The Hardest (Working) Man in Showbiz (43 page)

But thus far, nobody had gotten a glimpse of it. The tabloids were drooling for just one picture, but Bobbitt wouldn’t allow it. During Howard Stern’s 1994 New Year’s Rotten Eve Special, Bobbitt was offered $15,000 to flash his mangled dick for the cameras, but he refused. It only heightened the national fervor, and every day there were new rumors circulating about Bobbitt’s now notorious cock.

I wasn’t vain enough to think that I would be the one to unveil his penis to the world. If he wouldn’t show his dick to Howard Stern, he sure as hell wouldn’t show it to me, much less allow me to photograph him having sex with a porn actress. All I wanted was a nonsex dialogue cameo to make the video more interesting and newsworthy.

“Sure,” he told me. “That sounds like fun. I’ll do it.”

The next morning, I received a call from Bobbitt’s managers, Jack
*
and Aaron Gordon. They weren’t the most traditional management team in Hollywood. They were scandal chasers. They worked primarily with B-list stars and scandal celebrities. Aside from Bobbitt, their clients included Paula Jones, Divine Brown, and a lounge singer who claimed to be Elvis Presley’s illegitimate son. They even represented Bobbitt’s wife, Lorena, which was nothing if not a conflict of interest.

“Ronnie, baby,” Jack’s smarmy voice echoed into the phone.

“Looks like we’re gonna be doing business together.”

“So I hear,” I said.

“We’ve had a long talk with Bobbitt about this movie of yours, and the way we figure it, why stop at a little dialogue? If he’s gonna do a porno, we might as well go all the way. The whole nine yards!”

I checked the phone’s receiver to make sure I didn’t have a bad connection. “Excuse me?” I asked.

“Johnny wants to do
it
.”

“Do…
it?
”

“Sex. He wants to have sex. On camera. For you.”

I must’ve been hearing things. I roughly jabbed at my ears with a finger.

“Are you fucking with me?” I asked.

“I’m not fucking with you, Ron,” he said. “He’s serious about this.”

“And he’ll do it for the same price as a dialogue cameo?”

A raspy chuckle escaped Jack’s throat. “No, smart-ass. It’s gonna cost you a
lot
more.”

When I hung up the phone, I had to take a moment to catch my breath. I couldn’t believe what was happening to me. Not
only
was I getting Bobbitt for a film, not
only
would he be showing his schmeckel, but he was going to
use
it. He was going to
fuck
! Or at least
try
to fuck. I still wasn’t sure if his penis worked. It didn’t matter, limp or hard, he was going to do it all for the camera. I felt as if I had just won the lottery.

I knew exactly who to call.

Many of the adult companies were furious with me for bringing Bobbitt to Mark Carriere and Leisure Time Entertainment. “He’s already a multimillionaire,” they told me. “You’re making a rich man even richer.” While this was true, Mark was also my friend, and he’d been loyal to me for years. If I’d taken the deal to another major company like Vivid, VCA, or Wicked, they would’ve thrown me a few grand as a finder’s fee and passed it along to one of their in-house directors.

Another reason to bring it to Mark was the production costs. It wouldn’t be cheap to get Bobbitt out of his pants. He wanted thousands up front and a hefty percentage of the profits. Overall, he stood to make at least $500,000 for the entire thing if it all went well. It wasn’t chump change, and Mark was the only man I knew whose pockets were that deep.

I called Mark immediately. Just days later, Mark and I met with Bobbitt at a restaurant at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. From the moment we stepped inside, we were the center of attention. Waiters did double takes, diners paused in midbite as we walked past. They were staring at Bobbitt, pointing at him and whispering to one another. “Is that the guy who got his dick chopped off?”

After we had signed the contracts and sealed the deal with a handshake, we decided to take some comical pictures to commemorate the occasion. John and I posed with steak knifes, aiming the sharp edges toward each other’s crotch like we intended to carve out our initials.

“Be careful with that thing,” Bobbitt said to me, eyeing my knife nervously.

“Oh, relax,” I told him. “It isn’t anything you haven’t felt before.”

Y’
know, John, we could’ve made this movie without you. I was going to get Robert De Niro to play you and Danny DeVito was going to play your penis.”

