The Porn Star's Revenge: Formerly Known as Jeff Stryker, Charles Peyton Has Turned His Toxic Feud Over the Folk-Music Club Kulak's Woodshed Into a Real-Life Online Obsession

The grandiosely named Marvin Braude San Fernando Valley Constituent Service Center is a normally placid Van Nuys outpost of city bureaucracy. Last August, however, about 100 citizens crowded its Mediterranean-fantasy portico and halls. People had come from Tehachapi and from down the street. They arrived in cars and in wheelchairs. Women wore hot pants and cowgirl skirts; men sported beards and ponytails. They weren’t here for some ribbon-cutting ceremony but to attend a variance hearing in support of Kulak’s Woodshed, a tiny folk-music club in Valley Village trying to extend its hours of operation.

“I tend to hold long hearings,” announced zoning-department chair Nicholas Brown in a precise lecture-hall tone. “I believe in deep democracy, in which people sit together and talk things out.”

Surveying the unusually full hearing room, guarded by cops standing at parade-rest, Brown then confided his own facilitator’s philosophy: “I like to manage expectations.”

Over the next two hours and 45 minutes, he would learn just how much work that would be.

The Woodshed war’s seeds were sown in 1999, when Paul Kulak opened his club for business. (For the dispute’s origins, see L.A. Weekly’s “No Peace in the Valley,” by Steven Mikulan, February 22, 2007.) Kulak and his partisans claim that theirs is strictly a defensive battle for survival. But Kulak’s neighbors, Charles Peyton and Jim Britten, who operate businesses on each side of the club on Laurel Canyon Boulevard, beg to differ.

Peyton’s complaints boil down to his allegation that the folk club generates Studio 54–type pandemonium normally associated with large late-night urban venues: noise, drugs, unruly patrons, vandalism, graffiti, public urination and parking headaches. And because, among other infractions, Kulak was cited several years ago for not having a sound wall or offsite parking plan, Peyton habitually describes himas a criminal operating an outlaw club. In the past, Peyton also has claimed that noise from the club interfered with his attempts to write an autobiography in his next-door office.

“That’s been put on perpetual hold until I can get myself back together,” Peyton tells L.A. Weekly in his smoky drawl. “I got a $25,000 advance on it but could never complete it.” He claims the noise next door broke his concentration.

Peyton is not just any memoirist, but the porn star formerly known as Jeff Stryker. Besides writing about a hardscrabble upbringing (“Jeff,” the 10 Plus star writes online, “got expelled from the school district because he beat the shit outa a big Jock in class for breaking a retarded kid’s pencils”), Peyton has operated a mail-order business marketing dildos cast from his own anatomy, as well as Jeff Stryker action dolls. He currently uses his office to manage several Web sites tapping into his fame as a legendary porn actor.

Britten more modestly operates a floor-covering store, but similarly swears that the Woodshed wreaks havoc on his livelihood, saying that its performances have prevented him from expanding his business. The two men also claim that, with the connivance of city officials, Kulak flaunts permit laws and profits handsomely from his no-pay, donations-only club.

Kulak, however, notes that Britten’s business, like most others on the block, is closed during the Woodshed’s six-night 8-10 p.m. schedule. Britten counters by saying he often meets with customers or tries to do work after closing hours. And he has also considered extending his operating hours, but says he has been thwarted by the club’s activity. Still, as further proof of the Woodshed’s unobtrusive neighborhood footprint, Kulak points to his venue’s 35-person occupancy limit, its restriction against alcoholic beverages and the low-decibel nature of folk music. He says that Peyton frequently retaliates by blasting much louder dance music during performances, from speakers placed at the walls between the two storefronts, and that he has urinated on Kulak’s truck.

The club owner also alleges, more darkly, that Peyton often lurks in the alley he shares with the Woodshed, whispering threats to Kulak from the shadows and intimidating his patrons — when he is not on the front sidewalk, kicking a martial-arts mannequin a few feet from the folkies.

“He constantly reminds me he’s a firearms expert,” Kulak says, “and will hide behind his back door when I dump the trash. Once, he started making mechanical gun clicks. I could see he had a pistol in his hand as he was dry-firing it.”

“That guy is so out there!” replies Peyton when this allegation is raised.

These are the dispute’s bare contours. Beyond them lies a baffling thicket of lawsuits, restraining orders, building inspections and neighborhood-council hearings. And past these stretches a litiginous horizon of threats, cyber stalking, sabotage and vandalism — all alleged or documented on videotape and online (including Peyton’s disco music and his outdoor kickboxing). According to a statement issued by Kulak, the past four years have produced no fewer than “24 LAPD raids, 14 Dept. of Building and Safety raids, 10 Fire Dept. raids, nine City of L.A. public hearings, six court appearances, three LAPD Vice Unit raids and investigations.”