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

by Howie Gordon

  In his last years, Pacheco was attacked by a kind of creeping respectability. He became engulfed by its bloblike nature and was excreted like any other parent at a private school who couldn’t really afford to be sending his kids there. His ticket to the land of Suck-This-Uniqueness had been revoked. He trembled as he saw himself becoming ordinary.

  It all served to drive him quite mad. His mind became a war zone between the past and the present. His once proud centerfold’s body went to pot as he tried to eat his way through the chaos. He became addicted to Diet Coke and peanut butter. It was painful to watch. The utter tyranny of normal life was suffocating him.

  When he caught himself in bed watching daytime soap operas on TV, he ran out of the house screaming like Richard Pryor on fire.

  Soon after that, I visited Pacheco in a mental hospital where the doctors had him on enough Valium to make an elephant slur. He was so low he had to look up to see the caterpillars.

  I tried to cheer him up. “It’s over,” I told him. “You’re finished. You’re old news, stale popcorn, flat soda, dead meat, washed-up, finito, the end, sayonara, goodnight, sweet dreams, over and out, roger and wilco, 10-4, good buddy, turn off the lights, adios, and hit the road. The fat lady sang six years ago! Your wife and kids don’t need this. Richard Pacheco, you’re dead.”

  “I know,” he said. “I went into an Adult Video store last week and no one recognized me. The last time I was in there, the owner gave me my tapes for free and told me his wife wanted to fuck me. This time, some guy charged me eleven dollars and twenty-nine cents and told me I’d be fined if I didn’t rewind.” I stroked his head compassionately. He looked up at me with clear knowing eyes. “I’m going, aren’t I?”

  “Yes, you are,” I told him. It broke my heart. He was like Peter Pan. He just wasn’t meant to grow any older.

  “When I started in the business,” he said, “it wasn’t like it is today.”

  “I know,” I told him.

  “We spoke a language of sexual liberation and human potential. You remember Esalen?”

  “Yes, I remember.”

  “People were all uptight about sex, but there was no reason to be! We were like noble rogues in some divinely human struggle to make life in a body easier. It was important work! We shook the world! My generation tried to make lust respectable!”

  “Yes, Richard, I remember.”

  “Ah, but the Fates would not have it be so,” he waxed poetically. He was a man trying to understand the significance of his own existence. “God has a terrible sense of humor,” he said.

  “Yes, terrible.” I agreed.

  “The AIDS curse destroyed the X-rated business,” he said. “Only the fools and the desperate remain. There’s no respect left. Society has down-graded the occupation of porn star to one right in-between child molester and village idiot.”

  Just then, the nurse entered the room. She turned to me and asked, “Do you want me to sit on his face? Sometimes, that helps them.”

  “No! no!” shouted Pacheco sitting up angrily in bed.

  “Alright,” said the nurse. “I’m going. I’m going. I just thought you might like to know that I’m not wearing any panties.”

  “Really?” said Pacheco. The nurse smiled back at him and nodded. “Turn around, slowly,” he said. “and pull up your skirt.”

  The nurse turned her back to Pacheco and bent over slightly so that her buttocks would be protruded. She slowly raised the hem of her white dress while her bottom cheeks seemed to be dancing with each other. She paused when the dress reached the top of her thighs. “Are you ready?” she asked with a smile. He nodded eagerly. She pulled up the dress and revealed her naked bottom.

  An involuntary, “Ohhh,” escaped from the lips of Richard Pacheco, along with a thin line of drool that landed on his hospital gown. “Reminds me of Nina Hartley,” he said turning to me.

  “Yeah, kind of,” I agreed. My cock stirred in my pants.

  “Thank you, nurse,” he said. “That’ll be all.” With a pout, the nurse lowered her skirt. I caught a fleeting glimpse of her brown bush. She straightened her uniform and then left us to each other.

  Pacheco lay back on the bed with his eyes closed. “You know,” he said, “in sex, sometimes you see more with your eyes closed.” I didn’t know what to say to that. Then, he turned to me, and with the saddest eyes I ever saw, he said, “I’ve done my last come shot.”

  “One day,” he continued, “there will be a cure or a vaccine to fight AIDS. It’ll be too late for me. I know that, but it will benefit the children. Let me see a picture of the kids.”

  I took out my wallet and gave him a picture.

  “Yeah,” he said, “they’re beautiful. Growing-up did me in. Richard Pacheco’s lust was one thing, but Daddy’s lust is quite another. It’s a whole different banana factory.”

  “I know,” I told him. I understood.

  “Take care of those babies, pal,” he said to me.

  “I will,” I assured him. He closed his eyes again as if he was going way inside.

  When he spoke again, he said, “All that stuff I told you about helping humanity and important work? You know making sex acceptable and all?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Well, it’s true and all that, but it didn’t really matter. I was just trying to get all the pussy I could get.” A hundred pound weight seemed to dissolve from his shoulders.

  “I know that,” I told him.

  “Sometimes, it wasn’t worth it,” he chuckled to himself, recalling a hundred different incidents. “But sometimes, it was great!” he said contentedly, recalling a hundred more. He was a man making his final peace with himself.

