Tom Swift is Alive and Well and Making Dildos

What Joys Hath Disney World for a Lad Whose Daddy Owns a Dildo Factory?

Leaf through any sex-aid catalog--past dancing dingers and squirt bananas and Piece Grease--and you have to figure there's a gnomish, spittle-flecky creep, a hunchback with coarse hair over the kidneys, who sits chained to his Whoopee cushion someplace, thinking up all this fatuous, supergrunge sexual flotsam. Not so: Steve Marché, 28, of Marché Manufacturing, seems as brisk and innocent as the check-out-counter kid who put your six-pack on top of your dozen eggs at Grand Union last week. Marché is the most energetic sex-aid company around.

"My father carved our first dildo at the dining-room table, while we were having dinner," Steve says. Will Dad carve? He's carving already, can't you see that? While meat or pink-orange?

"The three of us, Mom, Dad and I, worked in a 15-foot-square room. When I wasn't in school, I did whatever I could." Hey, Steve, want to play stickball after school? No, gotta help my father get his dicks out.

"Basically, we had three sizes: small, medium and large--five, six, seven and a half inches in length. They were prosthetic; they strapped on. Then people requested larger. So we went from five by one and a half inches to nine by two. These were done in plastic vinyl. Originally, we cut them out of balsawood. From that, the molds were made out of metal. You couldn't buy them, you couldn't buy anything. Our machines in the back, they're made by us. At first we were in mail order very big. A lot of letters came in, describing what people wanted. A lot of pictures came in. Oh, a lot of pictures. 'I want a bigger head, a smaller head, a larger stalk.' On an average of 10,000 pieces ordered, we found that 55 percent were in the medium--six inches."

In those early hand-carved years, Steve was more research assistant than commercial pervert. "We used to go through the libraries. A lot of books, hard-to-get books, and engravings in the archives. A lot of our stuff was designed from an old book that showed illustrations of erotic carvings in old caves. Mostly caves in India and the Orient."

If you could fire dildos from a trench mortar, there'd be ammo enough in Marché's in-house showroom to wipe out three platoons and one field kitchen. Plus blow-up Judy dolls. Plus curious novelties such as the ever-popular Penis Pacifier "for women who talk too much." Some were inspired by archival research or customer feedback; some by the Marchés themselves. But many have been imported--thought up by Germans and Hong Kongese with kidney hair. The finest rubber comes from Germany. You get good vibes (battery powered) from Asia. Yet there is risk involved with imports; sex can lose in the international translation.

"The artificial vagina we designed sold tremendously. One of our competitors copied it, sent it to Hong Kong and ordered 10,000 in flesh color." Marché grins. "They came back yellow. And when they looked at the sleeves--instead of three inches in diameter, so you have plenty of room to move around in--they came back the size of a quarter. Try getting into a quarter. Rotsa ruck." Now we know why Pearl Harbor was bombed: penis envy.

As sexual technicians, the Marchés, père and fils, are bozo-sharp. Take your standard clit stimulator--all those pointy little rubber scratching posts that goose a female starter button when you've got the clit stim ringtossed around your tree root. Right off, Ted Marché knew how to manufacture one.

"Dad cut it out of a welcome mat, took home the piece and made some plaster molds. And the first vibrating dildo was designed by us. It was a little black box that strapped to a penis. Of course, if you're playing with a dildo, you don't want to lose it. A lot of stuff goes up people's things, either end. So Dad says, 'Gee, I gotta put something on the end.' So he made a dong with a base. It's not funny. Right now, there isn't anybody Who makes a vibrator with a handle or a string or a base. A guy was playing with a vibrator with no base, got it lost up his friend's goodie. Rushed him to the hospital. The doctor says, 'Aha. A vibrator extraction.' Proceeds to get the forceps and extracts it with a little problem of moving and angling--and it's still vibrating, good batteries in it--gets it out, drops it onto the stainless-steel tray. Plunk. And he says, 'Nurse, please clean up.' It's all dirty, of course. And the nurse comes over and whispers, 'Did you want this?' And he says, 'Hell, yes--I paid $9.95 for that.'" Me, I'd like to see the Blue Cross form he filled out.

While eagle scouts his age were helping old women across the street, Steve Marché was helping them across the menopause. He also fashioned toys, toys that, you betcha, he was the first (and last) on his block to have.

"Years back, when I was a kid, I said, 'Hey, Dad, give me some peckers.' I went out to the store and got some real small speakers, took apart some walkie-talkies and made myself a pecker walkie-talkie. Then I thought, Well, that's not good enough. So I came up with an AM radio. I made two balls: One ball was for tuning, one ball was the On-Off and volume knob and in the head was the speaker. All kinds of things. Salt and pepper shakers. Motorcyde handle grips. I didn't make any volume off it. I just did it for fun."

