"Café Flesh" and Me

Confessions of a Cult Sex King

Ok, how many pornographers do you know?

Huh? I'm not counting Uncle Buddy, who made a bundle after the war peddling snapshots of wayward Stuttgart gals he lured off the streets with the promise of nylons and hot Sauerbraten if they'd pose with Himmler, the barracks schnauzer.

No, sir. We're talking contempo twitch and wriggle here. The loops you used to have to slide a quarter in the slot for have spawned an industry only slightly less legit than the one that cranks out wholesome fodder of the Gandhi II and Gidget Gets a Heat Rash variety. But because they don't know any, scads of citizens never realize that most of today's thriving smutmeisters lead lives of no greater raciness than 20-year men from Mutual of Omaha.

Drab but true. Porno's ho-hum reality remains a peculiar and little-known secret to the world at large. Nobody assumes that insurance guys gambol about their pads on weekends, engaging in all sorts of insurancy, actuary-packed shenanigans. But if you've ever dabbled in dirt for hire--if you happen to have "done poundcake," as insiders like to say--then your status as sex-flick vet will likely give folks the notion that your entire waking life is spent in nonstop pornlike thought and endeavor. It's not.

My own foray into X land, as a cocreator of the strangely acclaimed postnuke scorcher Café Flesh, left me stamped with the sort of shady notoriety shared by spouses of mass murderers and Senate pages who tell all. Worse (or better) yet, I've been accosted by morons, befriended by unsavory strangers, set upon by a menagerie of Midwest swells and slavering innocents too numerous to cram into one lonely article. The best thing, maybe, is not even to think of this as an article: Think of it as sort of a strange-o review in which you, lucky reader, will get to meet some of the just plain folks who saw our special movie and decided that, more than anything, they wanted to step out of their own lives and get their feet wet in erotica. With mixed results.

But to fully appreciate the colossal weirdness that followed Flesh's ascension into cult-hit heaven, it helps for the reader to have a peek at the Gehenna it popped out of. Which means--hand me those Valiums, dear--recalling how it all began, risking a little visit back to the Days of Slime and Bozos.

You'll have to wait for the PBS docudrama to get the whole story, but here's the gist. Way back in 1981, director Rinse Dream and I cooked up a screenplay about what life would be like in the postnuclear future. (Rinse Dream, of course, is not the name his mom and dad gave him. But having opted to escape the skin trade in order to try to crack the lucrative Afterschool Special market, he decided it might be best to let the whole C.F. episode remain something only his best friends know. My own movie moniker, Herbert W. Day, was based on a little-league coach who used to swat me about the coccyx for dropping flies.) Our goal, in that apple-cheeked era, was to perpetrate a World War Three musical. We had in mind a kind of high-rad Cabaret in which trendy mutants and atomic mobsters held sway over survivors bombed beyond all normal pleasures. Lots of people made movies about the end of the world, but how many showed what the night life would be like?

Back then, Dream and I reasoned, New Wave loomed as the Next Big Thing. And the Next Thing After That was sure to be Nuclear Obsession (soon to set off a battery of Big Blast weepers from Testament to The Day After). The point is, none of this had happened yet. This was, for you youngsters, pre-Road Warrior and Liquid Sky, a season or two before Flashdance and MTV made quick-cut, steamy visuals as wholesome as Sheriff Andy's sinking his choppers into Aunt Bee's cobbler. We knew we were on to something. Only--go figure!--none of the right-thinking agents and studio execs we'd begun to badger could recognize our prescience. We weren't just turned down, we were scorned, driven off like pinheads trying to crash a Mensa dinner dance.

The horror! For half a year, Dream and I made like duck-tailed pundits, foisting our forecasts of postnuke greenbacks on sniffy producers who plainly couldn't wait to pry us off their sling chairs and spray the room with Glade. "Now, Halloween," they'd declaim, "that's a movie the kids'll lick up! That's an up!" But some film about a gaggle of shell-shocked skeeks stranded on the planet after they bounce the Big One ... well, that was a "downer." Even if it did sport lots of girls in leopardskin doing the dirty hula.

