Her stunt came off successfully, beyond expectation. She achieved 6-foot flames. Photos appeared in adult magazines around the world of Jasmin shooting fire from her ass as men held skewers and roasted marshmallows. Two weeks later, however, a mysterious blaze destroyed Randall “Master Magician” Richman’s apartment complex.
Each week, dozens of adult videos arrived at my office on the third floor of the Flynt building. Occasionally, other products arrived -- dildos, butt plugs, artificial vaginas, bondage hardware -- which their manufacturers hoped Hustler would review and promote. One day, a representative from a company arrived to deliver in person what she claimed was a revolutionary product: a rubberized female torso with a removable vaginal insert made of a patented substance that she guaranteed “feels like the real thing.” The torso came with its own carrying case, lubricants and a cleaning brush for the vaginal cavity.
The rubber coating of the torso approximated the color of skin about as well as a Band-Aid. The vaginal insert did feel remarkably like human flesh, but touching it brought to mind feeling up a cadaver.
I never reviewed it. I gave it some thought, because someone had obviously gone to a lot of expense to develop and manufacture the product. I tried to see in it what they must have seen. But I couldn‘t get around the fact that to use the product as it was intended would entail copulating with something that resembled an armless, legless, headless body. It was a nightmarish prospect. Thankfully, my editor never asked me to write a review.
I placed the torso on top of my bookshelf, where it remained for about a year. During that time, my thoughts began to turn. What if this torso were the last woman on Earth? What if I were trapped on a desert island with it? Would I fill it with memories of women I’ve longed for and loved? Would I eventually develop a sexual relationship with it? Would I pour out my heart to her and feel that she understood me?
As I read more of the letters to Barely Legal models from men who led desert-island existences of their own, I concluded that under the right circumstances I could probably love the torso. Perhaps she could even become a better alternative to the real thing. Just as methadone mimics heroin without any of its intoxicating side effects, a pornographic substitute might simulate intimacy without any of its dangerous consequences, emotional pain, fear of loss.
Greg Dark‘s persona was based on several essential myths. His father had been an anthropologist who disappeared in Haiti. Or he was a criminal who disappeared in the state prison system, depending on which story Greg was telling. His mother had been a “party girl,” a Las Vegas entertainer who had raised Greg with a series of common-law stepfathers. When he was a teenager, he and his mother moved to L.A., where he went to Fairfax High and developed a fascination for Charles Manson, whom he claims to have met once at a party on Sunset. Greg said he studied art at Stanford, moved to New York, became a conceptual artist, then wound up as a documentary filmmaker. In 1983 he co-directed and produced Fallen Angels, an anti-porn documentary that would nevertheless inspire him to enter the adult business.
But of all his myriad past experiences and encounters, Greg credited one man with teaching him the most important lesson of his life. He met his teacher in the early ’70s on the tennis courts at Stanford. During certain hours of the week, the courts were open to the public. According to Greg, a man showed up one morning driving a garishly painted Cadillac. He wore a peacock-feather hat and an ankle-length fur coat, which he slipped off to reveal standard tennis whites. The man was a street pimp from Oakland. Greg and the pimp became friends on and off the court. In Greg‘s personal lore, the pimp taught him the essentials of the “whore con”:
A) Men are powerless before the lure of female sexuality.
B) The whore lures men by promising unlimited sexual fulfillment.
C) As soon as she has lured a man and has begun to extract payment, the whore withholds as much sex as she can get away with.
D) The whore understands that the more she withholds, the greater her value.
E) All women are whores.
After dropping out of therapy, I increasingly turned to Greg for personal guidance. According to him, the object of being a man was to outsmart the whore con. Outwardly, he seemed to be a master of the game. There were weeks when he bragged of bedding a new beautiful woman every night -- dancers, porn girls, and young, college-educated women working entry-level Hollywood jobs.
But the more time I spent with Greg, the more he seemed to be a woefully inept player. Inevitably, he a developed infatuations with women who moved into his apartment and began treating him with the cold, disinterested contempt they thought he deserved.
For several months it was Treatie, a peepshow dancer more than 20 years Greg’s junior. Greg would pick me up in his red Corvette, we would have dinner at the Daily Grill or Louise‘s Trattoria, then he would drive up and down Sunset and Hollywood discussing his problems with her, occasionally pulling over to chat with a streetwalker.
