Johnny Porno
by Charlie Stella
JOHNNY PORNO
Published by Stark House Press
2200 O Street
Eureka, CA 95501, USA
[email protected]
www.starkhousepress.com
JOHNNY PORNO copyright © 2010 by Charlie Stella.
Introduction copyright © 2010 by Charlie Stella
All rights reserved
ISBN-13: 978-1-933586-49-6
Visit charliestella.com
Text set in Figural. Heads set in Champion
Cover design and layout by Mark Shepard, shepgraphics.com
Proofreading and e-book formatting by Rick Ollerman
The publisher would like to thank Ed Gorman for all his help instigating this project.
PUBLISHER’S NOTE:
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used fictionally, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales, is entirely coincidental.
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or introduced into a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of the book.
First Stark House Press edition: April 2010
First Stark House Press e-book edition: February 2012
Table Of Contents
Author’s Note
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Epilogue
Charlie Stella Bibliography
Author’s Note
Amici:
A few years ago, after reading an article about the tragic life and death of Linda Susan Boreman (a.k.a., Linda Lovelace), I noticed a documentary had been made about the film responsible for her becoming an overnight celebrity and household name. Inside Deep Throat was a masterful exposé that detailed the many variables at play behind the making of the film and how its political persecution became the driving force behind its financial success. Immediately after watching the documentary, my wife and I looked to each other and said, “Next book.”
In 1973 Richard Nixon was inaugurated for his second term as President; the U.S. Supreme Court, in a 7-2 vote, legalized abortion with their decision in Roe v. Wade; U.S. involvement in North Vietnam ended with the signing of the Paris Peace Accords and Willie Mays hit his last home run (#660). Among these historic milestones was a decision by NY Criminal Court Judge Joel Tyler to ban the pornographic film, Deep Throat. Tyler wrote, “This nadir of decadence...this feast of carrion and squalor...this Sodom and Gomorrah gone wild before the fire... this is one throat that deserves to be cut.”
As films go, one has to acknowledge Deep Throat was nothing more than a campy, cheaply made porno that showcased the “sexual talents” of a young woman stage-named Linda Lovelace. With a soundtrack comprised of silly parodies and jingles and a plot born of male fantasy, the movie might well have come and gone without the slightest notice had the government ignored it. Instead, political directives from the White House launching a moral crusade that had much more to do with distracting the public from the war in Southeast Asia and an ever growing Watergate scandal guaranteed the film’s iconic success. What it also did was provide organized crime with a new way to make a fast buck. It is fittingly ironic that the name given to the secret informant (FBI agent, William Mark Felt) who provided information that would eventually take down the Nixon White House itself shared the name of the film.
Deep Throat was the brain child of a hair dresser from Queens (Gerard Damiano) who thought up the film’s storyline while driving across the Queensborough Bridge into Manhattan. After witnessing Linda Lovelace’s unique ability to perform fellatio, Damiano pitched the idea for the flick to a couple of New York wiseguys who then fronted the $25,000 film budget. Filmed in Miami over a six day period, Deep Throat would go on to earn more than $600 million. Unfortunately for Damiano and the cast of the movie, there was no trickle down income from the mob’s windfall profit. Damiano’s original one-third partnership was bought out for pennies on the dollar and he was told to skedaddle immediately after the film’s success. Lovelace was reportedly paid between $1,500—$2,500 for her performance in Deep Throat and her co-star, Harry Reems, originally hired to help with the lighting, earned a per diem of only $100. Both actors were burdened with nothing but problems afterward. Lovelace had not only been used by those behind the movie, she felt betrayed by the feminist movement after spending the latter half of her troubled life publicly battling the porn industry. Harry Reems nearly went to jail for his role in the movie and it is believed he was saved from the slammer only when (and because) Jimmy Carter defeated Gerald Ford in the 1976 presidential election.
With all the media attention and government-inspired moral outrage, Deep Throat became the proverbial forbidden fruit and the mob was gifted a new Prohibition. But America had proved itself ready to move beyond the sexual rigidity and censorship that had dominated the cultural landscape prior to the film’s release. A New York Times article proclaimed the film "Porno Chic: after several icons of American celebrity decried censorship and openly attended showings. By the time Judge Tyler rendered his decision to ban the film, Deep Throat had become taboo enough to entice the public into a near frenzy; people who’d never had a thought about pornography suddenly had to see it.