Finally--into the polyester inferno--we got wind of a few "adult" financiers with a hundred thou in quarters they wanted to unload. These gentlemen made nice money churning out low-grade tush 'n' bush, but now they had an itch to add "something a little classy" to their line. (We had our first hint of what their idea of class was when we saw their headquarters: a three-room closet one flight up from a 16mm "art house" that offered round-the-clock one-handers.) Café Flesh, as it happened, caught the pornsters' fancy. It was the "poifect vehicle"--with certain key additions. All we had to do was work in some poochy, so the raincoat crowd wouldn't give us a bad review. Otherwise, it was smooth sailing.

So it was that our initial romp through the holocaust, hardly PG-13 to begin with, made its first, fatal stagger down the path to flat-out obscenity. To make the backers happy--and snag that ever-elusive budget--we swore on our kneecaps to stick in half a dozen squirting-kielbasa scenes. But to nurse our integrity, we crammed in all the disturbo words and visuals we could. That way, see, it was still "creative." It was still "cool." It was still, if you sort of squinted, "our film."

Etc., etc. The entire epic was shot in ten days, on a single set, in a studio the size of a Dunkin' Donuts--for less than it costs to shoot two and a half days of most normal movies. But Café Flesh, for better or worse, was never in real danger of ending up a normal movie.

The new plot, retooled for "wet shots," hinged on the notion that after the apocalypse, 99 percent of those who survived would wake up D.O.A. between the legs. These were the Sex Negatives. Unable to relieve their lust--they got nauseated when they tried--the Negs nevertheless craved the sight of others who could still pull off the act. These others, the functioning one percent, were called Sex Positives. By rigidly enforced edict, Pozzies were required to perform for Neggies. And the "in" spot where all the lame and denatured went to slaver? Café Flesh, postnuke Copacabana.

Some fun! To keep things hopping between cinema-gyno shots, we concocted a little backstage romance. The hero was Negative, the heroine a smoldering Positive: Dick and Jane Get Radiation. Toss in a sicko lounge comic, a queen-of-the-roller-derby hostess, a frantic synthesizer sound track and the tragically hip bon ton of Hollywood Boulevard as extras, and what else do you need for a cult sensation?

If it wasn't exactly the stuff of Gilbert and Sullivan, it wasn't quite Debbie Does Decatur, either. The best part of the setup was that most of the Chucks and Suzies who had to lock femurs onscreen never had to utter a word--a definite plus. Your solid porn pro, as gifted as he may be at expressive rooting, generally lacks dramatic verve when it comes to mouthing dialog. But the way Flesh was remolded, just about all the snappy patter could be handled by "real" actors (out-of-work Strasberg grads and sitcom hopefuls). And the sex, pesky business, ended up in a series of choreographed side shows--stagy diversions, I like to think, in the gala tradition of the June Taylor dance segments on the old Jackie Gleason Show.

Imagine! By accident or by cosmic design, a new genre had been created: postatomic erotica. Apocalypse Wow! Even more ludicrous, this mutant genesis established a pair of fledgling film pups as the Woodward and Bernstein of big-screen bush. Lucky us.

But not to rush. Right out of the chute, Flesh ran into static in the smut parlors. Understandably, fellows who slipped into Babs's House o' Peeps for an evening of Teeny Buns saw red when a batch of scab-and-Mohawk types hit the screen instead. They wanted those teenies! Rumor had it that a battalion of Portland hard-core fans had slashed some seats, and--this I witnessed--at least six rows of Japanese businessmen filed out to commit ritual bus boarding halfway through a sneak preview at Hollywood's famed Pussycat Theatre.

It wasn't pretty. A hot item in the doors-barred, blinds-drawn home-video market, Café quickly belly-upped in the Adult Bund. In some places, it closed in a day. And whole chains, such as the New (continued on page 118)"Café Flesh"(continued from page 80) England Motion Picture web, refused to book it at all. Tough sledding! The original backers, swilling their Bromos, panicked and sold the pic for a song. And then--I still have to pinch myself--more than a year after dying as a dirty movie, Café Flesh was born again ... as an art film, hailed as a bona fide bit of midnight cult cinema: "The Rocky Horror Picture Show of the Eighties."

