One Hand Jerking (8 page)

The rapper explained in an interview on BET: “I'm 30 years old now. Three kids. A wife. A mom. Brothers. Artists. Family. Friends. They all need me. They depend on me. I've been leading [homeboys] off the cliff for five, six years. So now I'm going slow.”

However,
High Times
editor Steve Bloom considers the possibility that Snoop's surprise declaration is not necessarily a true change of heart, since he had been fined and placed on probation for a pot offense in Ohio the previous year.

“He was the biggest, baddest pot smoker out there,” says Bloom, “and maybe he's just stepping back because it got too hot. Maybe he really has decided he wants to take a break or not smoke anymore. But all this could be a smoke-screen.”

Sort of like when Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey, both of whom, after they were busted for dope, advised young people to stop taking LSD (
wink, wink
).

Indeed,
Rollingstone.com
has reported: “In a closed-door session at the Department of Justice, Snoop Dogg engaged the attorney general in a spirited debate about medical marijuana. ‘The Doggfather and I have our differences,' an unusually expansive John Ashcroft told reporters afterward, ‘but we are both committed to relieving chronic pain.' ‘Or at a mutherfuckin' minimum,' rejoined Dogg, ‘relievin' with the Chronic.'”

In any case, on the Internet, Snoop's fans reacted to his announcement with both dismay and skepticism. The news also inspired commentary in Aaron McGruder's controversial comic strip,
The Boondocks
. Huey Freeman, the radical African-American kid, says, referring to Snoop's announcement, “It's the
potential impact on the global economy that I'm worried about,” and his little neighbor Jazmine responds, “Think he'll do a benefit song for his dealer?”

Dogg seems to have a double standard, though, when it comes to victimless “crimes.” Whereas his flamboyant image once graced a cover of
High Times
, he now appears instead, seated on a throne, in full pimp regalia, on the cover of the September 2002 issue of
Adult Video News
a slick trade journal for the $20-billion pornography industry. Their accompanying article states:

“While Snoop Dogg wasn't the first rapper to make porn—DJ Yella of N.W.A. has been producing it since the mid-1990s—
Doggystyle
, more than any other porn/hip-hop synthesis, awakened the adult industry to the immense commercial possibilities of the genre. The tape, Snoop's first collaboration with Hustler Video, in which he introduces the sex scenes but doesn't have sex on camera, has sold more than 150,000 units world-wide, garnering
AVN's
Top Selling Tape of 2001 Award. . . . Largely due to the success of
Doggystyle
, more and more rappers are appearing in porn videos with no fear of alienating fans.”

Snoop believes that the hip-hop/porn connection benefits both industries.

“The adult video world is so much what rap music is all about,” he says in
Adult Video News
, “about expressing ourselves and having fun, and a lot of times radio and TV don't understand that so they censor us. So I feel like we're doing each other justice by being hand-in-hand and working with each other. I mean, a lot of people be in the closet about it, but they all listen to rap music or watch adult videos one way or another.

“I always wanted to do it because I felt like I had a lot of records that would never get no airplay or never get no visuals, and I just wanted to make some type of video where I could do these songs and have naked ladies in them and doing that type of shit. And then when I figured out that I could make a whole movie, I got with the right director and then put my ideas down and made it happen.”

Speaking of his follow-up to
Doggystyle
, titled
HUSTLAZ, Diary of a Pimp
, he expounds, “It's just basically the day in the life of a pimp, everything he's got going on with all the ladies in different rooms in the house and different situations that occur. And videos. So it's just like a live, put-together movie. It's a diary. It's like a documentary in movie fashion. We made three new records [‘Break These Hoes for Snoop,' ‘Doin' It Too' and ‘Pussy Like This'] that were just specifically for this, where we could make records that was hot and we knew they were X-rated and they would fit the movie, fit the theme. This shit is hot. When it's all side-by-side, the videos and the acting and the music all comes together.”

