by Howie Gordon
I think it was Eric Edwards who took a mouthful of fruit and pretended to barf it all over Jamie’s cock, Amber’s ass, and some part of the pig.
By now, I had Janey bent over the table and we were going at it doggy-style. In this crowd, that may have qualified us as conservative Republicans.
Harry Reems had the starring role in this film. This was supposed to be his big comeback movie after some time away from the lens. After a while, it seemed like he just got tired of Jamie stealing the scene. He vaulted up on to the center of the table and joined in the pig smearing. He offered his cock to Amber fore and aft and if memory serves, she took him in both ways.
As I recall, Harry pulled out of Amber and jerked his cock furiously until drops of sperm came raining down upon all of us around the table. After extracting the last drop, Harry then plunged his dick into a cherry pie.
There was a film run-out. The camera(s) were quiet. It was still on the set for a moment as all involved just surveyed the wreckage. It quickly dissolved into an eruption of laughter and activity. Surprisingly, no grown-ups came in and yelled at us. I just stayed close to Janey.
When we got back to work, we went in for close-ups on one couple at a time and did the sex until each male orgasm. As you might expect, simple fucking could be decidedly anticlimactic after such pyrotechnics, but, not really, if you were personally involved. The show carried on and I enjoyed the time I got to play with Janey Robbins.
And after the sex, I got to die! I jumped up choking and gagging from the table! Ach du lieber, I had been poisoned! With this royal assemblage of porn stars watching, I reeled from the dinner table and stumbled into an expensive vase sending it crashing into the floor. After that, I chewed whatever other scenery I could find, and then collapsed and died. I was good too. I was ten years old playing Cowboys and Indians.
When they cut film, my honored colleagues gave me applause. How gratifying! I felt like Bette Davis! It was perfectly silly.
There was more dialogue amongst the surviving guests. They had to examine my body to see what had killed me. (It was the writers!)
I was wrapped. Whatever happened in the rest of the film was none of my business.
I had been in the most disgusting sex scene I had ever seen. I wondered how much of it could possibly be in the movie. We had either just done the greatest food sex scene since Albert Finney’s Tom Jones of the 1960s or else we had just made a very expensive contribution to Producer Arthur King’s outtake reel.
Chapter Fifty-Eight
The Sky Is Falling! The Sky Is Falling!
On November 10, 1984, The San Francisco Chronicle ran this story on the front page:
San Francisco Chronicle.
Up to that moment in history, AIDS had been thought to be a gay disease. It was believed to be a sexually transmitted lethal disease with no known cure that had been wreaking havoc and killing many people in the gay community.
It was now crossing the sexual orientation border into the heterosexual population.
In the realm of sexually transmitted diseases, herpes had caused me great personal concern four years earlier when we had first begun trying to get pregnant. With AIDS now, we were no longer talking about a pimple on the mouth or genitals that came and went, we were talking about dead!
Every day, there was another front-page story about AIDS. On Wednesday, Nov. 14, The Chronicle headline was:
“New AIDS Warning Aimed at Straights”
The high-risk group for potentially transmitting the disease was identified as gay or bi-sexual men, Haitians, and intravenous drug users.
The X-rated industry had two out of the three there.
“Any sexual activities that involve the exchange of any bodily fluids — whether heterosexual or homosexual — should be considered to have risk now.”
Dr. Harold Jaffe, Center for Disease Control
The San Francisco Chronicle
Amidst the flurry of AIDS headlines that week, our friend Michael Rossman came over to pay us a visit. Among other things, Michael was a mathematician. He told Carly and me that he’d done some projections on the spread of the AIDS virus based on the numbers that had been reported in The Chronicle’s news stories.
“Howie,” he said, “you’re in the wrong business at the wrong time. You need to retire.”
I didn’t consider Michael to be an alarmist and it was not what I wanted to hear. It was not what I wanted to believe.
I’d worked my way up from the bottom of the pile to become a performer of some standing in Adult films. I thought I was just coming into my own. There was no way I wanted to quit.
Carly was all over it. She wanted me to retire too, but I didn’t entirely trust her motives. I thought she was just using it to her advantage in the continuing monogamy wars that had long been raging between us.
I didn’t want monogamy and I didn’t want to lose my job. I wanted to believe that the newsmakers were just selling newspapers and that this whole AIDS thing would soon blow over like a bad hurricane. We would clean up from the mess and move on.
In the meantime, I had three movies lined up for early December. They would provide us with some much-needed cash for the holidays. Over both Carly’s and Michael’s objections, I decided to do them.
Then again, I may be dumb but I ain’t stupid. I put a call in to my old friend David Sobel. We had grown up together in Pittsburgh. We both had moved to California. He was a doctor now. I asked him to look into this AIDS thing for me to see if he could think of any way it could be safe for me to continue working in the X-rated business.
Chapter Fifty-Nine
White and Wong
It began with Director Charles De Santos parading me in front of Linda Wong. She would be auditioning me as a potential partner for her planned return to the Adult Cinema.
In films like Oriental Babysitter and Jade Pussycat, in which she costarred with Georgina Spelvin and John Holmes, Linda Wong had been a major star of the early seventies. Her last film had been released in 1977, round the time I was just getting started in the business.
When I met her, she was an aging China Doll. The Doll had become a mature woman. She had rounded edges.
We awkwardly hello’ed. My first impression was that she was not very interested. She later explained that she told Charles she wanted an eighteen-year-old guy in the part. Charles delivered her me. I was thirty-six. If I did the gym religiously for a month, I could play twenty-five, but I was clearly beyond eighteen.
Charles cued up a scene of mine from Anal Annie on the VCR and then left us to watch it and get acquainted while he dealt with some other business.
Linda quizzed me. She hadn’t followed the business at all since she had dropped out, and she had never heard of me. She emphasized that she was looking for men who could act. She was fairly intimidating. I did my best to let her know that I felt that I knew my way around a set. After a while, our conversation became friendlier. The ice had broken when we both agreed that this Anal Annie movie was really stupid! It cracked us both up. We turned it off.
Linda expressed her desire to make a real quality sex film. She acted as if she were slumming as an actress to get involved with porno again. She thought of herself as beyond it. She carried a copy of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet in her bag. I was impressed, but then again, I was easily impressed, especially by women who I would later have to have sex with on camera.
Linda made a big deal about how her movie was going to be head and shoulders above all the rest. I told her that was fine with me. We did no rehearsing, took off no clothes, and did not touch during our encounter. Eventually indicating that the audition was over, she told me that I had the part. She said she and Charles would change the scene so that I would be more appropriate for the role. She told me that I’d get a script.
It was all strictly business and it seemed like good foreplay.
Couple days later, Charles called with the dates for shooting the scene with Linda. She got on the phone and told me n
ot to have sex with any Oriental women for three days prior to the scene. I promised her that I wouldn’t if she likewise stayed away from any Jewish guys during that same time. She didn’t laugh. That was not a good sign. And I never did get a script. That wasn’t a good sign either.
Linda’s high-quality movie, better than all the rest, turned out to be an ad-libbed feature-length video shot in two days. Uh-oh.
When I first got to the set, Linda was already in costume, made-up, and ready to go. Charles was on the set shooting a sex scene with three other actors. Linda told me that she was trying to get herself “in the mode” for work. She paced nervously. She didn’t like my hair. Our makeup man didn’t do hair. I was sent out to Supercuts.
When I got back with my new haircut, Linda was still trying to get herself “in the mode.” I asked if there was anything I could do to help.
“No,” she told me. She said that she had to do it for herself. She told me that once she got it started, I wouldn’t be able to stop her. I didn’t know what that meant, but I took it all quite seriously for a while, until she started to repeat herself. Eventually, the light bulb just came on and I realized that something wasn’t quite right here.
I spent a long time with her trying to make contact. A lot of words were spoken, but they weren’t doing anybody any good. We weren’t getting anywhere. For whatever reasons, Linda wasn’t coming out of that makeup room. I had no answers. This was a job for the director. Besides that, Charles was also her friend. I passed him the baton.
There was a lot more waiting. A lot more.
Eventually, Charles applied about a half a bottle of brandy therapy with Lord only knows what else on the side. It worked. Linda eventually made her way out of the makeup room and onto the set. She was in the mode.
This time I was a vanilla banker from Nebraska with spectacles. Linda was to play a cross between a guru and a high-class courtesan. She was going to heal my pain and expand my sexual consciousness with a mystical Oriental experience.
It was The Seven Seductions of Madame Lau all over again, the first picture I’d made with Charles De Santos. Instead of Annette Haven, we had a real Chinese Madame Lau this time.
The long delay had forced Charles into his hurry-up offense. The lack of a script had us improvising a dialogue to set up the sex scene. We were going at it rush-rush-rush, just trying to get the scene done.
Looking at the movie now, we were just jabbering. It took all the air out of the scene. Less would have been so much more. In fact, it all would have been so much better if we had just said nothing at all and let our touching tell the tale.
Instead it was yakety-yakety-yakety-yak and fuck. That was too bad too, because by the time we finally got it going there, the sex was pretty good. The orgasm was great! But, alas, it may have been too little, too late to recover from all the damage done by our insipid yammering beforehand.
I watch the movie now, and I see that it was a good orgasm, but it wasn’t worth getting AIDS over. And don’t think that that dreadful thought hadn’t crossed my mind a time or twenty when we were shooting that scene.
My career as a sexual performer really ended on November 10, 1984, when I had first read of the heterosexual transmission of AIDS in the San Francisco Chronicle. I just didn’t know it yet.
Chapter Sixty
Sex Wars
This was supposed to be the X-rated answer to Star Wars.
Erotic Star Warriors was our working title, but by the time we were finished, It Came From Uranus would have been much more apt. It stunk. This little film never had much of a chance. It died before it even got started.
