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

by Howie Gordon

  Then, in that special burst of magic that only pornographic movies seem to be able to provide, while I was sucking her hose, she would begin sucking mine. Tee-hee, very funny, let’s shoot the shot. “And Action!”

  Well, the problem was I had never siphoned gasoline before. I dipped one end of the hose into her tank and began sucking on the other. I should have tried acting. We did some very stupid double entendre dialogue before I was surprisingly rewarded with a mouthful of gasoline…

  I couldn’t spit it out fast enough! Have you ever tasted gasoline?

  DON’T!

  Eventually, I recovered enough for us to continue shooting the scene, but my penis had to do it without me. There was enough pleasure in her sucking that it was able to get hard, but it was acting, Academy Award acting! I was completely distracted by that god awful taste still in my mouth. I would have killed for a glob full of peanut butter. Blow job? What blow job?

  But Marilyn sucked like a pro and they soon had all the hardcore footage they needed except for the come shot, the almighty come shot.

  Director asked me if I was ready to come. He just wasn’t paying attention. On a one-to-ten scale, I was about a 2. They were all in a hurry to get to lunch. For me to come from her sucking could have used up a goodly portion of her remaining youth. Perhaps I exaggerate. Realistically, it would have taken thirty minutes to an hour, if it would have been even possible for me to come at that point. It has always taken me a long time to come from a blow job, on screen or off - and that’s without drinking any gasoline.

  So, I did everyone a favor that day. Rather than use up Marilyn for that long, with all the potential for disaster that it included, I took matters into my own right hand. If it was my orgasm that they all awaited and who knew better than me how to turn me on? Everybody loved the idea and I lay down next to the Ferrari and closed my eyes.

  In my own private little world, I began to masturbate. Talk about taking one for the team! Ah, the glamour of it all! I don’t know what Marilyn did. They were probably touching up her makeup. She was on stand-by, after all, waiting for the call that my squirt was imminent.

  I can’t be sure, but it seemed like it didn’t take me all that long. I can’t remember who or what I was thinking about, but whatever and whoever, it worked! When I felt myself getting close , I jumped up and hit my mark like Marlon Brando! Marilyn was there on her knees in a flash.

  The director called for action and the rest you can see for yourself in the movie. A lot of people did. Insatiable was probably the most popular film that I was ever in.

  I was at the beach in San Diego one day and I spotted this insanely erotic-looking woman sitting nearby. When the man she was with saw me staring at her, I looked away.

  A few minutes later, he again caught me looking at her. Again, I turned away. When he saw me staring yet again a third time, he rose up and started coming towards me. Oh, shit, he was big. Well, here it comes, I thought. I quietly clenched the fingers of my right hand into a fist.

  He got up close to me, leaned down, and said, “Weren’t you in Insatiable?”

  “YES!” I said, way too loudly. “YES! THAT WAS ME!” I said in the joy of relief. “I WAS IN THAT MOVIE!” And we had ourselves a nice little chat.

  I can’t tell you how many of my old high school and college friends were jealous to learn that I’d gotten a blow job from Marilyn Chambers. She had a huge following. I didn’t always tell them the truth about that experience.

  Maybe I shouldn’t even have told you.

  Luckily for us, Marilyn and I were able to meet again in several future sex scenes, ones that left a much better taste in our mouths.

  Chapter Three

  Schmeckle Movies in California

  The telephone was ringing. I was drunk and on the outside of my locked front door. The ringing was going on inside and I was having trouble getting the key into the keyhole. Finally!

  I rushed to pick up the phone. “Hello?”

  “You’re busted!” came a hard, raspy voice over the line.

  What? My mind raced into overdrive. It’s amazing how fast those two little words can sober you up. I knew that getting busted was one of the occupational hazards of the business I was in. I figured it was just my time.

  “Didn’t you hear me?” the voice asked, “I said you were busted.” Visions of courtrooms and lawyers swirled in my brain. I saw myself in handcuffs. Was I being arrested? What was the charge? I wondered who I should call first. I did not want to hear the heavy, rolling sounds of iron doors closing behind me.

  “What are you in for?” the killer would ask.

  “Smut,” I’d tell him.

