Hairy Palms

I missed the porn train as a lad. No crinkled pages wedged covertly under the Encyclopedia Brown series. No Mexican playing cards poking out teasingly from the spokes of my bike tires. I heard about Hugh Hefner and Al Goldstein and Bob Guccione, but their pubs remained mysterious terrain in a pre-Internet era when forbidden images still held mysterious sway over the imaginations of shy suburban boys. I had no older brother to filch from, and I was way too timid to shouldertap; “Hey mister, can you score me a Hustler?”

Allan MacDonell’s memoir, Prisoner of X, about his years at the helm of Hustler, pulls back the curtain of the dark wizard Larry Flynt and fills in some of the holes in my childhood education. It’s also pretty damn funny. Flynt and his not-so-merry band of smut peddlers come off even weirder and more perverse than legend would have it. I’m guessing Althea’s family ain’t inviting Allan to any remembrances, as he paints the woman Courtney played as an angry smack whore. Larry doesn’t come off much better, although moments of guarded affection slip in between bouts of terror and loathing. Mr. Flynt ain’t easy, and our hero, who opens self-deprecatingly, inevitably turns egomaniacal and nasty. Not a lot of kindness gets slung across these pages, but I suppose that just don’t sell. Once again we get a man in middle age who never tires of reminding us how smart he is and how grotesque just about everyone around him is, but he doesn’t quite reach the heights of bravado in this week’s other porn memoir, I Have Fun Everywhere I Go.

If stories of a sex tape showing Jane Fonda buttramming Ted Turner with a strap-on while Georgia's Silver-Haired Fox pummels a saucy brunette while barking orders to the cameraman, “Make sure you get all of it!” excite you, you’ll really go wild for Chuck Berry’s escapades with female excrement. Yes, it gets that gross. But it also has moments of a less scatological nature- remember when the impeachment process was hitting high gear and Larry put an ad in the Washington Post offering up to a million dollars to anyone who could document sexual liaisons with powerful Republicans? Hell, they brought down the next Speaker of the House, Bob Livingston, without producing any real evidence. They bluffed, he bought it, and then he resigned. The party in Larry’s office must have cooked that night.

Working under a drug-addicted, emotionally volcanic and seemingly fearless fucker like Flynt probably does its damage, but clearly, our hero found some perks- power being arguably the greatest aphrodisiac in this rise and fall tale. Yes, in the end, MacDonell gets canned after his skewering of Larry at the latter’s roast cuts too close to the grizzled bone. So we get this story, and if you too missed out on a child’s pornographic rite of passage or you just want to find out what’s on those Berry tapes, I’ve got a book for you.