by Gerrie Lim
My editor at Penthouse Variations was V.K. McCarty, herself a whip-wielding demi-goddess (known as Mam’selle Victoire) in the New York S&M scene. In that story, the first of many I would write under the column “Cinema Blue” for her magazine, I was to play a role, “a film critic from a small Midwestern newspaper,” an observer reporting back for the one-handed reading of our faithful subscribers. I was told to conjure my own nom de plume, and I chose Drew McKenzie, a zesty moniker bespeaking sexy, androgynous frisson. (For maybe two seconds, I thought of calling myself Norman Bates, from Hitchcock’s Psycho, but it just didn’t have the same ring.)
And so I navigated the world of gorgeous women with perfect hair and pendulous breasts, armed with the best disguise; I was a bespectacled Asian guy with a prep-school vocabulary and graying Bruce Lee hair, who carried around the film sets three vital things: a notebook, a tape recorder, and an attitude.
I copped the industry parlance. I could talk to directors like Andrew Blake, about directors like Paul Thomas; to A-list girls like Asia Carrera, about girls like Stephanie Swift. All it took was an uncanny ability to set them at ease, so they could feel like I was their confidante.
Sexual openness is also about sexual trust. Shayla LaVeaux, for instance, once stopped in mid-sentence to thank me: “You make me feel very comfortable, Gerrie, you’re a great interviewer.” She then continued telling me about the first time she ever masturbated in her family bathtub when she was twelve years old. Halli Aston gasped when she found out I was from Penthouse Variations. “That was the first porn I ever read!” she gushed, and told me she had learned to masturbate from perusing it after discovering her father’s secret magazine stash. (I didn’t need an ice-breaker with her after that, and we did a long three-hour interview.) And Jenna Jameson had no trouble telling me her pet stories about sex in public places (hers was in an open hallway at the Beverly Hills Hotel, with her then-boyfriend).
It was a favorite interview tactic of mine; if they were ever ill at ease to disclose raunchy details, I could first share my own (in a darkened corner of a disco, as I disclosed to Jenna, with a tall blonde I’d only just met; “That’s so cool!” Jenna squealed). In such manner, they could somehow sense in me a kindred spirit and then trust me enough to tell all. You catch more flies with honey, as they say.
In some ways, it was meant to be my gig, because Penthouse Variations was America’s digest-size journal of fetish and kink, with a 300,000 circulation mostly in the Midwest. Yes, in the quaint enclaves of the Bible Belt and the quiet suburbs of Stepford Wife country! What better, more perfect readership could there be? A survey of our subscribers in 1998 revealed that ninety-three percent preferred magazines as their main source of erotica, ninety-one percent indicated that they masturbate and enjoy it, fifty-three percent admitted they frequented sex shops, and thirty-sevem percent had been Penthouse Variations readers for more than ten years.
I think that V.K. might have factored into the equation the implications of my coming from Singapore, a country where Penthouse cannot be bought legally and porn is still banned. I think she saw in me someone who could revel in my mission, to invade all those impressionable minds, all those places where seemingly staid people did delightfully nasty things behind closed doors, things they wouldn’t dare tell their conservative neighbors at the local church fair. She liked the fact, I’m sure, that I did not fit the stereotype of the goofy, buck-toothed, short-haired, nebbish Asian man at all, but rather seemed like someone these people could actually hang out with. I was going to be, as she put it, “our man in the San Fernando Valley.”
I remember my first Drew McKenzie fan letter. Some guy wrote me from Ohio, telling me how much he enjoyed reading my interviews with these girls and asking me for recommendations on porn movies to rent. He also wanted to know if the girls had real orgasms on screen. He must have liked my movie tips, for he never wrote back. Who knows how much I may have changed his life?
I remember how mine was changed.
In 1986, I was living la vida loca, the acceptably mad life of a rock critic in Los Angeles, writing about music for stylish magazines like L.A. Style, L.A. Weekly, and Playboy, and interviewing the likes of Tina Turner, David Bowie, and Pete Townshend. One night, I’d arrived late at a music industry function and took the very last seat available, which found me next to an elfin blonde lass. Her name was Karen and she spent most of the evening telling me about how she had moved from her small town in West Virginia, expressly to become a rock star. She sang in a band, one of many gigging the L.A. club circuit in hopes of snagging that big-time record contract.