  Hey, wait a minute, I thought to myself. This ain’t right. I heard a familiar sound in that raspy voice.

  “Is this Jimmy?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” he said, “and you’re busted!” It was my cousin Jimmy calling from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Now, I was confused. If I was getting busted, why was my cousin Jimmy calling from Pittsburgh to tell me about it? I guess I wasn’t as sober as I thought.

  “What are you talking about, Jimmy? I asked him. “Tell me what happened?”

  “Cousin Burton saw you in a porno film!” he said.

  What? I started laughing. Another country heard from — cousin Burton! I was so relieved that nobody was dead and that the KGB wasn’t involved that I just started laughing. This wasn’t gonna be about cousin Jimmy at all, this was gonna be about cousin Burton!

  Okay.

  From what I could put together, cousin Burton was a lawyer who worked for Valium in Washington, D.C. Apparently, he skipped out of work one afternoon and took himself down to the Pussycat Theatre to see an X-rated movie. This, of course, was in the prehistoric days before home video.

  Just my luck, cousin Burton stumbled into The Candy Stripers, my first adult film, and cousin Burton thought he recognized me up there on the screen. He got so excited that he drove all the way home to Maryland, picked up his wife in suburbia, left their kids with some neighbors, and then drove all the way back to the porno house in Washington in order to show her the movie.

  “Is that cousin Howard up there?” he asked

  “Yes, that’s cousin Howard up there.”

  “You’re sure that’s cousin Howard?”

  “Yes, I’m sure that’s cousin Howard,” she said.

  Well, cousin Burton got so excited that he done lost his mind. He called my parents! He was going to tell on me. I was thirty-two years old. I hadn’t lived at home in fourteen years. cousin Burton was thirty-seven.

  It turned out that my parents were not at home when he called, so cousin Burton called his own mom, my Aunt Lil. He told her that he had just seen cousin Howard in a porno film!

  Well, Aunt Lil made cousin Burton promise not to tell my mother. It seems that Aunt Lil had once taken my mother to see the scandalous movie Last Tango in Paris. When Marlon Brando began buttering up Maria Schneider’s asshole, my mother dragged my Aunt Lil out of the theater. This, by the way, was all news to me. I guess Aunt Lil felt pretty sure that my mother would not take cousin Burton’s news very well. She decided she would protect my mom from this bit of distressing information about her youngest son.

  “So, how did you find out about all of this?” I asked cousin Jimmy, who, after all, was telling me all these stories. “Did Aunt Lil tell you?”

  “No,” Jimmy said, “Aunt Kitty told me. I think she got it from Aunt Rose.” Now, this was getting very complicated. If Aunt Kitty and Aunt Rose knew, that meant that Uncle Chink and Uncle Manny knew too, and so would Uncle Leo.”

  “But don’t worry,” cousin Jimmy said, “everybody swears they’ll all keep it secret from your mother and father.”

  My heart dropped. I felt the anguish of being an embarrassment to my parents. I imagined the relatives whispering behind their backs at the next Bar Mitzvah. My parents wouldn’t even know what was happening. It was no good.

  “Why didn’t Burton just call me?” I asked J
immy.

  “How the hell should I know?” Jimmy answered. “He’s a jag-off!” It didn’t really matter. The cat was out of the bag. I knew that it was now time for me to call my parents and tell them about my X-rated film career.

  First, I had to de-fuse Jimmy. He was wired. He was acting as my agent, but his attitude was all filled with sin and scandal. I tried to act like this was no big thing.

  I tried very hard to believe that myself. I really had no idea how my parents would react. The only thing I had going for me was that I was their son. The apple’s not supposed to fall far from the tree, right? Biology seemed to suggest that my actions would not be too farfetched for my own parents to be able to comprehend. But I’ll tell ya what, I was not overjoyed that I had to call my parents and tell them that I had been in some porno movies.

  The sexual revolution of the 1960s seemed to just completely skip Pittsburgh. In the city of Roberto Clemente and the golden triangle, pornography was still an incredibly seedy thing. The mob-run theaters were in the crappiest parts of town and the vibe was absolute lowlife. It was not the pre-AIDS, upbeat San Francisco scene at all. There were no Mitchell Brothers hobnobbing with the city’s artists, intelligentsia and cultural elite.

