I Have Fun Everywhere I Go Page 3

  Bobo wasn’t kidding when he said he wrote a novel a week. People who had been doing it for a while—and didn’t suffer from porn-induced psychosis or institutional burnout—could crank out two. By the time I was done, I had written twenty-eight novels, all attributed to “Anonymous.” These books didn’t even merit the clever pseudonyms that D-list hack writers customarily drape themselves in. But I could finish a serviceable book in under twenty-two hours: Mandy’s Shame, Rich Man’s Sex Toy, Busting Susan’s Cherry . . . they were mine. Ditto Cindy’s Brutal Ordeal, Sex Farm, Class Virgin, and on and on.

  The Factory, as the space we wrote in came to be called, was above a storefront on Third Avenue near Thirty-eighth Street, down the street from the Pierpont Morgan Library. It was a nice open loft, with about half a dozen workspaces equipped with Kaypro computers. These were primitive metal boxes that looked like air conditioners, with text-only green LED screens, and no hard drive. We were always swapping five-and-a-quarter-inch floppy disks in and out of the two toasterlike slots at the front of them—one for the system, one for PerfectWriter, which was the software we used, and one to actually write the book on. They ran on a clunky operating system called CPM, which froze up all the time and wasn’t good for much else besides writing dirty books. But it was an advance over the old electric typewriters, which were still the default technology of the publishing world.

  In the back of the loft was another whirring, sputtering behemoth headed for the boneyard, the repro machine, which spit out reproduction-quality copy and stank of dangerous photochemicals. It was about the size of a Good Humor truck and needed to be fondled and sweet-talked if you expected it to work for you.

  Basically, we ran a glorified typesetting operation. While I was crafting another masterpiece, their semiskilled house artist was rendering another museum-quality work for the cover. When I finished, the galleys were run out, packaged with the cover, and sent to a mob-run distribution company. They printed the books and flooded Forty-second Street with them for the raincoat brigade. They also distributed “rubber goods and marital aids.” It was a different era, before the Internet, before VHS tapes were affordable technology. I think we sent about twelve books a week to the printer.

  The Factory was run by a gay couple who worked upstairs from the loft and rarely came down. But they were nice as pie, and they paid every week, on time. When I started, I was making $250 per book, but that went up steadily, as I became more productive and consistent. After a while I was getting $430 per, not bad dough for a twenty-one-year-old dropout in 1985. (Plus, I was still writing the high-minded wrestling stuff. One could not live by smut alone. Spiritually, I mean.) And they let us invoice them in half-book increments, so if one week I wrote only half a book, I would still get paid. On the honor system. They were very good people that way.

  They also had an enormous tabby cat with about twenty-five extra toes. His name was Handsome, but everyone called him Kitty Porn.

  It was Christmas, and they had a lovely party for all their writers, which turned out to be a weird lot of young punks and old queens, lit majors down on their luck, and bored housewives who wrote prose of a previously unimaginable prurience, so depraved that even veteran smut writers blushed when they dared read it. The soiree was low-key but well catered, and queer as could be, with smoked salmon (the good stuff, not the pink plastic crap they serve at office parties these days), champagne, and ladyfingers. Everyone got a Christmas bonus, prorated on how long you had been there. I had only worked there for about three weeks, and had probably finished writing two books. It took a little while for me to really get up to speed. I think I got a hundred dollars, and I was over the moon.

  I had to write every day, or I’d never hit the book-a-week quota. It meant at least acting like a professional writer and showing a little discipline. Hungover, no sleep, lazy, stoned, problems at home, felt like playing hooky and fucking off to the ball game—no matter what, I had to put my head down and write or I wasn’t going to get paid that week. Worse, I’d lose any momentum I might have built up toward putting the polish on another groundbreaking paean to fuzzy handcuffs and butt plugs. You had to get up a good head of steam and drive hard from Chapter One until “they lived happily ever after.”

  To do this, you needed a guide of some kind. Like the man said, they wanted books with plots. Beginnings, middles, and ends. In academic terms, a premise, a conflict, and resolution.

  To wit: Little Miss Muffet sat on her tuffet, eating her curds and whey. (There’s your premise.) Along came a spider and sat down beside her (conflict!) and scared Miss Muffet away (resolution!). Of course, the story could have ended up with the spider sucking the brains out of Miss Muffet’s head, or with Miss Muffet fellating the spider on top of the tuffet. But there you have it—everything you need to write your own bestseller.

