by Mark Dapin
On a bus into the city – gorgeous, friendly Vancouver, where I broke my heart and Jo’s heart and changed the person I was – I saw a gang of skinheads in khaki flying jackets and fourteen-hole Dr Martens boots. I wanted to tear into them, kicking and punching, to force them to hit me back. I wanted them to kick me unconscious, to knock my spirit out of my body.
I could not bear to be a part of myself. I was sweating in my brain. I could feel it blister and pop. There was a hand around my heart, a fist in my throat, a cancer in my stomach. I felt doubled over with pain, all the time. We had breakfast in a diner. Jo vomited in the bathroom. After a week, we parted the way I had learned from my parents – no shouting, no fighting, no anger, only pain. I caught a plane back to Sydney. I did not know if I was going for a weekend or for the rest of my life.
Chris picked me up from the airport. I needed to talk to him so much, but he went away for the weekend with a girl he had met in a pub, and left me in his Paddington unit, trapped with myself. I had 200 duty-free cigarettes, and I smoked them one after another after another after another, breathing nicotine like oxygen. At first, D refused to see me, but she finally agreed to meet me in the Rose and Crown on Glenmore Road, the street where she lived. She told me she was not interested in me, she had moved on. She did not want to listen to me, did not care that I had come back, did not know me.
I went home to Chris’s flat. Jo rang me and I told her I was coming back to Canada, but it was the weekend, I had no credit card, and I could not buy a ticket until Monday.
She said, ‘Oh, baby, I’m so happy.’
I stayed awake all night, smoking, drinking, ringing my mates in England, confessing everything to each of them. I thought they would not like me anymore. The next morning I had a beer for breakfast, then went out for a drink with a friend. She listened to my story in the Glengarry, with all her patience and love, comforted me for an hour and a half, then told me she had to go because she felt weak because she’d had an abortion the day before.
Back at Chris’s flat, there was a message from D on the answerphone. She said she had changed her mind, and perhaps we could have some kind of relationship. I kneeled by the phone, playing her message over and over.
D came to the flat and I left with her. Within a couple of weeks, we moved in together, in a unit in Chalmers Street, Redfern. And I never phoned Jo back, ever.
She said, ‘Oh, baby, I’m so happy,’ and I never called to say I would not be meeting her in Vancouver.
I strangled something breathing inside myself, and some nights when I am alone I can still feel my fingers choking my neck.
I thought about killing myself every morning for the next three years. When I woke up, my heart exploded. Suicide beckoned from banal utilities: fire escapes and bathroom cabinets. I would stop suddenly in the street, make a gun out of my fingers, stick my hand in my mouth and pull the trigger with my thumb.
I could not believe what I had done, what I had become. I had left my wife, who had always shown me nothing but love, to move in with D, who seemed to hate me.
Jo said to me, ‘You were the light in my world, and now that light’s gone out,’ and I could not stop crying because I had lived with her since we were nineteen and I knew everything about her and we had shared everything for nine years and most of what we shared had been hers, and she was a lovely, kind, loyal, trusting person and I fucked around behind her back and abandoned her in a foreign country.
I did not know who I was.
One of the first nights I spent with D, we sat in her Paddington house and turned on the TV. I never watched TV, but D wanted to be with the kind of person who did, so we sat together in front of a program made by the feminist writer Andrea Dworkin called Against Pornography. Dworkin’s thesis was that pornography was violence, that it corroded the souls of men and destroyed the lives of women. She spoke to a former model who had first had sex with men and women, then with dogs and snakes. She’d had a baby, and used it to make more pornography. She raped her baby with a snake.
When I went to bed with D that night, I knew what I was. I was the kind of person who would work on pornography.
Until then, I’d had no idea about porn. I did not even know what it was for. As a teenager, I’d had a small collection of randomly shoplifted magazines: a copy of Hustler, an issue of Swish (‘the magazine of spanking fun’) and a magazine called Probe, which disappeared from my schoolbag one lunchbreak.