Maybe she thought I could help her career. Or maybe she was too drunk. After the party, I walked her to her car and leaned in to kiss her goodnight, and she responded by promptly jamming her tongue down my throat.
Well, to paraphrase Bruce Springsteen’s hit song of that day, you can’t light a fire without a spark. Karen and I dated for about a year. She worked a secretarial job in downtown L.A., and I would meet her for dinner. We would return to her office later, to spend the rest of the night on the carpet, the table, the armchair. You name it, we did it. She would call me the next morning to tell me about the rug burns.
Karen’s favorite thing to do on weekends was to smoke a bag of pot, get totally stoned, pop in a tape and watch porn. I hadn’t been watching much porn at all, at that point, and was only vaguely interested in it, but now I had somehow chosen to exchange bodily fluids with a porn fan. Good golly Miss Molly, what was I thinking? Karen’s finest long-term contribution to my life, however, outlasted our relationship; she subscribed to the Adam & Eve mailing list, and put me on the list too.
Adam & Eve, the largest adult entertainment mail-order company in America, fine purveyors of everything from videos to vibrators, was based in the unlikely outback town of Carrboro, North Carolina. Like many mail-order companies, it often urged its subscribers to refer friends. Thanks to Karen’s generous initiative, those mail-order catalogs continued to arrive in my mailbox month after month, long after we broke up. I began to peruse them with newfound wonder.
The osmosis was taking effect, immeasurably, the seed firmly planted. I had discovered porn. It always happens when you’re not looking. Especially when a woman you’re actually having sex with turns out to be the wicked messenger.
Something else transpired, just before Karen and I split up at the end of 1987. One sunny afternoon, in a public parking lot, Karen was giving me a blowjob in my car. She was an exquisite deep-throater. I could actually feel the very back of her throat; a mildly strange but not entirely unpleasant sensation which aroused me even more. So I was a bit perturbed when she suddenly stopped.
“There’s a security guard watching us,” she whispered, looking out the window of my car, a sporty Volkswagen Scirocco painted gold with a handsome maroon trim—a likely target for parking-lot voyeurs on any given day but, surely, more so with a blonde inside visibly bobbing her head up and down.
She looked at me, I looked at her, and we burst into giggles. “Why not?” she shrugged. “Let him watch.” And with that, she immediately put my cock back in her mouth.
Thanks to this moment of telepathy, leading to sheer spontaneity, we were performing in our very own porn movie, sans camera. We did have one viewer, so I guess that counted.
Years later, I would interview porn stars who would tell me what a rush it was for them, knowing people were watching them do the same on camera. The more people watching, the better—that’s what they always told me. Turning people on was what they did for a living, after all, or else what was the point of being a porn star?
“It’s kind of a rush being paid to have sex,” one girl told me. “Usually when I’m having sex, I’m thinking of the thousands of guys jerking off at home later, watching me have sex. That gets me off!”
“Yeah,” I agreed, all too knowingly. “I can relate to that.” To appreciate porn is to understand that level of vicarious pleasure, whichever side of the camera you happen
to be on. If you don’t understand that, you’ll never get it.
I also remember another pivotal event, also in the mid-80s: the screening of the porn classic Café Flesh, at the famous art-house cinema in West Los Angeles, the Nuart Theatre. Two friends took me to see it one night. We’d smoked a bag of sensamilla in the car before going in, so I was mildly buzzed as I ogled the lead actress, Pia Snow, who’d also appeared in Penthouse under the name Michelle Bauer (and remains better known today as “the B-movie equivalent of Carole Lombard,” as one critic put it, in such cult classics as Vampire Vixens from Venus, Attack of the 60-foot Centerfold and, under the name Michelle McClellan, that late-night cable collector’s item, Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers.)