  “You know,” he said, “I looked at the box cover of the last movie I was in…”

  “Yeah?”

  “My name wasn’t even listed in the credits!”

  “How quickly they forget,” I said to him, but I can’t forget Richard Pacheco. I’ll never forget Richard Pacheco and that’s when I reached over and pulled the plug.

  Pacheco became agitated. He grabbed his dick and gurgled something about not being able to find a literary agent. I held him closely to my bosom and rapped, “Lisa’s Got a Big Ol’ Butt,” softly in his ear. Pacheco stopped struggling. He smiled up at me, sighed deeply, and then left this world for a better place.

  And when I was finished, when I was done, they gave me a standing ovation. The group of performers on the stage and maybe a thousand people in the audience all stood up and applauded me.

  I wasn’t prepared for that.

  It scared the hell out of me.

  It was like the time in golf, I shot a hole in one.

  It was like opening the wrong door and stumbling upon God getting dressed. Emotions welled up in my chest and I hurriedly took my seat while making what were not immodest gestures for the applause to stop.

  In some fracture of time, the program continued. Nina Hartley was taking her turn at the podium. When my body ceased it’s trembling, I decided I should probably put on my pants. I leaned back in my chair to quietly pull the jeans up over my buttocks and promptly flipped myself over backwards. The unexpected commotion stopped Nina in mid-sentence. All eyes were once again on me.

  Ooops! I had nothing further to offer save my embarrassment. I righted myself as quickly as possible and sat back down to appear as an appropriately attentive audience member. Nina graciously continued. I marveled at how I’d gone from Demosthenes to Jerry Lewis in a matter of moments.

  Afterwards, all the performers posed for one big group shot.

  If you look closely in the lower left-hand corner of the photo, you will see that I am just about to lift up Hall of Fame actress Sharon Mitchell and put her over my shoulder.

  And as you study the close-up, intimate portrait of Miss Mitchell, you will discover that I was not the only performer without any underpants on that day.

  Shortly after that final session, I got in my car alone and headed North on Highway 5. There was
no point in my hanging around LA any longer; I knew it couldn’t possibly get any better. This had been my missing good-bye. And this memory would be my Cooperstown. “Top of the world, Ma, top of the world!”

  As the miles passed, I wept with the gentle, fragile joy of having felt God’s sweet breath.

  Chapter Three

  In 1999, Annie Sprinkle and Richard Pacheco were both inducted into the Adult Video News Hall of Fame and both were given Lifetime Achievement Awards by the Free Speech Coalition.

  Chapter Four

  Sam

  Sam died in the year 2000. And who could believe that I had drifted so far out of the X-rated world that I only learned of Anthony Spinelli’s death while leafing through the pages of the Adult Video News (July, 2000).

  I read the piece by Gene Ross and spent the rest of the day walking into walls trying to make my peace with it. I called his son Mitchell and his wife Roz. I called John Leslie. Nobody was home anywhere. It was probably better off that they weren’t, I mean, what was there to say to them? My conversation was with Sam, a conversation I had sorely missed since first departing the industry in the 1980s. After that, we lost Sam to the effects of what we thought were stroke activity and later Alzheimer’s. Those who knew and loved him had to live with Sam really being gone long before his body finally gave out.

  “You hit the peaks with Anthony Spinelli!” he once told me and that we did. Tears in one scene and laughter in the next.

  I used to call him every year on his birthday, Feb. 21. When I called back in 1996, his wife Roz had to ask him if he still remembered me.

  This man, who was my mentor and friend in the skin trade, had often roared with life. When he spoke to me that year, his voice was halting and trembling with confusion. He was fighting a losing battle to remember his own life. His self was melting. It was heartbreaking.

  This man had often paid me more money than I had asked for. We rode through some battles together, both taking the hits and sharing the glory. We had built a bond of trust in a sea of harshness, greed, and human corruption. Now, his wife had to ask if he still remembered me.

  Life is funny that way. Odd, where we find love. Odd, where we share truth. Odd, how we give our loyalty. And most odd, how things fade away.

  “Happy Birthday, Sam,” I told him. “I love you.”

  I never called him again after that.

  Chapter Five

  John

  John Leslie died in 2010. It was completely unexpected. His wife Kathleen told me that the doctor said it was a massive stroke. He said that by the time John would have realized that something was wrong, he was already gone.

  John Leslie — Extra Crispy

  Just returned from the crematorium where I stood next to John’s wife, his best friend Joey, and his dog Holmes, as we all held each other up, said good-bye and then watched as they loaded his shell into a very big oven. It kinda looked like an industrial, working-class, MRI machine. Never saw one of those ovens before. Don’t really care if I never see another one again.

  On the way back across the Bay, I listen to the John Leslie Blues Band on a CD. It’s very comforting to hear John’s voice again. I will have to get used to the idea that there will be no more new conversations.

  At home, back in my kitchen, I go looking for the obituary that ran in yesterday’s Chronicle. I can’t seem to find it. I search the recycled papers twice. It finally turns up in the garbage can with a noodle on it. I rescue it — the obituary, not the noodle. I will fold it up and save it somewhere. It will no doubt be thrown out one day when one of my own kids is going through my old papers after I’m gone. Who knows, maybe it will have another noodle on it again one of these days.

  It takes two-and-a-half hours to cremate a human body. Then they sweep out the oven. They still have to crush some bones and pulverize the teeth I guess. It’s a very good thing to be dead when they do this otherwise it could all be very painful. They package whatever is left in an urn. I knew a man once who wanted to have his ashes taken after he died and put into a plastic mold where they make bicycle seats. He then wanted the seat to be given to Raquel Welch.

  The Memorial at the Sportsmen’s Lodge in L.A

  John Leslie didn’t like funerals, and if he were alive, he never would have attended, but he would have missed out on two, sometimes three generations of people who came here to celebrate his life, his work, and to tell his spirit how much they really loved and appreciated him.

  It was a send-off for a King. The words were all spoken. The feelings were all felt. We all saw each other with gray hair and wondered, “How the hell did this happen?”

  John’s assistant, Kevin Moore, in conjunction with Kathleen, John’s wife; Joey Silvera, his Sancho Panza; Jules Jordan, his Evil Angel colleague and friend; and Chris Mann, an organizer of this event, put together and showed us a video titled, In His Own Words.

  In it, we revisited John Leslie the young actor, the water colorist, the lover, the filmmaker, and saw a bring-down-the-house rendition of John as the incredible blues musician that he also was. The only thing missing was that John wasn’t around to cater the affair.

  For a long time, the room was even quiet for the speeches, a rather incredible accomplishment for a porn crowd unused to honoring the simple civilities of the social contract. John Leslie was loved. He was respected. And he was admired. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind why we were all drawn to be there this night and why we all paid our respects to this passing master.

  Bill Margold made the comment that this was probably our generation’s last hurrah. With John Holmes and Jamie Gillis already being gone, and now John Leslie too, nobody else had the power to bring us all together again.

  It was back at the end of Talk Dirty To Me or Nothing To Hide. John and I were together in the hotel room after the shoot, just the two of us. I found myself being astonished that I had really come to care about the man.

  “Y’know, John, I really love you!”

  “What?” he said.

  “I really love you!” I repeated.

  “You want to fuck me?” he asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “Then calm the fuck down,” he told me.

  John Leslie was the Benvenuto Cellini of the weenie, a Frank Sinatra from Pittsburgh, and the living intersection of Jackie Gleason, Babe Ruth, and Curly Howard, three of the heroes of his younger life.

  Amongst the players of porn’s Golden Age, we’d all have to say that John Leslie was the best of us.

  Chapter Six

  Me

  I haven’t died yet. I’m still here. And in order to finish this book, I want to tell you about forty-four years of foreplay.

  The hottest sex I ever had was in the ninth grade. Sally was the first girl I ever made out with.

  Sally, my sweet Sally! Had I only known that my first hands-on sexual experiences were going to be carved and burned into my erotic psyche for the rest of my sperm-bearing years, I would have done things differently.

  I wasn’t kidding. I have spent much of my sexual life revisiting those torrid make-out scenes of our youth. It was in her game room, in Pittsburgh. The Kingston Trio was on the record player. It was the hottest sex I ever had. And it was all just petting. We never did get to go all the way.

  But oh how I wanted to! I wanted to when I was fourteen and I still wanted to when I was twenty-four. How many times have I masturbated and finished that sex act in the magic of my own imagination? Hundreds? Easily. A thousand, two thousand? Perhaps.

  It never went away. I still wanted to have her when I was thirty-four and when I was forty-four too, but there were always reasons why we couldn’t and why we didn’t.

  Out of sight was not out of mind, as I often saw her while in the arms of all the other women who came after her, including my wife. Now is not the time to play pretend. My memories of Sally had inserted themselves like some sort of stepping stone in the very DNA of my sexual arousal process.

  Every time — well, not every ti
me, but enough to be allowed to exaggerate and say, “every time” — every time I got aroused, I’d see her again. It was like a French postcard of a century ago that might have been being remembered by our grandfathers.

  In mind’s eye, I would see myself pulling down Sally’s panties, again, just as I had done that first time. And I would be aflame. The years did not pass in that game room. We remained young and fresh. We remained eager and reluctant lovers, both conflicted and mesmerized. We were driven beyond fear by all that brand new desire.

  I lived with it. Obsession? Fixation? Arrested development? I don’t know where it fit in the textbooks. Mostly, I just moved on after we broke up. After all, I had the tenth grade to deal with. There were never any walls covered with her pictures in my house. There were no secret shrines built to her in hidden alcoves. It never stopped me from falling in love with other women and enjoying them sexually too, and it didn’t stop me from marrying the love of my life.

  But it was in my mind. I lived with it. I never sought the cure. I never thought it was that big a deal. I thought everybody felt that way about their first sexual experiences. I lived with it. The price I paid was sexual. I brought a ghost into bed with me. What do other people think about when they fuck?

  We were a sex act frozen in amber. I wanted to melt that amber and finish what we started.

  I never wanted to run away from home and go live with Sally. I didn’t want to break up her marriage, neither did I want her to break up mine. Over time, it all became very specific: