Junior’s is the first face I see when we get to Joey’s. We lived together.
No, that’s not exactly true. Junior lived on my couch. Briefly.
Having Junior there was like waking up to fresh flowers every day - nice to look at the first day or two, but that’s about all and after a week it’s just a vase full of dirty water and dying organic matter. He’s on the rug, watching dog porn and rubbing himself –nothing’s changed, it’s pretty much all he did when we lived together he lived on my couch. In a little while he’ll head to the bathroom, jerk off into a towel and hang the towel back on the rack.
That part drove me crazy. Getting out of the shower, grabbing a towel and… “Junior! You motherfucker! Get me a clean fucking towel!”
We’d been together. Once. Before he moved in.
Thing was, cocaine makes men feel like sexual giants, like they can fuck all night. Okay, maybe they can, but not in any way I’ve ever found satisfying. There always needs to be something “extra” in the mix. Like a single girl and the usual holes are not enough and sex becomes something devised by Rube Goldberg rather than Mother Nature. You need extra hands, extra stimulation and sometimes you need an extra person or two. Junior’d needed me to do all the work, follow instructions, move this here, put that there, left, right, inside out, upside down, tongue here, okay, okay, now, now, wait, now…okay.
Sometimes, once is more than enough. But, he was still pretty, goddamn it, and he was connected. So I’d let him stay. On the couch.
Two Shoes and Trigger the Greek bookie hovered over the pile coke on the table. The more the Greek sniffed, the worse the spasms in his leg got. Hence, the nickname. Tonight, he was threatening to wear a hole in the carpet. There were two actors, A. was famous–but just for the moment, Eddie was not, a few unidentified wiseguys on the couch and a few unidentified guns on the table.
Piper brought the bottles into the kitchen and mixed us a couple of drinks. Vodka. Ice.And a splash of Seven-Up for color.
“Here,” I dropped the bullets between the guns, “we took ‘em off a cop at work.”
Joey looked up from his cocaine. “Five?”
Piper grabbed him by the arm, laughing and pulling him into the bedroom. “Stop it now. Come with me Daddy and let me tell you what a bad, bad girl I’ve been.”
I made drinks for the boys, settled next to Eddie on the couch, and to the background TV sounds of girls giving head to German Shepherds and horses, we watched through the open door as they undressed each other and made love, laughed, smoked, slept, got high, fucked some more. From our spots in the living room we watched them and we laughed, got high, smoked, slept, got high and laughed some more.
I liked Eddie. He was sweet and handsome. He paid attention to me like I was a regular girl. But, he was no one, going no where. Eddie’s only juice was being friends with Joey.
And the only way to Joey, was going to be through Piper.
This entry was written by , posted on January 21, 2010 at 1:23 pm, filed under the diary and tagged 1981, dirty boys, drinking, drugs, partners in crime, porn, wiseguys. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
3 naked ladies talk about their view from the stages and laps of the 70’s, 80’s, 90’s and today.
For as a long as there’s been music, women have danced for the entertainment and titillation of men. Scheherazade. Minsky’s Burlesque. Cage dancing go-go girls in the psychedelic 60’s. Times Square strippers, pole dancers and lap dancers. Women dance….Men watch.
Naked Ladies get around! Look for the 3 Naked Ladies and a new topic every Wednesday on laurishaw.com, or thedirtygirldiaries.com
Candida Royalle changed the porn industry when she founded Femme Productions. You have to wonder, the first time she got Naked for Money, was that her plan? The Naked Ladies talk about having a plan–or not.
Candida Royalle: I’d been rather ‘focused’ until just after my first year of college. I was attending one of the best art colleges in the country, majoring in fashion illustration, but when the whole political - hippie - feminist movements came flooding in to our generational culture, the fashion world began to lose its appeal. Plus, I discovered recreational drugs and you know…kinda’ sets you on a new way of thinking and questioning everything you believed in.
Jodi Sh. Doff: I wasn’t questioning anything, I had no plan. I started working in the topless bars at 17 because I needed a job. I’d been hanging around hustler’s bars and thought I was a tough little chick, but I was just a kid who liked to drink. Topless bars didn’t require experience or skills beyond working in skimpy outfits. I’d been having a recurring dream, every night, where I died at 23. I believed it, so nothing really mattered…
Lauri Shaw: What plan? I was 19 when I started stripping, estranged from my family, and had been living on my own for several years already. I was just trying to live day to day and keep a roof over my head.
