eFanzines.com - Earl Kemp: e*I* Vol. 5 No. 3

As for literary criticism in general: I have long felt that any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel or a play or a poem is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae or a banana split.
--Kurt Vonnegut, Palm Sunday

THIS ISSUE OF eI is for and in memory of Althea Flynt, the highest paid female editor ever.

In the exclusively science fiction world, it is also in memory of John Paul Garcia and fellow Trufen member Torkel Franzen.

As always, everything in this issue of eI beneath my byline is part of my in-progress rough-draft memoirs. As such, I would appreciate any corrections, revisions, extensions, anecdotes, photographs, jpegs, or what have you sent to me at earlkemp@citlink.net and thank you in advance for all your help.

Bill Burns is jefe around here. If it wasn’t for him, nothing would get done. He inspires activity. He deserves some really great rewards. It is a privilege and a pleasure to have him working with me to make eI whatever it is.

Other than Bill Burns, Dave Locke, and Robert Lichtman, these are the people who made this issue of eI possible: Victor Banis, Ann Bannon, Robert Bonfils, Bruce Brenner, rich brown, Chris Garcia, John Paul Garcia, Harvey Hornwood, Tony Jacobs, Earl Terry Kemp, Allan MacDonell, Todd Marion, Art Scott, Robert Speray, Peter Weston, Alan White, and Ted White.

ARTWORK: This issue of eI features original artwork by Schirm [Marc R. Schirmeister], and recycled artwork by Harry Bell, William Rotsler, and Dan Steffan.

I try to keep deep love out of my stories because, once that particular subject comes up, it is almost impossible to talk about anything else. Readers don't want to hear about anything else. They go gaga about love. If a lover in a story wins his true love, that's the end of the tale, even if World War III is about to begin, and the sky is black with flying saucers.
--Kurt Vonnegut, Palm Sunday

…Return to sender, address unknown…. 17
The Official eI Letters to the Editor Column
Artwork recycled William Rotsler

By Earl Kemp

We get letters. Some parts of some of them are printable. Your letter of comment is most wanted via email to earlkemp@citlink.net or by snail mail to P.O. Box 6642, Kingman, AZ 86402-6642 and thank you.

Also, please note, I observe DNQs and make arbitrary and capricious deletions from these letters in order to remain on topic.

This is the official Letter Column of eI, and following are a few quotes from a few of those letters concerning the last issue of eI. All this in an effort to get you to write letters of comment to eI so you can look for them when they appear here.

Thursday March 30, 2006:

Everytime I put out a really good issue of The Drink Tank, you come along and put out an issue of eI that just makes it look like a hobo smothered in dog vomit.

I love that idiotically manipulated cover of Lust Bandits. Just a hideous reworking of the prior piece of work.

I love American propaganda films of WWII. There are a few from WWI that I've seen, silents of course, but they're wonderful, especially the ones depicting The Hun attacking American women. Nazi symbology is so instantly recognised. There's no question what you're looking at if you even see as little as the jodhpurs tucked into the high boots. Never saw any of those Naughty Nazis buchern. I thought that the I Was A Nazi Flyer cover was really artful. As far as films, there was one called After Mein Kampf that was released during the summer of 1941. It was outright saying what was going on in Germany at the time. As far as I know, the film isn't easy to find, but it has a lot of similarities to several of the political docs made about the Bush Administration.

I love Weird War comics. My Pops loves war comics, so I read a lot of those over the years.

Metropolis. As stunning a masterpiece as it is, I've only seen it on the big screen once. It was accompanied by the Alloy Orchestra and it was absolutely amazing. No other science fiction film, with the possible exception of A Trip To The Moon has had as much effect on both the written and filmed ways we deal with SF. Frau im Mond is a worthwhile film, nowhere near as powerfully done as Metropolis, but it's still really good. I wish I owned it on DVD, but I've only managed to get it on Netflix and I really should look into buying it.

Anything shot using ends given by Kubrick is a blessed production. I've never seen it, but I'm now making it my goal to watch it and then fully understand it. The little research I've managed since I first started reading the article has revealed that it's well thought of in the various communities of film that I've been running in. I loved the behind-the-scenes and stills from the flick and I really hope there's a longer (book-length perhaps!) piece waiting for me in the future.

The end of Victor Banis' article had me laughing harder than I have in ages.

What's funny is that one of the better Alternate Histories that I've heard about hasn't been written. A lass in BArea fandom was talking about it for years where the Nazis not only managed to wipe all the Jews off the face of Europe, but they build the Museum of the Vanished Race (or whatever they were going to call it) and the rebelling youth culture started to turn toward Judaica as a source of inspiration. I'm hoping she'll write it eventually.

Leni Riefenstahl, while probably a Nazi and certainly the one who shaped the way many Germans looked at as the perfect ideal, was a brilliant filmmaker. Die Blaue Licht proved that she was a fine actress and the rest of her documentaries were incredible and influential for generations. Triumph of the Will forced all Cinematographers to rethink the way they do things. Olympiad is a beautiful film, especially the weird diving stuff she shot. Now, was she evil? Maybe. Was she cozy with Hitler? Yeah, she was according to most folks who knew her and him. Did she have an amazing eye for scene and composition? Absolutely. The documentary on her, The Wonderful Horrible World of Leni Riefenstahl is a study in filmmakers walking the line when they're pretending to be hard hitting.

Strange thing is I've never read any French erotica from the period of the war, but I've seen a lot of it on film. The cheap film camera was widely available in France and they made thousands and thousands of erotic films during the war. They were cheap to make, they were often sold for almost nothing, and they've started to end up on DVD.

I wish I had known you were doing the Hitler Issue because I'd have sent you the script for my short film Good Hitler. In it, Adolf and Eva had a kid who was discovered in the bunker and secreted away to America where he got a black hippie girl pregnant. He grew up and when he learned what his grandfather had done, he sets out to right all the wrongs. He sends letters to every family that lost a member. He coaches a youth soccer team (The Highland Jumpers) and he works on impregnating 6 million Jewish women to “Bring Balance” to the world again. It's told as a mockumentary created to Larry Reeferstall. It's one of the more wrong things I've ever written. We're about to start shooting it this summer. Another very wrong thing I once wrote was that Cheech & Chong were working on the sequel to Spielberg's opus and calling it Schindler's List II: Up In Smoke.

--Chris Garcia

Friday March 31, 2006:

There is a small mistake in the “Curious Couplings 6” section in eI25. The beautiful ass on the still is undoubtedly the ass of Brigitte Bardot (not Brigette) as it was 40 or 45 years ago. The film is not And God Created Woman but En Cas de Malheur. I don't think this movie was ever released in the US. The same mistake was made in “Curious Couplings 1.” The photo was attributed by error to Fellini's film La Dolce Vita.

--Jacques Hamon http://www.noosfere.org/showcase/

I just saw my Elmer Gantry piece on eI25. It looks great. I just want to thank you for including me on this issue. I will read the articles avidly and it is people like you who can and will defeat the Bushes, O'Reillys, DeLays, Kristols, and Joe Liebermans and all the corpssuits whose assholes they leach onto.

--Jay A. Gertzman

Sunday April 2, 2006:

I have checked out eI25 and found it, as usual, to be a wonderful mix of what I find important. I speak, of course, of the articles on the “adult” paperback industry, and of the reminiscences of “my life in the porn industry,” but this time, especially, of the articles on Germany and the Third Reich. I also was in profound sympathy with your Bush-bashing. Here in Australia we have a prime minister and a government—but the prime minister in particular—with mouths firmly fixed to Bush's fundamental orifice. More to the point, in view of the way Bush is treating John Howard, I am reminded of a Grove Press edition of a novel by a Dutch author whose name I cannot recall in which a character describes another (this is what reminds me of John Howard) as 'the sort of arsehole who likes to lick the shit off the cock that's just fucked him'.

The Reich articles were necessary not only for their relevance to today, but also because people MUST be constantly reminded of just what horrors were performed under Hitler's regime.

One of the things I find quite unbelievable is the denial of the Holocaust. Which is why I particularly selected the sources for the images you published.

Samuel Fuller's The Big Red One is a great war (anti-war) movie with some of the most heart-wrenching scenes and images I have seen—and from which scenes the first montage was constructed. The “reconstructed” version of The Big Red One is available on DVD.

The BBC documentary on Auschwitz provided more images, and is a documentary I'd like everyone to see. My copy is the American two-set DVD version which has a narration by Linda Hunt, which she executes so beautifully—no histrionics, just a quiet matter-of-fact presentation which is therefore so much more powerful. The original BBC version had a British male narration which lacks the force of Hunt's measured performance.

The Night and Fog montage is from a short film by Alain Resnais (available as a DVD from Criterion in the US) which, because it too is presented in a quiet, unmannered way, becomes very emotional.