In the summer of 1973 I was between high school and college working a summer job humping sheetrock at the Olympic Tower in Manhattan to put aside a few extra coins before I flew off to Minot State College in North Dakota. I didn’t know a thing about Deep Throat, except that my father and a few of his friends had seen it and seemed to enjoy cracking jokes about it. I was focused on playing football. Fortunately, distractions like VCRs weren’t available yet (or like too many kids today obsessed with entertainment technology, I might never have left my bedroom).
Although the bulk of my focus back then was on football, a Freshman English class would forever alter my life (no matter how many detours I would make along the way). Dave Gresham, the smartest guy I know, was my professor. A Renaissance man in the truest sense of the word, Dave had received a Woodrow Wilson scholarship and attended the University of Iowa’s Writers Workshop (where he studied, along with fellow classmates John Irving,
Andre Dubus and James Crumley, under Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Yates). Dave has designed and built a solar home from the ground up, was a state ranked tennis player and coach at Minot State College and smoked the fish he caught off his sailboat on Lake Sakakawea in some smoking gadget he’d made in his yard. Dave can name birds on sight and continues to rebuild homes, sailboats, etc., to this day. In fact, my last email exchange with Dave found him helping a friend of his make a new mast for a 107 foot boat—out of a hundred foot fir tree. As Dave put it, “with (how’s this for bird sightings) ospreys looking down on us and ducks hiding out in his front-yard pond.”
Dave and his wonderful wife Linda have also raised a more than exceptional family (two Harvard graduates and one Air Force Academy graduate). Dave was also a great teacher and not to weigh his record down with having influenced a small-timer like myself, it should be noted that he also taught a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and current head of the Seattle office of the LA Times, Kim Murphy. Kim and I were classmates along with another terrific writer, Michael Vaughn, who was the college paper editor and probably the second smartest guy I ever met. All of us benefited from Dave’s ability to polish the already finely tuned (Kim and Mike) while simultaneously grooming the grammatically and academically challenged (myself).
Needless to say, I took every class I could from Dave and it was during my sophomore year when he began a Creative Writing class by reading the opening lines to the George V. Higgins classic, The Friends of Eddie Coyle, that I became hooked as an avid reader and a wannabe writer of modern crime fiction. I knew people who talked like the characters Higgins portrayed. I had lived around them most of my life.
By semester’s end, Dave had introduced me to Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, Elmore Leonard’s Glitz and a host of other writers and their works who would put me on a reading binge that has lasted to this day. Dave had told our class: “Once you see your name in print, you’ll always want it there.” At the end of the semester he submitted a short story of mine for a college magazine writing award. It received an honorable mention and Dave’s prophecy proved correct. A victim of seeing something I had written get published, I indeed wanted more of the same.
After transferring to Hofstra University I won a fiction contest there under author Sam Topperoff’s tutelage. Eventually bored with school and too impatient for the dedication writing might require, I took a job cleaning windows, married and started a family. I worked two and three legitimate jobs at a time over the next several years, but the writing bug had been firmly implanted and I would continue trying, on and off, over the next twenty years (always with Dave’s encouragement), until I got lucky.
At one point, after moving out of the legitimate workforce into the subculture I write about, while manning the phones in a bookmaking office, I began writing scenes to plays. Although they would never be produced, the dialogue I was engaged in while taking bets was a constant reminder of the world Higgins and Leonard had portrayed so masterfully. It was also a reminder to maybe take another shot at writing a novel.
Before I could put something together worth reading (never mind selling), I stayed with theatre and wrote a few plays about things I was most familiar with: gambling, street finance and irreverence. Three plays of mine were produced off-off Broadway, but I found the theatre required and depended on a lot more than one man’s effort. I quickly gave it up to pursue the riches a street life offered to those willing to take risks and hustle.
Fast forward a few more years and a few dozen more detours, including a few divorces, arrests and countless jobs, and the writing bug returned with a vengeance. It was when I first met my wife, Ann Marie. My attempt to impress her as something more than a street smart wannabe resulted in my first published novel, Eddie’s World. Shortly thereafter Ann Marie and I moved in together. I left the street and the money that went with it behind. The financial transition was a tough one. I had to survive earning a word processing salary, an annual income I had sometimes made inside a few months on the street, but playing it square also meant a peace of mind money can’t buy.
It took some time, but eventually I came to realize the fazools (money) wasn’t worth the hassle or the risk, and that eating local take-out instead of steaks at The Palm wasn’t such a bad tradeoff. I had attained a lifelong goal of getting published and I had found the love of my life.
In October of 2008, Gerard Damiano, the director of Deep Throat died of complications from a stroke he’d suffered a few months earlier. He was 80 years old. The less fortunate story of Linda (Lovelace) Boreman ended in April of 2002. After suffering massive internal injuries in a car crash a few weeks earlier, she was removed from life support and died at the age of 53.