  In Pittsburgh, pornography was still equated with racketeering, mobsters, illegal gambling and prostitution. It was “schtick drek” (a piece of shit)! There was no Sexual Freedom League. There was no socially redeeming value. Pornography was vice, a crime. To the Jewish community there, it was decidedly trafe (not kosher). Sexual liberation, Wilhelm Reich, Esalen Institute, Masters and Johnson’s sex therapy, all of that was just California bubbameinz (silly talk). In Pittsburgh, a dirty movie was still just a dirty movie.

  By the time I reached the age of thirty-two, all that longhaired generation gap crap of the sixties was over for me. I was now into just getting along with my folks. I had come to appreciate their acquired wisdom based simply on their years of raising a family, staying married, and being alive. I no longer wanted to know their dark secrets or have them be my friend. I had given up on trying to reeducate them or change them with each new wave of therapy I had discovered in the counter-cultural Mecca of Berkeley in the seventies. I had come the full circle back to just loving them and being grateful that they had brought me into this life and nourished me.

  I knew I had a real curveball to throw at them! I just hoped that they could handle it.

  As I approached that telephone call back home, I prepared myself to become the black sheep of the family. I prepared myself for excommunication. I could see the headlines:

  Dateline Pittsburgh — LOCAL JEWBOY DISCOVERED FUCKING SHIKSAS FOR CASH IN CALIFORNIA — news at 11.

  Well, for good or bad, I was about to reunite the characters of myself. Richard Pacheco, porn star and wonderful figment of my imagination, I’d like you to meet your real parents, Sam and Adeline Gordon. I picked up the phone and dialed. My wife got on the line with me. I needed her there for moral support.

  My mother answered the phone. My dad had gone out to get a haircut. We did a little small talk. She was having the walls washed and the new carpeting installed. It was keeping her busy. She was getting the house ready for my brother’s return. After ten years in Israel, my brother, the doctor, was moving his family back to Pittsburgh. My parents were ecstatic about his return.

  “Listen, ma,” I always called her “ma,” “I have to tell you something.”

  “Yeah?” she said.

  “Yeah,” I answered. “I did a couple of X-rated movies awhile back.” The truth was I had done thirty features, ten loops, and two magazines by then, but I did not want to open with the sledge hammer…“HEY, MA, I’M A PORN STAR! I FUCK SHIKSAS FOR A LIVING!” I thought I’d take it a little slower and see how the medicine was going down.

  “Yeah, I did a couple of X-rated movies awhile back. I didn’t tell you about it before because I didn’t think you’d be too crazy to hear about it.”

  “Ye-ahhh,” she said haltingly. My mother was no dummy. She was waiting for all the bombs to fall.

  “Yeah, well, cousin Burton stumbled into one of my movies playing in Washington and —”

  “He goes to see those movies?” my mother asked me.

  “I guess so, ma,” I told her. “Anyway, he got himself all excited at seeing me and he called Aunt Lil.”

  “Aunt Lil?” my mom asked. “Why didn’t he call you?”

  “Good question, ma.”

  “Did Lil call you?” she asked.

  “No, it was cousin Jimmy.” I answered.

  “Cousin Jimmy?” she said, “how did he know?”

  “I think he heard about it from Aunt Kitty or Aunt Rose, I’m not really sure, ma. Cousin Burton told Aunt Lil, and I think Aunt Lil told Kitty and I think it maybe was Aunt Rose told Jimmy…Look, Ma, I don’t know. Jimmy was kind of excited when he told me all this. The bottom line is that it’s all over the family grapevine and I wanted you and Dad to hear about it from me before you got wind of all the gossip that’s goin’ around.” There was a pause.

  “What was the movie’s name?” she asked.

  “The Candy Stripers was the one that Burton saw,” I answered.

  “How much did they pay you?” she wanted to know.

  “I got $200 a day for a couple of days work in the film.” It was the truth. There was a moment of silence. “I worked with Marilyn Chambers,” I added. That was technically a lie. I worked with Marilyn Chambers in another film, but I somehow thought that Marilyn Chamber’s fame might somehow help to legitimize the whole thing.

