Role Models

by John Waters

  What ruined David’s business was not police busts or the revenge of malevolent hustlers. It was a wrestling accident in 1990. “The truth of it is, I got kicked in the eye,” David sadly admits. He was “having fun” on videotape, filming himself wrestling with some trick, and the stud turned David around and accidentally poked him. David’s vision in one eye began to go, a terrifying thing for a photographer. “That’s when I realized I couldn’t drive. That’s when things began to fall apart. For six months I was a codeine addict.” He sold his L.A. house and bought a trailer in Long Beach and continued to video men with no visible means of support. “The boys there stole my equipment so I couldn’t shoot. Those people in Long Beach were bad. They found me—the new pigeon in the trailer park. The worst ones were their girlfriends—one tried to stab me one time. Sometimes they’d come for diaper money and I would give it to them.”

  And then, lo and behold, David Hurles photographed a twenty-three-year-old man named Mike, and despite the fact that Mike is straight, they hooked up and this happy couple has been together for the last twelve years. “He looks like the world’s oldest hippie.” David smiles, shyly showing me a photo of a very handsome tough guy who so personifies David’s type. “Does Mike work?” I hesitatingly ask. “No, he’s basically illiterate,” David laughs. “Is he a drug addict?” I sheepishly question. “Yes, sure,” David instantly admits, amazed I’d even have to ask. “Speed,” he explains. But as for all Americans these days, the economy is an issue. “We can’t afford for him to be a speed freak,” David sighs.

  Long Beach didn’t exactly embrace the new honeymooners. “Every day we were in more and more danger—home invasions twice with guns. They took everything but my work.” In declining health, David moved in with a friend for eighteen months, but his friend didn’t like Mike, so Mike was homeless. Finally, “I got this place [in L.A.] for me and Mike,” and they moved in. Mike’s mattress is on the floor on the other side of the apartment, and he is supposed to show up to take a photograph of David and me, but Mike never appears. “My building manager hates us,” David admits, “for no good reason. We’ve got to move, been here fourteen months now. They don’t like the look of the people who come to see me.”

  But all his work! What will he do with it? Does he have an archive? “I already lost a lot. I have a storage place. In two years the rent has gone from $198 a month to $256. I can’t keep paying it. I’m stuck with Social Security. All I have is a still camera; I don’t have a Hi8 video.” David Hurles has no idea what will happen to his work after he dies. “Do you have a family?” I hesitantly ask. “I loved my mother more than anything,” he says bluntly. “She absolutely knew everything I did.” He is one of four living siblings, but when his “mother died three years ago none of them bothered to tell me. I didn’t ask why they didn’t tell me. What do you do?” True, he has had a minor revival lately. In 2005, Green Candy Press put out a beautiful coffee-table book of his photos entitled Speeding, and he got an actual cash advance. Some of his work is also featured in Taschen’s incredible The Big Penis Book, but his artistic estate and critical reputation are very uncertain. “There are still some Old Reliable men out there,” David says, “fewer and fewer every year. I wish I could shoot them.” “Did AIDS ruin rough trade?” I ask sadly. “Yes,” he answers glumly, “that and the Internet.” I ask David to sign his book to me and he writes, “To John Waters, a co-conspirator and fellow traveler. You led and we followed. My best, David R. Hurles.” But David is wrong. Without the pioneering pornographers who changed what we thought was indecent, and on rare occasion, subverted artistic lust, I could never have had the nerve to make my movies. Isn’t there some sort of Purple Heart for the auteurs of amateur porn? Can’t some hotshot university start a Legion of Honor for David Hurles and buy his collection of smut to preserve it forever? The wonderful, terrible, beautifully scary life of David Hurles has been an inspiration to my inner filth for years and it’s high time he got the academic respect he so rightfully deserves.

