The Mammoth Book of International Erotica

GINCH by Michael Perkins

YEARS AGO YOU probably would have recognized Parker Coleman’s name. Parker Coleman – wasn’t he one of the movers and shakers who put together the Woodstock Festival? A record producer? One of four guys Bob Dylan slugged in 1968?

Parker popped up everywhere in the sixties; it was a decade he always claimed he invented. Certainly he exploited it better than almost anyone else I’ve heard of under thirty. Parker was a Zen hustler with a beard before the words “hippie” and “businessman” were joined together by Time magazine. While the rest of us floated lazily downstream on what we had been told was the current of history, smoking good weed and blithely awaiting the news that the revolution of consciousness had swept the board room of General Motors and the Pentagon, Parker made a few grand by swimming upstream – hawking psychedelic buttons, T-shirts, records, rock magazines and concerts, and once even a child guru from Ceylon named Bubba Sammy.

You might say that Parker saw us coming, because he was always paddling the other way. So he made money in the sixties, and he got a lot of ginch – his word for fuckable women.

Ginch. Think about it, because it will tell you everything you need to know about Parker’s attitude toward women. His Kansas accent, overlaid with the street black’s drawl he’d picked up, stretched the middle of the word like a rubber band.

Since his reputation as a cocksman was nearly as great as his reputation as a hustler, Parker had ample opportunity to select candidates for his private stable of ginch from among the finest examples of concupiscent American womanhood. There always seemed to be two or three twenty-two-year-old deep-breasted, deep-fried long-legged blondes dressed in eye-popping T-shirts trailing him as he moved from appointment to appointment, usually in a limousine. It was boom time.

Then one morning Parker woke up in a rented house in Topanga Canyon, and the sixties were over. National Guardsmen at Kent State shot the shit out of them. The seventies dawned gray and cold, and Parker’s tired Aquarian customers – a generation of big-eyed Keane children – went home to catch some Zs. When they woke up, they began looking around for jobs.

Parker had overextended himself financially. When his customers disappeared back into the middle class from whence they’d come, he was wiped out. An overnight has-been.

Decline is somehow more uncomfortable to bear in California than in colder places where people work for a living, so Parker returned to his native city of New York and took a loft on Varick Street in Soho where he could meditate and try to figure out his next move. It didn’t take him long to come up with the idea of making pornographic movies: low investment, high return, and ginch to boot.

In short order he had established himself as the boy wonder of porno films. Small distinction, perhaps, but his own. He cranked them out in his loft like home movies, which is what the loops you see in porno theatres basically are – good old American home movies full of fucking, sucking, golden showers, S/M, and come facials for the apple-cheeked girls Parker recruited from his stock of ginch.

The first time I talked with him on the telephone, he was getting ready to shoot his first feature film, a rip-off of Charlie’s Angels that – naturally – he called Parker’s Angels. He woke me out of a sound Tequila-induced sleep into one of the worst hangovers that ever sank its claws into man’s cerebellum.

“Yeah?”

“Nick, this is Parker Coleman. Grinning Bare Productions, you know.”

He sounded like Ralph Williams selling used cars on television. I moved the receiver a few inches from my ear and picked dirt from between my toenails while I listened. I used to meet him a lot at parties, but we’d never spent more than five minutes together. What he wanted was for me to write a script for him. He’d seen stuff I’d done in the underground papers and I guess he figured I was good enough to do the job for him, and poor enough to accept the postage stamps he wanted to pay me with.

He was right, of course. I was two months behind on the rent, and Con Edison had already turned off my electric typewriter, freeing me to spend more time in the air-conditioned comfort of my favorite saloon, a small establishment on Sheridan Square where I was running up a tab as long as my arm.

“I’m not talking peanuts, Nick. This is big time. Parker’s Angels is going to revolutionize the business. I know how to publicize a film, if you don’t know my reputation. Gerry Damiano is small potatoes, if you know what I mean.”

“I’ve heard of you,” I allowed. Grudgingly, because tiny golfers were using my brain for a driving range.

“Isn’t that title great? Parker’s Angels. Tell me it isn’t great. And we’re going to have the greatest collection of ginch – prime California stuff – you ever saw.”

I put the phone closer to my ear, perking up at the thought of Marilyn Chambers doing her number while I looked on, script in one hand, my rod in the other. I’d never written a porno film before, but even through a hangover, the perquisites were tantalizing. I get horny when I’m hung over, and all I could see was a vision of Marilyn rehearsing song and dance numbers on my stiff prick. I agreed to visit Parker in his loft that afternoon.

Three hours later I was panting up the steep wooden stairs to Parker’s loft. On his metal door in gold lettering were the words: