The Scene is the whole thing, and the pain or the mood or the concept replaces orgasm and generic sexual activity.
We went to a room where he did photography. There was a large Irish setter sleeping in a shipping kennel. The door was open and she was very friendly, but she was the source of the omnipresent smell of dog. I was getting around fifty dollars an hour. The twisted pros of the industry really liked me even though I wasn’t the standard tits-and-hair nude model. I was trusting, good natured, liberal, and incredibly submissive.
He had me model a number of weird leather arrangements. One was a leather hood with no holes in it, except one to breathe through. It pulled over your head like a falcon’s hood. My hands were handcuffed behind me. I posed in a number of positions for about an hour: on my knees with my head bowed, or lying on my side on the floor under a floodlight, or sitting backwards in a chair. I never felt fear. It took me a long time to learn fear.
After the shoot he told me he really liked me. He had several live-in slaves and wanted me to join the crew. I thought it could be fun. It seemed like the beginning of an interesting cult.
On my second visit they began my initiation. He gave me a name with his initials in it: Morrow. All of his slaves had his initials in their name. Two pretty young girls came in, one was a young blonde with a gold ring through one lip of her pussy. I thought it looked great. I was told not to make eye contact with anyone and to always respond to Ron as Sir. That was hard to do with a straight face.
I was told to kneel in front of a bad painting of a woman with her head bowed. While I recited lines of devotion and submission, they whipped me. It was tremendously exciting and it hurt just enough. They had the line between pleasure and pain memorized.
They had a cool set-up for doing pain scenes. Beforehand they would give you a key word. If things ever got too heavy you could just say the word and things would stop.
I bellied up on living there. My main objection was that the place was tacky. If Ron had money or taste, I think I could have bought into it. But the furniture was ugly and old, the house smelled like that damn dog, and Ron was no prize. When I left that day, I thought, if I’m going to be a slave, I’m going to be a rich slave.
After seeing the blonde girl at Ron’s and reading
It was hard to get the needle to go through because the skin was very thick and rubbery. I had to really push and ended up having to put a cork behind it and then pushed it through. Bled like mad, got the earring in. Swelled so much in a day I wasn’t able to walk. It was shiny and swollen and felt like red ants had nested there. I couldn’t even think of wearing pants. By the third day I gave up, I pulled it out. It started healing within twelve hours and was completely healed in two days. It was miraculous.
I found out how to do proper piercing much later on. What you do is start on antibiotics a week before you do it and continue to take them for a week after. It cuts down on the grief I went through. I’ve met a lot of people over the years into ritualist piercing. They all used antibiotics.
3 Lower Haight
The most depressing place I’ve ever lived was at the bottom of Haight Street near Market. My apartment was in a three-story building that had originally been three flats, but they had been divided in half lengthwise to make six apartments. I lived in one of the back three where you had to use the outside stairs. I was living on SSI for being crazy, writing a lot of tortured poetry, taking drugs and screwing my brains out, like some people do on SSI.
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.
