So I have come to see Johnny the same way masochistic parents make their children smoke an entire pack of cigarettes if they catch them smoking one. I want to stare into the face of a single man, forty years my senior, who’s been looking for love in the most unlikely place imaginable. I am in search of well-earned wisdom, of someone to smack me out of my habits. Like a vaccination, I am hoping that by immersing myself in an extreme version of my problem, I can be cured of my problem. But seeing as how our longest conversation ever has been about a dead bird, I hold off on sharing this revelation. Instead, we start at the beginning.
* * *
Johnny was born in 1943 in New Rochelle, New York, where he was a good student but not a great one. His younger brothers quickly surpassed him in athletic and academic prowess. Not that Johnny would have known. His mother instructed his brothers to lie about their trophies and their grades—even to physically hunch on occasion—to protect Johnny’s feelings. Which is an efficient way to mess up multiple children at once. Johnny learned that he was living in his own personal Truman Show during college, while home playing basketball with his youngest brother. For the first time, he didn’t let Johnny win. Johnny was unable to compute the loss, so the brother explained everything. As one might imagine, Johnny was more than a little unmoored. Activities at which he’d always excelled were called into question. He wondered if he had any talent at all.
Then, in 1965, he was drafted. This upset him because he was seeing a therapist who he liked and he hadn’t “completed the therapy.” Therapy, understandably, was paramount to Johnny. Less understandable is the fact that most of the family saw the same therapist when he was growing up. He remembers riding a Schwinn to go see a psychiatrist. When I ask him if he was given a specific reason, he says therapy was like “brushing your teeth,” just some Salingery exercise in which the whole family partook.
“So how long did you stay in therapy?”
“I stopped a couple of months ago. My therapist was older than I am, which is hard to find at my age.”
“Oh,” I say, “I’m sorry.”
“He’s not dead,” Johnny corrects me. “He just thought I was cured.”
“Of what?”
“Of my problems,” he says, smiling coyly.
I theorize that since he started going to therapy before he had problems, perhaps it’s therapy that gave him the problems. Like one of those lip balms secretly formulated to make your lips dry so you keep using it.
“That sounds paranoid,” Johnny says.
Fair enough, I think. You reach six decades of therapy, you are officially allowed to diagnose anyone you choose.
After he got out of the military, Johnny packed up his car and moved to Fort Lauderdale to “figure out what life is all about.” When I tell him that Fort Lauderdale is not a place generally associated with enlightenment, he tells me that’s why he moved to Minneapolis. After Minneapolis came Denver, after Denver came San Francisco—and San Francisco is where his life cracked open.
“I arrived in 1970 and everyone was openly smoking pot and I thought, Wow, this is pretty wild. At first, I was living in a residents’ club. It was cheap and you got to meet a whole new group of people before everyone went in different directions. It was really delightful.”
Only a small percentage of the population speaks of shared toilets with such fondness. Then again, an even smaller percentage of nice Jewish boys from Westchester go into the adult film industry. But Johnny has a way of imbuing everything with positive thinking. On his castmates’ orgasms: “I would wager a high percentage of them faked it but hey, what can you do?” On his niche notoriety: “I was just so happy knowing the women were happy with me.” On John Holmes: “Private guy. Upbeat!” Johnny’s first job in San Francisco was selling cable subscriptions door-to-door. And guess what? He friggin’ loved it.
“The cable company was required by law to have a channel that was available to the public.”
“A public-access channel?”
“Yes, one of those. And they needed a host. So I wound up interviewing people, and they supplied me with a cameraman. I interviewed exotic dancers and artists. They filmed me getting a massage. One day I interviewed this guy who published a magazine for the Sexual Freedom League and I was intrigued. They had some wild parties—nude parties, sex parties—and I attended those.”
“Attended,” I interject, adding air quotes.
Johnny looks at me as if I’m trying to sexualize a trip to the mailbox.
“Anyway, I started distributing the league’s magazine in vending machines. I had never even seen an adult film at that point. So I went to a theater downtown and I was awed by what these people were doing up on the screen.”
Awed is what most people feel when they see the northern lights or Meryl Streep. And yet I wholly believe Johnny when he says it, just like I believe him when he says he then said to himself, “My God, that woman seems to be having a great time! How do I get in on that?”
Turns out, the answer was at hand. The paper Johnny distributed was covering the trial of the Mitchell brothers, who, already famous for producing live sex shows, were
