The Hardest (Working) Man in Showbiz (19 page)

When you worked in porn during those days, you were instantly part of a community, with all the kinship and feelings of belonging that went along with it. It was a small, close-knit group. We all knew one another’s names, watched one another’s films, and the odds were good that we’d have sex with one another eventually. You couldn’t be an outsider in porn because we were
all
outsiders, and we supported and rooted for one another like family.

John Holmes and I were always very friendly. Our introduction—on the set of a film called
WPINK-TV
—was even captured on-screen. After one of his sex scenes, I walked over to shake John’s hand and ended up noticing how sticky it was. It wasn’t the most pleasant way to start a friendship, but, given our chosen professions, it was probably the best I could have expected.

Whenever I ran into John at a film premiere or public event, we would go out of our way to tease each other. He liked to call me “Little Dick” (he had about two inches on me).

“John, I’m already hitting bottom,” I’d tell him. “Where else are you gonna go?”

“That’s okay, Little Dick,” he’d say, patting my cheek. “I’m sure you make the most with what you have. Hey, pleasing a woman isn’t everything.”

“What, are you entering the uterus or something? That’s not sex, John. It’s a Pap smear.”

“Little Dick” and “Pap Smear” became our regular pet names for each other. Anytime we saw each other, John would yell out, “Hey, Little Dick,” and I’d yell back, “Hey, Pap Smear!”

During the Consumer Electronic Shows in Vegas, we’d spend half our days just trying to harass each other. We’d pass notes back and forth between our booths, with little messages like, “Will you move your cock? People are trying to leave the parking lot.” I had sex with his wife, Laurie Rose, in a porno called
Personal Touch
, several years before she met John. I used to tease him about it, sending him notes that read, “Love your wife. I had her first.”

I lost touch with John after he went to jail in 1982 for allegedly orchestrating the Wonderland Murders. I was sad but not altogether surprised. At around the same time, I began hearing stories that John was a police informant, ratting on his friends in the porn business to save his own ass. I knew that he was into drugs and involved with bad people.

In 1984, I was asked to interview actors on the red carpet for the Pussycat Theater’s premiere of
Girls on Fire
, a new adult film starring John Holmes and Ginger Lynn. It was one of the most aggressively promoted films of the year. There were billboards all over New York and Los Angeles.

I was told that John Holmes might be at the premiere. He had been released from prison just weeks earlier and was keeping a low profile, so nobody knew for sure if he would show up. There were also rumors that John might immortalize himself in cement for the occasion. Inspired by the celebrity handprints outside Mann’s Chinese Theater, the owners of Hollywood’s Pussycat Theater had created their own version of the Walk of Fame. The theater’s entrance was covered with handprints of porn’s biggest names: Linda Lovelace, Marilyn Chambers, Harry Reems. But for a star like John Holmes, his hand hardly seemed like the appropriate limb to commemorate his legacy accurately.

I arrived at the Pussycat on the night of the
Girls on Fire
premiere. Vince Miranda, the theater’s owner and manager, took me aside and said, “We have a problem.”

Usually, when I did interviews at movie openings, I was given a microphone that was attached to some kind of recording device. All of my interviews were filmed and then screened before the feature, and sometimes used again in the videotape release. But Vince didn’t have all of the equipment. He had a microphone, but nothing to plug it into. And his careless assistant had found a camera but failed to get any film.

“Think you can fake it?” he asked.

“You want me to just interview people without getting it on film?” I said.

“Well, there’ll be a camera on you. But it’ll be empty. We don’t want to offend anybody, so just pretend that we’re actually getting it on tape, okay?”

It wasn’t as pointless as it sounded. A porn premiere always attracted the media, from local newscasts to national shows like
Speak Up America
and
Current Affair
. And whenever their reporters saw me interviewing somebody, they’d come running over and aim their cameras at me. They wanted to find out what I was saying and who I was talking to. There’d be ten microphones shoved in my face, so it didn’t matter anymore if my microphone was live. My role was mostly as media bait, an excuse to get the theater and the movie’s title on the nightly news.