  Am I a pervert for loving the work of Bobby Garcia and David Hurles? Well, yes, I guess. But a healthy one. I made friends with my neuroses through psychiatry. I believe in the talking cure and you should, too. Freud was right about a lot of stuff, but these days insurance companies won’t even pay for therapy. No, they want you on pills: one visit to be diagnosed for anxiety and a second one to get you zonked. None of this expensive open-ended treatment with no cutoff date. Don’t get me wrong: Prozac-type medicine saved the lives of a few of my friends who really were manic-depressive. You know the type—staying in bed for days sobbing under the covers and/or beating up their pillows in an endless rage. For these people mood stabilizers are a godsend. I never bring up the sexual side effects—I keep thinking I’d rather be depressed with a hard-on than happily blank without one, but, hey, I’m all for choice. But for all the neurotics who may have felt a little blue one day and were unfairly diagnosed and overly medicated before they could even try to talk out their problems, I have some advice. It’s appropriate to be depressed sometimes. Who wants to be “even” day after day? If you just killed three people in a DWI accident, you should feel bad. If your whole family molested you in a giant basket on Easter morning, you have the right to be grumpy every once in a while. But feeling down can make you feel up if you’re the creative type. The emotional damage may have already been done to you, but stop whining. Use your insanity to get ahead.

  “But what about love?” you may ask. That terribly exciting disease that, to me, feels like another full-time job. Isn’t love just trying to get back what your parents didn’t give you before you were three years old? One thing I learned in therapy is you’ll never get this back, so move on, for God’s sake. Make friends with your neuroses. I know that true love is supposed to be companionship, growing old together, blah blah blah. I thought that was what friends were for, not sexual partners! Some of us want hot lunatic porn sex and we want it forever!

  Everybody has his or her “love map,” as the late, great, sadly discredited Baltimore sexologist Dr. John Money once called our predetermined sexual types. And we can never really change our love maps, but we can learn to see them coming. A healthy neurotic knows his type can and probably will bring emotional trouble combined with a powerful sexual wallop. But we can see, through effective therapy, that we have a choice. Yes, our love maps may be bad for us but WOW! I won’t find this kind of sex in a healthy relationship. So is it worth it? If it is, yes, you are fucked-up, but as long as you choose it, you are also neurotically happy. When Bobby Garcia and David Hurles build up the self-esteem of their masculinity-troubled stars by lowering their own in the name of sexual excitement, who am I to say these artists would be better off in a mature relationship of self-respect? Maybe being fucked-up is why they are so original.

  And I know what you are thinking from reading this chapter, but you are wrong. I don’t only like straight men. As a young man, I had three gay boyfriends, two beatniks and one hairdresser, and in my adult life three relationships that were important to me: one with a gay man, one with a guy who today identifies as straight, and another who is completely bisexual. I’m friends with them all today, too. And for the record, I may be an alternative Father Flanagan, but I never slept with any prisoner I taught or counseled professionally, even though one of their relatives good-naturedly, and almost approvingly, yelled, “Payback time!” after he was paroled and I went over to pick him up at his family’s house for our first night out in the free world. It just wouldn’t have seemed right. I am in the “corrections” field and I take my responsibilities seriously. But sure, I can still go for a confused dick. My real type, these days, is a blue-collar closet queen—they’re the best. They don’t want to go to premieres with you, they don’t want to be in your movies, they don’t want to meet your famous friends, they don’t even want to be seen with you because then people would know. They just want to come over. The perfect boyfriend.

  I’ve never really dated age-appro
priately either. I have a sixty-five-year-old friend who shows me photos of similar-aged guys he meets online and he says, “Aren’t they cute?” No! I think. They’re old men! Even though I know I, too, am an old man. I’m just not as healthy as my friend and I don’t really want to be. I guess I’m looking for a sexy gerontophiliac (an ugly word for a lovely thought), even though I know anyone searching for a sexual father figure wants to punish his father, not reenact their functional relationship.

