Role Models

by John Waters

  It isn’t easy to find Bobby today. Sure, you can buy his videos from Frat House Boys through the mail or go to “AWOL Marines” online and see his later work with daily updates, but Bobby long ago sold the rights to his tapes, and he’s not even aware of their distribution. How could he be? He doesn’t even have a computer. He barely has a house. After years of searching, finally I got a lead to Bobby’s phone number from a Bobby benefactor. I call him and he agrees to let me come to meet him in Twentynine Palms, California, where he lives. I have no idea of what to expect. I have seen so many of his tapes that I know the couches in his apartments and the sound of the train coming by that you hear in the background of all that whacking and slathering of baby oil. (Bobby loves baby oil. In one eye-popping tape, Bobby takes a big drink of baby oil straight from the bottle before he goes down on a startled Marine.) But all those apartments are gone. Long gone. Today Bobby is renting or maybe squatting in a run-down home surrounded by jail-strength industrial chain-link fencing. As I pull up in a ridiculous Mercedes-Benz that I didn’t order but was upgraded to by the car rental place, I feel a sickening sense of entitlement. I hate fancy cars. In real life I drive a plain Buick that looks like a narcotics-agent car or the vehicle of the local monsignor. Who wants to be noticed in his car? Suppose I still might want to commit a crime? Who would ever want a car a witness could describe? Anyway, here I am at the home of the most notorious underground Marine pornographer in the world, the one who caused the big scandal at Camp Pendleton, for chrissakes, and I’m in some fancy Hollywood-executive-type vehicle.

  As I step out of the car, a pack of snarling dogs runs from the front door and leaps up on the fence, barking and baring their teeth. Bobby follows, yelling at them to calm down and welcoming me. He looks much thinner than he did on the tapes. But, oh God, it’s him all right—Bobby Garcia, the in-his-forties Mexican American man who has blown hundreds and hundreds of really cute Marines and lived to tell about it. The Almodóvar of Anuses, the Buñuel of Blow Jobs, the Jodorowsky of Jerking Off. Here is an auteur who devoted his life for you to be able to enjoy Marine porn, a man whose work makes me so happy, so jealous of his dirty dedication, that I am, quite simply, thunderstruck.

  Bobby calls the dogs off, breaking up the ones who have paired off to fight wildly among themselves, and unlocks the padlock of the gate. I drive onto his property and the dogs jump up on the car, barking in the hastily rolled up windows on both sides as Bobby screams commands for them to stop. The dogs sort of listen and calm down. I get out of the car and shake hands with Mr. Garcia, and he invites me into his humble abode.

  I am stupefied to see the interior. Well, I use the word “interior” freely—his home is part outdoors, too. Times are tough for Bobby these days. As we search for a comfortable place to sit, I notice a trough with two real pigs waddling around, weighing in at a total of 750 pounds. Inside his house. Bobby actually lives in a pigpen! As we sit down and I get out my tape recorder, I look up in alarm at a giant rooster (one of two) who is also one of Bobby’s roommates. I soon realize this is not Bobby’s house—it’s his Noah’s ark! “I live with eleven dogs, two pigs, two roosters, and more than five hundred rats—one thousand, or two thousand—who cares?” he announces happily. I suddenly actually feel some sort of critters moving under the newspaper covering the kitchen floor. Good God. “Do the other animals like the rats?” I ask in shock. “They could care less,” he laughs. “The rats don’t bother you. You give them scratch [chicken feed] from Wal-Mart.” He tells me he feels them crawling over him when he’s sleeping, and I momentarily consider making a break and running to the safety of the rental car, but something about his sweetness and hospitality makes me stay. The rats “no bother me,” Bobby says with a shrug. “They don’t make no mess. They eat at such and such time.” He even has names for the rats! “When you live in the house you get to know the mama and the papa. And the mama gonna have ten, twenty little rats so you know the mama’s name. I have a special whistle for mealtime. I invite them in…I don’t want to kill them.” He’s no Willard, though. “I wish they were gone, absolutely,” he admits, but then suddenly is inspired by my horror. “I video if you want,” he offers. “I’ll film the rats next week.” “No, that’s okay,” I sputter, wondering if we should team up and make a John Waters–Bobby Garcia coproduction: he is servicing the cutest Marine of all time and a rat jumps out when I blow Bobby’s whistle and bites the Marine right on his ass.

