Re: R.I.P Linda Lovelace

from: Ed_Zeppelin
172.148.37.92/02-04-24/17:31

Deep Throat was the first dirty movie I ever saw. That's because one day after school Russ, Rick, Danny, Dave, Larry and me were hanging out in a little building way in the back of Russ' parent's property, a stone relic from the 40's considered ancient by Sudden California standards.

It was the perfect place for teenagers because it was hidden from the prying eyes of authority on all sides by trees and bushes.

We had the world's skankiest Lay-Z-Boy set up for "beer bonging," where you'd recline the chair all the way, poke a hole in the bottom of a beer can with a screwdriver and hold that to your lips while you popped the top, and it would shoot beer straight down your gullet (provided your esophogeal muscles didn't even quiver or you'd wind up with beer spewing all over you like a volcano).

Another favorite activity on the old Lay-Z-Boy was laying upside down on it with your head near the floor, and having somebody blow a "shotgun" up your lungs and then somebody would grab the handle on the chair and "raise" it (actually, recline it) bringing your head up.

Then somebody would grab you under your armpits and haul you off the chair, stand you up, wrap their arms around you from behind and squeeze your chest like a motherfucker. You HAD to hold your hit the whole time, or risk derisive catcalls about your lack of virility.

This was especially important when we were down to the last few piddly pipe-fulls and had to make it last. You could get more wasted on one hit with this method than other people could by smoking a kilo.

Of course, periodically one of us would pass out (gee, what are the odds?) and bounce their head off the concrete floor to the accompaniment of your "pal's" laughter.

Adding mental roughage to this experience, Russ had swiped an orange plastic traffic cone off the street one day while we were driving. He waited until the precise point he saw you were going to pass out, and he'd stick that horrible thing in your face and do a Tarzan yell.

Having been on the other end of that fucker a couple of hundred times, I can tell you it was like being enveloped in a black cloud and just before the light goes out entirely, a yodeling train comes barreling through and bashes into your skull.

Nowadays, you can throw a dirty video or DVD on with abandon. The slightest twinge of horniness and you're online in a flash, downloading pictures of people sticking their appendages in and on each other and any conceivable object.

But back in 1972, when my friends and I were all around 16 years old, the talk was all about "Deep Throat." It was in the newspapers, on TV and all the kids were talking about it. We didn't really know what it was about, until a friend snuck into a porno theater in the next town over (nobody had VCRs in 1972) and told us about this woman who could suck a whole dick down her throat without gagging. We just had to see it.

So we found out the name of the projectionist who had snuck our friend in, and paid him five bucks each to let us in. (Getting five dollars when you were 16 years old in 1972 was like getting $500 now.) The normal ticket price for a movie was $2 back then.

The projectionist told us to wait in the alley behind the theater and he'd come get us one-by-one after the movie started. Sure enough, after about a half-hour of milling around all nervous and stoned in the alley, the door opened and a gruff voice said "Okay, you. C'mon" and one of us disappeared into the darkness and the door gently clicked shut behind him.

"Shit, man!" We were saying to each other, "this is so totally bichen, man!" Soon he came back and one-by-one, another member of our group disappeared through the doorway into the pitch blackness inside.

Every time the door opened, those of us still outside could hear dialog and moaning from the movie. "The Pride" was stretching my Jordache jeans into a fucking pup-tent. I had to get in there and see what was going on.

As soon as the door opened again, I elbowed everybody else aside and entered into the cool dank darkness. It smelled like somebody had spilled Clorox fairly recently (an odor I came to recognize as emotion-lotion in my later years).

The projectionist grabbed my elbow and steered me down a row of seats near the front. My eyes wouldn't adjust to the dark, so I still couldn't see a fucking thing except the glare of the movie.

As my vision returned, I made out my friends ahead of me on the row, each with an empty seat beside them. I sat down and started watching the movie right about the time the famous line "do you mind if I smoke while you eat?" was uttered.

It was fantastic. I was in heaven. Then Harry Reems made his appearance onscreen as the Doctor, and Linda Lovelace (who couldn't act for shit) learned that her clit was in her throat and good ol' Harry helped her find it using his special probe. Oh. My. God!

Yup, it was just like everybody said. She just wrapped her face around that dick and stuck it down her throat! Yeow!

In later years I read where Linda says that she was forced to do that at gunpoint, and got the shit kicked out of her regularly while learning to ride herd on her tonsils, but frankly I don't believe it. She loved it. She was an INSPIRED cocksucker. It certainly more than made up for her inability to deliver a line of dialog with utterly no pretense of believability.

She couldn't act to save her life, but when it came to sucking dick, she attained levels of believability that would make Meryl Streep weep with envy. "Method acting" indeed.

The projectionist had told us to scram at the end of the movie, because he could get arrested for letting us in there. Of course we didn't want to fuck up a good thing (later he let us in to see "Behind the Green Door. Now THERE was a dirty movie!), so we complied quietly.

The next day at school we were like conquering heroes. All day we recited whole lines of dialog from the movie and described in aching detail every nuance to small audiences of rapt pimply faces at lunchtime.

When I went into that theater that night, I was a pimply geek in weird clothes my mom had picked out for me. I couldn't even talk to a girl without almost barfing on myself in fear. I came out of that theater a changed man.

Right about that time the Chicago cops beat the fuck out of protesters at the Democratic convention, Charles Manson and his gang of merrymakers carved up a Hollywood party, and Led Zeppelin II came out. I started to really let my hair grow, listening to devil-music and teaching my girlfriend to let her larynx shake hands with my cock (she got pretty good at it, too). I joined a real rock band. I was a rebel.

So I'm sorry if that stuff about the abuse was true, Linda. I realize that when you died you were a 53-year-old mother and had become another person entirely.

But for a little while there, long ago, in the darkened row of a seedy theater in Pomona, California, right there stark naked before my steaming adolescent eyes, you rocked my fucking world. Thanks. I'll never forget you. Godspeed.