Recollection: Hollywood Sleaze

Recollection: Hollywood Sleaze

(a fast woman, a slow horse, & two inept pornographers)

          I’d been unsuccessfully pursuing Melody, the young groupie-wife of a minor rock star who was always on the road, for weeks, so when she came across the court from her unit to where I hung out with a musician-songwriter friend named Jeff and asked me with her angelically round face and give-me-an-instant-hardon smile for a ride to a party in the hills, I didn’t think twice.

          The party was in a house up a steep set of stairs in Beachwood Canyon, somewhere beneath the big ‘HOLLYWOOD’ sign of picture-postcard fame. Our host, a screenwriter-director named Yabo, took a liking to me after I’d done a drunk-and-stoned impromptu verbal performance involving the sexual inclinations of Lithuanian dwarves. Not acceptably sensitive by today’s standards, certainly, but I was ripped, on a roll, not yet 24, and it was only 1970. Anyway, he couldn’t stop laughing. I lost sight of where Melody had gone, but excessive alcohol intake made that irrelevant. I slept that morning on Yabo’s couch.

          Yabo adopted me as his common-law nephew. I’d been sleeping in my VW minibus parked in a garage behind Jeff and Melody’s court, so he offered me his spare room in exchange for housekeeping duties and such, including “dragging me up the hill when I’m too drunk to make it on my own.” The catch was that I’d have to find alternative accommodation when his girlfriend Sue came to visit, because: “We’re gonna be fuckin all over the house – we’re gonna be fuckin in the fireplace, we’re gonna be fuckin in the kitchen sink!”

          I took care of Yabo, both domestically and as sort of his PA while he was directing a movie he’d written, a bomb starring Mickey Rooney that the financial backers eventually released, as The Manipulator, to thundering indifference by both critics and the movie-going public. I saw a VHS cassette of it in the video section of some store in rural New Zealand 18 years later, but I didn’t have a VCR at home at the time so I never saw it. After each day’s shoot he’d consume amazing amounts of Fundador Spanish brandy. I had to hoist him up the hill more than once. Even though I’m fairly big and was somewhat burly at the time and he was a relatively sawn-off little bugger, it still required major effort. The steps were steep.

          The film’s crew had a post-wrap shindig on the semi-surrealistic set. It degenerated into an orgy, of course, with Yabo taking over my sorta girlfriend at the time, a six-foot-tall stripper named Patti. Amongst other tag-team pleasures, I had a go with the hairdresser’s date, Donna, a red-headed example of sturdy young California womanhood. Since Donna lived just three houses down the hill from Yabo and Frankie the hairdresser returned promptly to his wife and family in Miami, I subsequently took to spending my Sue-visiting-Yabo nights at her place instead of in my minibus.

          The shooting being over and the film going into the post-production phase, Yabo had more free time during which he wasn’t too drunk to stand, and I was soon spending more nights at Donna’s than at his place. Since Donna rolled monster joints as thick as my forefinger and had both an epicurean taste for swallowing semen and a skill for satisfying that taste, in addition to a laid-back, cheerful disposition, this was fine with me.

          I was actually growing somewhat fond of her as someone other than a sex object. The couple of times that I had to sleep by myself when she took gentlemen acquaintances just out of prison back to the sleepout up the hill behind the house for overnights didn’t disconcert me, though. It was her place and fair’s fair.

          I remember in particular going with her to some la-di-da showbiz soirée at an upmarket mansionette with a deck that looked out over the lights of the city below – a scene out of countless self-referential jerk-off movies. The social setting was replete with Hollywood-style decorative women and even more decorative fagolas (‘fagola’ is a word I invented for heterosexual men of extreme, effete, almost feminine prettiness and fey, essentially camp mannerisms; they abound in Hollywood and tend to attract women of similar appearance), as well as the usual tanned, open-necked, middle-aged sorts who smelt like money and talked in what they thought was the latest slang.

          I don’t know how we ended up in a situation and locale such as that. Maybe they’d invited Yabo and he’d sent us there instead. We did stand out like Hasidim at a tent revival, though, but when Donna started rolling her marijuana cheroots right there in the movie-set living room the movers, shakers, and fagolas, who’d been nervously going out onto the deck to be surreptitious with matchstick-thin doobies, clustered around her like flies on a dead bird on a hot day, despite her thick, muscular thighs, small tits, and casual attire. When she later took my arm and said that she wanted to go back to her place and give me head I felt inordinately prideful.

          Then one day she told me that she’d blown the rent money with a bookie, betting on a losing horse, and that since I was staying there so much – rent free – I was to accompany her to this address she’d glommed from an ad in the Free Press and perform in a fuck flick with her in order to earn enough cash to cover the rent. It seemed reasonable to me, and even though I had a head full of pollinated snot I said, ‘Sure’.

          We drove down to some undistinguished and unmemorable building on one of the north-south thoroughfares (La Brea? Highland?) in some grey area where Hollywood segues into non-Hollywood. As we walked from the car to the address Donna actually took my hand and held it tightly. Nerves? A rush of unanticipated shame? Affection? Fear that her mother might somehow see the finished product? I didn’t know and wasn’t going to ask. I doubt if it was the last one, though, as she’d told me that her mother, whom I’d never met, was addicted to Seconal.

          A couple of weedy nerds greeted us at the door. Both were wearing nondescript dark trousers and light-coloured patterned sport shirts with those half-sleeves that come down almost to the elbow. One of them, apparently the the one in charge, thrust his narrow, rat-like face forward at us and, with what I suppose he imagined was an ingratiating smile, explained the plot to us with only a mild stutter. He told us that Donna was to disrobe and lie naked on a bed they had set up under some lights. I was to walk into shot with my gear still on. Donna was to disrobe me. I was to clamber into the rack. We were to do It. All this nuanced filmmaking to be accomplished without sound. In black and white, probably, for all I knew.

          We followed the script without problem, at least at the start. It didn’t feel that odd getting my kit off in front of a camera. What felt odd was the nervousness that Donna was radiating. It soon became clear, however, that our employers had never done anything remotely similar before. Using just two lights on C stands and one camera, they set up their shots poorly, even with the simple set. This resulted in them having to keep changing the lighting and refocusing the camera in a ludicrous stop-start routine.

          Right after I slipped it into Donna for the first time, for example, as I was losing awareness of the ludicrous situation and everything else except the sensual fullness of the moment, I heard ratface’s reedy voice call out, “Cut! Hold it! Steve! [or Sal or Sven or Serge or whatever the lighting nincompoop’s name was] Too much shadow! We gotta move that light!” or address whatever other problem had arisen. Then, after they spent five minutes fixing things up, we started again, but just as I was getting my rhythm and I felt Donna starting to get into it ratface called for another cut and instructed us to shift our positions.

          After about another 15 or 20 of these interruptions my concentration, already compromised by having a head full of snot, left me, and the terminal-for-the-production problem of an inability to keep me turgid led to them calling off the shoot, ratface remonstrating with me that he didn’t know how anyone could lose his hardon with such a beautiful young woman.

          Eventually he said that he’d intercut the usable footage with footage from another shoot, and Donna negotiated with him for enough money to cover the rent. She held my hand tightly again as we walked back to my minibus and drove back to her place. Once there I had no erectile dysfunction whatsoever, and we enjoyed sex with each other as usual for the rest of the afternoon.

          I think it would’ve been cool if my mother had seen the footage, but of course that would have been out of the realm of possibility.