Fun. That's my long-seasoned assessment of sex-aid people: They're enjoying themselves. Sex should be play--right up there with pinochle and miniature golf. I think we'd all be healthier if we could dial one ball and tune in Cousin Brucie or Wolfman Jack. Not always, just now and then.

Tom Swift, Jr., has it out with a young Philanthropist of sex, who puts it back, politely

In a way, this is the tale of two young men. Steve Marché and Farley Malorrus are both 28. Farley is president of United Sales (hereinafter referred to as U. S.). In the sex-aid line, U. S. has probably filled more cracks than a bathtub-grout manufacturer. Young Farley looks all-Hollywood: Mod glasses, vehement verbal style, with one of those nondescript religious emblems around his neck, one that wouldn't offend in cathedral or synagogue or Teamster hiring hall. He speaks Ecumenical fluently. Somehow, I can't picture Farley on all fours cutting clit stims out of a welcome mat.

U. S. (its parent firm is traded nationally over the counter) doesn't excel in sex innovation, but it's superb in cut-rate marketing: low price, volume, huge stock. It began in St. Louis 40 years ago, a premium house: watches, jewelry, perfume. That hasn't changed, which fact makes U. S. slightly schizoid. There are two showrooms: premium stuff, the ego, up front; sex trappings, the id, down a hall and to your left. As for superego, Farley supplies that. "We backed into the sexual-novelty business." Free enterprise, doggie style. "My father is a very ambitious man. By accident, he got into this business because wholesale distributors had a demand."

Vibrators gave U. S. its first profitable sex buzz after Malorrus, Sr., bought rights to the Stim-Vib. "You see, wholesale business was suffering because large companies were importing direct, instead of buying from distributors--or were making things themselves. So the wholesale distributors, like ourselves, had a choice to make several years ago, which was either to go out of business or go into this line. United Sales decided to go into the line whole hog, as you can see."

We see. We see. This isn't just whole hog, this is a pride of whole hogs or a pod of whole hogs or whatever whole hogs call themselves when they get together socially. The id showroom at U. S. would make Marché's look prangless. All it needs to be perfect is a plastisol Havelock Ellis in the corner. Farley and I stand near this prone blow-up doll, this fake fallen woman. She appears to have a case of terminal leak: One good screw and you couldn't tell her from the bed sheet.

"Here's Cindy, our Greek Virgin Doll. She's a very friendly person. She's cute. Soft face and nice contoured body and all, uh, all the needed things there. And it's an extremely therapeutic thing." (Yeah--for the lungs. Cindy can't make it with emphysematics.) "Imagine the little girl and her doll. And imagine the older man with his doll. There's really not any difference. When I was selling mail order, I would have customers who bought the dolls--many old men, nice old men; they'd dress them up, they'd make them up--they'd bring them into the store dressed up, with lingerie on. It'd be a way for them to channel their loneliness or their tension or their hang-ups. Ever since I saw that aspect of it, I said, Why should anyone deny an inflatable to anyone who wants to buy it? The dolls are not to be used for any illicit purpose, but they are complete--they come with all the complete orifices. I personally don't think they're used by many people in that way."

You catch the drift. Or drifts. Heavy emphasis on therapeutic value. Human concern. Pride in the product. And, underneath it all, embarrassment. Farley's best-engineered item has to be his defense mechanism. It's understandable. I mean, what do you say at a cocktail party when asked what line of work you're in? Do you say, I make rectal masturbators and butt plugs and pass the guacamole, please? No, you don't. You say, I'm in plastic. Or, I'm in marriage encounter. Or, I'm a therapist. Farley is honest enough about it. "My heart has never been into this. One day, I hope to take this company and the profit that's made from it and use it for humanitarian good. Like, if it has to do with health foods or with the environment, setting up tennis clubs or finding the cure for a major disease." Tennis elbow, perhaps?

Even Steve Marché--a more pragmatic sort--has image hang-ups. From 000 to 215 on my tape machine, and intermittently thereafter, I get hospital bulletins from him. "The first few items here were tested at a major hospital. We have a citation in a medical journal from Johns Hopkins. I have an article that would make you cry about a little boy that we helped. We made a little prosthesis for him." And, of course, Marché products are packaged under the "Doc" Johnson trademark. No false claims have been made. Hell, Doc could stand for dock-worker. But the dignified man on the box does wear a button-across-the-shoulder white uniform that says, by implication, "You can undress in front of me. I'm professional; I prepped with pHisohex. Anyhow, I've seen millions of them." And Marché products aren't just doctor-tested: Some have been ape-tested. "That's how we went into the rectal aid. They tried the length, the angle--the right angle, the left angle--with monkeys on prostate massage. At a major hospital right here in L.A." Takes a pretty determined and selfless researcher, that. Come to think of it, a pretty determined and selfless monkey as well.

