Short Circuits (14 page)

Have you any idea of the degree of enthusiasm with which I greeted this whole prospect? But he pleaded and I, unused to resisting the pleas of male models, gave in.

So, to Inga's room and to bed.

6 a.m. A knock on the door: “Time to get up, sweetheart,” my boss called. Inga got out of her bed and hurried to the door. The minute she opened it, the boss strode in. Hearing him at the door, I had pulled the covers over my head and prayed for death.

A moment later, I felt a hand on my shoulder: “Time to get up, honey,” he said.

I will leave to your imagination the look on his face when I sat up. Betrayal! Debauchery! Boinking the boss's girlfriend right under his nose! Shock!

He stormed wordlessly out of the room, followed by Inga, leaving me to get up and get dressed. I'm not sure how I got through breakfast, but let's just say the atmosphere was a tad strained.

Finally, about noon, I'd had it, and told the boss I wanted to talk to him. Now, whether he knew I was gay or not I don't know, but this was at a time when you could be fired in the blink of an eye if it was thought you were. So I couldn't very well just say, “Hey, don't worry about Inga: I'm gay.” Instead, I told him that I had come up there to work, I explained the circumstances (as I'm sure Inga must have, as well), and that children's games were for children. He merely looked at me.

Immediately upon return to Los Angeles, I began looking for another job.

Oh, and for those of you who have read my Dick Hardesty mystery,
The Butcher's Son
, should you see any similarity whatever between my boss Laurence Laurie and Dick's boss, Carlton Carson, I can assure you it is purely coincidental. Purely. Yes.

* * *

JOBS FROM HELL, PART III

Well, as long as we're on the subject of jobs from hell, I might add one more snapshot from my rather full album. I find it interesting, now, as I look them over, that three of the worst jobs I ever had were all during my 18 years in Los Angeles.

Immediately after leaving my glory days with the P.R. firm, related earlier, a friend got me a job with Peterson Publications, a magazine publishing conglomerate that cranked out countless well-known, mainly male-oriented periodicals such as
Car and Driver.
My tenure there was blessedly short, for reasons soon to be made clear.

I have always held to the philosophy that one should work to live, and one should never, as so very many people seem to, live to work. Combining that philosophy with my ability to exist in the world without really being a part of it has largely enabled me to pretty much sail through life like the Flying Dutchman. Still….

Some jobs are furnaces, some are ice boxes, and some, like my stint at Peterson Publishing are London fogs. My job with Peterson was definitely fog: fog so thick that I never did understand exactly what my job was supposed to be, other than do whatever I was told to do at the moment. I think I was in the Promotions department, the primary purpose of which I gather was to come up with little gimmicks to attract new readers. I do recall making up a fake airline baggage claim ticket to be attached to the front cover of one of their travel magazines. I assume it had something to do with an offer of a free trip, though its purpose was never explained to me and I never saw the finished magazine to which it was attached.

There was a similar cover attachment for a diving magazine, featuring a ferocious-looking shark, which I was assigned to draw. This, to me, was proof positive that the inmates were running the asylum, since I have never, ever been able to draw
anything
that ended up looking even remotely like whatever it was I had set out to draw. I think I found a photo of a shark in some other publisher's magazine and just traced it. It was atrocious, but they used it. And again, I never knew its purpose.

It was not a bad place to work, I don't think. It was just reminded me of what Limbo must be like. There were people there, but other than the friend who had gotten me the job, they all existed in this thick, grey fog. I do not remember the face…let alone the name…of a single person there. I do not remember the layout of the workplace or what went on there. I would imagine I did have a fairly good idea at the time where the restrooms were, but other than that….

But what I do remember distinctly was that the entire organization seemed to be focused on Office Politics, particularly among the management, whom I do not think I ever saw.

From what I could gather from my friend, the company operated like some strange, gigantic game of chess. While I know nothing at all about chess, I gathered that in this game, the employees were pawns, the lower-level supervisors rooks, the supervisor's supervisors the queens, etc. So when one queen bested another queen, not only would the overturned queen be fired, but all the rooks and pawns under him/her as well. Entire departments would be let go at one time. I couldn't quite figure out how an organization could survive like that, but what did I know?

I did not understand the rules of the game and I really didn't care.

Suffice it to say that after perhaps three months in Limbo, my supervisor's supervisor lost to his faceless opponent and my entire department was let go.

I did not weep.

* * *

MY DAYS IN PORN

I'm not out to offend the pure of heart. Really, I'm not. But it is the not-ordinary that tends to make life most interesting, and I've had quite a few not-ordinaries in mine. Here's a look at one of them.

When my mom died in September of 1971, I quit my job, bought a Winnebago motor home and just took off on an open-ended attempt to run away from life…which of course never works, but is indicative of my mental state at the time. I'll be talking more about the trip in future entries, and it is mentioned here merely as a brief lead-in to how I ended up working several years for probably the largest porn mill on the West Coast.

When I finally returned home I was forced to face the reality of getting another job. I saw an ad in the paper for an editor for a “men's magazine” and sent in my resume. Shortly thereafter I got a call from the company for an interview.

The company was located in Chatsworth, one of L.A.'s innumerable suburbs, and probably about half an hour's drive from my home, and I arrived, as always, early. The building was truly impressive…a huge, sprawling, modern concrete-slab structure that bespoke success.

My appointment was with the chief editor of one of the company's several divisions. Keith was in his late 40s, stocky, glasses, a crew-cut, and friendly, and took me into his office where he explained the job. When the ad said “men's magazine” it meant it, literally. The job involved editing several “sex education” magazines with explicit photographs—which, of course, are what sold the publications.

This was at the time when the phrase “redeeming social value” was vital to the success of what a few years earlier had come to be known as “the sexual revolution.” Every magazine put out by the company was comprised of very carefully-researched-and-written articles which did, indeed, serve the purpose of providing basic information on human sexuality—strictly, totally, and exclusively heterosexual, of course. Each article, as I say, was carefully researched and had to be footnoted with references to no fewer than five, I believe, published works by noted authorities and published works in the field of human sexuality.

Popular idioms for sex acts and body parts were forbidden. Clinical terms only. Every explicit photograph…and here there were no holds barred…had to have a caption specifically relating it to the subject of the article and using exact physical terminology. Not easy to do, I can tell you.

Anyway, after we'd talked quite a while, Keith called in his wife, Iris, who was also an editor there. Iris, too, was in her late 40s; she wore no makeup, and her long blond hair was pulled back in a pony tail. I liked her right away. After a few more minutes, Keith offered me the job...and here comes the part of the story I love best. I had never before told a prospective employer that I was gay, but in this case, I saw no way around it. So I said: “Well, there is only one problem: since I'm gay, I don't have the foggiest idea what men and women do in bed together.”

Without batting an eye, Keith said: “Well, then you'll have a different outlook on things.” It was a truly liberating moment, and I decided in that instant that if they could have that kind of attitude, I wanted to work for them.

I was with the company for four or five years, through many turbulent free-speech confrontations including the local police locking the building to keep workers out (we shifted operations to several smaller locations), one over-a-weekend (so no judge could be contacted to free them) arrest of Keith and Iris, and various forms of legal harassment. (The police would arrive with a search warrant and a judge sitting in a squad car. If, during their search, they found something of interest not covered in the warrant, they would simply go out to the squad car and have the warrant amended.)

But we all survived, and I'm delighted to say that I count Keith and Iris among my best friends, after some 38 years.

There are several more stories from my porn days, which may well fuel future entries.

But for now…

* * *

OK, MORE PORN-DAYS STORIES

I hadn't really intended to do another porn-days entry right away, but as I posted the last one several stories occurred to me which I thought I might as well pass along while I'm thinking of them.

