Out of the Blue

by Blue Blake

  The miniscule plot of The Wild Ones involved Chris and I riding around Los Angeles on our Harley Davidsons, inviting hot guys to join us for an orgy. Chris and I don’t appear in the orgy scene, since they couldn’t pay me enough. Three-ways were bad enough—I had done a few of those—but orgies were out of the question. I was far too particular about whom I fucked to do a big group sex scene.

  The Wild Ones also starred Michael Brawn, Wolf, and Zak Spears, among others. In a weird coincidence, the first scene Chris and I shot was set in a garage and we were mechanics just like in Nothin’ Nice. Dirk directed. A guy called Marcus did the videography. He owned a company based in Brazil called Marco Studios, and he shot a lot of bodybuilders in his films. He was a small, unassuming guy, and I adored him. We just hit it off straight away. In fact, years later I traveled to Sao Paolo and stayed with him for two weeks while we discussed making a film called Brazilian Blue. I would star as a British tourist visiting Brazil; fucking my way through the country. The film never got made but Marcus and I have remained great friends.

  In our Wild Ones’ scene, Chris drags me off the street and into a car repair garage. He pulls down my cut-off shorts, eats my arse then fucks me silly.

  Although Dirk knew how to spot terrifically hot men, he was a terrible director. A lot of people think they can direct porn just because they watch a lot of it but it’s an incredibly complicated jigsaw puzzle that must connect properly. That’s why there are so few really talented porn directors. While we were shooting our scene I noticed Dirk was paying way too much attention to the B-roll—this is the acting that sets the scene up—and not enough attention to the hardcore. When Dirk shouted, “It’s a wrap” I was astonished. He couldn’t possibly have enough hardcore footage for an entire scene. However, I said nothing because I didn’t want to cause any hassle on the set. But I noticed Marco looking strangely at Dirk, as if he too couldn’t believe we had finished so soon.

  After the shoot Chris gave me a ride home. He seemed nervous.

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “Sure,” I replied.

  “Joanie and I want to move to San Francisco and we want you to come with us.”

  San Francisco!!! I never dreamed of moving back to San Francisco . . . still, I had a lot of friends there: Gabriella, Officer Betty and a ton of leather men.

  “Let me think about it,” I said. “That’s a big step for us . . . or me.”

  I was ambivalent. If it had just been Chris and me, I would have bitten his arm off to move to San Francisco, but with Joanie as well? I wasn’t even bisexual for God’s sake, and on top of that our sex life was growing stranger by the day. Joanie was really into seeing Chris getting his ass used and she was always trying to “fist” him . . . stick her fist up his ass.

  Chris dropped me off at my apartment and I walked in to find Gage watching Roseanne while Stephanie was in the kitchen cooking a pot roast. Jesus, my apartment life was turning into an episode of Leave it to Beaver! I had to put an end to this.

  “I’m moving to San Francisco with Chris Duffy,” I announced spontaneously.

  I heard “Roseanne” laughing insanely in the corner of the room as if predicting the folly of my decision.

  I rented an apartment back at Casa Sanchez and Chris and Joanie rented the apartment above me. Straight away it was a really uncomfortable situation. Joanie sensed that Chris was slipping through her fingers as he became more involved with men. They fought constantly, and when they weren’t arguing, they were taking drugs and fucking.

  We had only been in San Francisco a few weeks when I received a call from Dirk Dehner.

  “Blue, I have a huge problem.” I knew exactly what was coming. “In the footage we have of you, we didn’t shoot enough close-up penetration shots.”

  No shit Sherlock.

  “So could you fly back to Los Angeles so we can reshoot just the penetration shots?”

  FUCK!!! FUCK!!! FUCK!!!

  “I’ll talk to Chris about it,” I said wearily.

  “There’s just one more problem,” Dirk added, “We don’t have it in the budget to pay you.”

  Now if my career hadn’t been just starting I would have told Dirk to fuck off, but truth be told, I liked Dirk and didn’t want to mess up his first film. I agreed to indeed fly back to L.A. for the reshoot of the penetration with no pay.

