Hindsight: True Love & Mischief in the Golden Age of Porn

by Howie Gordon

  I remember that the first time I ever placed Donna’s hand on my bare penis, she just broke out in a scary fit of laughing. Uh-oh, this was not good for my self-esteem. You want to talk about an event that can scar a young man for life? This was definitely one of the top five nominees. It seemed like forever until she calmed down enough to explain that she sometimes laughed hysterically when she got very nervous.

  She said that I had surprised her when I placed her hand on my dick. Having never touched one before, it occurred to her that she had no idea what to do with it. And that thought all of a sudden seemed like the funniest thing in the world to her. By then, thank the Lord, it seemed pretty funny to me too. Poor girl was a wreck, laughing, crying, mucous coming out of her nose. Well, we calmed each other down. After that, I made a few suggestions of what she might do with a handful of dick. And we progressed from there.

  Then came that fateful night during my first Thanksgiving vacation home from college. My parents had gone out for the evening. Donna’s father had dropped her off at our house. He would come back later and pick her up.

  Donna and I had enjoyed some heavy petting before I had gone off to college. When I inevitably had pressed the point, she had always insisted upon me keeping my point to myself. Even still, we had come very close to “doing it” several times.

  Tonight was gonna be the night. I had a condom and a new philosophy. I was ready. There was preliminary debate. Kissing soon replaced the words. I could tell her resistance was weakening, but who remembers how long all that took? I guess we just lost track of the time.

  We were petting and wrestling on my parents’ big double bed. Finally, we put a rubber on my penis that I’d been carrying around since the tenth grade. She went on top. She held my cock in place and slowly and carefully impaled herself upon me. We were still. I was all the way in. No doubt about it. This was the actual it. She reported no pain. I began to move slowly. It was great.

  Then, there was a loud knocking downstairs at the front door. Uh-oh.

  Fuck this shit! I thought. Whoever it was, they could wait! It was clear that it was the little head that was doing all of the thinking. I jammed into high gear and tried to come.

  The knocking turned into shouting, “DONNA? DONNA? ARE YOU THERE?” It was the maiden’s father! He was early. We were late. What did it matter? He was at the front door! I was squirting into the condom as she flew off of me and raced into her clothes. I raced into mine. We both bumbled downstairs. I was still wearing the wet rubber underneath when I waved good-bye.

  I refuse to think of this as the night I lost my virginity.

  In the great romance novel of my life, I prefer to think that I lost my virginity to Lucy.

  I hooked up with Lucy at the very end of high school. She would soon replace all three of the women that I was seeing. We would be a couple for the next five years.

  Though a year younger, Lucy had become sexually active way before me. She was the teacher. I was the student. She was smart. And she was a straight-haired blonde looker along the lines of Mary Travers from Peter, Paul & Mary with legs that went from here to Heaven. I counted myself lucky to be with her.

  I’ve forgotten most of the how or why, but I think the first time we ever had sex was on a mattress, on a floor, in a New York City apartment. She wore bikini bottom, leopard print panties, no shy maiden in white cotton, she.

  Unhurriedly, thank the Lord, she was the one sitting in the back of the canoe guiding us through all the steps down the river until we went over the falls. I did, anyway. In those days, I was never too sure about women’s orgasms. They didn’t always say. I couldn’t always tell. And I didn’t always ask. I just knew that it was gonna be awhile before I could go again. So. I would usually hope that whatever had just happened had been enough for her too.

  Lucy’s first words to me afterward, apropos of being the teacher, were, “Do you feel guilty?”

  “No,” I answered. At the time, it was as close to the truth as I could get.

  I think from that point on, and for many years to come, my penis pretty much just took over my life and used the rest of me as a disguise.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Lucy and I, and a lot of other young couples in the 1960s, were stuck trying to be Romeo and Juliet and do Free Love at the same time.

  Good luck wid dat!

  We were fine whenever we’d be together, but both school and work often conspired to put us in different cities for periods of time.

  And when that happened, we were the revolution. It was “When you can’t be with the one you love, honey, love the one you’re with.” When we were apart, we were both fucking everything that moved. I’ll have one of those and one of those and one of those. We were both dining freely at the lover’s buffet of life. Monogamy was so yesterday.

  And then when Lucy and I would get back together again, well, we didn’t always know exactly how to handle it. To be kind, let’s just say that the truth often took a beating. And jealousy, they don’t call it “the green-eyed monster” for nothing. Jealousy was formidable and merciless.

  But we thought jealousy was like racism and imperialism! We thought it just another outmoded idea to be discredited and disregarded. We were supposed to do better than jealousy! In the Age of Aquarius, we thought we were all supposed to be able to have sex with whoever we wanted to have sex and everybody else was just supposed to be groovy with it.

  Seemed like we beat that dead horse for years!

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  I made my first “skin flick” when I was a senior in college. Gloria had asked Lucy and me if she could film us having sex.

  Gloria was a freshman at Antioch who was as much a novice at filmmaking as she was about sex. She figured she’d kill two birds with one stone and learn a lot about each in the process.

