Look Alive Out There

by Sloane Crosley

  This superlative seared into my brain. How many self-identifying stunt cocks have walked the earth to make “ever” meaningful? Forty? “Ever” seemed a touch hyperbolic for an unquantifiable group of people. I also wondered if Johnny’s unique endowments meant I, too, had the good genitalia gene. If I have a son, will he be pretty much set in that department? That might be a nice bonus attribute, though hopefully not one he will have to rely on for money.

  In case you’re not familiar, a stunt cock is the guy who steps in to produce the money shot if an actor can’t maintain an erection. I imagine this was handy in the era before little blue pills and digital film, but it seems like a real morale dampener for everyone else. This is the guy who opens the pickle jar after you’ve loosened it, the one who carries the birthday cake you baked out of the kitchen. More than anything, it struck me as an odd hook for an interview. It’s the kind of detail that a man might drop about himself, but would be less likely to point out about another man. Unless, of course, it was the sole reason for an article that might not exist otherwise. And there, if you will, was the rub. I got the sense that, despite his 116 films, Johnny had been all but forgotten. In pornography, being tag-teamed by three women and a vacuum cleaner nozzle does not a legend make. Johnny needed to be reintroduced.

  *

  Like I said, the man’s not my uncle. Though I’ve known Johnny my whole life, I can count our interactions on one hand. Our family is not the reunion type. We’re either united already or distant for some very good reason. Growing up, I saw Johnny at funerals and shivas, possibly a wedding—definitely one Thanksgiving when my father got a real kick out of offering him breast meat. And yet we referred to him as “uncle” in a way we did not with his brothers, who were cast as childhood friends of my mother’s.

  A combination of factors made this possible. For starters, my otherwise straitlaced parents could barely contain their excitement at having a porn star in their midst. A porn star is chum in the water for people who think getting wait-listed from college is a haunting secret. Also, Johnny’s other brothers are both doctors. One practices in Paris, which means he can say things like “femur” in French (fémur). Even I will concede this is a dramatic divergence in life paths—it’s not as if the other brothers work in marketing or club promotion. But my parents’ reverse mythologizing of Johnny made it impossible to get an accurate sense of the guy. Which is my family’s way.

  One of their favorite pastimes is diagnosing a person’s entire character by latching on to arbitrary details. They’re really good at it. When I was twelve, my friend Alexis and I were watching TV in my parents’ bedroom. Alexis was lying on the bed with her chin in her palms when my mother entered the room. Alexis said hello, but failed to remove her feet from where they rested—on my mother’s pillow. And that was that. I tried to defend my friend, citing the layer of sock that separated her feet from where my mother put her face, but it was no use. When Alexis and I had a falling-out years later, my mother danced on the grave of the friendship.

  “That girl,” she reiterated, “was a bad influence.”

  Meanwhile, my friend Dave, who once tried convincing me to have sex in the back of a van so we could “knock it out” before college, could do no wrong after once ringing the doorbell with our newspaper in hand.

  In this same way, snippets about Johnny were presented as essentials or in lieu of essentials. I knew that he dropped out of UNC Chapel Hill, which meant he was smart enough to get in, and that he’d spent the last thirty years living alone in an apartment somewhere in Los Angeles, which meant he was sad. I knew he was once so lost to a world of sex-crazed degenerates that he sent his mother, my great-aunt, a magazine with an advertisement for one of his films. The photo featured Johnny, bespectacled and naked, pushing a woman on a swing, also naked. I’ve always imagined him giving a thumbs-up but I can’t confirm this because I’ve never actually seen the magazine.

  But most shockingly of all, I knew that Johnny got into porn to find a girlfriend.