  Chris didn’t mind. He had left his motorbike in L.A. and wanted to ride it back to San Francisco anyway. Also, I think he wanted a night away from Joanie who was imbibing drugs like a mad woman.

  Once we got to Los Angeles we were put up by the Tom of Finland Foundation in Silverlake. The foundation was housed in an old rambling place that was constantly full of pierced and tattooed volunteers. Gage would have been in heaven. Upon announcing that I was moving to San Francisco however, Gage had returned to London with Stephanie, thereby giving up our apartment.

  We shot the penetration shots in a cellar dungeon. The walls were full of pictures of guys wearing gas masks and drinking piss. If you watch The Wild Ones closely you can see the lighting and floor beneath me in the fucking shots are completely different in the wide angles than in the close up shots.

  The next day, I flew back to San Francisco and found Joanie high on GHB. At that moment something inside me clicked. Looking into her drugged up, pinprick pupils I realized my life in America was over. Just like that. I was sick of this circus that my life had become. I didn’t even wait for Chris to arrive back from Los Angeles on his motorbike. I called up British Airways and caught a flight back to London that night.

  Chris and I lost touch after San Francisco. I heard about him as the years went by only through the grapevine. He and Joanie moved to Florida but eventually divorced. Joanie became a dog groomer and Chris fell in love with a female impersonator who moved back to San Francisco with him. Chris was a genetic marvel who at a young age was adored by millions of men all over the world. I always thought he seemed to be searching for something that nobody was capable of giving him and that is why he experimented so deeply with drugs. I saw him once more in New Orleans. The last time we spoke he seemed sublimely happy having finally settled down with a guy with no wife around to ruin things for him. Perhaps that’s what he needed all along. It definitely wasn’t Chris’s or my destiny to stay together forever, but for a brief while we were in . . . lust.

  The Tom of Finland movie came out and was an enormous hit. It felt like I became an instant star in every porn-buying country on the planet.

  A club promoter from Paris called and flew me in to make a personal appearance at the King Club, Paris’s hottest gay venue. I gave radio interviews, and you couldn’t pick up a gay magazine without seeing Chris and I. We were on the cover of Torso magazine as “The Dynamic Duo.” The cover of Advocate Men proclaimed “Tom Boys . . . Tom of Finland Comes to Life.” To top it off, we were on the cover of the Tom of Finland Calendar . I had achieved in a couple of years what most porn actors never experience in a lifetime . . . infamy.

  I languished in London. As autumn drew near and the days grew colder, the siren song of Los Angeles wailed in my ears. As much as I enjoyed my return to England, it wasn’t home for me the way it once was. I knew I should be exploiting my newfound porn fame in the U.S. I was wise enough to realize this moment would quickly pass. Even so, I was reticent to move back to Los Angeles because I felt settled in London.

  I had also restarted Musclemen Masseurs, my bodybuilding escort agency. It was, as always, a huge success and I had several competition bodybuilders working for me. One of them, Joe, a married forty year old with two kids, had been having an affair with me. He had been the British middleweight champion and was so sexy it took my breath away. Five foot seven and two hundred pounds, he would work from my apartment all day turning tricks and then would return to his wife and kids at night. I fell in love with him. He had a big uncut dick and I was blissfully happy, but something gnawed away inside of me. Joe was never going to leave his wife for me, nor did I want
him to. So I rented my apartment to him and decided impulsively to go and live in South Africa of all places.

  I had met a really nice client named Ralph who wasn’t bad looking, and he told me he owned a diamond mine in Pretoria just outside of Johannesburg. He invited me to stay with him for as long as I wanted so I hopped on a flight and set off for South Africa for six months.

  I arrived with a song in my heart and a clear head. Living with a guy who owned a diamond mine was probably going to be super luxurious and who knew—I might fall madly in love with Ralph. He was extremely soft spoken, with thick strawberry blonde hair and blue eyes that, on the three times I had seen him, shone like diamonds.