The crew laughed, but Bobbitt didn’t seem to notice. He had other things on his mind besides my crappy jokes.

Bobbitt arrived for his first day on the set looking uneasy. I wasn’t sure if he was having second thoughts or if he was just worried about whether he’d be able to perform. He had a daunting task in front of him. A first experience in porno can be frightening enough, but when your cock is tied together with sutures and it’s
literally
hanging by a string, a guy can be excused for a little performance anxiety.

I thought some humor might lighten the mood. I just wanted to remind him that we were all friends and we were all here with a single purpose: to make fun of his crooked, misshapen, gargoylish penis.

To be fair, it didn’t look
that
bad. The stitches were hardly noticeable. It had a slight curve in the middle like someone had tried to snap it in half. But otherwise, it looked like any other penile shaft.

The million-dollar question was whether it could get hard.

“You know what really makes me think?” I told John. “Your penis stayed in the park for around
three
hours before the cops found it. A hot dog can’t be left outside for that long without getting a little funky. You throw a knockwurst into the park and a squirrel is gonna steal it. A dog will take it away. A stray cat is going to bite into it. John, all kidding aside, how disgusting is your dick that not even a
cockroach
crawled through it? Not one squirrel looked at it and said, ‘Hey, that could be lunch?’ How does that happen, John? How repulsive is your penis that not one animal would so much as give it a sniff?”

Bobbitt smiled at me, but my teasing clearly wasn’t putting him at ease.

“Hey,” I added. “I forgot to mention. We invited Lorena to be in the movie, but she got into a car accident on the way to the set. Apparently some prick cut her off.”

The crew howled in laughter, but Bobbitt’s face was a blank slate. Not even a glimmer of outrage or bemusement.

Bobbitt’s first few scenes were less than successful. He tried to get an erection on his own, but it was clearly a losing battle. I had prepared for just such a difficulty. This was in the age before Viagra, so it wasn’t as simple as having him pop a few blue pills and waiting for wood. But if you had contacts with a few helpful doctors, it was possible to get your hands on some Caverject.

Caverject, for you nonmedical types, contains something called prostaglandin, a lipid hormone that causes the muscles to relax and stimulates the flow of blood. You just insert it directly into the spongy tissue of the penis and, five minutes later,
blamo
, instant hard-on. The only problem is, it needs to be injected with a huge and menacing-looking needle. The thought of having your arm punctured with a needle the size of a fencing sword is enough to make most people a little light-headed. But imagine taking that same needle and jabbing it into your
penis
.

I wasn’t about to give Bobbitt the injections, so I gave the job to Adam, Mark’s assistant. Before every scene, he would take Bobbitt into the bathroom and demonstrate how the Caverject shots were used. It was supposed to be a temporary thing, as we assumed that Bobbitt would eventually be able to do it himself. But Bobbitt didn’t have the nerve to ram his own penis with a needle, so Adam became his permanent medical liaison.

I loved watching Adam on the set. He’d stand on the sidelines with his fingers crossed, waiting to find out if Bobbitt would be able to perform without the injections. “Oh please, please, please,” I heard him muttering. But invariably Bobbitt would go limp, and, with a heavy sigh, Adam would grab his arm and bring him back into the bathroom.

“Now, don’t get too carried away,” I’d tell him. “I need Bobbitt excited, but not
too
excited.”

“Fuck you, Jeremy,” Adam would grumble before slamming the door.

Bobbitt’s costars knew about the Caverject, but they weren’t entirely clear on why Adam was helping him. “What’s going on in there?” they asked me after Adam and Bobbitt disappeared into the bathroom.

“Well,” I said, “Adam takes Bobbitt’s cock in his hand and gives it a few jerks. And then when it’s nice and hard, he puts the needle in. If that doesn’t work, he blows him.”

And the girls believed me!

When Adam found out about the rumors I’d been spreading, he went ballistic. “I do
not
do that!” he screamed at me in front of the cast and crew. “I do
not
jerk that man’s penis. Nor do I blow him. That is a filthy, rotten lie.”

“None of us think any less of you,” I teased him. “You’re a valuable part of the production team. Just because you have your hands all over another guy’s cock doesn’t mean you’re gay.”

