A Girl Loves Her SOB [April 4, 2007]]

In the summer of 1980, I worked briefly as a senior editor at Larry Flynt (yes, that one) Publications in Los Angeles. Women had come suddenly to find me awfully presentable; hardly a day went by that a female fellow employee didn’t come into my office, close the door behind her, and offer herself to me.

I went to a party that lots of us Flynt employees attended down by the beach in Venice. As was my custom at the time, I poured a great deal of wine down my throat trying to suppress my natural shyness, and toked deeply on a succession of joints. By the time I resolved to try to drive back to the Koreatown art hovel in which I hung my hat at the time, and at which a couple of my housemates were throwing a party of their won, I was very much under the influence.

Two women staffed the magazines’ talent department – which is to say they were in charge of finding young slatterns to pose for the lurid pictorials for which Hustler was known. One was a slim black woman called Alice, whom everybody else in the world seemed to perceive as a great deal more ravishing than I did (when I took her to yet another party, half the people there came over to demand to know who she was), and who’d made most clear that she liked the cut of my jib. Her colleague, Sunday Leatherbury (I’m not making this up) was attractive, a little hard, slightly disreputable in a way I found quite sexy, and at the party in Venice —which, unbeknownst to me, she quit shortly before I said my own goodbyes.

Walking back to my car, I saw her ahead of me on Lincoln Blvd. getting surrounded in front of a dive by a small mob of leering lowlifes. I had enough alcohol and THC in me to throw caution to the wind, and leapt unflinchingly into the breach, something I’d never have done sober. A couple of the boys floated the idea of kicking my head in, but no one laid a finger on either of us. Which isn’t to say my heart wasn’t thumping like the bass drum in a Pet Shop Boys record by the time we got to my car.

Having only risked my life for her, and apparently being the hunkiest boy on the 39th floor, I was expecting a bit of gratitude; Instead, she treated me like Legionnaire’s Disease.

Weeks later, I learned that Sunday had played the bitch because she figured it would set her apart from the droves of maidens who invited themselves into my office seductively batting their eyelashes.

Lucky me!

More than that, though, Sunday had her heart set on Bruce, Flynt’s editor-in-chief, living refutation of every good thing you’ve ever heard about chronic overuse of cocaine; bullying, abusive, demanding, impatient, often, as when he fired the parents of young children for no perceptible reason, downright sadistic.

In the couple of months I lasted at the place, I ascertained that Bruce and I were universally regarded as running neck and neck in the male desirability sweepstakes.

Twenty-seven years after the fact, I think I’m beginning to understand. Daring to behave as monstrously as Bruce sends a strong biological signal — I will defend our young against all comers. We think we’re so hotsy-totsy and evolved, but beneath our fashionable attire and skincare products, we’re still, all these millions of years later, just baboons with delusions of grandeur.

Which, of course, is to beg the very interesting question of why just as many women find stereotypical chest-beating masculinity repulsive. My new pal Cherryl, a mother of two, equestrienne, and dominatrix from Leeds, purports to greatly prefer softspoken men, and not for any reason to do with her being a dominatrix.

Speaking of dominatrices, one of my dearest friends, the best woman (as in best man, you see) at my wedding, was mauled by a dog four years ago, and now learns from her lawyers that she’d better accept the pittance the mutt’s owners are offering because if it goes to court, the dog owners’ attorneys will bring to light what she does for a living, and she might wind up with an even smaller pittance -- if not tarred and feathered. She recently met a divorced guy whom she liked, and who adored her (as who wouldn’t?), but they had to stop seeing each other because he reckoned his ex-wife’s finding out about my friend’s occupation might result in his losing access to his children.

People look at the unfashionability of homophobia and imagine that we live in enlightened times, but don’t bank on it. I’ve been saying for years that kink, which I know to be practiced mostly by people who aren’t as inclined to kindness and compassion as their vanilla neighbours, but more inclined, is the new homosexuality. It’s snickered about or even viewed as pathological now, but is destined one day soon to be seen as no less natural to its practitioners than homosexuality is to gays and lesbians -- and big tits fetishism (let's call a spade a spade) is to the average American joe.

That day won’t come too soon.

[For the record, I don’t regard my having driven home drunk from the party in Venice, and from a lot of other places, as really Keith Richards. Indeed, I have come to believe that drunk drivers shouldn’t be castrated, but beheaded. The party at the Koreatown art hovel might have been the best I'd ever attended had I managed to attend it. Noting that it was absolutely lousy with gorgeous New Wave beauties in very short skirts, I resolved to try to cut a wide swath through it after a wee nap to clear my head. The next thing I knew, 'twas the next morning.]