without them, and was pretty much fed up with their amateur-hour bullshit. Alec was still infuriating soundmen all over Europe, and Jim was burrowing deeper into a wine-sodden wormhole dug with his inability to relate to anyone or get a grip on the basic responsibilities of a working band. How many gigs in how many countries do you have to play before you learn how to plug in a microphone? Or get a decent balance on your amplifier? It was maddening.
Tonia, however, was a winner. She fell in love with a nice German boy, and the next year she would end up going back to Berlin to marry him. She lived there for a couple of years, becoming something of an ambassador for baseball, teaching the American Pastime to punk rockers who wanted to start an inter-bar beer league. Later they moved to Massachusetts and began a family.
When we got back to New York after that tour, I was ready once again for the Edison Cure. I sent out for Japanese food, drank an ice-cold can of Budweiser in a steaming hot shower, and smoked a joint I had sagely left in my sock drawer for the occasion. After two months of zero time alone—except when I was squatting over some primitive European commode—I was ecstatic not to have to speak with anyone. No annoying bandmates, no idiots in brown leather pants who wanted to blame me personally for putting short-range nuclear missiles in Europe, not even any Fräuleins who, no matter how libertine and interested in my clipped Jewish wing-wang they might have been, had finally worn me down with their collective inability to conjugate English verbs. Yesterday I go to Berlin. Tomorrow we make going for New York. After two months, my English was getting soft.
Downtown, some of our friends’ bands were playing, and I know we were expected to show up in our new guise of conquering heroes, but all I wanted to conquer was a plate of raw fish and some twentieth-century plumbing. The last thing in the world I wanted to hear was another loud electric guitar. I was ready for an adult dose of American television. Maybe I’d start with Sesame Street and work my way up to Twin Peaks.
Leave it to Alec to piss on my party of one. Once he was in a room full of boozy punk rockers who wanted to know how the tour was—and, naturally, if he got laid—he couldn’t stop himself from leaking information like a Washington call girl with a bad coke habit.
“Jim and I didn’t get any, but Mike slept with lots of girls.”
I was just nuzzling up to my take-out sushi when the phone started ringing with ex-flames who wanted details. As if. I neither confirmed nor denied anything. Which somehow made them all hot to see me. That week I had dates every night with women just dying to repatriate me.
Perhaps I should be thanking Alec for a week of guilt-free sex? Fuck that. What happens on the road, stays on the road. It wasn’t long after that I pulled the plug on Sharky’s Machine.
Now I had no band and no job. While we were out on the road, another punk had taken my slot at the record store. Someone else might have seen the lack of livelihood as a problem. I am not one of those people.
6
LOUISIANA
I was twenty-four years old, and I had life kicked in the ass. I was in the backseat of a cab bouncing through New Orleans, watching the graveyards blur by, just like in Easy Rider, on my way to do a story for Cheri magazine on “the girls of the Big Easy.”
Only a few days before, out of work and spinning my wheels against a bleak future, I had responded to an ad in The New York Times to work for a “men’s sophisticate,” which back in those days was the shibboleth for “porn rag.”
When Cheri called back a few days later, I knew right away I had the job. They wanted someone who could travel and set up out-of-town trips to photograph, for instance, the Girls of New Orleans. No problem. I was a film school guy (okay, dropout, but they didn’t have to know that right away) and therefore expert in organizing all manner of photo shoots. And I knew how to put out a magazine. Dig my stellar writing career—Screw, professional wrestling, and teenage bondage books. See? I was already in the gutter! They insisted that I come in right away for an interview.
I showed up at the Cheri offices at Forty-second Street and Second Avenue the next morning at 9:30 a.m. sharp, on time and drunk as a skunk.
It was my birthday, and when they called, I was just about to head downtown for some celebratory tippling. Having an important job interview the next morning did little to deter me; in fact, it only inspired me to new heights of inebriation. At 4:00 a.m.—closing time in New York City—I was offering to buy drinks for everyone because “tomorrow I’m getting a job for a porn mag.” The bartender told me to get out, go home, and get some sleep. I just kept drinking. In those days I insisted that sleep was for infants and old people and I would sleep when I was dead.