  I was instantly all for it. After having been that fat kid, the world was now inviting me to become a movie star! It was like winning an award for having done 900,000 sit-ups. The fact that it was to be a film about sex only made it more exciting.

  Lucy, however, had her doubts. She had the curiosity and chutzpah to get naked for a film, but she suspected the young Gloria of having a crush on me, which she found less than amusing. In the end, though, Lucy agreed to make the film.

  There was no script. The planning only went as far as picking out a date and a place. When that date arrived, Gloria arrived at our apartment; stage lit our bedroom, and then hid behind her camera waiting for something to happen. I heard Woody Allen worked like that sometimes.

  It was awkward. Lucy and I didn’t know what to do and there was Gloria hiding behind her camera. When she pushed the “on” button, we fell into some kissing and began taking off our clothes. There was no passion. We felt stupid.

  On a whim, I picked Lucy up in my arms and swung her around the room. We laughed. It broke the ice.

  I asked Gloria if she minded if we played around a little bit first. Gloria said that we should do whatever we wanted to do. She was more nervous than we were. In her own recollection, she wrote:

  “I’d never even seen an X-rated film, much less made one. How do you get two people to fuck for the camera? What am I supposed to say? I don’t know how to get this started in a movie any more than I do in real life. How do I get this rolling? I need help. I want you guys to show me.”

  There was a six-foot cardboard tube in the room with red and white barber stripes around it. I put one end of it over my cock while Lucy put the other end between her legs six feet away. We posed. There was a toy gun. We did some schtick with that too. There was a lot of jumping up and down like humans sometimes do at the zoo when they’re trying to get a rise out of the monkeys.

  And that was foreplay.

  When we began the sex in earnest, Gloria wrote:

  “Okay, more serious stuff. Howie and Lucy silhouetted against the light, bodies close, kissing, touching. Looks like lovers in front of the moon, romantic, tender. Pull back, Howie moves her in fro
nt of the camera, pushes her down on the bed, spreads her legs, buries his face in her crotch. Lucy eases back, letting him have her, closing her eyes against the bright glare of the lights. I move back and forth behind him, watching her face, listening, feeling like an intruder with permission, like a voyeur. He moves up, kissing her belly, breasts, neck. Her round hoop earrings catch and reflect the lights. The room heats up quickly from the quartz lights, but they just keep going.”

  What I remember was that there was an endless scene of Lucy sucking my cock followed by an equally endless scene of me sucking her.

  After that, we fucked for about six-and-a-half days.

  Gloria shot and shot and shot. She only stopped for reloading. She said nothing. We ignored her.

  The truth that Lucy and I shared about our having had sex for the camera that day was that it was not all that much fun. Our private sex was much more exciting. Neither one of us turned out to be much of an exhibitionist. We weren’t getting off by being watched. The lights were hot and they just kept getting hotter. The sex became a chore.

  In the end, neither one of us reached orgasm. We just stopped. We’d had enough. Of the three of us, Gloria probably got the biggest kick. Her eyes were big like a baby giraffe’s as she gathered up her equipment and left. She later wrote:

  “When Howie finally rolled off her, they just lay there spooned together. They touched and kissed and whispered to each other so low that I could not hear it at the foot of the bed. When he finally turned to look at me, it was almost as if he was surprised to see me still standing there. He smiled to the camera, spread his legs wide and shook his balls at me, thumbed his nose, and jumped off the bed. Lucy headed for her clothes. Cut. Wrap.

  I thanked them, genuflected a few times, grabbed my equipment and split. Oh, wow, I know I got some good stuff. That was great! Wow, what amazing people. Oh, wow, I can’t wait to see it. I wonder if Kodak will process it if I just drop it off at the Pharmacy. Oh, wow, this was so great. So, that’s how it’s done! Shit, I could never do that. I wonder if Lucy really felt okay about this, I wonder if Howie really had to talk her into it.”

  And when Gloria was gone, gone and gone, Lucy and I mercifully finished up that sex scene in the quiet darkness of our own love.

  Several weeks later, we saw the film. It had no title. It had no credits. And it had no sound. It was amateurish and innocent and really quite cute — right up to the parts where we saw ourselves exhausted, sweating profusely, and trying to extricate ourselves from the situation. But on the whole, we were glad we had done it.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  I graduated Antioch College in 1970 with a degree in both History and Urban Affairs.

  You ask, “Did most people who worked as actors in the X-rated industry have college degrees?” And I say that’s a very good question to which I don’t have the answer. Let’s just say, it wasn’t required. For the men, the ability to become aroused and have an orgasm in front of the prying eyes of many other men, women, and machines had to be at the top of your résumé, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves here.

  Lucy and I were playing house in Washington, D.C. While I worked at a firm that served as consultants to what remained of the Federal Poverty Programs, Lucy was finishing her senior year of college.

  My job was like being a traveling salesman for social reform. We’d fly all around the country on contracts from the Department of Labor administering “technical assistance” to the programs in need. They were all in need. It was like putting band-aids on cancer.

  The Republican Nixon had begun gutting the programs when he took office in 1968. What was left were the mere remnants of what had once been the noble effort of a national War on Poverty initiated by the Democrat John Kennedy and later expanded into The Great Society of Lyndon Johnson, his successor in the early 1960s.

