The Mammoth Book of International Erotica

1 Hot Nazis

I was riding on the 7 Haight bus to my massage job downtown when I sat down next to a thin friendly blonde girl. She was on her way to the clap clinic. She said she had clap of the throat. She might have gotten it from a girl she had worked with on a porno film. I had never met anyone who’d done porn before, or even seen any for that matter. She said she was working for these really nice guys called the Mitchell Brothers and told me just to call their theater if I wanted to work.

I was very excited by the idea. I had just started to get into S amp;M: having boyfriends who liked to tie me up or spank me, biting hard, doing things that left marks and looking at my own marks after a long night. I thought I was about as kinky and decadent as anyone. I called after thinking about it for a few days. I went to an interview at the O’Farrell Theater and was confused by the incredible similarity between the two brothers. They were fine-boned, relatively small men, with a way of making the bizarre seem totally routine. The older brother was Jim, the younger, Artie. They asked me if I’d ever done this sort of work before and I said no, but that I was a masochist and loved to be beaten and they could really do it if they wanted. There was a list of other things they asked if I would do. I said yes to them all. They told me they were going to do a series of short, very hardcore films called Ultra Core.

A few days later I went to a large brick building in the Tenderloin. It’s across from Hyde Street Studios now. I was overweight and not nearly as flashy as the other women, but much more enthusiastic. They had this outrageously beautiful makeup woman who was also from Fresno. Years later she would fall in love with my friend Patty at my wedding.

The title of the film was Hot Nazis and I was to play a lesbian Jew. I was very impressed when I heard Michael Bloomfield was writing the music. There were no scripts.

One room was a reproduction of a bleak concrete bunker. At one end was a large radio. On the wall to the left was a barbed wire cage filled with straw and bones, fresh bones from cattle legs. There was a large wiry German shepherd gnawing on one of the bones. Myself and a girl named Virginia were to be in the cage. I took her aside to find out if she really liked women. She did. She had done a lot of this work before. We were given torn thermal underwear to wear and smudged up a little. The first scene to be shot was of us getting it on in the straw. I had no idea having an audience would get me off so much. Virgina knew the ropes and nothing was faked. I was pretty submissive. She gave ferocious head and finger fucked me until I screamed.

The crew applauded our first scene. Then Artie (in retrospect I know it was Artie) asked me if I would fuck the dog. It boggled my mind. I wanted to be a trooper, but the dog! I declined and Virgina attempted to get the dog aroused. The dog growled. They left him alone.

The rest of the action focused around a tall gaunt man named Vernon, who played head Nazi and his girlfriend Enjil, a beautiful Nordic woman. There were several men playing Gestapo guards and a woman with dark hair named Monique. They did some scenes of the guards fucking one another and the girls, and then it was my turn again. I was to be held down on a table and screwed by Vernon. Everyone was doing hits off a full bottle of liquid amyl nitrate. I was lying on my back and he started out by running a riding crop across my body. Slowly he began tapping it on the insides of my thighs. He hit harder and harder, at which point my girlfriend was supposed to pull him off and he was to continue by screwing me. Only he wouldn’t stop whipping me. Every time he lifted the crop there would be a bright new red stripe on my body. She tried to pull him off and he pushed her into the barbed wire that was wrapped around the cage. He returned to continue beating me now for real. He was laying the whip into my very white skin as hard as he could. Finally Virginia yelled “CUT!” to the cameramen. They realized we weren’t just acting and subdued Vernon. In the film the welts were unbelievable. Virginia’s leg bled real blood from the barbed wire.

They wanted just one final insertion shot on the table. I lay down, face up. I asked Monique for a hit of the amyl nitrate. She tilted the bottle and poured the whole thing up my nose and into my eyes. The burning was unbelievable. I jumped up screaming, and then I started rushing. It was like I’d shot speed and jumped off a cliff at the same time. Everything was buzzing and my ears were ringing and I couldn’t get my breath. Jim had gotten water and was flushing my face with it. I knew I was going to have a seizure. I knew I was going to be blind. I knew I should go to the hospital. It was the most total, complete panic I’ve ever had.

In the space adjacent to the Hot Nazis set was a room with an elaborate bed. It had been used in a scene from the brothers’ film, Sodom and Gomorrah. I lay there for a long time while they continued to shoot the movie. I finally realized I wasn’t going to die, that I was a lesbian Jew in a storage building in the Tenderloin of San Francisco. Artie came in to see how I was. We had sex for the first time and I finally felt the cord being cut from the tule fog and tract houses that had been my home.

