I met Joanne while living on Lower Haight. She was the hottest woman I’ve ever known. When I met her we were both doing live all-girl sex shows at the O’Farrell Theater. My friend Artie took me to the dressing room on my first day and introduced us.
She was sitting on a table in front of a make-up mirror smoking a cigarette and wearing only a beat-up motorcycle jacket. With her laconic expression, her long naked legs, her short brown pubic hair, and her tiny nipples against the heavy gold zipper of the jacket, she looked like one of Warhol’s women: jaded, bored and beautiful. She had gigantic cool and the prettiness of an East Coast socialite gone bad. She looked me up and down and sounding like Nico on Valium, she said, “I can’t wait to get to work.”
It turned me on completely. From then on it was a competition to see who could be the most hardcore and the coolest. Doing shows with her was more fun than I’d ever had.
Our first time together was in the Ultra Room when it first opened. The Mitchell Brothers had come back from a visit to New York with the idea. The entire room was upholstered in black leather and measured about ten by fifteen feet in length. There were ropes and pulleys hanging from the ceiling with square mirrors set into the wall at eye level. All the girls could see their own reflection, but from outside the customers could see in. Two or three women would work the room at the same time, giving head to each other, using dildos, or just masturbating for the audience.
We started the show with three women in the room. We would flirt and kiss and hump each other, rapidly getting more and more bold until we were screaming and carrying on like mad women. I was on my period and Joanne gave me head. It wasn’t pretty.
Here’s what made it even more memorable: Herb Caen, a local newspaper columnist, had come to the O’Farrell that night. He brought a member of the Rockefeller clan, who had to go outside to throw-up after watching us. I’m sure it was better to do than see. The next day Caen said in his column that the show was the most disgusting thing he’d ever seen. Business tripled.
Joanne had a son who was six years old. He’d grown up around drag queens in the Castro District. He knew more about sexual aberrations than most adults, and would do gut-wrenching impersonations of drag queens trying to pick up tricks. Joanne got into angel dust, which I couldn’t handle. But there was a lot of this other drug called MDMA around (now they call it Ecstasy). I would score it at Toad Hall on Castro Street. We shot it up a number of times and made love. It made you incredibly sensitive and horny. We thought we’d achieved sexual enlightenment.
We went to gay bars sometimes after work and would see how outrageous we could be, like I would give her head on the dance floor while she danced and held a martini in her hand. She loved being passionate in public, and so did I. Rumor had it Joanne had even fist fucked a gay guy on the bar at the Stud on Folsom Street. She made me feel like Pollyanna. I was in awe. I get total recall when I think of Joanne.
Also while living on Lower Haight, I befriended a strange photographer who called one night and asked me if I’d like to go meet his coke connection in the wine country and be like a present to him. I’d never been a present before and agreed.
The coke dealer was a big, gentle man who collected guitars and antiques, and had lots of dogs. The photographer also brought a beautiful girl who was about nineteen. She had thick chestnut hair and a Playboy Bunny body. Her name was Arrega. The two guys wanted to see us make love but she refused, and later asked me if she could come to my house the next day.
She moved in for a month and the photographer was crushed. It gave me great pleasure to watch men go nuts over her and then find out she was with me. She turned tricks on Polk Street occasionally while I was taking Isadora Duncan dance lessons at California Hill. We slept together but I was very jealous because she was still seeing men and ultimately threw her out.
After Arrega, I had an affair with a gangster and his wife. I first met them at a couples party in Oakland. We did three ways for a while, but as usual in those situations, I fell heavily for the woman. She was a tall, svelte submissive blonde he had rescued from the streets. I saw her alone for about six months while he was doing a short stretch of time in jail.
She disappeared and after he got out, while he was searching for her, I slept with him alone. He always had great drugs. He slept with a.357 Magnum under the pillow, which seemed kind of exciting to me for a while, then some remnant of common sense burst through when I heard at the bathhouse that the Hell’s Angels had a contract out on him. Then Sonny Barger, the Oakland Hell’s Angels leader, called my house to threaten him. I went back to my mother’s house in Oroville for a while to chill out. I saw him on the Bay Area tv news, talking about his wife’s disappearance through a voice processor with a mask on.
That was followed by a relationship with a fastidious hippie guy who worked for the Post Office, had been to Afghanistan (and never recovered), and could fuck like a man possessed. He was hunky but a little too chubby, with flawless auburn hair to his shoulders and a full beard. He decided to rescue me.
We’d been having polite dinners and good sex. He didn’t shoot-up and had a nice apartment in the Avenues. I never cooked at my house and there were always dirty dishes in the sink. We’d had pizza one night and had slept at my place. For breakfast I’d decided to heat the pizza and blithely turned on the oven to heat, going into the other room for a few minutes. When I returned the entire top of the stove was covered with cockroaches. Big ones, baby ones. They were jumping around on the hot stove, and were so thick you couldn’t see the top. I guess they’d been breeding in the oven.
I realized my life was grimmer than I really wanted, that maybe I had suffered enough for art, and moved into his apartment in the Avenues.
4 Tahoe
The first porno people I worked with besides the Brothers were from Los Angeles. The word around was that they were Mafia-backed. A lot of LA people came to shoot porn in San Francisco at that time because it was a lot less likely they would get busted here.
The people who “acted” in these films had a tremendous network going. I found I could call anyone who I’d worked with or even heard of and ask them about a potential employer. If someone didn’t pay at the end of the shoot, or was horrible to work with, the word spread like lightning. I had about four pages of notes listing producers’ names, and the opinions of other actors and their past experiences with them.
The first duo I worked with from LA were really sleazy. They wanted to make a ski-oriented film and were going to take the entire cast to Tahoe for a week. They also brought along a skiing coach, some camera men and the director’s dad. We got a huge house at Northstar.
The director’s dad liked to tell stories. He had been a hobo for a time and would tell about hopping freight trains and drinking sterno. I had never heard of such a thing. They would drain the fluid out of sterno cans used to heat food and mix it with Tokay grape wine. They called it Tokay and Squeezins. I couldn’t believe he was still alive.
They had asked me to shave my crotch for the shoot, which I did but the second day I had broken out with razor burn. It was hideous. It looked like prime teenage acne all over my pubic area.
When we went skiing, it was a disaster. I had not skied since I was seven years old, and had very poor balance and muscle control. My dance teachers had always called it “your neurological problem”, but it was a little more vague than that. My first time down the bunny hill I broke through the surface of a frozen-over creek and was totally drenched in ice water. The woman who played my favorite girlfriend in the film sprained her ankle and it became grossly swollen.
Our first scene together in the shower was shot the next morning around my razor burn and her ankle. Mostly I gave her head. The level of sexual excitement was so intense that everyone said they’d have to re-shoot the rest of the film to bring it up to our level. We could make each other come just by looking at each other.