Kingdom of Fear (5 page)

But not really. Don’t get me wrong, fellas. That is only a whooped-up “figure of speech,” or maybe a failed metaphor. It is a term of Art, not a term of Law. If the freak who wrote the Book of Revelation had been busted and jailed for the horrible
threats
he made against the whole human race, he would have been executed on the spot by a Military Tribunal. So long, Johnny, we never really liked you anyway. Mahalo.

Not everybody understands the real meaning of being “brought within The System.” It is legal language, the kind of talk you hear in the hallways at professional police conventions or pretrial hearings in musty urban courtrooms. As in, “The time has come, Judge, to drop the net on this loathsome criminal deviate and reel him into The System.”

We are talking about The Criminal Justice System, here, and once you get brought into it, there will be a part of your brain that thinks about nothing else for the rest of your life. It will be as if a leech had attached itself to the small of your back forever. . . . Just ask Bill Clinton.

Some people call it Rehabilitation, but. . .

A cop killing is always big news—except when Police kill one of their own, in which case the death notice is rarely if ever made public. The Law Enforcement Fraternity is very tight when it comes to media embarrassment. There is a basic operating rule among Criminal Defense Lawyers that says: “Above all, the
lawyer
must not go to jail.” It is not always an easy rule to observe, given that the lawyer is also an ordained Officer of the Court.

Be keenly aware of this fact when you get accused (on paper/formal charges are filed) of anything at all—
anything
from
shoplifting to felony murder—that could/might/will result in your being Convicted and formally Punished
in any way
for any violation of
any
part of
any
Criminal Code. The law is not on your side when you become a defendant in a criminal courtroom. They
are
out to get you, and they
will
if you are not alert.

“He who goes to law takes a wolf by the ears.”
Robert Burton said that, and I am citing it as a very dangerous Reality in this war-torn world that we live in. This is 2002. The American Century was over in January of 2001. They were Punctual, as the Fascist mentality cannot survive without brute Punctuality. Never be
late
, for fear of being guilty of
Deviant Behavior,
and
brought within The System.
BANG! SLAM! BEND OVER. . . .
Seig heil!
Who is God? The Boss is God—and you’re not. . . . Hey rube, you are Nothing! You are Guilty! You are lower than the shit of some filthy animal.

Yassuh, Boss. I’ll do
anything,
just don’t put me in Jail. I am guilty. I will do whatever you say.

Marilyn Chambers at 17 (HST archives)

. . .

It was a cold winter night when the Witness first came to my house. She was a very large woman, about 35 years old—dark hair, long legs, and tastefully enlarged breasts—who once worked in Southern California as a director of sex films. That is not a bad job to have in L.A., especially if you have a natural talent for it, and this woman did. I recognized it immediately.

I know the Sex Business. I was the Night Manager of the famous O’Farrell Theatre, in San Francisco, for two years, and I still have a keen eye for working girls. There is a certain lewd radiance about them that comes only from dancing naked in public for 2,000 nights. . . . Sex business people recognize one another immediately. They have ridden for the XXX brand, and the brand has ridden them.

It is not an unfriendly brand, nothing like a scar on the cheek, or a crude tattoo on top of a butt that says
PROPERTY OF HELL’S ANGELS
. That would not be appropriate for a stylish lap-dancing venue in Nashville or Toledo. The customers would be offended. Big tippers tend to be wary of a woman who has pulled the Hell’s Angels train. The mark of the XXX business is an attitude more than a brand or a nasty tattoo.

The O’Farrell was once celebrated as “the Carnegie Hall of Public Sex in America.” It was a nice place to work in those money-mad years of the Reagan Revolution. We had about 100 girls on the payroll, and many more on the waiting list. Naked women were a hot commodity in those days. It was the “Golden Era of pornography,” according to chroniclers of that ilk, when sex movies were still shot with bright lights and reels of celluloid film.

Deep Throat
and
Behind the Green Door
were still packing huge multisexual crowds into respectable theaters all over the country, Oral Sex was mainstream, and lush entertainment expenses were tax-deductible. Huge expense money was the oil that kept the national economy going, and sex was everywhere, 24 hours a day. Powder cocaine was the recreational drug of choice, but LSD-25 was still fashionable in upscale communes and coastal brokerage firms.