2 Dabbling in S amp;M

I never have liked going nude. I have rarely been thin enough to be proud of my body. I’m thick through the waist. I have almost no tits. I have great confidence in my face and legs, but as far as my torso is concerned, I would just as soon leave it covered up. I’ve had a few boyfriends who were very comfortable nude.

I also get cold very easily, but I just don’t like people to look at my naked body. It’s not shyness. It is simply that I feel I cannot pass muster. I’ve been with and around so many beautiful sexy women, it has left me humble in that regard. A lot of men like to look at your body, like when you’re walking across the room. That bothers me. I never felt confident unless I was actually making body contact. I knew I was better at the tactile than the visual.

I think my hating to be nude in front of people is why I got off so much on the movies. I got off from proving how hot I was, if not pretty, and because of the adrenaline from being terrified. I was lucky they didn’t require any acting. I was way too scared to think clearly, but it made the sex great. The best part came afterwards, rehashing the films in my mind. I would be in retrospective bliss for weeks after a shoot.

When I was twenty-two I made up a list of everyone I could recall having had sex with. It was nearly two hundred people in length. Apparently I was active before the AIDS epidemic. I was unbelievably lucky on that one. Only two of them were real tricks, everything else was in films or for recreation.

Late in 1975 I answered an ad in one of the sex magazines that said they were looking for nude bondage models. It sounded like good, non-boring work. I called and talked to a man who seemed pretty lucid and straightforward. His name was Ron Reynolds or something close to that. Anyway, his initials were R.R. He had a little S amp;M Victorian in Oakland. I remember I’d never ridden BART, the local subway system, and I rode BART over from San Francisco. He picked me up in a stationwagon that smelled like a dog. He dressed like he sold cars, and seemed very gentle and polite. He wore very thick glasses with black frames that made his eyes look intense and maybe a little psychotic, but not enough to make me uncomfortable.

We drove to his house and I could still smell the dog. The place was divided into different torture rooms, with women attending them who dressed in leather, looked cold and unforgiving, and did domination scenes with men. There was never any standard sex. And this Ron guy was that way with me. Everyone I had done nude modeling for at that point had tried to fuck me, but he didn’t try. It seems when sadists and masochists really become purist, The Scene is the whole thing, and the pain or the mood or the concept replaces orgasm and generic sexual activity.

We went to a room where he did photography. There was a large Irish setter sleeping in a shipping kennel. The door was open and she was very friendly, but she was the source of the omnipresent smell of dog. I was getting around fifty dollars an hour. The twisted pros of the industry really liked me even though I wasn’t the standard tits-and-hair nude model. I was trusting, good natured, liberal, and incredibly submissive.

He had me model a number of weird leather arrangements. One was a leather hood with no holes in it, except one to breathe through. It pulled over your head like a falcon’s hood. My hands were handcuffed behind me. I posed in a number of positions for about an hour: on my knees with my head bowed, or lying on my side on the floor under a floodlight, or sitting backwards in a chair. I never felt fear. It took me a long time to learn fear.

After the shoot he told me he really liked me. He had several live-in slaves and wanted me to join the crew. I thought it could be fun. It seemed like the beginning of an interesting cult.

On my second visit they began my initiation. He gave me a name with his initials in it: Morrow. All of his slaves had his initials in their name. Two pretty young girls came in, one was a young blonde with a gold ring through one lip of her pussy. I thought it looked great. I was told not to make eye contact with anyone and to always respond to Ron as Sir. That was hard to do with a straight face.

I was told to kneel in front of a bad painting of a woman with her head bowed. While I recited lines of devotion and submission, they whipped me. It was tremendously exciting and it hurt just enough. They had the line between pleasure and pain memorized.

They had a cool set-up for doing pain scenes. Beforehand they would give you a key word. If things ever got too heavy you could just say the word and things would stop.

I bellied up on living there. My main objection was that the place was tacky. If Ron had money or taste, I think I could have bought into it. But the furniture was ugly and old, the house smelled like that damn dog, and Ron was no prize. When I left that day, I thought, if I’m going to be a slave, I’m going to be a rich slave. The Story of O became my bible.

After seeing the blonde girl at Ron’s and reading The Story of O, I decided to pierce my labia. I’d been working on films with a lot of other girls who had various piercings: labia, nipples, noses. I thought a gold ring looked pretty sexy. It was also like a badge showing how hardcore you really were. I didn’t know any of the technicalities of correct piercing. I took a couple of pain killers and got out a large upholstery needle. I did clean it with alcohol. I’d gotten a small gold self-piercing hoop to put in after I’d made the hole. My friend Patty came over to watch. She was intrigued. She and I had watched each other do some pretty bizarre things.