Later that night the stars began to arrive, and I took my place on the red carpet. John Holmes pulled up with his entourage, and he walked straight over to greet me.

“Little Dick,” John exclaimed. “Long time no see!”

He gave me a hug, and I could feel a lump on his back, which felt suspiciously like a concealed firearm.

“What’s that?” I whispered to him.

He glanced at the reporters that were already beginning to descend on us. “Don’t say anything,” he muttered.

“Please tell me that’s not a gun.”

“You don’t understand, Ron,” he said, his voice tinged with real panic. “There are people after me.” He was referring to his involvement in the Wonderland Murders.

I looked over at Bill Amerson, John’s manager and best friend, and he also had a conspicuous bulge in his jacket.

We were already surrounded by camera crews and enough microphones to catch even the most hushed whispers. So I went on with the interview. I introduced him to an up-and-coming young comic named Sam Kinison, and then led him over to the wet concrete, where he made imprints of his hands.

“Is there anything else you want to put in there?” I teased him. “Come on! Dip it in! We all know you want to.”

He laughed and declined the penis dip, and we actually managed to have a pretty good interview. It wasn’t always easy with John. We had an understanding that it was all in good fun, but at times he’d take my ribbing too seriously. I made a few jokes about his recent legal troubles that made his expression turn suddenly aggressive.

“Are you trying to embarrass me?” he hissed.

“What?” I said, backing away. “No, no, John, I’m trying to be funny. That’s what I do.”

He studied my face, trying to figure out if I could be trusted. “I’m in no mood for this, Ron. If you think I’m a moron, just come right out and tell me.”

The last thing I wanted to do was offend a man with a gun strapped to his back. “No, no, Johnny, you’ve got it all wrong. You’ve got a big penis, I crack jokes—that’s how this works.”

Eventually the TV camera crews moved on, but John continued with the interview. He told me about his upcoming movies and his marriage to Laurie Rose. Everybody had moved inside for the screening, and we were the only two people still on the street, having a conversation in front of a camera that only one of us knew didn’t have film in it.

“John, John,” I finally said, cutting him off. “This is all great, but nobody’s going to know what you’re saying now that the media’s gone.”

He looked at me quizzically. “What do you mean?”

“The camera,” I said. “It’s…it doesn’t work.”

His head snapped toward the cameraman, who had already retreated inside the theater. He plucked the microphone out of my hand and examined it.

“I suppose this is fake, too?” he asked.

“No, it’s real,” I said. “But it’s not connected to anything.”

He yanked at the cord, trying to determine where it led. “There’s something on the other end of this.”

“Well,” I said, “let’s find out together.”

We followed the cord inside, pulling on it like Sherpas scaling a mountainside. We crept through the lobby, into the back of the Pussycat, finally coming to the end of the cord at Vince’s office, where it was tied securely to a doorknob.

“There you have it,” I said. “For the last half hour, you’ve been talking to a doorknob.”

“Well,” he laughed, letting the microphone’s useless cord drop to the floor. “I guess it’s what I deserve for calling you Little Dick.”

J
ohn Holmes and some other porn stars indulged in drugs on occasion.
*
A young porn stud with connections could have access to an endless supply of pot, booze, crystal meth, amphetamines, methamphetamines, uppers, downers—a veritable pharmacological potpourri. It was all available for the taking, and I wasn’t interested in any of it.

It’s not like I was sitting at home every night, watching TV and going to bed before nine
P
.
M
. I never missed a party. I went to nightclubs and discos, rubbing shoulders with celebrities, rock stars, and the type of people your mother used to warn you about. But I wasn’t the guy in the bathroom, plunging his face into a small mountain of coke until he couldn’t remember his own name. I was the guy upstairs, having sex with the drug dealer’s wife (with the dealer’s permission, of course).

Sex was in no short supply during the 1980s. With AIDS still considered a mostly gay disease, casual sex reigned supreme, and you couldn’t shake a stick without finding somebody ready to jump on top of you to take a quick ride. And you didn’t need to go to someplace like Plato’s where sex was the main attraction. You could go to Studio 54 and have sex in the coat-check room.
*
You could swing by the Hellfire Club and have sex before you even left the parking lot. And if nothing else was available, you’d just need to find out where the porn actors were socializing. Wherever they went, there were certain to be plenty of willing sex partners to go around.