Apparently, Snoop Dogg's family—those three kids, his wife and his mother—are all completely supportive of his current activity. And so he maintains a hard-on all the way to the bank. Snoop's new public agenda can be summed up in four little words: “Porn,
sí
. Pot,
no
.”

The recent TV movie,
Helter Skelter
, perpetuated the myth of Charles Manson. In 1969, when the news broke about the massacre of pregnant actress Sharon Tate and her house guests, there was a sudden epidemic of paranoia in certain Hollywood circles. Actor Steve McQueen fled to England, for example, and I wondered why. After the trial of Manson and his brainwashed followers, I began my own private investigation, if only to satisfy my sense of curiosity about the case.

I corresponded with Manson, visited Charlie's Devils in prison, including Susan Atkins, and—in a classic example of participatory journalism—I took an acid trip with a few family members, including Squeaky Fromme, who is now behind bars for the attempted assassination of then-President Gerald Ford.

Ed Sanders' book,
The Family
, had mentioned that Los Angeles police had discovered porn flicks in a loft at the crime scene, the home Tate shared with her director husband, Roman Polanski (who was in London at the time of the murders). And yet, the prosecutor in Manson's trial, Vincent Bugliosi, denied in his book,
Helter Skelter
, that any porn flicks had been found. It was possible that the police had indeed uncovered them but lied to Bugliosi.

I learned why when I consulted the renowned San Francisco private investigator, Hal Lipset, whose career had been the basis for an excellent film,
The Conversation
, starring Gene Hackman. Lipset informed me that not only did Los Angeles police seize porn movies and videotapes, but also that individual officers were
selling
them. He had talked with one police source who told him exactly which porn flicks were available—a total of seven hours' worth for a quarter-million dollars.

Lipset began reciting a litany of those porn videos. The most notorious was Greg Bautzer, an attorney for financier Howard Hughes, together with Jane
Wyman, the former wife of then-Governor Ronald Reagan. There was Sharon Tate with Dean Martin. There was Sharon with Steve McQueen. (That was a silent
Aha!
moment for me.) There was Sharon with two black bisexual men.

“The cops were not too happy about
that
one,” Lipset recalled.

There was a video of Cass Elliot from the Mamas and the Papas in an orgy with Yul Brynner, Peter Sellers and Warren Beatty. Coincidentally, Brynner and Sellers, together with John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas, had offered a $25,000 reward for the capture of the killers.

I always felt the executioners had a prior connection with their victims. I finally tracked down a reporter who had hung around with police and seen a porn video of Susan Atkins with one of the victims, Voytek Frykowski. When I asked Manson about that, he responded: “You are ill advised and mis-led. [Victim Jay] Sebring done Susan's hair and I think he sucked one or two of her dicks. I'm not sure who she was walking out from her stars and cages, that girl
loves
dick, you know what I mean, hon. Yul Brynner, Peter Sellers . . .”

Meanwhile, Charlie has become a cultural symbol. In surfer jargon, a “manson” means a crazy, reckless surfer. For comedians, Manson has become a generic joke reference. I asked him how he felt about that. He wrote back: “I don't know what a generic is, Joke. I think I know what that means. That means you talk bad about Reagan or Bush. I've always ran poker games and whores and crime. I'm a crook. You make the reality in court and press. I just ride and play the cards that were pushed on me to play. Mass killer, it's a job, what can I say.”

But Manson has apparently been moonlighting, because his new CD,
All the Way Alive
, was recently released. He was discussing with the producer of his album the notion that people's public images can be vastly different from the way they behave in their private lives. As an example, Charlie mentioned “the sex movies Steve McQueen and Peter Sellers were doing with Sharon Tate.”

I am in complete awe of the democracy of the Internet, which presents an infinite menu for individual tastes and ideologies, and in this context, specifically
to viewers of online porn. From golden showers to farm animals, the World Wide Web caters to virtually every imaginable desire. With the privacy provided by a computer screen, you can worship at the fetish of your choice. But, in the process of surfing porn sites—for research purposes only, of course—I realized that I had never come across a site specializing in coprophagia. It means eating shit. Literally.