On my bedroom wall, jaggedly arranged among black-and-white posters of The Clash and The Damned, and a music-paper obituary to Sid Vicious, was a naked centrefold of porn queen Dorothy Stratten, who later died on a bondage machine. I slapped the word ‘dead’ on her poster, cut and pasted from a newspaper headline. I didn’t know what a bondage machine was – I still don’t – or how it could kill someone, but I liked the poster because I thought it was ‘punk’, because a character’s walls were papered with similar pictures in the TV version of Sham 69’s album ‘That’s Life’, and because Ray Grange worked in a sex shop in The Clash movie Rude Boy.
Every summer, when I was a boy, I grudgingly returned to Leeds for a week with my dad. When he and his second wife went out and left me alone in the house. I would sneak into their bedroom and open every cupboard and drawer, climb chairs and scale the built-in wardrobe, lift up suitcases and pull out hidden magazines – Vibrations and Private – scurry off to my room and take them to bed.
But I wouldn’t do anything with them. I studied the stories and stared at the pictures, and tried to understand, to find out what women were. I think I took these magazines for a kind of sex aid – something to give you an erection before you went with a woman. When boys at school made jokes about the pages of their magazines sticking together, I had no idea what they meant.
When we were fifteen, Rich and I used to sneak into X-rated films. They never showed close-ups of couples fucking, and offered only rare glimpses of full-frontal female nudity. They confirmed my uneasy feeling that sex was just a rumour.
Australian Penthouse was published by Horwitz-Graham, from offices in Cammeray, on Sydney’s north shore. It used to be run from an actual penthouse flat, but one of the Horwitz family had moved in when the magazine grew too large. I had freelanced a boxing story for the editor, Phil Abraham, while I was working at POL. When I returned from Canada, I did not have a job, so I went to ask him for more commissions. I thought I would try to be a freelance writer.
Phil was a shrewd, talented editor, with a love for good writing that was rare in publishing and, I imagined, unique in pornography. He was also a dedicated greyhound owner, and perhaps the only person in Australia ever to have been associated with both dog racing and sex. He suggested I try a few days sub-editing on Penthouse. He had just lost a sub-editor unexpectedly when she had found out he was paying her less than another member of staff, and she had thrown his own in-tray at him. The in-tray bounced off Phil’s head, and I briefly took over her chair, eager to add ‘pornographer’ to the letters ‘liar’ and ‘bastard’ that I imagined followed my name I sat between staff-writer Mark and deputy editor Todd, who was later to become editor of Men’s Health. Mark had a black eye, the result of having slept at the house of another journalist’s ex-girlfriend. He had been woken up by the journalist’s cowboy boot stomping on his face. He said he had chased the stomper around the living room, naked, and punched him back. Todd had recently left the military, having tried out for the SAS. It seemed like the kind of place where I might fit in, and there was a good chance I could suffer violence. I was hungry for self-harm.
I smoked relentlessly at my desk, as did Todd. Mark only smoked heavily. We each had our own ashtray, where mountains of butts curled up and died like poisoned slugs. At lunchtime, we drank beer in North Sydney Bears, as I tried to hold back emotional collapse. I gibbered maniacally about D, while they shared office gossip and compared theories about Phil. They were both clever and were expected to write and edit dramatic, involving, exciting journalism, which would
then be surrounded by pictures of nude models playing with themselves to distract the readers’ attention from it.
Sub-editing at Penthouse presented certain challenges. Was blow job one word or two? Did it take a hyphen? Did hand job follow the same style? What about nose job, then? When a man ejaculates, he comes, but does he ejaculate come or cum? If it’s cum, then why didn’t he cum in the first place? And how was it that the rest of the country, and the rest of the magazine, had shifted to the metric system of measurement in 1966, but penis size was still expressed in inches? Why don’t men prefer to think in centimetres, since there are more of them to the dick? On these and many other questions, the official reference work, the Australian Government Publishing Service’s Style Manual, maintained a stuffy, puritanical approach to usage.
Blow jobs and cum mainly came up in the Forum Letters, which opened the magazine in every state but Queensland. The contributors to Forum Letters never forgot their grade-four English teacher’s warning not to use the same word twice in a sentence.