Finally, as regards Holocaust deniers, probably the best book I have read in the last year and half—certainly the most important—is Deborah Lipstadt's History on Trial. In one of her previous books she mentioned, in a passing paragraph, that 'historian' David Irving was a holocaust denier. Irving sued her—but had the case held in England where the libel laws are different to those in the US, and where the burden lies with the defendant—that is, Lipstadt had to show that her description of Irving was factual. She wrote a book about the trial. She won, by the way.

I put 'historian' above in quotes because, as her book makes perfectly clear, Irving was anything but.

I mention the three DVDs and the book because I would like as many people as possible to see them and read it.

--Dick Jenssen (aka Ditmar, Martin)

#

…a nearly indescribable site: http://efanzines.com/EK/index.html. That’s Earl Kemp’s site. Do look at the many back issues there too, all well-indexed. Just call in sick to your workplace for the next several days. You’ll have a seriously tough time prying yourself away.

--Rose Idlet, Black Ace Books, Auction 103 Catalog

Wednesday April 5: 2006:

I just wanted to say how impressed I am with your ezine. I'm glad that you are doing it. I know it takes a lot of work, but what doesn't?

I read most of it this time (sometimes I just read the main articles of interest), and it was a great read.

Who is the guy that you quoted? Must be some radical commie pinko that should be in jail, with all that bashing he does of our fine president. I'll have you know that Bush served proudly for three month while in the reserves for the two years. And that goes for Cheney too, you can't accuse him of shooting his mouth off. Shooting other people's mouth off- yes! But not his own. Good Christian men who make this country great as God intended. God bless the rich (and the hell with everybody else). I can't wait to get to Heaven and be surrounded by people like Bush and Cheney.

--Attila

Thursday April 6, 2006:

In eI25, Lynn Monroe says, “Or Dean Koontz, who is in heavy-duty denial about the 30 porno titles he wrote with his wife 36 years ago. Dean has successfully re-invented himself, and I sincerely believe that he sincerely means it when he swears he did not write those books, because I believe he thinks that 1970 Dean Koontz was a different person. Too bad they accidentally put his real name on Bounce Girl.”

As a matter of fact, they “accidentally” included his wife’s name as well. The byline was “By Dean & Gerda Koontz.”

How do I know this? Because Dean sent me a copy when it was published, and inscribed it to me! At the time (late ‘60s) he was very proud of that book.

And a little background on rich brown’s “Two of a Kind”—

The version published (which you used) was not the version rich originally wrote. I liked the basic story, but it was much more crudely written. I told him, “Rich, you can use four-letter words in my magazine, but only in dialog. I don’t want any four-letter words in the narrative. That’s the distinction between literature and porn.” He took my advice to heart and rewrote the story. In the process he improved it considerably—not just in terms of “cleaning up” the narrative, but in terms of tight prose. The end result was almost Westlake-like.

I had it scheduled for the 50th Anniversary issue of Amazing, but, as rich told you, it got bumped. At the Very Last Moment, Harlan decided that he had to be in that issue, and he went over my head, calling up Sol Cohen. The end result was that Sol had him send the story directly to the typesetter and I didn’t have a chance to read it until I had the page proofs for it. This did not please me; I’d already rejected a story by Harlan (all about bleeding gargoyles and murdered nuns, as I recall) and I didn’t like being cut out of the loop like that. Nor did I like bumping what I thought was the strongest story in the issue.
But I published it an issue or two later, and it was well received, for the most part.

--Ted White

Saturday April 8, 2006:

I have downloaded eI25, and will start a loc henceforth. It’s getting tougher to write locs for this zine, you know. Unless I really want to repeat myself (and I probably do that already), I’ll keep putting the same superlatives and excuses in each letter. If I don’t want to repeat myself, I’ll eventually get down to RAE, BNC. I’ll try my best not to go that far.

Great excerpts from Capitol Hill Blue and Kurt Vonnegut. (And Sandra Day O’Connor sums it up just right.) Makes you wish we could go back in time, before the 9/11 and Bush nightmares started, and do it all differently and better. Well, the US is still a great country, and it needs redemption in the form of a new president with higher ideals. It would be tough to do worse than Bush, and the whole world is wishing American voters can do better, to vote for as much a return to normality, law and civility as possible. Even up here, and in a few fanzines I get, I see the line “Bush lied. Thousands died.” In the future, I would like to read books about the Dubya presidency, and the comments historians make about it from the perspective of 2020, for example. One person I’d love to hear from, and I know I never will…I wonder what George H.W. Bush feels about the acts of his son? I know how much Americans love their country, and you must hurt in the deepest places. (Could Bush Sr. be an eventual buffer, to advise his son that he has finally gone too far, and to stop?) After Pat Robertson opens his big, ignorant mouth once too often, are even Republicans embarrassed by this age of fascism?

Chris Priest’s researches into Rudolf Hess are fascinating. So many mysteries and cover-ups, stories for which we may never have any clarity. Will Britain make us wait until 2017 before giving up the secrets within the Hess file? Is there a Freedom of Information Act in Britain that might free up this information quicker? You never know what a late document will turn up about a person…look at the just-revealed gospel of Judas Iscariot, making his a loyal follower of Christ who was just following orders.

Somehow, the idea of erotica in France seems natural. A part of everyday life, and therefore, not exploited or abused. Perhaps it was lusted after once the German occupiers made such erotica verboten. This happens to things you want but are told you can’t have.
A short time ago, I saw a documentary about the hidden treasures in Russian museums and depositories. One hidden item, revealed in that programme, was a chunk of skull attributed to have come from the skull of one Adolf Hitler. As far as the depository officials know, it is the only remaining piece of Hitler’s body on the planet.

I think I’m done now…this was a tough issue. It is a shame that such opinion as Doug Thompson’s must see light through web press, instead of through the pages of established print magazines and newspapers, and on television, all of which are saluting super-straight in the name of patriotism and higher ratings and sales. There are two years left in the Bush presidency, and only now are senior officials in Washington mentioning the idea of impeachment. They are being shouted down, but I think the noise for some punishment for Bush’s abuse of power will increase as he gets closer to leaving the White House. Can’t come soon enough, for everyone.

--Lloyd Penney

Tuesday May 2, 2006:

I've been checking out eI, it not having crossed my horizons before. Interesting stuff. I had the pleasure of being Evan Hunter's British publisher for the last few years of his life, and sitting in this seat, I have to say I would have encouraged him—had the question ever come up—to deny his porn writing past. His determination not to miss a deadline even during the succession of operations which dogged his last three or four years was astonishing. And he succeeded, mostly.

--Malcolm Edwards

[Malcolm, this steadfast duty to writing and deadline observing was one of the necessities of the early days porno writers. Scott Meredith, who agented most of the better “regular” hack writers of the day, was a past master at instilling those traits in his writers…it meant more money for him. –Earl Kemp]

Thursday May 4, 2006:

Well, Earl, I really gotta hand it to you: another superlative theme issue, and thoroughly enjoyable. And it also caters to one of my many interests, that of military history, especially regarding the Der Fuhrer and the Third Reich. Of all of mankind's many perversions, the rise and fall of Adolf Hitler is one of the most perplexing, but not totally non-understandable when one considers the situation in Germany leading up to, through, and following WWI. Despite the man's many bizarre tendencies, one still has to grant Hitler a begrudging admiration for his ability as an orator, manipulator, and opportunist. The man certainly made the most of the situations he was in and created.

Usually, whenever the History Channel runs a new program/documentary about World War II, you can find me watching it. (My undeclared minor as an undergraduate at Iowa State University was Russian Studies, I took a few Military History classes as part of that.) The penchant for Third Reich documentaries on that cable channel has spurred my wife to nickname it the “All-Hitler Channel,” although there are, of course, many non-Nazi shows.

That being said, you and your writers have explored aspects of Hitler that I have heard of before, but in much greater detail. I mean, the Linwood, Cartiledge, Moorcock and Priest articles were wonderfully informative, to say nothing of enlightening, but “Erotica in France During the Occupation” is something that is unlikely to be found on the History Channel. Definitely a specialized interest, I'd say. Loved the article “Springtime for BushCo and Halliburton.” The parallels between Hitler and Dubya are phenomenal, even downright scary, and the conclusion of “My Love Affair with Adolf Schicklgruber” hits home, too. Both of these fellas have some issues that need to be addressed. Let's hope our political system's checks and balances keep Dubya at bay until the next witless baboon moves into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. (No, I'm not politically cynical, not at all. . .)

Also, I continue to be entertained by your on-going feature, “Curious Couplings.” If I can find them somewhere, someday, there are a couple old science fiction paperback covers that I remember are remarkably similar. Problem is, I can't remember which books they are. I vaguely recall one of them might have been an old Ace Double with an A. Bertram Chandler novel on one side, the cover of which matched something I saw again a few years later on a different book by a different author. Methinks some hunting is in order, but don't hold your breath.