It was hard to get the needle to go through because the skin was very thick and rubbery. I had to really push and ended up having to put a cork behind it and then pushed it through. Bled like mad, got the earring in. Swelled so much in a day I wasn’t able to walk. It was shiny and swollen and felt like red ants had nested there. I couldn’t even think of wearing pants. By the third day I gave up, I pulled it out. It started healing within twelve hours and was completely healed in two days. It was miraculous.

I found out how to do proper piercing much later on. What you do is start on antibiotics a week before you do it and continue to take them for a week after. It cuts down on the grief I went through. I’ve met a lot of people over the years into ritualist piercing. They all used antibiotics.

3 Lower Haight

The most depressing place I’ve ever lived was at the bottom of Haight Street near Market. My apartment was in a three-story building that had originally been three flats, but they had been divided in half lengthwise to make six apartments. I lived in one of the back three where you had to use the outside stairs. I was living on SSI for being crazy, writing a lot of tortured poetry, taking drugs and screwing my brains out, like some people do on SSI.

I met Joanne while living on Lower Haight. She was the hottest woman I’ve ever known. When I met her we were both doing live all-girl sex shows at the O’Farrell Theater. My friend Artie took me to the dressing room on my first day and introduced us.

She was sitting on a table in front of a make-up mirror smoking a cigarette and wearing only a beat-up motorcycle jacket. With her laconic expression, her long naked legs, her short brown pubic hair, and her tiny nipples against the heavy gold zipper of the jacket, she looked like one of Warhol’s women: jaded, bored and beautiful. She had gigantic cool and the prettiness of an East Coast socialite gone bad. She looked me up and down and sounding like Nico on Valium, she said, “I can’t wait to get to work.”

It turned me on completely. From then on it was a competition to see who could be the most hardcore and the coolest. Doing shows with her was more fun than I’d ever had.

Our first time together was in the Ultra Room when it first opened. The Mitchell Brothers had come back from a visit to New York with the idea. The entire room was upholstered in black leather and measured about ten by fifteen feet in length. There were ropes and pulleys hanging from the ceiling with square mirrors set into the wall at eye level. All the girls could see their own reflection, but from outside the customers could see in. Two or three women would work the room at the same time, giving head to each other, using dildos, or just masturbating for the audience.

We started the show with three women in the room. We would flirt and kiss and hump each other, rapidly getting more and more bold until we were screaming and carrying on like mad women. I was on my period and Joanne gave me head. It wasn’t pretty.

Here’s what made it even more memorable: Herb Caen, a local newspaper columnist, had come to the O’Farrell that night. He brought a member of the Rockefeller clan, who had to go outside to throw-up after watching us. I’m sure it was better to do than see. The next day Caen said in his column that the show was the most disgusting thing he’d ever seen. Business tripled.

Joanne had a son who was six years old. He’d grown up around drag queens in the Castro District. He knew more about sexual aberrations than most adults, and would do gut-wrenching impersonations of drag queens trying to pick up tricks. Joanne got into angel dust, which I couldn’t handle. But there was a lot of this other drug called MDMA around (now they call it Ecstasy). I would score it at Toad Hall on Castro Street. We shot it up a number of times and made love. It made you incredibly sensitive and horny. We thought we’d achieved sexual enlightenment.

We went to gay bars sometimes after work and would see how outrageous we could be, like I would give her head on the dance floor while she danced and held a martini in her hand. She loved being passionate in public, and so did I. Rumor had it Joanne had even fist fucked a gay guy on the bar at the Stud on Folsom Street. She made me feel like Pollyanna. I was in awe. I get total recall when I think of Joanne.

Also while living on Lower Haight, I befriended a strange photographer who called one night and asked me if I’d like to go meet his coke connection in the wine country and be like a present to him. I’d never been a present before and agreed.

The coke dealer was a big, gentle man who collected guitars and antiques, and had lots of dogs. The photographer also brought a beautiful girl who was about nineteen. She had thick chestnut hair and a Playboy Bunny body. Her name was Arrega. The two guys wanted to see us make love but she refused, and later asked me if she could come to my house the next day.