Something between my legs acknowledged her as the very kind of brunette I personally liked. But what really took me by surprise was the visual sensibility of Café Flesh—what film critics term the “look” of the film—which was stylish, futuristic and very sleek, with obvious nods to film noir. The story was about a post-nuclear milieu where highly-sexed people performed live sex shows (at a place called Café Flesh, of course) for the viewing pleasure of those rendered impotent by the bomb. I had never heard of Rinse Dream, the director (whose real name, I later learned, was Stephen Sayadian—whoa, porn people have fake names? What a revelation!), and I was amazed that someone would bother to put so much effort into something primarily meant for men to masturbate to. The art direction, the production values, the attention to detail … all fascinated me.
I learned later that the script of Café Flesh was written by Jerry Stahl, under the pseudonym Herbert W. Day, before he became famous as the author of Permanent Midnight. And that the record producer Mitchell Froom, who had been responsible for so many albums by musicians I personally liked (from Los Lobos to Richard Thompson) had composed the music, before he became famous himself and married the singer Suzanne Vega. Hmm. There must be more to this, I thought. And I hadn’t even discovered Andrew Blake yet.
Years later, in September 2003, I would find myself on the set of Café Flesh 3 (the sequel to the sequel!) at Hustler Studios in Canoga Park, California—deep in the heart of the darkest Northwest San Fernando Valley—watching director Antonio Passolini put the delectable Sunset Thomas through her paces, as she took on three guys at once on the same bed. She played a surrogate First Lady, wearing only a Stars and Stripes bikini, and the three guys wore masks with the faces of three American presidents (Washington, Lincoln, and Nixon; why Clinton was missing was beyond me).
It was exhausting just watching her, as she sucked and fucked all three of them for what seemed an eternity. But I was enthralled, because Sunset was already a big star, even outside the adult film community. She was widely known as porn’s most famous working whore, a blond beauty who spent her off-camera hours having sex with her fans out at Nevada’s most famous legal brothel, the Moonlite Bunnyranch (where all good porn stars go to, well, moonlight) and she had also starred in Cathouse, the HBO series based on the same. During a break in filming, I met her and as we shook hands, I noticed she had the most perfect cheerleader smile. Gleaming white teeth contrasting with bright red lipstick. She casually strolled around backstage, wearing not a stitch, and glowed with a nonchalant confidence. I was quite taken by her naked charms.
Of course, I had previously seen her in Michael Ninn’s Sex and its sequel, Sex 2, and Michael Raven’s offbeat porn homage to the psychedelic age, White Rabbit, named after the Jefferson Airplane song, no less. (The term “Jefferson airplane,” by the way, is slang for a used match bent to hold a marijuana cigarette that’s been smoked too short to hold without burning the hands, something I’ve never done myself since I unselfishly don’t bogart joints, but, ahem, that’s another story.) I had also just seen the ad in AVN for Sunset’s latest film, Truck Stop Trixie. On the box cover, Sunset is dressed as roadhouse diner waitress, licking dripping soda from a straw. (You get the picture.)
Now, here she was, completely naked and casually chatting with me, as I made a mental note to hold still my beating heart.
Suddenly I understood why Samson was a sucker for Delilah, (especially in the screen version with Hedy Lamarr, whom I consider a dark-haired version of Sunset Thomas). Unlike some other guys that evening, I wasn’t about to rush back to watch Survivor on TV. I was more interested to see if I would survive this. The three guys were breathing hard and we hadn’t even finished the scene yet. Kelly Holland and Jake Jacobs, the cinematographers, were talking about shooting the next position. Kelly had her camera over her shoulder and Jake was working the crane overhead, its rotating jib hovering above the circular bed.
And Sunset Thomas looked as fresh as a football cheerleader, all five feet five inches and 36-24-36 of her ready for more. Sex, she has always told anyone who cared to know, was like food to her. And she was always hungry.
It was going to be a long night.
How did this happen to a guy from a squeaky-clean country like Singapore? Well, there was a tall blond hippie chick I saw one afternoon as I was leaving school when I was fourteen, walking out of the gates of Saint Joseph’s Institution in Singapore only to be confronted by the sight of her strolling down Bras Basah Road. Her nipples visible, her braless breasts doing a carefree jiggle under her brown cotton top. It resulted in my first memorable erection of note. (What can I say? I was a late bloomer.)