JshD: I’d grown up on Shindig, Hullaballo and then Laugh-In. That’s where I got my ideas about life as a go-go dancer–that was the term in the 70s. I thought I’d be a cross between the hip, swinging stewardesses of “Coffee, Tea or Me” and Xaviera Hollander’s Happy Hooker. Eventually, I figured on becoming a mobsters girlfriend or a high class call girl making oodles of money, being wined and dined by handsome powerful men.
There was wine, men, and money, but not like I’d imagined. I wasn’t tough enough to be a Show World silver dollar girl, pretty enough to make big money at or sober enough to hang on to any of it.
LS: I expected I’d go back to college at some point, but I didn’t know what I wanted to be “when I grew up” and didn’t feel compelled towards any particular course of study. I just figured I would try to get as much cash as I could into the bank before I quit dancing. That went out the window as well once I developed a fondness for the “Devil’s Dandruff.”
The whole time I was dancing, I couldn’t see more than 24 hours into the future. Half the time I wasn’t even working at the same club from one night to the next. I didn’t know what my average earnings were. I didn’t know how far I’d have to drive to get at those earnings. The most forward thinking I ever did was to maybe bag a sandwich for my next shift! I lived my entire life by the seat of my pants. I’d burn through relationships, fuck buddies… I devoured whatever was in front of me.
JshD: I thought I’d be dead by 23, so there was no point planning for 30 or 40. Same as you, I lived day to day. Stripping was a way for me to drink and drug as much as I wanted and just be wild. To paraphrase Gretchen Wilson “I was there for the party And I wasn’t leavin’ ’til they throw’d me out.”
LS: I feel that if I had been in my mid-twenties or older, I’d have been much more focused on the future…
CR: Well, I can shoot down your theory about age and focus, Lauri, at least in my case. I didn’t get in to the sex biz until I was nearly 25. I’d been training in dance for many years and got close to the professional ranks, summer stock and all that, but had to choose between that and art college. Well, long story short, I lost interest in all the things I’d been ‘focused’ on and took off for San Francisco where I got even more in to drugs…
JshD: What would life had been like for any of us, I wonder, if drugs and alcohol had never entered the picture….
CR: …and began living and performing with some really freaky people, some of the original Cockettes and Angels of Light. Did a play with Divine, even began singing in jazz clubs. At that time materialism was looked down on, but I needed to pay rent, so at 24 I answered an ad for nude modeling. The agent asked me if I was interested in being in a porn film. I’d never even seen one and stormed out.
JshD: I had girlfriends that did print and film but I remembered a high school teacher who’d been a Playboy centerfold. Every year someone would dredge up that old centerfold and tape it to her door and she’d be in tears. I was afraid of that kind of permanent image following me if I ever wanted to go “straight.” I guess I still bought into the white collar Prince Charming at the end of the rainbow.
CR: My boyfriend thought porn was a great idea and ended up as the lead in a big adult feature. I got to see that it wasn’t the sleazy scene I’d thought, at least not at that level, and sex was so out in the open in those days. That’s how I got in to the sex biz. In hindsight, I too wished I had remained more focused on other things I really loved to do, like dance and sing. I could’ve made a career of it. But, as Jodi pointed out, once you’re on film it’s forever, and you close many doors once you show up in an adult movie.
In the end, my foray in to porn and burlesque gave me the idea for female-centric erotic cinema, so while it began with a ‘devil may care’ attitude, I ended up achieving exactly what I wanted: a career that enables me to express myself artistically and politically, and one that financially provides me with the means to take care of myself. In fact, I’ve probably created far more of a legacy for myself than I might have trying to compete with all the Madonna’s of the world.
This entry was written by , posted on December 9, 2009 at 9:00 am, filed under three naked ladies and tagged porn, strippers. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
For as a long as there’s been music, women have danced for the entertainment and titillation of men. Scheherazade. Minsky’s Burlesque. Cage dancing go-go girls in the psychedelic 60’s. Times Square strippers, pole dancers and lap dancers. Women dance….Men watch.
Naked Ladies get around! Look for the 3 Naked Ladies and a new topic every Wednesday on laurishaw.com, $pread magazine online or thedirtygirldiaries.com
This week on Three Naked Ladies, the legendary Georgina Spelvin sits in for Jodi Sh. Doff.
Georgina Spelvin: My childhood was spent “on the road.” The only real friend I had was a girl who lived across the street from my uncle in Jasper, Texas. I spent a week or two at their house every summer until I was about twelve. She and I connected again in the early 90s. Georgina Spelvin is a stage name, so she never knew. When she learned about my “secret life in porn,” she was thrilled and delighted. Probably more so than I ever was.