As I mentioned, the company for which I worked was 99.99% heterosexual, though their “Lesbian” magazines were always popular. The fact is, of course, that the women featured in them were not lesbians, and they were not directed to lesbians, but were strictly for the intellectual musings of straight men, who inexplicably seem to be fascinated by the thought of women having sex together. Very rarely…very, very rarely…there would be a picture in one of the other magazines of two men together. The company, naturally, offered nothing specifically aimed at the gay market. I'm quite sure it had never occurred to them that there was such a thing.

The company was owned by a husband and wife team in their 60s, who had been in the business for many years and who had made a very large fortune at it. The husband ran the publishing end, his wife the business end. The husband had his own strong, definite ideas of what was sexy, and they seemed to boil down to three irrefutable facts: 1) mesh stockings drive men into a frenzy of desire; 2) A woman's sexual appeal is in direct ratio to how many rings she can cram onto her fingers; 3) A 30-year-old woman in pigtails, an elementary-school uniform, oversize dark-rimmed glasses and coyly licking a lollipop is the epitome of sexual appeal.

I was fascinated to realize, in a short time, how astonishingly little heterosexual men know about the workings of the female body, especially as it relates to sexuality.

Anyway, after I'd been with the company for a while, I suggested that perhaps they might consider putting out a few magazines aimed at gay men. The initial universal revulsion (except from my immediate boss Keith and his wife Iris) was somewhat lessened when I provided some facts and figures on the buying power of gay men. They were still revolted, but the prospect of making even more money than they already had overcame it, and I became editor of two new magazines devoted to gay sexuality, which although I was never privy to the degree of success of any of the magazines I edited, straight or gay, obviously sold well enough to keep them going.

I subsequently suggested a line of gay-oriented erotic fiction and, surprisingly, they went for that, too.

Finding suitable manuscripts at first was something of a problem.

The top lieutenant to the owners was an outstandingly dour man not only totally devoid of a sense of humor but of any signs whatever of a personality. He had a college-student nephew…totally straight, of course…who wanted to be a writer, and I was informed that this young man would be supplying me with the manuscript for a male gay novel, for which he was to be paid the then-princely sum of $1,000.

I insisted on seeing a rough draft and when I did…well, let's just say I was somewhat less than ecstatic. This kid couldn't write his way out of a paper bag, and judging from his writing “style” I had no idea how he'd gotten out of third grade. If I had come to the company with no knowledge of what men and women do in bed together, this kid was several planets past Pluto in having a clue about gay men.

I will quote you here one line from his manuscript which is engraved forever in my mind. He was writing what I'm sure he assumed was the penultimate gay sex scene, and the line was (feel free to write this down): “They pressed their lips together and enjoyed it very much.”

I immediately wrote the young man thanking him for his time, assuring him that he could keep his prepaid $1,000, and wrote the book myself.

Life ain't always easy, but sure can be a lot of fun.

* * *

PEBBLES

I live within a mile of Lake Michigan now, and it is a very pleasant lake. But it always strikes me, somehow, as being…well, almost subdued compared to the majesty of Lake Superior, only 17 miles from my former home in northern Wisconsin. I used to love spending hours walking along its deserted beaches, where you can sometimes go for literally hours without seeing another human being.

The first impression I always got, when standing on the shore within a few feet of the water on a bright summer day, was of blue: the incredibly intense blue sky dotted with cotton-ball clouds. Beneath the blue of the sky, the darker blue of the water, flecked with whitecaps and the white wings of wave-skimming seagulls and an occasional white triangle of a passing sailboat. And every now and then, where the sky met the water, I would see the small dark smudge of smoke from a cargo ship far off over the horizon.

But the shore held its own, more immediate fascination. Superior is not a sandy-shored lake, for the most part. It is more pebbles and small rocks of every shape, size, and color, almost all rounded or smoothed from countless years/centuries/aeons of shifting against and around one another. I wondered, if they could think and speak, what they would talk of.