  I knew nothing about South Africa. I wasn’t really sure even what the word apartheid meant. On arrival in Johannesburg I searched the airport for Ralph. I saw no one except a priest in long white robes. A strawberry headed priest with sparkling eyes. Was it Halloween? What the hell was Ralph doing dressed as a priest? Was he going to a costume party?

  “Blue, it’s me Ralph,” he waved.

  “Yeah . . . I know, great to see you . . . what’s with the robes?”

  “Well, I didn’t know how to tell you in London because I never thought I would have to but . . . well, the truth is I’m a priest.” A priest who owned a diamond mine? He must be lavishing money on the sick and impoverished.

  “But how do you find time to run the diamond mine?”

  “Ah yes, the diamond mine, Well, that actually doesn’t exist.”

  NO DIAMOND MINE. “I took a vow of poverty and now live on the kindness of the township in which I preach.” My head was spinning—poverty, townships, kindness of strangers. I suddenly realized the plane had crashed and I had died and gone to hell.

  “It’s not too bad. The nuns and I tend the lepers at the local colony and we all get on wonderfully.” He said leper colony like he was pronouncing the words Club Med.

  “You live on a leper colony?” I shrieked. I suddenly had visions of my fingers dropping off, followed by my nose. How would I escort with no fingers or nose??

  “NO . . . I don’t live on the colony, I live at the church on the local army base and offer spiritual comfort to the young Afrikaans soldiers who are far from home.”

  Now that was more like it. Young soldiers miles from home, good thing I had packed my leopard skin leg warmers. I felt memories of the troops in Northern Ireland wash over me and my dick got hard.

  “Why did you lie to me?” I demanded.

  Ralph suddenly looked very sad.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, “I fell in love with you in London and I thought it would shock you to know I was a priest . . . I should have told you before you arrived.”

  I looked into his big sad eyes and realized how lonely Ralph must have been. Nobody knew he was gay and he had fallen for a bodybuilder escort who had shown him some passion and a bit of slap and tickle.

  Once outside the airport I looked around me. The land was dry and arid and the weather was hot but I could suck it up and make the best of it for the next six months. After all the hedonism I almost welcomed this. I wasn’t going back to London or the States for the foreseeable future so I was just going to roll up my sleeves and pitch in. If Ralph could care for lepers and young soldiers so could I. Well I could care for the young soldiers bit . . . or bits.

  In South Africa all the young men had to do two years of national service when they reached the age of eighteen. Most were strict Catholics, and Father Ralph’s church was a haven to the young homesick troops. Amazingly there was a great gym on the base and I soon realized I was actually as happy as a pig in shit. All Father Ralph’s friends drank like fish and they would gather in his house which adjoined the church on the army base and get drunk and sing the Christian pop hits of the day. I didn’t bother telling anybody I was gay, as no one I met was “out” and I didn’t want Father Ralph being asked unfortunate questions about how we had met in London while he was on his sabbatical.

  All the servants were black people, but if they disdained their roles, they knew better than to complain to their employers. Remember, this was the apartheid era and the racism was atrocious.

  I had my own room, which contained a bed, a chest of drawers and a crucifix on the wall. Jesus would look down on me disapprovingly every night from his cross as I jerked off thinking about the soldiers I had seen in the gym that day. There was nothing to do but work out so my body grew accordingly. For some reason the only television show that wasn’t in Afrikaans was The Bold and the Beautiful. I had never watched it in America and I now knew why. The show was ludicrous—all based around some ridiculous family called the Forresters who owned a fashion empire. They could string out a plotline for months on that damn show. Brooke Forrester had been pregnant for two years it seemed, but I became hooked as it provided a lifeline to the world I had come from.

  In those days there were no computers in South Africa, at least none I knew of in Pretoria. We were actually living in a small area outside of Pretoria called Voortrekkerhoogte. It was a place where the original Dutch settlers had landed and settled. Translated into English Voortrekkerhoogte meant something like “agonizing trek.” The Afrikaans church preached fire and brimstone and hell and damnation so the Afrikaan soldiers came to Father Ralph’s church instead for prayer.