There's an old saying among nutritionists: “You are what you eat.” However, comedian Darryl Henriques, playing the role of a New Age swami, says, “You are what you don't shit.”

One of the nastiest things you can say to someone is, “Eat shit.” A non-fiction book,
The Pit
, reveals a strange cult in San Francisco where a group of successful businessmen were forced, along with other acts of humiliation, to eat their own shit. Ultimately, they were represented in a lawsuit by flamboyant attorney Melvin Belli. But that was involuntary shit eating, and what we're talking about here is the voluntary kind.

For many years I heard stories that comic actor Danny Thomas, the star of
Make Room For Daddy
, was a coprophagiac. I assumed it was just another urban legend until I bumped into an old friend who was now working as a prostitute in Hollywood. Over lunch, she mentioned the names of some of her celebrity clients, including Danny Thomas. She told me how he had hired her to save her solid waste in her panties so that he could rub the panties on his face and gobble up her shit as though it were cotton candy.

When he finished, he would wash himself thoroughly, then pay her, and, as if coming out of a trance, he'd say, “Where was I?” He was trying to distance himself from what he had just done. Instant denial. Since then, I have believed that Danny Thomas's fundraising for Saint Jude's Hospital was really for the purpose of having secret access to their bedpans.

Anyway, I googled “Eating Shit.” Topping the list was “Shit Eating Grins: In Defense of Adam Sandler,
South Park
and the Proud Tradition of Poop Humor”—an article in
Salon.com
.
But sure enough, I was soon led to hard-core shit-eating sites, which I found totally disgusting yet absolutely riveting. You may not want to read any further, but we both know you will.

There are photos of beautiful women shitting; if you click for a close-up you can spot a yellow kernel of corn in one big brown chunk o' shit. Women are spreading shit all over their naked bodies and inside their vaginas. A pair of lovely lesbians are eating handfuls of shit, then tongue kissing each other. Two women are eating
the same lengthy turd, starting from opposite ends. A woman, fully dressed, wearing a mini-skirt, is shitting as she walks along the sidewalk. One woman is shitting into another woman's mouth. Mmmm, good to the last dingleberry.

Among the shit-eating sites, there are Asian movies. Here's a couple of descriptions: “A bunch of kinky Japanese guys find some truly hot looking girls and take them down below the streets of Tokyo into a real sewer full of shit.” And, “Cute Kyoko's diarrhea suddenly acts up again. Her piano teacher becomes a willing student of hot scat games. Lots of shit pours out of her hot ass into his waiting mouth. Then she asks if he would rub it all over her. Sure, why not, he says.”

If there is one particular image that remains in my mind's eye, it is an innocent looking, attractive teenager—she's over 18, of course—and she is cheerfully drinking a shit shake through a straw in an old-fashioned malted milk glass.

I thought about her father discovering that photo in cyberspace, yet he is unable to confront his daughter about it because he would then have to admit what
he
was doing at that site. I mean, this isn't exactly the type of thing that would be mass e-mailed by one of those selfless spammers. And even if the father did confess to his daughter, he would undoubtedly hesitate to ask if he could eat
her
shit, because that could be considered a form of incest, and you have to draw the line somewhere, right?

There must be an especially strong bond among coprophagiacs, though, because they have experienced in common a form of liberation from a taboo that can be traced all the way back to infancy, when a parent would cringe and say, “Stop! Don't eat that! I said
no
!”

Who knows, some day coprophagia might even become a religion?

Holy shit!

The annual frenzy of psychic prophesizing in the supermarket tabloids is now in full swing. Help yourself to some free samples of predictions from the weekly
Sun
:

☞ In an effort to boost the sagging tourism industry, Florida will provide free airfare to anyone wanting to vacation in the Sunshine State.

☞ A plot to assassinate President Bush will be uncovered in the nick of time by CBS newsman Dan Rather.