Anyway, I had nothing to worry about. I give great interview. Years of watching wrestling on TV had prepared me for pretty much anything. In fact, the first thing they said was, “Tell us about working at the wrestling magazine.”
“Well,” I said, without getting too puffed up, “I do everything—I write the stories, I assign photographers, sometimes I go to matches and shoot them myself. I write all the headlines and I spec the type; I bring it to the old Jewish man who typesets it for us; I read the galleys and make corrections and then bring it back to the typesetter for the repro proof. I shoot stats, lay out pages with the art director, write captions and pull quotes for space, write the cover lines, and let me tell you, when my name is on that masthead, I guarantee it is the best wrestling magazine money can buy.” They told me to go home and get some sleep and come back the next day.
They hired me as an editor for 20K, handed me a company credit card, partnered me up with a short, dyspeptic Chinese photographer who called himself Wally Wang, and sent me on my way to New Orleans, my first assignment. “I can smell Pulitzer!” I declared to my fellow pornographers, who at that point were still wondering how I even got past the receptionist.
Driving toward the French Quarter, Wally wasn’t nearly as happy as I was.
“Wally,” I said, “this is fucking great. First thing we’re gonna do is score some weed and maybe some coke and get some Dixie beer and start guzzling oysters. And then we’re going to the strip club to meet the girls and set things up for tomorrow’s shoot. We’re Big-Time Magazine Guys from New York.”
Wally was having none of it. “To you, this is New Orleans,” he sputtered. “To me, this is Louisiana, and they hate my Chink ass. We’re taking pictures and we’re leaving.”
Two days later Wally and I were still going strong with a couple of Bourbon Street strippers, both named Bunny.
The Superbowl was going to be in New Orleans that year, and our idea was, after doing a series of “nature pictures” at every topless joint in the Quarter, to throw a criminally sexy Superbowl soiree in a hotel room and then build a theme issue around our little fiesta.
Let me set the mise-en-scène for you: The Bunnys—dressed to kill in tearaway Saints jerseys and the kind of ultra-dynamite fuck-me pumps that no one not employed by Ringling Bros. could possibly walk on—are tipsy, horny, and . . . bored. Unable to distract their chuckle-head no-neck boyfriends from the turf battle on TV, they wander off to the bedroom to throw their own private party, one of those everyman’s fantasy scenarios that the discerning gentlemen who buy these magazines think actually happen in real life. Whammo-zammo, and you’ve got yourself eight pages of four-color squack.
The Bunnys were very sexy but were never going to make it to the Playboy centerfold. I’m not even sure their names really were Bunny. But they liked to have fun. We were the Big Time Magazine Guys from New York, they were the Topless Dancers from the French Quarter, and everyone was very happy. We took good care of them; they were stars. They were going to be in a magazine—no trifling feat for a couple of girls from Jefferson Parish. They’d advertise themselves “as seen in Cheri,” and they’d get top billing at the finest go-go emporiums in the land. The fact th
at we all got along so well was what my boss would have called a “perquisite,” had he known the word.
The hotel room was about as low-rent as you could get. Everything was bolted down, including the Gideon Bible. In terms of production values, this wasn’t exactly Star Wars. It wasn’t even Deep Throat. More like home movies of the Kennedy assassination. We bought a case of cheap champagne and filled the bathtub with ice. The girls dropped some ecstasy. It may not have had the makings of Gone With the Wind, but we had all the elements for a successful shoot, or at least an extremely pleasant afternoon. Never underestimate the dramatic impact of a couple of D-cup strippers getting it on in football helmets and heels.
The key to these low-budget, on-location girlie shoots is cheating. It can’t look like a cheap hotel room. If an alarm clock somehow shows up in a picture, you’ve just given away the secret to the trick. We’re like magicians, and if you could see the shit-colored wallpaper and the generic lamp on the night table, you could probably smell the disinfectant, too.