Those 20 sex-crazed years between the introduction of the birth control pill and the eruption of AIDS was a wild and orgiastic time in America, and I loved it.

Ah, but that was many years ago, or at least it seems that way. It was a good time to be young and reckless—when you could still take your date to a movie without having to worry about being hit on by strangers demanding blow jobs. That came in with the Democrats, who quickly discovered that getting busted in Washington for sodomy was a proven way to get re-elected in states like Arkansas and California. If Bill Clinton had not been term-limited by federal law, he would still be in the White House today and we would all be free from fear.

Or maybe not. There is another school of thought that says Clinton would have been assassinated if he’d been able to run for a third term. “The Texas Mafia would never have let it happen,” my friend Curtis assured me. “He would have been jerked out like a bad tooth. . . .” Maybe you have to be from Texas to agree with talk like that, but I doubt it. Texas is not the only state full of wealthy freaks with sinister agendas. Some of them are friends of mine, in fact, and I have never doubted that just because they are nice people to have a few drinks with doesn’t mean they won’t do monstrous things. Cruelty and perversion are common jokes in the oil and orgy business.

Indeed, but we can save those stories for later, so let’s get back to this woman I was trying to describe. Her name is Gail, but for vaguely legal reasons we will have to call her Jane. If I called her Gail we would have a lot of bitching from lawyers.

We will call her the Witness, which better suits her role in this drama. Some people called her the Victim, but not for long. That was a convenient legal fiction for the local D.A. and his (since-departed) gang of vengeful thugs. They are gone from this valley now, most of them fired or demoted into obscurity. The chief investigator in my case, the de facto boss of the gang, now works for the DEA in Europe. The Prosecutor, now known as Mr. Shiteyes, resigned soon after and is now a criminal lawyer in Aspen, where he is frequently seen on trial days with his arm around accused criminals wearing orange jumpsuits and handcuffs and jail haircuts, but he no longer works as a prosecutor. He “flipped,” as they say in the cop shop. . . .

I didn’t know the Witness personally, but she definitely knew me. She had been harassing me by mail for four or five months, telling me I didn’t know how much FUN I was missing by not getting
together with her immediately for a fascinating chat about her days in the Sex Business. We would have more FUN than a barrel of monkeys in heat, she hinted. Ho ho. She would even come out to Colorado in order to meet me on my own savage turf. She had already sent me a thick sheaf of lurid press clippings about her adventures as a wholesome college cheerleader who got into the Porno Movie business by accident and had been a big success. “I guess I was just lucky,” she said demurely. “But once I saw how much talent I had, I never looked back. It’s just amazing, isn’t it.”

It is important to understand that Jane had been extremely open with me, a complete stranger, about her background in the sex business. She was proud of it. Her record spoke for itself: nine successful XXX movies, including classics of abysmal lewdness like
Hot Lips, FleshSucker, Candy Goes to Hollywood, Eat Me While I’m Hot,
and a truly depraved saga about rape and degradation in a Japanese sex prison somewhere in the South Pacific called
Nazi Penetration,
starring Long John Holmes, one berserk Nazi, and five helpless white women with huge tits.

Nazi Penetration
has long been one of my favorite films of the sex genre. It is a story of shipwreck, sadism, and absolutely hopeless female victims confined on a tiny tropical island with only a Nazi war criminal and two cruel Japanese nymphomaniacs to keep them company. The naked white girls are innocent prisoners of some long-forgotten war that is never mentioned in the movie except by way of the frayed and often bottomless military uniforms worn by the demented villains—who also carry spotless German Lugers and don’t mind shooting them at escaped Sex Slaves who keep running away and fleeing into the jungle, only to be recaptured and relentlessly raped and tortured for their efforts. They are losers, and they will never be rescued—not even by the good-hearted Holmes, who also fucks them relentlessly.

I mention this epic of degenerate suffering only for reasons of historical context and Witness identification. If Jane had been a practicing Jehovah’s Witness when I met her, my story might have a different ending, but she was not. She was just another one of those goofy, over-the-hump Porno Queens from the good old days who was looking around for some other line of work to get into,
something where she could use her natural talents for harmless commercial sex without compromising her artistic integrity or her dubious social standing. I know them well, and I have a certain affection for most of them. They are girls who went to Hollywood when they were 17 years old, hoping to make the most of their whorish ambitions by becoming movie stars.

Very few succeeded, and many got sidetracked into the Sex Business, where work is always available. “My pussy is my ticket to ride,” a stripper named Bambi once told me. “Men want to see my pussy and they want to see me fuck something scary. That’s why they pay me, and that’s why I do it.”

Bambi was a lovely girl from a middle-class family in Sacramento, with an elegant body and a seductively morbid sense of humor. I liked her and used my influence to help her become a star at the O’Farrell, where she routinely made a thousand dollars a night. I was always tempted to fuck her, but I never did. I was deeply in love with my girlfriend Maria at the time. She was a sex star in her own right, and a jewel of a friend and a lover.

My Night Manager job put me in close contact with dozens of aggressively naked women every night, which never ceased to amaze me and kept me constantly high on sex. It was an overwhelming work environment, at times, but with Maria’s help I soon became comfortable with it. Not everybody can handle being surrounded by lust, beauty, and clearly available nakedness at all times. It is like living in the Garden of Eden, with luscious apples hanging from every tree and the power to banish all snakes—which were Everywhere, writhing and cooing with a lust that bordered on madness.

Only a freak of passion could have resisted that kind of massive temptation, and on some nights I came close to caving in to it. “You are crazy as a goddamn loon not to fuck every one of these girls,” Artie Mitchell told me. “They all love you and they all want to fuck you like animals. I’ve never seen anybody turn down so much guaranteed fine pussy. It makes me sick.”

“So what?” I would say to him. “You are a sleazy whoremonger and you don’t understand anything. Herb Caen told me you have syphilis.”

“What?” he would scream. “You sick bastard! I’ll kill Herb Caen if he ever prints that. Herb Caen sucks dicks!!”

Jim and Artie Mitchell were as bizarre a pair of brothers as ever lived. I loved them both, but the Sex Business had made them crazy. They made millions of dollars off of sex and smuggled guns to the IRA when they weren’t fondling naked girls or entertaining corrupt cops and politicians. But they were not suave. Neither one of them had social ambitions, but they fought like wolves to protect their vice-ridden turf. They were deep into San Francisco politics, but they were always in desperate need of sound political advice.

That was my job. The Night Manager gig was only a cover for my real responsibility, which was to keep them out of Jail, which was not easy. The backstairs politics of San Francisco has always been a byzantine snake pit of treachery and overweening bribery-driven corruption so perverse as to stagger the best minds of any generation. All political power comes from the barrel of either guns, pussy, or opium pipes, and people seem to like it that way. The charm of the city is legendary to the point of worship all over the world, with the possible exception of Kabul, New Orleans, and Bangkok.

. . .

On that cold night in late February when the Witness came to my house, she was wearing a blue business suit that made her look a bit on the chubby side and high-heeled shoes that would have made her seem dangerously tall if my other guests had not been well over six feet and none too happy to see her. Her head was huge, far larger than mine, and her body was oddly muscular—more in the style of a female bodybuilder with an uncontrollable appetite for speed and lethal steroids who had spent too much time in sexually oriented weight rooms on the wrong side of Hollywood. She was clearly an athlete—a “big” girl, in a word—and she spoke with a wiggy confidence that made me nervous. My mother would have called her pushy, or perhaps even rude. But I am not so polite. To me, she looked sleazy. There was something corrupt about her, something foul and dishonest that would have put me instantly on my guard if I had cared enough to worry about it that night. But I didn’t. She meant nothing to me, at the time. We get all
kinds of people in this house, from common thugs and deviates to stupid thieves with hearts full of hate and U.S. senators with amazing whores on their arms. Some arrive on private jets, and others drive stolen cars full of illegal drugs and weapons. It is an ugly mix, at times, but I have learned to live with it, if only because I am a professional journalist and a writer of books about life in the weird lane—which is “interesting” in the Chinese sense, but not necessarily uplifting.