Mirabile dictu! This unheard-of phenomenon kicked off in ever-hep Los Angeles, where the trendy Nuart Theater plopped us into the Friday slot then occupied by Pink Flamingos. Flamingos had also premiered there, ten years before, and my only fear was that one night, a tizzed-off Divine would burst through my French doors, wielding a bullwhip and a tub of Happy Boy margarine, bent on revenge. Success, as I soon learned, always packs a hidden risk.

Meanwhile, word of our cult coronation had brought us a spate of cryptic and unsavory acclaim. The Hollywood Reporter dubbed the film "Brechtian." The Village Voice warned that it was "only for the truly alienated." L.A.'s Herald Examiner labeled it "one of the strangest movies ever presented to an unwary public." And in no time, the unwary could get strange at scads of perfectly respectable venues. Cafe Flesh ran in New York, Boston, D.C.--all the places you'd expect. But reports also filtered back from such lonely outposts as the El Paseo in Santa Fe, Greensboro's Janus, even the Kalamazoo Campus, where puzzled distribution vets declared that it had outgrossed a week of Rumble Fish in two midnight showings.

" 'Café Flesh' sweeps Kalamazoo!" We'd done the undoable! And yet--awful truth--I had begun to suffer recurring nightmares about dumping that twisted thing in all these normal little towns.

Sure, they called me paranoid. But I had a premonition that Flesh's exposure in the heartland would generate some grotesque fallout. Unless we pulled all the prints and dashed them with battery acid, like, right away, it could be Uh-Oh City.

I was right. Weeks after we broke into the White Bread Belt, the first blown-out devotee tracked me down, railing from the depths of the Midwest that Flesh had inspired him to drop everything and take his own stab at porno glory. My worst nightmare: He knew I was just the man to make his dream come true!

•

Seymour, it turned out, was a convenience-mart mogul from Indianapolis. He called up--no word on how he had gotten the number--to let yours truly know he had "a wad of cabbage thick as whale dong" if I wanted to work up this wild idea he had for a movie.

"Do any bun whackin'?" he asked, having waked me out of a deep, troubled sleep at nine A.M.

"Excuse me?" I mumbled.

"Bun whackin'," Seymour repeated, shouting this time and making a thwacking noise with his cheek. "I was wonderin' if you got into much of that out there on the Coast. Here in Indy, it's just catchin' on, so I figured you people out there were beyond that into somethin' else."

I gave a little grunt, which the Mart King somehow took for an affirmative. "I thought so," he said. "I bet you guys get to try all kinds of kooky stuff. That's how I know you're gonna love Hamper."

Too groggy to protest, I plumped the pillow and listened with grim fascination as he described Hamper Girls, a brain storm inspired by a roguish vending-machine repairman he paid to keep things up to snuff at his Piggly Wigglys or whatever they were. "My guy moonlights on dollar-bill changers, and he tells me these little launderettes are so full of quiff, you gotta slap it off. I'm not kiddin'," he chuckled, as chummy as a lodge brother. "The way I figure, we go in and shoot some nice poochy pokin' out of a top loader. Real cute stuff. What say I whip you guys out the treatment and we slide right into development...."

At what point, I wondered, did people in Indianapolis start talking "treatments" and "development deals"? Does anybody know the exact date? Seymour seemed to have a firmer grasp on the lingo than my own agent, who boasted a background in Renaissance lit. He went prattling on about "gross points" and "a rich back end" until he wound himself down, then suggested he scoot something out by Purolator so we could get the ball rolling.

I confess that for one foggy minute, I considered telling him that Hamper was the best thing I'd ever heard, maybe asking him to send off a little start-up check of, say, 90 Gs, then just cashing in and going nameless in Tijuana for a season in case he got antsy and dispatched some strapping Indiana lad to drag me back and make me work off every penny stocking shelves at a Terre Haute all-nighter. But it was too big a decision to make before noon.

"Mr. Seymour," I whispered, cupping the receiver so none of my immediate neighbors would hear. (These condo walls are so thin, and some people still didn't know.) "Mr. Seymour, it's not like you think.... I'm not really a porno guy."

"Whaddaya talkin'? You made the son of a bitch, didn't you?"

"A one-shot," I said, still sotto voce. "I start dental school in the fall."

"Is this some kind of stunt?" he hollered. The man had cut his teeth in the dog-eat-dog world of Hoosier mart management, and he wasn't used to hearing no for an answer. "If it's price you're worried about, forget it. Say the word and you can make yourself a sweet wad of cabbage."

I swore it wasn't the cabbage, but the denial only brought on more wheedling. "C'mon, guy, level with your uncle Sy. Am I getting bullshit or am I getting fruit salad?"

"What?"

Call me a softy, but I just can't hang up on people. I couldn't even hang up on Uncle Sy.

Finally, dusting off a few old Dale Carnegie techniques, I told him that if I were going to tackle a Hamper-size deal, I'd want to give it 110 percent; but right now, I was just swamped with other projects. (I didn't tell him the big one was delivering circulars for Goodwill, but I didn't think Dale would want me to.) For a dizzy month or so, there had actually been talk of a Café Flesh cable series; and before that fizzled, there were hints of a French financier dying to spring for a reshot R version of the movie. This being Hollywood and all, it turned out that both parties wanted to pay in Monopoly money. Still, for a while there, I was a guy with projects.

"Okeydoke, business over," Seymour snapped, suddenly shifting gears and getting reverential. "Can I be personal now, kiddo? I just wanna tell you I think Café Flesh is the greatest flick this country's seen since The Stepford Wives. And I mean that. I wouldn't say it if it wasn't true."

It took a minute for this to sink in, during which Seymour asked quickly if I'd mind showing him and a buddy around if they ever happened to drop into Tinseltown. "A guy like you must know all the hot spots, huh?"

"You bet," I said. It was the only way to get him off the phone before Meet the Press.

Two weeks later--"Surprise!"--Sy called to say that he was at the Hollywood Holiday Inn with a lodge brother named Babe and they were dying to catch some hotcha-hotcha. "So where's the action?" he wanted to know. "What's on the agenda?"

Well, what the hell. An artist owes something to his fans. That's just as true for a giant like Julio Iglesias as it is for you and me. Just having any fans at all was a new experience, and I was sort of curious to see what an out-of-stater was like. And (continued on page 199)"Cafe Flesh"(continued from page 118) so, abandoning friends and family, an hour later, I found myself with a case of the willies in the Holiday Inn corridor. The door I knocked on was opened by a dead ringer for Mr. Mooney, the banker on the old Lucy Show, and behind him, in a pair of Army-issue boxers, was Seymour the Mart King.

Seymour, happily, was every bit as short, bald and paunchy as I'd imagined. He looked like a miniature Jack E. Leonard, as though the bulky insult comic had been shipped off to a Korean toy factory, where he'd been measured and made into a handy mold so they could stamp out tiny, convenience-size versions after the jumbo original passed on. I noticed he wore a pinkie ring the size of a Chicklet, but Seymour seemed to think I was staring at his gut. "Nothin' but corn-fed pork," he hooted, slapping both hands on his ample breadbasket. "Gladda see ya, you old porn dog!"

Brother Babe was a slow dresser. He fussed over the flyaway collar of his plaid shirt jac, sneaking glances at the mirror to adjust his toupee, while Sy took two seconds to slip into his snug double knits. The sporty flares made up the bottom half of a baby-blue leisure suit. "The missus never lets me dress this way," he chuckled, stretching out on an unmade twin and crossing his plump arms behind his head. "She don't know about a lot of things, huh, Babe?"

Babe just snickered and patted down his Mr. Mooney hairpiece, which I discovered was about all you could expect of him.

More than once, as the evening progressed, I had the uncanny sense of having been astrally projected onto a cocktail napkin. It was that kind of fun. After a little powwow in Seymour's suite (why would a mogul check into a place like this? "So's he can stay one, Buster!"), we decided on a topless spot around the corner. I'd been there twice, with my accountant, who had sort of made it his unofficial H.Q. since his wife left him with three kids to run off with a pro wrestler. I only hoped we wouldn't bump into him. I didn't want the boys to have to hear how he came home from a loophole conference to find his Prissie pinned to the mattress in a half nelson by a 300-pounder in satin trunks.

Luckily, the C.P.A. never showed. Minutes after his third boilermaker, Sy was throwing crumpled 20s at anything without an Adam's apple, while Babe, his toupee askew, had begun shouting to the bus drivers and merchant seamen at other tables that "they didn't have stuff like this back in Indianapolis." When he saw me squirm, Sy told his pal to can it. Then he leaned close, his florid baby cheeks just inches from my own, and confided that he'd really made this jaunt West for two reasons. One was to check on a spot in Forest Lawn for his mother-in-law (big snicker and wig pat from Babe); the other, as I'd already guessed, to try yet again to persuade me to toss my hat in the ring with Hamper.

The man wouldn't quit! When I thanked him and said that I was flattered but the answer was still "N-O!" he threw himself back into his chair and slammed his hands down on the flimsy cocktail table. The impact upset Babe's Schlitz into his lap. Babe leaped to his feet and the bottle somehow shattered. When enough lounge lizards had turned our way to make it an occasion, Sy slipped his stubby arm over my shoulders, broke into a big Jack E. Leonard grin and boomed in a voice loud enough for customers in adjacent auto-parts stores to hear: "You see this little guy? This little guy writes the best dirty movie in the business. Any son of a bitch here thinks different, they gotta talk to Seymour!"

Luckily, no one from Vice was there to take down my name and prints. But the episode lingers as one of the great post-Flesh mortifying moments. The gala evening ended up at the Ivar, a superannuated strip joint north of Sunset Boulevard, where we scrutinized half a dozen lovelies before Seymour tried to pick up a sturdy blonde who looked as if she might hold down a day job in meat packing. "Check out the hoot owls on that one!" he cackled, digging his elbow into my windpipe. "Seymour likes!"

I still don't know whether or not the Mart King hit pay dirt. Right then, poor Babe took sick on his shirt jac--it hardly showed in that plaid--and had to be helped off to the little boys' room, where he rested his head on the bowl and fanned himself with his toupee. When we made it back to our seats, Uncle Sy was gone.

As I recall, the last words I heard him utter were that the hearty blonde was "just right for the lead in Hamper-Scamper." (He'd announced the title change only hours before, explaining that just being in L.A. gave him the idea of sticking in some kinky, Manson-style "commune action" to spice up the laundromat stuff.) But that was it. Until, about a month or so later, I stumbled home one night to hear that Midwestern rasp on my machine, thanking me for a swell time and proclaiming that Uncle Sy had decided to "deep-six the pornski" and branch out into home dry cleaning instead. He said he had some little German units that were "real beauties." They were going like hot cakes at eight and a half; but if I was interested, there was one with my name on it for three seventy-five.

Needless to say, I'm still saving up.

•

The oddest thing about the Uncle Seymour saga is that it proved not to be that odd at all. All sorts of benevolent swells sailed forth in that twisted era, each with his or her own fix on the Flesh biz. The peculiar nature of our achievement evoked equally peculiar reactions. Just admitting that you had seen the movie, in some circles, could be construed as a dicey personal confession, something sure to crop up in a negative ad blitz if it fell into the wrong hands during a no-holds-barred gubernatorial bid.

Schizy stuff. If it remained semishameful to have slid into porn, it was absurdly enviable to have had a hand in a genuine "cult sensation." The cult status induced certain people to seek you out. But the porn part, for some reason, gave them the green light to launch into their own erotic bents two seconds after you'd been introduced. Which isn't as titillating as it may sound.

At the height of Café madness, on a cross-country flight to attend a relative's funeral, I was feeling drunk and contrite enough to loose my lips and blab about having written you know what. Within minutes, my seatmate, a former Marine captain turned Ohio homicide dick, had snapped open his leather-look attaché case, fished under a stock of manuals on police neck restraints and plucked out a copy of "a little something" he'd been fiddling with between cases.

It was called--nobody ever believes this--Buns 'n' Ammo, authentic memoirs of a crime-fighting stud in "a certain scum basin back East that isn't Philadelphia and isn't Newark, New Jersey." Whatever that means. Oddest of all was that every word was written in a neat-as-a-pin, girlish backhand on loose-leaf note paper. (I had this image of Detective Buzz slapping on his .38 and popping into a Thrifty Drugs at three A.M. to get more paper, then stopping off at his diner for a cruller and Java while he banged out more two-fisted schoolgirl sentences.)

Although I felt a little silly giving him advice, the investigator provided a retreat from reality on an otherwise morbid trek. For some reason, he was dying to be "an adult-screenplay author." And since just about all the screen offerings he'd ever seen had had "Teenage," "Wet" or "Kitten" in their titles, he was eager to get a Wet Teenage Kitten script under his belt as soon as possible.

Buzz kept in touch for a while, occasionally shipping out a few sizzling, action-packed pages stocked with "Mafia playthings" named Bunny or Chita who "laid down and made like Oklahoma while I fingered my Mauser"--that sort of thing, all in the prissy, labored hand of a conscientious 12-year-old.

Who knows? I wish now that I'd saved some of the officer's tonier prose. At the time, though, I had this irrational fear of being found keeled over my Smith-Corona, with nothing to explain my untimely demise but a couple of empty Mickey's big mouths and a copy of Detective Buzz's Broad with a Badge stuffed into my top drawer. In his last missive, I forgot to mention, the scrappy law-and-order scribe confided that he was shifting the P.O.V. in Buns. The new version featured Captain Poodle, "a buxom ex-prosty who liked her men hot and her lead even hotter."

The dick's late-inning switch may or may not explain that Suzy Penmanship backhand. (Just kidding, Buzz.... Don't shoot!) Either way, I didn't want my loved ones scratching their heads over it when I wasn't around to explain. "It all started with that creepy movie," they'd say. "He was almost OK before that...." So one day, I just tossed the collected X-rated Ammo epistles into the bin with the weekly dunning notices. If it turns out that Buzz is the Hemingway of his generation, the joke's on me.

•

It makes sense, I suppose, that weirdness should be as contagious as hepatitis or ringworm. And for a while there, I admit, nothing could kill that odd psychic rash that Café Flesh had engendered. One mondo-repulso incident seemed to bleed right into another. But it was more than a parade of porn-crazed normals and businessmen. I was receiving even gamier entreaties: photo proposals from good folks who'd seen Flesh and had a little somebody special they wanted me to check out for the sequel. "I think Tammi would be just right for a classy erotic cult product like your own."

Uh-huh! Most of the smudgy Polaroids slipped my way packed the same slightly earnest sinfulness as the hopefuls in Hustler Beaver Hunts. Busloads of near-miss homecoming queens tricked out in Frederick's of Hollywood motelwear. Some aspirants scribbled little captions on the snapshot margins for extra impact: Here's Meg being naughty! But the most arresting eight-by-ten glossy I ever got proffered a mother-daughter team, whimsically buns up, grinning side by side on a pair of velvet throw pillows for the lucky shutterbug (Dad, I suppose, or a favorite uncle). One or two guys also sent in pix of themselves, though I don't know whether their partners made them or if they just got the urge to pose for a few wind-swept candids amid the driftwood all on their own.

In the classic Meshulam Riklis mode, there was even one gentleman who offered through intermediaries to pay for a movie if we'd just agree to put "his Sheilah" in the starring role. According to the spokesman, a smooth talker from Queens, the girl had come in first in a Charo look-alike contest. I'd have loved to get in touch, if only to find out if Xavier Cugat himself had been there doing any judging. But Sheilah's four-color PR pack made this doubtful, unless her sugar daddy had somehow managed to buy off the famous bandleader. But could the once great Cugie be so hard up for cash that he'd pawn off a Charo crown for a few measly dollars?