Don't misunderstand me. I accept; I (continued on page 138) Tom Swift (continued from page 134) approve. Sex aids have been a playful excuse for consenting adults to touch, even to touch, in self-consent, themselves. I don't mock the lonely who woo and consort with plastic. Nor those disfigured or shy for whom prosthesis is self-esteem; nor those for whom that valuable and skittish beast, the female orgasm, can be brought to bay only by mechanical hounds.

Meanwhile, back at the Raunch. if you've got lead in your pencil, do you really need a schwantz on your eraser?

But just how therapeutic--for man or ape--is a schlong-shaped false nose? (Nostril prosthesis?) Or plastic coat hangers cast to represent ballet-split and explicit lower woman? Or the Peter Heater ("$1.98. Hand-knitted by a little old lady in Pasadena, from memory.")? Or candy pants? Or a Boobie Bell ("Mounts on the wall. Push the nipple and ring the bell.")? Yet human thought has gone into these wowers. Take the Dick Ring Toss Game. Steve Marché carries that one on his conscience.

"Well, we were playing around with some little peckers and we made them into a circle. At first it didn't go, because we sold it as a toilet-seat cover, and who the hell is going to put that on a toilet seat? You have to raise it and the damn thing weighs five pounds. Then we bought a box, made some leather rings and an instruction sheet--and we had a ring-toss game. Erasers. I was thinking of erasers one day, so I went to our injection-mold man and said, 'Design an eraser that looks like a pecker.' We've sold hundreds and hundreds of thousands of them, we've sold over a million. Then there's the Tommy Scale switch plate. As a matter of fact, I came up with the idea to make it fluorescent so it glows in the dark. What it is is a fat man, just getting out of the shower, standing on a scale with a towel over his shoulder. And your light switch is his pecker."

Farley will market his share of one-lobed items, too. How about a Jaws masturbation sleeve? For those who don't mind trailing their undercarriage in dangerous water. Farley says, "We were asked to make that. A fellow in Miami wanted it for when the movie hit. It didn't sell well. It was a dog. We have a lot of dogs here." But to be fair, the real Mortimer Snerd toys--the squirt cucumbers and the Mouth Organs (dildo and harmonica together)--are created for export in Hong Kong or Taiwan. By Orientals who think, with good reason, that your average Caucasian is a Mongoloid.

Sex-Aid manufacturers don't get no respect. the answer: classy packaging

Comedy releases. Laughter has the exact shape of orgasm: It's sudden, it's uncontrollable and it's usually over in 2.8 seconds. Sex, like any other supersolemn topic--religion, death, John Mitchell--attracts satire. The dirty joke (each sex toy is a sight gag) has had its privileged court-jester role, its sort of private pew in American middle-class society. Ditto for the whorehouse. They're both traditional: Even the most butt-plugged Victorian or Edwardian father would condone (indeed, might cater) an initiatory brothel bar mitzvah for his son. What sex jokes and whorehouses had in common was their protective, fraternal/conspiratorial attitude toward women; respectable women, that is. The seriousness of sex--procreation, adultery, performance fear--has been located in serious women: fiancée, wife, daughter, mother. Jokes, bordellos and, of course, sex toys were a male asylum, a letting go.

Problem, though. Circa 1978, women--fiancée, wife, daughter, mother--are out front consumer-testing Marché grosseries. And some chicks treat men like round-heel fast lays, just one more pretty biceps. The locker room has been liberated. And men--most sex-novelty houses are run by men--are no longer quite comfortable. Jokes, with their saltpeter touch, are getting into bed with us. Because that clubbish special male environment has been penetrated, a strange uneasiness roosts on the industry.

There are other considerations. The sex-aid people, as noted, would like an honorary degree in therapeutic medicine. Not "Doc" but Dr. Johnson, with his very bedside manner; it ratifies, it makes respectable. Ron Cole, Marché's marketing and sales director, told me, "To market something like this," Cole held up a dildo, "we've had to sell it as a novelty. You had to. The reason being, there was no way of being taken to court, due to the fact that there was no way of proving that anyone bought it with the intention of using it." You can appreciate their dilemma. Who'd want to be the defendant if some inept customer got stuck for good in an artificial twat? Coitus uninterruptus.

Worse yet, even prosthetic sex equipment can't be realistic. Marché makes a nine-inch red-white-and-blue Bicentennial dildo. I want to stand and put one palm over my heart when I see it. Largeness and color are the signatures of comic camp. But, you say, if it were really into sex therapy, wouldn't Marché manufacture pudlike puds? It doesn't work, or, as the French put it, ça ne Marché pas. Steve: "We've tried being more authentic. And it scared them. The idea is relief--a person wants relief. If it's too authentic, it gives them that dead feeling or that threatened feeling." The joke, when it climbs into bed with you, had better still be just a little bit funny. No one features being cuckolded by rubber.

They're horny for approval, the sex-aid manufacturers. They want to be chamber of commerce, B.P.O.E., jes' regular folk. They have two strategies for popular acceptance.