Lauri Shaw: But, you started in Broadway musicals, right? Were your peers in the mainstream judgmental of your decision to go into porn?
GS: I didn’t make any lasting friendships in the world of musical comedy. It was always “I loved you, Baby, but the show closed.” Because of this itinerant life, others’ opinions of me, or anything else for that matter - held little weight.
LS: The 90s class system went like this: feature entertainer porn stars like Jenna Jameson or Janine Lindemulder were at the top; then came girls from Scores, Tens, and VIP; mid-level topless girls from say, Flashdancers next, after which came the girls at topless dives. Girls like me who removed their panties were close to the bottom of the heap. It was strange — we made more money than the girls in many of the topless clubs. But you definitely lost status the minute you showed cooch.
Rachel Aimee: Yes, girls at the high-end clubs can be really snobby about dive bar strippers because we make our money in dollar bills instead of twenties, but the reality is that the dollar bills often add up to more than the twenties after the high-end club girls pay out their $100-plus house fees.
LS: In the nude clubs, there was always someone whining, “I didn’t sell a bottle because I don’t do blow jobs like all these other bitches.” If someone was openly turning tricks, she was low on the totem pole. There was a lot of hypocrisy.
RA: Strippers look down on peepshow girls because they take their bottoms off and do dildo shows. But, I worked at a peepshow briefly and I found the peepshow girls disparaging about strippers. They would say “at least we work behind glass and don’t touch our customers.”
LS: Human nature doesn’t change, I’m guessing your generation had a pecking order too?
GS: I’m sure there was, but I was just “tap dancin’ as fast as I could” trying to make a living. Making friends was not a big priority.
RA: Most girls move from club to club so quickly that making friends isn’t a priority. There’s this unwritten rule that you don’t talk to the new girl until she’s been there for at least three weeks, because who knows if she’s going to stick around anyway? I’ve worked at several clubs where I never even exchanged so much as a hello with any of the other dancers. I only really made friends at the club where I worked for six years!
GS: I didn’t socialize much with anyone doing the films –I have no idea what they did off the set. Getting cast as Miss Jones was such a fluke. And every sex film I did after that was a case of someone talking me into doing “just one more.” They were a means of getting a few dollars together to pay the rent on the Pickle Factory: the film company our little “collective” of wannabe film makers we were trying to keep going in New York in ‘72. They didn’t pay anything like what they do today, believe me. $100 for the day. That was it.
RA: I’ve always been lazy about doing any kind of sex work other than stripping because stripping can be so low maintenance. You can go in there, make money, then leave work and stop thinking about it. You don’t have to worry about maintaining relationships with clients or agencies or scheduling your life around your job. (Although, of course, there are plenty of strippers whose lives revolve around their jobs — I’ve been privileged enough so far to be able to get by without really throwing myself into it.)
GS: I always thought of myself as an actress - working in the only medium where work was offered to me. Hollywood never called me back. I am very glad to count several of the sex film actors and actresses I’ve met recently - and the few I got back in touch with when writing my memoir, The Devil Made Me Do It, as friends. I’m not terribly active in any causes - sex work related or otherwise. I’m too lazy and very selfish with my time.
RA: Being a part of the sex worker activist community has always been really important to me, as a support network as much as anything else, because it can be so difficult to talk about sex work with outsiders.
LS: What stopped me from doing porn was, I was afraid my father or my brother might inadvertently stumble on the material. Once someone takes a picture of you, you can’t control where it ends up, and it lives forever… weren’t you worried about anyone you knew coming across your work?
GS: When I did my first hard core film, I didn’t know it was to be hard core until we got to that scene. The only “blue movie” I’d ever seen was a short clip of Candy Barr - a famous stripper in her day. She’d given a guy a blow job in a motel room while someone recorded the event with an 8mm “home movie” camera. It was all new to me. No one I knew, nor anyone they knew, knew anything about such things.
At the time, it was $100 a day that was sorely needed to pay the rent on the Pickle Factory. That was all I was thinking about. Trying to remake the world through underground films. If I had had any idea that making The Devil in Miss Jones (not to be confused with The Devil & Miss Jones!) would make Georgina Spelvin a household word, I might have given it some thought…The short answer? It never entered my mind.
This entry was written by , posted on November 4, 2009 at 6:00 am, filed under three naked ladies and tagged porn, strippers. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
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