Excerpt from a work in progress

From the end cred­its, A Girl’s Best Friend, 1981. 

Last month I had a rather unfor­tu­nate staircase-running acci­dent, which res­ul­ted in my hav­ing twenty stitches sewn into the under­side of my left big toe. I thought I might use the being-unable-to-run-or-swim time to catch up on Blu-ray assess­ment (I know I am WAY over­due on a new Consumer Guide, and I’m sorry about that, and I don’t think I’m gonna actu­ally be able to put one togeth­er until the fall weath­er starts set­ting in, the way it’s look­ing) but instead I found the “muse” “call­ing” and I was com­pelled to work on a book pro­ject that I’ve been, for lack of a bet­ter term, dick­ing around with since the turn of the century. 

To my sur­prise and delight, I find now that I have fin­ished it, or, at the very least, the major nar­rat­ive sec­tion of it, and while it’s in an admitedly rough form, it actu­ally exists, as a thing, and I’m now in the pro­cess of get­ting vari­ous people to look at it with the express pur­pose of “shop­ping it around, as they say.” As I feel kind of bad for depriving my audi­ence of blog stuff whilst I worked on this, I thought it would not be remiss to provide the fol­low­ing not just as an excuse, but poten­tially an enter­tain­ment. And so, the first twenty hun­dred words or so of “A Girl’s Best Friend,” which is Chapter One of My LIfe In Pornography. 

    “I don’t think you’re cut out for manu­al labor.” My dad told me that in 1970, when I was ten going on elev­en. My dad was a “route man” for National Foods, which dis­trib­uted Wise Potato Chips through­out Northern and I believe Central New Jersey, and every now and then dur­ing my child­hood, he’d take me out on a run, for which he had to get up every week­day at about four in the morn­ing to get his truck out of the gar­age by six. The truck was small, and single seated, so on those few times I went out with him I had to sit in a fold­ing chair and hang on to a handle by the slid­ing right door. My func­tion would be to help my dad unpack and set up the boxes of snacks at vari­ous super­mar­kets and del­is, and he placed a good amount of pride in the care with which he set up the dis­plays in each par­tic­u­lar store, and tried to impart this expert­ise to me, but I was quite a bit more inter­ested in eat­ing potato chips than in the niceties of their retail dis­play, and also more inter­ested in leaf­ing through a deli’s stock of Warren Magazines (they pub­lished “Vampirella” and “Eerie” and that kind of hor­ror com­ic dreck) than in unload­ing and cut­ting open boxes and stuff. I was a bit of an abstrac­ted child—a “dream­er,” as some of my kin put it, and how I did come to hate that word—and once my dad had rewar­ded me with a curs­ory sum of money for my indif­fer­ent con­tri­bu­tion to his work, I’d go out and squander it on some rock LP that had caught my fancy for whatever reas­on. (The record I bought after the out­ing which had promp­ted my father’s observation—an obser­va­tion made more in resig­na­tion than in anger, I ought to emphasize—was Donovan’s Open Road. Yeah, I dunno either.)

    I can’t say for cer­tain wheth­er I was remem­ber­ing those words—oh, to hell with it, I can pretty much guar­an­tee I was not remem­ber­ing those words—as I stood in a hard­ware store on 8^th Avenue near the Port Authority in New York City one morn­ing in late August of 1980, look­ing for some­thing that I thought was called “duck tape.”  Clearly, though, the ker­nel of my father’s obser­va­tion had held true. Picking up this mys­ter­i­ous  “duck tape” was the first task of what was to be a day full or manu­al labor, and fur­ther evid­ence that this wasn’t really my thing is that, as far as I can remem­ber, the shoes I was wear­ing, and would wear through much if not all of the next two weeks,  were black pat­ent leath­er loafers, which were the only foot­wear avail­able to me at the time. Every time I remem­ber this I can barely believe it. There’s abso­lutely no sense to the idea that even as a 21-year-old I didn’t have the where­with­al to run out and get a cheap pair of Chuck Taylors for a two-week job that entailed a lot of run­ning around and lug­ging stuff. I didn’t have a lot of where­with­al at 21, who does, but still. That sounds like a bit much. And yet that’s what I remem­ber hav­ing on my feet much of the time work­ing as a pro­duc­tion assist­ant on the por­no­graph­ic film A Girl’s Best Friend, which was shoot­ing under the title The Family Jewels.