United Sales is an advocate of strategy A--to quit. Farley: "We're moving in the direction of vibrators only. The rubber goods are fun to have and they've sold well, but the middle class is going to demand more quality, more packaging, more precision products, which means costs and money. We may either let our competitors do it or just pass on to another line of business completely." When Farley says the middle class is going to demand more quality, he means middle-class women. More and more sex aids will be dressed, cosmetized for women. They can't live openly in the middle-class home--any more than antimacassars or silverware could--without female consent.

Ron Cole is an exponent of strategy B--stylish packaging. "I think men tend to buy the biggest thing they can possibly find. If you look at the products, 95 percent of them are made for insertion into the female. I think a lot of that is going to change. I think it's going to become more vibrating, rotating motions, more clitoral stimulation, less of shoving the biggest possible cock you can find up a broad, which I think is becoming passé. The whole idea that a woman wants the biggest possible cock she can find is outdated. Of course, I haven't found any woman who would turn one down, but.... What we've done, we've decided to go into a kind of class line, where the item goes into a bubble pack on a card. Everyone else is still doing the old thing. We've already started upgrading, because we really feel that this is where it's at."

They all have a dream (and sometimes they announce it in Martin Luther King, Jr., Old Testament pulpit tones): to crack the starting line-up at Saks Fifth Avenue. Terri Richmond, for instance. She owns Product Promotions in L.A., the largest sex-cosmetics firm. Terri is upgrading, upgrading and playing it safe as well. Her Gentle George's Bawdy Lotion has been packaged in two styles, a tumid plastic (continued on page 228) Tom Swift (continued from page 138) squeeze penis bottle and a discreet Arpegeish box. She says, "Every time I come up with something new, someone tries to imitate it. Have you noticed how many things are fruit flavored? I started that. Before that, everything was perfumed. When I came up with something called Hot Lips, Max Factor tried to make Hot Lips. I made him stop using the name because I had it first. So, instead, I think he called it Kissing Potion. Of course, they're not saying it's for making love. They're selling it for the face."

And Steve Marché: "I'm sure, in a very few years, we'll have peckers hanging in your major department stores."

Me, I don't think so. If sex-aid manufacturers prostitute their lewdness to score the Bloomingdales trade, their characteristic identity will also be deballed. Max Factor and Elizabeth Arden can trounce them hands down at that hustle. The essential packaging will be of a different kind. Stores, not products, need to be giftwrapped. And they have been.

How two young men climbed Mons Veneris and saw a vast prospect

The years 1970 and 1971 mark a rubbershed in American cultural history, for several reasons. A guy who had been arrested for transporting dildos across state lines beat the rap on appeal, Terri Richmond cranked up her operation and Malorrus went whole pork into sex apparatus.

But perhaps the most significant event of those years occurred when a young man named Duane Colglazier, fresh from his father's Colorado ranch, met a young man named Bill Rifkin. Together they synthesized the Pleasure Chest chain of boutiques.

Duane: "We started very slowly--in a little store in the Village where the rent was $75 a month. It was very, very small. And there was no place to stock, anyhow, so you didn't have to worry about stock. It just kind of grew and grew. Nine months later, we moved to a regular-sized store."

Bill: "Duane was afraid to admit we were selling the stuff. It was my idea to set up a high-class sex boutique and sell water beds and novelty items. And people would come in and say, 'Well, do you sell anything besides water beds?' Duane would say, 'No, that's it.' And they'd say, 'Well, what's upstairs?' And he'd say, 'Storage.' And I'd say, 'Duane, we're not going to do any business if you won't tell people what we're selling.'"

They guessed curve ball and their timing was exactly right. America had begun to sprout hair in strange places; a national pubescence. Duane: "As soon as we moved into the new store, the Times came along and gave us a very wonderful review. It immediately put us right there in the establishment. If middle-class America wants his wife to tie him up and tickle him, well--you know ... he deserves that."

Now there are nine discreet, plush, elitist Pleasure Chest boutiques from sea to shining sea, so well carpeted that you can't hear yourself go in; mirror-silvery luster, French-restaurant dimness.

Boutiques have revolutionized the sex industry. They provide point-of-sale input. Duane: "I like working in the store. It gives you the chance to meet people on a very intimate basis and get their feedback. For instance, fist fucking became popular in the gay community a couple of years ago. And the dildos that were made at the time were very small. I mean, hell, they didn't compare with a fist. We had a lot of requests for much larger dildos. I hired somebody to sculpt one. Now Marché makes about seven phallic types for us. And two fists. And one hand."

Steve Marché agrees: "Our biggest dildo is 30 inches long and three and a half inches in diameter. I have a surgeon friend. The only thing he could figure when he saw those giant dildos sitting on our counter was that the people who were using them were getting an inside heart massage."