So you shoot everything close. Play to your strengths, fill the frame with flesh. Tits, beavers, ridiculous toy football filling various orifices, girls soaked in bubbly tongue-bathing each other (that cheap champagne gets pretty sticky), colored streamers everywhere . . .
Colored streamers? Yup. And confetti. How dumb was that? Hey, it was supposed to be a party, and I thought it would add a little color. And in the end it did look pretty good. But as we were shooting and playing around with the girls, champagne was getting spilled all over the bed and the streamers were bleeding on the white sheets. The red ink made it look like a pig had just been slaughtered, but the blue was just plain unsettling. There was no way to explain it except maybe that a Smurf got whacked in there along with the pig. When the maid came in the next morning she looked as if she were going to call the police. Or the X-Files.
Up until that point it was probably the greatest weekend of my life. I had been driven to score some pot in a stolen Z-car by a hooker with a heart of gold. I was taken to a rodeo-themed gay bar by a spectacularly well-built go-go girl—she looked as if she had walked out of an R. Crumb comic and could crush coconuts with her thighs. It was the last bar open in the Quarter, and we were still thirsty. We were there for about half a drink before a guy in leather chaps grabbed my ass. My new best friend, the Amazonian go-go girl, knocked him out cold and then hurried us back to my hotel, where she took very good care of me—worried as she was that I might be upset about a guy in chaps grabbing my ass. And I got a blow job from another, somewhat more provincial stripper who took me into a back room and declared, “My first Jew!”
Cheri was owned by Drake Publishing (later known as Crescent Publishing Group), which also published High Society, Celebrity Skin, and, oddly, Playgirl, whose all-female staff of cock-and-ball peddlers generally thought that what they did was somehow more sophisticated than the smut we perpetrated.
Each of the men’s mags had a slightly different niche: High Society was a pseudo-serious pornographic magazine and always had the best-looking photo sets, name porn stars, lots of girl-girl and boy-girl stuff. High Society was also the launching pad for Celebrity Skin, which fed on paparazzi titty-shots and 35 mm frames of now-famous actresses glommed from the nude scenes in the B movies they made before they hit it big. The idea for the celebrity stuff came right from Hustler, the ne plus ultra of porn mags, which had struck gold with the Jackie O. sunbathing shots in the early seventies. The rest was knocked off from Penthouse, right down to the idiotically pretentious, moneyed-sounding name. But in 1976, when High Society launched, local newsstands weren’t overcrowded with a lot of high-quality “pink,” and it caught on. Cheri was skewed more toward big-breasted, corn-fed American girls and lots of location shoots—i.e., the Girls of Wisconsin, the Girls of Michigan, etc., which is how they made their name. I got lucky with New Orleans. I could just as easily have been assigned the Girls of Hackensack.
The man behind the curtain at Drake was Carl Ruderman, a secretive, overtanned madman famous within the industry for being the “invisible pornographer.” The one original spark to come out of Ruderman’s brain was to hire yenta porn star Gloria Leonard as the magazine’s “publisher.” Of course she had little to do with the day-to-day running of the business, but it was a well-received put-on. Well-spoken, with an alluring air of open sexuality and elegance, she was the perfect front person and was instrumental in making Ruderman millions from the phone sex business.
Legend would have it that Ruderman was the genius behind the very first paid-for phone sex lines, an innovation that would put him in the same league as Alexander Graham Bell. A more popular version of the story is that he got the concept from an underling who had the idea to promote High Society with sexy phone messages read by Gloria. They started with a few lines and a few message machines, and the whole thing just exploded. Before long they had hundreds of lines and were charging by the minute. Ruderman then allegedly shit-canned the guy who actually thought of the gimmick and made a boatload from it.
Ruderman was filthy rich from selling sex, but unlike Goldstein, Hefner, Guccione, and Flynt, he stayed far out of the public eye, seemingly embarrassed at how he made his dough. He was obsessed with maintaining a smoke screen of manufactured respectability.