That was too bad because it was being produced by Arthur King again, the same guy that did Ten Little Maidens. I liked him. He was a cool guy and he seemed intent on trying to produce better quality sex films. In this movie, King had actually put money into the budget for the construction of miniature spacecraft and special effects. Who was this guy? As the videos were getting cheaper and cheaper to make, Arthur King was still putting his money into the far more expensive world of film. He rented Bob Vosse’s soundstage in San Francisco, which was all well and good, but he also hired Vosse to be his director, which turned out to be a colossal mistake.
Harry Reems was to be the star. I would play his sidekick. Annette Haven was cast as the female lead. On paper, we looked great. A week before production, we were all given big, fat scripts to learn. We were scheduled to begin shooting the day after Thanksgiving.
My parents were in town. They were staying at our house. I was going to wake up one morning, say good-bye to my wife and kids, my mom and my dad, and then go off to make a dirty movie. Life was full of surprises. I needed the job and my parents just happened to be visiting. I supposed that we could all handle it somehow.
Two days before the shoot, Harry Reems quit the job, saying that he had developed a contagious rash and couldn’t work. At the urging of Annette Haven, Paul Thomas was his replacement. Paul Thomas — or PT as he would later be known in the business — was an excellent actor. There wasn’t any drop-off there. It would be a big push for him to learn so much script so fast but PT could handle it. We’d been through this exact same kind of thing before together in Pizza Girls. We made it work then, we’d make it work now.
On Thanksgiving Day, Annette Haven called Vosse to arrange transportation for herself to and from the set. Annette lived way out in the boonies and didn’t drive. Bob Vosse refused to accommodate her in any way. And they managed to get on each other’s nerves in a hurry.
In the course of several phone calls throughout the holiday, Annette offered to stay in San Francisco and pay her own hotel bills if Vosse would provide a driver or pick up her cab fares. Bob Vosse’s diplomatic response was to fire her. Less than twenty-four hours before shooting was to commence, he had to recast the female lead. He gave it to one of the bit players that had been hired named Robin.
It was good-bye Annette. And it was good-bye movie.
Robin was a thin, leggy, young woman with very large breasts. She was now our female lead.
When I met her backstage that first morning, she was mortified. She was afraid of delivering her lines and freaked out about having sex on camera. That made her two for two and this was all before coffee. The poor girl had never even been in a high school play. She had gone straight from being a model doing some nude stills to being cast as the lead actress in this feature film.
It wasn’t her fault. I went looking for Paul Thomas, and we gathered in a dressing room to rehearse.
Within a few moments, it was clear to Paul and me that we were going to be in for a rough day. Robin was clueless. It wasn’t about good or bad, it was about total inexperience. Large breasts notwithstanding, Mr. Rogers would have made a better female lead.
I found Vosse and told him we had a real problem. First of all, he just categorically rejected the idea of calling up Annette Haven and getting her back on the project.
Okay, that being the case, I thought I had an absolutely brilliant backup idea for a Plan B. This being science fiction and all, we could just make Robin’s character an alien who communicated telepathically. All of her lines could be delivered by an off-camera voice and it would be as if we were hearing her thoughts. Robin wouldn’t have to remember pages and pages of lines nor have to fret at all about how to deliver any of them. We could just zip through this script and get on to the sex scenes.
I thought it was pure genius, but Bob Vosse did not. He wanted her to speak. PT and I were sent back to the dressing room to work with her.
Things were going slowly backstage. The situation sucked, but we were stuck in it. We did our best to help Robin. She was just a victim of circumstance here. If Vosse hadn’t copped such an attitude with Annette Haven, we wouldn’t have been in all this shit. Hell, if I would have had any idea how green Robin was, I would have offered to pay Annette Haven’s cab fares myself! At this point, we had to live with it. We prepared as best we could.
Once we got o
ut there on the set, Robin was lost. She was still at the stage where she was trying to stop looking directly at the camera. It wasn’t fair to ask her to take this big a step. As the hours passed, they ripped pages and pages out of the script in order to cope with the situation. I thought of all that time spent learning my lines.
What? And give up show business?
Director Bob Vosse was of so little help. At one point he said, “You’re the actors, go act! What are you bothering me for?” He stayed busy with his lights and lenses and seemed to be involved only with the technical aspects of each scene. When he didn’t like our performances as actors, he just yelled at us. He remained like that throughout the whole movie. He was a horseshit director. Sadly, we were the horseshit he directed.
Turned out, Harry Reems and Annette Haven were the lucky ones.
But the guy I really felt sorry for was producer Arthur King. I thought he must’ve sunk a lot of money into this movie. He’d even written the script that we were now eviscerating. One had to wonder how he could just let Vosse seem to run rampant over the whole thing. I discovered later that Vosse was also one of the producers of this film. I don’t know who had the power.
Paul got hard first and I got out of his way. I watched as he fucked Robin. It was like a tag-team wrestling match. When he finished, I jumped right into the saddle.
I was weak, just getting over a cold. The sex felt good for about thirty seconds and then degenerated into a contest to see if I could maintain an erection. I lost it a few times and I got it back. Robin was real nervous. I was real weak. Vosse displayed the sensitivity of a yak. The sex became desperate. Robin managed to do what I asked and cooperation and imagination pulled us through.