  All of these books, no matter what the perversion, fetish, or felony, were based on the same formula played in three acts, just like a nursery rhyme. It went something like this: Miss Muffet, always a bit fearful of the ways of the world and fearful of losing her virtue, starts out playing hard to get, before she finally acquiesces and gives it up to the spider. And then all hell breaks loose. For example, in Busting Susan’s Cherry, Susan was, can you guess? A virgin! Did you guess that she was a very (very) sexy virgin? And that the fellas were just lining up for the honor of introducing her to the joys of womanhood? But Susan just wasn’t ready. First base, second base . . . maybe some unsteady petting, a couple of fumbling blow jobs . . . And then one night, out behind old Mrs. McLeary’s barn, or in the backseat of Zack’s hot rod, or, well, you get the picture . . . and then . . . she just can’t get enough. It’s a slippery slope—one good fuck, and suddenly Susan is a raging slut on a full-time quest for summer sausage. By the end of the book, even the pimply-faced benchwarmers on the junior varsity badminton team were enjoying the pleasures of Susan’s newly liberated loins.

  It was always the same. Cindy didn’t want to be tied up. “Oh, no. I’m not like that!” And then the Heavy Metal Band shows her the joys of bondage and barre chords—and she just can’t get enough.

  Each book was coded, depending on its particular niche. For example, YC was Young Cherries. LB was Lesbian Fantasies. IT was Incest Tales. Books were assigned according to a master production schedule, which presumably echoed the ebb and flow of a sophisticated marketplace and the demands of a discriminating readership. Everyone wrote everything; those were the rules of the house. I even wrote a couple of gay titles like Frankie and Johnny and His Black Boyfriend.

  When I first got assigned His Black Boyfriend, I balked. What the fuck did I know about gay sex? “Well,” the editor said, “you got a hole, and you got a pole, and that don’t change. Now sit down and write your fucking book.” Okay, Skip. Whatever you say.

  I sat there and looked at the screen for a while, until inspiration came to me like a heavenly vision: His Black Boyfriend would be the adventures of Mr. T and Hulk Hogan—Tito and the Champ I would call them—and their match at the first WrestleMania, set against a greasy pastiche of locker-room ass play. After that epiphany, the book wrote itself. Fifty thousand words later, I was sitting on an interracial homosexual obra maestra that not only exploited the lovely chiaroscuro of black-on-white gay love through carefully crafted descriptive language and stunningly tender imagery, but also managed to pretty soundly bitchslap that chump Hogan.

  And the hits just kept on coming. I had even made it into Screw, the notoriously obscene scum sucker of the publishing industry, which was always a lot funnier and hipper and more political than most people realized.

  Writing for Screw was a gas. The paper was going great guns in those days: they had large, well-staffed offices and a bull pen of great writers. Their parties were legend. Al Goldstein, the founder, editor in chief, television star, corpulent media whore, and vociferous loudmouth, was like a rock star in the publishing world, and he was so filthy and reckless regarding whom he would attack in Screw and on his te
levision show, Midnight Blue, that even other pornographers avoided him like a summons server.

  I adored him. Goldstein was a renegade of the 1960s counterculture. He hated hippies but claimed the Yippies among his heroes. He was an old-school New York Jew, an admirer of Lenny Bruce and Groucho Marx, very smart and very funny. Screw was an inky weekly tabloid, part free-form Baedeker for libertarian hedonists, left-wing sex addicts, and hipster comic geeks, and part PennySaver for transvestite hookers. It seemed that they would print anything. They were fearless. Along with the most abject, unglamorized porn shots that would make any normal person puke (a reaction to the middle-of-the-road airbrush jobs in Playboy), the mag was filled with cut-and-paste composites of the president of the United States taking it up the ass and antiporn crusaders sucking cock (more than anything, Al hated hypocritical politicians and moralists), plus poison-pen hate rants against anyone who crossed Al wrong, from hot dog vendors to airlines. He had been arrested nineteen times on obscenity charges and found guilty only once, in 1971, for showing pubic hair in his magazine. He won a major lawsuit brought against him by Pillsbury after he had shown their Doughboy mascot shtupping the “Doughgirl.” (Goldstein: “She had a yeast infection!”) Thanks to Al, the right to parody corporate logos is now protected speech. Operating with more disregard for authority than even Hustler (which stole freely from Screw), and despite any discernible concern for the reader’s ability to use Screw for nonprocreative acts, Screw pushed the First Amendment to its outermost limits. It was just the kind of rag I wanted to be part of. Considering the crap I was churning out at the Factory, I felt like a real corporate ladder climber.

