Sunday, February 15, 2009

Handjob and Gargle: A Film That Was Never Laid

Author's Note:

This piece was originally composed for my McBeardo at MrSkin.com column and, actually, the bulk of it was composed for the purposes of creating a screenplay and, from there, a feature-length motion picture.

Believe it or not, forces exis
t at my adults-only, naked-ladies job whose inevitable offense taken at the following would be more trouble than it would be worth to post it there.

So then I tried putting it on
my plain old McBeardo blog, and that thing wouldn't allow me to post pictures. So here we are now, really horribly stretching the boundaries of this blog. But something this foaming-at-the-extremities berserk must be shared somewhere, and immediately. Love me, love my psychoses.

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Cinderella with Cheryl “Rainbeaux” Smith. Alice in Wonderland with Kristine DeBelle. The Erotic Adventures of Pinocchio with Uschi Digard and Dyanne Thorne. Fairy Tales with Angela Aames and Linnea Quigley and Anne Gaybis and Lindsay Freeman.

The list goes on, as does my fascination with 1970s' "adult" movie adaptations of beloved children's fairy tales extends back to my own childhood, when these things were cropping up everywhere.

The previous post here on Rock Trauma delves deep enough into this topic. Here, I'd like to share my effort to contribute to this (de)formative keystone in my own own young psychosexual undoing, as well as an effort to revive a Great Lost Art.

A year or so ago, as my freak-rock combo Gays in the Military was wrapping up the brown-ring circus tent, a couple of GitM collaborators -- specifically Meg McCarville a.k.a. Lil Princess and Miss Julie Fabulous -- introduced me to the zero-budget Chicago artsploitation studio Diamondcamp Films.

Diamondcamp's master(batory)mind Peter Lambert is an A-class chap and unique talent. I was not only happy to become friendly with him, it's been beyond a hoot to act in a couple of his productions: Green Lust (2008) and Dead American Woman (2009).

Seeing how I am a powerhouse Hollywood screenwriter (ever heard of a couple of little blockbusters called Devil in Miss Jones 5 or Sex Freaks or Gregory Dark's Flesh or Animal Instincts 3: The Seductress? Uh, yeah ... all penned by me), I aimed to work with Diamondcamp Films to mount the first major "erotic" Mother Goose adaptation in decades: a Hansel and Gretel reimagining titled HANDJOB AND GARGLE.

We had a game cast with Lil Princess and Porn Kid Joe in the title roles, Julie Fabulous and me as the parents and bloody-breasted performance artist Heather Marie as The Witch.

I even concocted what would surely be a first in the annals of boffo box office ballyhoo gimmicks: Live Nude Adult Mother-Daughter Breastfeeding!

Lil Princess was convinced that we could convince her real flesh-and-blood mom -- whom we nicknamed Big Princess -- to pull out her tits and let her topless daughter suck on them for the camera. I was even more convinced that I could convince here. Trust me: that shit was a go. All I needed to do was concoct the proper vehicle for it.

What follows is the treatment I wrote for HANDJOB AND GARGLE. Diamondcamp Films opted to complete work on some projects-in-progress before undertaking anything of this scope.

I still say this could and would -- and should -- make everyone involved a worshipped artist genius and world-famous billionaire.

What say YOU, reader? Have at it, below.

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HANDJOB and GARGLE

The movie begins with Big Princess cooking breakfast in her kitchen. It's morning. She's wearing a robe and curlers in her hair. She calls upstairs to Lil Princess, telling her to come down and eat. Lil Princess yells back in annoyance: "Alright! Alright! Jesus CHRIST!"

Lil Princess then scowlingly enters the kitchen completely naked, takes a cigarette out of a pack on the table, and lights it up. Big Princess is appalled: "What is WRONG with you?! You're not supposed to smoke in your condition!" The camera closes-up on Lil P's pregnant belly.

Lil Princess barks back: "FUCK YOU, MOM!"

This makes Big Princess cry. She collapses into a rocking chair with her hand in her hands, sobbing as she wonders where she went wrong and what happened to her darling daughter, etc.

Lil Princess gets very sad, and goes to comfort Big P, rubbing her back and apologizing. She then curls up in her mother's lap and says, "I'm sorry, Mommy. I'll be good. Please tell me a story like you used to. Tell me the story about the brother and sister who get lost in the woods and go to the house made of candy where a witch lives. I love that one. And, please, mommy - will you give me some milk?"

Big Princess then takes her breast out of her robe, puts it in Lil P's happily sucking mouth, and begins telling her the story of "Handjob and Gargle."

Fade in to the cartoonish shanty residence of the Das Beardo Family - Big Dick Stepmammy (who is a woman but who, in fact, does have a lovely and fully-functioning big dick), Big Dick Daddy, Handjob, and Gargle. The house is decorated with topless pictures of Kate Moss, Milla Jovovich, Jane Birkin, and other famous women with huge, long nipples.

Big Dick Stepmammy is a wicked villainess in the classic Disney tradition, and she dresses the part.

Big Dick Daddy is a white power skinhead, although the only indication of this is his wardrobe, which is chock full of Skrewdriver t-shirts and the like.

Handjob and Gargle twin bother and sister, dressed in traditional Hansel and Gretel garb.

Times are tough for the Das Beardo clan. Big Dick Daddy can barely eke out a living at his job protecting the border of Dirty Storybook Land.

Big Dick Stepmammy is addicted to candy, which she forbids her children from eating.

We see Stepmammy forcing Handjob and Gargle to administer a Pixie Stick enema to her, and then she becomes furious when they try to lick the glistening remnants from her asshole.

Daddy comes home from work with pockets full of bodega candies, which he took from Mexican border-crashers during the day. He gives them right to Stepmammy, who orders Handjob and Gargle to eat organic rice, read McSweeney's publications, and listen to NPR.

We cut back to Lil P nursing from her mother's bosom and saying: "Ewwww!"

"That's right," Big P says, and commences with the story.

The only bright spot in the Gargle's life is how much Daddy loves her – especially her nipples. We see Daddy playing with Gargle's nipples as she giggles and coos.

Handjob takes solace in muscle magazines that he hides under his straw bed, and he dreams some day of being a professional oil boy for competitive bodybuilders. In the woods behind their house, Handjob hides a mannequin that he oils up and then orgasmically barks pageant commands at, such as "Clean jerk! Pump! Squat!", while he humps the ground.

One day, Stepmammy sees that someone has broken into her candy stash, and she is livid. She looks out at Handjob and Gargle playing in the yard, and decides that they have got to go.

Stepmammy and Big Dick Daddy lay side-by-side next to each other in bed. They are wearing normal nightclothes, with eye-goggles and their penises are exposed. Stepmammy brings up the topic of the children, and then blasts urine into Daddy's face. As he answers, he blasts urine back into Stepmammy's face. The entire conversation is punctuated by blasts of urine in the face.

When Big Dick Daddy expresses doubt about getting rid of the children, Stepmammy stands up and pisses directly into Daddy's mouth. She waves her dick in his face and tells him: "THEY go, or you can consider THIS goldmine all dried up."

We cut to Daddy taking Handjob and Gargle for a walk in the woods. He leads Gargle by the nipple. Handjob tries to sneak his Man-nequin along, but Daddy tells him it's okay.

Then Daddy instructs the kids to walk ahead and he'll catch up. He turns to run away, but he thinks of Gargle's nipples and dashes back to them. He pulls heaps of pills out of his pockets, and says, "Use this Viagra and female hormone supplements to leave a trail behind you so you can find your way home!"

The kids say okay and then take off, scattering the pills behind them. Daddy runs home. As Handjob and Gargle walk off into the distance, two Emmet-Kelly-style hobos crawl out of the forest and snort up the pills.

Cut back to Lil P and Big P.

Lil P asks, "Will Handjob and Gargle be all right?" Big P tells her, "Now hush and just listen! And let's change to the other tit." Big P takes out her other breast and puts it in Lil P's mouth. While Lip P suckles on one nipple, she tweaks the other with her fingers.

We fade back to Handjob and Gargle in the forest. As they walk, the hobos continue to snort up the trail of pills behind them. Handjob says it's getting late, and maybe they should turn back. Gargle notes that it's good they left their trail of pills.

The kids turn and see the cloaked figures, and gasp. Oh no! These creatures have been snorting up all their pills! "Who are you?"

The hobos leap up and tear off their shabby tramp clothes, revealing that they've been transformed into transsexuals with giant erections. They approach the children curiously. One lifts Gargle's skirt, sticks her finger in Gargle's pussy, sniffs her finger and screams. The other T-Hobo follows suit, then they grab Handjob's mannequin and run off.

Handjob and Gargle are scared. They don't know what to do. They're getting hungry and starting to freak out. Handjob suggests that they climb a tree for shelter. As they start to mount a tree, they notice that it has enormous human breasts. They look around and see that they're in the middle of a whole cluster of Titty Trees with enormous human breasts.

Best of all, the breasts squirt milk. Handjob and Gargle feast on the Titty Trees, going from one to another and sucking on the nipples. Gargle sticks her finger up her ass. When she pulls it out, it's covered in brown muck. She wipes the muck on a set of nipples and says, "Mmm! Chocolate milk!", then goes back to suckling.

Handjob sees this and thinks it's a good idea. He sticks a finger up his ass, but he goes so deep that he sprays blood from his rectum. He aims the blood-spray at one Titty Tree, covering the breasts in red.

Gargle cheers, "Yay! Strawberry milk!" and then licks the breasts clean.

Back home, while Stepmammy luxuriates in a bathtub filled with candy and masturbates with a Sno-Cone, Daddy is eaten up with guilt about abandoning the children. All he can think about is Gargle's nipples.

We see Daddy agonizing over Gargle's omnipresent nipples in a montage like the spinning bicycle wheels from Pee-Wee's Big Adventure.

Daddy performs a Norse Pagan black-magic ritual and a bass-playing Wizard appears to him, accompanied by naked barbarian slave girls.

The Wizard fires off an epic, wicked bass solo as the slave girls gyrate, strip and make out. The music conjures up thunder, lightning, and a small earthquake.

Falling to his knees before the Wizard, Daddy humbly asks, "Will you help me? Will you help me find my daughter's nipples?"

The Wizard deadpans to Daddy, point blank: "No. Go do it yourself." And then he disappears in a puff of smoke.

Cut back to Hansel and Gretel sleeping intertwined with one another on the forest floor. Their pants are undone and their stomachs are bloated from all the milk. Without stirring, they casually urinate all over themselves and each other.

A naked, long-nippled woman twirling a Hula Hoop appears behind them. "Come children," she says. "Rise! Look into my nips!"

Handjob and Gargle stand up and become mesmerized by the hooping figure. Her nipples turn into vortexes that hypnotize the children. Then the nipples show the image of a house made of candy.

"Come, darlings," the hoop lady says. "Follow me."

Handjob and Gargle get sucked into the Hoop Girl's nipples in a psychedelic whirlwind of sexual imagery that is both repulsive and arousing while acid-rock blares on the soundtrack.

When Handjob and Gargle finally crash-land in front of the Candy House, they can't contain themselves. They run wild, licking, chewing and sucking on every inch of the structure.

Every few feet, there's a glory hole through which protrudes an actual hard cock or a bent-over girl's ass and pussy. Handjob and Gargle treat the private parts like any other treat and delightedly lick, slurp and suck on them.

Maggots and other vermin feast on the ground, drinking up Handjob and Gargle's candy drool and newly diabetic urine.

That's when the Witch throws open the door of the candy house and invites the children inside.

Cut back to Big P in the chair, as Lil P does a spit take, spraying milk everywhere, and says: "A witch!"

"Yes," nods Big P.

"And did she have a magic wand?" asks Lil P.

"Oh, yes," says Big P.

"Just like yours, Mommy?" asks Lil P, as she reaches down into her Big P's lap and pulls a vibrator out of her pussy, sniffs it, and smiles.

"Even more powerful than your Mommy's," Big P says, as Lil P goes back to suckling, and the story continues.

Big Dick Daddy goes out into the woods to search for Handjob and Gargle.

He comes across the T-Hobos having some kind of strange sex with Handjob's Man-nequin. Daddy recognizes it and demands to know where they got it. The T-Hobos take out their erections and challenge him to a duel.

Daddy takes out his boner and they engage in a good, old-fashioned fight with dick-swords that culminates with Daddy sodomizing each of them to death with one powerful thrust each. He then cleans his dick by flicking it the way Samurais do to get rid of the blood, only we see blood, shit and come fly off the cock and splatter on the dead bodies.

Big Dick Daddy then beats his chest and howls at the sky, "I need my daughter's perfect Aryan niiiihhhh-pullllz!"

Cut to the interior of the Witch's house.

It is a human zoo, where odd characters (including monster-jugged porn star Alix Lakehurst and other naked people) are kept in cages. Among them is the Zuni fetish doll from Trilogy of Terror, and Bad Ronald, who paints pictures of Atranta on the wall. The prisoners are fed vile things, and they shit out candy and ice cream treats, which the Witch uses to spackle her home.

The Witch summons her two servants. They're troll-like creatures who look like the monsters from the 1973 TV-movie Don't Be Afraid of the Dark. Also, as in that film, the servants constantly whisper-chant: "Sally! Sally!"

The servants strip Handjob and Gargle, and the Witch inspects their naked bodies. She waves a hand over Gargle's pregnant belly, and we see an X-ray of a fetus with a beard just like Big Daddy's.

"This one's ready for milking!" the Witch says. The servants take Gargle, put cow horns on her head, and a cowbelly around her neck and lead her to a milking maching. She rests on all fours as her nipples are pumped into tubes, where her milk comes out as Shamrock Shakes, root beer, and cherry Slurpee.

The Witch inspects Handjob and says, "This one's not ready yet! Knock him up!"

The servants throw Handjob into a cage with a very eager Wiley, who's licking his lips and rubbing his hands together.

"And don't come out until he's good and pregnant!" the Witch orders.

Cut back to Stepmammy at home. She's eating red cotton candy, which prompts her to have flashbacks of Handjob's fluffy red pubic mound. She misses her sonny-boy, bursts into tears and explodes out the front door. She's going to retrieve her fire-pubed son!

Stepmammy tears through the forest on a rampage. She lays quick waste to each character who was previously encountered by the kids and Big Daddy.

The Wizard appears and whips up a storm by playing his bass. Stepmammy rips the guitar from him and rapes him with it, then uses the instrument to beat the boobs off the Titty Trees.

Covered in blood, guts, shit, and milk, Stepamammy rips into the disembodied boobs with her teeth and roars into the camera as she storms toward the witch's house. As she runs, her dress flies open and we see her erect cock.

Cut to Daddy on his hands and knees by a gloryhole on the side of the Witch's house. His plumber's crack is showing. Daddy keeps trying to push a boner out of the way so he can see what's going on inside, saying: "Move! Quit it! Lemme see!" He scoots over to another gloryhole, and tries to reason with a bent-over female butt. The butt farts loudly and sprays diarrhea into Daddy's face, which he wipes off with his fingers that he licks clean.

Stepmammy furiously runs up behind Daddy, and her dick crashes into his asshole. Stepmammy then pumps Daddy doggy-style as they discuss a plan get inside the house.

Cut to the Witch sitting on her throne, observing her prisoners manufacturing candy for her as she spouts off a monologue summing up her philosophy of the world.

The doorbell rings. The Witch sends her servants to answer it.

It's a unicorn with a penis for a horn. Obviously, its two people in a cheap horse costume, but it stands at the door butt-first, with the head turned completely around, facing inside the doorway. Daddy is on his hands and knees in the body of the unicorn. Stepmammy is wearing the front legs and head, still fucking Daddy's butt.

The Witch says, "Bring it in! We've been running short on GLUE to sniff around here lately!"

Stepmammy and Daddy throw off the costume and reveal themselves! Stepmammy speeds off to find the children and Daddy lunges at the Witch, dick-first. He strikes a fencing stance and shouts, "En Garde!"

The Witch yawns and spreads her legs. A long, long, super-agile penis grows out of her crotch, and takes on Daddy in another dick-duel. (The Witch's magic penis will actually be a puppet.)

Stepmammy races around freeing the prisoners.

The Zuni fetish doll, liberated from his cage, charges up to the Witch. He cuts off her magic penis and charges into her vagina. We see a lot of bulges in her pubic area and hear all kinds of terrible wet, slicing sounds, as Zuni carves his way out of the Witch's asshole.

There's a huge rumbling sound, and the Witch's taint explodes, sending a mighty gusher of candy into the air.

As candy rains down around them, Handjob and Gargle reunite with their parents in triumph.

The troll-like servants turn into two gigantic fat lesbians who call each other "Sally" and have sex.

Stepmammy tackles Handjob, a lovingly bites off big clumps of his public hair, which she chews and swallows.

Gargle pulls down her panties, and Big Dick Daddy chews her pubes into the shape of a swastika.

Stepmammy and Daddy lay back on the witch's undulating corpse as their children mount them reverse-cowgirl style. The parent's hold hands as they thrust their hips upward.

Gretel then pulls Daddy's cock out of her vagina, leans sideways like she's farting, and pumps out a live, newborn baby who has a full beard.

They rejoice and in unison cry out: "It's a girl!" They all lick the afterbirth off their new family member.

We hear Big Princess say: "And heterosexuality was restored, and they all lived hygienically ever after!"

Cut to Big P and Lil P in the chair, both masturbating, and talking - in stilted, sexual grunts - about how beautiful the story was. They each reach screaming, volcanic orgasms at the same time.

Then Lil P looks down at her crotch and joyously gasps: "Mommy, look!" Her pubes have been magically shaved into the shape of a swastika.

Big P looks down at her own crotch and sees that her pubes, too, have taken on the shape of a swastika.

Together mother and daughter hug and rejoice, licking each other's fingers and crying: "It's a miracle! It's a miracle!" They both then squat and give birth to babies with upside-down crosses congenitally etched in their foreheads.

The camera pulls back to show the entire cast of the movie sitting on floor around Big P and Lil P. Each one of them holds a baby with a swastika forehead.

In the manner of the final scene of The Trial of Billy Jack, Daddy stands up and sings a capella: "All we are saying / is give peace a chance." He repeats it as the cast slowly joins him by clapping along, and then singing as they stand, one by one.

When each cast member claps, they follow it with a "Heil Hitler" salute, until everyone is clapping, singing, and heiling. Interspersed with this are images of the UN, the puppets from "It's a Small World", Gandhi, JFK, MLK, and anti-pornography propaganda.

Each cast member then approaches the camera one at a time (or in pairs in the case of Stepmammy and Big Daddy; Handjob and Gargle; Big P and Lil P). They each take a bow, and walk off, still singing and clapping.

After the final bow, the camera pulls back, and points up to the sky, with the singing still going on. These words fade in on the screen:

"ALL we are saying is give PEACE a chance."

The words then dissolve into the image of a Christian cross, a Star of David and a Muslim crescent holding hands over the slain body of a yin-yang symbol.

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Hot Child in the Bunk-Bed



All I ever wanted was the glamorous life of a child pornography star.

I was ten years old and in the right place at what most consider now to be a very wrong time.

Musically, my ripe-for-psychoanalysis dream was embodied by “Hot Child in the City”, an impossibly lurid come-on by Nick Gilder.

In addition, “Bad Girls” by Donna Summer, with its sassy streetwalkers and garish images of neon-splattered urban sin, supplied even more context.

But “Hot Child in the City” and “Bad Girls” were, for me, a long time coming.




Forget Jaws and The Brady Bunch and disco sucking and Pet Rocks selling. The ’70s media sensation that ruptured my development irrevocably was the omnipresent coverage of shag-carpet-era Sexual Revolutionaries at their libidinously most unbridled.

The news, in its every format, came consistently ablaze with talk (and Films at Eleven!) of wife-swappers, swing clubs, nude beaches, topless bars, massage parlors, Hef & Gooch & Larry, and--above and beyond all--dirty movies.

My obsession started, healthily enough, with plain old movies. Life was horrible. Movies were not. I wanted as much relief in motion-picture form as I could get. Combine this with what overcame me when I stared at (and dug crotch-level holes in the carpet over) the Naked Lady Golf Tees in the Spencer Gifts catalog and the onward progression of my mental well-being pretty effectively froze right there.

And all that went down when I was around seven.

I started volunteering to pick up my grandmother’s daily newspapers in order to study the New York tabloids’ Arts & Leisure spots for the auteur efforts of Gerard Damiano and Little Oral Annie’s celluloid showcases.

When I was finally old enough to ride my bike off the block, I spent most Saturday mornings in Ponce-De-Leon-like exploration of Brooklyn, only I wasn’t hunting for any Fountain of Youth. I peddled, instead, on the lookout for Fountains of Spew, wildly two-wheeling for hours on end to find adults-only bijous. One would turn out to be the first porn palace I ever sneaked into -- the Cinema Kings Highway -- and it's still open and running (yes, very much like a sore)!

Once there, I’d park my bike on the opposite corner and stare. And stare. And stare. And muse while I was staring about what must have been going on inside. Of course, if pressed, I’m not sure I could exactly define exactly what I thought that was. But it was . . . sexy. And it involved naked ladies. This is what mattered. Sexy naked ladies. Doing sexy naked-lady things. All sexy, all naked. All naked and sexy. I really couldn’t put it into words, but I knew the name for it. It was the universally preadolescent term for all such heady concepts: Playboy.

First handling of Playboy: November 1975. Location: a laundry hamper used to store my family’s extra bedding. Rightful owner: Pops McBeardo. Centerfold: lush, soft, sweet, redheaded Janet Lupo (pictorial title: “Hooray for Hoboken!”).Cover story: “Sex in Cinema ’75.”

The entirety of my subsequent existence ignited at that moment of my discovery of that issue. I had a purpose: Get more Playboy. See more boobies. And butts. And whatever lay beneath Janet Lupo’s heaping stacks of lap-fro. More importantly, I needed to see the type of movies that were featured in the “Sex in Cinema” section. SOON. But how . . . ?

After much thought--and I mean more thought than any seven-year-old has ever expended on anything--I hit on my solution and cried out: “I NEED A SAILOR!”

Ain’t than an adorable thought--slight, towheaded tyke McBeardo (who some people still mistook for a girl at this point) out there propositioning sea dogs for hands-on assistance in my carnal development.

Here’s what I was thinking: What kind of gentlemen normally frequent venues of fleshly repute? The answer: Military men. And Navy dudes always seemed to be carrying around those big duffel bags everywhere--duffel bags that certainly appeared sizable enough to encase a quiet second-grader, even with my raging one-inch “extra.”

Thus I dreamt of slipping some swabbie a couple of bucks (from my First Communion booty, no less) in exchange for his stashing me in his gunny sack and then taking in a porn flick. I was more than willing to sweeten the pot if he’d pack the satchel with Playboys and a flashlight.

I mulled over the feasibility of this plan for years. Fortunately, I didn’t have much opportunity to dawdle much near New York’s waterfronts. Then.

Ferociously fanning the flames of my precocious skin-screen passions were the bizarre, only-in-the-’70s succession of “adult” adaptations of beloved storybook favorites. Please understand the confusion generated in my impressionable libido by the likes of The Newd Adventures of Snow White (1969), The Ribald Tales of Robin Hood (1969), The Erotic Adventures of Pinocchio (1971) – and I was a Pinocchio nut to begin with – The Erotic Adventures of Zorro (1972), The Erotic Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1975), and The Amorous Adventures of Don Quixote (1976).

This puerile soft-porn succession led to two masterpieces of the form, the R-rated musical Cinderella (1977) with Cheryl “Rainbeaux” Smith and the bluntly titled omnibus Fairy Tales (1978), but only after the all-out assault on the senses mounted by the hardcore Alice in Wonderland (1976) across the summer of the Bicentennial.

“The world’s most popular bedtime story now really is a bedtime story. . . .” So intoned a kewpie-doll female voice in saturation radio spots touting the X-rated Alice that cropped up between spins of “More, More, More” by crossover (and connectible) porn queen Andrea True.



Coincidentally or not, the masturbation market’s curiously literal foray into childishness was followed, on a mass scale, by heightened public interest in the Real Deal.

Kiddie porn erupted all-encompassingly onto newsweekly covers, New York Post exposés, and every edition of ABC’s then-fledgling, Geraldo-powered 20/20, along with au courant installments of Starsky & Hutch and Lou Grant.

In addition, arguably higher-brow endeavors poked about in the same junior-size used-panties hamper. For instance, at your local art theatre (please note the “re” spelling), sophisticates could take in Brie-breathed filmmaker Louis Malle’s Pretty Baby (1978), wherein model/actress/sexual-dynamo Brooke Shields exhibited roughly the same amount of her raw physical being as Marilyn Chambers did in any given Mitchell Brothers production. And Brooke was a perfect ten. As in, born just a decade earlier.

Brooke then followed up Baby by announcing on TV commercials and extremely lickable print ads that nothing came between her and her Calvins. Get it?

I got it. I got it ALL.



My closest access to the black-market peddling of the pink-and-hairless, however, came via the Golden Age of the Made-for-Television movie.

Leading the pack was Linda Blair’s twin towers of genuinely seamy small-screen teen tempestuousness: Born Innocent (1974), with a proto-Abner-Louima misappropriation of broomstick that will forever elicit incredulous shrieks of “THIS was on TV?!”; and Sweet Hostage (1975), the blueprint for Vincent Gallo’s Buffalo 66 in which loony-bin coop-flier Martin Sheen kidnaps and falls for the pudgily pubescent future coke-squeeze of Superfreak Rick James.



Dawn: Portrait of a Teenage Runaway (1976), stars Jan Brady (Eve Plumb!), helmed by the director of Grease and The Blue Lagoon (Randal Kleiser!) and featuring the finest-ever use of “Cherry Bomb” (by The Runaways!).



Huge props, as well, get doled to Diary of a Teenage Hitchhiker (1979), wherein Charlene Tilton extends more than her mere thumb, and Off the Minnesota Strip (1980), the tale of a Mare Winningham as wayward filly who returns to the Heartland after some time working passenger seats along New York City’s infamous underage hooker boulevard.

Even Sooner or Later (1979), a bittersweet rock-and-roll coming-of-age story that went on to keep Rex Smith in dinner-theater paychecks for decades, exudes an inescapable pedo vibe.

Sooner follows a 13-year-old groupie girl who passes herself off as 16 to captivate the too-tight trousers of the pseudo-Frampton played by Rexilicious. Again, this was a nonjudgmental prime-time depiction of a junior-high-schooler doing what was necessary to get laid.

The movie’s spin-off love theme, “You Take My Breath Away,” performed by Smith, became an AM-radio smash. I thought it was “gay.”



Decidedly NOT “gay” however, despite its eerily androgynous vocal, was an insomnia-sparking creepout that shared Top 40 space with Rex Smith titled “Hot Child in the City.” The artist was Nick Gilder. The lyrics go as follows:

“Danger in the shape of somethin' wild
Stranger dressed in black, she's a hungry child
So young to be loose and on her own
Young boys, they all want to take her home
Hot child in the city
Hot child in the city
Runnin' wild and lookin' pretty”

Mr. Gilder’s opus was ultimately translated into a 35-mm X-rated motion picture. I know this because I accompanied my mother on a shopping trip to Red Bank, New Jersey, one summer afternoon just to get a glimpse of the poster for Hot Child in the City: The Movie. It was playing at The Strand, a hardcore pull-yourself-palace smack in the midst of Red Bank’s otherwise charming antique stores and cozy cafes. I can’t stress enough: It was the ’70s. Nobody noticed.

The gottadamerung of Network Kidporn Programming, though, remains Fallen Angel (1980), starring the since-deceased Dana Hill (Audrey Griswold in the second Vacation movie) and Richard Masur (Ms. Romano’s schlemiel boyfriend on the first season of One Day at a Time) as muse and molester. Respectively.

Fallen Angel’s opening shot depicts a boy and a girl, maybe twelve, leaning into what looks like a romantic love scene. Suddenly, the boy, who’s shirtless, flubs his line of dialogue. An irate auteur shouts, “CUT!” and the camera pulls back to reveal a Hollywood-scale motion-picture set with grips, gaffers, a clapboard guy, Panavision equiment, towering lights, a craft-services table, and an army scurrying to placate the frazzled filmmaker.

This was the television industry’s idea of how child pornography got made.

And it sure looked all right to me.

At last, I understood the “truth” about child pornography: Those kids got to get NAKED and got to have SEX. And they got PAID to have NAKED SEX! And the more NAKED SEX they had, the more they got paid and the more bonuses they scored--wicked shit, too, like puppies and pinball machines.

From then on, a (now) distressingly dominant share of my daydreaming was dedicated to imaging myself as a Child Pornography Star.

I envisioned lightin’ out of Flatbush all Huck-Finn-like on the F train (I swear, it was really the “F” train). Destination: Times Square.

Upon arriving at the Crossroads of the World, I’d seek out one of those “Chickenhawks” that I’d been studying up on. These were the child pornography industry’s talent scouts--keen-eyed gents in the know who corralled sweet-faced young-uns into the bang-biz.

The movies always depicted Chickenhawks as the “bad guys” but, to me, they’d be my ticket to hot times between the sheets with an endless succession of elementary-school lovelies, where I’d perform brilliantly and be rewarded with Coleco football games and all-the-root-beer-you-can-guzzle wrap parties.

Of course, I was suffering under the idiotic delusion that child pornography depicts its subjects enjoying warm, giggly, mutually groovy hetero high jinks. The raped-to-death and tossed-in-the-trash reality of such business didn’t really occur to me.

For a while.

Still, a boy can meditate to the tones of “Hot Child in the City” and imagine hanging out with high-heeled “Bad Girls” and hump the mattress of his bunk-bed and dream, can’t he?