“I’m going to kill you, you motherfucker!” he snarled, storming off. Everybody was laughing except him (the cast and crew soon figured out I was just kidding).

Eventually Bobbitt learned how to do the injections himself. But he wasn’t very good at it. Before one of his scenes, he walked out of the bathroom clutching his penis like he’d just been kicked in the balls.

“I think I put it in wrong,” he said, grimacing. “It hurts.”

I felt sorry for the poor guy. It was heartbreaking to watch him cowering in the corner, tending his wounded penis, thoroughly humiliated. The rest of the crew was just annoyed by the delay, but I almost felt fatherly toward him. He looked so helpless and scared, and nobody deserved that, even if there
was
a fat payday at stake.

“It’s okay, John,” I told him, joining him on the floor. “Put some ice on it and take a break. This isn’t worth torturing yourself over.”

Bobbitt faced some extra intimidation when he found out that he was doing a scene alongside of me. Mark wanted another dick in the movie, just in case audiences got bored watching Bobbitt’s contorted cock in action. So we arranged for a mini-orgy, with Bobbitt and me each tackling a different girl in separate corners of the room.
*
It was a risky proposition for Bobbitt, as it meant being unfairly compared with a porn pro. He handled it well, though, and he even let me share a few tips on giving a better performance. I demonstrated “The Grip” to him, one of my most time-honored techniques.

Never heard of it, you say? Well, sounds to me like it’s time for more…

SEX Advice from DR. RON JEREMY

Part 3:
THE GRIP

F
irst, give your penis a few jerks, just enough to get a semierection. Then grip your penis by its base, using two fingers and a thumb, and squeeze. Don’t use your entire fist, just the fingers and thumb. You’re not trying to double the size of your schlong. Rather, you’re creating a cock ring, viselike effect. You’re forcing whatever blood is already in there toward the front of your shaft and giving it some leverage so that it actually sticks forward.

Now jump on the bed and waddle toward your lady’s “business.” As long as you’re gripping tightly at the base, your penis won’t lose any of its rigidity. And you’ll have enough of an erection to make an actual insertion. Once you’re inside, it’ll feel so damn good that a real erection will form on its own. In just a matter of minutes, you’ll be able to release your grip, and say, “Look, Ma, no hands!”

Trust in “The Grip.” If it worked for Bobbitt, it can work for you.

You’re welcome.

M
aking
John Wayne Bobbitt Uncut
—yes, that was the title—was, to say the least, surreal. I knew what it was like to have the vice cops kick down my door. I knew what it was like to fear that somebody was lurking outside, just waiting to catch you in the act. But this was scrutiny of a very different sort.

We’d arrive on the set each morning, and the front lawn would already be besieged by news crews. The streets were lined with vans, satellite dishes mounted on their hoods like doomsday devices. Helicopters hovered over the house constantly, and photographers skulked in the bushes, waiting for any sign of movement inside. Our set was quite literally a compound. We couldn’t even open a window without attracting reporters, who’d come running like mosquitoes to a sweaty neck.

Aaron Gordon, our public relations director, had his hands full keeping the media juggernaut at bay. Our production was under tight security, so nobody—much less a reporter—was allowed on the set during the shoot.
*
But right under our noses, our so-called “closed set” was infiltrated by a spy.

We caught the little bugger red-handed. He was an extra, hired for a boat party scene during the production’s final days. He’d hidden a tiny camera in his sleeve and was taking photos all day before a crew member nabbed him. His name was Steve Duran, and he admitted to working for
Current Affair
and gladly gave up the name of his accomplice: my friend and roommate porn star Devon Shire. I confronted her and tried to play the stern disciplinarian, but I was too impressed with her ruse to give her any grief.

“
Please
tell me you got paid for sneaking him onto my set,” I said.

“Of course,” Devon said with a smug smile. “You think I’d sell you out for free?”

“I can’t believe you pulled that off,” I chuckled. “Well done.”

We agreed to let the rogue photographer keep his pictures, and even shoot some B-roll video, but only on the condition that he give
Hard Copy
(to which Aaron had given an exclusive) a two-day lead. And because I’m such a good sport, I even paid him his full wage as an extra. So he got a $30 check
and
a scoop on the Bobbitt set. Not bad for a day’s work.