The Hardest (Working) Man in Showbiz (16 page)

Very few people believe me when I tell them I don’t enjoy blowing myself, but it’s true. Conventional wisdom has it that self-fellatio is every guy’s dream. As George Carlin once observed, “If I could reach, I’d never leave the house.” And sure, it sounds like a good idea in theory. But when you’re actually
doing
it, unless you’re gay or bisexual, it can be a profoundly disturbing experience. A part of me is thinking, Hey, you’ve got a nice set of lips on your dick. That feels pretty good. But the other half is screaming, Ron, there’s a fucking dick in your mouth! Get it out! Get it out!!

Anyway, this back-and-forth with Barbara and me went on for one half an hour. She’d suck it for a while, then I’d suck it, then she’d suck it, and eventually we had enough footage for a proper scene. When the director was ready to shoot the cumshot, he asked if I might consider popping in my own face.

“Are you crazy?” I boomed. “It’s not gonna happen.”

“Come on,” he goaded me. “It’ll be hot.”

“Nope. Not a prayer. Don’t even think about it.”

I wasn’t thrilled about giving him any kind of pop shot, but I finally agreed to shoot it into the air, aimed squarely
away
from my face. We had to time it down to the last second. I wasn’t going to reach orgasm with my own mouth, so Barbara got me to the point of nearly exploding and then leapt out of the frame while I jerked myself off, making it appear that I had blown myself to completion.

“Never again,” I told myself. “Never again.”

“Never again,” however, soon turned into “just one more time.”

Chuck Vincent, a brilliant porn director who gave me my first starring role in
Fascination
, asked me to kiss my dick in a film called
This Lady Is a Tramp
. It was for a scene involving a traveling circus of sex freaks. He had already cast an actress named Veri Knotty who could tie her pussy lips into a knot. I agreed because Chuck was a friend and I wouldn’t be the only sexual oddity on display.

But never again, I said.

Until
Lips
. It was a Swedish erotica film, and the script had a funny scene that had been written just for me. I played a pervert, watching two girls have sex from an outside balcony. They catch me in the act of kissing myself and invite me inside for a threeway. It was just used as a joke, and I had to kiss myself only for a few quick seconds.

But that’s it, I told myself. You’re done. No more blowing or kissing yourself on camera.

Until
The Devil in Miss Jones, Part 2
. I had to do that one. In it, I was a lost soul damned to the bowels of hell, where I was forced to lick the tip of my cock for all eternity. And it was a prosthetic forked tongue, so it wasn’t even mine. (Good rationalization, huh?)

But that’s where it ended. I was through being porn’s sideshow attraction. I vowed that, from that day forward, I would never perform self-fellatio, or kiss it, or lick it, or even stare too closely at it ever again.

Except for
Sulka’s Wedding
.

And
Consenting Adults
.

And
Cosmopolitan Girls
.

And
Olympic Fever
.

But that was it. I was done. I was officially retired as a self-fellator. If they wanted to see Ron Jeremy kiss himself, they’d have to imagine it.

Absolutely.

Seriously…

T
he funny thing is, I wasn’t even the first porn actor to display this talent for the cameras. That achievement belongs to Ken Turner, a seven-foot-tall blond giant who played a sadistic pervert in the 1976 kink film
Femmes De Sade
. There was also a gay actor named Dr. Infinity who performed self-fellatio in several stag films during the 1970s. And more recently, Al Eingang devoted his entire career to the art of sucking his own penis, putting out films like
The Young Man from Nantucket
and
Blown Alone
. All of these actors deserve at least a little of the spotlight.

I know that I’m almost solely to blame for creating my own mythos. I haven’t exactly turned down many opportunities to demonstrate my abilities, and it’s had a weird way of catching up with me, usually in inopportune moments. Once I was invited to be a guest with Seka on Tom Snyder’s TV talk show. It was a debate on pornography, and both Seka and I surprised everyone with our well-spoken arguments.

“You really are a fascinating and intelligent young man,” Snyder told me during a commercial break.

But later, seemingly out of the blue, he turned against me.

“Oh, Ron,” Snyder said with a frown, “is it true that you kissed your own penis in a movie?”

“Where’d you hear that?” I asked miserably.

He shook his head like a disapproving parent. “I was even starting to like you.”

“You still can,” I said, but I knew that any respect he’d had for me was long gone.

Despite the occasional humiliations, I still thrived on the notoriety that came with my self-made image. I had a standard set of jokes that I told at every opportunity, whether doing stand-up comedy at strip clubs or giving radio or TV interviews or even before kissing my cock in a porn movie.

“I make sure to wear a rubber before I do it,” I’d say, “‘cause I don’t know where he’s been.”

Or “Before I do it, I take myself out to dinner.”

Or “I gave myself a wrong phone number so that I don’t call me anymore.”

John Holmes, who had a much larger penis than mine, once asked me how to do it. Lucky for him, I have a foolproof technique that will work for just about anybody. And it doesn’t involve removing a rib or having costly penile enlargement surgery.

Self-Fellatio 101

B
egin in a standing position, tilting your body slightly at the waist, with each hand on a hip bone and your head facing your penis. In yoga, this position is called the “Crouching Penis.” Roll forward from your hips, pushing your head toward your toes and allowing the weight of your upper body to stretch your back. Exhale and hold for twenty seconds. Now pull back and repeat, pushing from your hips while keeping your spine in its natural arched position. When you’ve stretched as far forward as you can, have somebody jump on your back, snapping your spinal cord like an old piece of candy. When you get out of the hospital, you should be able to do it.

I’m kidding, of course.

I’m just having fun with you.

The truth is, there is no technique. It helps to have a huge dick, but John Holmes had a horse cock and he couldn’t come close. It helps to have a short torso and a flexible spine, but that won’t mean a thing if you’re hung like a peanut.