  Jesus, I’m embedded with Bobby and the sun is going down and I’m suddenly not even sure Bobby has electricity. The more the pig grunts and the rooster eyes me with pent-up rage, the more antsy I get. Bobby takes me into the bedroom where his tapes are kept, but there’s no light and I keep hearing scampering noises of God knows what, so I suggest, “for sound purposes on the tape recorder,” we sit in the car to continue the interview. Bobby’s fine with that, so we go out front with the dogs fighting in the dirt and get in my rented Mercedes. Bad idea. The dogs jump up again on both sides of the car and I can hear their claws scratching the doors and I pale, imagining the damages I’ll have to pay the car rental company. “Put down the windows,” Bobby advises, seeing my alarm, and he’s right; the dogs back off. We continue talking about a career that deserves some kind of grant. If only there were a MacArthur award for porn, Bobby Garcia would be the ideal recipient.

  Marine lust this strong must have started somewhere, and Bobby quickly agrees. “I grew up in Acapulco. That’s where I became a queer,” he explains. He then moved with his family near Fort Hood, Texas, next to an army base. “My father was killed when I was six years old.” His civilian mom “used to run a business; she used to take care of a motel where all the boys from the army lived, so my job was to wake them up to go back to work.” Whatever happened during those “wake-up” calls seems to have lit the fuse of a lifetime explosion of sexual monomania.

  Before VCRs, before camcorders, in “’seventy-five or ’seventy-six,” Bobby moved to L.A. and started shooting 8 mm loops, peep-show stuff of “always” straight men, but burned the film in what one would imagine was artistic frustration. It wasn’t until Bobby (working under another name) was hired as household help by a “showbiz lady,” who he quickly claims was Raquel Welch (!), that his calling in life revealed itself. “I drove to San Diego for Raquel and ran out of gas in her Jaguar, pulled off in Oceanside, saw the beautiful boys [the Marines at Camp Pendleton] on Friday night. I went back to Beverly Hills but that was in my mind. Then I went back [to Oceanside] and stayed for good.”

  “I filmed where I lived,” Bobby states emphatically, like some confident location manager on an independent film. He bought a VHS camera “for hobby, not to make money.” “When I moved to Oceanside I was in my small little studio paying $150 a month. I was one block from the main street. I only have to walk a half a block to get a Marine. I say, ‘Hi, do you want a beer?’” “I’m not twenty-one,” they would answer, but Bobby knew eighteen years of age was legal for what he had in mind. “I live nearby, I have some beer at home,” Bobby would coyly offer. “Fuck, yeah!” was a response he told me was typical.

  Bobby’s apartments, his soundstages, were what Cinecittà was for Fellini. Here is where he would always shoot his Marine masterpieces. Many of his fans can still identify the bedrooms of the three different places in Oceanside; the next one in Camp Lejeune in Jacksonville, North Carolina, where he relocated for about a year and “did some of [his] best work”; and the other one near the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center in Twentynine Palms that he has long since vacated. Bobby got laid more than anyone I ever knew, if you called what Bobby liked “getting laid.” “I make them feel good” is his only comment on why he is so successful in luring straight Marines to whip it out. “How can a guy like me who can barely speak English get this beauty?” He laughs as he looks through his “talent” scrapbooks, which rate his corps of military stars in sexual power. “Everything I did was to make them comfortable,” Bobby remembers as he gazes lovingly a
t the long-gone heterosexuals who at the beginning of his career were more handsome than any professional porno stars working today. And at first Bobby didn’t even pay them! “The main thing you tell them is [you will] keep your mouth shut with other Marines. If I see you in the street, I keep going, I never see you again. If you want a good blow job or some man-pussy you know where I live.”

  “But aren’t the Marines nervous about what other Marines are going to think?” I ask, bewildered. “In some of the tapes,” I remind Bobby, “you can hear other Marines laughing and waiting off-screen in another room in your apartment for their turn to jerk off for the camera or to be blown by you.” “Absolutely,” Bobby confirms. “I just put a sheet over the door [to where he was shooting]. They know what is going on because they are going to do the same fucking thing.” Just as in the lives of many gay men, I notice the attractiveness of his Marines diminish slightly as Bobby gets older. “Is there such a thing as an ugly Marine?” I ask, wondering just how stringent his casting process was. “Yes,” Bobby reluctantly admits but you can tell what really tests his patience is not how cute or not the Marines are; it’s when they have trouble reaching a climax on videotape. In one hilarious vignette Bobby looks right at the viewer through the camera lens and rolls his eyes in frustration as he jerks off a nervous and panicked Marine who can’t come no matter how much baby oil Bobby applies to his “blue balls.” There’s never been a Bobby blooper reel, but I can have a dream, can’t I?