  The first thing I wrote for Screw was a Star Trek satire called “The Captain’s Log.” I followed that with a profile of miscreant punk rocker GG Allin, legendary for beating up audience members and defecating onstage.

  GG was the Bizarro World Liberty Valance, a man whose reality scorched the myth. No matter how many stories were told of his excesses—the violence, the bloodshed, the onstage suck jobs, gigs that wound up with audience and star in the hospital or hoosegow—they could never approach the very real white-knuckle terror and bad vibes that were the invariable by-products of his shows. Even his best gigs rarely lasted more than a few songs before fights broke out, the power was turned off, and GG was making a fast exit to escape getting his head caved in by angry villagers wielding torches and tire irons.

  Musically, GG was an unadorned between-the-eyes punk with a ringing theme of hard-core self-destruction, rough sex, booze, and drugs. His masterpiece, Seven Songs About Ass-Fucking, Butt Sucking, Cunt Licking and Masturbation, was a fucked-up, fuzzed-out mess, with hints of country and a full bouquet of extreme pain. The guitar solo in “Needle Up My Cock,” a viciously high-pitched one-note workout, was particularly painful. “Drink, Fight, and Fuck” could have been the anthem for a generation.

  There was always some young Turk who wanted to book GG and make his bones by promoting the most notorious man in punk rock. Everyone had heard the stories, but no one ever believed it would happen to them. And then the show would start, the shit would start flying, and everyone involved would be deathly sorry that they got out of bed that day. GG was the one man in show business who would alienate even his best fans. It usually took only a few minutes before someone in the front row would have a microphone-shaped hole in his head, his teeth on the floor looking for a new home.

  Mykel Board, a longtime Maximum Rock ’n’ Roll writer and fellow author of underground classics, had introduced GG and me the night of the infamous Cat Club show. GG’s band for this fiasco in the making consisted of New York indie rock royalty, including members of Sonic Youth and Dinosaur Jr. They had barely finished the first number before GG was slinging shit and broken glass in all directions, the fire marshal was screaming for heads, and the audience was fleeing for the exits.

  GG agreed to meet me in Boston the next week to do the story for Screw. (He lived in Hooksett, New Hampshire, a cow town near Manchester, where he occasionally drove a laundry truck—a job he loved, since it fed directly into his fetish for smelly panties.)

  He met me at the bus station in a white Trans Am driven by one of his many scumbag sycophants. Between the two of them, they were wearing enough eye makeup to have supplied Tammy Faye Baker for twelve lifetimes.

  We took off for the Combat Zone, Boston’s sorry old strip of porn parlors and go-go bars. I took some pictures of GG in a dumpster trying to pleasure himself while looking at the pictures in Screw. Failing to accomplish the task at hand, he used the paper for more practical purposes.

  Most other magazines would banish their freelancers to the far reaches of unemployment hell for even suggesting that they take pictures of the world’s most disgusting punk rocker wiping his ass with their magazine. Screw encouraged it.

  Afterward, we hunkered down in a bar to talk. GG was actually very charismatic, smart, and funny. He could be quite charming, even while smashing a beer bottle over his head for a cheap laugh. He was ecstatic about being in Screw. No one had ever written a serious article about him before. And we had a few things in common: we were both a lot more interested in the Rolling Stones and the New York Dolls, for instance, than in the prevalent punk rock of the day. We drank Jim Beam like water. We loved Hank Williams and worshipped Jerry Lee Lewis.

  Beyond all of the outrage, GG actually adhered to a cogent philosophy of Rock ’n’ Roll as Creator and Destroyer. It was rock ’n’ roll that had made him a nightmare: he was everything Ma and Pa America ever warned you about. Fuck phonies like Alice Cooper or Lou Reed, GG Allin was the Rock ’n’ Roll Animal. He believed this with his heart and soul, and despite his constant threats to kill himself onstage, he reveled in it.