I didn't want to believe it. There was, in one or two shots, a kind of wide-angle brassiness to Sheilah's features--the young Kate Smith feel. Still, if Meshulam baby could scoop up that plum Butterfly script for his li'l Pia, how much hassle would our man have snapping up the discount notoriety of porn stardom? If that's what he wanted. The only genuine sex queens I ever met were both hitched to mild-mannered, Tony Dow kind of guys, towheads who sat on the side lines boning up for their state contractor's exams while their lifemates took simultaneous dog and whistle from fellows hung like Forties hood ornaments. Since he didn't have to live off his sweetheart's labors, though, it's tough to say just what kick Sheilah's backer got out of her.

But, hey, no hard feelings! Ultimately, one likes to think that all these worthy supplicants got what they wanted. I have yet to see Inside Sheilah blasting from the marquee of my local theater, but maybe she had to change her name for tax purposes.

Lest it sound as if my entire post-X existence consisted of fending off unsavory requests from aspiring pornophiles, I hasten to add that there were other unsavory requests, as well. Some of them quite inviting. Because of its ground-breaking (at the time) synthesis of punk fashion and Fifties dialog, Flesh boasted a particular appeal to youthful art victims. In Los Angeles, at least, part of what fueled its 18-month run was that half the town's underground avant actually appeared in the movie. This bestowed on us a built-in cachet among local nuevo-ettes, a breed of heavily mascaraed existential gals who smoked Gitanes and kept tattered copies of Naked Lunch in the glove compartments of their Karmann-Ghias. For those rarefied few, Café really said something. They mentioned it in their poetry and told their therapists about it.

Pre-Café, my groupie experience was negligible to nil. Before I wrangled my meager cult status, any female who gave me the time of day did so because she got some strange kick out of it--not because of the imagined glamor attached to my dubious achievement. That's just the kind of guy I am.

Anyhow, you couldn't honestly call it a bevy, but in the wake of Café Flesh, a trickle of interesting vixens did make themselves known. Their motivation, as near as I could gather, hinged on the ill-conceived prestige they attached to my having written the movie's one-liners. Not a good sign. Anyone who wanted to sleep with me as a career move was either insane or willing to settle for minimal advancement. One notably alarming offer came from a doe-eyed Loretta Young-on-Quaaludes type who sidled up to me at a barbecue and announced that she wanted to get into the movies more than anything else in the world. "Like the kind you made," she slurred.

"The kind I made is not the kind you think I made," I replied, a tad hysterically. Lately, I'd found myself repeating that Zenlike snippet, often with no provocation, to cashiers at burrito stands, priests in elevators--anyone at all, really, who would listen for a minute while I tried to explain the truth about what I had done.

But a little bout of compulso babble made no dif to Doe-eyes, who blew a strand of hair off her face and announced blandly, "Ace can pull the van around the side of the house when you're ready."

"Ace?"

"He's my boyfriend, but it's cool," she insisted, "he's also kind of my manager. He'll wait in the front seat till we're done."

Can this, I wondered, be all there is to know about Hollywood?

For sheer cosmic unlikeliness, however, the offscreen encounter with a concerned Valley girl whose church group was discussing the Nightmare of Nuclear Madness pretty much steals the show. (I've been saving this one for Merv, but what the hell; his people haven't returned a single call.) "Misty"--let's not shame her congregation--called out of the proverbial blue one day to announce that she'd heard about the intense anti-atomic sentiment to be found in Flesh. "We need more of that," she sighed, voice aquiver with righteous fervor, "people willing to look at the situation the way it really is, people like Helen Caldicott, you know, and film makers like you and your partner Rinse...."

Hard to believe she could have heard about Flesh without also hearing about its dirty little secret. But the concerned young Val gave no sign that she had. It seemed dangerous and giddy to be discussing nuke stuff like a guy who'd gone to the wall for world disarmament, especially when the truth was that the antinuke chunks of the story had to compete for space with the frontal slap and tickle. Still, on the phone, Misty sounded sort of like Jeane Kirkpatrick, always a turn-on, so I decided there was no harm in hooking up. (I could always explain later about the meat and potatoes, if it came to that.)