My favourite Forum Letter, from ‘Name and address withheld’, described female genitalia first as ‘brown snatch’, then ‘pussy’, ‘doona-tuna’, ‘firm box’, ‘aching arch’, ‘crying chasm’, ‘cunt’, ‘inner sanctum’, ‘hornet’s nest’, ‘come-crater’ and ‘flaps’ – all within five hundred words. He referred to his own cock as his ‘jock rocket’, ‘vein-train’, ‘lead flute’ (it ‘played its final tune’ when he came) and ‘trouser puppet’. His finest moment, however, arrived when he looked over to see his girlfriend having sex with his best friend, while he made love to his best friend’s girl: ‘Their tongues came together with their lips touching, curling around each other like Spanish dancers while my balls clicked in and out of Tiffany like castanets.’
Nearly all Forum Letters came from the readers, who wrote them in response to an annual competition with a $1000 prize. Apart from the need to compose the occasional short Forum Letter to fill the gaps, the job that separated Penthouse staffers from the rest of the journalistic world was the need to write ‘Pet lines’.
The Penthouse Pet of the Month was always Australian and called, if not by her birth name, then at least a name by which she was known. Some of the other pictorials were bought in, and it was up to the staff to decide who the women would be. The models came from all over the world, and all over the world they were given different biographies by different writers on different magazines. At home, she might be Sonia from St Petersburg who likes Solzhenitsyn and salt herrings; in the US, she could be Sandy from Seattle who enjoys slalom and steak; in the UK, she would be passed off as Sarah from Skipton who is into sausages and spanking, but in Australia she would be Sami from Surfers who loves sand, sea and Stolis.
The only time the writers got to see pictures of naked women was when they had to come up with the Pet Lines. We would go to the light box, pick up the loupe, and stare at the transparencies of the photo shoot, as if we believed that looking at her labia might unlock the secret of the model’s imaginary personality. Writers could get quite creative with the Pet lines, especially when ascribing ethnic backgrounds to brunettes, who might easily find themselves half-Mauritian, half-Lithuanian and living in Yass, or quarter-Nepalese, quarter-Slovenian, and half-Laotian, but somehow born in Grafton. We were generous with academic qualifications, regularly handing out BAs and BScs, MAs and even PhDs. The girls grew more exotic and highly qualified, until Phil was forced to send around a message saying there were to be no more doctorates awarded to nude models.
Penthouse carried terse, funny video reviews, which differed from the reviews in other magazines in that the critic only watched pornos. I had never seen a porn video, and I thought they were an urban myth. The reviewer lent me a film called Backpackers II, which I genuinely expected to be about backpackers, but the improbable narrative centred around some kind of outdoor fitness centre. It featured a white guy and a black guy having sex with women, often at the same time. I was astonished that people would do that kind of thing on film. I can’t explain how I could have lived my life without knowing this happened, but it was only the previous year that I had met somebody I really believed was gay.
The video reviewer was an enthusiastic consumer of pornography, who was initially thrilled to be paid to watch six pornos a month. As the tapes turned, however, he found it more and more difficult to become aroused by them. After two years, it was something vaguely unpleasant he had to do to pay the rent. He grew bitter about the whole way Penthouse portrayed sex, from the formulaic Forum Letters to the polished pictorials. He felt cheated by the lie that was perpetuated by the magazine, and the people who bought it. He wanted to shake them and shout, ‘Can’t you see that this isn’t how life is? Why do you all want to believe that you will have this amazing foursome one day with Swedish air hostesses? You won’t. And you will never fuck this girl with plastic tits. And this girl with plastic tits, who looks great after airbrushing, when you meet her, she will be a snaggle-toothed, five-foot-zero stripper with bad acne!’ He was a man who took his job seriously.
When there was nothing to do in the office, Phil encouraged me to browse the back issues for story ideas. There was a bookshelf of bound copies in the storeroom. I turned past pages of naked women pouting and writhing through the 1970s and 1980s. It was a forlorn kind of voyeurism, to look and know their bodies would be worn now, their breasts loose and low. It was also faintly alarming. In the 1970s, pubic hair had been lustrous and dense, like a rainforest. This, after all, was what the readers were hunting for: a glimpse of the darkness down there. In the 1980s, the rainforest was mercilessly logged, until it became a thin strip of isolated foliage, nothing more than a reminder that once there was jungle here. By the nineties, it had disappeared: all the mystery was gone.