She moved in for a month and the photographer was crushed. It gave me great pleasure to watch men go nuts over her and then find out she was with me. She turned tricks on Polk Street occasionally while I was taking Isadora Duncan dance lessons at California Hill. We slept together but I was very jealous because she was still seeing men and ultimately threw her out.

After Arrega, I had an affair with a gangster and his wife. I first met them at a couples party in Oakland. We did three ways for a while, but as usual in those situations, I fell heavily for the woman. She was a tall, svelte submissive blonde he had rescued from the streets. I saw her alone for about six months while he was doing a short stretch of time in jail.

She disappeared and after he got out, while he was searching for her, I slept with him alone. He always had great drugs. He slept with a.357 Magnum under the pillow, which seemed kind of exciting to me for a while, then some remnant of common sense burst through when I heard at the bathhouse that the Hell’s Angels had a contract out on him. Then Sonny Barger, the Oakland Hell’s Angels leader, called my house to threaten him. I went back to my mother’s house in Oroville for a while to chill out. I saw him on the Bay Area tv news, talking about his wife’s disappearance through a voice processor with a mask on.

That was followed by a relationship with a fastidious hippie guy who worked for the Post Office, had been to Afghanistan (and never recovered), and could fuck like a man possessed. He was hunky but a little too chubby, with flawless auburn hair to his shoulders and a full beard. He decided to rescue me.

We’d been having polite dinners and good sex. He didn’t shoot-up and had a nice apartment in the Avenues. I never cooked at my house and there were always dirty dishes in the sink. We’d had pizza one night and had slept at my place. For breakfast I’d decided to heat the pizza and blithely turned on the oven to heat, going into the other room for a few minutes. When I returned the entire top of the stove was covered with cockroaches. Big ones, baby ones. They were jumping around on the hot stove, and were so thick you couldn’t see the top. I guess they’d been breeding in the oven.

I realized my life was grimmer than I really wanted, that maybe I had suffered enough for art, and moved into his apartment in the Avenues.

4 Tahoe

The first porno people I worked with besides the Brothers were from Los Angeles. The word around was that they were Mafia-backed. A lot of LA people came to shoot porn in San Francisco at that time because it was a lot less likely they would get busted here.

The people who “acted” in these films had a tremendous network going. I found I could call anyone who I’d worked with or even heard of and ask them about a potential employer. If someone didn’t pay at the end of the shoot, or was horrible to work with, the word spread like lightning. I had about four pages of notes listing producers’ names, and the opinions of other actors and their past experiences with them.

The first duo I worked with from LA were really sleazy. They wanted to make a ski-oriented film and were going to take the entire cast to Tahoe for a week. They also brought along a skiing coach, some camera men and the director’s dad. We got a huge house at Northstar.

The director’s dad liked to tell stories. He had been a hobo for a time and would tell about hopping freight trains and drinking sterno. I had never heard of such a thing. They would drain the fluid out of sterno cans used to heat food and mix it with Tokay grape wine. They called it Tokay and Squeezins. I couldn’t believe he was still alive.

They had asked me to shave my crotch for the shoot, which I did but the second day I had broken out with razor burn. It was hideous. It looked like prime teenage acne all over my pubic area.

When we went skiing, it was a disaster. I had not skied since I was seven years old, and had very poor balance and muscle control. My dance teachers had always called it “your neurological problem”, but it was a little more vague than that. My first time down the bunny hill I broke through the surface of a frozen-over creek and was totally drenched in ice water. The woman who played my favorite girlfriend in the film sprained her ankle and it became grossly swollen.

Our first scene together in the shower was shot the next morning around my razor burn and her ankle. Mostly I gave her head. The level of sexual excitement was so intense that everyone said they’d have to re-shoot the rest of the film to bring it up to our level. We could make each other come just by looking at each other.

We hung out together at the house when everyone else went out to the casinos at night. She had brought some heroin with her and we would smoke it and make love. It was like camp for decadent San Franciscans. I had never gotten to go to real camp because of my asthma.

On the third night there I had returned to my own bed to sleep and had a grand mal seizure. It was generally controlled by a drug called Dilantin, but I think the heroin cut right through. I woke up on the floor with a number of people I did not recognize staring down at me. I had wet my pants. I did not know where I was. It was several hours before my memory came back. The girl I had been with held me and stayed with me until I got reoriented. I had never had a seizure in front of strangers before but everyone handled it well.

I think the film was called Snowballing or something like that. I made a couple of hundred dollars a day and it was nice to get out of the city. I never saw the finished product.