Recently Ann Marie and I were discussing how much of a role luck (good or bad) plays in any given life; whether people make their own or it just falls from the sky randomly landing on this or that person; does divine design dictate who gets lucky (or unlucky) at exactly the right time they might need (or deserve) it? It was one of our early morning dialogues that usually starts with a cup of coffee and ends several cups later, somewhere around noon. Although we never came up with a definitive conclusion regarding luck, we agreed we’ve been the beneficiary of whatever it is and/or however it happens; we’ve been blessed with good fortune unobtainable on the open market.
Seven novels down the road, all of them originally edited by Peter Skutches (talk about being blessed), I’ve lucked out again. Ed Gorman, to whom this book is dedicated, recommended Johnny Porno to Greg Shepard at Stark House Press and here we are. Greg’s enthusiasm, encouragement and support has been more than invigorating for us. Johnny Porno has the honor of being Stark House’s first venture into publishing original novels.
How lucky can one guy get? It never ceases to amaze me.
—Charlie Stella
For Ed Gorman
Thank You
‘Tis but thy name that is my enemy;
Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.
What’s Montague? it is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!
What’s in a name?
Chapter 1
John Albano used his right thumb to count through a thick wad of five-dollar bills while George Berg listed the reasons weekend receipts were off.
“Friday was supposed to piss down rain, it didn’t,” Berg said. “Shoulda been good, it wasn’t. Maybe they went the regular movies instead, who knows. I had five guys the afternoon I told come back later, two of them didn’t bother. I had nineteen end of day. Then yesterday, cloudy all day, a little chilly, that shoulda helped, but there was the Mets-Pirates at Shea and the Giants-Jets up to Connecticut, that preseason fiasco, the Yale bowl. What that cost me, I shoulda went the trotters. I show it three times for a fifty-five count. And today, this rain it looked like again, I showed it six times, the theater, from nine until half an hour ago, I still couldn’t bust a hundred. Total’s one seventy-two for the weekend, ninety-eight today. That lunatic the bar there in Brooklyn, he’s making threats I don’t clear two hundred, but what the hell’m I supposed to do they don’t come? God help me it’s sunny next weekend. They’ll all be out the beaches while I’m sweating I don’t catch a beating here for not meeting an impossible quota. That happens, we get beach weather next week, I’m thinking I shouldn’t even show it. What’s the point?”
John looked up from his count, one hundred thirty five-dollar bills so far, and said, “That’s your call, George. Just make sure you let them know in Brooklyn if you’re not gonna show it. It’ll save me time I don’t have making the trip out here.”
They were standing in front of the Knights of Columbus on East Gate Road in Massapequa, Long Island. It was a cloudy, humid afternoon. A film case holding the porn film rested against John’s left leg. He stopped his count to wipe sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand.
“I’m just saying is all,” Berg said.
“I mean, I was filling the place with fifty, sixty guys a showing there almost nonstop I first got the thing. Now guys are on vacation, it being summer and all, football season around the corner, I’m lucky I’m puttin’ gas in my tank for all the work I’m doing.”
John was close to finished with his count. Berg was right, the total was low. They wouldn’t be happy in Brooklyn when he dropped the money off later. If he ever got there, he was thinking. He had two more stops to make.
“Most guys already seen it,” Berg continued. “Last week they asked me skip the opening scene, go straight to the sex.”
“I hope you did it for them,” John said.
“Yeah, I did, but only because it got them out sooner rather than later. Some a them use the toilet there, I know they’re beating themselves off. I have the old lady clean it with Lysol soon’s they’re gone, but sometimes she brings the kids and they gotta use it. It’s disgusting.”
John couldn’t imagine it, letting your wife clean toilets where a group of sweaty men had watched pornos. He shook the thought off.
“I don’t know you remember the crowds when you were just counting heads,” Berg said. “It’s thinned out considerably. We need an angle, something new to generate interest.”
John finished the count. “Eight-sixty,” he said, then counted off twenty-four fives and stashed them in Berg’s shirt pocket. “Minus one-twenty is seven-forty.”
“Peanuts, I know,” Berg said. “We need that new angle.”
One of the men who’d paid to see the movie approached them. He was a heavyset bald man with thick black glasses. He looked at George first, then John. “Whatever happened the other guy?” he asked.
“What other guy?” John said.
“Tommy Porno,” the bald man said. “Guy used to bring the films. He was supposed to get me something. I left him a fifty-dollar deposit last month and he never came back.”
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