--John Purcell

Friday May 12, 2006:

It was really astonishing to read in the April issue of eI an article named “Erotica in France during the Occupation.” I really wonder who could have had the idea to write an article about the same subject here in France.

--Jacques Hamon

The humanist behaves well without any expectations of rewards or punishments in an afterlife. They served, as indeed my ancestors in Indianapolis had done, the only abstraction with which they had any familiarity, which is community. And that's been enough.
—Kurt Vonnegut, Star News article, 6/00

Curious Couplings 7

By Earl Kemp

As I wrote in eI19, I have noticed a number of odd coincidences regarding sleaze paperback covers and other publications that have intrigued me. Some of them were reasonable and understandable, some of them were outright criminal theft, and some of them were beneath contempt.

What I propose to do is to run a few of them in some issues of eI to see if I can create real interest in perusing the venture. It is a participation project. You send me jpegs of your favorite duos to earlkemp@citlink.net and I’ll take it from there.

Here then is the next set of examples of Curious Couplings. These four covers are from the collection of Tony Jacobs.

We welcome your contributions to this series. Please email your jpegs to earlkemp@citlink.net and thank you very much for participating in this novel and interesting exercise in futility.

1492. The teachers told the children that this was when the continent was discovered by human beings. Actually, millions of human beings were already living full and imaginative lives on the continent in 1492. That was simply the year in which sea pirates began to cheat and rob and kill them.
—Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions

In Passing*
Artwork recycled William Rotsler

By Victor J. Banis

The lovely Victor Banis and the even lovelier Ann Bannon at the Paperback Show and Sale, Mission Hills, CA, April 2005.

“You sure you don't want to wait for a lift?” Chris was a fusser. “I'll be glad to run you home. It won't take me more than an hour to finish up here, maybe less.”

“Thanks. By that time I'll be tucked in bed,” I told him, slipping into my windbreaker.

“You're not worried about the bogey man?”

It took me a minute to sort that out. I hadn't heard him called that. “You mean the Slasher?” I asked. “Nah. He's after sweet young things, isn't he?”

“You could pass for twenty. You're not so old,” he said, and gave me the look. I knew why he wanted me to stick around, and it wasn't out of concern for my safety—though I suppose you could say he was thinking of my skin. It was flattering, but he wasn't my type. Anyway, in a sense, at least, I worked for him. He didn't own the bar, but there was the hierarchy to these jobs: he was bartender, I was just the lowly bar-back. I have a standing policy: don't shit where you eat.

“I'm not so sweet, either,” I said. I opened the front door and he came to lock it behind me. “Good night. See you Thursday.”

He looked longingly. Hoping, maybe, for a kiss. He got a smile instead. He was still looking as I started away, pulling the collar of the windbreaker up. The weather had been mild, but even in the summer, even in West Virginia, it can be cool at three in the morning.

It was not a long walk, anyway, and I liked the late night hours. I wasn't a daytime person. It had driven me to distraction when I lived in Los Angeles, all those sun-worshippers. My body couldn't take it. Ten minutes of toasting and I could feel my skin start to shrivel and all but hear the cancer grow. Besides, moonlight was flattering. All the songsmiths knew that. In its silver glow, I probably could pass for twenty, the way Chris said. I lived a lifestyle conducive to staying young. In the bright light of day, however, if you looked long and hard, the years sang out. I didn't like the tune.

I almost didn't see him. He was waiting for the bus, not out in the open, at the stop, but in a doorway. He must have seen me approach, however. He cleared his throat as I neared, and I slowed my steps even more and glanced in his direction.

“You don't know what time the bus comes, do you?” he asked. He moved a little out of the shadows, so I could get a look at him. I stopped altogether.

“I don't think there is one, till morning,” I said.

“Fuck.” He stepped then into the light and looked up and down the street, as if a bus might make a liar of me, and then looked back at me, a look that suggested there was more on his mind than bus schedules. “What, six o'clock?”

“Something like that,” I said, and gave him the same sort of once over. He was cute, in a scruffy way, and young, and lean looking. Even in the dim light, I could see a nervous pulse throb in his throat, and the outline along one thigh made me think he might have been fondling himself to make it look enticing. It did.

“Guess I've got a lot of time to kill,” he said. He tried for a wistful look, but his eagerness belied that. It was plain what he was looking for, and it wasn't a ride—not on a bus, at any rate.

“Well, there are ways to pass the time,” I said, and smiled in the general direction of that telltale bulge.

He smiled back, even teeth flashing in the moonlight. “Live near here?” he asked.

“Not far,” I said, hesitantly. I didn't like taking tricks back to my place, and not only because it was so inelegant. If I was any judge, and I ought to be with my experience, he was one of those quasi-straight ones, who liked to get their rocks off, and could be unpredictable afterward, and I did not want the complication of getting him out of my apartment after our business was concluded.

He picked up on the hesitation, though, maybe a little too quickly. “There's an alley, just over there,” he said, nodding across the street.

“Too dark,” I said. “I like to see what I'm doing, and whom.”

He laughed, a laugh that sounded far older than he looked. “I know a place,” he said, and started to walk. I fell into step beside him and we walked a ways in silence. When he spoke, the question surprised me: “How old are you?”

“What makes you ask that?” I asked.

He shrugged and smiled. “I wouldn't want to get into trouble. You look awfully young. Younger than me.” Something in his voice, a hopeful note that he did not quite disguise, made me think that maybe he hoped I really was; maybe he was one of those who favored the “wee laddies” when he fooled around. Probably the “wee lassies” too; I doubted that he was really, gay; or, really out, in any event. Well, so long as he fulfilled my expectations, that did not concern me.

“That's very kind of you,” I said, glancing sideways to be sure he wasn't just pulling my chain. “It's the moonlight, I'm afraid. How old are you, since you've brought the subject up.”

“Twenty one,” he said, and then added quickly, “Twenty, but I'll be twenty one in a month.”

“What's your name?”

It was his turn to hesitate. There is a protocol to this kind of pickup, and it doesn't usually involve exchanging names; on the other hand, he had already introduced the subject of personal information, so he could hardly cavil.

“Garland,” he said.

“I'm Victor.” We shook hands briefly.

“In here,” he said, indicating.

“Here?” I stopped, surprised. We were at the gate to St Agnes' cemetery. The “old cemetery.” The new one, near the edge of town, was itself nearly a century old, built when this one had been filled to the point where there was no more room for graves. No one came here, except the occasional young boy on a dare, on Halloween night.

“No one comes here,” he said, echoing my thoughts. “It's private. And lots of moonlight. You said you didn't like it too dark.”

He was right: it was private. The old church stood dark on one side, and high stone walls enclosed it on the other three sides. I could only assume he had been here before, for similar assignations.

I shrugged—graveyards held no fears for me—and went through the gate before him. We strolled among tombstones. About half way back, I looked toward the street. No one passing there would see us this far into the cemetery. We might as well have been in our own little garden.

“This do?” I asked.

“Perfect.” When I looked, he was already tugging his pants down. I like a man who gets right to it. He perched atop a weather-worn tombstone, his trousers about his ankles now, knees spread wide, and I knelt on the damp grass before him, but when I put my hand down by his foot, to balance myself, it landed on something metal and cold. I looked, and picked it up: a switchblade knife. It must have fallen out of his pocket when he pulled down his pants.

He saw it in my hand. “Sorry,” he said. “I stuck it in my pocket when I came out earlier. It's that Slasher business.” He paused and added, “They say he goes for young guys.”

He swallowed hard, and I watched his Adam's apple bob up and down, but, really, he didn't look sorry, he looked excited. At any rate, surely the diplomatic thing to do was to suggest that I hold on to it till we were done, to allay any fears I might have, since I was the one who would be in the vulnerable position, but that did not seem to occur to him. He held out his hand for it, and I paused no more than a heartbeat or two before I handed it to him.

He was still as erect and as stiff as before—stiffer, I thought. Maybe that little business with the knife, thinking he had frightened me, was a turn on for him. It wasn't for me, but, in for a penny….

I put the thought of the knife from my mind, and concentrated instead on paying homage to that most ancient of deities.

There are few things to equal the thrill of a man spewing into your mouth when he reaches his climax—the taste of it, drinking the life force from him, feeling it renew your own juices. I always felt better for it, and younger—it was part, I am sure, of what kept me looking so youthful.

His was a powerful one, and I savored it, and not until he had finished entirely and I had drained every drop of it from him, did I even think again of that knife. I had been right, of course: he had not plunged it into my back while I knelt before him. If he were going to do that, it would be after his wants were taken care of, not before. His kind always got their rocks off first.