Here’s how I ended up with epilepsy:

I was a tremendously emotional, spoiled, asthmatic child who loved horses. I was stick thin and pale, and the floor of my room was stained from the ever-present vaporizer. My parents bought me a horse when I was ten to encourage me to be active, and to shut me up.

We found a totally wild, part-Morgan pinto mare up north in a town near Oroville called Bangor. We managed to tame her to some extent but she was always pretty crazy. She was even going over fences after about a year. I had a British ex-cavalry riding instructor who wasn’t there the day of the accident, but my father was and some visitors from LA. I was jumping a course of fences about four feet high and wearing a helmet that was not appropriate for jumping. The real “brain-bucket” style has a wide leather chin strap. This had elastic. My horse took a bad fence, caught the pole above her knees, crashed on the far side and did a somersault. I was under her at the time.

They say the saddle held her weight off me and that I was probably hit in the head by a stirrup iron. When they took me to the Children’s Hospital I was walking and talking but remembering nothing. The doctors sent me home. My mother was there and being a nurse, saw that my pupils were radically different from one another, a sure sign of a serious head injury. She took me to another hospital where it was determined I had a fractured skull. I didn’t remember anything for three or four days. I returned home after a week in the hospital and this part I remember like a photograph. I was walking to the refrigerator for orange juice when I felt a big pressure on my forehead, then I felt tremendously drunk. I woke up with my face under the water heater, staring at thick dust motes and the pilot light, my legs wet with piss, and my mother saying, “You’ve had a seizure, just relax.”

My body ached for days, as if I’d been bucked off a horse.

5 Highway 1

I came down the stairs with my little dog to answer the door at six in the morning, wearing only a long black and orange bathrobe. I was excited about seeing the man who was waiting there because I didn’t get to see him very often, and then only at his whim.

He had called at 5.30, drug-crazed, belligerent and exciting, demanding that I throw out whoever was in my bed, which I did. His name was Artie Mitchell and I had met him when I worked on my first porno film. He had continued to call after the work was through. Being addicted to bizarre sex, he was the only person I’d ever met who had no fear of the physical or chemical edge.

There was an air of chaos and sleazy glamor that permeated his life, now confirmed by the silver limo at the curb driven by his hunky blonde cousin who smiled as I was pulled without resisting into the back seat littered with children’s toys. I’d heard his wife was fertile.

I complained to him that I hadn’t locked my apartment door and he told me with drunken gallantry that he would replace whatever was stolen. There wasn’t much there anyway.

He had an uncommon ability for calling when I was on my period, but it wasn’t really that hard because I was bleeding more often than not. We did some cocaine and soon were humping like mink on the approach to the Golden Gate Bridge. Being concerned about the nice gray velour seats I told him I was bleeding heavily. He told me he didn’t care. We had hot, wet, mad menstrual sex on the bridge at sunrise, filling the back seat with orgasms while my little dog slept peacefully on the floor.

We took a break on the road to Mount Tam, where he pulled out a wad of money and wiped the blood off me and himself. He threw the bloody money on the floor with the dog and lit a joint.

Heading north on Highway 1, we picked up a suntanned girl hitchhiker with tangled blonde hair like the morning after. She was happy to be picked up by a limousine but after we’d started up again she saw the puppy and the blood money and got nervous. He teased her for being squeamish, and asked me to recite some poems. After she heard them, she asked to get out. We pulled over and left her by the roadside. We accelerated our intake of drugs.

We drove another hour up the perfect California coastline, then turned off on a dirt road that led to a little trailer with a small group of people standing around and sitting in lawn chairs drinking beer. We got out of the car and he told me they were his relatives. There was a sweet comfortable woman in her fifties who he said was his aunt. I was in my bathrobe with no shoes on. She was nice to me anyway.

The men had just been abalone diving. They were telling extravagant stories with their hands. I was astounded that my friend would ask anyone to meet relatives in my condition, but they took it well. They joked that they thought someone had died when they saw the limo in the driveway.

We stayed too long and he renewed his drunkenness with beer and hot sun well into the afternoon. When we finally left, we stood up in the open sunroof and made bird noises, calling to the crows.

We resumed our passionate fucking as we returned to the city. The tinted windows amplified the darkness, smudging the edges of things. It was late when we arrived and he wanted to eat, so we went to Japantown where they didn’t care that I had no shoes. I ate sushi for the first time, and being so high it seemed to slither down my throat.

A week later I got a card from him: the ace of spades folded in a dollar bill covered with dried blood. I framed it and hung it on the wall.