  One day while visiting an old age home with Father Ralph, I listened to an Afrikaan sermon being preached. It was all about growing old and being abandoned by one’s loved ones and praying for death to shake off the misery of this mortal coil. Very depressing. When we got back I immediately ransacked the church until I found a bottle of communion wine, which I guzzled until I passed out in a stupor behind the altar.

  After spending an uneventful Christmas I decided to hitchhike across South Africa to reach the resort of Cape Town. I had slept with a couple of soldiers but although they were good looking they were terrible in bed. I had heard that Cape Town had a banging gay nightlife so I packed some shorts and t-shirts in an old army bag and set off. Father Ralph thought it extremely foolish and dangerous for me to hitchhike across the continent, but I was so bored a native’s spear in my head seemed better than this slow death amongst the religious zealots.

  Ralph let me out on the main highway and I bade him a tearful goodbye. I assured him I would call and he drove off to tend the lepers.

  I looked exactly like a young soldier and soon a couple stopped to give me a ride. They were astonished by the fact that I was English and plied me with questions about the Queen and the houses of Parliament and scones and jam. This was how my journey to Cape Town progressed: going from car to car until as the sun went down I was dropped off in the middle of nowhere by my last ride. As the sun sank behind the hills I began to realize that Father Ralph may have been correct and this may have been a very foolish venture for me to embark upon.

  So I stood by the side of the road and prayed for a ride as car after car sailed by.

  Finally a car stopped and I threw myself inside.

  “Man . . . you were lucky we came by,” said the driver, “You could have been murdered out there.” I nearly wept tears of pure pleasure when he told me he was heading for Cape Town.

  A few hours later we arrived in Cape Town. To my surprise it turned out to be like bloody Brighton. It was as boring as hell.

  The city is built on the apex of the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean. For some reason, I always imagined the Indian Ocean would be warm and inviting. It was fucking FREEZING. Every day I would hang out on the local gay beach. Well, no beach actually, craggy rocks that one could fall on and smash ones brains out on. All the gays would trek over the rocks like a pilgrimage to bask naked in the South African sun. Every day helicopters would fly over full of tourists and point out the naked gay people. They would descend so low that towels would blow into the freezing ocean and people would run screaming into the bushes that bordered the rocks. I would just lie there impassively enjoying the stares and rubbing myself with tanning lotion. That
was when I came to an enormous realization. Why was I lying on a rock showing my bits off to gawking South Africans for free when I could be back in Los Angeles enjoying the fruits of my porno labor?

  I decided to return to America and pick up my porno career where I had left off.

  I hitchhiked back to Voortrekkerhoogte and said a final farewell to Father Ralph. I think he was relieved to see me go as people were starting to ask questions and I think he was afraid his cover was going to be blown. I jumped on the next plane heading to Los Angeles.

  Upon arriving back in Los Angeles I moved in with a really good friend of mine, Greg Greene. I had met Greg years before when I had been living in San Francisco with Gage. He and his boyfriend, the porn star Greg Strom, had hired me one night to fuck Greg Strom while Greg Greene watched and called his boyfriend a dirty whore. That was their M.O. I had stayed good friends with Greg Greene, who shared an apartment downtown with a crystal addict named Eddie. I moved in with them, much to Eddie’s disgust and began working every night at the hustler bar “Numbers” again.

  One night, when I was leaning on the bar at Numbers, a loud drag queen in a tatty nylon dress came running over.

  “Blue!” she squealed.

  “Hello,” I replied looking mystified.

  “It’s me, bitch, Crystal Crawford!”

  “Oh my god . . . Crystal . . . I haven’t seen you since . . . .” Well, I hadn’t seen her since she had tried to stiff me on my check for that terrible movie I had starred in.

  “Listen, I’m seeing your face everywhere, but nobody has known how to get hold of you.”

  “I’ve been living in South Africa,”

  “Was it fun?”

  “Nuns, leprosy, bad sex.”

  “Well, a great friend of mine, Gino Colbert, is directing a movie called Night Walk. It’s going to be the most expensive porn movie ever made. I can get you an interview with him.”