What can I tell you? It’s a genetic crapshoot.

Filming
Bad Girls.
(Courtesy Collectors/Gourmet Video)

chapter 6

SWINGING IN THE RAIN

There's an opening
montage in a film called
Fascination
—my first starring role (as a nerd named Ernie Gordon) and still my proudest moment in porn. In it, I’m seen wandering through New York, gazing at the lights and sounds of the city at night. But it’s not the New York that’s usually romanticized in movies. It’s the New York that was personified, at least during the late 1970s and early ‘80s, by Times Square, the one-time epicenter of sleaze. There are the triple-X theaters and strip clubs and massage parlors and porn palaces…and hookers plying their trade along Eighth Avenue. Everywhere I look, there’s sex for sale, and I’m drinking it all in with a grateful smile that seems to say, I’m the luckiest boy in the whole wide world.

That five-minute montage perfectly encapsulates my experiences in New York City as a young porn actor.

It was on the set of that movie where I first met Mike Feline and Barbara Burns. Mike, a burly hulk of a man with a wispy mustache, played my father, while Barbara, a slender and exotic-looking brunette, had a brief cameo as a nightclub dancer. We became fast friends on the set, and I learned that they were a happily married couple and lifelong swingers.

They invited me to join them during their nightly escapades through New York’s bustling swingers’ scene. I had already been getting my fair share of sex, but this was a whole new world to me. I’d heard rumors about the “anything-goes” sex clubs and partner-swapping key parties that were a mainstay of Manhattan nightlife, but I’d never been brave enough to venture out and explore them on my own. I hadn’t even set foot inside Show World, the infamous sex emporium where many of my porn colleagues performed live sex shows every night. When it came to the city’s nightlife, I was a novice, but I was eager to learn. And Mike and Barbara were more than happy to show me the ropes.

It was like a buffet of sex. There was enough available flesh for everybody to enjoy. On some nights, it was like a hectic race to see and do everything. We’d start at the legendary Le Trapeze, move on to the S&M-friendly Hellfire Club, and end up at the “Barnyard” in Brooklyn, a private swinging party hosted by a two-hundred-fifty-pound lesbian. Though I relished every new discovery, nothing could quite compare to the glorious debauchery I would find at Plato’s Retreat.

From the moment I walked into the doors of Plato’s, I knew that I was home. It was a swingers’ club straight from the smuttiest edges of my imagination. Located in the basement of the Ansonia Hotel on the Upper West Side, it had once been known as the Continental Baths, an all-gay bathhouse that launched a young Bette Midler’s singing career. But in the late 1970s, it was devoted to heterosexual swinging, boldly promising a return to “the glory of ancient Rome.”

Inside, it was like a sexual rumpus room, a playground for frisky adults. It housed a disco, several saunas and Jacuzzis, a swimming pool with waterfalls, and dozens of private and public rooms where sex was not just permitted but encouraged. Although clothing was optional, nudity was the norm, and it was unusual to meet somebody in anything more than a towel and a smile. On any given night, you could have sex with as many partners as you could handle or, if you felt in a more voyeuristic mood, just sit on a couch and watch the action. With more than six hundred couples visiting every night, the odds were definitely in your favor.

I became a regular at Plato’s, stopping by at least a few nights a week and often staying until the wee hours of the morning. Almost always I’d bring a date, and once in a while I’d go alone, but I always ended up sleeping with somebody—sometimes a few somebodys. It was easy, especially when you were a recognized porn star with a famously large penis.

On one night, a married man approached me and asked if I’d be willing to have sex with his wife.

“It’s her birthday,” he explained, “and I want to get her something special.”

It may have sounded like a filthy proposition, but it was actually quite beautiful. As I had sex with her, the husband sat next to us and held her hand. He was as excited as I was, but for very different reasons. He was just enjoying her pleasure, thrilled at her every orgasmic shudder. His penis was on the small side, and I was going places that he couldn’t begin to reach. Jealousy wasn’t a factor for them. They knew that I wasn’t a threat to their marital vows. I was nothing more than a prop, a human dildo for their sexual play. She didn’t even make eye contact with me while we were doing it. She just gazed at her husband, and if you could’ve seen the look on their faces, filled with so much gratitude and mutual appreciation and unmitigated love, it would’ve broken your heart, as corny as that sounds.

The minute we were finished, they both thanked me and disappeared. I saw them later in another room, just sitting together on a couch and cuddling. It was probably one of the most romantic things I’d ever seen in this environment, and it made me understand for the first time how swinging and marriage could coexist. If it truly is a mutual experience, and a couple is able to distinguish between sex and love, swinging can actually bring two people closer together rather than (as so many critics are quick to claim) tear them apart.

The couple told me that they’d been married for twenty years. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if they were still together.

And then, of course, I had sex at Plato’s that had nothing whatsoever to do with love or intimacy. It was just nasty, lewd fucking between two anonymous strangers for no other purpose than feeling another person’s naughty bits. So in a lot of ways, Plato’s was the best of both worlds.

I eventually met up with Larry Levenson, Plato’s founder and owner. We instantly took a liking to each other. I admired him because he was the self-proclaimed King of Swing, and he admired me because I was an up-and-coming porn star. Larry liked telling people, “I knew Ron back when he was just some young skinny kid with a big dick.”

Larry was like a big teddy bear. He wasn’t the most gorgeous guy, but women flocked to him. I don’t know if it was his kindness (he was the most gentle man I’ve ever known) or his generosity (he threw cash around like it was peanuts), but I never saw him without a girl on his arm. He didn’t have a large penis by any means, but everybody who slept with him said he was a decent lover. Like me, he loved to give a woman head. Loved it more than anything else. That alone was enough to make him very popular.