    How I got the job was this: my friend Ron, on gradu­at­ing from NYU with a film­mak­ing degree, took an entry level pos­i­tion at Quality X Video, on 44^th Street between Eighth and Ninth aven­ues, where he was in charge, or second in charge, of video­tape duplic­a­tion, man­ning a con­sole which ran off cop­ies of VHS cas­settes of “adult” movies. Quality X was the domain of Sam Lake, the one-time grind­house king who turned to hard­core full time after being part of the big Deep Throat score. Lake, like many of his peers in the exploit­a­tion game, had a very alert nose for a buck. For instance, a few months my brief ten­ure in his employ, John Lennon was shot to death. This event triggered a memory in Sam: didn’t he have, in his vault (or wherever it was that he kept the nasty products he’d been churn­ing out for the skeeve cognoscenti since the mid ’60s) a movie in which a young­ish Yoko Ono played a small role, and in fact appeared nude? Indeed he had: the movie was Satan’s Bed, made in 1965 when Ono was a semi-struggling artist in New York, although Sam was wrong about her appear­ing nude in it; she does run around in her under­wear and get smacked around a bit though. In any event, Lake dic­tated a let­ter to Ono send­ing his con­dol­ences on the recent tra­gic events and offer­ing to let her take his print of Satan’s Bed off of his hands for $50,000. Sam’s sec­ret­ary, not a woman of inor­din­ate sen­ti­ment­al­ity, flatly refused to type the let­ter, and that was that. Upstairs from his office, in a small facil­ity, Ron would spend his days keep­ing watch over sev­er­al mon­it­ors as mas­ters of vari­ous porno films played out as they were duplic­ated onto VHS tapes which would retail for some­thing like eighty bucks a pop. (Home video was primar­ily a rent­al mar­ket at that time.) He wound up watch­ing a LOT of porn, which was not some­thing he was neces­sar­ily inter­ested in. I don’t actu­ally know why he took the job in the first place, now that I think of it; I think he was eager to get out from under the wings of his par­ents, who had put him through school but now would be entirely happy for him to come in and help run the fam­ily busi­ness of women’s cloth­ing retail, which he had zero interest in doing.

    I had no such con­cerns. I was still in col­lege, whit­tling down my course load semester after semester, squan­der­ing my col­lege loans on ever more obscure record albums (that sum­mer I found a copy of Henry Cow/Slapp Happy’s In Praise Of Learning at the Soho Music Gallery: score!), and hanging out a lot at the office of the col­lege paper, the Beacon, where I was Arts Editor and unof­fi­cial Enfant Terrible. My par­ents had not busi­ness for me to go into, and were in fact FINALLY get­ting the divorce that had been loom­ing since my dad had taken up with anoth­er woman about five years pri­or. One of my sum­mer “jobs” had been at the stu­dent cen­ter at my school, set­ting up events and stuff. When I wasn’t doing that—and the hours weren’t exactly generous—I worked as the World’s Worst Telemarketer, selling, or rather, not selling, sub­scrip­tions to TV Guide, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone and oth­er Fine Publications to people who would say to me that they would only shell out for such a thing if I could spell the name of the town I was call­ing, in this case being Nacogdoches, and then reneging once real­iz­ing that, of course, I had the name of the town on the card I had with their phone num­ber to call. I don’t know why, exactly, I was the World’s Worst Telemarketer; even in my early twen­ties I had a rel­at­ively pleas­ant, res­on­ant speak­ing voice, and I could read from a script like nobody’s busi­ness, way bet­ter than the oth­er doo­fuses who would start off on the wrongest foot, end­ing their intros with a ques­tion mark. But I couldn’t sell worth shit. I don’t know if my deliv­ery lacked the requis­ite sin­cer­ity; maybe I read from the script too well. In any event, it was likely only my rel­at­ive object­ive com­pet­ence that staved off a fir­ing, but I could kind of feel it coming.