Since 1970-1971, Pleasure Chest must have rung up one half million dollars' worth of business with Marché alone. That's a very erotic figure. It would make any manufacturer lubricate without Emotion Lotion. "I don't care what you want," Steve Marché told me, "you pay for it and you get it."

Wherein the Phrase "This is Going to Hurt me more than it will you" is Revealed to be a Falsehood when Spoken by a Leather Salesman

Imagine the pain. Apparently, a lot of people do just that: imagine, imagine. The demand for S/M trinkets has swollen, like men with hydrocele. And when an S demands, he demands. Ten thousand steer have died to keep Pleasure Chest boutiques in leather. Duane and Bill dominate America's dominance market. Their office/factory is on 11th Avenue, with a superb underview of the elevated but not elevating West Side Highway as it affably corrodes down to iron grit. About 15 men--I.L.G.W.U. members don't appear more pleasant or unfascist--labor in contentment at 120 11th Avenue. Time will pass quickly when you're having a good time. Leather is die-cut, glued, stitched, riveted or grommeted to make svelte labia spreaders and handcuff belts and neck-and-wrist restraints and blindfolds and ball gags and cock rings and harnesses and shackles. It's enthralling work. The human body can be connected to itself in more ways than a hotel switchboard. Pleasure Chest will also sell you Salem Stocks for $225 or Punishment Chairs for $210. The Pleasure Chest craftsmanship is elegant, Rolls-Royce quality. After just six years, Duane and Bill have become our largest bondage-tool manufacturers. They're almost in restraint of trade in trade of restraint.

Bill: "First thing Duane and I made was shackles. And we did them in our living room, on the floor; we had no sewing machines. Everything was hand-punched, hand-riveted, you know. We were doing, like, six pairs of shackles a week, some blindfolds. Now we do 60 pairs of shackles at $30 each, 50 head harnesses at $60 each--at a sitting. You're talking about thousands of plain-leather cock rings a year; that's still the best seller. And we custom-make leather clothes. They stretch with wear; we'll take them in, for free--no other company does that. A lot of times I'll wake up in the middle of the night with an idea for something. We have people who come in with things we know won't work. We try to switch them over, the way a car salesman would. Look, we say, it's more practical for the hood to open this way than that."

Duane: "The clerk at one of our stores called up. A customer had asked for a pair of shackles for an infant." I am somewhat shocked. Duane isn't. "Maybe the baby sucks its thumb and they wanted to keep his hands apart." Maybe.

"What was that book, Duane? The one with the grope suit in it?"

"You mean The Joy of Sex." Grope suit? I ask. What's a grope suit? "We have no idea. But, based on the book, we tried to build one. Supposedly, it was a suit made out of hair that would arouse all the erotic zones in your body. Clitoral stimulators, anal stimulators and everything else. We tried to put it together, only no way would it work. But when you have hundreds of people asking for an item, you try. That's why we're here. Service."

And who buys all this Auschwitz surplus? you want to know. Bill: "Our store in Greenwich Village is 60 to 70 percent gay. The uptown store is 70 percent straight. A lot of the things we sell downtown, we don't sell uptown. Like dildos; we can't sell dildos uptown. Uptown, they buy vibrators. They buy creams. And they buy a tremendous amount of leather. See, homosexuals had so much going against them to begin with, so it didn't matter what you did after that. But the heterosexual community has always been into this. Either they've been making their own or they've had enough money to say, 'No names. This is what I want. Make it for me.' Now they can buy it on the shelf nicely displayed.

"I'm into the leather scene myself. But I feel that an S/M scene has to be just that, S and M. Both people have to be into it together and both people have to be responsive to each other's needs. The S has to be able to feel just how hard he or she can go without hurting the other one. It's still sex and sex is an emotional thing. I've had situations where people have said, 'Kill me.' And I've said, 'Too bad. You want to be killed, go out and play in heavy traffic.'

"There are people who are into leather without the S/M. People who say, 'Let's just stay dressed.' In full leather. In August. Hot. And there are people who get off on being tied up in clothesline. No, we don't sell clothesline. We send them to a hardware store for that."

What leather is, see--it's a surrogate skin. Skin that won't sweat, peel, age. Skin without hair or mole or stretchmark or compassionate touch. It's the high-gloss, made-up look of Vogue models. Fashionable in both senses. It's stylish and it can be fashioned, custom-made. Leather will streamline the body. And streamlining is abstraction. Is detachment. Superiority. "I mean," says Bill, "let's say the woman is on top, the dominatrix. And she comes out fat, flabby, with fly swatter in her hand, wearing a baggy bra ... now, can you imagine some man being submissive to a woman in a baggy bra? How can you be subservient to your equal or dominate your equal? It's the way the hair is done. The way the make-up is done. The way the leather fits: It's very important. You can't be emotionally involved."