  To me, this idea was always the most difficult to grasp. It seemed the most implausible. What kind of cockamamy plan was this from a man who got accepted to UNC from out of state? It’s common enough for people to spend their whole lives building careers or amassing wealth in order to get laid. So one could argue that Johnny had cleverly skipped the middleman. His career was to get laid. Which is all well and good—unless that was never the point. Unless Johnny only ever wanted to cuddle and spoon and take turns spitting toothpaste into a bathroom sink. What if all those lawn orgies and park-bench encounters were constructed solely for Johnny to find love? For years, I thought about this every time I sat on a park bench. Until one day, when I couldn’t stand thinking about it anymore.

  *

  “What do you need his e-mail address for?”

  My parents are skeptical about me contacting Johnny. They have spent most of my life portraying this man as a caricature, but when push comes to shove, Johnny is suddenly quite three-dimensional. They don’t want me pestering a seventy-four-year-old man with stunt-cock inquiries.

  “He’s a very sweet person,” adds my mother.

  “What is it you think I’m going to do to him?”

  The truth is I don’t know exactly what I want from Johnny. Certainly, an academic curiosity about pornography is not a revelation. What am I going to do, blow the lid off fake orgasms? Nor is a sociological curiosity. David Foster Wallace wrote at length about the Adult Video News Awards, thus pissing a circle around the subject for all eternity. My only credential is that I am a blood relative. But even this is a lame justification. People related to politicians, for instance, don’t get more insight into them than the rest of us. If anything, they get less.

  At least some portion of Johnny’s draw comes from my own coastal turmoil. I have often felt I was mistakenly born a mid-Atlantic baby. I’m happy in San Francisco and have taught myself to be happy in Los Angeles. But after a few weeks, some tendril pokes up from my core and says: “You can’t stay here, you’ll go crazy.” And so I come back east, feeling smug and sane, having taken advice from a talking tendril. Yet the more I heard of Johnny’s “running off to California,” the more I felt a kinship with this person over my family.

  But I can’t tell my parents any of that. So I play the mortality card instead.

  “He won’t be around forever,” I say.

  “Neither will we,” my father says. “And we’re interesting!”

  “Not that interesting,” my mother corrects him, and forks over the e-mail.

  *

  Johnny writes back right away. It’s nice to hear from me, but he’s hesitant to chat. He needs to mull it over. I tell him to take his time, mull away, no problem. In truth, I am surprised. Not because I expect him to expose himself emotionally as he has physically, but because he has been a public participant in his former life. Only a few years ago, he was inducted into the Legends of Erotica Hall of Fame in Las Vegas. No one in my family was told about it, but during a recent Google search I read how a former colleague introduced him as “the most important person in all of Northern California during porn’s golden age; the guy who literally taught me how to fuck on camera—and this was before Viagra!” (The invocation of Viagra seems to be the porn industry equivalent of telling a younger person that you used to walk uphill to and from school, both ways.) At the end of the ceremony, the host wheeled out a block of cement for Johnny to stick his septuagenarian penis into. He demurred and signed his name instead.

  A full month later, Johnny’s name reappears in my in-box along with the subject line “apologies.” Of course, “apologies.” Of course, I should never have contacted him. I should have done as my parents suggested and let the man live his life. But Johnny is only apologizing for the delay. He was in Ojai and off e-mail. Ojai, I think. He has a place in the mountains! A place he can escape to or at least visit. He is not sad, he is happy. One rumor debunked already. Ojai. That’s where they have the turtle sanctuary. I imagin
e Johnny stepping out of a sun-dappled ranch house. The air is perfumed with flowers as he heads out on his morning turtle feed. I imagine him sitting on one of the great big ones, being carried in slow motion across a green meadow. Then I imagine him doing all of this naked and giving a thumbs-up.

  And so I stop imagining and get on a plane.

  *

  Reality is quick to replace fantasy. This is true in every arena except for sex, where pornography has more or less ruined sex for all men under thirty. But it remains true that once you visit a place, it’s almost impossible to replicate the images you had of that place before you went. As I stand across the street from Johnny’s apartment complex in Culver City, I make a mental note of what I think it might look like inside. From my febrile imagination, I conjure a time capsule of the seventies—faux wood paneling, disco records, memorabilia and awards. Maybe a sunken living room. Maybe a sex swing. Maybe a wicker sex swing.