    So late-ish in the sum­mer, when Ron told me that Lake, who was now back­ing one fea­ture pro­duc­tion each year as his busi­ness mod­el shif­ted to video, erm, mon­et­iz­a­tion of his lib­rary, was assem­bling a crew to shoot a new pic­ture, and that there was a pro­duc­tion assist­ant job there for the tak­ing, I was in a not atyp­ic­al “why not?” frame of mind. In 1980 you were pretty much out of the “porno chic” era but still in the time of porn-with-mainstream-ambitions/pretentions. Lake had not named his out­fit Quality X for noth­ing. This pic­ture was going to be shot on 35mm, with Panavision cam­er­as, by a highly pro­fes­sion­al out­fit headed by a guy who was best known these days for his stel­lar on-the-fly work for the proto-reality TV series That’s Incredible. It would amount to Invaluable Technical Experience for someone inter­ested in work­ing in film. Ron would take it him­self, except he’d have to accept his pay being docked for those two weeks from $200 a week to $50 a week, which he couldn’t afford. For me, who was just sort of sleep­ing on pull-outs at vari­ous res­id­ences whose rents were being paid by friends or a par­ent or anoth­er, this was not so much a prob­lem. As for “inter­ested in work­ing in film,” I was mainly inter­ested in not work­ing but I seemed to be com­ing to an age where I’d have to make some adjust­ments in that area. So I said sure.

    Still, a porn film. That might be a little weird. Not to worry, Ron assured me; all the sex stuff was shot on a “closed set.” I’d carry and set up lights and reflect­ors and go back to the truck and ima­gine I was work­ing on a “real” movie. If that’s what I preferred.

    Others were not so san­guine about this temp gig. I had a din­ner at the log cab­in in Wayne, N.J., that my mom and dad split spend­ing time at as their mar­riage under­went its final dis­sol­u­tion and they made rather drawn-out arrange­ments to get rid of the place and set up house­keep­ing, sep­ar­ately, else­where. The log cab­in had been the final geo­graph­ic­al my dad and mom pulled before everything fell apart for good, and I’ve always felt a little guilty over it, and I’m sure my young­er sis­ter, a year my juni­or, feels sim­il­arly. At the time they got the cab­in, the only kid liv­ing “at home” was my high-school age broth­er, and the house was a rel­at­ively cozy, con­geni­al fit for three and poten­tially a good space for a rebuild­ing of rela­tions but then I had one roommate/girlfriend/whatever situ­ation go all wobbly so crawl­ing back I came to the new old homestead, and in the mean­while my sis­ter messed up juni­or col­lege up in Boston, and she came crawl­ing back with an affected Southie accent, and there we all were again, one big happy fam­ily, which was actu­ally hardly the idea. So one night, my sis­ter and my broth­er and I were din­ing with Mom, as she was in charge of the house that even­ing, and I laid out that I was doing this thing and I was gonna crash most nights in Brooklyn at my uncle’s place or maybe at my pseudo-quasi-girlfriend’s or some­thing, but it didn’t make sense giv­en the poten­tially errat­ic hours for me to try to com­mute from the more rus­tic depths of Wayne into the city every day blah blah blah, and my sis­ter com­plained to our moth­er, “I can’t BELIEVE you’re let­ting Glenn work on a PORNO MOVIE. If I was in a porno movie you’d have a FIT.”  Our poor moth­er, who had a bunch of oth­er things on her mind, only one of which, I ima­gine, was the ques­tion as to how she’d man­aged to be blessed with this gaggle of idi­ot chil­dren, rolled her eyes and said, “Well, your brother’s not going to be IN the film, he’s going to be set­ting up lights for it. OF COURSE I’d have a fit if you were in a porno movie.” She looked at me mean­ing­fully. “Still…”

    “It’s okay, mom, really. They’re shoot­ing it on Panavision cameras!”