Listen to the man. He's got something there. The leather S/M interplay--with its peculiar transaction between top and bottom--applies in some degree to all sex aids. A dildo has sensual weight precisely because, like leather, it's impersonal, unrealistic, abstract. You can't be emotionally involved. Interpersonal sex, with all its concomitant quirks and neuroses and guilt and trips laid on will always tend to distract from the art of coming. Sex aids--used alone or in company--are paid for; are small, abstract gigolos and whores. They won't require stimulation or entertainment or bed politics. And you don't have to hang around for that overrated fugitive sexual incident: the simultaneous orgasm.

Say "Cheese," Ladies, and hold it for about three hours

Ask Doug Johns about sexual abstraction. He should know. Doug was the world's first--bring entrance music up, "ta-daa"--Cunt Sculptor. His New York studio looks like--um. It looks like whatever passes before the mind's eye of a drowning gynecologist. Gashville, man. Squanch everywhere. Against the wall--ten or 12 feet high, yours for just $30,000--is an edition of Doug's masterwork, 90 colored plaster twats on one transparent poly-something pane. Talk about conversation pieces. They're big: inner lips only, twice life-size (eight times life-size in volume); and any one of them would send John Holmes home with his tail between his legs. Big and ... well ... quite lovely. Snowflakes aren't more unsimilar. In fact, they don't resemble genitalia at all; sea shells beachcombed, maybe, or slippers. Roses. Each is accurate, personalized as a handprint in front of Grauman's Chinese Theater. So realistic that they're totally abstract, some other thing. Doug is 38, all reddish beard, happy. Thin and angular; a plumber might have installed him. He began doing his thing--and other people's things--guess when? Rubbershed time: six or seven years ago.

"I had a plastics factory. I was working for different artists, making very large things in fiberglass and polyester. They'd tell me to make a 12-foot doughnut, things like that. I liked art, but basically I had no training. On the other hand, the plastics factory was a miserable failure and I went on to make things in wood. A guy came in one day and said, 'I'd like you to make some copies of this pipe from India.' It was a little penis pipe with balls on it. While I was making them, I had this feeling that I was doing something a little out of the ordinary. It wasn't too nice. Sleazy. I was being one of those weirdos. And the only difference was, all my friends wanted one. And then I realized for the first time I was talking about sex freely and easily and it all just fell in naturally. And I loved it. So I sat down for five and a half months with one piece of wood and I carved a very representative piece of wood that was fucking itself. And within that five and a half months' time, my whole life changed completely. From where I was practically a recluse to where people wanted me to go to parties and show this piece of wood. I was getting laid left and right. I turned around and sold the piece of wood for $4500. Suddenly, I had a thing--sex art.

"These, the cunts, were started about four years ago. It came about because I had a girlfriend and I looked at her, and I looked at a couple of other women, but most of my sexual experiences were still with the lights out, sort of groping and slopping. I figured I had to do one in wax, very accurate. So I asked a friend to pose. And I finished the sculpture and I said, 'Gosh, this thing--it looks so different from my girlfriend.' It was like a major thing to come up with. My passion became--for a year--to sculpt anybody who would pose for me.

"These portraits took three or four hours apiece. The woman is lying there with a pillow and something to drink. We talk and put on music. Usually, I take my clothes off. The ages range somewhere around 18 to somewhere around 60. And there are all sorts of religions, races, sizes, weights. In 100 percent of the cases, they want a mirror to see how accurate it is. You'd be surprised how critical a woman can be about her own cunt. It's almost like I have a supercritic there. It's almost like an opening performance every day."

Doug has also done 50 different cocks. "They're huge, three times life-size, so 27 times the volume. Just the last inch and a half. I did that specifically because I found that the guys who were posing for me wanted a little longer, a little larger. Could I straighten it out a little bit? So I said, Cut this, I'm going to drop the ego involvement. Everybody's got an inch and a half."

You can buy a plaster snatch for $20 to $600. Or the biggest ever section of human egg roll for $30 to $600. Do they sell? Is Doug Johns getting rich? They don't. He isn't. Doug should have checked with Steve Marché or Farley Malorrus: Exaggerative size plus realism gives people the runs.

So how can he afford wine enough for all those hothouse flowers? Smallness: Smallness goes over big. Doug has carved, then cast in silver, hundreds of half-inch or smaller genital earrings and pendants and pins. Edie Solow, his partner at Erotics, a sex-art gallery on Christopher Street in the Village, told me, "People like small erotica, which is one of the reasons we went into jewelry. Because they like to be able to conceal it. The pieces are small, so unless you know somebody and get up close, you can't really see it. People find the smallness to be part of the flash, when you can do this"--flip. Up goes a sheaf of dark hair. One petite, unerectpenis earring has zapped me. Ya-ya. Gone.