Porn stars always had the best parties. Mark “Ten and a Half Inches” Stevens, of
Devil in Miss Jones
fame, would host parties every other weekend in New York, attracting all the biggest names in porn. I never appeared in a film with him, but he once asked me to play a priest in his mock wedding at a disco called Magique,
**
when he married his one-time porn costar Jill Munroe. Stevens’s most legendary parties happened on Valentine’s Day, held at Magique. The place was packed with porn stars like Serena, Vanessa Del Rio, Seka, Samantha Fox, and Jamie Gillis. They’d show up in leather outfits or black lingerie or sometimes nothing at all. We danced beneath strobe lights and, of course, had sex in every available room, private or otherwise.

Los Angeles was a nonstop sex smorgasbord as well, especially if you knew where to go. A few times in the 1980s, the Playboy Mansion was a hotspot for porn gatherings, when Hugh Hefner hosted the after parties for the AFAA Awards. Al Goldstein and I were in charge of the guest list. Hef’s only stipulation was that he wanted more actors and actresses than executives. He didn’t want the mansion filled with producers, distributors, and exhibitors. He wanted sexy women. So that’s what we got him.

Although the entire six-acre mansion would be overtaken by frolicking porn stars, most of us preferred to stay in the grotto, if only because that was where the real action took place. It was a synthetic cave that you could enter through a waterfall. Once inside, there were Jacuzzis, cushioned loveseats, and a lagoon-shaped swimming pool that was kept warm year-round for skinny-dipping.

On one memorable evening, I brought a porn star named Mai Lin to the grotto. All of the naked flesh must have put her in a frisky mood, because she announced that she wanted to have a gang bang. No surprise, there were plenty of volunteers, and she ended up having sex with a dozen guys in just under an hour.

After she finished off almost every guy in the grotto, she looked over at me. She cozied up to me in the Jacuzzi and tried to sit on my lap. I picked her up and carried her over to the Jacuzzi’s jets.

“That should do it,” I said. “It’s like a douche.”

I had her sit there for so long, I think she cleaned her tonsils. When I was confident that there wasn’t a drop of man juice left, we had sex in the Jacuzzi.

Hefner himself would occasionally join us in the grotto. Whenever he showed up, he always brought a few Playmates with him. During one visit, a sexy lady (who might have been a Playmate) swam over to me in the pool and began giving me head. This went on for a while, and then I noticed that Hefner was standing behind her. It was like being in the presence of greatness. He wasn’t just another run-of-the-mill porn publisher. Hefner was a legend, the grand pooh-bah of the sexual revolution.

He was massaging her shoulders and rubbing against her. When the lady realized that Hefner was behind her, she turned around and began hugging him. I watched them for a few minutes and then thought, Hey, what happened here? I thought we had something going. Hefner and the woman were fondling each other, and I was all but forgotten.

I’m not one to interrupt a master like Hefner when he was in the middle of enjoying a sexy model, but I was feeling a little ignored. I decided to give her a friendly reminder that I was still there, and I still had a massive erection that needed some attention. I stood up and began slapping my penis against the girl, just a few light bops on the back of her shoulder, kind of in a humorous way.

Everybody in the grotto was watching us and laughing, and even the girl was giggling, reaching behind and jerking my penis with a few good strokes. If Hefner was aware of what we were doing, he didn’t appear to be bothered by it.

Without so much as a nod in my direction, Hefner took the lady by the arm and led her out of the pool. I followed them, just hovering in the distance, hoping that Hef might ask me to join them. I wasn’t looking for a handout. I could’ve brought a girl to join in. I would’ve made it worthwhile. But he didn’t even look at me. He just escorted the lady out of the grotto, taking her straight to his bedroom.

I stood there and watched them go, my erection waving in the breeze like it was saying good-bye. Anthony Spinelli, a renowned porn director, was standing next to me, and he could see the disappointment in my face.