Now that he was finished, he was impatient to end our little liaison. He got up quickly, hurriedly tugging his pants up, tucking himself away, as if embarrassed to let me see what a moment earlier he had been more than happy to shove down my throat.

I half rose, too, and paused to look at the tombstone on which he had been seated.

“What did you say your name was?” I asked, standing in front of him, reaching my hand into the pocket of my windbreaker, fumbling for cigarettes that weren't there.

“Garland,” he said, a little surly, now that he had gotten what he wanted. I had been right, as well, about the type he was. It was part of what had attracted me to him, of why I had come here with him. I particularly liked the ones who wanted it so eagerly, and then were pissed off about it when it was over. That was my special turn on. “Why, what's it to you?”

“Oh,” I made a little dismissive gesture. “It's just, it is an odd name, isn't it? And such a coincidence, seeing it there, on that headstone.” I gestured toward the stone he had graced with his bare butt while I serviced him.

“My name? You're kidding.” He turned to look. The lettering on the tombstone was old and worn, and he had to stoop down and look closely to make it out. “Shit,” he said, “You're pulling my leg, you faggot, it says John….”

My methods are not the orthodox ones. The slashing can be done later, but I like to kill them quickly, one knife thrust, carefully placed to enter the heart, I know the exact spot, have perfected it with practice. The blood is still fresh that way, and perfectly useable, and the mutilation can be done afterward.

The beauty of it is, it is all so obvious that they never even look for the bite marks. He was the sixth since I had arrived in town and the reports of the deaths had yet to mention those two tiny puncture wounds on the throat. Why would they, when they have an obviously fatal knife wound, and all that business with the penises to distract them?

I would have to be moving on soon—with some regret: West Virginia was blessed with lots of horny young men who welcomed blow jobs, so long as they were anonymous.

But there was no shortage of towns and cities yet to be explored, and no shortage of young men like this one. They were legion.

And I had centuries to find them.

- - -
*This was written for Chris Garcia who correctly sent it to eI for publication.

Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely.
—Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

Todd Mason

Scratch and Sniff
Artwork recycled William Rotsler

By Todd Mason

Hustler was always at the periphery of my consciousness of skin magazines as a kid…it was definitely not around when I’d find my parents’ copies of Playboy and Playgirl tucked away around the house, nor mixed in with the stash of more-explicit (probably Dutch or Scandinavian) porn magazines left by the previous residents in the house we moved into in 1973, with the extreme close-up photos of genitals during coitus puzzling to my 8-year-old self and my cohort (the more panoramic photos helped us dope things out).

I’d hear about Hustler in the news from time to time, but it was most in evidence to young adolescent me in its effects on Playboy, which followed up its reluctant display, post-Penthouse, of pubic hair with a post-Hustler display of women’s genitalia…when visiting my grandparents, my step-grandfather’s stacks of Playboys (and High Societys) certainly impressed me with this new liberty, and I’m not sure I’ve ever understood the reluctance to allow such imagery on the part of Hefner and company…why on Earth would someone who enjoyed the sight of a woman’s body pointedly not want to see her pubis? What the hell was that?

As a teen, my family moved to Hawaii, and the same second-hand bookstore, “Froggie’s” no less, that had all these lovely Fantastic and Fantasy and Science Fiction back issues for sale did a small business in back issues of skin mags, as well; some of my high school friends particularly enjoyed picking up the most obnoxious materials they could find there, which for them meant copies of Confidential and its imitators and, definitely, Hustler. Between my casual browsing at the store and visits to my friends’ houses, I got my first firsthand exposure to the magazine.

The cartoons were, indeed, obnoxious (says a man to the woman fellating him, “I didn’t come; that was the discharge from my gonorrhea infection.”); the pictorials seemed always to feature women less attractive, to me at the time at least, than the more slick Playboy (though about as attractive on average as Penthouse, and without all the fog).

On one occasion, I served as a supporting player in a student film for a fellow named Chris Coad’s high school drama class; entitled A Really Awful Man, iirc, it starred Jared Sanford, who has gone on to a slightly eccentric film career after a bit of singing with the band Poi Dog Pondering, and one of the ways the man was really awful was in throwing parties wherein his guests were invited to flip through his collection of tattered Hustlers…our classmate Maile Berger, some years before her service as associate producer of the miniseries adaptation of The Mists of Avalon, sat next to me on the couch as we populated this party scene and paged through copies with appropriate attentiveness. (The trip sequence of the film involved Sanford’s character driving down a street and the camera panning from him leering to focusing out through the windshield, then turning on its side; a film of very modest ambition, it earned Coad a failing grade.)

Not A Love Story, the documentary, certainly focused a fair amount of its rage on Hustler and the tendencies in magazine photography it encouraged; they had a bit of a point about the “meat-grinder” cover, certainly, but overstated nearly every other point they had…meanwhile, I was not quite aware of Theodore Sturgeon or Paul Krassner’s involvement with the magazine, but I did enjoy the coverage of the Falwell suit (and the eventual film about the circumstances leading up to the suit and its aftermath).

While Penthouse would spin off Omni and its extensions and Gallery would spin off Twilight Zone Magazine and Night Cry, Hustler would only impinge on my consciousness even more indirectly…and so up to yesterday, when a Philadelphia paper ran an AP report about the mainstreaming of porn and those who resent it, with a hook of the continued success of the original Hustler store in Ohio….

“Television drama, although not yet classified as fine art, has on occasion performed marvelous services for Americans who want us to be less paranoid, to be fairer and more merciful. M.A.S.H. and Law and Order, to name only two shows, have been stunning masterpieces in that regard.”
-- Kurt Vonnegut, 1/27/03, “In These Times”

Sybil Danning hugs Alan White on his 40th birthday.

Painted Pussy

By Alan White

I finally get a chance to drop you a line and if I remember right, you once asked for Hustler tales.

I have a minuscule tale that hasn't been told in 28 years, so this must be the time to tell it.

And here it is:

I couldn't pass up being an assistant on a Hustler photo shoot outside Palm Springs in August of 1978.

Monster fan and John Chambers apprentice Rick Schwartz worked for Peter David at Hustler and Slam, their short-lived adult humor magazine, on photo shoots where an odd makeup was needed.

Rick and I met the rest of the crew at a small motel used as our base of operations on a hot Friday night in August.

Larry Flynt’s short-lived adult humor magazine Slam. “I remember Rick Schwartz telling me about sticking that mustache and wig on the cover girl.” –Alan White

Makeup call was 4:00 am and the job was to apply latex “Cat” appliances on two girls who would pose in the underbrush as some kind of girl-on-girl feral kitty action. One of the girls immediately had a fit when gluing the appliance to her face and ran screaming from the room, never to be seen again. The other girl, who turned out to be (she said) a sister of Sharon Tate, was just as claustrophobic, as she threw a fit and burst into tears. Fearing we'd made the trip down there for nothing, we found a few ludes made her more amenable to the situation.

About 8:00 am we ventured to a likely spot to photograph those solo kitty follies. Outside of the face-piece, nails, kitty ears, and some wild hair, she was otherwise in nature's own. And thus we spent an ungodly amount of time in the blazing sun -- six hours in the hottest part of the year, under the guns of a demoniacal photographer.

We were draping wet towels around the girl during film reloading, but none-the-less, she was clearly burned to a crisp, dehydrated, emotionally shot, and she collapsed on the spot.

That evening the poor cat-girl hid in her room while the rest of us shamelessly partied and carried on. I had taken a fancy to Nicole the hairdresser and thus spent the next few days in Palm Springs. She was an odd character, being from a wealthy French family and in the states solely to prove to her parents she could exist without there help. She was, however, convinced that during a photo shoot in Jamaica a voodoo curse had been placed on her and she would occasionally burst into heebie jeebies, claiming the voodoo “Got me.”


Left photo: Painted pussy location shot outside Palm Springs, CA, 1978. Right photo: Nicole, the French Hairdresser.

About six months later she gave it up and moved back to France where her parents bought her a boutique.

The pictures from the photo shoot were never printed in the magazine.

“The Internet has already become for a fortunate few ('spiritual scuba divers', one is tempted to call them) a limitless ocean without bottom or shores. In whose depths one can breathe effortlessly—in and out, in and out. It is the habitat of the newest creatures to evolve in our part of the Milky Way—as enchanting and nobly bizarre as any giant manta or moray eel, say. They are recorded thoughts and feelings about what it is like to be a living thing.”
-- Kurt Vonnegut, 9/99

Prisoner of X*

By Earl Kemp

Early this year, Adam Parfrey, publisher of Feral House, sent me a note about the upcoming publication of Prisoner of X, by Allan MacDonell (punk rock activist, chronicler, and dropout), the just-fired, almost-20-year editor of Hustler. Naturally, being greedy and frugal, I wrote Adam back immediately suggesting that he send me a review copy ASAP. That’s one way I save money by not buying books I can cadge for free…with a little blood, sweat, and tears going into promoting the title afterward (like now)…assuming that I like it.

This one I really like.

Adam Parfrey mailed me an advance copy of Prisoner of X. It arrived on Thursday March 23, 2006 as I was frantically trying to gather up my pieces to leave for the long weekend in Los Angeles for the 27th Annual Paperback Show and Sale. I wrote about this [“Living the Legend”] elsewhere in this issue of eI…rather I wrote of the event for Jacques Hamon and his incredible website http://www.noosfere.org/showcase/ and reused it elsewhere in this issue of eI.

For me MacDonell’s book was a real page-turner. While I had numerous things to do before leaving for Los Angeles, I simply couldn’t put the book down. I read it all day Thursday and on into Friday morning before I could finish it and get back to the urgent task at hand.

As a last minute request of Adam Parfrey, I sent him an email message asking him to please pick up Allan MacDonell (who also lives in Los Angeles) and drag him to the paperback show if necessary. I had to meet the man. I had to tell him in a gushing rush of uninhibited praise how very much I loved his book.

And Adam did…and I did…and none of us could believe the warmth surrounding us for a few hours on Sunday after the paperback show had closed down for the year.

I think Prisoner of X is one of the very best books ever written from the inside out about the pornography industry of the last two decades. I found it to be a real page-turner and couldn’t put it down. I point out that this book covers the last two decades for an obvious reason—I hope—that being my involvement with the industry had ended a full decade before Allan MacDonell’s even began…a late comer (no pun intended) amid the lush fields of greenback green.

Nevertheless, the single thing that so glued me to the book was the astonishing similarities of our two tenures working at the lust mills of Southern California. In reality, almost nothing was the same from my 1961-1972 tenure to his 1985-2005 time shackled to the chief editor’s desk. Certainly there was no similarity on the legal front. If anything, Allan had it much easier than I did in that regard.

Nowhere in his book did I find the bit about the constant federal surveillance that we at The Porno Factory had to live with 24/7. Not one single instance of not being able to use their telephones because of all the illegal law enforcement wiretaps. Not one single instance of not being able to receive the office mail until after the feds had opened, examined, and copied all of it. Not one single instance of accidentally running into the numerous different federal agents dogging their steps wherever they find themselves anywhere in the world.

Really much easier than our times. Maybe not nearly as exciting, but certainly more sexual and drug-drenched in nature.

The memories of those times that Allan brought back for me were unbelievably wonderful.

Way back then when pornography wasn’t available in every major chain hotel in the USA, in most major bookstores (cleverly hidden as literature of course), things were quite a bit different for everyone involved with producing that pornography or erotica or sleaze…under any other name, a rose is still a rose.

At the time, when we at The Porno Factory, otherwise known as Greenleaf Classics, Inc., thought of ourselves as being the Mercedes of the industry, there were some people working within the field who where so outrageous, so unbelievably audacious, as to be avoided at all costs.

Larry Flynt was at or near the top of that list of the terminally shunned.

He wasn’t alone, of course. His fellow list members consisted of people like Ruben Sturman, Marvin Miller, Mike Thevis, and their sordid ilk. Most of them were criminals, plain and simple, playing the game by their own rules and running roughshod over anything or anyone that happened to be in their way. Eventually, some of them even died in prisons where they had been sentenced for real crimes, not for producing pornography.

The industry itself had nothing but contempt for those individuals. There were always groans of protest whenever even one of them would surface at an industry convention or gathering of any sort. They were definitely NOT colleagues…not contemporaries…just unwanted nuisances that had to be watched at all times and held at arm’s length for fear of being victimized or much worse.

Playboy was THE man’s magazine. Penthouse was a good copy with a more brazenly liberal attitude. Hustler was simply garbage. Every one of us knew that Larry Flynt would eventually kill the market for all of us…if not more.

How strange it is that, through time, one’s attitudes and perceptions alter so much that things turn out very differently than anticipated.

That’s what happened for me with Larry Flynt. Over time I came to appreciate the things he did more and more. That they were much more civic-minded and public-spirited and a great deal less sleazy didn’t count at all. I actually admired the way Flynt handled himself in public, in court, and on the US political scene.

Then I respected Hustler for what it was, a no-holds-barred, blatantly blue collar beat-off magazine. The ultimate male accessory. And, at the same time, I viewed Playboy no longer as THE man’s magazine but as a terribly distorted, not-too-well-disguised [excuse the expression] fag mag.

The men in Hustler were men and the men in Playboy were all closet frauds of some sort.

[Having lived in Chicago through the birth and initial success of Playboy, I viewed it very differently in the beginning years. I greatly admired Hugh Hefner then and I still do to this day and I am proud that Hefner calls me Earl when the occasion arises and that I freely call him Hugh. But I still, even then, couldn’t find a real man in any issue of his magazine and, I knew that many of the people who produced those issues, made those photo shoots, did the makeup, the airbrushing, etc. were gay. Little wonder real masculinity never got through to the magazine subscribers.]

But I am drifting much too far away from Allan MacDonell and his memoirs of working with Flynt at Hustler, where this all began.

Allan MacDonell in his Hustler office displaying the $1,000,000 reward poster.

Among other things, and certainly the things that never ever entered into my porno-publishing career, were the salacious things concerning public personalities and prominent professional politicians that were revealed through Hustler. These are things like video of Jane Fonda wearing a strap-on dildo, Ted Turner, and a hired hooker having three-way sex with Turner plugged in (literally) as the centerpiece. Like another video of Chuck Berry playing with his dingaling and his special way of eating the byproducts of the hookers he patronizes complete with frozen, Tupperwared leftovers for later repasts. Like offering $1,000,000 rewards to anyone who would admit to sleeping with major-player Republican professional politicians. Like the exhaustive search to verify an illegitimate child alleged to have been sired by George Bush.

All those plus the extra special nuggets of unknown depravity associated with Larry Flynt, with Althea Flynt, and various other Hustler staffers, most notably the child molestation conviction of the artist who drew the continuing series of “Chester the Molester” cartoons and how he had another ballable child literally dumped onto him after his legal ordeal was over.

Adam and Allan arrived at the paperback show in Mission Hills at the peak of the event. They made a tour of the entire show, all the exhibits, and the three different display rooms…and didn’t find me at all. I spent hours, it seemed, running just a matter of minutes behind them trying to catch up. They had brought copies of Prisoner of X and left them on sale with one of the local exhibitors. Allan signed those copies for the people who bought them…and the two of them kept moving…always just a few steps ahead of me.

Finally, almost exhausted, I gave up and went to my hotel room to collapse.

The arrangements I had made with Adam just as I left for Los Angeles included dinner together on Sunday following the show. There would be Adam, Allan, my son Terry who just happened to be an ex-Hustler staffer as well (see his article “Prisoner of XXX, Jr.” elsewhere in this issue of eI), and myself. Since I couldn’t catch up with them, I decided they would have to catch up with me.

I had just began changing clothes…removing my “show” regalia and slipping into something a bit more comfortable…when they knocked on the hotel room door. I was shirtless and with my comfortable jeans hobbling my feet when Terry opened the door and asked them to enter. Just that way I gave Adam a big hug and turned to Allan, his turn, his hug…this stranger I had never met but felt so very close to…and he responded in kind.

After I finished dressing, we began trying to decide on a restaurant for dinner. Because I had grown so tired from the events of the day, I didn’t feel like a large meal, so I suggested a deli instead, and they knew where one of the very best was located.

Brent’s was the name of it, in nearby Northridge, only a short drive away from the hotel, and it was unlike any deli I had ever seen before. It was huge, and crowded, and there was a long line of people wanting to eat standing inside the restaurant and outside and stretching down the sidewalk. Nevertheless, we decided to stay there and wait for a table. A bit later, we were finally seated and placed our orders.

The food was some of the very best deli cuisine I’ve ever experienced and I had acquired quite a fondness for Kosher delicacies when I lived in Chicago…chopped liver being my all-time favorite, so that’s what I ordered. I was served a huge mound of chopped liver married to a huge mound of superb egg salad…on rye…with a large pile of pickles, ripe tomatoes, red onion slices, and numerous other things.

The dialogue was nonstop with all of us trying to get a word in edgewise almost without success. Terry and Allan had many very common memories to share of mutual former Hustler co-workers. Allan and I had many very common memories to share of identical happenings almost 40 years apart. For all the world it was as if two of my sons, not one, were at that table sharing the tawdry tidbits of their extremely sex- and drug-saturated publishing careers.

When we left the restaurant, not a one of us had any doubts that we were somehow quite related and that we would have more family reunions in the future, hopefully at every one of the upcoming Paperback Show and Sales.

The irony of it all was, even though we had taken a number of cameras (digital and film) with us to Los Angeles, intent upon taking many, many pictures, in the excitement and rampant adrenalin rush associated with our family reunion, we neglected to take even one photograph.

Nothing but the memories lingers on….

OK, now let's have some fun. Let's talk about sex. Let's talk about women. Freud said he didn't know what women wanted. I know what women want. They want a whole lot of people to talk to. What do they want to talk about? They want to talk about everything.
--Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian

Allan MacDonell

Snatches of Blue*

By Allan MacDonell

My first trip to France as a Hustler journalist, during the spring of 1990, was made in the company of a bigger-than-life exotic dancer and blue-screen sensation, Sandra Scream. A California-bred beauty from upper echelons of the Golden State’s founding families, with bolt-on breasts and a smile as wide and cracked as the San Andreas Fault, Sandra bonded with me as one of two Americans in a succession of mini-vans, restaurants, and hotel suites overrun with camera-toting, chain-smoking Frenchmen. We were both on the continent as guests of Hot Video, Sandra in her capacity as a star attention grabber, me as an emissary from Hustler. Christian Shapiro’s reviews of Sandra Scream performances had always been enthusiastic, like the performances themselves, with one caveat. Sandra was among the maddening sub-breed of porn girl who refused to be filmed having sex with anyone other than her boyfriend. While chatting at the airport in Paris, I had intuited that she and the boyfriend might be on the outs. They had in fact broken up, but rather than signal the onslaught of Sandra’s on-screen promiscuity, the faltering relationship precipitated the starlet’s total absence from the blue screen.

Irregardless of impending retirement, mincing Ms. Scream spun the Cannes Festival on its gonads. Lounging on the beach, boating on the sea, sauntering along the beachfront promenade, riding in a topless Cadillac through the clogged thoroughfares, dining at a shoreline café, everywhere Sandra Scream appeared, at each Hot Video orchestrated publicity coup, she stole thunder that had been set in place to crash for legitimate Hollywood royalty. Day after day, the Cannes newspapers featured full-color images of the fabulous American porn star decked out in a series of cleavage-boosting, hip-squeezing gowns. Whenever she ventured into the vicinity of legitimate Cannes Film Festival galas, Sandra created a camera slipstream and whipped up frenzied mobs. I’d never seen anything like it, and I still don’t understand what all the hysteria signified. Walking past the red carpet at the Palais, while world-class thespians ascended the A-list steps virtually ignored, the less-than-subtle Ms. Scream pulled away the paparazzi like a powerful magnet drawing loose filings. Such an uproar flared among the massed spectators that a phalanx of armed policemen rushed to restore order, and perhaps to save Sandra from being lifted on the shoulders of the mob and paraded through the streets.

“We saw a great girl,” enthused a glowing French grandma stooped but blissful. “A great girl.”

Afterward, Sandra and entourage sat ensconced at the poolside café of the Majestic Hotel. The bar catered to a fairly young, nose-in-the-air crowd. Everybody lit cigarettes at the same time and exhaled. A leprechaun-like Hot Video editor crouched at the starlet’s arm.

“What do you think of the French people? Crazy, eh?”

Sandra looked like the homecoming queen after the prom. The pressure was off.

“It made me wet when all those people started coming toward me. I thought, Oh, God. I’m getting my period.”

Toward the end of our joint Hot Video vacation, Sandra and I were placed on the beach to stage an interview. Nearly exhausted from a week of ceaseless veneration, Sandra lounged on a towel, basking in the playful touch of the warm breeze. The Mediterranean Sea sparkled in front of her, a deep Mediterranean blue. The Cote d’Azur sky was a brilliant, limitless, azure canopy above. It was like being in a whole different world, a world of our own, but not for long.

Sandra Scream took off her bikini top.

Sandra took off her bikini top. The beach was littered with women whose tits were flopped out right in the open. All kinds: big, little, perky, bouncy. The first shadow was cast by the boom microphone of a soundman. His partner blotted a sliver of sun, leaning toward Sandra with a camera.

“Does that belong all to you?” he hollered. “Can you give me some?”

The view of the deep, blue sea was cut off by roving journalists, notepads in hand. Snatches of blue were obscured by the legs of jostling photo buffs, a crowd of whom seemed to have sprung up from the very sand. The sea was lost behind a thicket of leering, shouting camera faces. Only the sky offered any escape. Cameras, hungry and ferocious, closed in above Sandra. The ring of scruffy photogs tightened. The ashes of their cigarettes hung perilously long over Sandra’s face and breasts, spilling in, filling in the blue of the heavens. One cigarette burn away from panic, Sandra reached up to retie her bikini top. The mob howled its protest. I joined in with the Hot Video crew, surrounding Sandra and shouldering her through the throng to the safety of a private bar. The teeming mass hadn’t made her wet this time.

Q: “Based on what you’ve read and seen in the media, what is not being said in the mainstream press about President Bush's policies and the impending war in Iraq?”
A: “That they are nonsense.”
-- Kurt Vonnegut, 1/27/03, “In These Times”

Prisoner of XXX, Jr.
Collage by Marc Schirmeister

By Earl Terry Kemp

My life and times at Hustler, etc.

Brief Memoirs of the Heir Apparent to Mi Familia, Cosa Nostra, or The Biz.

Recently I met Allan MacDonnell, author of Prisoner of X, his memoirs about his twenty years working at Hustler. It’s a great book, a hoot to read. I highly recommend it to anyone who has ever worked in any part of the business, and to anyone who has ever read an issue of Hustler. The man is very funny with a droll sense of wit. Over dinner we shared mutual recollections about working at Hustler for Larry Flynt, surprised that we knew so many of the same people, but had never met each other.

It wasn’t as much of a surprise to me. After all I have lived most of my life intentionally under the radar and off the record. My brief time at LFP (Larry Flynt Publications) was done the same way. I came to work after everyone had left the building and left shortly before anyone returned. I made a great deal of money soaking LFP, working as a “freelance” typographer, doing work for them and doing work for myself with their equipment.

So much money that I was able to launder all of my income, and write off everything I earned as a business expense. I ended up not having to pay any income tax for several years. I suspect that even though I was a lowly unknown typesetter that I made more money than Allan did working at LFP at that time, and after tax time I’m certain that I did.

Talking with Allan brought back more than two years of fond memories living in Los Angeles and working at LFP. Where do my memories of working at Hustler begin? I started working at Sid’s Typographers in Culver City in 1987. I had gotten tired of the underpaid world of typesetting in San Diego and had decided to broaden my horizons and look into working in Los Angeles.

In February of that year I took the three-hour-plus drive up to LA and interviewed at Sid’s, they hired me on the spot, doubling my current salary, and put me to work immediately that same afternoon. After a few months working there I had gotten bored with the LA scene in general and started to look for more work to fill up my time. I was making a god awful lot of money at the time, and realized that I could make even more.

Sid’s Typographers, June 1988
Fellow worker, UFO Ben, and Terry Kemp.

Since I got off of work at Sid’s at 3:30 it wasn’t too difficult to find another gig to fill in my second-shift. I found a part-time job as a typesetter for a local Catholic newsletter, working under two nearly twin sisters. I could never really tell them apart. I privately referred to them as Moron One and Moron Two. The “cute” near twins had some simpering names like Tina and Lena.

They had hosed up the newsletter, replete with the most mystifying, unworkable filing system possible. I was brought in for last minute changes while both sisters conveniently disappeared. Although they spent the night calling me to find out how I was doing.

I got practically nothing done. They decided to dump on me about this, I told them to fuck off. The publisher knew where the problem was and offered me their jobs, but I wasn’t interested any longer. The prevalent fanaticism of the near-Moonite religious zealots working there (complete with photos taken with the Pope) was enough to turn my stomach.

In my brief two-three days working there, one of the sisters had mentioned an ex-boyfriend who worked at Hustler. Lo and behold, an ad appeared in the LA Times about this time seeking a typesetter for a local major magazine. I went to interview for the position.

I became somewhat giddy when I walked in the door to LFP and realized where I was and who I was going to be interviewing with. Memory flashes of sitting in the lobby at Greenleaf Classics almost twenty years earlier raced through my head. I half expected to spot publisher Bill Hamling stalking past on yet another rant, verbally kicking the shit out of his porn staff. Instead I looked forward to seeing good ole boy Larry, and getting to see one of his rants.

I was hired on the spot as a “freelance” typesetter, second shift, by a skinny black chick who was clearly in over her head and unable to produce the required results due to a thorough lack of ability that was apparent the first time I met her.

Right away I managed to set myself up with a seven-day-a-week work schedule, easily working more than 60 hours a week at LFP. I would come in during the second shift, and do the skinny black chicks’ work for her, cleaning up her daily abortions. I ended up working with David Buchannan, another typesetter at that time, and we became pals of a sort. There was another female working there, but she didn’t last very long.

Dave would come in on weekends to soak up the overtime working on personal projects that had nothing to do with LFP, but during the week I was pretty much left all alone and had the run of the entire floor.

Wandering around at night I pilfered stacks of the various magazines available, stealing piles of all of the latest issues and taking them home to “read” later. I took even longer bathroom breaks powdering my nose. Generally I did as little work as I could. Since this was more than anyone else did, I was considered a god.

One night shortly after I began working there, while staying very late, a very young blond headed guy stuck his head into the typesetting room and introduced himself as Frank. He proceeded to hustle me up for a ride home that night. I was quite willing to oblige as I put in another three extra hours of overtime waiting for his shift to end.

My dear friend, Frank, 1988, Los Angeles.

We ended up cruising the darker, seedier parts of LA that night scoring a baggy of weed on a nameless street corner. We smoked ourselves into a blissful, unforgettable state, splitting up the remainder before dawn. Such was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

From that moment on Frank took me under his wings (very dark wings) and showed me the LFP ropes. After everyone would clear out of the building we would start our hours long, all night long, breaks in the computer room. Frank worked in the computer room performing database backups. This was a dull, boring job which entailed monitoring reels of computer tape and switching them out as they were filled with information.

The computer room was a sealed room, with its own special security system. Only Frank had the code to enter this room. It had its own ventilation system also. We would spend hours safely ensconced behind the thick metal security door smoking weed and snorting coke in that room, while going through the old paste-ups and negatives and photos of magazines past stored in a ransacked alcove. We were the kings of LFP.

Frank had a special “in” with Larry Flynt. He had started working for Larry as his bagman. Larry would fly him all around the world, loaded down with various illegal drugs, and Frank would deliver the goods. After Frank took a vacation back home he was promoted to computer room lackey upon his return to the dark heart of LFP.

Frank was a very enterprising young man. Aside from stealing as many magazines as he could and reselling them to friends, or trading them for drugs, he also was the front for “The Beast” (the actor, Ron Perlman) and processed his mail, forging autographs on photos for desperate fans.

Dave Buchannan was another enterprising Flynt employee. Dave ran a free ad in various LFP magazines offering his “How to win at Blackjack” pamphlet. When his stock would run low, he’d Xerox off more at work. He fronted the enterprise with a Beverly Hills fake address. He though the fake address (in reality a post office box drop) added a cachet and sophistication to his ripped off product and brought in more revenue. I admired the enterprise but doubted the success. After all he never seemed to have any money, no car, and when we met, no girlfriend. Whatever he was earning was going (noticeably) up his nose.

Dave also built computers from scratch out of component parts, selling the finished product to fellow employees (along with other, more illicit, products). He had built his first computer system while in the hospital undergoing treatment for Hodgkin’s. After our first weekend working together (and telling me his life’s story) Dave hustled me into driving him around town.

It seemed for some unmentioned reason Dave had no car, no license, and no insurance. My job as his chauffeur began on our first payday together, when I drove him to the local Cash Your Check stall. We cashed our checks and raced over to his dealer spending most of our overtime soaked money buying coke.

As our weekends together developed we began to go to computer swap meets buying parts. I learned under Dave’s tutelage how to build computers. It was a lot of fun. We did all of this on the clock at LFP, including weekly 12-hour-long journeys around LA to those swap meets. No one ever noticed, no one cared. The nameless black chick (I forget her name) our ostensive supervisor, was too busy working her own clients and totally neglecting her job at LFP that she was grateful that any work got done. She had to be, as she was incapable of doing any of it.

Eventually she would even bring me her clients and have me do the typesetting for them, all the while keeping the profit for herself, but ripping off LFP and having LFP pay me for my time.


My only LFP souvenir, Christmas Card from 1988.

I first meet Morgan Hagen during my nights at LFP. Morgan was one of the original characters from Larry’s early days. He reminded me of a similar seedy porn writer, Vern Lundgren, whom I had met several years earlier, back in the late 1960’s, during my years growing up in the business. Vern was a gonzo writer, always high on something. Eventually in a fit of boredom he pulled out his 9mm at the dinner table down in Ajijic, Mexico, and shot himself in front of family and friends. I noticed a lot of Vern in Morgan.

Vern was one of the rambling horde of porn writers in my father’s stable when he ran Greenleaf Classics for Bill “We don’t print Fuck Books here” Hamling.

Morgan was sleeping on one of the couches in a private office (not his) at LFP. Homeless and broke, as he explained to me, he still had his access to the floor. He had his clothes and things stashed all over, hanging behind almost every door, inside unused bottom drawers, and hidden behind cabinets. His secret stash included a very large pressurized bottle of nitrous oxide, very visible, casually placed behind a potted palm that every visitor passed everyday, which he liberally shared with all. I had a lot of fun with Morgan.

He would disappear at closing time (5:00) and come back four or five hours later righteously hammered. He always seemed to be wearing the same clothes, and they stunk, but not enough to keep the barflies he picked up away from him. He brought up the most interesting assortment of young females to the office, always managing to bring them by my office for a late night chat, showing off their more than ample physical “charms.”

Eventually he turned his obsession with well-endowed females into another successful magazine for LFP when he talked Larry into launching Big Busty. Clearly many of the young females he brought by were lured into his clutches as potential “models.”

“Come on up to my ‘office’ little girl. Just take off your top and let me take a few photos. I’ll make you famous. Say, Terry, can you hold the lights a little closer!”

As my year at LFP progressed I got to know several of the editors and artists, practically anyone who ever stayed late. I did almost all the work putting together Chic, I was developing a name for myself inside the microcosm of LFP.

For a while it seemed that I was on the black chick’s good side. I trained her new hires. She brought in one idiot girlfriend after another. They could barely type, and knew nothing about typesetting, and none of them lasted longer than a week. I continued to do her work for her, including the work for her private clients. She began to dangle a position on the “staff” in front of me “if I continued to keep up the good work.” But nothing ever came of it. After a few months of dangling it was transparent that the offer was bullshit. I made her look too good. She was never going through with her promise and arrange to have me hired.

About the time that everything fell apart for me at LFP Dave had gotten back together with his ex-girlfriend. Lo and behold it was the very same chick I had worked for at the Catholic newsletter. (Tina or Lena, I could never tell which one.) Dave began maneuvering, trying to get her a job at LFP. I argued against this, as she was incompetent. Dave had to agree that I was right, but he was fucking her, and that counted for a whole lot more than ability in his estimation.

Next Frank left LFP for good to return to his home state and go back to college. Something I was proud of, like he was my own son, or younger brother. I had finally convinced him after many a long session smoking weed in the computer room to return to college in order to make something of himself, not only that, to go for it with gusto and grab the brass ring. I guess I pumped him up enough that he decided to finally go for it. We stayed in touch and while he was away Frank continued to send me regular monthly care packages of the finest weed.

Dave knew that I was doing the black chick’s private clients work for her at LFP, on the LFP time clock. In a power move to take over the typesetting department he ratted out the black chick to the “bosses.” She blamed me and fired me from my “freelance” position. She lasted a few more days before she was fired for her lack of ability.

For over a year she had been so busy doing her own thing that she hadn’t kept up with the state-of-the-art requirements in the typesetting department, that coupled with a remedial skill level in typing brought her the old heave-ho when she was faced with doing all the work herself. My friend Dave told me the story of her quick demise with much delight, clearly proud that his power play had been so successful.

He was reluctant to bring me back on board after he was made chief typesetter; instead he brought in his girlfriend and her sister. After all, as he explained to me, he was fucking them both.

About a year later Frank returned to LA with a gang of college friends, all recent graduates. They had developed the most interesting system of indoor gardening producing some exceptionally fine weed which they had sold on campus. Now they were exploring the LA marketplace, determined to find their niche.

One of them, another Dave, got a job at LFP working in the accounting department. At the sacrifice of his nose and cheek ring he started to climb the LFP corporate ladder.

We became roommates and he provided me with a steady flow of magazines and insider LFP gossip, also some lasting lessons on the fine art of indoor gardening.

Terry Kemp on vacation, June 1988, visiting my old alma mater, UC Berkeley

We all parted company one day a year later when I returned to San Diego. The fun had gone out of our gang. Dave, Frank, and the rest of the boys had given up drugs and found ambition, the lure of money and alcohol was proving more powerful than being original and authentic. I couldn’t really fault them for being sell-outs. It was clearly a part of their generation and something that had been reinforced in them while working at LFP.

By 1991 something had gone missing from the world. The charm of partying with the gang and regularly dropping acid with them had been dulled by a backdrop of endlessly boring dated Frank Zappa musical noodlings. Even home growing imported Amsterdam weed had become a business rather than a way of life. All the boys in our gang had begun to wear imported, expensive suits, and gaining an impressive (and irrelevant) knowledge of ties.

Something was certainly missing. They all had begun to believe in the myth of money. If a redneck cracker like Larry could make it big, certainly they could. If they worked for him long enough and studied him hard enough, certainly the world would be theirs. Wouldn’t it?

I'm afraid that I'm like Joe Heller. I don't vote anymore and that is terrible and I don't recommend that to anybody. Joe Heller never voted. He didn't want to be complicit.
-- Kurt Vonnegut, explaining why he didn't vote, National Public Radio, 11/6/02

Hustled*
Artwork recycled Dan Steffan

By Ted White

On a Monday in the middle of August 1980, shortly after I'd arrived at my office at the National Lampoon Inc., Len Mogel, the publisher of Heavy Metal, asked me to step into his office for a moment and told me that my position as editor of HM was being eliminated. I'd get four weeks severance, and I was promised lots of “work” to ease the burden of unemployment, but Friday was to be my last day.

Emotionally stunned, I wandered out of Len's corner office and down the short hallway to the art director's studio-office, where I found John Workman and Dan Steffan. “I was just fired,” I told them. They were both surprised and incredulous.

I felt like a rug had been yanked out from under my feet. I'd completed a year with the magazine (or would have by that Friday) and I'd been full of plans for the upcoming year. I'd been pleased with the changes I'd made in the magazine, and had gotten no hint that management was less pleased (the changes had been, after all, the reason they'd hired me). It was seventeen years later that I found out that Len had lied to me when he said sales under my editorship had not changed. John Workman told me when I met him at Lou Stathis’s funeral that in fact sales peaked in 1980 and fell off again after my departure. But I didn’t know that then.

Later, after all the promises of “work” had been broken, I realized that I'd been fired as part of a cost-cutting measure that reflected the company's growing nervousness with The National Lampoon's slipping sales, but right then I felt that I'd been on a roll and had built up a lot of momentum, and that if I had to leave HM, I ought to find another magazine with which to continue. Better yet, I'd start a new magazine!

Sitting around in Lou Stathis's apartment with Dan Steffan, I rifled through dictionaries looking for The Word that would make the new magazine's title instantly communicate what I wanted the magazine to be, and we talked about whom to try to get for a publisher.

I found the title, and somewhere along the line Larry Flynt's name was bunted about.

Larry Flynt was a strange man who launched a publishing empire on newsstand sleaze from Columbus, Ohio. He turned a club, the Hustler Club, into a magazine, Hustler. In its first few years Hustler was a magazine in a class of its own. Slick, like Playboy, and full of full-color photography, like Penthouse, it had the raunchy, idiosyncratic editorial personality of a sex tabloid like Screw. It was Flynt who pioneered the use of mirrors to beam sunlight into the open vaginas of his models. It was Flynt who used a woman in her fifties for his fold-out center-spread—not a woman whose beauty was that of a woman ten or twenty years younger, but a woman who showed her age, who looked used, but who still had a gleam in her eye. And it was Flynt who ran photo-features on very young teenaged girls as well. And his cartoons—his cartoons epitomized the very worst taste. One looked at them with astonishment. Hustler, in other words, everything the “class” men's mags were not. It was crude, raunchy, and surprisingly real. It was a blue-collar men's mag. It catered to truck drivers rather than young professionals. And it was published by a midwestern redneck with less than a high school education. HustIer was an “overnight” publishing success, and Larry Flynt had money. He used this money in odd ways. He bought up other publications, including Ohio Magazine and the Plains (Georgia) Gazette. Plains was the hometown of the man who was then president of the United States. Then Flynt was shot on the steps of a courthouse where he was being prosecuted for publishing pornography, and experienced a brief rebirth as a Baptist at the hands of the president's sister, with whom he professed great friendship.

Flynt was paralyzed below the waist and confined to a wheelchair after he was shot. In the mid-eighties, he was in the news with a crackpot campaign for the presidency, and obtained and released FBI tapes in the DeLorean cocaine case. (He cursed out the nine justices of the Supreme Court when they refused to allow him to represent himself, and was ordered jailed for contempt of court. Feisty guy.)

In 1980 Flynt was known as a man who wanted a publishing empire that stretched beyond the porno-sleaze of Hustler and its sister magazines, and a man who had some respect for the editorial independence of his non-porn publications. He had recently bought a pseudo-SF magazine (which specialized in SF film and ran a comic strip written by Forry Ackerman) along with its distributor. And he was rumored to be interested in doing a Heavy Metal-type magazine.

So, one afternoon later in my final week at HM, I wrote Flynt a brief letter. I said I'd heard he was interested in doing a HM-type magazine, and I said I could offer him almost the entire staff of the magazine. I gave him my Virginia address and phone number.

I heard nothing more about it for several months. Then one afternoon in the middle of November the phone rang. The female voice identified herself as Mrs. Flynt's secretary. My letter had somehow surfaced. Mrs. Flynt, who was running the magazines these days, was curious about me, and had decided she wanted to meet me. Would I be interested in coming out to Los Angeles so she could see me?

Mrs. Flynt was Althea Leisure Flynt (the former Althea Leisure, who had worked in the original Hustler Club and had probably done more for some of the customers than just serve them drinks, and who had married the boss early in Hustler's publishing career), and in the aftermath of Larry's shooting had taken over much of the day-to-day work in running his business. (Flynt, in constant pain from his legs, was taking large quantities of drugs that left him unable to concentrate on details. Later he had an operation that cut his nerves and ended the pain, but left him incontinent. I strongly suspect that he was no longer capable of sexual enjoyment either, which has its ironies.)

In short order, Mrs. Flynt's secretary had arranged for me to fly out on November 18th for an afternoon meeting. Mrs. Flynt took care of the tickets.

I was met at L.A. airport, after some delay, by a friendly man perhaps ten years younger than I who was driving a big black (but slightly scruffy) Lincoln Continental. He took me to a Beverly Hills hotel and checked me in, bought me lunch, and drove me to Century Plaza. Century Plaza is an office-tower complex. Flynt had the 38th floors of both towers. The editorial offices (and the Flynts') were in one tower, and the business and accounting offices were in the other.

When we arrived, only a few moments before my scheduled appointment, we discovered that Althea was not there yet. She was at a recording studio, it turned out, supervising a recording project. She was, I was told, a good singer herself. She was described to me in tones almost of awe. In any case, we had some time to kill.

The man who'd picked me up had been hired by Paul Krassner, my old friend from his Realist days, who had briefly been editor of Hustler during one of Flynt's ambitious periods. Few of those hired by Paul were left, it seemed. He turned me over to one of the senior editors. (Gosh, I wish I could remember their names, but....) This guy was even younger—in his late twenties. He also wrote thrillers, and spent much of his time while I was in his office talking on the phone to his agent in New York. During one extended phone call I picked up one of his books and read a little of it. Trashy.

After an hour of thumb-twiddling in the senior editor's office, I was offered a tour of the Flynt Publishing offices.

Basically the floor had the elevators and a reception area in its center, and individual offices around its outer walls. The area between, roughly doughnut-shaped, was open and continuous, but sectioned off into areas, each area serving the production of one of the three or four “men's” magazines Flynt published. The women who worked as secretaries, clerks, etc., at desks scattered through this open area were all superficially attractive, but in a sleazoid, gum-chewing sort of way. Listening to their chatter I was struck by the fact that they, like the editorial staff, seemed to have Midwestern, working-class origins—unlike virtually everyone else I've ever encountered in publishing. No sophistication here!

The walls in this open area were decorated solely with artwork—or photographs—from the appropriate magazines, all blown up large and framed like artworks. Thus, one might glance at a glossy, slick, colorful photograph that sprawled across four or five feet of wall, only to realize that one was staring at a larger-than-life-size blowup of a female torso, legs invitingly spread, labia moist and open, clitoris pink, erect, and spotlighted brightly.

Other walls were used as layout boards for a current issue, full-sized pages, Xeroxed, blue-lined, or just roughly penciled, arranged in four or five tiers across ten feet of wall space. Everywhere you looked, there were photos of nude women displaying their genitals. I wondered what it was like to work in such surroundings every day—especially for the women.

By now Althea was more than two hours late. Apologies were made to me by her secretary, her secretary's secretary, and several editors, all of whom spoke of her in deferential tones. I was shown her office and Larry's office. Larry's was furnished in lavish period-French-style drapes and furniture and looked like a museum display. It was apparently rarely used, since Larry never came in.

I wandered through all this in an increasingly numbed state. Early on I'd tried to be friendly and conversational with the people to whom I'd been entrusted, but each of them had a faintly sleazy quality, a quality which made ongoing conversation difficult.

I'd gone out to see Mrs. Flynt with the hope of getting enough money to set up operations for my magazine in Northern Vi