In which we find reason to consider the advantages of having a live girlfriend during the next power failure

Your most exotic female substitute is a Volkswagen tail pipe. That, credit it or not, was what the Funways people--manufacturers of ACCU-JAC--first used to cast their prototypal masturbation sleeve. ACCU-JAC II and its six mechanical sister products represent the apex of sex technology. Pressurized air flow and complex valving produce alternate suction/compression to drive a sleeve up/down on your Maypole. At Funways' plant in North Hollywood, machine after machine huffs and puffs through quality-control testing, like out-of-shape wives. Me, I've never used ACCU-JAC; probably I recall the time I got myself sucked into a vacuum cleaner. Don't ask what I was doing, but by now both nature and I abhor vacuums.

The ACCU-JAC is fun to watch, a jaunty thing. Sort of like a polite small gentleman, lifting his hat again, again, again; never quite off. Similar pneumatic principles will drive a dildo, one held between female knees. "The companion model and male adapter--for men and women--costs just $299 and runs at 30-80 spm in the female mode and 40-100 spm in the male mode." Mae West was before her time when she said, "If I don't show up, start without me." The portable ACCU-JACS come in a sort of neat fishing-tackle-type box. Sleeves are transparent, "so you can watch the action from start to finish. Even if you tried to avoid climax, you would not succeed." It tugs you, insistent as a five-year-old at Disneyland. The famous $795 ACCU-JAC II--with stroke controls, suction controls and custom U+25A1 walnut U+25A1 oak U+25A1 white kid U+25A1 moroccan leather cabinet--will soon be modified for compactness. No wonder; the original was big enough to give an Airedale a decent burial in.

Dan Stoughton invented the ACCU-JAC. Stoughton is handsome, blond; looks like a young Charles Lindbergh. And New York-Paris solo was horse dust compared with the agony of developing Funways' own solo machine. In fact, Stoughton is a brilliant man. The Edison of raunch. Someday he'll package female orgasms in an aerosol can; or invent some way to get fellated by phone, direct distance dialing. His partner, Charles Boynton, seems to be in the wrong line of work: he'll blush at anything. His genial face reddens like a female chimp's behind when her rut time has come. They're both very kind to me, considering that I once wrote a four-snore review of ACCU-JAC II based on hearsay consumer reports given to me by Screw publisher Al Goldstein. I should have known better. Goldstein needs a staff of five, plus three tax lawyers, just to play with himself.

"Charley and I recognized a need. There should be some type of masturbation device for men. I was working at IBM at the time. He wanted to make one and hopefully sell it at a reasonable price. More important, you could go buy a whole bunch of junk, but it didn't work. So we decided to build a product that really worked, and wherever the price ended up, that was what we were going to sell it for. So I brought out the gadgets at night and started designing. We didn't know how difficult it was going to be. The price then was $89.95. Everybody told us that anything that sold for that much money would never go. So we built 20 of them and said, 'That'll hold them for a while.' They were gone in a month.

"One of the first prototypes we made actually using air was out of an old washing machine. It was huge. You could hear it running all the way down the street. A big old one-horsepower motor with a big old cylinder--it ran about 500 strokes a minute. It was wild. We'd sneak out into the garage and fire the thing up and it sounded like an airplane. But it worked, it worked. Then it took us over a year to get it down to a reasonable size."

Charley: "We tested them on ourselves and our friends, everybody we could coerce into doing it. It's a hell of an engineering problem. If you're going to make something that moves back and forth similar to the way a man's hand moves, what do you hang it from? The ceiling? A big trapeze? There was no information on masturbation when we started this thing. You could go to the library and research and research and there wasn't anything available. Not only that, there was nothing on the air circuitry, either. There was no decent material for the sleeve. We had to start from scratch. One day, Dan found a short in his hi-fi system. So when you put your hand on the hi-fi like this, there was a tingling in your finger tips. So we were going to hook up that tingle. So I put it on and nothing happened. Then Dan suggested I take off my shoe. Well, when I put my bare foot on the concrete, the shock intensified 1000 times. It was like running 110 volts through your pecker. So we stopped that. Goddamn, that was a shock and a half.

"Now, of course, we work with a sex clinic. We test all of the stuff through them. We stand there and watch the subjects and they give us feedback. It's a good measure of sexual response. Until the ACCU-JAC, they didn't really have any way of measuring sexual performance, the averages required to bring you to orgasm. The machine can also alleviate guilt. They're not masturbating themselves; some people have guilt associated with doing it themselves. We even had to make a machine that would work with biofeedback for a major university, so that as a test subject approaches the alpha state, the ACCU-JAC goes faster and faster. So he's being rewarded for producing alpha waves."