  Anyway, it was so over by 1970. Kennedy and his brother had been murdered. So had civil rights leaders Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X. The Vietnam War was still ravaging the nation. We didn’t exactly know it yet, but the great “revolution” of the sixties was over. The bad guys had won.

  Still, the great liberals on our staff argued that if we helped one person, then it was all worth our pay. And by the way, our pay was good! There was very good money in poverty if you were on the right side of the equation. I made a nice salary cast in the role of the longhaired disenchanted youth trying to work within the system.

  Each Monday morning, I’d be part of a crew getting on an airplane bound for one of the nation’s ghettoes. We’d spend the week there working and then return to D.C. on Friday for our staff meetings. The locals in the cities where we had been sent usually didn’t trust us. They protected their turf, their funding, and worked the Feds for whatever they could get. We’d study their programs, make suggestions, and write reports.

  I had worked over three years in this job. From true believer in the earlier days before Nixon, I had become a disappointed cynic. My tolerance for the necessary games of bureaucracy had disappeared.

  Toward the end, what I pretty much did was try to fuck as many women as I could in the cities where we went, before returning home each Friday to play house with Lucy. Mostly, I had the good sense not to hit on the women in the actual programs we were working. That was a no-no. But after work, I’d find the hippie part of town and see what I could find. I was twenty-two years old back then. When the wind would blow, I would get a hard-on. I was baffled by people who could sit around in an office all day long and not fuck. It made me crazy.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Go West Young Man

  I’d already been to California a few times. My company had sent me on various trips to both Los Angeles and San Francisco where I had worked on a number of the poverty programs out there, but this trip was different.

  For one thing, Lucy and I were just hanging on by a thread. Not surprisingly, too many other lovers had finally combined with too many strange scenes, too many half-truths, and too many outright lies. We couldn’t find each other anymore. Our ability to go on loving and supporting each other had been absolutely mangled.

  We had a wonderful little apartment behind the Biograph Theatre in Georgetown, but it had grown cold and tense in there. We were living in limbo with too many painful memories as lovers and roommates.

  When I got this particular reassignment to San Francisco, I was offered the whole weekend there so that I could show up fresh for work at 9:00 a.m. on Monday. As usual, I was going to stay at a hotel.

  Turned out, a friend of mine named Bonnie, a woman who I’d recently had a fling with, was also going to be traveling to California. We made plans to travel together. Bonnie was going to move into a commune in Berkeley called Dragon’s Eye. She said they’d probably have room for me to spend the weekend there if I wanted. I wanted. It sounded great. In all the time spent on that job, there had already been far too many hotel rooms.

  We took the redeye out of D.C. on Thursday night. It was still morning on Friday, when we pulled up to the front door of that Berkeley commune. There was a flutter of activity. The inhabitants were all busy loading up four cars with food, dogs, sleeping bags, and themselves. They were going camping for the weekend, to a friend’s property near Yosemite. Did I want to tag along?

  Yes.

  Three or four hours later, the sun was high and hot when we arrived at a farmhouse up in the mountains. It seemed like everyone just jumped out of the cars and took off all of their clothes. Whoa!

  Chapter Thirty

  That night, in the California mountains, Melody first invited me to her bed. I thought she was ten years older than me. Turned out, it was only three or four, but she had a twelve-year-old daughter and was far more experienced than any other woman I had ever touched. I guess that’s the point here. She was a woman. It seemed like the rest had all been girls.

  By morning, I was completely in love.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  When I got back to D.C., Lucy and
I said our good-byes. I quit my job. I was moving to California, to join Melody, and to join the commune.

  Melody flew back East to ride across the country with me. We stopped off to visit my folks in Pittsburgh. I’ve had better ideas. My mother ended up throwing us out of the house the next day. She was not happy that Melody was older. “What’s she want with a schtonk like you?” my mother asked.

  She also didn’t like it that Melody had a child and she was slightly less than thrilled that my new lover wasn’t Jewish. She thought I was stupid to quit my job and to move to California. My parents heard the word “commune” and thought I was joining the Manson Family.

  When Melody and I openly slept together that night in my old bedroom, my Mom sent my Dad in the next morning to tell us we had to go.

  We went.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Now, you remember what happened with Melody and me on that highway driving through Kansas.

  It was a hot summer day. We were riding in my convertible. I took off my shirt to beat the heat and catch some rays. Melody took hers off too. No bra, nothing, I squirmed. Her tits were splendid, especially for a woman who had nursed a baby, but I thought baring them on the Interstate in Kansas wasn’t exactly clever. And I said so.

  I told her that we were still out here in America and not back in Berkeley. Bad idea, it ended the honeymoon right then and there. She lit into me like I was the Ku Klux Klan. It was my first lecture from her on sexism. And it was not to be the last.

  As the miles accumulated, so did my regrets. I was in way over my head with this woman and I could still smell the bridges burning behind me. All across Colorado and on to the great Golden Gate, Melody was on my case for things that I wouldn’t learn about for another five or six years.