It disturbed me that the hair on my head had followed the exact same path, and if the last reserves of pubic hair could vanish at the end of the century, my thinning copse could fade away too. Perhaps this was the punishment of the pornographer.
Penthouse’s licence did not give the magazine access to much US material, so Horwitz was forced to provide a budget for local words and pictures. The writing was brawny and comic – as I wanted mine to be – and Penthouse had a past as a newsbreaking magazine. Unlike Playboy – or even Penthouse, by the time I got there – it was printed locally, which meant it could cover stories as they happened. It exposed gangsters in the Victorian Painters and Dockers union, in the story that directly resulted in the establishment of a Royal Commission.
There were poignant features by Sallie-Anne Huckstepp, the gorgeous, murdered prostitute, who wrote about her time in the brothels of Kalgoorlie and as a streetwalker in Darlinghurst Road, Kings Cross, as well as a funny piece about hiring a male escort (‘He whispered, “You are so lovely. Next time we go out, I won’t charge you.” My only thought was that if there was ever a next time, he’d have to pay me.’)
The year before I arrived, Phil ran Todd’s two-part story of his (ultimately unsuccessful) attempt to get into the SAS. It was the ultimate men’s magazine story, incorporating a long period of physical training, an elite regiment, mateship tested and strong men crumbling, in a world without women. For the next couple of years, almost every man I spoke to admitted to having read it.
I worked hard at Penthouse – I even wrote half a Forum Letter about two people having sex under water – but my mind was on D and Jo and how things would ever get better. I could not think, not really, not about anything but them. Phil gave me a short story to sub, by a second-division author of Australian literary fiction. It was dense and confusing, with no drama at its core. I worked on it for a day, but it still did not make sense.
I told Phil I could write better fiction. He said if I could, he would publish it. At heart, he wanted to gild his splayed vaginas with fiction by Australian Capotes, Updikes and Bellows – none of whom existed. That weekend, I finished a short story called ‘Dog’, about a gangster who had just been released from jail. Phil bo
ught it for $1000, which is still the most I have been paid for a short story. ‘Dog’ was written in the first person, so for several years Todd and Mark called me ‘Dog’, which should be a warning to anyone thinking of calling a story ‘Cock’.
Phil’s Penthouse was a carefully packaged, almost corporate product. It earned several penthouses for the Horwitz family, because it was all things to all masturbators. The ‘unrestricted’ newsstand issue, which could be flicked through at the newsagency and bought by anybody, showed full-frontal nudity. Penthouse White Label, a limited-edition Category 1 magazine, offered women with open legs and men with erections. Penthouse Black Label was available by subscription only. It showed full penetration, all curiosity satisfied. A special, tamer, topless-only newsstand edition was produced for Queensland, as a result of which Queensland had the highest proportion of Black Label subscribers in the country. There were even two separate editions for New Zealand.
Penthouse also produced the compilations Best of Penthouse and Girls of Penthouse, and a hairy handful of digest-sized books such as Forum Letters. In the early 1990s, there could be twenty Penthouse titles on the shelves at the same time, including US Penthouse and its offshoots.
Phil had gradually increased the nude-girl count from three to six, sourcing the extra shoots from Europe and the US. Whereas Playboy would settle for a coy nipple glimpsed above a silk sheet in its celebrity pictorials, Penthouse readers – in the appropriate editions – got the whole inner labia.
Penthouse was often ahead of its time. The staff were choosing Australia’s sexiest women in 1992, two years before the launch of FHM in the UK, and five years before the magazine was cloned for the Australian market. In other respects, it was as old-fashioned as Modern Fishing. When Penthouse ran a satirical piece, it flagged it as ‘Humour’, in capital letters. Once everything in men’s magazines was humour, Penthouse’s editorial content looked as stuffy and out of touch as Playboy’s. It might as well have been marked ‘Serious’, or ‘For Dad’.