  What could my personal Internet sex ad read? I’ve seen my own name mentioned in other people’s “dating” profiles—something like, “Come on over and we’ll watch a John Waters movie.” I wonder how they’d respond if I answered, “I am John Waters and I’ve got all his films. I’m on my way!” Should I place a classified in Boxoffice, that great trade magazine for middle-American theater owners I’ve been subscribing to for decades? Maybe buried beneath all the ads for popcorn-machine parts and chewing-gum removal chemicals, my notice could read, “The Sultan of Sleaze seeks lunatic usher with good bod and a crooked smile. Let’s rob a multiplex together and hole up at my place afterward. Send photos c/o Atomic Books, 3620 Falls Road, Baltimore, MD 21211.” Go ahead, try answering my ad. I’ll get your response. For real.

  Having a sense of humor about your neurotic love maps can make things a lot easier. At Elton John’s fancy L.A. dinner party/Oscar gala, a fellow neurotic and good friend, for no apparent reason, whispered in my ear, “What’s better than rimming?” Surprised at the seemingly inappropriate riddle told in the middle of all this glamour, I answered, “Okay, what?” “Nothing,” he said with the self-satisfied grin of a happy pervert. I had another dear white friend in Baltimore whose shrink was so concerned over the patient’s sexual compulsion for sleeping with scary heterosexual black men that he prescribed Depo-Provera, the drug authorities force sex offenders to take to erase all sexual desire. But my friend still could get a hard-on after he’d taken it! To watch him in action was amazing. He’d bravely approach whatever ghetto gangsta he so lusted after, look him dead in the eyes, and then throw an entire ring of keys at his feet without saying a word. They got the point. And if my friend was lucky, some of them picked up his key ring, went home with him, and looked a gift horse in the mouth.

  Of course you can go too far. There are sexual neurotics who lose their sense of irony about their compulsion and let their love maps destroy them. Like poor, poor Uncle Ed, real name Ed Savitz, the most notorious pervert ever to come out of Philadelphia, who for years paid teenage boys cash for their sweaty socks and skid-marked underwear and caught their turds in cellophane and saved them like a butterfly collection. Who would choose to be Uncle Ed? When the police finally moved in and arrested him after he’d spent decades supplying “beer money” to young blue-collar hustlers, who viewed him without guilt as a convenient cash machine (“No big deal,” one commented, “he was a nice guy and a faggot”), they found 312 garbage bags filled with soiled socks and underwear. A neighbor in his fancy Rittenhouse Square condo building told the press Uncle Ed “cooperated with the rules of the building,” but others weren’t so understanding and called the police complaining about “smelling shit.”

  When the headlines screamed and Uncle Ed was put in prison with a twenty-million-dollar bail, everybody but the delinquent “victims” wrung their hands in dismay. “If you was a boy, you’d understand,” one of Uncle Ed’s more liberal fecal friends tried to explain to the press. “It was like a natural thing,” another said, “you need money, you go up to ‘Fast Ed’s,’ sell him your dirty socks, spit in his mouth, sell him your shit.” Another sixteen-year-old, perplexed by the outrage of misunderstanding adults in his Philadelphia community, commented, “If selling socks and underwear were illegal, Woolworth’s would be out of business.”

  Then they found out Uncle Ed had AIDS and the whole world went crazy. Prison officials took away his bad wig and let him get beaten and robbed in jail before his trial began, until he was incoherent. There was never any credible evidence that anyone ever got AIDS from Uncle Ed, but who cared? True, he had given some “bro-jobs” to straight boys, but all doctors agree the main way you can sexually transmit this disease is by being the passive partner in anal intercourse, something these boys never were. And surely turning over your moldy underpants was safe sex! Uncle Ed died in prison, the ultimate Frankenstein’s monster of homophobia.

  I don’t feel sympathy for all outside perverts. Sometimes the worst ones are heterosexual insiders like the Connecticut businessman (I won’t bring up his name in case he is in recovery) who became the laughingstock of the country in 1995. Flying business class on United Flight 976 from Buenos Aires to JFK, our passenger was guzzling cocktails in an alarming manner, so the flight attendants cut him off. According to police reports, this frequent flyer rejected “last call” with a ferocious resolve. He shoved his way into the first-class cabin and began serving himself another drink. When the crew tried to stop him, he shoved a flight attendant into a seat, climbed on top of the serving cart, dropped his pants, and took a shit.