Young Misty and I took a lunch in Burbank. She turned out to be one of those golden, beach-loving beauties I'd always thought only lifeguards named Lance or Skip could ever hope to get next to. As it happened, I was pretty much right. But it was all I could do not to choke on my endives when the sun-tanned lovely explained, in that Kirkpatrick voice of hers, the reason she'd wanted to meet me: to see if I'd pop in to her Wednesday-night church group and give a "teensy talk."

"But, Misty," I sputtered, "a church group.... I mean, don't you think--"

"Silly," she interrupted, patting her golden fingers atop mine on the tablecloth. "It's OK if you're Jewish. We've all seen Jews before!"

After much imploring, I put the prayer issue on hold and agreed to accompany the clean-living California beauty to that week's midnight show. Three minutes into things, when the first throbbing gristle hit the screen in the infamous rat-in-the-milkman-suit sequence, I half expected my date to let out a tortured shriek and lash me with her pocket Bible. Instead, weirder still, she nuzzled closer and whispered that she had had no idea the film would be so ... colorful.

The fact is, nothing could have induced me to show up at a church group, even if I weren't a quasi pornster fearful of instant shipment to Pitchfork City on general principle. That ours was not a match made in heaven merely lessened the odds. Before the night was up, Misty was on the phone to Lance. And I never got the chance to hear any dulcet ambassadorial sighs and whimpers. Kirkpatrick interruptus. It was all over when the voice of God told her that my happy log was the Devil's tool. Just because I'd penned some silly film.

Still, I can't complain. Provided you get vaccinated against dreaded gold-chain disease, porn itself stands out as such weird turf that it's worth a visit for the pure anthropological kick. (These days, who can afford a trip to the Trobriand Islands?) In the same way that Las Vegas, while maintaining its status as the sin capital, stands out as the squarest town on the map, Adult Filmland is equally L-Seven, a kind of D version of the "real" movie industry. The only spooky part is the number of snuggle kings who believe their product matters. As if all over the free world, people walk the streets racked with anticipation over the release of Key Punch Girls in Bondage. Then again, after what I've seen, it wouldn't surprise me if a few did.

To this day, director Rinse Dream and I are periodically tagged by one X syndicate or another to see if we want to "come back to the fold." And when we break out in hives, they always seem confused. (One enterprising team even put out a sort of ur-Flesh, called Smoker, promoted as picking up where our little effort had left off--as if that were something to be proud of.)

Or does all this sound like carping? In its way, just to be fair, popular pornography may not be such a bad career--especially if you make enough on your first film to pay for a lobotomy before you tackle your second, third, fourth and 27th.

Weirdly enough, a handful of legitimate worthies have ventured forth with projects. Jerry Casale, of Devo, has a colorfully deranged, Orwellian concept he'd like scripted for himself and the band. He wants to direct. Likewise, Larry Bishop, veteran film actor and son of Joey, has expressed a serious affection for Flesh and has approached those responsible about expanding a certain little property he owns to a few-million-dollar film. And so on.

Terrific options, far and wide; and if dime one ever rolls out of escrow, we'll be in business. Until then, yours truly can hang on for the odd royalty and stay underground long enough to write a real movie. In fact, I have this great idea about a couple of arty young thugs who stumble into porn when the rent's due and they can't land any other deal, about how they accidentally make a smash that snags them all sorts of strange attention and how, after that--but don't get me going.

Maybe I could talk Uncle Sy into forking over a few Gs for foreign rights. Promise him another night at the Ivar. If we can scarf up some development money, we could be shooting in a month. Or better yet, maybe 20th will scoop up the film rights. I mean, right off, I see Chris Reeve as the plucky hero, and Pia's a natural as the sensitive Vassar grad who has a love affair with the movies only to find herself head over Heidegger in a World of Lust and Terror.

Of course, the majors always change your plot around, which is A-OK, as long as they hire some other simp to write the sex scenes. A guy can't be too careful with his reputation.

"I had a premonition that 'Flesh's' exposure in the heartland would generate some grotesque fallout."

"He hooted, slapping both hands on his ample breadbasket. 'Gladda see ya, you old porn dog!' "