  “Who?” my mother asked.

  “Marilyn Chambers, ma,” I said, “you know…” Jesus, I thought the whole world knew about Marilyn Chambers. “You remember, ma, the Ivory Snow girl, on the box cover, the woman with the baby?”

  “You worked with a baby?” she asked.

  “No, ma, Marilyn Chambers was on the Ivory Snow package with the baby. Then when they found out she’d worked in Behind the Green Door, they fired her. Remember? It was all over the papers.”

  “Oh,” said my mother. Awkward silence. “So, that’s your news?”

  “That’s it,” I said.

  “You want to know what I think?” she asked.

  “Yeah, ma, tell me whatdya think?”

  “Plllbbbbbbb!” she said. “That’s what I think.” My mom gave me the raspberry! I laughed. My wife laughed. My mom laughed. That was basically it! Soon, we all said our good-byes. I hung up the phone, relieved.

  I imagined my mom meeting one of her friends at the kosher butcher shop. “So, how are your kids?” the friend would ask.

  “Fine,” my mother would answer. “My son, the doctor, is coming back home from Israel and my other son, he’s making schmeckle movies in California.”

  Several days later, my old Chevy died. When I called a tow truck to make the funeral arrangements, I was told that I needed to have the car’s title. I had to call my Dad and ask him to send it to California.

  On the phone, Dad told me, “No problem.” Then he said that cousin Jimmy had told him that I had won some kind of award. I had told Jimmy that I had won me a couple of Best Supporting Actor Awards. I had told him and then forgotten all about it. Jimmy told my Dad, and when my Dad mentioned it, I habitually just started to lie. Then, I remembered, I no longer had to.

  “Yeah,” I said, noticing a little pride creeping into my voice, “I won a Best Supporting Acting Award.” There was a brief pause.

  “You want to know what I think?” my Dad asked. Uh-oh, here we go, I braced myself for what was to come.

  “What?” I answered.

  “How’s your health?” he asked.

  “Fine,” I told him, taken back a little.

  “How’s your wife’s health?” he asked.

  “She’s fine too.” I told him.

  “You love your wife?” he asked.

  “Yeah, Dad, I do.”

  “Does she love you?”

  “Yeah.”


  “Well, then everything’s okay,” he said, “and that’s what I think!”

  Over the phone, I could hear the smile on his face. I don’t think in my heart that my Dad could understand at all what I was doing. He was much too shy about such things. Even so, he had found it in himself not to worry about it, not to let it come between us. I wanted to cry then, but held my emotions in check. It would’ve just made us both uncomfortable. The men in our family held their emotions in check. I think that’s why I was drawn to acting. You get to have emotions. You get to express emotions. Hell, you’ve got to express emotions, but that’s another story.

  The moment between father and son passed just as it had between mother and son earlier. There was no hellfire and there was no celebration. It just wasn’t going to be any big deal between us. I’m sure that volumes exist in what wasn’t said, but our bond had managed to survive the fact that their son made some schmeckle movies in California.

  I was a lucky man. I wonder sometimes about the conversation that must have taken place between my mom and dad when he came home after getting that haircut when I first gave mom the news. In later years, he claimed that he didn’t even remember it.

  Cousin Burton became one of my biggest fans for a while. He knew more about X-rated movies than I did. He used to call me long-distance on his company’s dime to gossip about his favorite porn stars. He had a big crush on Vanessa del Rio. I used to plot revenge while I humored him. I was gonna ask Vanessa to lure him to a motel, chain him to a bed, and leave him stuck there with a cucumber up his ass.

  Eventually though, Burton found the common sense to apologize to me for starting all the wildfire family gossip that led to my confession to my parents. And I forgave him. In the end, he did me a favor. I didn’t like having a secret life from my parents. It was good for all of us to get the cards on the table. Besides, I thought, in a couple of months, none of this would matter anymore anyway. I was going straight!

  Chapter Four

  Carly and I were house hunting in LA. We were looking to find a place in Venice Beach. No matter that one-room garages were selling for a million-two because I was Playgirl’s Man-of-the-Year!