I don’t think she even noticed the bespectacled schoolboy she’d unknowingly stopped dead in his tracks. But it was her air of insouciance that stayed with me, much more than the delectable roundness of her movable feasts under the fabric, the sort of haughty detachment I would later see over and over again, in all the adult film actresses I met. It was exhibitionism with an unspoken culpability, of the kind that tacitly addressed only an unseen voyeuristic audience.
I liked that look, the Brigitte Bardot pout, which all good strippers and porn stars have emulated since, especially after it had single-handedly (pardon the pun) put Saint-Tropez on the pop culture map. That, coupled with the fact that she resembled Linda Thoren, a coincidence I would also realize as relevant only many years later. But mostly, methinks, it happened because of a certain security guard, whom I still have yet to thank.
The Weird Turn Pro
As the late Hunter S. Thompson so famously quipped, “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.” I never fully understood that now-famous gonzo-defining maxim until I made the career move from music critic to porn pundit. It was a slow transition, but one that began with a single innocent phone call.
Looking back, I had no inkling at all as to how things would eventually transpire when, on January 26, 1995, my friend Christine Fugate called to ask if I would be interested in working with her on a new CD-ROM project for Spice Interactive. I didn’t even have cable television in my apartment at the time and only knew of Spice because a friend’s father subscribed to it. This friend often went into graphic detail about the adult movies her father watched openly in the family home, which I found amusing to hear. (What a healthy upbringing this girl had, I thought! This must be the 90s equivalent of how, in the 70s, hippie parents would walk naked around the house in front of the kids.)
Sure, I told Christine, I had some time between projects. I was writing for Billboard at the time, penning long conceptual pieces about film soundtracks and independent record labels, and saw her offer as another way to leverage upon my industry contacts and work for a new media outlet. Christine would eventually go on to direct The Girl Next Door, an insightful documentary film about the life of Stacy Valentine, the Tulsa Oklahoma housewife who became a porn star, which became a left-field hit at the 1999 Sundance Film Festival. But this was four years before that happened, and she was asking me if I would serve as music editor for her new CD-ROM magazine.
Spice was then attempting to cash in on the CR-ROM format, since “multimedia” was the buzzword of the day. They had already planned thirty new releases for 1995, including interactive games, MPEG-compatible movies and CD-ROMs utili
zing the then-trendy Quicktime video software for both Windows and Macintosh users. Of course nobody foresaw that in just a few more years the Internet would render the CD-ROM format obsolete. Back then we all thought we were hot shit. (This predated by a mere few years the now infamous Internet gold rush, which would eventually bomb as well. What we never learn, as they say, we are all doomed to repeat.)
At that juncture, the multimedia arm of the company, Spice Interactive, was selling new CD-ROM discs with corny titles like Interactive Sex Therapy and The Treasures of Spice. Our newly planned magazine was going to be called Surge (a somewhat more subtle title, to be sure). It was going to be a softcore magazine like Playboy, but only accessed via a computer disc, and we’d have an “interactive centerfold” as well as cutting-edge interviews with the likes of William Gibson, thanks to the wonderment of video-compression technology.
For the premiere edition of Surge, I extolled the virtues of two acts that had just released their first albums, the Orange County punk-pop band Sugar Ray and the Alaskan-born, San Diego folkie songbird Jewel Kilcher (known today just as Jewel). At that time, I had never worked with any kind of hardcore porn and thought that working with Spice would merely be an adjunct to Playboy on my resumé, fusing my passion for current music trends with an editorially hip men’s magazine.
However, we only lasted one issue. The powers-that-be at Spice pulled the plug, after it became evident that Surge just didn’t have the eye-candy pull of the other racier titles. (The sales must have been appalling for that first issue, but in mitigation I must say it was tough sharing shelf space with typical Spice titles like Angel of Passion, Lap Dancer, Flesh Tones, and Erotic Dreams). Nevertheless, in the summer of 1995, our editorial and sales teams were assembled to promote the disc at the upcoming “E3 show” (the famous Electronic Entertainment Expo) held at the Los Angeles Convention Center.