  We got good and drunk, and somewhere along the line we agreed that I should write some songs for him and play the drums on his next record.

  Just in case I was getting ahead of my station in life, hobnobbing with aristocrats like GG, Screw also kept me on the peep-show beat, scouring Forty-second Street (then still known as “The Deuce”) for the best and worst in gutter entertainment.

  Once a month I’d take a walking tour of the neighborhood to see if any new filth palaces had opened or closed, and I’d adjust the Naked City listings at the back of the magazine accordingly. If I felt particularly strongly about any establishment, I might dock it or award it another “erect penis,” which stood in for stars in our ratings system.

  In l’Age d’Or, before Rudy Giuliani whored the block to Disney, there were peep shows and dirty bookstores every few feet. Some places had actual live sex shows, mostly junkies trying (and failing) to get it on behind a Plexiglas screen. There were also “private fantasy booths,” where, separated by a partition, one could enjoy the eclectic proclivities of one’s very own stripper. Everything was paid for in tokens, twenty-five cents or a buck at a time. I remember reporting on the closing of the city’s last “open window” peep show, where one was supposed to (presumably; I’m actually far too prudent to have ever found out for sure) interact with the “girl” on the other side of the window. If time ran out before stuffing another token in the slot, a metal shade would slam down like a guillotine. I shed a tear whenever I think of those days.

  I was also writing a lot of letters, of the “Dear Penthouse” variety. You know the type: Dear Penthouse, I never really believed the letters in your magazine were real until one day last week when I got on the crosstown bus. There was only one free seat, and it happened to be next to the prettiest girl I have ever seen. She was wearing . . .

  Letter writing was a great racket. I know a lot of people who got started in the business that way. First-person sexual adventures were common fodder in every men’s mag on the stands, and I had met a few editors who needed stuff. It seemed like there were always column inches to fill, and I could churn it out fairly effortlessly.

  Screw, of course, wanted complete filth, the sleazier and more outrageous, the better. I was paid fifty bucks a po
p for a seven-hundred-word My Scene column, allegedly readers’ tales of finding love in unexpected places.

  My first story was written from the point of view of a Sinatra-loving cabbie who pretended to be a headbanger and wore a Bon Jovi T-shirt when he picked up slutty, spandexed hair hoppers coming out of heavy metal clubs. After that I was a college student who bought himself a crack whore with ten bucks in change. I picked up women at pro-choice rallies by pretending to “care,” and I was a chubby chaser who would offer fat women food for sex. (“Come on back to my place, I’ve got some roast beef, a cheese log, some pies . . .”) Nothing was too low, too base, or too sleazy for Screw. I have been a sex-crazed woman climbing the career ladder by blowing the board of directors, and a ninety-year-old man dry humping a ninety-year-old woman in a wheelchair. I have orchestrated drug-and-sex orgies with unwashed hippie chicks, and I got the best head of my life from a toothless homeless woman in exchange for a pint of cheap liquor.

  When I had moved up the food chain and actually did write for Penthouse Letters, they always got my best stuff. For the money they were paying—two grand for a long letter—you had better believe it. I wrote “communiqués from abroad” and I always took my time with them, carefully plotting stories that arced over several steamy scenes in exotic scenarios before the Big Payoff. Even when getting into extremely graphic detail, I tried to avoid sex scenes that were purely blow-by-blow nonsense of the He-Did-This, She-Did-That variety. Ambience, texture, and thoughtful descriptions of the tactile experience, tastes, and smells were very important. What did her stockings feel like when you touched them? What did her perfume smell like— cheap, expensive, sweet, like Lysol? Or did she just smell of cigarettes and booze? How old was she? What kind of accent did she have? The dialogue rang true, colored with foreign phrases and local slang. The geography was spot-on. If I said there was a hotel on the Boulevard St.-Germain, you could count on its being there. All of these stories were based in some part on reality, on some adventure, some tryst that I had in my travels, and the stuff I made up I fact-checked scrupulously. It would take a couple of days to write one of these letters properly. I respected that paycheck, and I respected the editor who called on me to deliver a first-class job.