Everyone in the Drake office had to wear jackets and ties at all times, as if it were some kind of bush-league country club—a ridiculous conceit, especially given the fact that no one who worked there ever had to interact with the public on any professional level. We were twenty-something-year-old pornographers mostly getting paid shit, but Ruderman wanted to pretend that we were a “real” company. He wore four-thousand-dollar suits and fabulous silk ties that had been coded with tags on the back so he could get dressed in the morning without having to worry about clashing—allegedly he was completely colorblind, a sizable challenge if your business is publishing picture books.
When he came strolling through the office, people hid. He could be terribly intimidating. Personally, I thought he was funny. Completely off his nut, but funny. His spectacularly manicured fingernails actually sparkled, every silver hair on his head was perfectly in place, and he blurted non sequiturs while sucking on a fat, unlit cigar.
“Mr. Edison!” he would scream. “We’ve got to do some barnstorming! I want to hear ideas!”
“Yes, Mr. Ruderman. Brainstorming. Always brainstorming.”
“That’s right . . . barnstorming! Who’s Trump fucking these days? Find out!” He was obsessed with Donald Trump.
“Uh, he’s marrying that Maples girl.”
“But is he fucking any men? That’s what people want to know! Find out!”
In 1983, outraged that someone who was making a fortune sucking at the teat of the sex industry thought he could somehow remain anonymous and retain his precious standing in society, Larry Flynt made Ruderman Hustler’s Asshole of the Month and paid a five-hundred-dollar reward for a photo of Ruderman to run in the magazine.
The real brains of the operation at Drake was the editorial director, Carmine Bellucci, the capo di tutti capi, who led a somewhat retarded crew of miscast pornographers. Carmine had actually been on the front lines of publishing, editing, and producing girlie mags and movie-star scandal sheets, and was, unlike Ruderman, willing to get his hands dirty.
In the late 1970s and early ’80s Carmine toured the country in a Winnebago with the legendary stripper Cheri Bomb. They would go from town to town doing shoots of local go-go girls and promoting Cheri magazine. It was quite a racket, and Cheri grew into a ridiculously popular title. If you take into consideration all the amateur porn and Girls Gone Wild stuff that came years later, Carmine was well ahead of the curve. Crescent bought Cheri and brought Carmine on as editorial director for the whole shop.
Carmine was the only one up there who really knew what he was doing. He understood the ins and outs of production as well as how to edit the “girl sets” and deliver the product. He was a smooth talker and a leader, and he
could tell war stories about the early days of the business. He was slick, in his mid-thirties; he dressed well and had a game-show host’s smile. He knew everyone in the business and could wheel and deal. Everyone at Drake looked up to him, not only because he was the boss, but because he carried himself like one.
Working under Carmine were his “captains”—Ron Ronson, Vincent Stevens, and Barry Rosenbaum—all just a few years younger than Carmine. Ron Ronson was the one who initially called me on my birthday and hired me the next day after getting the okay from Carmine. Previously he had worked on some square computer magazine. One day he decided he needed to do something “cool” so he signed on with a girlie mag. He was going through a very clichéd midlife crisis, which was doubly sad because he was only about ten years older than I. He pierced his ear and bought a motorcycle. It didn’t work for me, though I suppose a gold hoop and a rice-burner pulled pussy in suburbia. But Ronson was a good guy, and he encouraged me. Eventually he helped me move up through the ranks of Drake.
Vince Stevens looked like a minor-league baseball player, tall, blond, and perpetually sunburned, and that’s about all he had going for him. He was the nominal editor of High Society, Drake’s flagship magazine, but Carmine was really pulling the strings, choosing the photo sets and going over every layout, blocking the sequences, setting the tone. Vince had never troubled himself with a purely original thought. There was no need to—being tall was enough to get by at Crescent.
Barry Rosenbaum, who worked on one-off titles, was a nice Jewish boy, a nebbish who probably would have been better off writing insurance claims than editing the kind of bathroom gazettes you read with one hand. Working at Drake had turned him into a complete head case, a victim of the near-deadly side effects of spending one’s days in an erotic candy store.