  In the early eighties, “somebody from Long Beach” came around, saw the tapes, and recommended “someone who could help [Bobby] get money” for his movies and get them distributed on VHS in video shops’ porn sections all over America. Bobby was thankful. “I started paying the boys,” he remembers, “a good-looking boy for a good blow job got twenty-dollars.” The new cash “helped with beer money for the guys.” Bobby’s tapes were released by an L.A. company and were an instant sensation: some of the first “amateur porn tapes” to offer supposedly “all straight guys,” a genre Bobby helped start that is widely copied today. Bobby Garcia was suddenly a brand name. “Right next door to Camp Pendleton in the small town of Oceanside,” the promotional material screamed, “Bobby lives smack in the middle of 44 thousand Marines.” Porn enthusiasts were amazed at the raw sexuality of his stars. Shoot to Kill, Bomb Squad, and Basic Training were just a few of the hilarious titles, but their taglines were even better: “Discharge means only one thing to Bobby—get off or get out!” Each Marine was given a lurid screen-test profile: “Johnny—a big beefy hairy-chested Nebraska farm boy. He worships his cock with one hand while fingering his asshole with the other.” Or “Tom—this is a cocky little son of a bitch. He has a mean streak when it comes to sex…He also demonstrates how male he is by humping a pillow. This tape is an ass-lover’s dream.” Stars were being born; lots of them.

  And then, in 1993, the scandal happened. Bobby remembers, “A Marine came over with some girl’s income tax check. I endorsed it and cashed it for him, and the girl claimed she never got the $600. I got arrested for receiving stolen property, or whatever…They came looking for me and found some tapes. When I was in the federal holding tank, two guys from D.C.—one guy showed me the tape. The next person, a military person…offered to me—no more jail time [if he’d talk]. But I walk away. I keep my mouth shut.” According to the Los Angeles Times, “Pornographic pictures accompanied by notes, asserting that Marines at the Twentynine Palms base were being recruited by other Marines and offered money to pose naked, were sent anonymously to Commandant Gen. James Jones who commented that participating in pornographic activity is ‘incompatible with the ideals upheld by the United States Marine Corps.’” Somebody snitched. And according to the other published reports, “two Marines were ultimately discharged [!]” But nothing happened to Bobby. What he was doing wasn’t exactly illegal. The men were of age and nobody could possibly imagine them being bullied into doing anything they didn’t want to do. Compared to most porn, the tapes were fairly tame. Bobby went to jail, not for his smut, but on the stolen property charge. “Seven months in jail,” Bobby dreamily recalls as his eyes roll back in joyous ecstasy at the memory. “The most wonderful time,” he sighs; “ahh…federal jail!” Snapping back to reality, he laughs, “I got out and went back to Oceanside.”

  Back to work. Buy the beer. Order the poppers. Stock up on baby oil. True, there were some rules he must have learned from his new distributors. No more swallowing. Even though he “never feared AIDS,” mistakenly believing that all straight men are safe, he reluctantly made the Marines wear rubbers when they fucked him. Such was the price of success. “Every day I had six to ten guys,” Bobby recalls proudly. At times, other pornographers would show up outside Bobby’s apartment to try to lure away Marines who were lining up to get inside. Imagine! A traffic jam of horny Marines! Next came the copycat Marine porn, but as Bobby says of his “so-called competition” at the time, “anybody can get a five-to-ten-dollar military haircut!” He could spot the fake Marines in a minute and knows that if you ever see Marine porn where the men are dressed in uniform, the tape is bullshit. “A Marine will never wear the uniform in the scene. No money in the world for them to do that!” In other words, Bobby’s boys may have been amateurs in the porn world but were hard-core pros in the military life. “What percentage of the Marines you ask to be in your films turn you down?” I wonder. “Mmmm…ten percent,” he estimates, before adding that some of the ones “who won’t let me do anything [except watch them jerk off]” eventually “come back” for more.

  Bobby works alone. He is his only crew. Because Bobby encourages his talent to shoot their loads anywhere—on him, on the bedding, on the furniture, even on the rug—one imagines cleaning and laundering are his biggest budgeted items. Wherever semen lands, Bobby then zooms in with the camera with an almost religious, mystical respect for the Marine load and then lingers, sometimes endlessly, before panning up to the embarrassed shooter cleaning himself up.