  Imagine if you were reading your book or watching the movie and you looked up and saw a middle-aged man shitting on the service cart. Arms outstretched for balance as the cart careened up and down the aisle toward you with bowel movements flying. Surfing turd! The president of Portugal and the Argentine foreign minister were on this flight, heading to the United Nations’ fiftieth anniversary—just think of their later cocktail chatter! Would they share the details of their sky-high horror on Flight IOU A #2? Would they whisper to international ladies in evening gowns that this air-rager had “used linen napkins as toilet paper, wiping his hands on various counters and service implements” as the New York Post reported? Would they confide their relief when the pilot “then canceled further food service”? I guess he did! How many frequent flyer reward points do you get to make up for a turd in your lap between courses?

  Think of how this mad shitter must have felt when he began to sober up in his jail cell. Whom did he call? His wife? “How was the flight, honey?” must have been the one question he feared the most. Did he tell her the truth—“I got drunk and shit all over the plane and I’ll be on the front cover of all the tabloids tomorrow”—or did he just mumble, “I’ll be a little late”? Did he warn his three daughters to “maybe take off from school tomorrow—there may be some cruel jokes about your daddy making the rounds in the cafeteria”? Or was he a serial shitter who was hiding his past turd terrorism? Had he been doing “upper deckers” for years in his community? Was he the one who thought up the revenge tactic of shitting in the top tank of the toilets of your enemies so they can never locate the odor?

  Did his turd tirade start a trend? How would he feel years later if he read The Great Deluge, by Douglas Brinkley, and learned the details of the looting following Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans? Did he secretly sympathize with the riot community who somehow spread the word in the middle of a national disaster, with no electric power, no radios, and no telephones, that it was proper looting etiquette to take a dump in the beds of the homes you’d just ransacked? To leave individual turds wrapped up in the clothes you didn’t take from the damaged stores you broke into? How faulty toilet training caused a new minority? A turd community?

  I mean, it gets worse. I know your eyes are not garbage cans, but somehow I feel it is my duty to share with you the depths of depravity some of our long-lost brothers have fallen to. Just so you will know there are good perverts and bad perverts; like snowflakes, no two are the same. And I’m not talking about lightweight neurotics-in-denial like Idaho senator Larry Craig. Any respectable tearoom queen could have told him how to have sex in a public bathroom in an airport without getting caught. All you do is have one man sit on the toilet while the other stands with each leg in an empty shopping bag. If any nosy vice cops are looking under the stall, they’ll only see one set of legs and two shopping bags. Duh! Larry, it’s fucking easy!

  No, I’m talking about real perverts, the
ones who make happy neurotics like me look bad to the rest of the world. Like Donald H. Baker, for example. I’m really glad I’m not friends with this man. Not even once did I entertain the idea of finding him to interview for this chapter. But I have to admit, I secretly feel bad for him. Let’s call Donald “Shithead.” He was discovered by police under a woman’s outhouse in a state park in Santa Barbara, directly below the toilet bowl opening. In the pit of shit. He was “covered in human waste,” according to the press, “wearing only drawstring briefs and tennis shoes.” Mr. Baker was ordered out by the police, told to hose himself down, and then arrested and booked. He later explained to investigators that he “liked the dank and the smell of the outhouse.” Picture the policeman’s face as he jotted down this comment. Imagine the horror-movie-like scream of the girls who used the restroom and saw him down under. Try not to chuckle when you picture the mother sputtering to reporters that her daughters “are now afraid to use the restrooms” anywhere near the park. Who uses outhouses in public parks? Aren’t perverts always lurking in bathrooms of public places? One would think an unperverted mom would require her daughters to eliminate before leaving the house for a day of public running and jumping. It’s just common sense.