  Johnny comes out into the hallway to greet me as I step off the elevator. He is shorter than I am, soft-spoken, with a shy grin. Some people are more comforting to look at than others and Johnny is one of them. He has a face like the man in the moon. He’s also noticeably spry. I pick up the pace and follow him to his apartment. He opens the door to an aseptic one-bedroom with white carpeting that stops at the kitchen. The counters are overrun with rows of vitamin bottles. In the living room sits a white sofa, white sitting chairs and a white table with a glass bowl of fruit on it. Angled on a small piano are framed photographs of his nieces and nephews, a family that is not quite mine. This is the apartment of a dental hygienist. There is, however, a curious amount of exercise equipment.

  “I like to stay fit,” Johnny says.

  The place is laden with bars and bells and core-strengthening mousetraps. Two purple balls take over the whole sofa like giant dogs. Across the bedroom door frame is a pull-up bar, gleaming in the sunlight. Johnny removes a hand gripper from one of the chairs and offers me a blueberry. I sit and sigh. Then he sits and sighs. We then proceed to talk about his brother’s cockatoo for what feels like ten minutes. This is my doing. I’m the one who broached the subject of the cockatoo. When I was nineteen, I spent an afternoon with the Paris-dwelling doctor while backpacking across Europe. We sat on his balcony, drinking tea, while the cockatoo sprawled out on his lap, getting the underside of its wing scratched.

  Johnny informs me of the cockatoo’s recent demise. I thought they lived forever, like African gray parrots. Apparently they have an average aviary lifespan.

  “Do you think he’ll get another one?” I ask.

  “Oh, I don’t think so,” says Johnny. “I think the cockatoo was burdensome, shrieking every time the phone rang.”

  Have I flown to Los Angeles to make a retired porn star say “cockatoo” over and over? People go to Los Angeles for less.

  “I’m don’t know why I’m here,” I confess.

  “That’s okay,” Johnny says, gracious and smiling.

  I had said those words to myself many times en route—at airport security, while stomping through the empty tennis-ball can of a Jetway, in the bathroom at LAX, plugging Johnny’s address into my phone—but saying them out loud, I realize just how untrue they are. Deep down, I know exactly why I have come and it is not because I have a California fetish. It’s because, like Johnny, I have been looking for love in all the wrong places.

  While I have not been frequenting strip clubs in the hopes of snagging a soul mate, I have become increasingly attracted to unrealistic or unobtainable men. I have broken things off with them or vice versa but each relationship feels quicker than the one before it. This is a problem everyone I know seems to have encountered in their twenties but has spontaneously outgrown in their thirties. One day you look around and the most romantically remedial people imaginable are signing leases with whole human beings, getting wistful about their former proclivities for drunks and sociopaths. I attempt to participate in these conversations, nodding along. How stupid we all once were! But I am only thinking of the phone in my pocket, where some cleverly flirtatious text might await me. I am in my mid-thirties and I seem to be working in reverse, going from long relationships that aren’t wonderful to short relationships that aren’t horrible.

  So I have come to see Johnny the same way masochistic parents make their children smoke an entire pack of cigarettes if they catch them smoking one. I want to stare into the face of a single man, forty years my senior, who’s been looking for love in the most unlikely place imaginable. I am in search of well-earned wisdom, of someone to smack me out of my habits. Like a vaccination, I am hoping that by immersing myself in an extreme version of my problem, I can be cured of my problem. But seeing as how our longest conversation ever has been about a dead bird, I hold off on sharing this revelation. Instead, we start at the beginning.

  *

  Johnny was born in 1943 in New Rochelle, New York, where he was a good student but not a great one. His younger brothers quickly surpassed him in athletic and academic prowess. Not that Johnny would have known. His mother instructed his brothers to lie about their trophies and their grades—even to physically hunch on occasion—to protect Johnny’s feelings. Which is an efficient way to mess up multiple children at once. Johnny learned that he was living in his own personal Truman Show during college, while home playing basketball with his youngest brother. For the first time, he didn’t let Johnny win. Johnny was unable to compute the loss, so the brother explained everything. As one might imagine, Johnny was more than a little unmoored. Activities at which he’d always excelled were called into question. He wondered if he had any talent at all.