I had bad-mouthed the ACCU-JAC for not providing clitoral stimulation. Dan is defensive. "The clitoris on a woman can vary all over the place. It can be right near the vaginal opening or it can be way up high. We've even made a dildo driver that has an extension on it, so that no matter where it lies along that curve, this thing'll get up there and give some action. We've tried to make the attachments as universal as possible, but the basic theme of the machine is that it's driving a dildo, a life-sized dildo. Stylized, without all the exaggerated bumps and ridges. And giving it a stroke length that is comparable to life. There are women who wouldn't touch this thing with a ten-foot pole--no way, shape or form are they going to let any machine work on them. But those who do--we get the letters--are very satisfied. That's what kept us going, really. The response from the customers."

And they get letters from men claiming substantial penis enlargement. "We don't believe them. And I don't approve of the vacuum enlargers, where they have a pump and, the more you pump, the more vacuum you get. There are cases of actually rupturing a blood vessel. Our machine has a very low vacuum. It's just enough to help facilitate the blood flow into the penis. What doctors have told us is that these people have never experienced a full erection until now. If you use an organ to its fullest, it usually expands to full size. Anyhow, in normal sex, a slight vacuum occurs." Unless the woman opens her mouth, of course.

The Funways people care. Your orgasm is their orgasm. Charley: "If the customer even peeps, he immediately gets service. If we can't make him happy, we buy the machine back and he's out half the price of a sleeve and the freight and that's it. We used to offer a full guarantee and then it started to get popular and they'd want it for a weekend party. Then back it would come and it looked like it had been run over by a trailer. This is our new Manual Stroker System. You just move it back and forth in the sleeve, no motor. Go on, put your finger in, don't be shy. Now you feel it loosening up. Close the valve. Now, as you open it up, it slides easier and easier. With this you get 360 degrees of contact, as compared with your hand. And a slight collapse, imitating the vagina. This costs $39.95. But here we come up dead against the market that's been burned the most. In that $40 bracket, that's the one everybody hits for a rip-off. It's a hell of a thing to overcome. People pay $150, they figure, 'Jeez, they must be selling something.'"

Into the factory. I see dozens of sleeves upended (test tubes on a drying rack). "We thought everybody was one and one half inches, because that's what it said in Masters and Johnson, that everybody was one and one half inches by six. Now we have an inch in diameter, up to two inches in diameter--in one-eighth-inch increments. If a man isn't circumcised, we have a two-step sleeve here. This step actually tends to catch the foreskin. Some men aren't straight, so we have offset sleeves that are curved. In fact, I had one customer who sent in a sketch that almost looked like a horseshoe. Like the old limerick: Instead of coming, he went. Now, here's one. A China an from Hawaii who ordered a two-and-one-quarter-inch sleeve by 15 inches. What do you think of that?" I think he should stay in Hawaii.

Behind drapery, in a suburban sort of kitchen range, sleeves are being heat-cured. Dan has become antsy. He urges me out. His soft-plastic formula is secret, the key to ACCU-JAC's success. Who knows? I could be an industrial spy from Amdork. In the main production area, where 50 or so ACCU-JAC variable speeds are having their intricate mechanism soldered, a thought bung-hammers me. That touch of the gutter; it's missing. All these plastic boxes, they're antiseptic. Charley: "Yes, a lot of people have told us we're too clinical and sterile. You're right about the gutter. You won't find any dirty words in our catalog, but you have to imply something. You can't put it in as a straight clinical instrument." Well--I think out loud--all this marvelous machinery; why not stick it inside a woman? I don't mean a kid's balloon like the Judy doll. A real artificial woman. Heavy. With substance. With articulation. Dan looks at Charley. Charley looks at Dan. I reproduce their dialog:

Charley: Oh, yeah. Fantasy. I agree with Keith. You think people would pay three, four hundred dollars for it?

Dan: It would be more than that. About a thousand.

Charley: You think they'd pay? I wouldn't do it solid. I'd do it with an inner core.

Dan: It has to be lifelike; it can't be inflatable plastic.

Charley: I wasn't thinking inflatable, I was thinking----

Dan: And it can't be a dead hunk of rubber lying there; it's got to have realism.

Charley: Double-jointed. A little ticker in it for a heartbeat. A mail-order bride. Can you see? Audioani-matronic brothels; just come in and drop a quarter in the slot.

Dan: I've always wanted to build a robot, so I might as well do it here.

Charley: Or an S/M one that whips you and a voice comes out----

Dan: I'll need all the help I can get, but I'll give it a try. I have no intention of stopping here.

I look at Dan. His eyes have smoked over; they give me back my reflection. And I think he's seen the future. And she works.

[At presstime, we received word of changes in the lives of our heroes, Farley and Steve. Farley has undergone a personal transformation of sorts, losing weight and devoting his time to writing, acting, palm reading and astrology. The Marchés have sold Marché Manufacturing to an unidentified buyer and Steve, it is rumored, has gone into real estate.]

"Just how therapeutic is a schlong-shaped false nose? Or a Peter Heater? Or candy pants? Or a Boobie Bell?"

" 'If middle-class America wants his wife to tie him up and tickle him, well ... he deserves that.' "