  But what about individual stars? Like Troy, Bobby’s onetime costar, whom he picked up in a mall in Oceanside, one of the few “names” who reappeared and had sex in Bobby’s place with a lot of the Marines? Was he a surrogate? A son figure for Bobby? An heir apparent to Bobby’s world of “trade”? “No, he just did it because I paid him,” Bobby remembers unemotionally. “He was straight; he had girlfriends.” “Were you ever attracted to a gay man?” I ask. “No,” Bobby says without a moment’s hesitation. “But did you ever fall in love with any of them?” I probe. “I only fell in love with one,” Bobby admits sadly, “Chris. A long time ago. He was from Michigan and he fucked me. I was just watching his tape last night.” Relieved to hear that Bobby did have electricity somewhere in his house, I listened as Bobby explained. “I sucked his cock. Yes…I used to call him one, two, three o’clock in the morning and his wife would answer the phone. Ten minutes later he’d be here.”

  “Do you know where any of your Marines are today?” I quiz Bobby hopefully. “Very few,” he admits. “Did any of them turn into friends forever?” I ask. “No,” he states matter-of-factly. But Bobby has the tapes of them; that is all that counts. Unlike most directors Bobby continues to watch his own work over and over. The only pornography that can turn Bobby on is his own.

  “Did any of the guys regret what they did for you? Did they ever freak out when they heard their tapes were for sale or easy to see online?” “I never hear from no one, not even once. Straight guys never watch gay movies. Marines are the toughest; the killers, they never talk.” “Did they ever beat you up?” I ask, fearing the worst—“the gay knocks,” as old Baltimore queens used to call getting roughed up by straight hustlers. “No, no one beat me up. Did you ever notice in some of my films the Marines have their hands behind their necks?” Sure, I’d noticed, always assuming this was a “no reciprocation, full service” pose, one Bobby asked them to assume so they would not feel the obligation to touch him back. But no, I am wrong. It was just Bobby being practical. “
It’s because I wanted to see where their hands were!” “You mean, to hit you?” I asked, amazed at the sober reasoning of a man who admitted he had been an alcoholic when he made a lot of his movies. “Yes.” Bobby smiled. “Or strangle me. You can see me in the films move their clothes away [after they took them off]. I don’t want a knife or something hiding there.”

  How about the scariest Marine Bobby ever filmed? Keith, the psycho drunk who locks the front door of the bedroom in the middle of his scene so Bobby can’t get out and growls, “I’m gonna make you suck my cock.” True, this isn’t much of a threat as far as Bobby is concerned, but when Keith starts his violent, homophobic, sexist tirade while he jerks off and Bobby then blows him and eats his ass, you begin to fear for the director. “I may be from the backwaters of Tennessee,” Keith snarls, remembering “a fifty-three-year-old woman who loved my twenty-one-year-old dick.” By the time he’s boasting, “I like to beat the shit out of faggots,” you really feel guilty. But for what? Being turned on by a once-removed danger? “I set the whole thing up,” Bobby reveals with a Hitchcockian twinkle in his eyes. “I told him what to say.” For the first time, I think Bobby may be lying.

  I bring up my personal favorite of his stars, the Johnny Knoxville look-alike with the huge dick and the sunglasses, the cutest porn star in the world. Or the Quaaluded-out “Baby Face Marine” who obsessively shows off his ass while mumbling, “Bitch, fucking cunt, whore.” To whom, Bobby himself? “Call me names,” Bobby says again and again, never changing his lines except to order the talent to “make noises.” How about the lug-head with the broken leg in a cast who did a solo? “Just once,” Bobby remembers wistfully about his appearance, knowing exactly whom I mean instantly. Bobby knows them all! “Joe,” from the Kink series, with the big thighs who shot the biggest load ever seen in porn. “Ah yes,” he sighs; “he wouldn’t let me do anything.” In his amazingly tender tape A Message from Bobby, he leafs through his scrapbook tallying his conquests and shyly boasting, “Thirty-eight boys in one month!” He locates Polaroids of my favorite stars in his stable and gives them to me. Beautiful, sexy, naked shots that everybody in the world could see were art. These incredible photographs should be in a museum and could be if Bobby would just leave the porn world behind and upgrade his beat to contemporary galleries.