  Then, in 1965, he was drafted. This upset him because he was seeing a therapist who he liked and he hadn’t “completed the therapy.” Therapy, understandably, was paramount to Johnny. Less understandable is the fact that most of the family saw the same therapist when he was growing up. He remembers riding a Schwinn to go see a psychiatrist. When I ask him if he was given a specific reason, he says therapy was like “brushing your teeth,” just some Salingery exercise in which the whole family partook.

  “So how long did you stay in therapy?”

  “I stopped a couple of months ago. My therapist was older than I am, which is hard to find at my age.”

  “Oh,” I say, “I’m sorry.”

  “He’s not dead,” Johnny corrects me. “He just thought I was cured.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of my problems,” he says, smiling coyly.

  I theorize that since he started going to therapy before he had problems, perhaps it’s therapy that gave him the problems. Like one of those lip balms secretly formulated to make your lips dry so you keep using it.

  “That sounds paranoid,” Johnny says.

  Fair enough, I think. You reach six decades of therapy, you are officially allowed to diagnose anyone you choose.

  After he got out of the military, Johnny packed up his car and moved to Fort Lauderdale to “figure out what life is all about.” When I tell him that Fort Lauderdale is not a place generally associated with enlightenment, he tells me that’s why he moved to Minneapolis. After Minneapolis came Denver, after Denver came San Francisco—and San Francisco is where his life cracked open.

  “I arrived in 1970 and everyone was openly smoking pot and I thought, Wow, this is pretty wild. At first, I was living in a residents’ club. It was cheap and you got to meet a whole new group of people before everyone went in different directions. It was really delightful.”

  Only a small percentage of the population speaks of shared toilets with such fondness. Then again, an even smaller percentage of nice Jewish boys from Westchester go into the adult film industry. But Johnny has a way of imbuing everything with positive thinking. On his castmates’ orgasms: “I would wager a high percentage of them faked it but hey, what can you do?” On his niche notoriety: “I was just so happy knowing the women were happy with me.” On John Holmes: “Private guy. Upbeat!” Johnny’s first job in San Francis
co was selling cable subscriptions door-to-door. And guess what? He friggin’ loved it.

  “The cable company was required by law to have a channel that was available to the public.”

  “A public-access channel?”

  “Yes, one of those. And they needed a host. So I wound up interviewing people, and they supplied me with a cameraman. I interviewed exotic dancers and artists. They filmed me getting a massage. One day I interviewed this guy who published a magazine for the Sexual Freedom League and I was intrigued. They had some wild parties—nude parties, sex parties—and I attended those.”

  “Attended,” I interject, adding air quotes.

  Johnny looks at me as if I’m trying to sexualize a trip to the mailbox.

  “Anyway, I started distributing the league’s magazine in vending machines. I had never even seen an adult film at that point. So I went to a theater downtown and I was awed by what these people were doing up on the screen.”

  Awed is what most people feel when they see the northern lights or Meryl Streep. And yet I wholly believe Johnny when he says it, just like I believe him when he says he then said to himself, “My God, that woman seems to be having a great time! How do I get in on that?”

  Turns out, the answer was at hand. The paper Johnny distributed was covering the trial of the Mitchell brothers, who, already famous for producing live sex shows, were in hot water for making a film during which a priest sticks his penis through a confession box and gets a blow job. Because the world was a different place in 1972, the paper saw fit to print the physical address of the Mitchell brothers’ offices. Years later, one brother would shoot the other in the face, an incident that, among other tragic consequences, fated them to be played by Charlie Sheen and Emilio Estevez in a made-for-TV movie—but first, they had to contend with a determined young man by the name of Johnny Seeman.